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Shakespeare's Monologues



Links · Resources and Recripricals · Shakespeare's Monologues
Resources & Reciprocal Links

Portrait from
cover of First Folio. 
Click to browse monologues for all genders.

Resources
A list of resources helpful for choosing monologues, as well as for understanding and performing Shakespeare's text:

  • monologueaudition.com's list of overdone monologues & other resources - This site will help you avoid choosing one of the monologues that the people you're auditioning for may be growing tired of (after clicking "Men's" or "Women's", scroll to the bottom of the page for their overdone Shakespeare list.) Our site provides you with a database of all of Shakespeare's Monologues, so refer to the "overdone" lists at monologueaudition.com to help make sure you're making the best use of our site.)

  • No Fear Shakespeare - "Shakespeare's language side-by-side with a facing-page translation into modern English—the kind of English people actually speak today." Because paraphrasing is your friend.

  • Shakespeare's Words - Lexiconograpy. There are words in Elizabehan English that we no longer use. If you're looking up a word in modern dictionaries and not finding it there, search the glossary at Shakespeare's Words for definitions and more.

  • A site named The Bard of Avon: Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon has a great terminology primer. It defines and explains terms and background essential to understanding Shakespeare's works.

  • The First Folio of 1623 - The folio is the oldest available full printing of the complete works, and is the closest version to how the plays were originally performed that we have available to us today. Different versions of Shakespeare's works have variations in the text because each publishing house hired a different group of 'editors' who, working primarily with the First Folio of 1623, set to ink their own "interpretation" and "improvements" upon the text found in the First Folio. The spellings, punctuation (or lack thereof), and other conventions used in the folio, contain hints for actors which are lost in the later versions through "corrections" and other edits made by the editors of more recent generations. If something seems weird or off in a bit of a play you're working on, check the folio to get closer to Shakespeare's original intent. When in doubt, check The Folio!

    There are multiple digitized (scanned) copies of the folio online. However, several seem to sometimes move without notice or forwarding links, others just disappear, and new ones sometimes pop up. While some are relatively easy to use, others are made available via website interfaces that are almost unnavigable.

    Luckily for the rest of us, Sarah Werner maintains a list of links to digitized version of the First Folio ("F1"), with notes about the pros and cons of each:

    Sarah Werner's list of digitized First Folios

  • Shakespeare Resource Center - "Collected links from all over the World Wide Web to help you find information on William Shakespeare. There are millions of pages that reference Shakespeare on the Internet. This site aims to make it a little easier to find your sources."

Reciprocal Links
This is a list of links to sites that link to ours. They're listed in order primarily according to the amount of traffic they've sent our way during the last year or so.

Omitted from this list are: Sites already listed above on this page, search engines, sites that require a login to access (school websites mostly), and any sites that appear to be SEO clickbait (sites that offer no content of their own, but exist solely to draw visitors to click on ads disguised as content.)

If you have a site that links to ours, but we haven't noticed yet, please let us know and we'll get you listed here soon.

Enough prologue. The links:

  • Tee Quillin - Our partner, Tee is the host of the PDF files that we link to, for you to download and print for your scansion and transcription pleasure.
  • Backstage - For more than 50 years, Backstage has been the most trusted place for actors to find career advice and casting information. They link to us occasionally from articles, Q&A, lists of resources etc. Here's an example: