SOURCE: Garber, Marjorie. “‘The Rest Is Silence’: Ineffability and the ‘Unscene’ in Shakespeare's Plays.” In Ineffability: Naming the Unnamable from Dante to Beckett, edited by Peter S. Hawkins and Anne Howland Schotter, pp. 35-50. New York: AMS Press, 1984.

In the following essay, Garber surveys Shakespeare's onstage silences, his use of the indirect mode of representation—that is, characters' reports of events that occur offstage—and his adaptations of the conventional theme of inexpressibility. Garber asserts that Shakespeare understood that silence can be as effective as speech in communicating emotion.

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must keep silent” 

—Wittgenstein

“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on.” The paradox implicit in Keats's famous lines suggests the difficulties inherent in any approach to ineffability through the medium of language. The “unheard” melodies piped by figures on the Grecian urn are displaced and...