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

Front Cover
University of Chicago Press, 1999 M04 15 - 386 pages
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.

 

Contents

Mapping the Field
30
Membering
96
Some Propositions Concerning
130
Ballads Within Around Among Of Upon
168
Within the Wooden O
206
Circling the Subject
246
Listen Otherwise
287
Works Cited
343
Index
367
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (1999)

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.

Bibliographic information