The 'Sound of Shakespeare' reveals the surprising extent to which Shakespeare's art is informed by the various attitudes, beliefs, practices and discourses that pertained to sound and hearing in his culture.
In this engaging study, Wes Folkerth develops listening as a critical practice, attending to the ways in which Shakespeare's plays express their author's awareness of early modern associations between sound and particular forms of ethical and aesthetic experience. Through readings of the acoustic representation of deep subjectivity in Richard III, of the 'public ear' in...

This volume is about the role of sound in Shakespeare's art, about how he heard the world around him and about what it means for us to listen to him. It describes the kinds of things Shakespeare learned, through sound, about the early modern world he lived in and the people he shared it with. One of the primary goals of this book is to discover the different aesthetic and ethical dispositions Shakespeare regularly associates with sound, which include connections with vulnerability, community, access to the deeply subjective or pre-articulated self, grotesque continuity and transformation,...