A dramatic
monologue is a short piece of writing, often a poem, spoken by a persona who is
not the author. The speaker can be a fictional character, a real person now
alive, or a historical personage.
The most famous
examples of dramatic monologue come from the work of the English poet Robert
Browning, including “Andrea del Sarto,” spoken in the voice of that great
Renaisance painter as he looks back on his life. It was in this poem that Browning
wrote some of his most widely quoted lines:
Ah, but a man’s reach should
exceed his grasp,
Or what’s a heaven for?
Browning’s other famous dramatic
monologue is “My Last Duchess,” a murder mystery written in heroic couplets.
The dramatic
monologue reached a peak in the work of Edgar Lee Masters, who wrote Spoon River Anthology, a collection of
244 pieces in the voices of various characters speaking from the grave.
Together the poems create a surprisingly contemporary exposé of small-town life,
broaching such taboo subjects as frustrated passions, abortion, and the lasting effects
of war on veterans. Masters originally serialized the monologues in a newspaper
and published them in a best-selling book. He never lived to see their
performance as a successful play—his book was not adapted for the stage until after his
death.
Many of my favorite dramatic monologues are by
African American poets. Black American writers kept the form vital for
many decades, while White American writers were absorbed in autobiographical confessional poetry. There are so many terrific dramatic
monologues by African American poets, spanning the last century: Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “The Party,” Langston Hughes’s
“Mother to Son,” Gwendolyn Brooks’s “The Pool Players,” June Jordan’s “From The Talking Back of Miss Valentine Jones”
and “Unemployment Monologue,” Ntozake Shange’s play for colored girls… (written entirely in dramatic monologues), and
Sekou Sundiata’s “Space” from his play The
Circle Unbroken Is a Hard Bop. If you visit the website of Robert Pinsky's Favorite Poem Project, you can hear a wonderful reading of Dunbar's "The Party."
The Academy Award-winning actress Alfre Woodard recites a dramatic monologue from for colored girls… in this video from the original PBS version of Ntozake's Shange's play. This video has another fantastic monologue from Shange's now classic play, starting about the 6:00 mark.
The late, great Sekou Sundiata used to recite his amazing monologue "Space," which almost single-handedly created the spoken word movement. “But that's another bop,” to quote Sekou. I once asked him how he got his name, and he told me, “Sekou Sundiata is my nom de guerre.”
More on the
dramatic monologue in my next blogs, including the advantages and disadvantages
of the form, and suggestions for how to get started writing one of your own.
The Dramatic Monologue, Part 2: Pros and Cons
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Zack’s new memoir, Hugging My Father’s Ghost
