Nobody had counted, so we counted
Every page ranking for this search offers a list. Not one of them says how much material actually exists, which means nobody can tell you what proportion of it you are being shown.
So we took a marked-up text of all thirty-eight plays. Every line in it carries its speaker, its gender and whether it is verse or prose. We counted every uninterrupted speech. The answer is 278.
Now set that against what is actually recommended. We read every page ranking for this search and the same twenty-five to thirty speeches account for nearly all of it. One site lists sixty and another lists a hundred, but both repeat the same handful of characters several times over.
We counted across twelve curated lists. These appear most often: Helena from All’s Well and Helena from the Dream, Hermione, Isabella, Phebe, Titania, Portia from Julius Caesar, the Princess of France, Lady Percy and Joan la Pucelle.
Juliet, Lady Macbeth and the quality of mercy appear less often than you would expect on the short lists. The editors have already started avoiding them. The sixty and hundred-item inventories still carry Juliet five times over.
None of this is a reason to avoid a speech you love. It is a reason to know what you are walking into, which is a different thing.
A speech interrupted by another character counts as two speeches. That is the right rule for auditions, and it means anthologies which stitch interrupted speeches together will report a larger figure than ours.
Prose cannot be line-counted the same way, because in the source text a prose speech is stored as one block rather than as printed lines. We converted prose using the canon’s own measured average of 7.41 words to a verse line, so a twelve-line prose speech means about eighty-nine words.
The figure is sound to within a speech or two. Forty-nine speeches had no gender recorded and were checked by hand; four of them turned out to be Queen Katherine and were added back in.
Verse or prose, which is the column nobody prints
This decides whether your speech is allowed before anyone hears a word of it. Exactly one of the sites ranking for this search labels it systematically.
Four of the schools we checked require a speech written in verse and say so plainly. A prose speech does not fail because it is worse. It fails because it is not what was asked for.
Rosalind is a prose role. Her epilogue is prose, and so is almost everything else she has of audition length. Her only substantial verse speech is the one to Phebe in the third act.
The epilogue appears on list after list, and it is in our own free library. At Juilliard, Guildhall, the Royal Conservatoire and Mountview it is inadmissible, and no page recommending it says so.
The same trap catches the funniest women in the canon. Mistress Page, Mistress Ford and Mistress Quickly are all prose. Comic verse for women is so scarce that the Nurse counts as a find.
There is a smaller trap inside the Emilia speech, which is otherwise one of the best choices here. Her preceding line is prose and the verse begins at the words about husbands’ faults. An actor who starts one line early opens a verse audition in prose.
You may perform a man’s speech, and five schools say so in writing
Across every page ranking for this search there is one sentence on this question, and it amounts to a shrug. It is the most consequential thing on this page.
The theatres settled this a generation ago. Fiona Shaw played Richard the Second at the National in 1995. Kathryn Hunter became the first English-speaking woman to play Lear in 1997. She played him again at the Globe in 2022.
Our census found 278 female speeches of twelve lines or more. The same count for male characters is 1,392. Women hold 16.6 per cent of the audition-length material in the canon.
So a rule that gender need not decide your choice takes your available repertoire from 278 speeches to 1,670, which is six times larger. Five schools have written that rule down.
The Royal Shakespeare Company keeps a page about women playing male roles. Its deputy artistic director puts the artistic case in eight words: you hear it in a different way in a woman’s mouth.
The speeches, with the numbers
Every line count is computed from marked-up text rather than taken from another list. Timings assume about three seconds a verse line and are estimates, so time your own cut.
The canon averages 7.41 words to a line. So three seconds a line works out at roughly 148 words a minute, which is normal for spoken Shakespeare. Allow ten to twenty per cent more than the figures below, because these are text-only times and a panel’s stopwatch counts your breath.
Seventeen characters who read under twenty have a speech of twelve lines or more, and between them they hold about forty-six speeches. Juliet alone accounts for nine of them, and Helena and Julia hold another fourteen between them.
Take those three out and you are left with roughly twenty-three speeches across fourteen characters. Most of them run twelve to fourteen lines. Some panels will say that is not a monologue at all.
So take a sixteen-year-old told to bring two contrasting Shakespeare speeches, one of them in verse. Her genuinely age-appropriate options number somewhere in the twenties for the entire canon. That is worth knowing before you conclude the problem is you.
Four things our own library gets wrong
We keep thirty-four free monologues with the full text, and seven of them are Shakespeare speeches for women. Holding other pages to a standard means holding ours to it too.
The library is still the fastest way to read seven of the speeches on this page in full, for nothing, without an account. Take the verse or prose column from here and the text from there, and use both.
Which free text to work from, and why it is not the same question as which is free
Shakespeare is public domain, so this is an accuracy question rather than a rights question. Of the pages ranking for this search, one names its edition.
Why any of this matters to an actor rather than a scholar. The Victorian editors mistook some falsely dated quartos for first editions. They then used corrupt texts to amend the Folio, so small readings differ from a modern edition. Your panel will not test you on it, but your line may not be their line.
Grading the sources
This page publishes a count, quotes eleven institutions and corrects our own library, so it owes you the method on each.
Where we differ from the standard account
How much Shakespeare is there for women?
Commonly saidNever quantified. Lists run to sixty or a hundred entries with heavy repetition and no total.
What we found278 speeches of twelve lines or more, across 88 characters and 37 plays. About twenty-five are in circulation.
Does it matter whether the speech is verse?
Commonly saidBarely mentioned. One page in the whole set explains the consequence, and only for one speech.
What we foundFour schools require verse in writing. Rosalind is a prose role, and that rules her out at all four.
Can a woman perform a man’s speech?
Commonly saidOne sentence across the entire first page of results, amounting to it being up to you.
What we foundFive schools permit it in writing, none prohibits it, and it takes the canon from 278 speeches to 1,670.
How long is the speech?
Commonly saidNot one ranking page gives a line count or a running time for a single speech.
What we foundBoth, computed, for every entry. Nine speeches in the canon run past forty lines and all of them need cutting.
Which text should I use?
Commonly saidAlmost nobody names an edition, and the two biggest print a modernised text credited to nobody.
What we foundThe most used free texts are one Victorian edition wearing two different interfaces. Folger is the one to work from.
Is there plenty for a teenager?
Commonly saidTeen lists exist and imply an ordinary amount of choice.
What we foundStrip out Juliet, Helena and Julia and roughly twenty-three speeches remain in the whole canon.
Is Hermione’s trial speech a monologue?
Commonly saidPrinted as one in anthology after anthology.
What we foundIt is three speeches broken by interruptions. Two schools ban stitched pieces by name.
Is our own free library above criticism?
Commonly saidSites do not audit themselves, so the question never arises.
What we foundFour of our seven are overdone, one is banned by name at Rutgers, and none of them is labelled verse or prose.
So start with the requirement rather than the speech. Find out whether your school asks for verse, whether it restricts you to the Elizabethans, and whether it has published anything about gender at all. Then choose from the two hundred and fifty speeches nobody brings, and work from a modern text. Time the cut out loud, with a stopwatch running rather than in your head.