A monologue is an extended, uninterrupted speech or poem by a single person. The person may be speaking his or her thoughts aloud or directly addressing other persons, e.g. an audience, a character, reader, or inatimate object.

As a literary device, it is most common in dramatic genres (plays, animated cartoons, film) but can also be found in prose fiction. The term can also be applied to poems, which usually take the form of the thoughts or speech of a single individual. In everyday usage, a long, rather boring speech by a conversation partner is sometimes called a monologue as well.

The term 'dramatic monologue' is used both for monologues in plays and for a poetic genre.

Soliloquy / dramatic monologue (theatre)

[[image:A Soliloquy - Punch cartoon - Project Gutenberg eText 14514.png|thumb|A Soliloquy.
Youthful Mercury. "What's this 'ere on the plyte? 'Knock and ring'! Blowed if they won't be harsking yer tho 'walk hinside', next!!"
Cartoon from Punch magazine, Vol. 102, April 23, 1892]]There are different terms for monologues in plays. Although they are often used synonymously, they serve to distinguish monologues with regard to the addressee.

• If a speech is addressed to another person or group of people, it is called a Monologue.
• If a speech is addressed to the speaker himself, it is called a soliloquy.

Playwrights such as Shakespeare and Goethe used the soliloquy to great effect in order to reveal their characters' personal thoughts, emotions, and motives without resorting to third-person narration. Hamlet's "To be or not to be" speech may well be the most famous soliloquy. There is a dramatic convention that soliloquies, like "asides" to the audience, cannot necessarily be heard or noticed by the other characters, even if they are clearly delivered within earshot.

Monologues can also be distinguished with regard to their frame of reference. A speech addressed to a character or a group of characters within the play (including the speaker himself) is called an interior monologue. A speech addressed to the audience is called an exterior monologue. Sometimes a speech addressed to an absent character is also called an exterior monologue. The 'interior monologue' in drama must not be confused with the narrative device of the same name which often occurs in modernist prose fiction]]

Dramatic monologue (poetry)

The term 'dramatic monologue' is now mainly used for a poetic form developed and brought to a high standard by Robert Browning and [[Alfred Lord Tennyson. A dramatic monologue in this sense has a speaker who is not the poet and who delivers the poem in a clearly defined communication situation. The speaker can be a historical or a fictive person. The "listener" can be another character who does not speak (as in Browning's My Last Duchess), a group of characters (as in that poet's Fra Lippo Lippi), the speaker himself (as in Tennyson's Ulysses), or the reader (as in Browning's Porphyria's Lover).