How to memorize a Shakespeare monologue in a week

The usual advice is to read the speech until it sticks. It does not stick. Repetition puts a speech into your mouth in the room where you learned it, and then an audition panel asks you a question first, or the reader gives you the cue a beat early, and the whole thing goes. A week is enough time to learn a monologue properly, but only if you spend the week on the right things.

What follows is seven days. Each one is twenty to forty minutes, which is roughly how long you can work on a speech before you stop hearing it. If you have three days rather than seven, there is a compressed version at the end.

The worked example is Juliet from the balcony scene, because it is short, it is famously misquoted, and it contains a line that refuses to scan.

Day 1: read it for the argument, not for the words

A monologue is somebody trying to get something. Before you learn a syllable, write out in your own words what the speaker wants and what has changed by the end. Then mark the places where the thought turns: where they answer their own question, where they give up on one line of attack and start another.

Juliet’s first long speech in II.ii turns three times. She calls out to a person she believes is not there. She reasons her way through what a name actually is. She arrives at an offer. Those three moves are the structure you will hang the words on, and they are what will still be there on the day when the words wobble.

Do not write the speech out from memory yet. Day 1 produces one paragraph of prose about what happens in it, and nothing else.

Day 2: scan it, and mark only what breaks

Iambic pentameter is not a literary observation, it is a set of instructions about where the pressure goes. You do not need to mark every foot. You need to find the lines that refuse to sit in the pattern, because those are the lines that carry the feeling and, not by coincidence, the lines you are most likely to fluff.

O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo? Deny thy father and refuse thy name, Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love, And I’ll no longer be a Capulet.

Three of those four lines are regular. “Deny thy father and refuse thy name” is ten syllables that alternate exactly as advertised, and you will find it goes in almost by itself. The first line does not. It runs long, it puts his name in three times, and the stresses fall in the wrong places for a calm sentence. That is the point, because she is not calm. It is also the line most people get wrong, because they smooth it out into something metrical that Shakespeare did not write.

Mark the irregular lines. There are usually two or three in a speech, and they are your anchors for the rest of the week.

Day 3: learn the spine before the flesh

Write the first two or three words of each move you marked on Day 1, in order, on one index card. For the speech above that is a very short list. Learn the list.

This sounds like less work than learning the speech, and it is, which is why it works. Most drying happens at a join, not in the middle of a sentence: you finish a thought and there is nothing waiting behind it. A spine of first words gives every thought something to hand off to. Once the spine is solid the sentences fill in around it far faster than they would from a cold start, because you already know what each one is for.

Day 4: say it with half the words gone

This is the day to stop reading and start testing. Cover the text and speak it. Where you stall, look, and then start that move again from its first words rather than from the top of the speech.

Line learning on the scene page does this without index cards. It blurs everything after the first one, two or three letters of each word in your own lines, which is enough to jog the memory and not enough to read, and hovering a line clears the blur so you can check yourself without breaking off. Set it to three letters today and one letter later in the week.

Day 5: drill the join, not the speech

By now the speech is mostly in. What is not in yet is the entrance. In an audition you will be given a cue, or a question, or silence, and the first words have to arrive without a run-up.

So practise the join on its own. Take the last few words of whatever comes before you, leave a real pause, and go. Twenty times. It is dull, and it is the highest-value thing in the week, because the join is where the speech either starts or does not.

Cue mode is built for exactly this. It reduces the scene to pairs: the speech immediately before each of yours, when somebody else is speaking it, plus any stage direction in between, and then your line. Everything else drops out of the script. Turn on short cue as well and each incoming speech is trimmed to its last five words, which is what a prompter would give you and roughly all you get on the day.

That which we call a rose By any other word would smell as sweet.

The first of those is not a full line. Juliet is finishing a line somebody else started, and a shared line like that tells you she comes in on top of them rather than after a pause. Where the verse does that, the join is part of the metre, and you should drill it until it is fast.

Day 6: say it to something that answers

A speech you have only ever said alone is a speech you have only ever said at your own speed. It needs to survive another voice.

If you have a person, use the person. If you do not, a rehearsal session here reads every other part aloud and listens while you say yours, moving through the scene line by line, and you can step back a line when you want the same join again. It asks for the microphone when you press Rehearse and not before.

Run the whole speech in context twice. Then run it once with cue mode on, so all you get is the cue and your own lines, which is closer to how it will feel.

Day 7: break it on purpose

Do not do a clean run and stop. Make it harder than the day will be.

Say it while walking. Say it while doing something with your hands. Have somebody start you from the third move instead of the first. Say it once deliberately too fast and once deliberately too slow. Every one of these proves that the speech is attached to the argument rather than to a rhythm you fell into on Day 3, and the difference shows up the first time anything goes slightly wrong in front of a panel.

Finish with one run at performance pitch, and then leave it alone.

If you have three days and not seven

Day 1 becomes an hour: the argument, the moves and the irregular lines in one sitting. Skip Day 3’s index card and go straight to speaking with the words blurred. Keep Day 5 whole, because the join is not optional. Then do Day 7.

What you cannot compress is saying it aloud to something that answers back. That is the part that turns a memorised speech into one you can perform, and it is worth protecting even in a three-day week.

The scene below opens with Juliet already selected, so you can drill the Day 5 joins against a voice rather than against a page. It asks for the microphone when you press Rehearse and not before.