Can You Choose a Classical Speech Outside Your Gender Identity?

Drama school auditions are a genuine, low-stakes opportunity to explore classical monologues written for a gender you don’t personally identify with — and far more actors could be taking advantage of this than currently do.

Why It Makes Sense for Drama School Specifically

Shakespeare isn’t writing new material — the pool of usable classical speeches is fixed and, restricted to your own gender identity, genuinely limited. Drama schools aren’t casting you for a specific role in a production; they’re assessing your capability, your talent, and your fit for a training environment. That means the usual casting logic that applies professionally doesn’t really apply here. If a speech genuinely draws you in — whether it’s Angelo from Measure for Measure or Juliet from Romeo and Juliet — there’s no reason gender should rule it out for an audition.

This is genuinely different from professional auditions, where you’re working from a specific casting breakdown for a specific character. Since gender-blind and gender-bent casting isn’t yet the industry norm (though it’s shifting), this kind of exploration may be more available to you now, in a drama school audition, than it will be later in training or in the profession.

Choose It for the Right Reason

Whatever speech you land on, gender-crossing or not, it needs to be a genuine draw — something in the subject matter, character, or story that actually interests you. Choosing a speech purely to seem edgy or unconventional, without real connection to it, tends to fall flat regardless of the gender question.

The One Real Consideration: Lived Experience

Panels want genuine truth in a performance, and truth is closely tied to lived experience. If a speech is specifically about the experience of living as a particular gender — Emilia’s speech from Othello, for instance, which speaks directly to women’s treatment and status — that’s a much bigger imaginative leap if it’s not your own lived experience, and probably worth avoiding for that reason specifically.

But if a speech simply happens to be written for a character of a particular gender without the subject matter being about gender itself — Edmund’s speech from King Lear, for example, which centres on the injustice between siblings rather than anything gender-specific — that distinction doesn’t matter nearly as much. A passing reference to being someone’s “brother” doesn’t make the speech about gender; it’s simply incidental to the actual story being told.

The Bottom Line

Don’t let an assumed restriction narrow your options unnecessarily. If a classical speech genuinely resonates and doesn’t hinge specifically on gendered lived experience, it’s entirely fair game for a drama school audition — and often opens up material you’d never otherwise get the chance to explore.