Even If the topic of this paper is related to “Love Through Hearsay” , we should bear in mind, that in Shakespeare, the senses are not isolated, and the importance of the language cannot be taken appart from the importance of the vision, that is why I added here a fragment of the article: “Looking with ears, hearing with eyes: Shakespeare and the ear of the early modern”
1. Where is an ear? Is an ear part of the inside or the outside of a body, and how can we distinguish its own inside and outside surfaces? Where is the ear of an era, the ear of the early modern? And what of the ear of Shakespeare? Such quibbling might seem of little consequence, serving to irritate rather than illuminate, and yet irritation is sometimes productive. It is the foreign body that puts the body to work.[1]
2. These questions resonate in the context of the various debates within early modern studies on the body, on orality and aurality, on speech and writing, on the voice and the gaze. In particular, these questions have a special pertinence in the context of recent calls for an attention to sense, and to the senses, and the proposal that such attention might best come through a phenomenological approach. For it seems clear that phenomenology quickly embeds itself within a visuality that supplants and supplements orality. In other words, the eye and the ear change places, but without ever being able to eliminate the residue of the one in the other, like a foreign body, continuing to work like the grit within the oyster shell.
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3. In Shakespeare’s works, the ear is treated with an ambivalence that cannot be simply idiomatic. One of the most famous invocations of the ear is, of course, Antony’s “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears!” (3.2.65) in Julius Caesar.[2] Antony’s rhetorical display is one of the clearest examples of persuasion as force, and stands against seemingly more naive alternative views in Shakespeare’s works, such as that expressed in Othello by Brabantio: “words are words; I never yet did hear / That the bruis’d heart was pierced through the ear.” (1.3.216-19).[3] The irony of Brabantio’s lack of insight is that Desdemona is indeed won over by Othello’s stories, and the play, which is more frequently read through Othello’s desire for “ocular proof”, is full of references to the ear. At 1.3.377, Iago suggests that he will “abuse Othello’s ear” and the editor of the Cambridge edition glosses “abuse” as “deceive”. But is it that simple? Might it not rather be that Iago is simply going to exploit the openness of Othello’s ear, an image reinforced by his later claim that he will “pour this pestilence into his ear” (2.3.323). Anthony’s recognition of the power of speech is closer to Augustine’s sense of the ear as the route to the heart: “Whisper in my heart, I am here to save you. Speak so that I may hear your words. My heart has ears ready to listen to you, Lord. Open them and whisper in my heart, I am here to save you.” [4] Yet the ear, unlike the eye, is always open, always ready to receive, and can only be “closed” with difficulty. Thus there is always the possibility of the call, but this call cannot be screened; to decide whether or not to “listen” to a speech, one must already have heard it. Any pestilence will already have been incorporated. The difficulty arising is analogous to the problems of interpretation posed by a statement such as “Do not read this sentence.” One can only obey its prescription after having broken the law that it attempts to institute.
4. Equally, this problem about the spatial definition of the ear finds its way into critical texts. Thus Jonathan Bate, in a discussion of Olivier’s film of Hamlet, finds himself saying: “At the very centre of the play is Hamlet’s lacerating confrontation with his mother in her bedchamber. In this iconic moment, Hamlet is forcing Gertrude back on to the bed; he seems on the verge of piercing not just her ear but her body.” [5] Not just her ear but her body. What notion of the ear is Bate working with here, if he is able to distinguish the ear from the body? This might appear to be a mistake on Bate’s part, but I would like to suggest that it is rather a symptomatic example of the difficulties which surround (without lying “outside”) the ear.
5. Part of the fascination with the ear and hearing stems from a clear connection between the ear and the tongue, emphasised by the fact that one can hear oneself speak in a way that one cannot see oneself seeing, cannot taste oneself tasting, and so on. This link between a form of self-awareness and the voice makes hearing an intimate sense. But although this has led to a privileging of the ear and the tongue over other organs, there are indications in the literary texts of the early modern period that suggest we be cautious about endorsing this privilege. Adopting another perspective, over thirty years ago Jacques Derrida suggested that: “Hearing oneself speak is not the inwardness of an inside that is closed in upon itself; it is the irreducible openness in the inside; it is the eye and the world within speech.” [6] At the time, Derrida was attempting to account for the familiar association of speech with a sense of intimacy and interiority, and for the privilege of this sense over others within a philosophical tradition which culminates (without ending) in phenomenology. Of particular interest here is the movement from hearing to “the eye and the world within speech.” Rupturing any sense of the self-enclosed relay from tongue to ear, Derrida counts self-overhearing as an indication of the continuity of speech and world that refuses to be closed off as an expression of “self.” It is not that there is not a world elsewhere, it is that it refuses to remain safely “over there”, outside the body. It is worth restating here, however, that those who read statements such as this, as well as Derrida’s by now infamous “il n’y a pas de hors-texte” [“there is no outside-text”], as a gesture of textual idealism are clearly wrong.[7]
6. In part why I choose to cite Derrida here is that in two recent works of pertinence to our discussion, there has been a suggestion that phenomenology might provide a way to think through questions of the senses.[8] I think that such a movement is to be welcomed, but I also think that we should be clear about the trajectories that such phenomenological investigations might take. Western philosophy, it is sometimes argued, is the history of a sustained movement from the sensual to the supersensual. [9] Thinking, in this tradition, is not something that can be equated with sensing, or at least not with the actions of or impressions received by the senses. This is the difference between making sense and sensuality. This movement then from the physical to the metaphysical has a long and elevated history, even if that history now appears to be under a certain amount of stress. Bruce Smith’s recent work has offered an alternative to this separation of the realm of the senses from early modern textuality, emphasising the embodiedness of readers and audiences in an aural world. Smith’s work raises some important questions relevant to the debates on textuality and performativity in the early modern period. Yet there are ways in which certain early modern texts, and the ones chosen here are simply emblematic of a much wider (perhaps even interminable) project, might intervene in these debates. What I would like to offer here is merely an indication of a sense of unease that arises about the movement away from ‘philosophy’ and back to the embodied reader or audience member.
7. That philosophy need not be abandoned in our return to a concern for the senses is ably demonstrated by Jonathan Rée’s wonderful I See A Voice. While I might not fully endorse all that this book contains, there is a short passage which I think is instructive in opening up the significance of these questions. Noting the privilege afforded to voice (even by those most apparently keen to attack that privilege), Rée suggests that there are four basic “delusions” that govern the arguments around voice: “first, that the voice is intrinsically connected with the existence of a self-identical soul, spirit, or inward subjectivity; second, that experience must ultimately be analysed into the distinct contributions made by the various bodily senses; third, that hearing is specifically concerned with time, and vision with space; and fourth, that language has two fundamentally different forms: audible speech which occupies time but not space, and visible writing which occupies space but not time.” [10] As Rée suggests, such delusions do not evaporate simply because they can be recognised, the only way to approach them is through treating the world as phenomenon rather than object.
8. There is only space here to indicate trajectories for future work, but I think that the readings that I am proposing can act as exemplary figures for the larger debates onto which they open. My central point will be that much of the work on the orality of early modern English literature (and this also includes certain of the questions about performance with regard to dramatic texts) repeats a very familiar opposition of speech and writing that the texts that are purportedly being read complicate. The confusion of the senses that my title indicates acts as a marker of a difficulty that has to be attended to by early modern criticism.
http://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/07-1/robsears.htm