‘My Tongue Will tell the anger of my heart’: Revisiting Female Speech and Silence in Shakespeare

In one of many recent instances in which Shakespeare has become the target of cancel culture, actor Juliet Stevenson argued that some of his ostensibly offensive plays should “just be buried.” She includes among them the allegedly misogynist The Taming of the Shrew. This seems ironic since the social condition of women is so often thematically central to his works, while women’s opportunities for speech and, conversely, their enforced silence, are especially significant in The Taming of the Shrew. This essay is not about silence as such, but rather about being silenced and especially about two of Shakespeare’s characters, the loquacious Kate in The Taming of the Shrew and that modest yet proficient female rhetorician, Lucrece, in The Rape of Lucrece. I argue that female silence, or more accurately the stifling of women’s speech, paradoxically gives rise to significant instances of an urgent female vocality in these texts, which merit serious revisitation in light of the energies of our own cancel-culture moment.Dans l’un des nombreux cas récents où Shakespeare est devenu la cible de la culture de l’annulation, l’actrice Juliet Stevenson a soutenu que certaines de ses pièces ostensiblement offensantes devraient « simplement être enterrées ». Elle inclut parmi elles la pièce prétendument misogyne The Taming of the Shrew. Cela semble ironique puisque la condition sociale des femmes est si souvent au centre de la thématique des œuvres de Shakespeare, tandis que les possibilités de parole des femmes et, à l’inverse, leur silence forcé, sont particulièrement significatifs dans The Taming of the Shrew. Cet essai ne porte pas sur le silence en tant que tel, mais plutôt sur le fait d’être réduit au silence, et plus particulièrement sur deux personnages de Shakespeare, la loquace Kate dans The Taming of the Shrew et cette femme rhétoricienne pudique mais compétente, Lucrèce, dans The Rape of Lucrece. Je soutiens que le silence féminin, ou plus précisément l’étouffement de la parole des femmes, donne paradoxalement lieu à des exemples significatifs d’une vocalité féminine urgente dans ces textes, qui méritent d’être sérieusement revisités à la lumière des énergies de notre propre moment de culture de l’annulation

The roared-at boys? Repertory casting and gender politics in the RSC's 2014 Swan season

This essay interrogates the loading of the “Roaring Girls” season by asking what it means to “roar” in both the early modern period and twenty-first century, unpacking the terms on which the women of these productions are empowered or undermined through their treatment by their male counterparts. Performed alongside the 2014 “Midsummer Mischief” new writing season, the plays reposition “roaring” as challenging male-centred modes of representation. Drawing on Marvin Carlson's influential work on “ghosting”, this essay addresses these questions through investigation of the practices and implications of ensemble casting. With Arden of Faversham, The Roaring Girl and The White Devil sharing a single ensemble, the iterated roles of actors across the ensemble become key to understanding the season's overall strategies for presenting and interrogating misogyny. The recycling of actors’ bodies throws into relief the individual roles of the main “roaring girls”, framing and articulating the role of mischievous disruption within the company's work

Shakespeare

Francis Meres famously opined that Shakespeare was ‘honey-tongued’, while in the Sonnets the poet tells us that he is ‘tongue-tied’. In the context of these divergent accounts of Shakespeare’s verse expression, this chapter argues that ‘voice’, both the voice of the poet, especially Shakespeare’s distinctively Ovidian poetic persona and that of the other speakers and characters who populate his verse, is central to all of Shakespeare’s poetry. Because the phenomenon of reading poetry in print was relatively new in early modern England, the distinction between the voice, in the literal sense, and the poet’s voice as readers sounded poems out in their own heads, became increasingly significant. Reading was just as much about close listening to the sound communicated by the poem, with its stress on the faculty of internal hearing, as it was about visual apprehension. Attuned to the poet’s voice, the reader, like Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream might aver: ‘I see a voice’ (5.1.190). This chapter, then, considers what early modern readers might have ‘heard’ when they read Shakespeare’s poetry.</p