Noise, Sound and Fury in Macbeth

Abstract

Early modern ballads supplied tools for managing information, allowing audiences to compare stories, handle variants and sort through multiple interpretations. These activities revised how and what people learn when they come together, a transformation of social life similarly explored in Macbeth, where this technology takes shape in the messenger Ross. Ross dispenses information but also disrupts and sometimes shuts down lines of communication, connecting courts with battlefields, inventorying the dead and preparing bodies for slaughter. Drawing on scholarship about ballad reception, cognitive ecology and Shakespearean surveillance, I consider Ross's communications within a larger early modern social world which deactivates its members.