ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a particular kind of verbal silence, the silence of images expressed in words, a literary technique known as ekphrasis, and argues that in Shakespeare's plays and poems, silence has powerful, transformative and performative effects. Shakespeare engaged in his own version of the paragone taking it into new arenas, but understood it in terms ultimately drawn from Sir Philip Sidney and, before him. Leonardo da Vinci Yet in contrast to Sidney. 'Thinking is seeing, and ideas are pictures, but Sidney proposes to communicate the mental images, not through external pictures, but through the speaking picture of a poem'. Shakespeare's art comes, not for the first time, firmly within the compass of the paragone, a sixteenth-century debate between the auditoiy and visual arts. Drama is naturally as much a visual as an auditory art and hence the creative purposes to which Shakespearean silences were put are often pictorial.
