Word: soliloquy
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...notes as "always living at the limit of his destiny," a character who "stretches himself to and beyond his limits to make the world conform to his vision of it." Hamlet chooses once and for all to be rash, Cain says, in the "To be or not to be" soliloquy--which, incidentally, he reads...
Worse, when Hamlet begins his "To Be" soliloquy, he is sitting in total darkness (and nightclothes) on the edge of the stage, a cigarette lighter in hand. "To be?" he asks, flicking on the lighter, "or," flicking it off, "not," flicking it on again, "to be?" Too much, even though the flame-play is brilliantly echoed at the end of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to illuminate a different line entirely...
Likewise, the finest moment in Rosencrantz occurse when Hamlet, having rushed onstage (to R and G's usual befud-dlement), begins delivering a soliloquy to the theater's rear wall, and the parallel strikes home: When the Prince delivered that soliloquy in his own play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were upstage of him, seeing only his back. The audience has been placed entirely within the spies perspectives as minor characters within a larger show, summoned mysteriously from a place they cannot remember on a mission they cannot understand...
...large screen t.v. Yes, he hits some easy targets, but easy targets are often the largest ones, and hence worth hitting. For the most part, the short sketches are better than the long sketches, and the sketches in general better than the poems. But in one of his verses, "Soliloquy of Times Square," his ear--his feel for the way people think--appears, and magnificently...
Just hearing things, of course-like listening for waves in a sea shell. It did not occur to the air-traffic controllers to deliver that sort of archaic soliloquy, haunted by scruples. Most of them judged, briskly enough, that their desire for a 32-hour week and a minimum of $30,462 per year superseded the oath to which they once put their signatures...