Review of Shakespeare’s Auditory Worlds: Hearing and Staging Practices, Then and Now

Laury Magnus’s and Walter W. Cannon’s edited volume (Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 2021) demonstrates the strong value of its provenance from the American Shakespeare Center (ASC) and its Blackfriars Conference, an event that’s most recent iteration was sadly cancelled abruptly in 2021 due to institutional issues.  This conference puts its association with ASC at the heart of its sessions. Scholars are encouraged to collaborate with theatrical practitioners in their presentations, providing rich opportunities for new understandings of early modern theater.  Frequently, scholars gather in comparative isolation at conferences such as the Shakespeare Association of America, while practitioners meet at the Shakespeare Theatre Association and other theatrical venues.  The Blackfriars Conference is one of the important places where these disparate groups can share knowledge from their distinctive perspectives and investigate ways that arts practitioners and scholars can test out their ideas in an environment conducive to both literary and theatrical analysis. Shakespeare’s Auditory Worlds similarly presents material from both veteran and early career scholars and members of the ASC company. This integration of multiple perspectives into a single volume creates a worthy addition to the growing field of early modern Sound Studies. As this set of essays and interviews make clear, aurality figures prominently in both text and performance.  This collection reflects the breadth and depth of its topic, while offering learned and imaginative insights into a range of issues involving sound that are found in early modern drama and performances both at the…