Renaissance Forum: Volume 6, Number 2, Winter 2003: Matthew Steggle

Wes Folkerth. 2002. The Sound of Shakespeare. London and New York: Routledge. 147 pp. ISBN 0-415-25376-4. Ł60 (hb) / ISBN 0-415-25377-2. Ł16.99 (pb).

In the summer of 1888, Henry Irving spoke the opening speech of Richard III into a wax cylinder recording device. This earliest of all sound recordings of Shakespeare, crackly and incomplete, possesses an undeniable ghostly power, in spite of, or perhaps now partly because of, the fact that it is now so easily accessible to anyone – see http://www.theirvingsociety.org.uk/richard_iii.htm. Wes Folkerth's The Sound of Shakespeare starts with a dissection of this recording, looking for the layers of acoustic evidence – acoustic meaning – encoded within it. For Folkerth, indeed, such a recording is a metaphor for Shakespeare's playtexts themselves which contain within them 'the past presences of different voices, tones, and intonations, in the early modern theatre' (7). As such, The Sound of Shakespeare is a new contribution to an area which has of late been attracting growing interest within Shakespeare studies: the question of how Shakespeare can be considered relative to the acoustic experience, in all its forms.1
Chapter One, 'Shakespearience', is a discussion of the place of sound within early modern culture generally, building on the work of Bruce Smith's book The Acoustic World of Early Modern England in its argument that early modern culture perceived sound as a privileged mode of access to individual subjectivity. Chapter Two, on the other hand, looks in detail at early modern conceptualizations of the ear, in a range of discourses from the sermon (where the ear was privileged as a point where the word of god could enter the human body, often with reference to the Parable of the Sower); to the epistemological approach of Bacon and Thomas Wright, in their attempts to explain the physics and physiology of sensory perception; and onto a brief discussion of early modern anatomists' understanding of the organ. This model is then applied to Shakespeare's plays. What is impressive about these chapters, and indeed about Folkerth's study in general, is the sheer quantity of evidence from Shakespeare he has at his disposal: there is no shortage of moments in Shakespearean drama where hearing is explicitly discussed and problematized.
A particularly interesting example is Folkerth's dissection of Anthony and Cleopatra IV.iii, where hoboys play from under the stage as the watchmen hear what they interpret as the departure of Hercules. Folkerth's discussion uses evidence about the contemporary reputation of hoboys, notes Shakespeare's attention to the placement of the instruments, and contextualizes this effect within a scene where the dialogue is clearly already obsessed by images of hearing and problems of 'the public ear'. Through the remaining chapters of the book, other plays – including, but not limited to, Coriolanus, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Measure for Measure and Othello – are read with similar attention to the ways in which sound and hearing work within them. Thus, Coriolanus's obsession with the ear as a site for doing violence to someone is linked to the way in which characters struggle to control the acoustic environment. The 'fair large ears' that Bottom sports when transformed into an ass, and which Titania finds so erotic, are suggestively linked by Folkerth to Bottom's strange mixture of foolishness and of intense, synaesthetic receptivity to experiences of all sorts. In Measure for Measure, which finishes with a request for Isabella's 'willing ear', Folkerth argues that a strange equation is made between the act of listening and the irrational operation of mercy. Once again, the sheer quantity of references to hearing in this connection within the play provides persuasive evidence for the case.
Shakespeare, Folkerth argues, is intensely interested in the process of listening, and the ways in which listening creates a world: the plays are, in a sense, invitations to the audience, and to the reader, to listen. This elegant and refreshing book is an example of such listening in action.

MATTHEW STEGGLE
SHEFFIELD HALLAM UNIVERSITY

Bruce Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1999) – previously reviewed in Renaissance Forum; see also Kenneth Gross, Shakespeare's Noise (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2001); Matthew Steggle ed., Listening to the Early Modern, EMLS 7.1/Special Issue 8 (2001) online at http://purl.oclc.org/emls/07-1/07-1toc.htm.