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2 results

  • Introduction - The Sound of the Voice

  • Kent Lehnhof, Chapman University, California
  • Book:
    Voice and Ethics in Shakespeare's Late Plays
    Published online:
    03 December 2025
    Print publication:
    08 January 2026, pp 1-25
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  • Summary

    This Chapter emphasizes the centrality of voice and ear in the oral cultures and theatrical enterprises of early modern England. It further demonstrates that the sound of the voice and the act of listening are especially important in the works of William Shakespeare. To prepare the reader for an in-depth exploration of the significance of voice and vocality in five of Shakespeare’s late plays, the Chapter reviews important work in the fields of sound studies and ethical criticism. It then provides an introduction to the philosophical thought of Emmanuel Levinas and Adriana Cavarero, whose work provides the theoretical basis for the analysis that follows.

Voice and Ethics in Shakespeare's Late Plays
  • Kent Lehnhof
  • Published online:
    03 December 2025
    Print publication:
    08 January 2026
  • 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.