Introduction - The Sound of the Voice

Summary

This Chapter emphasizes the centrality of voice and ear in the oral cultures and theatrical enterprises of early modern England. It further demonstrates that the sound of the voice and the act of listening are especially important in the works of William Shakespeare. To prepare the reader for an in-depth exploration of the significance of voice and vocality in five of Shakespeare’s late plays, the Chapter reviews important work in the fields of sound studies and ethical criticism. It then provides an introduction to the philosophical thought of Emmanuel Levinas and Adriana Cavarero, whose work provides the theoretical basis for the analysis that follows.

Although this is a study of Shakespeare’s late plays, I wish to start with an early play: The Comedy of Errors, which was likely written around 1594. Patterned after two of Plautus’s comedies (The Menaechmi and Amphitryon), Shakespeare’s farce revolves around two sets of identical twins who are repeatedly mistaken for one another. The play authorizes these many mix-ups by presenting its twins as anatomically identical, right down to the last mole and wart. Notwithstanding the improbability of such a state, the Dromios are said to bear all the same “privy marks” about their bodies (3.2.143–45).¹ Supposedly, the twins mirror one another so absolutely that even the strictest visual scrutiny is not enough to differentiate them. But if the eyes are of no help here, what about the ears? Though the play stipulates that the brothers cannot be distinguished by sight, it says nothing about sound. This would seem to be another improbability of the play, given that one half of each sibling pair was raised in Syracuse, on the coast of Sicily, while their counterpart was raised over five hundred miles away in Ephesus, on the coast of present-day Turkey. Presumably, being brought up in different regions – one in Italy and one in Asia minor – would have given the boys different accents or idioms. As soon as they opened their mouths to speak, wouldn’t pronunciation make it possible to determine which twin was Syracusan and which was Ephesian? The play silently skips overs this question, acting as if regional accents do not exist.

Yet even as the comedy sidesteps questions of dialectical difference, it does not entirely do away with the idea that our voices might be distinctive, at an individual level. Toward the end of the play, Egeon catches sight of Antipholus E, confuses him for the son he raised in Syracuse, and calls out to him for aid. When Antipholus E fails to recognize his supplicant, Egeon concludes that the griefs and cares of the past seven years have so thoroughly “defeatured” him that he no longer resembles his former self. No matter: Egeon urges Antipholus E to listen to the sound of his voice, confident that this will establish his identity, notwithstanding the indistinction of his appearance:

egeon Why look you strange on me? You know me well.

antipholus e I never saw you in my life till now.

egeon Oh, grief hath changed me since you saw me last,

And careful hours with Time’s deformèd hand

Have written strange defeatures in my face.

But tell me yet, dost thou not know my voice? (5.1.295–300)

When both Antipholus E and Dromio E answer in the negative, Egeon cannot believe it. “I am sure thou dost,” he insists (5.1.304). Dromio E reiterates that Egeon’s voice is unfamiliar, and the merchant’s confidence collapses, leaving him perplexed and bewildered that his “poor tongue” should be so “cracked and splitted” as to be unrecognizable:

Not know my voice! O time’s extremity,

Hast thou so cracked and splitted my poor tongue

In seven short years that here my only son

Knows not my feeble key of untuned cares?

(5.1.308–11)

While Egeon is ready to accept that his “grainèd face” might be “hid / In sap-consuming winter’s drizzled snow,” he finds it much harder to accept that his voice would be inadequate to identify him (5.1.312–13). He has considered the voice a sure and steadfast manifestation of the self and cannot fathom that this might not be true. Thus, even as the drama plays fast and loose with privy marks and regional dialects, it continues to uphold the idea of individual voices as enduringly unique, capable of revealing ourselves to others.

Other Shakespeare plays also honor this idea. When Romeo addresses Juliet from the shadows of her garden, she replies: “My ears have not yet drunk a hundred words / Of thy tongue’s uttering, yet I know the sound. / Art thou not Romeo, and a Montague?” (Romeo and Juliet, Q2 2.1.100–2). When Gadshill challenges Poins and Falstaff on the side of a pitch-black highway, Poins exclaims, “Oh, ’tis our setter; I know his voice” (1 Henry IV, 2.2.44). When Portia approaches Jessica and Lorenzo in the dark of night, Lorenzo says, “That is the voice, / Or I am much deceived, of Portia” (Merchant of Venice, 5.1.110–11). And when Cassandra cries out unseen from within, Troilus reassures his companion, Priam, “’Tis our mad sister; I do know her voice” (Troilus and Cressida, 2.2.98). In King Lear, blind Gloucester recognizes Lear by the sound of his voice (4.5.96, 106–7), which is also how the Bastard recognizes Hubert in King John (5.6.5–8), how Cassius recognizes Casca in Julius Caesar (1.3.41), how Cominius recognizes Caius Martius in Coriolanus (1.6.25–27), how Trinculo recognizes Stefano in The Tempest (2.2.81–82), and how the Duke recognizes both Isabella and Lucio in Measure for Measure (4.3.100–1, 5.1.332–33). Throughout the Shakespearean drama, voices serve as distinctive signatures of the self, acoustically delivering the “I” to others. The aim of this book is to show how Shakespeare emphasizes this self-delivering feature of the voice, even before or beyond language. Especially in the late plays, the mere sound of the voice proves capable of constructing and reconstructing interpersonal relationships and obligations, irrespective of what is actually said. In these works, vocality itself – that is to say, all the pre- and extra-semantic aspects of speech and speaking – carries an intense ethical charge.

In its attention to vocality and ethics, this book draws together two important strands of Shakespeare criticism: one having to do with Shakespeare and sound and the other having to do with Shakespeare and moral philosophy. Much of our interest in the first of these pairings, Shakespeare and sound, can be traced back to Bruce Smith’s field-altering book, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England, first published in 1999. In this book, Smith develops and deploys a historical phenomenology to map out the soundscapes of Shakespeare’s England, from city to country to court. The goal, Smith says, is to push back on “the tyranny of Cartesian philosophy, with its privileging of visual experience” and to begin to “listen, otherwise.”² This relates especially to early modern amphitheaters. While outdoor playhouses are customarily envisioned as spaces for the display of visual spectacle, Smith insists that these venues were, first and foremost, “sound-devices,” that is, vast, airy “instruments for producing, shaping, and propagating sound.”³

In his own inventory of the sounds produced and propagated by early modern playhouses, Smith considers a wide range of noises, created by human and non-human agents alike. However, many of the scholars who have heeded Smith’s call to lend a listening ear to the public theaters have focused on the sound of the human voice. Individuals like Gina Bloom, Allison Deutermann, and Amy Rodgers have shown how a vocalic approach to the plays of the period can enhance our understanding of early modern attitudes toward gender (Bloom), genre (Deutermann), and audience formation (Rodgers).⁴ This book expands on such efforts by utilizing sound studies to augment our understanding of the moral and philosophical aspects of Shakespeare’s art. By concentrating on how Shakespeare’s late plays stage the sound of human speech, I make the case that these works enact ethics at an acoustic level. At the same time, I offer additional reasons for regarding Shakespeare’s oeuvre as a lively and embodied performance of moral philosophy.

To be sure, talking of Shakespeare as a moral philosopher is nothing new. As Michael Bristol points out, the very first book devoted entirely to Shakespeare criticism, Elizabeth Montagu’s Essays on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare (1769), lauds the playwright as “one of the greatest moral philosophers that ever lived.”⁵ Nevertheless, interest in Shakespeare’s moral and ethical engagements has risen markedly in recent years, as is evidenced by essay collections such as Shakespeare and Moral Agency (2010); “Shakespeare and Phenomenology” (2012); Shakespeare and Renaissance Ethics (2014); Shakespeare and Hospitality (2016); Face-to-Face in Shakespearean Drama (2019); Teaching Social Justice through Shakespeare (2019); Entertaining the Idea: Shakespeare, Performance, and Philosophy (2020); and Shakespeare and Virtue: A Handbook (2023).⁶ Each of these collections proposes, in one way or another, that the significance, value, and relevance of the Shakespearean drama resides in its moral and ethical concerns. As a discipline, we have become increasingly attentive to the various ways the Shakespearean stage robustly practices what Christopher Crosbie calls “vernacular ethical philosophy.”⁷ My objective is to advance our understanding of the moral and ethical aspects of Shakespeare’s art by attending to sound: specifically, the sound of the human voice. In this effort, I draw on several modern-day philosophers, most of whom work in a branch of philosophy associated with the German thinker G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831).

In their introduction to Shakespeare and Renaissance Ethics, Patrick Gray and John Cox note that the two primary sources for ethical concepts and systems of thought in Shakespeare’s day were classical philosophy and Christianity.⁸ Accordingly, the first set of essays in their volume situates Shakespeare alongside thinkers like Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca and takes up classical virtues like loyalty, wit, and empathy, while the second set of essays situates Shakespeare alongside thinkers like Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin and considers Christian virtues like contrition, submission, mercy, and forgiveness. Yet Gray and Cox are careful to point out that the relational sense of self that predominates in early modernity makes it so that Shakespeare’s art also has multiple and strong points of contact with intersubjective moral philosophy in the Hegelian vein, as practiced by modern-day ethicists like Martin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Ricoeur, and Alasdair MacIntyre.⁹ The essays collected in Shakespeare and Renaissance Ethics do not explore these post-Hegelian points of contact, but they are the focal point of my study. This book endeavors to advance our understanding of Shakespeare’s ethical practice by making use of two post-Hegelian philosophers in particular: the above-mentioned Emmanuel Levinas and his twenty-first-century champion and critic, Adriana Cavarero.

Emmanuel Levinas (1905–1995)

Emmanuel Levinas began his philosophical writings while incarcerated in a Nazi prison camp, seemingly worlds away from the life and times of Shakespeare. Yet Levinas, like Shakespeare, was fundamentally interested in matters of human interrelation. Like Shakespeare, Levinas thought deeply about the way our experiences of/with other people shape our sense of self and call it into question. Levinas often summed up this function by asserting that ethics, not ontology, is “first philosophy.” According to Levinas, ethics must precede ontology because the “I” of being cannot emerge as such until after the arrival of the other person. Were it not for the other person, Levinas explains, nothing would oppose the egoistic idea that everything is an extension of the self. However, the other explodes this delusion by confronting the “I” with that which cannot be reduced or assimilated. When I look on the face of the other, Levinas says, what I see exceeds my totality at every moment, outstripping every thought I can think of him or her. Or, as Levinas puts it, the other “escapes my grasp by an essential dimension, even if I have him at my disposal.”¹⁰ This radical alterity reveals to me the boundaries of my being and in this manner constitutes me as a subject. I become an ego inasmuch as I am demarcated or delimited as such by the presence of the other.

But the ego that is hereby constituted is also (and immediately) called into question. The “I” cannot freely pursue its own interests in the face of the other, for the nudity and neediness seen therein lay claim to all that the “I” would consume, control, or possess in such a pursuit. Arresting all egoism, the encounter with the other makes me responsible – not because I accept this responsibility but because the mere existence of the other makes it incumbent upon me. While I can try to ignore or evade my summons, I cannot unhear or silence it. According to Levinas, responsibility is the inexorable condition of human subjectivity. “To be” is always already to be ordained to a long and difficult life of service.

All this is a far cry from those ethical systems that emphasize empathy or fellow feeling, inviting us to regard others as similar to the self and to treat them accordingly (in the mode of “Love thy neighbor as thyself” or “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”). Levinas maintains that treating the other as an analog of the self is not an ethical response but a reductive one. This is not ethics but “egology”: a tiresome play of the same that cannot emancipate anyone. According to Levinas, we must not encounter the other as a second self (to be given equal consideration) but as a master (to be given all). His ethics impose upon the “I” an exorbitant and unending obligation. Paradoxically, Levinas teaches that this infinite obligation does not diminish my subjectivity but actually invests it. Since I am the only one who can fulfill my responsibility to the other, this responsibility endows me with absolute individuality – what Levinas terms the “supreme dignity of the unique.”¹¹

What’s more, the relation with the other that gives me my identity also gives me my world, by affording it a reality it could not otherwise possess. As Levinas explains, the exteriority of the world depends on there being more to it than just me. By providing me with the category of “not-me” that is the essence of exteriority, the other makes my world real. I know it to be actual rather than illusory to the extent that I have it in common with the other. Thus, the encounter with the other, while never comfortable, is nevertheless crucial, for it frees the ego from the dreadful state of solitary being in which there can be no identity, exteriority, or fecundity and summons it to go beyond being in a movement Levinas referred to as “excendence.”¹²

In recent years, literary critics have increasingly recognized that Levinas’s thoughts on excendence and interrelation can help us weigh the stakes, plot the trajectories, and explore the energies of Shakespeare’s plays. Having died in 1995, the philosopher himself was not alive to witness this Levinasian turn in Shakespeare studies; however, he did much to point us in this direction. In his interviews and essays, Levinas identified Shakespeare as one of his earliest influences, and in his collected works he refers to Shakespeare more often than any other author, save Dostoevsky.¹³ In his great work, Otherwise than Being (1974), Levinas alludes to both Hamlet and Macbeth on the very first page, and in the series of lectures published as Time and the Other (1948), he provocatively proposes that “the whole of philosophy is only a meditation of Shakespeare.”¹⁴ A half century after Levinas made this pronouncement, Shakespeare scholars took note and began to tease out the linkages between Levinas’s philosophy and Shakespeare’s art. In the early 2000s, Sean Lawrence, Geoff Baker, and Bruce Young published the first works putting the ethicist and the dramatist in dialogue.¹⁵ Since that time, Levinasian readings of Shakespeare have proliferated exponentially – to the point that a search on Google Scholar for “Levinas” and “Shakespeare” now returns over 18,600 results.¹⁶

In my previous work, I have emphasized the affinities between these two authors.¹⁷ I have shown that Levinas’s writings can deepen our understanding of what is at issue in the Shakespearean drama while offering us a rich vocabulary and sophisticated theory for describing its operation and effects. Correlatively, I have demonstrated that Shakespeare’s art can do much to clarify the radical quality of Levinas’s thought, which is all-too-often aligned with a politically correct, multicultural appreciation of difference and diversity.¹⁸ This book builds on these earlier efforts, further capitalizing on the complementarities of these two authors. At the same time, this book takes this ethical mode of literary analysis in new directions by following the lead of Adriana Cavarero, a twenty-first-century thinker whose engagement with and critique of Levinas charts an exciting pathway forward.

Adriana Cavarero (b. 1947)

Adriana Cavarero agrees with Levinas that the radical alterity of the other is the basis for subjectivity and for ethics. However, Cavarero is troubled by Levinas’s emphasis on vision. She finds it problematic to tie ethical responsiveness to the experience of seeing the face of the other because she is sensitive to the way sight cultivates a sense of detachment. Vision, after all, is voluntaristic: We can choose whether to look, with an action as simple as closing our eyes or averting our gaze. Moreover, what we decide to look upon remains external to us, “out there” in the visible world. “The visible world,” Cavarero writes, “is not a world that interrupts, interferes, or surprises … It is, rather, a stable, immobile, objective world that lies in front of us.”¹⁹ One can look at this world – and the people within it – without engaging or interacting; vision allows for an attitude of isolation, distance, and noninvolvement that is antithetical to ethical responsiveness.²⁰ Consequently, Cavarero contends, contra Levinas, that the fundamental ethical experience is not a visual relation, wherein one sees the face of the other, but an acoustic relation, wherein one hears the other’s voice.

Listening, Cavarero assures, is a more ethical modality than looking, for listening is involuntary, interruptive, and relational. As hearers, we are completely exposed to acoustic events, which come from an exterior we do not fully control. “Our ears are always open,” Cavarero writes, “even when we sleep. With respect to sounds, therefore, we are in a position of passivity. They can strike us without our being able to foresee or control them.” Unlike looking, which promotes feelings of agency and even mastery, “hearing consigns us to the world and its contingency.”²¹ Stephen Handel describes the difference this way: “Looking is centrifugal; it separates you from the world,” but “Listening is centripetal; it pulls you into the world.”²² Attuned to these contrasting impulses, Cavarero elevates audition over vision, pulling us more closely into ethical relation.

Cavarero describes this ethical connection as an “interlocution” or “convocation” and emphasizes its relational quality. “[T]he voice is always, irremediably relational,” Cavarero writes. It strikes the ear even when it does not mean to: “The voice is for the ear.”²³ Consequently, hearing the voice of the other is different than seeing his or her face. The one who speaks to me, as opposed to the one who faces me, not only prevents me from objectifying him or her (because voices do not come from objects but only from living throats) but also precludes me from remaining aloof or inactive (because the act of speaking necessarily means speaking to someone). Whereas the visual encounter can be one-sided, the vocal encounter “requires a reciprocity of speech and listening.” It does not allow its participants to remain abstract subjects but positions them instead as interlocutors, which is to say, as “human beings in flesh and bone, with mouths and ears.”²⁴

By orienting her ethics around voice, then, Cavarero continues to prioritize the irreducibility of the other but in a way that avoids the problems of vision.²⁵ Her reorientation also steers clear of the metaphysical abstraction that suffuses Levinas’s thought. When Levinas speaks of the face, he often resorts to figuration. According to him, the best way to encounter the face of the other “is not even to notice the color of his eyes!”²⁶ Instead of attending to the face in its specific, material reality, Levinas would have us regard it as a manifestation of the divine. To his way of thinking, the infinite alterity we see in the face of other should put us in mind of the Altogether Infinite.²⁷ For Levinas, in other words, the face functions as a metaphysical figure: one that is “in the trace of God” and in which God is “disincarnate.”²⁸ This aspect of Levinas’s thought has alienated many, including Alain Badiou, who complains that Levinas’s ethics is merely “decomposed religion” (religion décomposée) and ought to be discounted as such.²⁹ Cavarero’s approach to the voice, however, does not depend upon metaphysical figuration. Instead of ignoring the particular qualities of each voice, Cavarero draws our ear to things like pitch, timbre, cadence, tempo, intonation, and accent – for these are what communicate “the vital and unrepeatable uniqueness” of each speaker: a uniqueness that is neither abstract nor metaphysical but material and embodied.³⁰ Over and over again, Cavarero asks us to hear each voice as issuing from “a vibrating throat of flesh” and audibly communicating the singular, corporeal condition of the speaker. In this, Cavarero not only resists the abstraction of Levinas’s ethics but also the abstraction of western philosophy.

As Cavarero explains, the western philosophical project is founded upon and informed by a love for logos, which is seen as universal, immaterial, and eternal. This logocentrism has driven western philosophy in the direction of abstraction, as is evidenced by its attempts to transform both self and other into fictitious, disembodied entities, like the generic “man,” the Cartesian cogito, and the neo-liberal “individual.” Cavarero resists this universalizing impulse by founding her philosophy on the particular, material, and contextual ontology of the voice. Instead of accepting the metaphysical elevation of mind over matter and verbal meaning (logos) over vocalic sound (phone), Cavarero insists upon the importance of embodied speech. By resituating the voice within the body, Cavarero makes a case for the materiality of speech – as well as all those other things that metaphysics has deemed too material to matter, such as the corporeal, the feminine, and the natural. In this way, she offers a much-needed corrective to the logocentrism of the philosophical tradition. She also offers a corrective to the logocentrism of the literary critical tradition, pointing us toward novel interpretive practices that synergistically combine materialist, Marxist, feminist, antiracist, and ecocritical approaches. The aim of this book is to model these interpretive practices, showcasing what a vocalic approach to Shakespeare can accomplish.

Shakespeare and Speech

This, then, is a book about Shakespeare and speech. However, it differs from most studies of speech in Shakespeare by attending more to voice and vocality than to verbal meaning and linguistic content. It is less concerned with matters of semantics, stylistics, and rhetoric than it is with the sensuous, sonorous, and somatic dimensions of human speech. These aspects of speech have traditionally been dismissed as extraneous or even antithetical to signification: the noise or static that can get in the way of one’s intended meaning. Yet Cavarero contends that these aspects of the voice are replete with meaning, for they reveal the uniqueness of the other. Prior to and apart from the use of language, they announce that “there is a living person, throat, chest, feelings, who sends into the air this voice, different from all other voices.”³¹ To hear such a voice is to be drawn into relation, no matter what it says. As Cavarero states: “The act of speaking is relational: what it communicates first and foremost, beyond the specific content that the words communicate, is the acoustic, empirical, material relationality of singular voices.”³² According to Cavarero, speech is inherently affecting; it always already sounds an ethical summons. I believe that a similar understanding of speech informs and animates Shakespeare’s art. As this book attests, Cavarero’s ideas are useful to think with where Shakespeare is concerned because he, too, characterizes the voice of the other as an interruptive, ethically charged convocation.

Fittingly, the book in which Cavarero works out her ideas about vocality and ethics starts by linking them to Shakespeare. In the translator’s introduction to For More than One Voice (2005), Paul Kottman – motivated by Cavarero’s own fondness for Shakespeare – elects to use Romeo and Juliet to illustrate the central tenets and general promise of her thought.³³ What Kottman does is remarkable, but Shakespeare scholars have been slow to follow his lead. Readings that refer to Cavarero remain rare.³⁴ But if Cavarero has not been extensively utilized in Shakespeare studies, vocality itself has gained some traction, as sound studies has solidified as a sub-field.³⁵ Taking a vocalic approach to the Shakespearean stage certainly makes sense, given the centrality of voice and ear in the oral cultures and theatrical enterprises of early modern England.

Voices and Ears in Early Modern England

Jennifer Rae McDermott observes that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the senses of sight and hearing enjoyed special status, due to the belief that they do not depend on physical contiguity, as do the other senses, but are “active mediators between the inner wits and the outer world.”³⁶ Sir John Davies, for instance, describes the eyes and ears as “Conduit pipes of knowledge” that “feed the mind,” while the churchman Robert Wilkinson refers to them as the two “channels” by which knowledge is conveyed “into our soules.”³⁷ As conduits or channels, though, the eyes and ears are not identical, and many authors single out audition as the more impactful mode of perception. According to Sir Francis Bacon,

It hath beene anciently held, and observed, that the Sense of Hearing and the Kindes of Musicke, have most Operation on manners … The Cause is, for the Sense of Hearing striketh the Spirits more immediately than the other Senses and more corporeally than Smelling: for the Sight, Taste, and Feeling, have their Organs, not of so present and immediate Access to the Spirites, as the hearing hath …³⁸

Richard Braithwaite agrees that audition is in a class by itself, advising that the ear has “a distinct power to sound into the centre of the heart.”³⁹ Robert Wilkinson concurs, characterizing the ear as the “doore of the hart” and advising that “God neuer commeth so neere a mans soule, as when he entreth in by the doore of the eare.”⁴⁰As McDermott explains, these ideas about the immediacy of audition were strengthened by Bartolomeo Eustachy’s discovery in 1564 of an auditory canal that acts as an interior passageway for small particles, bodily liquids, and in-bred air. News of the Eustachian tube spread quickly throughout Europe, materially corroborating the prevailing notion that there is a direct connection between one’s ears and one’s insides.⁴¹ In her own survey of anatomical writings from the period, Allison Deutermann finds that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century authors, apparently without exception, refer to the ear as a gaping hole that leaves the body constantly, utterly exposed. According to Deutermann, early modern anatomists and barber surgeons “repeatedly describe sound as a force against which the body is all but defenseless.”⁴² On this count, John Bannister is representative, claiming in The Historie of Man (1578) that our ears are “continually open, and prest to receiue the sound of euery speach, or other noyse.”⁴³ Banister’s observations about our acoustic exposure rhyme with Cavarero’s, notwithstanding the centuries that separate them. Yet Bannister, unlike Cavarero, is not resisting but rather expressing the predominant thinking of his society. Whereas Cavarero is standing up to the videocentrism of her post-Cartesian world, Bannister is in step with the audiocentrism of his oral/aural one. Early modern England, as Robert Weimann advises, was very much “a culture of voices, a civilization of oral signs.”⁴⁴ During this time, Jennifer Richards and Richard Wistreich explain, voice was central to the transmission of almost every kind of knowledge – from scientific facts to spiritual truths to philosophical speculation – and was widely regarded as “the most efficacious means for impressing understanding on the mind.”⁴⁵ In this era, vocality was vital.

The centrality of voice is especially evident in the early modern playhouses, which revolve around acoustic interactions. In the theater, Russ McDonald writes, talking is not just “a kind of doing” but is “the only kind of doing.”⁴⁶ The entire endeavor depends upon speaking and listening. As Bruce Smith advises, everyone involved in early modern playmaking – from actors to playwrights to printhouse compositors – “spoke, read, and wrote within an episteme that gave primacy to voice and ear.”⁴⁷ Smith’s detailed architectural analysis of England’s outdoor amphitheaters verifies that they were, in essence, temples of sound.⁴⁸ This lesson was learned firsthand by the professional actors who played in the inaugural season of the reconstructed Globe in 1997–98. “In this space,” William Russell explained, “… It’s the voice that’s important. It’s what they hear that is the key to the thing. And they do hear. I’ve watched the audience listening, and I’m listening in a new way to other actors on the stage.” Andrew French agrees. Reflecting on his own experiences within the wooden O, he announced, “There is no place that relies so much on the art of the ear.”⁴⁹

Early modern authors often express awareness of this reliance. When the playwright John Webster (as we suppose) outlines the attributes and abilities of “An excellent Actor” in Sir Thomas Overbury’s expanded collection of characters, he focuses on voice. Praising the way a successful player “charms our attention,” Webster invites us to imagine a scene of aural enthrallment: “Sit in a full Theater, and you will thinke you see so many lines drawen from the circumference of so many eares, whiles the Actor is the Center.”⁵⁰ The prominence of voice and ear in the playhouse is also apparent in the way its patrons were described. As Andrew Gurr and Mariko Ichikawa note, the term “audience” (from the Latin audire, “to hear”) is far more prevalent in early modern England than the alternative term “spectator” (from the Latin spectare, “to see or watch”), leading them to conclude that stageplays were more usually understood as fare for the ear than for the eye.⁵¹

References to the hearing of plays abound in Shakespeare. When a troupe of traveling actors arrives in Elsinore, Prince Hamlet excitedly exclaims, “we’ll hear a play tomorrow,” and then invites Claudius to participate by asking, “will the King hear this piece of work?” (Hamlet, 2.2.505, 3.2.42). In Henry V, the Chorus implores the general assembly, “Gently to hear … our play” (Prologue 34), while the Prologue in Henry VIII addresses the playhouse patrons as “gentle hearers” and as “the first and happiest hearers of the town” (17, 24). When Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is given a choice of entertainments, he selects the lamentable tragedy of the rude mechanicals by announcing, “we will hear it.” Philostrates tries to dissuade him by saying, “I have heard it over, / And it is nothing,” but Theseus doubles down, insisting, “I will hear that play” (5.1.75–77, 81). And in the induction to The Taming of the Shrew, the lord tells the itinerant actors, “There is a lord will hear you play tonight” and warns them not to react if he behaves oddly, “For yet his honor never heard a play” (Induction 1.89, 92). The messenger then readies Sly for the performance by explaining that his various doctors “thought it good you hear a play” (Induction 2.129). Over and over again, Shakespeare refers to plays as acoustic experiences.

While Shakespeare’s propensity to present plays in sonic terms is characteristic of his era, he appears to have been unusually invested in the acoustic aspects of theater. When Gabriel Egan ran word searches in Literature Online (LION), the full-text database of all English drama, poetry, and fiction to 1900, he found that occurrences of “seeing a play” outnumber occurrences of “hearing a play” by a significant margin, making Shakespeare’s emphasis on the voice and ear somewhat anomalous. Indeed, Egan advises that nearly half of the aural examples in the era come from the writings of Shakespeare.⁵² Ben Jonson, it seems, desperately wanted his plays to be heard rather than seen but doubted that playgoers could pull it off. In his paratexts, Jonson often articulates this distrust, as in these lines spoken by the Prologue in The Staple of News (1625):

Would you were come to heare, not see a Play.

Though we his Actors must provide for those,

Who are our guests, here, in the way of showes,

The maker hath not so, he’ld have you wise,

Much rather by youre eares, then by your eyes.⁵³

As Gurr advises, Jonson almost always calls playgoers “spectators” – but this is not because he esteems vision over audition. Quite the contrary, Jonson is adamant that the “soul” of a play lives in its words. When he makes mention of “spectators,” then, Jonson is not privileging sight over sound but is “covertly sneering” at those who do. According to Gurr, each instance of “spectator” in Jonson’s works should be read as an insult, aimed at uncultured playgoers who prefer eye-pleasing spectacle.⁵⁴ Thus, even though Jonson regularly speaks of plays in visual terms, he adheres to the idea that stageplays – properly experienced – are something to be heard.

Jonson’s linguistic habits can provide some useful context for Egan’s word-search findings. Nevertheless, it remains true that Shakespeare stands out as unusually committed to the aural and vocal dimensions of playmaking. Shakespeare writes his plays with a listening ear in mind, and the plays he writes foreground the act of hearing. In his works, the word “ear” is frequently modified with an adjective. So it is that the playwright asks us to imagine persons with dull ears, healthful ears, grieved ears, willing ears, attent ears, foolish ears, knowing ears, greedy ears, grave ears, quick ears, licentious ears, treacherous ears, diligent ears, open ears, kindest ears, warlike ears, heedful ears, aged ears, ancient ears, ruined ears, sickly ears, pregnant ears, credent ears, patient ears, mad ears, deaf ears, married ears, savage ears, and sad ears. The staggering range and richness of this inventory attests to Shakespeare’s emphasis on the act of hearing, as well as his sense that hearing is an ethically charged behavior. What ear we use when listening to the voice of the other fundamentally shapes our reception, interaction, and relation. One can listen in a variety of ways, some more responsive/responsible than others.

The Agency of the Ear

Shakespeare’s aural qualifiers indicate that not all hearers are equally perceptive or equally receptive. Insofar as these modifiers allow that some auditors might be less than accepting, they align with an alternative understanding of the ear that is at odds with its presentment as a gaping hole. As Deutermann points out, early modern anatomy texts not only present the ear as an “always open” orifice but also as an elaborately constructed defensive mechanism. According to these experts, the structure of the ear performs two opposing functions: On the one hand, it acts like a funnel to draw sounds in, while, on the other hand, it acts like a series of barriers or checkpoints to prevent sounds from penetrating. Thus, the sense of hearing is both within and without one’s conscious control. Due to these disparities, Deutermann says, the medical literature leaves us with the idea that listeners can be arranged along a continuum, with individuals who are closed off or “sealed” on one side and those who are “indiscriminately absorptive” on the other. Instead of offering us a single, unified model, they articulate two contradictory ways of thinking about audition: To hear means “to absorb foreign, potentially harmful matter involuntarily,” but it also means “to select certain sounds over others by choice and according to judgment.”⁵⁵

This counternarrative, in which hearers can elect either to repel or invite, animates a great many sermons in the period. Robert Wilkinson, for instance, differentiates between three types of auditors: those who merely “apprehend an outward sound” (as animals do), those who listen solely “to haue their eares tickled” (as playgoers do), and those who make the effort to “performe attention” and “hearken.”⁵⁶ Exhorting his parishioners to be the latter, Wilkinson advises them it is their Christian duty to “moue their eares” toward the preachers of God’s word so as to “meete them in the halfe way with eares.”⁵⁷ William Cowper similarly addresses himself to the ear’s ability to admit or exclude in The Anatomie of a Christian Man (1611), explaining that just as “the mouth tastes the meat, and lets none goe downe to the stomack, vnlesse it be approued; so the eare of the godly tastes words, and lets none goe downe to the soule which is not from God.”⁵⁸ An analogous understanding informs Richard Braithwaite’s Essaies Upon the Five Senses (1620). Braithwaite attests that we can shut our ears, if not physically like the eye by way of an eyelid, then attentively so by way of a spiritual and cognitive “free will” and “pure consecrated desire” housed within the organ. Thus, a cautious ear can become “barracadoed against the insinuating desires of euery seducing appetite.”⁵⁹ In Braithwaite’s estimation, ears are neither passive nor inert. To the contrary, Braithwaite identifies audition as “one of the actiuest & laborioust faculties.” According to him, “A discreet eare seasons the vnderstanding, marshals the rest of the sences wandring, renewes the minde,” and collaborates “with iudgement” to determine “whether that which it hath heard, seeme to deserue approbation.”⁶⁰ In these texts and sundry others, as McDermott summarizes, churchmen, poets, philosophers, and anatomists alike construe hearing as a voluntaristic activity in which listeners can exercise discerning judgment to filter the good from the bad.⁶¹

The stakes of judicious listening are especially elevated in the early modern period due to the direct link between ears and insides, discussed above. Richard Crooke attests to this immediacy when he claims that “to heare then, is to attend with the eare, to receiue with the heart,” and “to conuert in the life.”⁶² The idea that sound can enter the heart and alter the life is not just notional, rhetorical, or metaphorical. Audition is presumed to be materially impactful. As Deutermann reports, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century anatomists describe sound “as an object or force capable of working profound physiological effects on its listeners.” According to these authors,

Noise slips inside the ear, or “hole of hearing,” and progresses ever more deeply inside the self, passing from the outer ear to the auditory canal and finally into the “after-braine” and memory. At each stage, sound presses upon the body and re-forms the corporeal material with which it comes into contact. The act of hearing is consequently imagined as a somatic transformation …⁶³

In Shakespeare’s day, it is widely held that the sounds that infiltrate one’s ears are capable of shaping and reshaping the self, materially as well as mentally and spiritually. For this reason, it is crucial that one has a care for what and how one hears.

Voice and Ethics

In such a schema, audition bears all kinds of moral and ethical weight. Shakespeare, I believe, was especially sensitive to this burden. As Michael Witmore remarks, the sounds we encounter in Shakespeare’s plays are loaded with meaning, whether they be lines of dialogue, non-linguistic utterances, or music. All of them resonate with what Witmore calls “an awakening and directional appeal”: They rouse the listener “with the sense that he or she is somehow meant to hear what is hanging in the air.”⁶⁴ To hear such an appeal is to experience an ethical summons, for listening implies obedience. This is Mladen Dolar’s sense of things, which he supports by pointing to the way the two are linked in multiple languages, including English (where “obey” derives from the Latin audire, “to hear”), German (where gehorchen, “to obey,” stems from hören, “to hear”), and several Slavic languages (where slušati can mean both “to listen” and “to obey”). According to Dolar, this etymology corroborates that “listening is ‘always-already’ incipient obedience.” “The moment one listens one has already started to obey,” Dolar writes. “In an embryonic way one always listens to one’s master’s voice, no matter how much one opposes it afterward.”⁶⁵ Every vibrating throat of flesh makes a claim on us, even if we resist.

This book argues that Shakespeare’s art is energized by this difficult dynamic. Especially in his later plays, Shakespeare makes much of the vibrating throat of flesh and the summons it sounds. This heightened attention to the sound of the voice might have something to do with the King’s Men’s move to Blackfriars Theatre in 1608. As scholars like Keith Sturgess, Bruce Smith, and Mary Thomas Crane have pointed out, vocal and auditory effects would have been especially salient in the intimate, enclosed space of the indoor theater, giving Shakespeare added reason and ability to explore what sounds can do.⁶⁶ However, the emphasis on voice that I detect in the late plays does not emerge only after 1608 but is something that builds over the entirety of Shakespeare’s career. I take it to be the natural progression of his playwrighting: an activity that is wholly dependent on dialogue. Shakespeare’s task in authoring a play is to invent and interweave an arresting array of distinctive voices, each of which demands to be heard. I propose that this repeated practice pushes Shakespeare in the direction of Cavarero’s position that the voice is always meant for the ear of the other, is always relational. One evidence of this is the decreasing number of soliloquies in Shakespeare’s later plays. Whereas characters in the early plays often talk to themselves, characters in the later plays more commonly talk to others. Their voices are not instruments for the expression of solitary thought but instruments for conversation and convocation. My aim in this book is to attend to these convoking voices, but in the manner Bruce Smith calls “hearing green.” Smith contrasts this methodology with a more logocentric approach, wherein speech is considered only for its semantic content. When we “hear green,” Smith says, we expand our range and become receptive to the totality of sound, including the extra-linguistic expressiveness of speech. According to Smith, the objective is “to undo Descartes’ separation of thinking subject and thought-about object.”⁶⁷ By enlisting the aid of Cavarero and other theorists of vocality, I seek, in addition, to undo the logocentric privileging of the masculine, the rational, the ideal, and the immaterial. My ambition is to do something to reclaim the voices of those who have been marginalized by metaphysics, including the underclass, women, and people of color. In this way, I affirm the importance of inclusivity in Shakespeare and in Shakespeare studies.⁶⁸ By thinking widely and capaciously about the voice and vocality, my book advances these interests by picking out and amplifying new and important ethical notes in the Shakespearean drama. At the same time, Voice and Ethics in Shakespeare’s Late Plays models a fresh form of philosophically informed criticism that promotes the goals of social and environmental justice by outlining a more responsive and responsible way of relating to others and of being in the world.

Chapter Summaries

Chapter 1 considers the significance of voice in Coriolanus, especially the way voices are said to be situated within bodies (e.g., in the tongue, in the lungs, in the heart). It shows how the patricians in the play locate their voices in the “worthier” parts of the body and the citizens’ voices in the “worser” parts, thereby leveraging anti-corporeal and anti-materialist ideologies to authorize their own speech and discredit the citizens’. This chapter also notes, however, that the voices in the play prove to be highly mobile. Instead of remaining in their respective regions, they move about within the body and even between bodies. The drama is replete with instances of “vocal contamination,” wherein the utterances of one person find their way into the mouth of another. This mobility undercuts the patricians’ conservative approach to bodies and voices and invites us to envision radical alternatives. Chapter 1 invokes Levinas and Cavarero to flesh out these radical alternatives, concluding that if we are to avoid replicating the antagonistic, self-defeating, zero-sum politics set forth in this play, we need to listen and respond to bodies and voices differently than we do – especially those belonging to the disadvantaged, the different, the marginalized, and the menaced.

Chapter 2 begins by considering the vocal deceptions in King Lear. Although Cavarero insists on the uniqueness of each person’s voice, both Kent and Edgar put on accents to disguise their voices and conceal, rather than reveal, their distinctive identities. The chapter then widens its scope to consider other ways voices are altered and speech is falsified in Lear, eventuating in an expressive crisis. Over the course of the play, speech is pushed to its breaking point as characters are reduced to traumatized, repetitive inarticulacy (“Alack, alack”; “Oh, oh, oh, oh!”; “Howl, howl, howl!”), until we reach the end, when Edgar can say hardly anything at all (“The weight of this sad time we must obey”). Yet even when words cannot wield the matter, the sound of the voice remains meaningful. The most powerful statements in the play are verbally spare – as in the case of Cordelia’s “No cause, no cause” – but they are significant nonetheless. This bears out Levinas’s belief that the act of saying is more important than the content of the said. Contesting the idea that logos is the primary source of meaning, King Lear demonstrates that it is through phone that we undertake the most meaningful of actions: namely, disclosing and delivering ourselves to the other.

Chapter 3 focuses on Pericles, Prince of Tyre, a romance that has a great deal to say about listening, especially in contrast to looking. It argues that in Pericles visual modes of perception are imbricated in regimes of power and exploitation, while audition is presented as a way out. When characters in the play lend their ears to sounds and voices that are all-too-often silenced, ignored, or drowned out – especially those belonging to women and the natural world – they are miraculously redeemed and regenerated. Marina’s voice, in particular, drives the drama toward its happy conclusion. To account for the power of her voice, I turn to Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and David Kleinberg-Levin, each of whom takes aim at the oppressiveness of logocentrism, celebrating instead the enlivening energies of the pre-semantic and extra-verbal. As do these authors, Pericles associates the plenipotent voice of the play with the feminine, the more-than-human, and the beyond-meaning, indicating that these can usher us into productive and ethical relationships with others and our world.

Chapter 4 turns to The Winter’s Tale with a focus on the unruly vocality of Paulina, the woman “Of boundless tongue,” who refuses to regulate her speech (2.3.91). Unlike King Leontes’s male counselors, who try to console him after the death of his wife and son, Paulina sounds a ceaseless lament that is faulted for being unreasonable and excessive. Nevertheless, this irrational, incontinent speech is precisely what is needed. Utilizing Nicole Loraux’s and Bonnie Honig’s work on mourning women in classical tragedy, this chapter emphasizes the ethical and political efficacy of Paulina’s speech. Although phallogocentrism would dismiss female phone as empty noise, The Winter’s Tale locates it at the center of an ethical practice that can convert tragedy into comedy, saving us from our self-destructive egoism and transforming us into “precious winners all” (5.3.131).

Chapter 5 examines the myriad ways Prospero vocally projects his authority in The Tempest, either on his own or in conjunction with other entities. It unpacks the vast range of vocal tricks Prospero uses to gain and wield power over others, especially his disgruntled slave, Caliban. Drawing on the work of Jennifer Lynn Stoever, it shows how Prospero imposes and enforces a “sonic color line” that punishes Caliban’s vocal difference in a way that enacts racial oppression through the ear. To the degree that it does this, the play chillingly anticipates racialized listening practices that remain with us today. Nevertheless, the play’s conclusion gives us reason to believe that Prospero perhaps comes to recognize, regret, and even repent of his vocal tyranny. Though the drama stops short of enacting a truly ethical dialogue, this possibility calls out to us, albeit faintly, at the end of the play.

The Vibrating Throat of Flesh

At the core of each chapter is the vibrating throat of flesh, which manifests the profound alterity and uniqueness of its speaker. As Steven Connor explains, our voices are identifying attributes, like the color of our hair, eyes, and complexion, or like our gait, physique, and fingerprints. However, the voice differs from these other attributes in that it does not merely belong or attach to the self. My voice is not “incidental to me” or “merely something about me,” Connor says, for “I produce my voice in a way that I do not produce these other attributes.” In a powerful way, my voice is me: “It is my way of being me in my going out from myself.” According to Connor, “Nothing else about me defines me so intimately as my voice, precisely because there is no other feature of my self whose nature it is thus to move from me to the world, and to move me into the world”:

All this is to say that my voice is not something that I merely have, or even something that I, if only in part, am. Rather, it is something that I do. A voice is not a condition, nor yet an attribute, but an event. It is less something that exists than something which occurs.⁶⁹

This book gives itself over to the event or occurrence of the voice in Shakespeare’s late plays. These plays, I maintain, are anchored in what Cavarero calls “a vocal ontology of uniqueness.”⁷⁰ Cavarero’s project is to demonstrate that this ontology of vocal uniqueness provides a durable foundation for ethics. My aim is to demonstrate that it also provides a durable foundation for ethical criticism.