“I heard a bustling rumour”: Shakespeare’s Aural Insurgents

Abstract

Renaissance drama, which absorbed many of the cultural injunctions found in conduct books and marriage manuals, often vilifies the female tongue as the unruly bodily member. Female characters’ open mouths and loose tongues were often aligned with gossip and promis- cuity, while the closed mouth and silent tongue signaled chastity and obedience.¹ The ear, however, registers in contradictory ways. The closed female ear was potentially threatening because of its inability or refusal to detect rumor and lies; it could also be powerfully disobedient in refusing to listen to men. And the open ear, while still apt to be corrupted by the failure to exercise aural discernment, was nonetheless aligned with the authority of earwitnessing. As much as Shakespeare embraces the discourse of the tongue, he invariably offers the ear as an alternative site of female transgression. Shakespeare’s female characters, however, often shift from closing to opening their ears, thereby imbuing them with what I call aural insurgency in co-opting the pow- ers of earwitnessing. Men, experiencing the inability to hear women’s private speech or subject to their own speech falling on deaf ears, could be stripped of their own informational authority. Shakespeare’s women thus adopt the characteristics of earwitnesses in exchanging their open mouths for discerning ears.

Heare much; but little speake; and flee from that is naught: Which lessons, by these formes in briefe, to every one are taught.

Geffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblèmes (1586)