Listening for Theatrical Form in Early Modern England by Allison K. Deutermann (review)

Allison Deutermann’s Listening for Theatrical Form in Early Modern England reminds us that early moderns went to “hear,” not to “see” or “watch,” a play— they were literally audiences rather than spectators. The book sits at the nexus of several recent developments in Renaissance theater history, performance studies, and critical theories of judgment and taste, and it makes a significant contribution to current interest in historical phenomenology, or early modern philosophies of perception, knowing, and subjectivity. Above all, as its title indicates, the book sets out to rethink the fundamental formal problems of drama from the perspective of its theatricality. Across five chapters and an epilogue, Listening for Theatrical Form attends to the “dramatic soundscape[s]” (25) of the stage in order to show how the formal resources of drama, far from being the disembodied or idealized textual effects privileged by New Criticism, were apprehended physically in performance and evaluated by audiences according to new cultural and aesthetic categories that playwrights and actors were attempting to institute.

One of the most exciting things about Listening for Theatrical Form is the way it charts the emergence of two genres that were key to the repertory system: revenge tragedy and city comedy. Deutermann reminds us how “noisy” the tragedies and history plays of the 1580s and 90s actually were; through a series of striking examples, she shows how consistently authors such as Peele, Greene, Lodge, Kyd, Marlowe, and Shakespeare assembled an auditory landscape made up of speaking styles, sound effects, and event-patterns that established an overall emotional tone for their plays centered around the idea of “revenge.” The term recurs frequently in plays of different types, characterizing not just individual actions, but rather a ubiquitous and sometimes confusing general ethos of passionate intensity. Deutermann then demonstrates how Jonson and Marston reacted against many of these sonic and stylistic conventions to craft a new genre of urban comedy. Both playwrights, she argues, were highly self-conscious about the way sound and music worked in the theater, and they engaged in sophisticated ways with the expectations about hearing and listening that early moderns brought with them to performances. As a result, playgoing became a mode of education through sensory apprehension and response, teaching new codes of urban behavior as well as new values for what drama was supposed to sound like and what larger moral effects poetry in general was imagined to have.

We could find no better commentator on the cultural process that Deutermann describes than Hamlet, who represents an amalgam of the newly sophisticated audience member and playwright that was emerging in the first decade of the seventeenth century. In a major chapter on Hamlet, audition, and theatrical form, Deutermann explores how Shakespeare responded to the theatrical innovations of Jonson and Marston by refashioning the auditory conventions of the revenge tradition. In Elsinore, the skillful manipulation of performative speech has become not only a sign of social distinction, an index of dramatic taste, or a pragmatic political tool, but also the spur to an existential dilemma; and hearing—or mis-hearing—drives the many misjudgments of characters and produces tragic consequences. As Deutermann argues, “How and what theatregoers hear becomes in Hamlet a question every bit as serious as how and what churchgoers hear, or heads of state, enacting on an individual, personal scale the political instability that sound’s violence often signified in early modern tragedies of revenge” (123). By demonstrating how widely the trope of hearing and its associated political and formal concerns extended through plays of the period, Deutermann shows the degree to which Shakespeare is at once highly original in his approach to auditory experience and less original than we always imagine him to be. For he is responding to a much broader set of cultural concerns, including the prestige of certain dramatic styles and the social status of audience members, that Jonson...