Actors are encouraged to have monologues in their back pockets, rehearsed, and ready to go for auditions.
Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue. But if you mouth it, as many of our players do, I had as lief the town crier spoke my lines.
Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, by use all gently, for in the very torrent, tempest, and (as I may say) whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness.
O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise.
Hamlet’s advice to the players is just as valid for speakers if you do a bit of homework on “groundlings” and “dumb shows” and other terms that have fallen out of common use.
But what about speakers?
Shouldn’t we master a few monologues?
What could we learn and demonstrate by performing Lincoln or Churchill or Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior?
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.
We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.
If you want to become an actor, you study the work of great playwrights.
If you want to become a musician, you study recordings by great artists.
And if you want to become a speaker…
Want to discover some worthwhile monologues for speakers?
Grab your copy of Stand and Deliver and get to it!