The Sound of Shakespeare

Wes Folkerth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415253772
• eBook ISBN: 9781317797203
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The 'Sound of Shakespeare' reveals the surprising extent to which Shakespeare's art is informed by the various attitudes, beliefs, practices and discourses that pertained to sound and hearing in his culture.
In this engaging study, Wes Folkerth develops listening as a critical practice, attending to the ways in which Shakespeare's plays express their author's awareness of early modern associations between sound and particular forms of ethical and aesthetic experience. Through readings of the acoustic representation of deep subjectivity in Richard III, of the 'public ear' in Antony and Cleopatra, the receptive ear in Coriolanus, the grotesque ear in A Midsummer Night's Dream, the 'greedy ear' in Othello, and the 'willing ear' in Measure for Measure, Folkerth demonstrates that by listening to Shakespeare himself listening, we derive a fuller understanding of why his works continue to resonate so strongly with is today.

1

Shakespearience

Are you Shakespearienced?

Trip Shakespeare

My God, I wish I’d met him, talked to him – but above all. heard and listened.

Laurence Olivier

The name ‘Pavlov’ wouldn’t have meant anything to Thomas Dekker or any of the audience members assembled to hear his play The Shoemaker’s Holiday at what was probably the Rose theatre around 1597–1600.¹ In the second scene of the fifth act, however, the apprentice Firke is in the midst of inviting various characters to his master’s feast when a sound effect causes what can only be described as a Pavlovian reaction among the characters onstage. Firke notes the sound first, because his ‘O brave, hearke, hearke’ occurs just before the stage direction, ‘Bell ringes’, in the text (5.2.184).² The order of these two elements in the playtext seems to indicate that the actor’s words were aural signals to whoever was in charge of actually ringing the bell during the performance. There is a general excitement onstage once the sound is recognized: ‘ALL. The Pancake bell rings, the pancake bel, tri-lill my hearts’ (5.2.185). For the apprentice characters onstage, the sound suggests at least two types of association. The first, as Firke tells us, is that it signals the start of a feast that has been promised by his master Simon Eyre, the new Lord Mayor. Indeed, the food is so central to Firke’s experience of the holiday that he describes it ambulating up and down the city streets under its own power:

O musical bel stil! O Hodge, O my brethren! theres cheere for the heavens, venson pasties walke up and down piping hote, like sergeants, beefe and brewesse comes marching in drie fattes, fritters and pancakes comes trowling in in wheele barrowes, hennes and orenges hopping in porters baskets, colloppes and egges in scuttles, and tartes and custardes comes quavering in in mault shovels.

(5.2.197–203)

Notwithstanding its centrality to this apprentice’s experience of the holiday, the pancake bell signifies more than a surfeit of food.

It also signals the start of a period of festivity (the ‘Shoemaker’s Holiday’ of the play’s title) that temporarily releases the workers from their routine obligations and responsibilities. The new Lord Mayor had promised as much in the previous scene: ‘… upon every Shrovetuesday, at the sound of the pancake bell: my fine dapper Assyrian lads, shall clap up their shop windows, and away .… Boyes, that day are you free, let masters care, And prentises shall pray for Simon Eyre’ (5.1.48–53). Firke again makes this clear for the audience, and for posterity: ‘Nay more my hearts, every Shrovetuesday is our yeere ofJubile: and when the pancake bel rings, we are as free as my lord Maior, we may shut up our shops, and make holiday: Ile have it calld, Saint Hughes Holiday’ (5.2.211–4) . St Hugh, the patron saint of shoemakers, had already been apportioned a holiday in the English calendar, 17 November – though by the time of Dekker’s play it had become overshadowed by Elizabeth’s ‘crownation’, which had fallen on the same day, when it was customary for all the bells in the kingdom to be rung in dynastic celebration (Cressy 1989: 30; 50–1; 136). St Hugh’s holiday had been appropriated by the Elizabethan government. Firke, whether wittingly or no, repossesses it for the fellows of his trade by repositioning the date of St Hugh’s Day to Shrove Tuesday, in speech licensed by the festive occasion, marked by the pancake bell.³

Whereas Dekker portrays the jubilant reactions of the apprenticecharacters, the sound of the pancake bell would have resonated quite differently with many members of the play’s initial audiences, who may have associated the sound of the bell in the streets of London on Shrove Tuesdays with anarchy and mob rule. This third response to the effect of the pancake bell is left to us by John Taylor in 1617, who writes of that particular holiday that

all the whole Kingdome is in quiet, but by that time the clocke strikes eleuen, which (by the helpe of a knavish Sexton) is commonly before nine, then there is a bell rung, cald The Pancake Bell the sound whereof makes thousands of people distracted, and forgetfull either of manner or humanitie.⁴

Dekker’s benign characterization of the holiday masks Shrove Tuesday’s reputation as a day when the London apprentices frequently ran riot, at times tearing down reputed brothels, carting prostitutes through the streets, freeing prisoners, and assaulting the theatres.⁵ It is important to note that the apprentices who enter the scene I’ve been describing do so armed, according to a stage direction, ‘all with cudgels, or such weapons’.

The points I want to emphasize in this short reading are that (1) a temporary disruption of the normal patterns of social order is announced simultaneously to the entire community by means of a very simple acoustic signal, (2) that the responses prompted by that signal would have been extremely variegated across the social spectrum, and (3) that these responses would include not only conventional semantic meanings such as ‘the festival has started’, but physiological and emotional components that will never be fully recoverable. This last point is, I believe, the most important. The pancake bell would have imparted a variety of extralinguistic meanings to the general public in attendance at a performance of The Shoemaker’s Holiday. In addition to announcing the commencement of that day’s festivities, it would also evoke a wide range of visceral emotional responses – from excitement and exhilaration to aggravation, revulsion and outright fear, depending upon whether one was an apprentice, a Thames boatman such as John Taylor, a tavern keeper, a theatre owner, or a worker in the South Bank’s sex industry. Hearing the pancake bell represented in a theatrical performance would undoubtedly evoke or carry over trace elements of these kinds of reactions in individual playgoers, and these reactions would then become part of that audience member’s experience of the play.⁶ While I have asserted that these types of responses will never be fully recoverable, I do believe that recent innovations in our understanding of the ways in which sound and culture interrelate provide us with the archaeological tools to chip away at these responses, and throw them into sharper relief.

Culture and sound | soundscape

Penelope Gouk, a pre-eminent researcher of the history of early modern acoustics, has observed that sound was not investigated as a discrete subject of study in its own right 400 years ago. Instead, the phenomenon was addressed from a number of different vantage points, including anatomy, religion, natural philosophy, magic, and cosmology, as well as musical, political and educational theory. Gouk accounts for this broad dispersion by reminding her reader that ‘seventeenth-century categories of thought are quite independent of present-day ones, and we must not expect to find the kind of systematic treatment that would be adopted by a modern writer’ (Gouk 1991: 95). It is notable, however, that little has actually changed in the intervening centuries. Today, there are many modern systematic approaches to sound, as Barry Truax has noted, and these approaches often work in effective isolation from one another in the physics, psychology, linguistics, audiology, medicine and engineering departments of academic institutions, where ‘each discipline concerns itself with only a particular aspect of the entire subject, and often no attempt is made to bridge the arbitrary gaps between them’ (Truax 1984: 2).

In response to the need for a more unified understanding of sound’s role in the lived experience of human cognition, communication and culture, the term soundscape was developed by communications theorists at Simon Fraser University in the late 1970s to denote the function of sound in human perceptual ecology.⁷ The word is closely related to, and of course derives from, the more familiar landscape, although there is also a significant difference between the two terms, which derives from the distinctive experiential properties of visual and acoustic perception. While we generally experience and therefore regard landscapes as objective entities, as existing ‘out there’, the soundscape is more specifically situated at the interface between the ‘out there’ and the perceiving subject’s involvement in its constitution. As Truax defines it in Acoustic Communication, the term ‘soundscape’ is not altogether synonymous with the ‘acoustic environment’, but instead denotes ‘how the individual and society as a whole understand the acoustic environment through listening’ (Truax 1984: xii; emphasis in original). What Truax means by listening is not simply acoustic sensation, but the process through which acoustic information is processed and rendered meaningful to us, by us. To listen is to winnow meaning from the acoustic environment.

The way early modern individuals record their listening experiences can tell us a great deal about the soundscape and their relationship to it, such as whether a sound is commonplace, sporadic, or rare, whether it has positive or negative connotations for that particular listener, whether it is tied to specific seasonal or calendrical festivities or rituals, and whether it contains symbolic significance for specific individuals or for the community as a whole. The degree to which a given listener is acquainted with the source of a particular sound, or to individual elements of the soundscape more generally, is often an index of that person’s position in, or relation to, the larger community. Richard of Gloucester’s opening soliloquy attests to Shakespeare’s own keen awareness of this. When considering the role of sound in early modern England, it is equally important to bear in mind that a number of cultures are entailed under that umbrella term. As Bruce R. Smith has comprehensively demonstrated, each of these subcultures has its own soundscape and acoustic complexion, from the rural hamlet and seaside village, to the royal court and the metropolitan centre of London with its markets and guild/plebeian components (Smith 1999: 49–95). Each makes localized contributions to the total acoustic environment, and, as the preceding discussion of the final scene of The Shoemaker’s Holiday suggests, each may experience and interpret the same acoustic event in very different ways. Truax calls these types of cultural formations acoustic communities, which he defines as

any soundscape in which acoustic information plays a pervasive role in the lives of the inhabitants (no matter how the commonality of such people is understood). Therefore, the boundary of the community is arbitrary and may be as small as a room of people, a home or building, or as large as an urban community, a broadcast area, or any other system of electroacoustic communication.

(Truax 1984: 58)

In addition to the soundscapes associated with specific localities in early modern England, other more mobile acoustic communities would have been formed of shepherds, soldiers, merchant sailors, players, healers, soldiers, tinkers, and other itinerant tradespeople, as well as vagabonds, thieves, robbers, and rogues, who were known to speak in their own obscure jargon called ‘cant’.⁸ Truax notes that in such acoustic communities sound plays a significant role in ‘defining the community spatially, temporally in terms of daily and seasonal cycles, as well as socially and culturally in terms of shared activities, rituals and dominant institutions’ (Truax 1984: 58). As we have seen, many of these roles would have come into play during the ringing of the pancake bell, though as John Taylor notes, the exact hour of the bell could vary from year to year, depending on the amount of ‘knavish’ impatience or enthusiasm possessed by the sexton charged with ringing it. In this ritual the civic tradespeople operate as an acoustic community, engaging sound to notify those in the immediate vicinity that time is about to be radically redescribed. Sound becomes the medium through which this community momentarily takes charge of, and redefines, social time. Contemporary listeners who heard an ‘early’ pancake bell would undoubtedly have experienced – and perhaps even recognized, if only for a fleeting moment – temporality itself as a contingent social phenomenon, rather than an objective parameter of social and ritual organization.

Another early modern acoustic community is quite clearly the public theatre itself, the sounds of which regularly carried from the loose acoustical confines of the theatre out to the wider culture. Even in the most populous city in Europe it would have been difficult to ignore the noise and clamour produced by close to 3,000 people gathered in an open-air building, erupting with laughter at the improvisations of a clown, spontaneously raining down hisses on a villain, or reacting to some sport or altercation taking place within the ranks of the audience itself. The noise that tended to emanate from the city playhouses was included as one of the complaints levelled in a petition to the Privy Council by citizens of the Blackfriars district in 1596, in which the citizens protest the presence of a playing house in their midst. Included in their list of objections is the complaint that ‘the same playhouse is so neere the Church that the noyse of the drummes and trumpetts will greatly disturbe and hinder both the ministers and parishioners in tyme of devine service and sermons’ (Thomson 1992: 178). The main argument advanced by the plaintiffs, who declare they are concerned that the noise will hinder the work of the local clergy, is probably also a roundabout way of legitimating the understandable fears they have for their own peace and quiet.

Of course, not all of the noise issuing from the theatres would have been produced by audience members. In London during the indoor playing season, for example, the theatre troupes would often announce performances and call potential customers with drums and trumpets. The practice is referred to in a letter from Lord Hunsdon to the Lord Mayor of London in September 1594, in which Hunsdon requests that his players be allowed to play at the Cross Keys that season, with the proviso that they ‘will nott use anie drumes or trumpettes att all for the callinge of peopell together’ (quoted in Thomson 1994: 114). It is not certain whether audiences were also called with these instruments from the top of the theatres’ tiring-houses over on the South Bank, or whether younger members of the troupes or technical assistants would parade noisily through the streets with such instruments to inform the populace about upcoming performances. It is probable that the same instruments were used to ‘drum up’ business when the troupes went on tour. Five years after Hunsdon’s request, Philip Henslowe records in his diary that he has lent some money to a member of his company ‘for to buy a drum when to go into the country’. Peter Thomson suspects that ‘two trumpets bought the following day by the actor Robert Shaw were for the same purpose’ (Thomson 1992: 20). Drums and trumpets were also sounded during performances to create effects such as thunder and military fanfares. Returning to the city, the bell atop the tiring-house could also have been used to notify audiences, its sound wafting over the river with much greater amplitude and clarity than that of a drum, or even of trumpets.

At this stage perhaps it will be helpful to preview, by way of a brief example, what I mean when I speak of sound having ethical valences. When we speak of listening as a form of ‘winnowing’, when we talk about the decisions we make, and don’t make, about what we hear, how we hear, and who we hear, we are talking about hearing as an ethical act involved in assigning value and recognition to particular elements and events in the acoustic environment. Hearing resonates throughout early modern culture as a sense characterized by passivity, community, obedience, and tradition. This is in contrast to vision, which the early modern understanding aligns with notions of activity, individualism, aggression, and technical innovation. Without denying the emerging ascendancy of the visual in early modern England, it bears remembering that the sense of hearing continues to occupy a significant place in that persistently oral culture as well; that light in the King James version of the Bible is brought into existence by a prior vocalization, that the first words to the gospel ofJohn are ‘In the beginning was the word’. Further examples of the importance of sound are encountered in the well-known cosmological metaphors elaborated in various early modern accounts of the musica mundana (Gouk 1999: 81; 95–111). Aural imagery used in conceptualizing the physical universe was commonly applied in references to human social existence as well. There is a preoccupation in Shakespeare’s day, one which permeates his history plays, with social harmony and concord, two terms that indicate the obligation individuals have to accept their social roles and stations. The defence of social stratification, of one’s necessary obedience to the greater harmony or concord of one’s society, is expressed most famously in the acoustic metaphor Ulysses employs in his speech on degree in Troilus and Cressida. Of degree, he says, ‘untune that string, / And, hark, what discord follows’ (1.3.109–10).

Contemporary links between the concepts of aurality and obedience can be traced in the historical record, where they are manifest in specific ideological legitimizing practices of the late Elizabethan/early Jacobean period, as well as in records of the contemporary judicial system. The Tudor monarchs, who ruled without the benefit of a standing army or police force, discovered that an effective preventative measure against...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Accents on Shakespeare
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• General editor's preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Shakespearience
• 2 The public ear
• 3 Receptivity
• 4 Transformation and continuity
• 5 Shakespearean acoustemologies
• Notes
• References
• Index