"Shakespeare's Noise" explores the playwright's deep fascination with dangerous and disorderly forms of utterance-rumor, slander, insult, vituperation, and curse-and how this generates an immense verbal energy in the poetry and on the stage. Kenneth Gross studies the strange gifts inherent not only in the ways that Shakespearean characters speak, but also in how they hear, overhear, and mishear what is spoken, how rumor becomes tragic knowledge for Hamlet or opens Othello to fantastic jealousies. Gross also shows how Shakespeare's preoccupation with dark and noisy speech echoes and transforms a broader cultural obsession with the power of defamation in Renaissance England.
