Sound it out

From its opening sequence’s stage directions “On a ship at sea: a tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning heard.” (Act 1. 1.1), it immediately catapults the audience into a world where events are already in motion. Shakespeare does not send in pages or lords or witches to clue us in with word. He thrusts past the phonological into sounds. Although these sounds have no place in our phonology they still hold meaning! There is language within the thunderstorm. A thunderstorm means danger, mystery, possibility, chance, and destruction. Shakespeare destroys the world of the characters on the boat and sets the audience up to be rebuilt all by having a thunder storm as the first aural experience had by the audience.
Moving away from simple stage directions and into the words themselves, the phonemes hold weight. It is argued by actor, teacher, director and author John Basil of the American Globe Theatre, that the sounds are equally if not more important than words themselves in Shakespeare (Will Power, Basil). It’s not just the words that manifest into meaning but an entire sound scape that engulfs the audience in thought and emotion. Take a look at Prospero reprimanding Ariel in 1.2:
"This blue-eyed hag was hither brought with child
And here was left by the sailors. Thou, my slave,
As thou report'st thyself, wast then her servant;
And, for thou wast a spirit too delicate
To act her earthy and abhorr'd commands,
Refusing her grand hests, she did confine thee,
By help of her more potent ministers
And in her most unmitigable rage,
Into a cloven pine; within which rift
Imprison'd thou didst painfully remain
A dozen years; within which space she died
And left thee there; where thou didst vent thy groans
As fast as mill-wheels strike. Then was this island--
Save for the son that she did litter here,
A freckled whelp hag-born--not honour'd with
A human shape."

I've italicized the consonant sounds of "p" "b" and "t"( in the final position only). It's fun to look at the sounds "p" and "b" together because in phonetics they are considered cognates of one another. Meanings they are identical in how they are formed and produced the only difference between them is one is given vibration ("b"), and one is not("p"). They are both bilabial plosives, or rather produced by "the lips are closing and blocking the expulsion of air from the mouth; the lips are then opened and the air rushes out." ( http://teflworldwiki.com/index.php?title=Bilabial_Plosives).Think about the letter "t" in isolation, if you create the sound enough times eventually it begins to sound like spitting! Adding this sound to the ends of the word creates the effect of spitting your words out. With the use of all of the bilabials and final ts in this speech Prospero appears to be exploding and spitting with Ariel. Perhaps it is time to stop thinking of Shakespeare as an playwright and begin to think about him as a sound designer.