Voice and Ethics in Shakespeare's Late Plays

Combining sound studies and contemporary philosophy, this study probes the ethical power of voice and vocality in Shakespearean drama.

Combining sound studies and contemporary philosophy, this study reveals the ethical potency of the sound of the voice in Shakespearean drama. Moving beyond merely verbal meaning, Kent Lehnhof mines the rich significance of the somatic and the sonorous, providing valuable insights for Shakespeare specialists and scholars of early modern literature.Breaking new ground in Shakespearean sound studies, Kent Lehnhof draws scholarly attention to the rich ethical significance of the voice and vocality. Less concerned with semantics, stylistics, and rhetoric than with the sensuous, sonorous, and somatic dimensions of human speech, Lehnhof performs close readings of five plays – Coriolanus, King Lear, Pericles, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest – to demonstrate how Shakespeare's later works present the act of speaking and the sound of the voice as capable of constructing, deconstructing, and reconstructing interpersonal relationships and obligations. By thinking widely and innovatively about the voice and vocality, Lehnhof models a fresh form of philosophically-minded criticism that resists logocentrism and elevates the voices of marginalized groups and individuals including women, members of societal “underclasses”, racialized persons and non-humans.