Who Hears in Shakespeare?: Shakespeare's Auditory World, Stage and Screen – by Luary Magnus, Walter Cannon

This volume, examining the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays are designed for hearers as well as spectators, has been prompted by recent explorations of the auditory dimension of early modern drama by scholars such as Andrew Gurr, Bruce Smith, and James Hirsh. To look at the acoustic world of the plays involves a real paradigm shift that changes how we understand virtually everything about Shakespeare’s plays: from the architecture of the buildings, to playing spaces, to blocking, and to larger interpretative issues, including our understanding of character based on players’ responses to what they hear, mishear, or refuse to hear. Who Hears in Shakespeare? Essays on Shakespeare’s Auditory World, Stage and Screen is comprised of three sections on Shakespeare’s texts and performance history: “The Poetics of Hearing and the Early Modern Stage”; “Metahearing: Hearing, Knowing, and Audiences, Onstage and Off”; and a final section entitled “Transhearing: Hearing, Whispering, Overhearing, and Eavesdropping in Film and other Media.”

Chapters by noted scholars explore the complex reactions and interactions of onstage and offstage audiences and show how Shakespearean stagecraft, actualized both on stage and/ or adapted on screen, revolves around various situations and conventions of hearing, such as soliloquies, asides, eavesdropping, overhearing, and stage whispers. In short, Who Hears in Shakespeare? enunciates Shakespeare’s nuanced, powerful stagecraft of hearing. The volume ends with Stephen Booth’s Afterword, a meditation on hearing in Shakespeare that returns us to consider Shakespearean “audiences” and their responses to what they hear—or don’t hear—in Shakespeare’s plays.

Released: 2011