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

The Acoustic World Of Early Modern England: Attending To The O-factor. By Bruce R. Smith. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999; pp. x + 300. $55.00 cloth, $21.00 paper.

Bruce R. Smith is also the author of the interesting Ancient Scripts and Modern Experience on the English Stage, 1500-1700 (1988), but anyone who expects this book to be focused on the theatre is in for a surprise. There is a forty-page chapter on the theatre, dramatic entertainments of various kinds are discussed elsewhere in the book, and plays are a source for comments on many customs and behaviors. Yet this book, which might more clearly have been titled Aural Experience in Early Modern England, is of astonishing breadth. It is not just that there are chapters on Elizabethan concepts of writing and of speaking, on ballads, on village pastimes, and even on communications in New England between colonists and Indians, but also what Smith brings to writing on those topics. He draws on such varied writers as the linguist Dell Hymes; Jan Vansina, who writes on African oral traditions; Steven Feld, on what one hears in Papuan forests; and Hugh Murray Baillie on the planning of state apartments in baroque palaces. He also uses a multitude of printed and manuscript sources, including collections of music, from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Smith seems to have a particular interest in music and prints a number of musical examples in the book.

The key chapter concerns what one would hear in the streets of London, in the countryside, and in waiting for and upon the monarch in those state apartments. The main point is how much quieter even a major city like London was then. The support for this comes from contemporary writings and from decibel measures for church bells, drums, and trumpets. The contemporary writings are used with ingenuity. For example, the distance at which an aviary was placed from Greenwich Palace, or fountains for the sound of splashing water, allows inferences about the level of ambient sound. The evocations in this chapter at times approach the visceral. I find it hard to believe, however, that the woods of Kenilworth, in which I played as a boy, are "without much undergrowth" and "would form a relatively resonant space, potentially full of echoes" (77), since they are dominated by oaks, with thick and fissured bark, and are blanketed in tall bracken.

Analysis of the acoustics of the 1599 Globe, the comparative pitches of boys' and adult men's speech, and the instruments used there contrasted with those in the Blackfriars comprise the chapter on theatre. Among the points he makes is:

Experience in the reconstructed Globe in London has demonstrated that the position of greatest dramatic power is not all the way downstage, where some theatre historians imagine soliloquies to have been spoken, but several feet back, somewhere in between the two pillars holding up the canopy. An actor may occupy the position of greatest visual presence at the geometric center of the playhouse, but he commands the greatest acoustical power near the geometric center of the space beneath the canopy.

[213-14]

Elsewhere Smith discusses the 1575 entertainments for Elizabeth at Kenilworth castle, prologues and other forms of direct address for initially quieting and involving the audience--"they give the audience an implicit fictional identity," often as a king's "political subjects as well as his auditory subjects" (273-74)--and a variety of quasi-dramatic and dramatic folk forms that "cross generic boundaries: neither song nor dance nor drama, they are at once none of the above and yet all of the above" (136). He also writes of how these Robin Hood plays, mummings, and morris dances are echoed and re-worked in written scripts and court entertainments.

While there is interest in what Smith writes of theatre, the pleasures of the book are in finding what one...