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Description

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 such scholars as Andrew Gurr, Bruce Smith, and James Hirsh. To look at the dynamics of hearing in Shakespeare’s plays involves a paradigm shift that changes how we understand virtually everything about them, 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? Auditory Worlds on Stageand 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 “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 on stage and adapted on screen, revolves around various situations and conventions of hearing—soliloquies,, asides, avesdropping, 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, his inspiring meditation on hearing that considers Shakespearean “audiences” and their responses to what they hear—or don’t hear—in Shakespeare’s plays.

Table of Contents

Introduction by Laury Magnus and Walter W. Cannon
Part I. The Poetics of Hearing and the Early Modern Stage
Chapter 1: Why Was the Globe Round? by Andrew Gurr
Chapter 2: Guarded, Unguarded, and Unguardable Speech in late Renaissance Drama by James Chapter 3: Hearing Complexity: Speech, Reticence, and the Construction of Character by Walter . Cannon
Chapter 4: “if this be worth your hearing”: Theorizing Gossip on Shakespeare’s Stage by Jennifer Holl
Part II. Metahearing: Hearing, Knowing, and Audiences, Onstage and Off
Chapter 5: Mimetic Hearing and Meta-hearing in Hamlet by Laury Magnus
Chapter 6: Hearing and Overhearing in The Tempest by David Bevington
Chapter 7: Asides and Multiple Audiences in The Merchant of Venice by Anthony Burton
Chapter 8: “And Now Behold the Meaning”: Audience, Interpretation, and Translation in All’s Well That Ends Well and Henry V by Kathleen Kalpin Smith
Chapter 9: Hearing Power in Measure for Measure by Bernice W. Kliman,
Chapter 10: “Hark, a word in your ear”: Whispers, Asides, and Interpretation in Troilus and Cressida by Nova Myhill
Part III. Transhearing: Hearing, Overhearing, Whispering, and Eavesdropping in Film and Other Media
Chapter 11: “Mutes or Audience to this Act”: Eavesdroppers in Branagh’s Shakespeare Films by Philippa Sheppard
Chapter 12: Overhearing Malvolio for Pleasure or Pity: The Letter Scene and the Dark House Scene in Twelfth Night on Stage and Screen by Gayle Gaski
Chapter 13: “But Mark His Gesture”: Hearing and Seeing in Othello’s Eavesdropping Scene by Erin Minear
Afterword: Who Doesn’t Listen in Shakespeare? by Stephen Booth

Product details

Published 21 Nov 2011
Format Ebook (PDF)
Edition 1st
Extent 313
ISBN 9781683938835
Imprint Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Anthology Editor

Laury Magnus

Anthology Editor

Walter W. Cannon

Contributor

David Bevington

Contributor

Stephen Booth

Contributor

Anthony Burton

Contributor

Gayle Gaskill

Contributor

Andrew Gurr

Contributor

James Hirsh

Contributor

Jennifer Holl

Contributor

Erin Minear

Contributor

Nova Myhill

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