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Chapter 3 Fortress ofthe Ear: Shakespeare's Late Plays, Protestant Sermons, and Audience An expanded political conception ofvoice needs Artaud's theatre to liberate it from its incarceration in the mouth. ... The particular force of this theatrical insightfor progressive politics is that it recalls us to the demands ofactive audition. -Peggy Phelan, "Performing Talking Cures'" DePlores: Beatrice: DePlores: Beatrice: Justice invites your blood to understand me. I dare not. Quickly! 0, I never shall! Speak ityetfurther off, that I may lose What has been spoken and no sound remain on't. I would not hear so much offense again For such another deed. -The Changeling2 When Beatrice, the chaste and compromised heroine ofMiddleton and Rowley's The Changeling, slowly realizes that the servant DePlores is proposing that she give up her virginity to compensate him for killing the man she didn't want to marry, she desperately wishes that she could stop herself from understanding his meaning. Once she is made to hear and admit she understands, she will have taken the first step toward losing the chastity that, according to the play's patriarchal logic, is her most important possession. To mitigate her fear, she recalls that DePlores' voice is made of sound, like all spoken voices; thus, there is some chance, she imagines, that the distance that separates her from DePlores will delay his voice from 112 Chapter 3 reaching her and corrupting her chaste sensibilities. Given my discussion in the last chapter of how female characters in early modern drama are able to exploit to their advantage representations of the voice's physical form, it is not surprising that Beatrice should describe DePlores' voice in such vividly acoustic terms. Having few other options, Beatrice lays her hopes on the possibility that DePlores' meaning, because it is conveyed by a voice made of sound, will not remain intact as it moves across the space between their bodies. Of course, DePlores does not abide by her request "to speak it yet further off;' and she is "quickly" made to "understand." Once she "hear[s] these words" (3.4.129), submitting aurally to De Flores, she believes she has little choice but to submit to his sexual advances. The scene presents a limitation to the theory ofagency I have presented in the previous chapter. If an abusive voice cannot be dispersed by environmental factors, if it isn't in the air long enough to be countered and dissipated , then a vulnerable woman like Beatrice can easily be victimized, aurally and sexually. Such a conclusion assumes, however, that a voice that reaches the listener has no other obstacles to overcome. And this is not a conclusion that can be drawn from all early modern representations of hearing. Indeed, as I shall show in this chapter, many early modern authors, in and out of the theater, represent the listener's body as an effective-or, from a different perspective, a frustrating-obstacle to vocal transmission. We need not wait, as Peggy Phelan maintains, for Artaud to "recall ... us to the demands of active audition." As I hope to prove, such an "expanded political conception of voice" is dramatized in the early modern theater and in moral and religious writings of the period. Acoustic Subjectivity in Protestant Sermons This principle of "active audition" is defined with particular urgency by early modern Protestant preachers, whose sermons instruct parishioners in how to attain salvation through hearing God's Word. In sermons on the biblical parable of "the sower and the seed;' the Word is imagined as a generative germ that enters parishioners' ears and, if sowed effectively, takes root in their hearts, helping them produce the "fruit" of good deeds. Salvation is thus contingent on parishioners' aural receptivity-the extent to which their ears can be penetrated and their hearts fertilized by the seed-Word. Drawing from an agricultural discourse that was frequently used in this pe- .151] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 04:41 GMT) Fortress ofthe Ear 113 riod to describe human sexual reproduction, the sermons suggest that salvation can be achieved ifthe Christian is fully open to the aural penetrations of the fertilizing Word.3 At the same time that Protestant sermons advocate receptive organs of hearing, however, they also express concern that ears are the bodily organs through which evil enters. John Donne preaches, "Take heed that you heare them whom God hath appointed to speake to you; But, when you come abroad, take heed what you hear; for, certainely, the...

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