Shakespeare’s Sonic World: Sound Studies and Early Modern Theatre
This panel session delves into how sound studies foster new insights and engagement with Shakespeare’s theatre. By focusing on the sonic dimensions of his works, we explore how auditory elements—both diegetic and extradiegetic—shape the aesthetic, socio-cultural, and political frameworks of his plays.
The session features three presentations that examine the role of sound in Shakespeare’s dramaturgy from different angles: Antonio Arnieri’s The Island’s Soundspace explores the setting of The Tempest as an auditory universe, Lara Ehrenfried’s Soundscapes of Violence examines sonic representations of violence in Macbeth and Richard III. Alexandra Siso’s Sounding Death investigates how sound underscores themes of mortality in Hamlet.
Current scholarship has emphasised the critical role of acoustic environments in understanding historical contexts and how these soundscapes were employed to represent the world on stage. Since Bruce Smith’s seminal work The Acoustic World of Early Modern England (1999) pioneered sound as a hermeneutic tool, evolving methodologies in sound studies offer new pathways to a multisensorial engagement with the past, connecting disciplines like literature, musicology, cultural studies, and the history of science to reconstruct a more nuanced understanding of the early modern sonic world.
Shakespeare’s works offer a fertile ground for these explorations. Sound in his plays functions both as a vehicle of meaning and as a tool for interrogating the epistemological assumptions constructed on stage. His acute awareness of the aural dimension reveals a strategic use of sound and music, reflecting broader cultural and scientific currents of the time. Re-examining these auditory elements enables new interpretative possibilities.
How can we recover the meanings associated with sound to deepen our understanding of Shakespeare’s plays? The answer lies in an interdisciplinary approach, which draws on a variety of sources—historical records, philosophical treatises, scientific texts, and rhetorical manuals—to construct a detailed picture of the role sound played in early modern life and theatre.
The objectives of the session are as follows:
• To explore how sound studies can deepen our understanding of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy by revealing the layered meanings carried by sound and music in his plays.
• To examine how early modern modes of listening differ from contemporary practices and the implications of these differences for interpreting Shakespeare’s works.
• To investigate the interdisciplinary connections between auditory history and Shakespeare studies, specifically how sound intersects with broader cultural, political, and scientific discourses.
• To encourage scholars to rethink the role of sound as a central, rather than peripheral, element in both the creation and reception of Shakespearean drama.
Through interdisciplinary dialogue, this panel aims to foster a renewed awareness of Shakespeare’s auditory world. We seek to open a discussion on how listening functioned in the early modern period, enriching our understanding of Shakespearean soundscapes and contributing to broader discussions on the role of sound in both historical and contemporary performance contexts. Ultimately, this panel offers a unique opportunity to reconsider Shakespeare’s plays not only as visual spectacles but as immersive auditory experiences that continue to resonate today, albeit in a transformed auditory world.
Antonio Arnieri, UAB – Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona
The Island’s Soundspace: The Auditory Universe of Shakespeare’s The Tempest
Antonio Arnieri’s paper examines the island in The Tempest as a self-contained world, representing a sonic abyss. Through an auditory history analysis, it explores how the island functions as a resonating shell—a metaphor for sound, knowledge, and spatiality. Referencing early modern treatises like Helkiah Crooke’s Mikrokosmographia (1616), the paper likens the island to an ear, capturing and amplifying sound to shape reality, thus challenging Renaissance views on hearing as a tool for knowledge. The study concludes by connecting this interpretation with Alessandro Serra’s 2022 adaptation, La Tempesta.
Lara Ehrenfried, LMU – University of Munich
Soundscapes of Violence
Lara Ehrenfried’s paper Soundscapes of Violence examines the links between the auditory dimension of Shakespeare’s plays and Early Modern theatre’s dramatization of violence. Ehrenfried argues that attuning ourselves to the sonic element of Shakespeare’s tragedies, such as Macbeth and Richard III, offers new insights into Early Modern conceptions of brutality and treason and critically interrogates what it means to ‘hear violence’. Macbeth and Richard III, for instance, rely on dissonant and discordant acoustics to explore socio-political upheaval. By establishing direct links between sound and violence on stage, Shakespeare’s tragedies also open up new spaces for performance and remediation.
Alexandra Siso, University of Sheffield
Sounding Death
Alexandra Siso’s paper Sounding Death examines the voice of Hamlet’s ghost as a sonic expression of Purgatory. While the Tudor era saw Purgatory’s gradual disappearance from religious doctrine, theatre—particularly in the Jacobean period—became a space where it could still resonate. The dead, once silent, silenced, and unseen in the mortal world, regained a voice and presence on stage, among the living. Nowhere is this more striking than in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, where the vivid and disturbing representation of Hamlet’s father breaks the silence of death, sounding with the echoes of Purgatory.