The Shakespearean Phonograph

This essay explores how reader-listeners process sound, importing their own turns of phrase and histories, poaching upon the text so that the authorial voice loosens its hold. As for mapping what sort of work the essay is performing, it offers a model of reflective, critical listening that describes and analyzes how actors perform selected moments or scenes. My own experience becomes a methodological tool drawing both from memories of live performance and digitally-reproduced performance, mediated by the camera and microphone and alert to the distinctions between the work of memory and the act of listening in the present. The piece moves from tracing James Hackett’s notes recording Edmund Kean’s performance of Richard III’s opening solo to Alan Howard’s rendering of A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s Oberon and to a series of “Shakespeare Solos” from The Guardian’s 2016 web site: Adrian Lester speaking Hamlet’s “To be or not to be”; Eileen Atkins voicing Emilia’s ideas on men and women’s sexualities; and, finally, Joanna Lumley speaking Viola’s first soliloquy from Twelfth Night. This series of case studies begins with Hamlet’s moment of high interiority, segues to Emilia speaking privately though wrapped in a public ambience, and concludes with Viola performing directly for the listener-viewer, channeling farce, as though playing proxy to a stand-up comic.