Looking with ears, hearing with eyes: Shakespeare and the ear of the early modern
Robson, Mark
Early Modern Literary Studies 7.1/ Special Issue 8 (May, 2001)
Abstract
Attention to aurality and orality offers the possibility of rethinking the relationship of text to world, but it is also important to take account of the interventions into these arguments of early modern texts themselves. Tracing a line which runs through Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Venus and Adonis, and the Sonnets, it is possible to detect a profound unease about the relationship between the senses, and about the effect of the world upon the body. Perception is not neutral. Hearing is revealed as and through a form of reading which demands eyes as well as ears.
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