USE OF SOLILOQUY IN “DOCTOR FAUSTUS”
Introduction
Literally soliloquy means talking to himself aloud when a person is alone or is supposed to be alone. In a play it means the talking on the part of the character regardless of the presence of hearers. From the very days of ancient dramatists soliloquy has been used as a technical device of considerable importance. It has been generally used sometimes to supply information regarding the plot and at some other time to reveal the secret workings in the minds of a character.
It is always assumed that the character is talking to himself, but in truth he is addressing the audience gathered before him. In fact a dramatist has not the freedom of a novelist to elaborate or speak for his characters in detail. Hence this is the dramatist’s great technique to enable him to take us down to the innermost recesses of a character of his drama.
Different Uses of Soliloquy
We find the Elizabethan dramatists, including the great Shakespeare, making varied use of this significant dramatic technique. So the function of soliloquy may be manifold. Firstly, it can be used to provide information about the incidents that happened in the past. It may also tell about some thoughts or feelings that developed in the past. As in the case of Faustus’s first soliloquy, it nicely sums up his life and growth of his ideas that took place before the actions that are going to occur on the stage. Sometimes a soliloquy enables us to understand the motives of a character, as from the comments of Shakespeare’s Iago on himself we are able to know about the motive of his actions. And one of the most significant uses of the soliloquy is to reveal a deep experience or a typical state of mind with all its waverings and inner conflict. Sometimes a soliloquy may reveal the moral underlying a play as we find in the case of the soliloquy of Shakespeare’s Othello and that of Marlowe’s Faustus in the last scene.
Significance of Soliloquies in “Doctor...