The Sounds of Silence: Discovering the Unheard Stories of Shakespeare's Women

Dr. Edward L. Risden, professor of English, recently presented a lecture for the attendees of a luncheon as part of the Women's Enrichment Series. Risden, sporting a tweed jacket, captivated the women in the audience as he gave his lecture entitled "Shakespeare's Women and the Sounds of Silence." Risden, who prepared the talk specifically for the Women's Enrichment Series, actually wrote his lecture with the intention of including it in a future piece of work, "an ongoing project on Shakespeare."

"I'm ultimately working toward a book, and this will be a chapter," he said.

When Risden writes anything, be it lecture or scholarly analysis, he tries to think of what more he might do with the piece. Could it be incorporated into an article for publication in an academic journal? Or, perhaps organized into a chapter for a book?

Risden admits: "Writing is hard! It takes a lot of energy!"

Risden teaches one of the major author courses required for English majors on Shakespeare's Drama. He encourages student writers not to think of pieces one writes as assignments, but as something you now have the opportunity to write about. If students wish to engage themselves more fully in their writing, he insists that we cannot just think they are simply "writing a silly assignment for a silly professor."

Unlike his Shakespeare class, this audience did not have a reading assignment ahead of time. However, Risden still wanted to give his lecture some depth so it did not seem like "fluff."

He said: "It was something that would be interesting I hope, but also accessible."

After spending years closely examining Shakespeare's drama, Risden was able to point out that one often finds wise and important women characters who are silenced during the play. While they are sometimes silenced by another character, they sometimes silence themselves.

Risden asked himself: "When we find these women silenced, why does that happen?"

The title of his lecture, "The Sounds of Silence," was borrowed from the Simon and Garfunkel song of the same name. The song expresses the troubling idea that silence is dangerous because it means that people who have things to say do not have the opportunity to say them. Risden discovered that the same thing occurs in Shakespearian drama.

Did Paul Simon linger over thoughts of women in Shakespeare when writing his famous song?

"I don't think I'll ever get to ask him," said Risden. "He doesn't return my phone calls."

Risden hopes his lectures will help people find "a sense of joy in the texts and a greater appreciation for their complexity." He emphatically suggested that we, as people with unique experiences and perspectives, must "commit ourselves not to remain silent." Should people attempt to silence us, "We have to do the best we can to make our voices heard."

Risden said: "We gain a bit of wisdom throughout our lifetime." He stopped to consider this fact, and adds: "If we don't share it, the world loses it."

He concluded his lecture with this thought: "We need wisdom and love together more than we need wit, ambition, and confidence together, and we should never abandon our voices and fail to speak when circumstance calls to us."

Risden mulls over this idea: "I think sometimes we feel as though our voices don't matter, but I would assert that they do.