Shakespeare's Noise (review)

Abstract

Reviews479 Kenneth Gross. Shakespeare's Noise. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Pp. xi + 282. $42.00 casebound; $16.00 paperbound. The subject of Kenneth Gross's new book, Shakespeare's "noise," is "disorderly forms of speaking: slander, defamation, insult, vituperation, malediction, and curse"; "the violence that the human tongue does to human ears" (1). The eloquence of these introductory phrases is sustained throughout the book, as we see when Gross calls the plays' interplays ofnoise and silence an "ethical conversation " (2), describes how Measurefor Measure's duke "moves through the play as an isolated, occulted ear," and says Coriolanus's "true and ancient enemies are not Volsces but voices" (139). The near-poetry of Gross's own voice makes Shakespeare's Noise a pleasure to read. No less commendable is the way the author's close, careful readings of Shakespeare remain anchored in the plays' fundamentally performative context. To Gross Shakespearean noise is not just a thematic phenomenon but an auditory circumstance, a mode bywhich spoken words, voice tones, other sounds, and even silences contribute to the audience's sense ofthe plays' meanings. While the discussion in this book ranges widely over Shakespearean and even modern plays, it focuses chiefly on Hamlet, Measurefor Measure, Othello, Coriolanus, and King Lear. Strongest are Gross's first, third, and fifth chapters , wherein he examines Hamlet's concern with "[w]ounded names" (14), Duke Vincentio's "prophylactic" hearing in Measure (79), and Coriolanus's preference of "War Noise" to "public language" (139). In his first chapter, anatomizing mostly Hamlet's speech, Gross points to the prince's guardedness of inner self against wild, name-wounding rumor, a damaging wind that transforms truth to unmerited "censure" (to use Hamlet's word). Gross illuminates Hamlet's anger at Guildenstern's attempt to "sound [him]," or play him like a pipe, by comparing Hamlet's lines to those spoken by "[r]umour, painful full oftongues," in 2 Henry TV: "Rumour is a pipe / Blown by surmises, jealousies , conjectures" (24). (Later, Gross ingeniously uses Rumour's costume to cast light on a famously awkward line in Coriolanus, wherein Roman citizens vow to "put [their] tongues in Coriolanus' wounds and speak" for the wounds; here Gross shows that Coriolanus fears his battle scars will somehow be replaced by public praise, a process he views as the exchange of fact for rumor [138].) Gross adeptly shows that Hamlet's early claim to have "that within which passes show" is borne out byhis play-long refusal to reveal the truths he knows about others. Attackingas slanderers those who, like Guildenstern, would claim to "pluck out the heart of [his own] mystery," Hamlet yet uses slanderous hints to force self-knowledge in others. "Hamlet does not work by directly pointing out some hidden truth," Grosswrites:"Rather, he says things that make 480Comparative Drama others think, or suspect, he has knowledge ofthem... . This means that Hamlet's knowledge is in part something others project onto him (by which they betray themselves, in both senses of the word)" (21). Thus Hamlet's slanderous accusations lead to other characters' (Claudius's and Gertrude's) legitimate selfaccusations , a process that bears out an ancient association between slander and accusations. The oblique slander Hamlet utters is, paradoxically, an agent ofjustice. Building on this association between slander and justice, Gross focuses his second and third chapters on slander and law. His second chapter examines Renaissance accounts of slander in texts as dissimilar as the Psalms and the imprisoned Essex's letter to Elizabeth I, in which Essex expressed fear of being played "in what forme [his detractors] listfed] upon the stage" (43). These examinations culminate in Gross's fascinating argument that slander mimics the operations oflegal censure: the "voices ofillicit accusation . . . show motives that echo the aspirations ofjustice itself" (56). The reader might wish Gross had made a more explicit connection between this insight and the action of MeasureforMeasurewhen he turns, in this third chapter, to that play (and also—for I must say this somewhere—that he had curtailed his enthusiasm for explanatory notes. Fifteen pages ofnotes expand the second chapter's arguments; sometimes the reader must flip back and forth between text and notes every...