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The poets Statius and Lucan are both said to have written pantomimes, and this chapter considers the relationship of pantomime art to poetic texts. The chapter underlines the importance of the enunciated narrative to the performance. The chapter considers a wide range of evidence about the libretti of pantomime, from disparaging comments on the quality of the words composed specifically for the pantomime dancer, to the alleged small fragments embedded in authors including Petronius. The chapter considers the possible reasons for the apparent wholesale loss of the words which accompanied pantomime, and discusses what sort of poetry and verse forms would have been most suitable; in adapting the text for a tragedy, for example, monologue would have proved much more practicable than stichomythia. The performance evidence relating to Bathyllus and Pylades, the pantomime dancers credited with introducing the art form in the reign of Augustus, is given detailed attention.

This chapter examines the tonal shifts of the narrative voice in Vanity Fair as encoding a yearning for public scenes of performance. Moving between public speechifying and chastened intimate address, the Thackerayan narrator offers readers an acoustic map of different imaginary scenes of reception. The pitch of Thackeray's voice—both its tone and its reach, its sound and the spaces it organizes—indexes various fantasmatic scenes of readerly witness, conveying in the process a vivid sense of the erosion of public space in the face of the exaltation of the domestic sphere. The sociohistorical imagination evident in Vanity Fair was given a new intensity of focus in his unperformed play The Wolves and the Lamb (1854) and the novel into which he later adapted it, the formally innovative Lovel the Widower (1860). In retreating from the stage, Thackeray both amplified his critique of mid-Victorian domesticity and pioneered the practice of interior monologue.

This introduction argues that Alfred Tennyson’s conception of “rapt oration” is critical to the understanding of a quartet of his major dramatic monologues, “St. Simeon Stylites,” “Ulysses,” “Tithonus,” and “Tiresias,” all drafted after the death in 1833 of his friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, though published over the course of the ensuing half-century. An examination of a variety of Tennyson’s works, in particular In Memoriam, establishes “rapt oration” as a state in which both speaker and listener are “transported” by the speaker’s oratorical prowess. A desire for rapture, characterized by both personal and political transformation, motivates the speech and actions of each of Tennyson’s speakers in these dramatic monologues. This introduction additionally argues that these dramatic monologues should be considered in the context of nineteenth-century rapture theology, reform politics, classical scholarship (in particular theories on Homer), and sexological theory, as well as in the context of Tennyson’s relationships with a range of contemporaries, including Thomas Carlyle, William Gladstone, John Stuart Mill, and Heinrich Schliemann.

Pearsall argues against the prevailing critical conception of dramatic monologists as inadvertent in their revelations and ignorant of the consequences of their speech, suggesting instead that dramatic monologists are highly purposeful in their speech, employing sophisticated rhetorical strategies in order to effect political and personal transformation, or “rapture.” The author divides Chapter One into two major sections. The first section, “Poetics: Persuasive Similitude,” offers a new approach to reading all Victorian dramatic monologues, identifying the trope of simile as a defining element of the genre, and arguing that monologists seek to perform a range of acts by way of their speech. The second section, “Politics: Whig Poetics,” details the relevance of Britain’s Whig Party and the furor surrounding the passage of the 1832 Reform Bill to Tennyson’s poetic development. Pearsall illuminates the ways in which Tennyson’s Whig political views were influenced by Arthur Henry Hallam, and helped shape his poetry both thematically and formally.

Chapter Two examines Tennyson’s dramatic monologue “St. Simeon Stylites” from several angles. The first section, “Victorian End Times,” places St. Simeon’s desire for rapture in the context of Victorian evangelicalism and millenarianism. Pearsall demonstrates the ways in which the theological arguments concerning rapture propounded by the evangelist Edward Irving (a controversial figure who deeply interested Tennyson’s fellow Cambridge Apostles, including Arthur Henry Hallam and Richard Chenevix Trench) influenced Tennyson’s portrayal of St. Simeon. The second section, “The Rapture of St. Simeon’s Stylites,” engages in a detailed reading of Tennyson’s monologue, examining the ingenious discursive strategies employed by St. Simeon as he labors to perform his own rapture. The chapter’s final section, “Simeon’s Afterlife: The Message of the Butterfly,” parallels Tennyson’s St. Simeon with contemporary environmental activist Julia Butterfly Hill, probing the similarities in their strategies for attaining communal as well as personal transformation.

Chapter Four engages in a detailed reading of Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” described as the prototypical Victorian dramatic monologue. The first section, “The Character of the Homeric Statesman,” establishes the monologue’s persistent stress on the importance of the knowledge of Tennyson’s Ulysses, examining the poem’s many sources, and a youthful epistolary debate between William Gladstone and Arthur Henry Hallam on Ulysses’ responsibility for the ruin of Troy. The second section, “Ulysses and the Rapture of Troy,” explores the political implications of the character of Ulysses, suggesting that his powerful resonance with his immediate audience within the monologue, as well as with the wider British public, is due to the illusion of a democratic ideal of equality conjured by his monologue. Ulysses’ desire is to effect a “rapture” of his audience, just as he formerly effected the “rapture” of Troy, illuminating the destruction of the fabled city as the monologue’s subtext.

This chapter examines “Tithonus” in the context of Tennyson’s “Oenone,” and of his early poems representing Tithonus’s son, Memnon. In studying the phenomenon of masculine beauty in a cluster of related poems of Tennyson’s, Chapter Five also explores the problem of beauty in Tennyson’s poetics. Section one, “Trojan Aesthetics,” examines some of Tithonus’s familial, social, and literary contexts and their implications for Tennyson’s own poetic practice. Drawing on Arthur Henry Hallam’s conception of “sympathy,” as well as a range of Victorian aesthetic, poetic, and psycho-sexual theories (including Havelock Ellis’s theory of “eonism”), this chapter’s second section, “The Rapture of Tiresias,” explores the nature of identification and similitude in Tennyson’s dramatic monologue. Pearsall responds to the critical tradition of dismissing Tennyson’s poetry as “effeminate” and “ornamental,” suggesting that, through Tithonus’s efficacious speech, Tennyson demonstrates the utility of beauty.

This chapter examines the civic ambitions of the speakers of Tennyson’s dramatic monologues “Tithonus” and “Tiresias,” in particular, their relationship to Victorian aristocratic ideology. Pearsall details the ways in which Tennyson’s contemporaries decried him as a poet of the elite and illustrates the importance of Tennyson’s Whig political beliefs (influenced by Edmund Burke) for these dramatic monologues. The first section, “Tithonus and the Trojan Aristocracy,” explores Tithonus’s status as a representative of Troy’s ruling family, and the political, as well as poetic, significance of his ultimate transformation. The second section, “The Rapture of Tiresias,” examines Tiresias’s complex identification with the song-built city of Thebes. Pearsall argues that this speaker’s eventual rejection of the dramatic monologue in favor of the “heroic hymn” represents a refutation by Tennyson of William Gladstone’s populist theories of oratory. “Tiresias” is further examined in the context of the representation of rapture in Tennyson’s early poem “Semele.”

This chapter introduces the idea of how we might sympathise with figures in fictional and artistic representations. It questions why writers and artists return to The Tempest to consider such problems. The chapter concludes by discussing the difficulties of reading dramatic monologues.

This chapter examines Browning's dramatic monologues in the light of his ideas about sympathy and theology, and his debt to Schleirmacher. Browning's poetry has been conventionally read as encouraging readers to sympathise with his fictional protagonists. Chapter 2 demonstrates that he complicates the fact of sympathizing, and presents writers, readers and protagonists as mimics and parodists, rather than true sympathizers. The chapter concludes with a close reading of ‘Caliban Upon Setebos’, demonstrating the relationship between these acts of failed sympathy, or mimicry, and Browning's belief in the incarnation.

This chapter turns from narrative to lyric, traditionally seen as expressing its writer’s own feelings. The ‘sincerity-topos’ is studied in the troubadour Bernart de Ventadorn and as embodied in late-medieval English love lyrics. Analyses of lovers’ complaints reveal their increasing awareness of their textual nature; some function as dramatic monologues, but others undermine the illusion of a speaker’s voice and presence. The chapter concludes with a detailed analysis of Chaucer’s Complaint Unto Pity, demonstrating that the effect of its organization about a sovereign centre, its allegorical wit, and its incorporation of a textual petition can be valued only if it is read as writing, incorporating two incompatible discourses, not as the speech of a single narratorial persona.

This chapter aims to offer new insight into perhaps the most significant poetic development of the age — the dramatic monologue — by looking at how the printed voices of Tennyson's early poems were shaped by orators at the Cambridge Union and beyond. It then charts the ways in which the Laureateship asked the poet to speak for as well as to his public, exploring how Tennyson's reading of imperialist oratory (and his long-standing relationship with the most famous orator of the age, William Gladstone) influenced the rhetorical structures of Maud (1855) and Idylls of the King (1859-85).

This essay centers around two queer British men who came to New York to perform the story of their lives in a confessional mode: Quentin Crisp in 1979 with his show An Evening with Quentin Crisp, and Bette Bourne in 2010 with his performance A Life in Three Acts. Both shows posed as evenings of plain, immediate chat, but both, in fact, were complex, remediated things. This essay argues that such complex media schemes are, in fact, a crucial characteristic of confessional monologue, which has pervaded American theater since the 1980s.

The themes of the previous chapters are brought together in Chapter 7 through the introduction of a series of cases. In contrast to standard depictions of third-person case vignettes, distorted and over-simplified by the heuristic purposes they serve, a new method of case presentation is employed here that attempts to capture the inner world of the practitioner as well as the dynamic ebb and flow of the interchange between patient(s) and practitioner during particular “moments” in the therapeutic session. This demonstrates previous emphasis on the moral psychology and character of the practitioner.

Central in the Wake among the many Joycean virtues are those of kindness, understanding, tolerance, acceptance, and forgiveness. Embodied in, and voiced by, ALP—most evidently in her closing monologue, but also at the very end of I-4—all are conceived in a distinctive way. Part of Joyce's conception of them involves a sense of struggle, of prior honesty in facing the realities of situations, of determination to explore those realities no matter how sordid or repulsive they may seem to be. Although Joyce's vision is one of the great versions of humanism, it would be hard to overlook the religious backdrop to his sense of human virtue. The principal task of this reading of the Wake is to understand that movement—to return to ALP's closing monologue, to its earlier anticipations and variations, with fuller appreciation. However, the second and third parts of the Wake should be examined first.

In Jean Rhys’s fiction, advertisements, songs, books, and voices of others impinge upon the interior monologues of her characters. In particular, the popular songs that are integrated into Rhys’s first-person novels enhance the auditory nature of her interior monologues. Yet, while the songs referenced in Voyage in the Dark (1934) and Good Morning, Midnight (1939) sometimes foster automatic responses and clichéd understandings for her narrators, they can also instill a sense of defiance and comfort, making music one of the few channels for a momentary sense of fulfillment and expression. By surveying Rhys’s depiction of popular gramophone recordings and their Bohemian associations in her short stories, this chapter reveals how Rhys crafts and commodifies a bohemian voice in her novels, which sounds out the dialectical relationship between a middle-class public with an appetite for lurid tales of the underbelly of society and so-called bohemians, who pushed the boundaries of individuality and freedom.