Roberta Mullini, Parlare per non farsi sentire. L’a parte nei drammi di Shakespeare, Roma: Bulzoni

In her recent book Parlare per non farsi sentire. L’a parte nei drammi di Shakespeare (Speaking not to be Heard: The Aside in Shakespeare’s Plays) Mullini re-examines taken-for-granted definitions of ‘aside’ and ‘aside to’, questions the idea of audience as explicit addressee of these dramatic conventions, probes the claim that Shakespeare used them mainly to characterise evil figures, and offers a detailed reading and pragma-linguistic analysis of selected asides through a quantitative analysis applied to the Shakespearean dramatic corpus by means of the Ant-Conc software, especially focusing on ‘asides to’. Mullini challenges previous studies on Shakespeare’s use of the aside, showing its relevance with regard to the characterisation of any character in crucial moments of the plot and, in the case of ‘asides to’, its importance to underline also the power distance between specific dramatis personae.