unloquaciousness

— We perhaps owe to a boy actor who happened to have a beautiful singing voice the moving snatches of song he gave to the distracted Ophelia and the heart-rending beauty of Desdemona’s Willow Song. Perhaps his voice had cracked when Shakespeare wrote King Lear, and Cordelia’s beautiful silence, her extreme unloquaciousness, which is so impressive in a play in which everyone else talks so much and so loudly, was something that Shakespeare’s imagination ‘found’ in writing for a company in which the best boy actor could only speak in a voice that was ‘soft, gentle and low’.