Shakespeare's Noise. (Reviews).

Kenneth Gross, Shakespeare's Noise

Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001. xi + 282 pp. $42 (cl), $17 (pbk). ISBN: 0-226-30988-6 (cl), 0-226-30989-4 (pbk).

This is an exciting account of slander, defamation, insult, vituperation, malediction, curse, rumor, and gossip in Renaissance thinking and in five plays of Shakespeare: Hamlet, Measure for Measure, Othello, Coriolanus, and King Lear. Gross uses the word "noise" to summarize his inquiry "Because it helps suggest a theater in which the human voice takes shape from the way that language interferes with itself, assumes the power of its own disorder -- especially if we recall the word's older associations with disturbance, quarrel, and scandal" (1). Gross also connects noise with the word "Newes" as used in the sixteenth century. Shakespeare's Noise actively engages with legal definitions of slander and libel as these impinge on metaphoric and philosophical meanings.

Although the book begins with a chapter on Hamlet, the introduction is actually chapter two, "The Book of the Slanderer." Gross deals with the extreme anxieties about slander in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. At a time when one's "fame" was crucial, slander wounds not only the person who is abused, but also the slanderer himself as well as the innocent listener, "who is never quite innocent enough" (36). Fame can be poisoned in the sense that one's identity is put into the hands of others. Montaigne inveighs against the desire for fame, which feeds "an aggressive, degrading, even idolatrous madness that steals one away from more interior measures of virtue" (42). The public theater released violent, even tabooed language, which is an expression of the actor's freedom (Michael Goldman's phrase), a commitment to theatrical illusion and to making the invisible visible on stage.

Of the five chapters on Shakespeare's plays, the ones most closely related to the complex workings of slander are those on Measure for Measure and Othello -- the chapter on King Lear is concerned with curse, a somewhat different topic. The Othello chapter is called "Denigration and Hallucination." It plays on minstrel show definitions of "denigration," since Othello's blackness was indicated by an actor on Shakespeare's stage who wore black makeup on his face. Gross is brilliant in his insistence that Iago is a "discourse monster": he "often means a lot less rather than a lot more than he seems to say" (109). Thus the language of the play is filled with menacing nonsense, which entangles the characters in its own vapid emptiness. Gross insists that Iago functions as Othello's teacher. Othello reacts to his poisonous discourse "as if he had never before felt the power of either dreams or fantasy. He takes from Iago a cluster of words and images for his own imagination to work on" (113). The reasoning here is p owerful and convincing. It's as if Othello is transfixed by Iago and stands onstage "continually on the threshold of falling asleep, trying in the process to put the entire world to sleep" (116).

In a discussion of Measure for Measure that recalls the strictures of Harry Berger, Jr., Gross probes deeply into the inadequacies of the Duke, who seems strangely deaf to the perturbations of other characters such as Angelo and Isabella. The play calls attention both to "the urgency of what he does not know and to his pointed lack of interest in it" (89). At the end of the play, the city of Vienna seems to be a wasteland.

Gross' commitment to complexity of interpretation is admirable. The book concludes with "An Imaginary Theater," a short, apocalyptic coda not directly on the slander theme but a larger view of the efficacy and openness of performance. Shakespeare's Noise is strikingly original in its wide-ranging concepts and its eloquent, lyrical style. At the end, there are 64 pages (in smaller type) of elaborate notes that constitute almost a separate book of commentaries on the main book.