Turn-taking in Shakespeare

Abstract

Whenever people talk to one another, there are at least two things going on at once. First, and most obviously, there is an exchange of speech. Second, and slightly less obviously, there is a negotiation about how that exchange is organized—about whose turn it is to talk at any given moment. Linguists call this second, organizational, level of communicative activity ‘turn-taking’, and since the late 1970s it has been central to the way in which spoken interaction is understood. In spite of its relevance to the study of drama, however, turn-taking has received little attention from critics and editors of Shakespeare. This book aims to put that right. It offers a fresh perspective on the dramatic text by reversing the priorities of traditional literary analysis. Rather than focusing on what characters say, it focuses on when they speak. Rather than focusing on how they talk, it focuses on how they gain access to the floor. Its central argument is that the turn-taking patterns of Shakespeare’s plays are a part of what Emrys Jones has called their ‘basic structural shaping’—as fundamental to dialogue as rhythm is to verse. It investigates what it means for a character to speak in or out of turn, to interrupt or overlap with a previous speaker, to pause before speaking, or to fail to speak at all. It explores how these moments are—and are not—signalled by the Shakespearean text, how best to describe and understand them, and the implications of such questions for contemporary debates about editing, rhetoric, prosody, and early modern performance practices.