This Chapter begins by considering the vocal disguises Kent and Edgar put on to obscure their identities in King Lear. It then widens its scope to consider other ways voices are altered and speech is falsified, eventuating in an expressive crisis. Over the course of the play, speech is pushed to its breaking point, and characters are reduced to traumatized, repetitive inarticulacy. 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 but emotionally and ethically full. 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.

Pericles, Prince of Tyre has a great deal to say about listening, especially in contrast to looking. This Chapter demonstrates 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.

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.

This Chapter considers the significance of voice in Coriolanus, especially the way voices are located within bodies. It shows how the patricians situate their voices in the “worthier” parts of the body and the citizens’ voices in the “worser,” leveraging anti-corporeal and anti-materialist ideologies to authorize their own speech and discredit the citizens’. Nevertheless, the voices in this play are highly mobile. They repeatedly move about within bodies and between bodies, undercutting the patricians’ conservative approach and allowing us to envision radical alternatives. Invoking work by Emmanuel Levinas and Adriana Cavarero, the Chapter concludes by fleshing out these radical alternatives.

This Chapter focuses on the unruly vocality of Paulina, the woman “Of boundless tongue,” who refuses to regulate her speech (2.3.91). Unlike King Leontes’s 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).

This Chapter examines the 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.

There is a modern expectation that since Shakespearean theatre is in some respects a popular art form, it should represent ordinary people in a positive or sympathetic light. This hope is frustrated at many points by the hierarchical structure of early modern culture, and its consequent tendency to identify the common people with whatever is ignoble and disorderly – an identification which is deepened, in plays as in society more generally, by the conventional image of the people as a nameless, fickle, and latently rebellious crowd. The pejorative force of these associations is complicated, however, by the fact that something like that very crowd is present in the theatre itself, watching, even co-creating, the show. It is as a formal dimension of the entertainment that ‘the people’ most tellingly take possession of Shakespeare’s stage.

The notion of original pronunciation (OP) has arisen because of interest from people who are not themselves phonologists, but who want to know how an earlier period of English sounded to add a fresh dimension to spoken or sung performance. After a discussion of the evidence available at different periods, the paper focuses on Early Modern English, reviewing five constituencies: early music, Bible translations and liturgy, heritage projects, non-dramatic poetry and (especially Shakespearean) theatre. The ways OP has been used by practitioners are described with particular reference to rhyme, wordplay, phonaesthetics and characterisation. A brief review of the history of the OP movement is followed by an illustration of the challenges of working with OP, using a case study of the options surrounding the phonetic character of /r/. Two recent projects, on Keats and Richard III, are summarised. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the extent to which OP projects can achieve authenticity.

This chapter takes a perspective on Shakespeare’s language that is more in tune with linguistics than literary criticism. Hence, it covers areas of language typically and traditionally discussed within linguistics, including phonology, grammar, lexis and semantics, but also includes pragmatics and, briefly, Conversation Analysis. It begins with a consideration of the label ‘Shakespeare’s language’ and what exactly that might encompass; the role of Shakespeare’s language in the study of the history of English; and popular myths that have arisen around Shakespeare’s language. It concludes with a reflection on methods of study, especially digital methods. It strives not only to acknowledge key research, but also to give the flavour of some of the findings of that research.

This chapter explores the verse drama, a genre favoured by Michael Field and by several other Victorian poets, including Robert Browning, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Algernon Charles Swinburne. This chapter sets Michael Field’s verse dramas in the wider contexts of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century drama and theatre, including debates about the New Drama (epitomised by Henrik Ibsen), ‘Shakespeare-philia’, and the modernist movement, such as T. S. Eliot’s verse plays.

This introduction establishes the overarching claim of this book: that Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists consistently focus on the disastrous consequences of willing and will-making, while simultaneously emphasizing the vital role that wills played in defining one’s sense of identity and self-worth. English Renaissance drama can be understood, in one way, to be preoccupied with considering the influence that wills exert over human life.

Here, I provide an overview of how both the faculty of the will and the last will and testament were conceived of in the period. The will was primarily thought to be an unruly part of the soul that hinders our ability to achieve what we desire, though the performance of the will was not merely localized to the body or psyche. One way of enacting one’s will upon the world was achieved for some through the production of a last will and testament. Last wills acted as tools for testators to impose their will upon the living, dictating who will, and who will not, benefit from their death. In their immaterial and material forms, wills shaped the quality and conditions of one’s life and afterlife.

This chapter attends to contemporary Latinx adaptations of early modern English drama and theater to theorize how a hegemonic playwright such as Shakespeare can be adapted as Latinx theater Cuban-American playwright Carlos-Zenen Trujillo’s 2019 play, The Island in Winter or, La Isla en Invierno (an adaptation of The Winter’s Tale), serves as a case study of the multimodal process of transnational theatrical bilanguaging, or the experience of living between languages. I argue that the currency of adapting Shakespeare for Latinx today is in the possibility of moving from a historical memory that recolonizes Latinx to an active site of Latinx temporality as worldmaking. Trujillo’s The Island in Winter as a process of epistemic disobedience disenfranchises anti-Black racism from theatrical representations of Cuban culture by integrating African Indigenous rituals into one of Shakespeare’s stories. It is through this process that cultural narratives are redrawn and reenacted, while gaps in the Western canon are exposed.

This chapter considers the aesthetics of the mixed style in Rabelais, Montaigne, and Shakespeare as anticipating Rancière’s rereading of Kant’s third critique, and it tries to show what is distinctive about Auerbach’s account by contrasting him with a better-known definition of the Renaissance by his friend Erwin Panofsky.