Shakespeare’s Auditory Worlds

Shakespeare's Auditory Worlds examines special listening situations like overhearing, eavesdropping, and asides; it explores complex relationships between sound and sight, dialogue and blocking, non-English languages, and non-verbal relationships inherent in noise, sounds, and music, ending with a discussion with ASC Actors.

Inspired by the verbal exuberance and richness of all that can be heard by audiences both on and off Shakespeare’s stages, Shakespeare’s Auditory Worlds examines such special listening situations as overhearing, eavesdropping, and asides. It breaks new ground by exploring the complex relationships between sound and sight, dialogue and blocking, dialects and other languages, re-voicings, and, finally, nonverbal or metaverbal relationships inherent in noise, sounds, and music, staging interstices that have been largely overlooked in the critical literature on aurality in Shakespeare. Its contributors include David Bevington, Ralph Alan Cohen, Steve Urkowitz, and Leslie Dunn, and, in a concluding “Virtual Roundtable” section, six seasoned repertory actors of the American Shakespeare Center as well, who discuss their nuanced hearing experiences on stage. Their “hearing” invites us to understand the multiple dimensions of Shakespeare’s auditory world from the vantage point of actors who are listening “in the round” to what they hear from their onstage interlocutors, from offstage and backstage cues, from the musicians’ galleries, and often most interestingly, from their audiences.

IntroductionListening to Shakespeare’s Worlds of Sound

Walter W. Cannon and Laury Magnus

Part I: Sensory Apprehension: Speaking, Hearing, and Seeing on Shakespeare’s Stages

1. “Report me and my cause aright”: Hearing the Language of Exhortation in Hamlet and King Lear

David Bevington

2. Sound and Sight, Sound vs. Sight in Hamlet

Laury Magnus

3. Hearing and Interfering: Solving Puzzles in Theater Productions of Measure for Measure

Gayle Gaskill

Part II: Hearing Gone Awry: Mishearing, Not Hearing, and Silence

4. Silence, Mishearing, and Indirection in Much Ado

Caroline Latta

5. Writing Letters, Hearing Voices: Epistolary Error in Twelfth Night

Walter W. Cannon

6. Staging “Skimble-skamble stuff”: 1 Henry IV and the Welsh Voice

Megan Lloyd and Elizabeth Brown

Part III: Hearing Beyond Words: Shakespeare’s Noise, Sounds, and Music

7. Soundscape for an Offstage Beheading: Shakespeare’s Revision of 2 Henry VI 4.1

Stephen Urkowitz

8. “Fearful and confused cries”: Birdsong, Sympathy, and the Fear of Sound in Titus Andronicus

Clio Doyle

9. “They say it will penetrate”: Music as Aural Violation in The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Cymbeline

R. W. Jones

10Hearing Cues in Shakespeare: Instrumental Music and Sound Effects in the Later Plays

Jennifer Linhart Wood

11. Restructuring Audience at Shakespeare’s Globe

Leslie C. Dunn

Part IV: Voices from the Blackfriars Stage

Voices from the Blackfriars Stage: A Virtual Roundtable Discussion from Actors at the American Shakespeare Center:

Benjamin Curns, Sarah Fallon, Allison Glenzer, John Harrell, James Keegan, Patrick Midgley

Hearing on the Blackfriars Stage: A Coda

Ralph Alan Cohen