Kent Lehnhof. Voices and Ethics in Shakespeare’s Late Plays

Attending to the sound of the human voice in early modern literary studies used to be a niche area. When I told people, some years ago, that I was attempting to write a history of the voice in early modern reading, they looked surprised. What would my sources be, they asked. This was despite the fact that the brilliant, generous, late Bruce R. Smith had already shown us how one might recover and think with the sounds of the past. But a range of studies have now demonstrated that the early modern ‘voice’ is a legitimate and valuable field of enquiry from a wide variety of perspectives, including Gina Bloom’s attention to the mechanics of vocal production to unlock new ways of reading plays, Lynn Enterline’s focus on voice training in Shakespeare’s schoolroom, and Sonia Massai’s study of accents in Shakespearean performance. We now also have Kent Lehnhof’s distinctive and welcome contribution, which attends to the ethical dimensions of the voice through a close reading of five of Shakespeare’s late plays, Coriolanus, King Lear, Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. He approaches voice from a viewpoint suggested by the Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero’s attention to its sonorous qualities in her challenge to Western logocentrism, For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression (2005).