The Power of 0: Computing and Modeling Silence in Shakespeare’s Drama
Whitney Sperrazza · Shakespeare Quarterly · 2024
Hers are contradictory words, somewhat mad from the standpoint of reason, inaudible for whoever listens to them with ready-made grids, with a fully elaborated code in hand. —Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One1 Until the last 450 lines of Shakespeare’sMeasure for Measure, Isabella is what we might call a “silence breaker.”2 “He would not,” she accuses Angelo, “but by gift of my chaste body / To his concupiscible intemperate lust, / Release my brother” (5.1.116–18).3 The play constantly exhibits her rhetorical skill, first introduced when her brother, Claudio, calls attention to the power of her speech: “[S]he hath prosperous art / When she will play with reason and discourse, / And well she can persuade” (1.2.182–84). Isabella is particularly good at directly confronting, with angry words, the men who treat her body as a bartering token. Demonstrating what Laura Kolb calls “the very modern anger of Shakespeare’s women,” Isabella verbalizes her anger not only at the play’s male characters but also at the structures that reinforce their power.4 The men’s “perilous mouths,” Isabella protests, “bear in them one and the selfsame tongue” and “[b]id[] the law make curtsy to their will” (2.4.186, 187, 189).5