David Schalkwyk - Speech and Performance in Shakespeares Sonnets and Plays

This book began as an idea sparked by a paper given by John Roe. The germ of that idea was nurtured in the seminars on Shakespeare's sonnets at the meetings of the Shakespeare Association of America in Albuquerque in 1994 and the World Shakespeare Congress in Los Angeles in 1996, and took root during my tenure as a Solmsen Research Fellow at the Humanities Institute of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, in 1999. I owe more than I can express to Lars Engle and Heather Dubrow, who ran the respective seminars, fortheirhelp, encouragement and acute criticism throughout the project. Lars got me to take the sonnets seriously; Heather enabled me to pursue that seriousness in the ideal collegial environment of the Humanities Institute in Madison. Both have been exceptionally generous colleagues and friends.

More generally, I wish to thank Jacques Berthoud, under whose guidance I first began to explore the relevance of Wittgenstein to literature. I have benefited in equal measure from his boundless generosity and toughness of mind overthe past twenty years. I owe a great deal of personal and intellectual debt for their selfless engagement and readiness to read parts of the manuscript to Jacques Lezra, Lesley Marx, Tony Parr and Susanne Wofford. Anston Bosman, Jonathan Crewe, John Higgins, Stephen Greenblatt, Randy McCloud, the late Nick Visser and Robert Weimann all contributed to the formation of this project through their conversation and comments. Sarah Stanton of Cambridge University Press has offered patient guidance and advice, and I owe the two Press readers a great deal of thanks for their acute and helpful comments on the original typescript.

An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared in Shakespeare Quarterly (1998), a version of chapter 2 in Shakespeare Quarterly (1994), and some paragraphs from the introduction in Shakespeare Quarterly (1999).

The research for this book was generously supported by a grant from the National Research Foundation of South Africa. I also wish to thank

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the University of Cape Town and my colleagues in the English Department forproviding the collegial support that made this project possible. Most important is the generosity, friendship and encouragement that I received from the members of the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin, in Madison. My special thanks go to the director, Paul Boyer, who made our trip to Madison a voyage of discovery and delight. Christina, Andrew and James know, I hope, how much of this book is theirs.

The text of Shakespeare's sonnets used in this book is the facsimile of the 1609 Quarto reproduced in Shakespeare's Sonnets, ed. Stephen Booth (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1978). Quotations from the plays are from The Oxford Shakespeare, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).

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