Most of us "talk to ourselves" (aloud) on some rare occasions,
but few if any have a practice of sustained oral self-address in
private. Yet that is what a soliloquy consists in. Soliloquy -
literally "talking alone" - derives from the theater, where
early on the need was felt to be able to give an occasional
inside view of the private thinking of a character. In the
theater, no thinking can be made directly available to the
audience unless it is brought to speech, so it was necessary to
propose a convention: the character would speak aloud, and the
audience would understand that what they were to imagine they
were hearing was what the character was saying to himself, or
what he would say if he were to give voice to his thought. In
other words, the audience was invited to imagine that the
character was "thinking aloud," but was expected to agree not to
import into its judgments about the character those
considerations it might import in real life if it were to hear a
person carrying on aloud with himself. Tha