Soliloquy

In the theater, a speech by a character alone on stage, who thinks aloud and shows the audience what he does not say to the others.

In Hamlet

For Hecuba! / What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, / That he should weep for her? What would he do / Had he the motive and the cue for passion / That I have?

Hamlet is alone when he compares himself to the actor, and so he tells the audience what he would not say at court: the shame of feeling less for a murdered father than the actor feels for Hecuba.

Act II: Feigned madness and the theater trap, Hamlet, alone

The spirit that I have seen / May be a devil, and the devil hath power / T' assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps, / Out of my weakness and my melancholy, / As he is very potent with such spirits, / Abuses me to damn me. I'll have grounds / More relative than this

Act II: Feigned madness and the theater trap, Hamlet, alone

The play's the thing / Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King.

Act II: Feigned madness and the theater trap, Hamlet, alone

To be, or not to be, that is the question

Act III: The Mousetrap and the death of Polonius, Hamlet, alone, in the soliloquy

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, / And thus the native hue of resolution / Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought

Act III: The Mousetrap and the death of Polonius, Hamlet, alone, in the soliloquy

That cannot be, since I am still possessed / Of those effects for which I did the murder: / My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen. / May one be pardoned and retain th' offense?

Act III: The Mousetrap and the death of Polonius, Claudius, alone

How stand I then, / That have a father killed, a mother stained, / Excitements of my reason and my blood, / And let all sleep

Act IV: Exile, madness, and the trap, Hamlet, alone