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Monologues

Sad is not something you can play. It is what happens to the room when somebody wants something badly and cannot have it.

So every piece on this page says what the character is doing rather than what they are feeling. Thirty-two of them, all free and legal, for men and women. And an honest answer to the question underneath the search, which is whether you are supposed to cry.

The thirty-twoShould you cry?

Also on this page: who is actually running this search, which is not who the results assume; the count showing that half of Shakespeare’s grief writing never mentions death at all; why two thirds of the material offered under this heading was written by the website offering it; and how to work on this material without it following you home.

The problemSad is a result

You cannot act an outcome. Every entry below names the action instead, because that is the thing you can do.

 The questionFour say don’t

Named casting directors on crying in the room, and the one who disagrees. Nobody else prints this.

 The supplyTwo thirds are originals

Eleven per cent came from published plays. One trade title is republishing another site’s originals.

 AfterwardsNobody publishes this

No union has guidance on coming down from heavy work. Thirty-nine per cent of actors say they struggle to.
The short answer
Stop looking for a sad speech and look for somebody trying to do something impossible. The tears are the by-product and they are not the assignment.

Look at what else is on this search

Before anything about the pieces themselves, it is worth knowing what kind of search this is, because it is not the same kind as the one for dramatic or comedic monologues.

We ran nine variants and read everything that came back. Roughly half of it is not about acting at all.

What ranks alongside the acting pages, September 2026All of this came back on the same searches
A poetry chapbookFor sale, about love and sorrow
Not acting
It is a book of poems and it ranks for this term. Alongside a music playlist, a fan-fiction site and a crowdsourced list of television scenes that made people cry.
Diary-style writing tagged as audition tipsA social platform
Not acting
Personal writing wearing an audition heading to catch the search. The tags are about writing and survival rather than about performing.
A high school’s own monologue listPublished on a school website
Schools
Full text of thirteen in-copyright pieces, no dates, no authors on some. A page one result for a national search term.
Monologues written by childrenA teaching platform, ages six to eighteen
Schools
Two hundred pieces, credited to the pupils who wrote them, with name, age and location.
Eight short-video discovery pagesOne is titled to make casting directors cry
Performance
A large parallel search happening inside a video app, on the same phrasings.
The site that owns every neighbouring termMonologues for women, comedic monologues, the hub
Absent
It has no page for this search at all. That absence is the most informative thing on the list.
So who is actually here, on the evidence rather than the assumption.

A pupil with a class or festival piece due, which the school pages, the children’s writing and the teen-specific lists all point to. Somebody reading emotional writing for its own sake, which the poetry, the fan fiction and the playlist point to. And an actor early on who wants to prove they can be moved, which the video pages point to.

What we found no evidence for is the professional with a brief. Somebody with a specific audition searches by play, by period or by playing age. They do not search by feeling.

Which matters, because it explains the whole shape of what follows. A search that names a feeling rather than a form can be answered by anything, and it has been.

Two empty wooden chairs facing each other in a bare rehearsal room

Sad is a result. You can only play the thing that causes it

This is the whole craft problem with the category, and across every page we read, two sentences address it.

Nobody in a play is being sad. They are refusing, bargaining, correcting somebody, holding on, or trying to make another person understand. Sadness is what the room does in response, and it is not available to you as an instruction.

You can see how badly the category needs this stated by looking at the nearest anybody comes. The largest trade title offers a rehearsal tip: perform a sad monologue as happily as you can. That is an excellent instinct with no principle behind it, and it is offered as a variation rather than as the point.

The same speech, described two waysOne of these you can rehearse
Maurya, at the end of Riders to the SeaUsually described as
Feeling
An old woman grieving her drowned sons. Which tells an actor to arrive sad and stay sad for eighty seconds.
The same speechDescribed as an action
Doing
She is closing an account. She names the dead in order and gives instructions about the coffin and the holy water, so that the sea has nothing left to take. It is admin, performed at the pitch of catastrophe.
Constance in King JohnUsually described as
Feeling
A mother mad with grief for her lost son.
The same speechDescribed as an action
Doing
She is refuting a diagnosis. A cardinal has just called her mad and she sets out the evidence that she is not, then says she wishes she were, because madness would let her forget.
Sonya at the end of Uncle VanyaUsually described as
Feeling
The most famous sad speech in Chekhov, about rest and the sky full of diamonds.
The same speechDescribed as an action
Doing
She is keeping him alive until bedtime. He has just tried to shoot himself and then to poison himself. She offers the only thing she has left, because she has to get him through tonight.

Every entry further down this page is written the second way. It is the only column that changes what you actually do in the room, and no other page on this subject has one.

Should you cry? Four say no, one disagrees, and almost nobody prints it

The category is organised around tears. One page in everything we read treats it as a craft question, and it gives it four sentences.

The people who cast are not neutral on this and they are on the record. A casting director whose credits include Mean Girls and Footloose puts it in one line: they do not expect you to cry on command like a wind-up toy, and adds that the point of the scene is not to produce tears but truth.

Named, published and datedWhat the people watching actually say
A film directorOn auditions specifically
No
She says she does not even like it when actors cry in an audition, because the scene becomes about the crying and goes one-dimensional. What she wants is honest emotion, not tears.
A casting director of thirty yearsSixty-five features
No
If you feel it the camera will see it, so you do not have to show it. And there is far more impact in watching somebody fight the tears back than in watching them arrive.
An acting teacher in New YorkOn the mechanism
No
The second an actor decides they have to cry at a given moment, they are working towards a result and have stopped telling the truth.
A casting director on a network dramaThe dissent, and it is fair
Sometimes
She values real tears when they come honestly and from a real place. Her warning is against looking fake, and she advises finding another way to carry the feeling if the tears will not come.
Every page ranking for this searchOn whether tears are wanted
Silent
Not one asks what the audition is, who is watching, or whether a self-tape and a drama school panel want the same thing. The craft discussion exists and it lives on entirely different pages.
The disagreement is narrower than it looks, and the useful part is what they agree on.

None of them is really arguing about tears. They are all arguing about whether you are chasing a result, and on that they are unanimous.

So the workable version is this. If it happens, let it. If it does not, do not go and get it, because the going and getting is visible from the other side of the table and it is the thing they are describing.

Two thirds of what is offered here was written by the site offering it

We counted every piece on every page by where it came from. The proportions are not what the headings promise.

Where the material comes fromCounted across the readable list pages
Written by the website itselfOr by its users
66%
Original pieces by a site owner, or by pupils on a teaching platform. Excellent for class and self-tape, and inadmissible wherever a published play is required.
Film and televisionScreenplays and episodes
22%
Four schools we have checked require a published play in writing, so this slice is out at all four.
Published stage playsThe thing most panels ask for
11%
One in nine. A single acting studio accounts for most of them, and it ranks weakly.
And one finding we did not expect at all. The largest trade title in the results carries ten pieces under a heading promising monologues from movies and plays. Not one of the ten is from a play. Seven are screen. The other three are web originals, two of them by the owner of another monologue website, credited by author name only, with no note that they are not from anything. A reader looking for stage material lands on the most authoritative page in the search and is handed nothing eligible. We do not think anybody set out to mislead. It is what happens when a search names a feeling and the supply rearranges itself to fit.

Thirty-two speeches, free and legal, and what each one is doing

Public domain throughout. Shakespeare line counts and verse or prose calls are computed from marked-up text; everything else is a checked estimate.

The ten we would start withThe action first, because that is the part you can rehearse
MauryaRiders to the Sea, Synge, to her daughters
Prose, F
137 words for the last speech, about 70 seconds; the full closing run is 346 words. Plays 60 and over. She is closing an account, naming the dead in order and giving instructions about the coffin.
Nell QuicklyHenry V 2.3, to Pistol and the others
Prose, F
185 words, about 1:20. Plays 35 to 55. They have just said Falstaff is in hell. She is contradicting them and producing evidence, down to the cold knees. Funny and devastating in the same breath.
ConstanceKing John 3.4, to Cardinal Pandulph
Verse 17, F
137 words, about 51 seconds. Plays 30 to 45. She is refuting a diagnosis, proving she is not mad and then wishing she were, because madness would let her forget.
HamletHamlet 2.2, to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
Prose, M
163 words, about 1:10. Plays 20 to 35. He is laying a trap, handing two spies an apparently candid confession of his own despair in order to watch what they do with it. The despair is real and so is the trap.
SonyaUncle Vanya, Act 4, to Voynitsky
Prose, F
About 180 words, roughly 1:20. Plays 18 to 25. She is keeping him alive until bedtime, after two attempts on his own life in one afternoon. The most famous sad speech in Chekhov is an emergency intervention.
SebastianTwelfth Night 2.1, to Antonio
Prose, M
119 words, about 51 seconds. Plays 18 to 30. He is trying to leave, explaining who he is in order to put a kind stranger off, and the grief ambushes him mid-sentence. Modern-sounding and never on a list.
Queen KatherineHenry VIII 3.1, to the two cardinals
Verse 13, F
105 words, about 39 seconds. Plays 40 to 55. She is demanding an audit of her own conduct, asking them to name the fault while knowing there is not one. Short, self-contained, no plot needed.
Mark AntonyJulius Caesar 3.1, alone with the body
Verse 23, M
180 words, about 1:09. Plays 30 to 50. He is making a promise to a corpse, apologising for shaking the murderers’ hands and converting the grief straight into a prophecy of war. Better than the Forum speech and private.
Lady PercyHenry IV Part Two 2.3, to her father-in-law
Verse 37, F
295 words, about 1:51. Plays 25 to 40. She is stopping him going to war, using her dead husband as the evidence that he has forfeited the right. Grief as prosecution.
MalvolioTwelfth Night 5.1, to Olivia and the company
Verse 15, M
127 words, about 45 seconds. Plays 35 to 55. He is entering a formal complaint, producing the letter as an exhibit and demanding a ruling in public. Humiliation rather than bereavement. And it is verse, after four acts of prose.
Twenty-two more, and the register varies more than you would thinkMale and female, with the action named
PaulinaThe Winter’s Tale 3.2, to Leontes
Verse 28, F
About 1:24, plays 35 to 55. She is sentencing him, itemising the crimes and daring him to invent a torture adequate to the last one.
Mrs AlvingGhosts, Act 2, to Pastor Manders
Prose, F
About 410 words, roughly 2:55, needs cutting. Plays 45 to 55. She is dismantling his account of her marriage, item by item. Nineteen years of grief, weaponised. William Archer’s translation.
NorthumberlandHenry IV Part Two 1.1, to his household
Verse 25, M
About 1:15, plays 50 to 65. He is talking himself into an army. He throws away the crutch and says the news of his son’s death has cured him. A grief speech that moves forward.
HermioneThe Winter’s Tale 3.2, on trial
Verse 33, F
About 1:39, plays 30 to 45. She is entering a plea for the record, knowing the verdict is fixed, and listing what has already been taken.
EgeonThe Comedy of Errors 1.1, to the Duke
Verse 23, M
About 1:09, plays 50 to 65. He is buying time by telling a story, because while the Duke is listening he is not being executed. From a comedy, which nobody expects.
Rita AllmersLittle Eyolf, Act 2, to her husband
Prose, F
About 210 words, roughly 1:30. Plays 30 to 45. She is apportioning blame for a drowned child and refusing to carry it alone. The whole play is a couple litigating a death, and it is unmined.
Alfred AllmersLittle Eyolf, Act 2, to Rita
Prose, M
About 165 words, roughly 1:10. Plays 35 to 50. He is confessing in order to make her share it, reframing their marriage as the cause. The male half of the pair above.
TitusTitus Andronicus 3.1, to the Tribunes
Verse 26, M
About 1:18, plays 50 to 65. He is petitioning, lying down in the road to plead for his sons. The Tribunes walk out mid-speech and the action does not change, which is the point.
AntigoneAntigone, to Creon and the guards
Prose, F
About 570 words, so it must be cut. Plays 16 to 25. She is justifying the choice one last time to people who have condemned her, with a cold piece of reasoning about brothers. Jebb’s translation is prose; Campbell’s is verse.
CleopatraAntony and Cleopatra 4.15, to her women
Verse 19, F
About 57 seconds, plays 30 to 45. She is resigning the throne, reducing herself to the level of the maid who milks so that she is free to die. A decision, not a lament.
Richard IIRichard II 3.2, to his remaining allies
Verse 34, M
About 1:42, plays 25 to 40. He is ordering them to stop comforting him, insisting on the worst account and forbidding anyone to argue. Grieving a self rather than a person.
HecubaThe Trojan Women, over the child’s body
Verse, F
About 3:20, needs cutting. Plays 55 and over. She is performing a funeral in a city that no longer exists and turning the ritual into an accusation. Read the copyright note below before you use a translation.
MedeaMedea, to her children
Prose, F
Long, and it must be cut. Plays 30 to 45. She is saying goodbye while arguing herself out of stopping, and she changes her mind three times inside it. That structure is the whole reason it plays.
Mrs HaleTrifles, Glaspell, to Mrs Peters
Prose, F
About 95 words, roughly 40 seconds. Plays 40 to 55. She is charging herself with a crime, building the case out loud while deciding whether to hide the evidence.
Oswald AlvingGhosts, Act 2, to his mother
Prose, M
About 290 words, roughly 2:05. Plays 25 to 30. He is making her understand the sentence, repeating the doctor’s words because she keeps trying to comfort him and he needs her to stop.
FaustusDoctor Faustus, the final hour, alone
Verse, M
About 3:00, cut hard. Plays 25 to 45. He is negotiating with the clock, bargaining eternity down to a hundred thousand years. Grief that is not bereavement at all, played as haggling.
Queen MargaretHenry VI Part Three 5.5, to her son’s killers
Verse 17, F
About 51 seconds, plays 35 to 50. She is goading them into killing her too, comparing them unfavourably to Caesar’s assassins.
The Father who has killed his sonHenry VI Part Three 2.5, alone
Verse 15, M
About 45 seconds, plays 40 to 60. He robs the corpse and then identifies it. He goes through the pockets first. The character has no name, so it carries no baggage at all.
Marcus AndronicusTitus Andronicus 2.4, to Lavinia
Verse 47, M
About 2:21, cut it. Plays 40 to 60. He is trying to make her stay long enough to be helped, and talking without stopping because if he stops he has to act.
LearKing Lear 5.3, over Cordelia
Verse, M
Two runs of seven lines each. Plays 65 and over. He is demanding an instrument, a glass and then a feather, to prove she is breathing. Played as one unit with the middle cut, it reaches about 70 seconds.
Rachel LovingRachel, Grimké, Act 2, alone
Prose, F
About 380 words, roughly 2:45. Plays around 21. She is breaking off relations with God and swearing never to bear children into a country that lynches them. Mourning children who do not exist. Free in America, in copyright in Britain until 2029.
Macduff and EmiliaMacbeth 4.3 and Othello 5.2
Too short
He has no children is four lines. Emilia’s death speech is seven and has the Willow song inside it. Both are scenes rather than monologues, and splicing them is banned by name at two schools.
The category is much broader than the word suggests, and we can put a number on it.

We took every substantial grief speech in Shakespeare, tested each for death vocabulary and then for a possessive naming a relation, and sorted them. Of one hundred and eighty-five speeches, only about fourteen per cent are somebody mourning a specific named person.

Just under half never mention death at all. They are loss of a future, humiliation, exile, loneliness, ruin and regret. Malvolio is on this page and nobody has died.

The method is a word search rather than a reading, so it will miscount in both directions. But the direction holds, and it explains why the same four bereavement speeches get used to exhaustion: they are the longest and the most self-contained, so they survive being cut out of the play.

One more number from the same scan, for anyone looking for a woman’s piece. The split is roughly three male speeches to every one female, which is why Constance, Lady Percy, Paulina and Queen Katherine are worth knowing.

Three copyright traps specific to this material, and they are sharper than the usual one.

The Greek verse translation that actually plays is not free everywhere. Gilbert Murray’s rhyming Euripides is public domain in America and still in copyright in Britain until 2028. The unambiguously free alternatives are older and read older.

The most-linked free Chekhov is a 1998 revision. Two of the texts that come up first carry a line saying the translation was revised in 1998. The underlying translation is free and the revision is not.

Juno and the Paycock is free in America and in copyright in Britain until 2035. It holds one of the great grief speeches in the language, which is why it is not on the list above.

Working on this without it following you home

Nobody in this search says a word about it, so here is what the field actually publishes, including how thin the evidence is in places.

Start with the technique argument, because it is old and it is unresolved. Strasberg taught actors to reach a feeling through the sensory particulars of a real memory, and his own institute still teaches it, with a rule that the memory should be at least seven years old.

Two of his contemporaries rejected it outright. Stella Adler said in 1966 that going back to a feeling from one’s own experience is unhealthy, and taught imagination instead. Meisner’s own book states that emotional memory plays no role in the system he evolved.

What is actually established, and what is notReported at the strength the evidence supports
Actors find it hard to come downA survey of 782 actors
Survey
Thirty-nine per cent reported difficulty relaxing or letting go after an emotionally demanding role. Eighty-four per cent warm up. Far fewer cool down.
The population is under strainA survey of 3,595 actors, 2026
Survey
Seventy-eight per cent report having had a mental health problem. Twenty-seven per cent reported thoughts of being better off dead, against seven per cent of adults generally.
Character and self can blurInterview studies, small samples
Qualitative
Student and professional actors describe losing the boundary while working. Interview work with seven to twenty participants, so suggestive rather than demonstrative.
That emotional recall causes lasting harmThe claim you will see repeated
Not shown
The concern is real, sustained and comes from named academics. We found no controlled study demonstrating it. Anyone telling you it is proven is overstating, and anyone calling it invented is also wrong.
Guidance on coming downFrom any union or casting body
None
We checked the performers’ unions on both sides of the Atlantic, the casting directors’ guild and the performing arts medicine body. The published duty of care is about physical work. Nobody has written this half.
So here is what does exist, from theatre academics rather than from any governing body.

The step-out. End the work with three slow, deep, complete breaths, then deliberately release the face and change your posture. It is small and it is a real marker.

Say your own name out loud. Not silently. Name the character you have finished being and then name yourself. It sounds absurd and it is the most reported practice in the literature.

Take the character off physically. Shake it out, or unzip it like a second skin, and leave it in the room you worked in rather than carrying it to the car.

Do the last one somewhere else. Watch the tape back in a different room from the one you recorded in, and talk about it as work rather than as what happened.

And one thing worth saying plainly, because no page in this search says it. Some people arrive at a search like this one not looking for an audition piece. If that is closer to why you are here, that is worth taking seriously rather than working around. Talking to your doctor, or to somebody you trust, is a reasonable next step. In the United States you can call or text 988 at any hour, and in the United Kingdom and Ireland Samaritans answer on 116 123, free, day or night. Neither of those is an emergency-only number and you do not have to be in crisis to use one.

One more note on choosing. Published guidance on portraying suicide exists and it is good, from the Samaritans, from an Australian government-funded body and from the World Health Organisation. It asks makers not to attribute a death to a single cause, not to present it as release, and to keep detail of method out. Every one of those documents is written to protect the audience, and not one of them says anything about the performer. That is the half nobody has written.

Grading the sources

This page publishes a count, quotes named professionals and makes a claim about who is searching, so it owes you the method on each.

The claim, and where it came fromWhat we found
Every count of what pages containEach page, read in full
Counted
Nine search variants, every readable result classified by source and medium in September 2026. Four pages were gated or blocked and are counted in nothing here.
Shakespeare line counts and formsMarked-up lineation
Primary
Computed from a corpus carrying form and gender on every line. It produced two surprises we would otherwise have got wrong, including that Malvolio’s last speech is verse.
Every quotation from a casting directorNamed, published, dated
Primary
Four named professionals, and the one who disagrees is quoted too. We dropped three widely circulated quotations because we could not find a primary source for any of them.
The bereavement proportionOur own lexical scan
Derived
A word search across 185 speeches, not a reading. It will over-count and under-count, and we have said which way on both.
Lengths outside ShakespeareFree full texts
Estimated
Word counts obtained from the texts themselves, but not machine-counted. Treat everything non-Shakespearean as within about twenty per cent, and time your own cut.
Who is searching thisInferred from the results
Inferred
We have no search data. This is read off what ranks and what the pages assume, which is evidence but not measurement.
That emotional recall harms actorsNamed academics
Unproven
Ethical argument, interview studies and one dissertation. No controlled study, and we have said so above rather than letting the section imply otherwise.
Two translator attributionsUncle Vanya and The Sea-Gull
Absent
The free files name no translator. We have not printed a name we cannot confirm.
Four pieces we wantedLady Gregory, Chekhov, O’Neill, Synge
Unmeasured
Real, free and almost certainly good, but our texts were truncated before we reached them. We are not printing lengths we did not obtain.

Where we differ from the standard account

What makes a monologue sad?

Commonly saidThe subject. Bereavement, heartbreak, a character in pain, described by what they feel.

What we foundSadness is what the room does. The character is doing something, and that is the only part you can rehearse.

Should the audition make them cry?

Commonly saidIt is the stated aim of several pages, including one built entirely around it.

What we foundFour named professionals say chasing tears is the error. The one who disagrees is arguing about honesty, not about tears.

Where does this material come from?

Commonly saidImplied to be plays and films, in the headings if not in the content.

What we foundTwo thirds is written by the site publishing it. One in nine is from a published stage play.

Who is searching for this?

Commonly saidAssumed to be actors, and every page is written that way.

What we foundThe results include a poetry book, a playlist and a school’s own page. It is at least three different people.

Does sad mean somebody has died?

Commonly saidEffectively yes, judging by what gets recommended.

What we foundAbout fourteen per cent of Shakespeare’s grief writing. Just under half never mentions death at all.

Is Chekhov free to use?

Commonly saidYes, and the first free text you find is treated as safe.

What we foundTwo of the most-linked free Chekhov texts are a 1998 revision carrying its own copyright.

Is there any risk in this material?

Commonly saidNot raised anywhere. No page in the search carries a note of any kind.

What we foundThirty-nine per cent of surveyed actors struggle to let go afterwards, and no union publishes guidance on it.

Is emotional recall dangerous?

Commonly saidEither that it is proven harmful, or that the concern is invented. Usually one or the other.

What we foundNeither. Real documented concern from named academics, and no controlled study either way.

So stop looking for a sad speech. Find somebody who wants something they are not going to get, work out exactly what they are doing about it in the next ninety seconds, and play that. The feeling arrives on its own or it does not arrive at all, and either way it was never the thing you were being asked to produce.

Keep going

The choice

How to pick a monologue

Working from the brief rather than from a feeling, and the questions to ask before you learn anything.

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Thirty-four complete pieces with the full text, comedy and drama, for men and for women.