Renaissance Forum: Volume 6, Number 1, Winter 2002: Dermot Cavanagh

Kenneth Gross. 2001. Shakespeare's Noise. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. x + 282pp. ISBN 0-226-30989-4. Ł11.00.

In this original and often stimulating study, Kenneth Gross considers Shakespeare's 'theater of noise', that is, how his plays represent and reflect upon, violent or disorderly speech. In a detailed study of four tragedies – Hamlet, Othello, Coriolanus, King Lear – and of one of the 'darker' comedies, Measure for Measure, Gross examines Shakespeare's preoccupation with the nature and effects of damaging words: slander, insult, curses, and rumour. The focus is primarily upon how such words shape, or sometimes misshape, the behaviour and self-conception of the central characters of these plays.
For Gross, an essential aspect of Shakespeare's tragic awareness derives from his sense of the risks that attend both hearing and speaking in 'a world drawn together by fragile, often corrosive networks of murmuring, news, and tale-telling, full of interruption, derangement, nonsense, and static' (2). This is a fascinating critical perception. It draws attention to how often a sense of reality and a sense of the self are established or destroyed by damaging speech acts in early modern drama. Shakespeare's works are perceived as both drawing upon and contributing to a contemporary obsession with both rhetoric and the fragile nature of identity. In this respect, they manifest an intense concern with calumny, with corrupt habits of speaking and hearing, and with the perils of ill-informed 'opinion'.
Hamlet is considered first and in terms of the Prince's addiction to duplicitous, subversive wordplay. For this a new context is provided: the Renaissance concern with rumour. The world of Hamlet is awash with news and tense with conflicts over who controls reliable and trustworthy information. This helps explain Hamlet's commitment to acting as 'the play's chief slanderer and rumormonger' (15), a figure who subjects public language to derisive misquotation. Gross interprets this as an ambiguous spectacle. It confirms, on the one hand, a Renaissance sense of the slanderer as manipulative and as consumed by aggression and envy; on the other hand, such speech allows Hamlet to disclose concealed truths and to preserve a space where he remains unreadable. Yet Hamlet also comes to depend, therefore, upon the same rumours and misperceptions that threaten him and this dilemma is read as expressing a deeper paradox of Renaissance sovereignty: that the very force which seeks to control rumour is also constituted by it.
The ground for subsequent chapters is then established in a lengthy and informative consideration of slander. This provides a context for analyzing the Duke's obsession with 'murmuring' in Measure for Measure and how this is balanced by the play's equal sensitivity to his 'prophylactic' hearing. The latter strategy results in the pained voices of Claudio, Isabella, and Angelo being obstructed or registered only as matter for his own self-gratifying activity. These two chapters display many of the strengths of this book: a concentrated attention to language from a fresh critical vantage point and an alertness to Shakespeare's complex, equivocal accounts of social and personal experience.
In relation to Othello, Gross connects the play's concern with denigrating blackness to the blackening of names and examines how inextricably the fate of all the characters depends upon what others say of them. Here Iago is conceived as a 'discourse monster', whose effect upon Othello embodies the worst potentialities of defamation. His chapter on Coriolanus concentrates on the language of anger and the ways in which this both expresses and imperils Coriolanus's humanity. It allows the chief protagonist a form of moral candour but this also results in his drastic isolation and infantilism. Finally, the book examines the paradoxical role of cursing in King Lear as constituting both a contingent utterance and an inescapable truth; curses express both the resentment of the disenfranchised and the anxieties of authority. This is connected to the play's interest in 'cursitors' or vagabonds and in the chaotic language of Tom which renders all claims of authority as contingent.
Gross writes capaciously and with a subtlety that is not well served by summary; the book repays careful reading. His approach is defiantly old-fashioned in its devotion to close reading, especially of passages that express the interiority of its key (male) protagonists. Yet this formalism does not extend to a consideration of dramatic structure; the polyphonic nature of Shakespeare's plays is less well attended to. The capacity of the plays' female characters, for example, to counter or question the self-preoccupation of the male protagonists is largely absent. Similarly, to isolate one further example, Gross's admiration for Coriolanus's profound political intelligence and moral candour depends upon accepting his contemptuous evaluation of the 'mob'. These voices have been given more complex and patient attention in, for example, the work of Annabel Patterson.
There are other symptoms of a somewhat patrician attitude in Gross's approach or, to put it in his own more stringent vocabulary, instances of failures of hearing. His study is resolutely indifferent to recent cultural and literary theory concerning race, language and gender, as well as being largely unconcerned with the broader context of contemporary Shakespearean studies. Even a study as well known as Stephen Greenblatt's Shakespearean Negotiations (1988), a work richly engaged with the theatrical appropriation of social discourses, is ignored. It is equally rare to encounter a work so unabashed in its use of a Romantic critical tradition. (Two of its most frequently cited sources are A. C. Bradley and G. Wilson Knight.) No doubt, there is much in this body of work that has been ignored or slighted, but no argument is presented to explain its continuing authority and value.
There are also two instances of an attenuated sense of context. The classical rhetorical tradition – surely a major cultural determinant upon Shakespeare's conception of the power of language to ennoble and defame – is neglected. Secondly, recent historical research – for example, the work of Adam Fox and Laura Gowing – into slander, rumour and sedition would have extended Gross's sense of the political and social significance of his subject. Nevertheless, this is a valuable, if sometimes narrowly conceived book, which achieves its aim of being suggestive rather than exhaustive.

DERMOT CAVANAGH
UNIVERSITY OF NORTHUMBRIA