“Soft you; A word or two before you go.
I have done the state some service, and they know’t.
No more of that. I pray you, in your letters,
When you will these unlucky deeds relate,
Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate
Nor set down aught in malice: Then must you speak
Of one that lov’d not wisely, but too well.
Of one not easily jealous, but being wrought
Perplex’d in the extreme. Of one whose hand,
Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away
Richer than all his tribe. Of one whose subdu’d eyes,
Albeit unused to the melting mood,
Dropp’d tears as fast as the Arabian trees
Their medicinal gum. Set you down this;
And say besides, that in Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turban’d Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduc’d the state,
I took by the throat the circumcised dog,
And smote him, thus.
I kiss’d thee ere I kill’d thee, no way but this:
Killing myself, to die upon a kiss.

Some of the most beautiful imagery in all of literature, in my opinion.

Another speech from Othello, which is one of my favorite speeches in Shakespeare period, is by Desdemona in the famous Willow scene, where she is talking about her maid:
“My mother had a maid, call’d Barbara.
She was in love, and he she lov’d prov’d mad
And did forsake her: She had a song of ‘Willow’,
An old thing ’twas, but it express’d her fortune,
And she died singing it. That song to-night
Will not go from my mind. I have much to do,
But to go hang my head on one side and sing it,
Like poor Barbara”

(I know it’s Barbary in a lot of texts, but it was Barbara when we did it at my theater, and I’ve learned it that way) the speech is incredibly simple, but has such a deep, sad, haunting tone to it that gives one chills. In this eight line speech, she just foreshadowed her own death, almost as if she knows that it will happen. Her lines before the speech (“If I do die before thee, prithee, shroud me in one of those same sheets”) supports this. The soft sounds of the speech, the use of open-ended words allows one to make it as dreamy and haunting as they so choose.

Of course, another fantastic speech, is Prospero’s from The Tempest:

“Our revels now are ended. These, our actors,
As I fortold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like the insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”

Beautiful, soft, could be a lullaby. There is more of this speech, but I only drew out this middle portion, because the rest ties in with the play (speaking to Ferdinand and Miranda), and the magic recedes. This speech makes the play, for me.

The speech of Jacques’, as well, brings a new level of deepness to the play of As You Like It, which, all-around, is a pretty silly, light, comedy.

“To die, to sleep
To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub,
 For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
 Must give us pause. There’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
 The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveler returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?”

Toni Rae above also added another great that must be in the mix, “sound & fury” from Macbeth.

This Act II, sc. V speech is an aria with a range that reaches the sublime. I’m falling in love with love all over again just by reciting the lines I once knew by heart. 

Rosalind Lacy MacLennan
 

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

Macbeth (Act 5, Scene 5, lines 17-28)
…just gets to me…

After Jacques concludes his speech, the stage directions inform us that Orlando enters, bearing old Adam on his back. The tenderness of this gesture offers a mute protest to the reductive vision of Jacques.