The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor

by Bruce R. Smith

Overview

We know how a Shakespeare play sounds when performed today, but what would listeners have heard within the wooden "O" of the Globe Theater in 1599? What sounds would have filled the air in early modern England, and what would these sounds have meant to people in that largely oral culture?

In this ear-opening journey into the sound-worlds of Shakespeare's contemporaries, Bruce R. Smith explores both the physical aspects of human speech (ears, lungs, tongue) and the surrounding environment (buildings, landscape, climate), as well as social and political structures. Drawing on a staggeringly wide range of evidence, he crafts a historical phenomenology of sound, from reconstructions of the "soundscapes" of city, country, and court to detailed accounts of the acoustic properties of the Globe and Blackfriars theaters and how scripts designed for the two spaces exploited sound very differently.

Critical for anyone who wants to understand the world of early modern England, Smith's pathbreaking "ecology" of voice and listening also has much to offer musicologists and acoustic ecologists.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226763767
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	05/01/1999
Edition description:	1
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Bruce R. Smith is the College Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California and the author of, most recently, Shakespeare and Masculinity and The Acoustic World of Early Modern England, the latter published by the University of Chicago Press.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
1. Around
1. Opening
2. Mapping the Field
3. The Soundscapes of Early Modern England: City, Country, Court
4. Re: Membering
5. Some Propositions Concerning O
2. Within
6. Games, Gambols, Gests, Jests, Jibes, Jigs
7. Ballads Within, Around, Among, Of, Upon, Against, Within
8. Within the Wooden O
9. Circling the Subject
3. Beyond
10. Listen, Otherwise
Works Cited
Index

What People are Saying About This

Peter Holland

Brilliant in concept, innovative in approach, and outstanding in execution, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England enable us to understand for the first time the particular sounds Shakespeare created for his theater.

Editorial Reviews

Smith goes from Donne to Castiglione, from Philip Sidney to Francis Bacon, in order to tease out the complexities of human sound...This is in many respects an academic and scholarly work, but it demonstrates scholarship with both poetry and purpose. Its aim is nothing less than to reveal a hidden world of meaning and memory, in which half the human life has always resided.
— The Times

Peter Ackroyd