by Suzanne Coley
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| Love's Not Time's Fool, 2025, Suzanne Coley |
In a recent production of The Merry Wives of Windsor at the Globe, I had the pleasure of seeing the minor characters deliver their lines in regional dialects. One actor, in particular, spoke as though singing hymnal gospel, in tones that evoked monastic chant or Catholic liturgy. He received a standing ovation. Perhaps it was the brilliance of the performance—or perhaps it was the first time Shakespeare had ever sounded like that. I looked him up afterward. On Instagram, the actor Samuel Creasey wrote, “The summer of dreams at the Globe.”
That performance affirmed what I had been trying to do: to read Shakespeare not just as text, but as sound. Sound that resonates from the deepest part of the soul. Sound that remembers: church bells, complex organ music, spiritual vortices, harmonies composed of both joy and despair.
In Shakespeare's sonnets, especially, I hear the diminution, a musical term describing the embellishment of a melody by dividing long notes into shorter, more intricate phrases. Diminution is a way of creating texture and emotional intensity. I hear this in vowels, in the subtle turns of phrase. We can trill with language. We can arpeggiate with breath. We can create music by simply playing with the shape of the word.
Diminution, in this way, mirrors what I attempt with book arts—adding visual and tactile texture to Shakespeare's language. Embellishing not only with voice, but with the body, the hand, the page. Turning printed words into living sound, and sound into visual form.
This connection became more evident during my research trip this summer. I was able to attend a rehearsal of Norma at La Scala, an intimate access to musical mastery. Watching one of the rehearsals of Vincenzo Bellini's opera in person was momentous. The principal singers, chorus, and instrumentalists were all wearing their regular street clothes. The stage was bare: there was no lighting, no set design, and no ornamentation to enhance the performances. Removing all the things we usually associate with operatic performances and hearing only voices and instruments allowed me to listen to the music in a new way. A way that left me in awe of the vocal agility and beauty, as well as how directors experiment to achieve the perfect sound for the performance.
Yet only days later, I was dismissed outright by book artists at the London Center for Book Arts. The rustic bookstore was open, but no, I could not see the spaces of the artists who gathered there; no, I could not see their work; no, they were not interested in what I do. The contrast could not have been sharper: welcomed by the sonic world of opera, shut out by the visual world of the book.
I left the Center asking, “What am I really doing?” The answer—at least one of them—is coloratura. Coloratura is an operatic term. In Italian, it means “coloring,” derived from the Latin colorare. In music, it refers to rapid vocal runs, trills, and leaps. These are the agile, virtuosic movements that define the most masterful sopranos. It is a style, but also a skill: a demand for breath control, for beauty drawn from intensity.
And for me, as a Black woman, coloratura carries an even deeper charge. The word color immediately evokes the American South, where my family is from. It echoes “For Colored Only,” a phrase that haunted bathrooms, schools, and bus seats. The very word color is fraught. Yet in coloratura, I find a different inheritance—one that allows me to name my process with beauty, precision, and pride. I claim color as movement, as resonance, as possibility.
Coloratura, then, becomes a bridge between the musical and the visual, between sound and print, between what is heard and what is held. It gives me a language to articulate how a Shakespearean sonnet can shimmer like stained glass or hum like a gospel hymn.
So when I think back to that actor, Samuel Creasey, at the Globe, transforming Shakespeare into something hymnal, something regional, something uncontainable—I feel seen. He wasn’t turning it into a musical. He was simply letting the language sing. That is what I want to do. That is what I am doing, even if I’m still learning to articulate it.
Shakespeare is sound. Sound is art. And as I continue to find my way, I hope to better understand—and express—how wind is colored.
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| Love's Not Time's Fool, 2025, Suzanne Coley Handmade book inspired by Shakespeare's Sonnet 116 |
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