Edited by Laury Magnus and Walter Cannon, Shakespeare's Auditory Worlds: Hearing and Staging Practices, Then and Now brings together scholars and practitioners to reflect on speech, hearing, and sound in Shakespeare's plays. It serves as something of a sequel or companion to Who Hears in Shakespeare? Shakespeare's Auditory World, Stage and Screen (2011), also edited by Magnus and Cannon. This collection is methodologically eclectic, with approaches ranging from extended close reading to contemporary performance analysis, via historical-contextual enquiry and practitioner interviews. One continuity, however, is meaningful consideration of Shakespeare's texts as performance scripts, with welcome attention given throughout to questions of theatricality and staging practicality.
The four parts of Shakespeare's Auditory Worlds sketch distinct areas of enquiry within this potentially vast topic. Language is the central concern of part 1, “Speaking, Hearing, and Seeing on Shakespeare's Stages.” David Bevington, to whose memory the volume is co-dedicated, begins the section with a tour de force reading of speech and speaking in Hamlet and King Lear. Magnus remains with Hamlet, tracing the interplay of eye and ear through key scenes. Gayle Gaskill, concluding the section, is the first of several contributors across the volume to use sound and hearing as an entry point into close investigation of a single character. She examines Duke Vincentio's hearing and interfering, and the staging possibilities these present, in Measure for Measure.
Part 2 is focused on aural failure and absence, ranging from mishearing to silence. Here, the contributors pay attention to a number of critically neglected characters, beginning with Margaret in Much Ado about Nothing, whose silent and—in some scenes—possibly unscripted presence is the subject of Caroline Latta's chapter. Cannon explores the mutability of letters as they appear (or rather as they are performed) in Twelfth Night. His account of how Maria's letter is altered each of the three times it is read or quoted in the play is particularly acute, although there is a slip in relation to Malvolio's initial reading of the letter in the “box-tree” scene (2.5): the Folio text reads “some are become great” (TLN 1149–50; my emphasis), not “some become great” (108, Cannon's emphasis), requiring intervention at least for the sake of grammar even if become is preferred over the usual emendation to born. Megan Lloyd and Elizabeth Brown, writing on staging “the Welsh Voice” in 1 Henry IV reflect incisively on some modern productions’ radically varied approaches to the play's use of Welsh and trace early modern English attitudes toward the Welsh language and its speakers.
The contributions in the third part, “Shakespeare's Noise, Sounds, and Music,” look beyond language. This is the longest section, with five chapters, and the most fruitfully engaged with contemporary sound studies and sensory scholarship. Clio Doyle and R. W. Jones contribute particularly valuably to current critical debates in their respective explorations of Titus Andronicus's birdsong as a departure from or “twist on” Ovid (168), and the unpleasant but culturally prevalent notion of musical penetration as it appears in The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Cymbeline. Steven Urkowitz offers a comparative account of Q1 and Folio 2 Henry VI, arguing that distinct authorial versions of Suffolk's execution scene (4.1) can be traced in each text. Even scholars who see the early texts differently will appreciate his account of the Folio scene's carefully crafted soundscape. His claim that Suffolk's offstage execution should be audible to the audience is theatrically compelling, although of course historical staging practice remains uncertain without an early text stage direction. Jennifer Linhart Wood offers welcome consideration of an understudied question: how early modern playhouse musicians took their cues. Because there is no documentary equivalent of Edward Alleyn's actor's part for Orlando Furioso, Wood turns to the plays' texts themselves, identifying patterns of repeated words, rhyming couplets, and sometimes even changes of meter and scansion that immediately precede Folio stage directions, arguing that these served as cues to the musicians. As Wood notes herself, some of the examples would be “fairly subtle” by the standards of a playhouse signal (206), and I am also curious as to whether repeated cues might have risked prompting early entries. It would be fascinating, then, to see these explored through practical staging workshops. Since music-cue conventions would presumably have been at least company-wide, moreover, the chapter invites a further search for such patterns across the King's Men's full contemporaneous repertory. Leslie C. Dunn concludes the section with a thoughtful and incisive study of music in “original practices” productions at London's reconstructed Globe theater. Drawing extensively on archival materials, she considers how “the ‘inner’ sonic world experienced by the performers” as they pursue historical practice intersects with “the ‘outer’ acoustic experience of the audiences” as they hear with ears attuned to modern sensory culture (222). She argues convincingly that the third Globe's “reconstructions of old acoustic technology offer us a distinctive and important new way of hearing Shakespeare” (229), and raises important wider questions about the intersection of historical sources, reconstructed practices, and modern audiences in contemporary theaters.
Studies of Shakespeare and early modern drama increasingly seek to incorporate practitioner perspectives, though few do so as extensively and productively as Magnus and Cannon in part 4 of Shakespeare's Auditory Worlds. Karen Richardson, to whose memory the volume is co-dedicated, and Magnus interviewed six actors who have worked extensively at the reconstructed Blackfriars theater at the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Virginia: Benjamin Curns, Sarah Fallon, Allison Glenzer, John Harrell, James Keegan, and Patrick Midgely. The result is a valuable archive of contemporary performance practice, contributing many insights to the volume's wider account of Shakespeare's auditory worlds. Ralph Alan Cohen's coda offers closing tributes to the work of the American Shakespeare Center, cited as inspiration by many contributors, and to the volume's wider project of fostering meaningful conversation between scholars and practitioners, as the American Shakespeare Center has long advocated.
