Sound effects: Hearing the early modern stage

By Laura Jayne Wright

This book shows that the sounds of the early modern stage do not only signify but are also significant. Sounds are weighted with meaning, offering a complex system of allusions. Playwrights such as Jonson and Shakespeare developed increasingly experimental soundscapes, from the storms of King Lear (1605) and Pericles (1607) to the explosive laboratory of The Alchemist (1610). Yet, sound is dependent on the subjectivity of listeners; this book is conscious of the complex relationship between sound as made and sound as heard. Sound effects should not resound from scene to scene without examination, any more than a pun can be reshaped in dialogue without acknowledgement of its shifting connotations. This book listens to sound as a rhetorical device, able to penetrate the ears and persuade the mind, to influence and to affect.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jun 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9781526159175

Book preview

ffirs01-fig-5002.jpg

SARAH DUSTAGHEER, PETER KIRWAN, DAVID MCINNIS and LUCY MUNRO

general editors

For over fifty years The Revels Plays has provided for students of early modern English drama carefully edited texts of major and lesser-known plays of the period. The Revels Plays Companion Library aims to complement and expand upon the work of The Revels Plays through pioneering new research into the background, context, and afterlives of these plays and their authors.

The Companion Library aims to publish work that will enable students of early modern drama to examine the achievements of dramatists from a broader perspective, while supporting the work of editors through the development of contextual knowledge and new theoretical frameworks. The series includes volumes of a variety of kinds, from new editions of important primary documents to critical monographs and edited collections on authors and topics pertinent to The Revels Plays. Together, the two series offer a foundational base for new scholarship on early modern drama.

To buy or to find out more about the books currently available in this series, please go to: https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/series/revels-plays-companion-library/

Sound effects

ffirs01-fig-5001.jpg

THE REVELS PLAYS COMPANION LIBRARY

Sound effects

HEARING THE EARLY MODERN STAGE

Laura Jayne Wright

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Laura Jayne Wright 2023

The right of Laura Jayne Wright to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 5918 2 hardback

First published 2023

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset

by New Best-set Typesetters Ltd

For James Eilbeck, with love

contents

general editors’ foreword

acknowledgements

conventions

introduction: follow the noise

1. soundgrams on stage: sonic allusions and commonplace sounds

2. hearing the night: nocturnal scenes and unsound effects

3. the head and the (play)house: bodies and sound in ben jonson

4. ‘unheard’ and ‘untold’: the promise of sound in shakespeare

conclusion

select bibliography

index

general editors’ foreword

Since the late 1950s the series known as The Revels Plays has provided for students of the English Renaissance drama carefully edited texts of the major Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. The series includes some of the best-known drama of the period and has continued to expand, both within its original field and, to a lesser extent, beyond it, to include some important plays from the earlier Tudor and from the Restoration periods. The Revels Plays Companion Library is intended to further this expansion and to allow for new developments.

The series includes volumes of a variety of kinds. Through monographs and collections of essays, the series presents new critical interpretations of the literary and performance culture of the period. Other volumes provide a fuller context for the plays of the period by offering new collections of documentary evidence on Elizabethan theatrical conditions and on the performance of plays during that period and later. A third aim of the series is to support the overall Revels enterprise through the publication of editions of masques, pageants and the non-dramatic work of Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights, as well as small collections of plays by a single author or grouped by theme, edited in accordance with the principles of textual modernisation of The Revels Plays. Taken as a whole, The Revels Plays Companion Library supplements and extends the work of the overall Revels enterprise.

acknowledgements

This book and I have had much support and encouragement and for that I am immeasurably grateful. I would like to thank all those who have listened to me talk about sound effects for so many years. More than anyone, I would like to thank Emma Smith, who heard every noisy idea. Her sharp and generative academic guidance has been indispensable, but her encouragement and contagious sense of fun have been even more valuable yet.

Thanks are also due to the examiners of the thesis on which this work has been based, Laurie Maguire and Lucy Munro. Their careful feedback has improved each chapter immeasurably. Thanks to the faculty at Yale University where my work on sound first developed and especially to Brian Walsh, in whose seminars the earliest seeds of this project were sown. Thanks to all of my colleagues at the University of Oxford, and particularly to colleagues at Univ – Nick Halmi, Joe Moshenska, Jack Parlett, and Laura Varnam – who provided support and coffee whenever it was needed. Thanks to Callan Davies, Ben Higgins, and Miranda Fay Thomas, all of whom shared advice on book proposals and publishing. Thanks to Katherine Craik for her help as I started teaching; my teaching has gone on to shape the focus of this book in many ways. Thanks to Simon Smith and Emma Whipday, who have been so generous with advice whenever our paths have crossed. Thanks to Jennifer Linhart Wood whose work on sound is inspiring and who generously read the fourth chapter of this book.

Over many years, this work has been shared with supportive colleagues at many events, including at conferences at Exeter and Durham, at the EPIC forum at the University of Oxford, and with the Early Modern Soundscapes network led by Rachel Willie and Emilie Murphy. Feedback at these events has been profoundly helpful and is much appreciated. I am also grateful for the expertise and support of staff at the Bodleian Library, Edinburgh University Library, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, and the Canterbury Cathedral Archives. Creation Theatre, and Lucy Askew in particular, have afforded me an incredible space to play with early modern drama and I am lucky to have had such excellent creative collaborators while writing this book. More recently, I have found warm and encouraging colleagues at Newcastle University, especially Jennifer Richards who has helped me to think ever more rigorously about sound and voice as my work develops in new directions.

Thanks are also due to the Ben Jonson Journal, for their permission to reprint material in the third chapter of this book that was printed as ‘Red silence: Ben Jonson and the Breath of Sound’, Ben Jonson Journal, 26:1 (May 2019), 40–61. Thanks to the Leverhulme Foundation with whose support I completed the final stages of indexing this book.

This book has, at every turn, been shaped by the support, patience, and thoughtful feedback of Peter Kirwan. His notes and suggestions have improved every chapter and I am incredibly grateful for the time he has spent with my work. My thanks also go to Matthew Frost and the team at MUP who shared advice and support at every stage of this book's development. Thanks too to the anonymous readers of this book's proposal whose comments were invaluable and to which I turned back often as I wrote.

Thanks to my friends, and especially to Beatrice Montedoro and Anna Senkiw, who have spent so many years sharing ideas and breakfast pastries with me. Thanks to Jacob, who has proved immeasurably loyal. Finally, there would be no book without the support and love of my family. Thanks to David Yates, who was there at the end with prosecco. Thanks to James and Isabel Eilbeck, to Jean and Kathy Wright: you are on every page.

conventions

All primary quotations drawn from unedited early modern texts have been modernised and their orthography standardised throughout. However, primary quotations drawn from modern editions retain the style of that edition. All stage directions are rendered in italics. Titles of primary works take modernised and abridged form in my prose but can be found in full in my references and bibliography. Speech prefixes etc. in dramatic extracts have been presented in a uniform style. Where it has not been possible to cite line numbers, page numbers or signature marks are given.

Apart from references to the Folio as discussed below, or unless otherwise specified, all references to the work of William Shakespeare are to The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, eds. Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson, David Scott Kastan, and H.R. Woudhuysen (London: Arden, 1998).

All references to Shakespeare's First Folio (1623) are to the digital facsimile of the Bodleian First Folio of Shakespeare's plays, Arch. G c.7, accessed at https://firstfolio.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/.

All references to the works of Ben Jonson, unless otherwise specified, are to The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, eds. David Bevington, Martin Butler, and Ian Donaldson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), vols 1–7. References are, where appropriate, abbreviated to CWBJ.

All dates for the plays discussed here (given as the proposed dates of first performance), all places of performance, and all acting companies referred to within are those proposed in Martin Wiggins (in association with Catherine Richardson), British Drama, 1533–1642: A Catalogue, vols i–ix (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), unless otherwise stated. References are, where appropriate, abbreviated to Wiggins, British Drama.

introduction: follow the noise

Listen. Follow the noise. Sound is everywhere. London, at the turn of the seventeenth century, is an aural muddle, a mixture of steeple bells, cartwheels, hooves, raised voices, creaking hinges, ballads, footsteps, whispers. A book which attempts to retrace that sound is, inevitably, chasing shadows, but the pursuit is not fruitless. Traces of described sound are scattered on the pages of early modern literature; and traces of performed sound linger in the sound effects demanded by the early modern stage. Sounds wait on the pages of plays to be heard again.

On 9 March 1615, students of Trinity College, Cambridge, members of the court, and King James I/VI were introduced to a revolutionary piece of sound technology, the otacousticon. Featured in Thomas Tomkis's academic drama Albumazar, this wearable, portable (and, of course, imaginary) piece of machinery – ‘an instrument that multiplies / Objects of hearing’ (B4v) – supposedly allowed users to hear whispers even on the other side of the world.¹ Five years earlier, in Sidereus Nuncius, Galileo had shown that the human eye could see the stars in once unimaginable detail.² Like Galileo's telescope, the otacousticon promised to augment the capacity of the human senses, offering new possibilities of knowledge and communication. Still, users might have been deterred by the fact that the device was not easy to wear, even for the least fashion-conscious of Jacobeans, being ‘a pair of ass's ears, and large ones’ (B4v). In this way, the otacousticon also offered a classical joke, recalling the donkey ears with which Midas was punished for claiming that his own music rivalled that of Apollo. The otacousticon was also (at least in the outlandish claims made for it) a joke in itself, a parody of the telescope but also of the desire to extend the senses beyond human limits that the telescope had come to represent. In Albumazar, the otacousticon reveals the difficulty of capturing sound even as it exposes the desire to do just that. In this way, quite accidentally, the aspirational technology of the otacousticon serves as a symbol for this book, which offers new methodologies for retracing sound, and explores both performance technology and sensory perception through the sounds of the stage.

This book draws together early modern sounds which echo from play to play, sounds which are split from sight, and sounds conjured only in the imagination. Over the fifty years of theatrical history discussed here (1576–1625), the use of sound on the early modern stage remained radically experimental, from the brash noise of explosions and trumpets which interrupt or propel action on stage in as yet unacknowledged ways to the increasingly allusive, imaginative, and unreliable sonic markers of later Stuart drama. Playwrights played with the brash noise of drums and trumpets and with the subtle, uncanny sounds of night; both Jonson and Shakespeare developed increasingly complex soundscapes, from the explosive laboratory of The Alchemist (1610) and raucous carnival of Bartholomew Fair (1614) to the storms of King Lear (1605) and Pericles (1607). In the course of these decades, sounds, once dismissed as crowd pleasers and gimmicks, became slippery; speculative; imaginary. As I will show, these sonic experiments can be found in the dialogue and stage directions of early modern playtexts. Sound was not an incidental feature of drama: early modern playwrights exploited and debated its popularity at length. Sound was a fundamental part of the theatrical experience and must therefore be heard attentively, as a vital unit of meaning on the early modern stage.

Sound effects are cues for actors and cues to shock the audience back into listening; they set scenes and they unsettle scenes, creating onstage and offstage worlds. Sound effects are integral to the creation of dramatic place (fashioning what R. Murray Schafer has termed a ‘soundscape’).³ When this terminology is applied to dramatic spaces, however, it must allow for the scene-shifting early modern stage. Eric Wilson has argued that ‘Soundscapes, like de Certeau's critique of space, are temporally contingent, fundamentally mobile, uttered by the acoustic entrances, exits, and struggles of its multiple constituents’.⁴ In the space of two hours, an early modern stage could be a battlefield, court, and city street. This book therefore examines not just the soundscape of a particular scene but the shifting and malleable sonic world – the fundamentally plastic sonic world – that can be created in the course of an early modern play.

Before I go further, I want to pause at a term found throughout this book and even in its title. The term ‘sound effect’ derives from radio; it ‘covers everything which comes out of a loud-speaker, except what is usually classed as Music or Speech’.⁵ While reference to a loud-speaker shows this definition to be highly anachronistic when applied to early modern drama, its distinctions have been crucial in shaping the focus of this book. Where it is useful to discuss music or speech, I have not hesitated to do so; but the sound effects of the stage remain my focus. Moreover, the proposition of such distinctions has been useful in offering a contrast to the aural culture of the early modern period, in which such categories as Music, Speech, and Sound are not clear ones. In her study of early modern music, Linda Austern notes that

Numerous Renaissance and Baroque thinkers remind us repeatedly that language and music formed an intellectually inseparable continuity of rhetorical persuasion. The former provided rational content and the latter served as an extra-rational channel for memory or affect.

⁶

While music's rhetorical power has been acknowledged, early modern theatrical sound has not received the same treatment.⁷ In my work, sound is therefore understood as a form of rhetorical persuasion, eloquent and flexible, articulate and emotive. ‘Sound effect’ is a useful term not only because it foregrounds sound itself, rather than speech or music, but because it allows for the possibility of sound's effect: its capacity to persuade, to channel memory, to ‘affect’.

Sound is, however, not the only kind of sonic effect. This book treats noise and sound as, if not synonyms, then intimately related terms. Modern definitions would separate noise from sound (noise is, as Ross Brown puts it, sound's ‘evil twin … raw, chaotic and inappropriate’).⁸ Yet the casting of noise as unwanted or intrusive and sound as cued or deliberate does not hold sway in early modern stage directions. Sound effects are often cued as noise: noise tends to suggest an unknown sound or one heard from offstage.⁹ When Titus Andronicus enters with his three sons ‘making a noise with hounds and horns’ (2.1.1, s.d.), there is no differentiation between animal and instrumental sound. The use of ‘noise’ as a collective noun for musicians – as in Thomas Nashe's Summer's Last Will and Testament (1592), ‘Enter Sol, very richly attired, with a noise of musicians before him’ (D1r) – only intertwines various sonic events more closely.¹⁰ Noise and sound are both considered throughout this book; noise may be ‘raw’ and ‘chaotic’, but it is not ‘inappropriate’.

With sound defined as sharply as it can be in an early modern acoustic world which resists clear definitions, I want now to turn to the four chapters of this book and their distinct models for listening to the sound (and noise) of the early modern stage for both its effect and affect. Sound is not just a phenomenon but an experience; it cannot be separated from the bodies which receive it, any more than the otacousticon can work without the ears to which it is held. This book, while offering four frameworks through which to read sound – sound as allusive, as acousmatic, as invasive, as imagined – therefore also offers four distinct explorations of bodily responses to (and cognitive creations of) that sound. The first chapter is concerned with memory, with the way that plays, and audiences, recall sounds both within and beyond a performance. The second is concerned with perception, with the fracturing of sight from sound and the sensory dissonance which results from that division. The third, centred on the plays of Ben Jonson, shows sound as violent, penetrating, poisonous – in short, capable of breaching the boundaries of the body. The fourth, centred on Shakespeare, examines cognitive responses to both performed and described sound and suggests that sound can be an imaginative experience. Together, these chapters offer new ways of listening to the early modern stage, insisting that sound is not only spatial (understood in terms of where it is heard within the playhouse), material (constructed by instruments or voices) but also, crucially, bodily. Far from understanding sound simply as an intangible phenomenon which cannot be traced beyond the moment of its performance, this book reveals an early modern understanding of sound as a system, produced by bodies through instruments, and received by the open ear, the memory, and the emotions.

Chapter 1 proposes that sounds onstage become ‘soundgrams’ (repeated components of theatrical meaning, following Louise George Clubb's term ‘theatregrams’, of which the ‘core process’ is given as ‘permutation and declension by recombination with compatible units, whether of person, association, action, or design’).¹¹ To trace the repeated use of sound effects onstage, this chapter narrows its focus to four of the most common (and loud) sounds of the early modern stage: trumpets, gunfire, thunder, and bells.¹² Following Wes Folkerth's coinage of the phrase ‘signature sounds’, it develops terminology to examine allusions and innovations in the theatrical sonic tradition.¹³ Using early modern commonplaces as a metaphor for this mobility of meaning, the chapter concludes that sounds have a rhetorical power like that of speech, in that they can create allusions, as well as humour, irony, shock, and fear.

Chapter 2 turns from loud and brash sounds to the more tenuous, complex, and even uncanny noises used increasingly after the turn of the seventeenth century, in parallel with the more regular use of indoor theatre space.¹⁴ With a focus on dark or ‘nocturnal’ scenes, this chapter is interested in the sounds of the supernatural, a study which might be traced as far back as Thomas De Quincey's influential ‘On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’ (1890), or more recently Frances Shirley's Shakespeare's Use of Off-stage Sounds (1963).¹⁵ This chapter expands the focus of such works (which are solely interested in Shakespeare) and offers new arguments which draw on sensory studies and explore a particularly Jacobean scepticism towards the sense of hearing as evidence of the world around us. It also acknowledges recent performance-as-research as a method of engaging with the spatial element of sound. The association of sound with location has been a source of debate for many philosophers of the sonic, following P.F. Strawson's claim in 1959 that

Sounds of course have temporal relations to each other, and may vary in character in certain ways: in loudness, pitch and timbre. But they have no intrinsic spatial characteristics: such expressions as ‘to the left of’, ‘spatially above’, ‘nearer’, ‘farther’ have no intrinsically auditory significance.

¹⁶

While contemporary philosophers continue to debate Strawson's claim, early modern playwrights are decided. Jacobean tragedies – disagreeing entirely with the idea that sounds have ‘no intrinsic spatial characteristics’ – relish in the use of sound that might come from above or below, echoing around the playhouse, and in doing so both disorienting playgoers and encouraging them to seek its source. Tracing sourceless sounds heard from offstage, or ascribed multiple, contradictory sources by those onstage, this chapter examines the ‘nocturnal’ soundscapes of Macbeth (1606), The Duchess of Malfi (1613), and The Night-walker (1615, revised 1633). It concludes that the ‘spatial characteristics’ of sounds are integral to their capacity to unsettle an audience's sense of what is true – even what is real – in a playhouse full of questionable noises.

While its first chapters range across the work of several playwrights and show wider theatrical trends, the second half of this book argues that attention to the soundscapes created by individual playwrights can demonstrate their vastly different approaches to the use of sound. Chapter 3 offers a detailed study of the plays of Ben Jonson, who shows an interest in sound in the abstract as well as in the form of practical stage effects.¹⁷ His use of sound is shown to be contradictory, torn between classical precedent and popular demand, between the power of silence and the difficulty of controlling noise on the early modern stage. His paratextual material dwells on the listening audience; his poetry expresses an awareness of Aristotle's and Horace's sonic theories. Aware of his conscious use of sonic theory in the abstract, Chapter 3 nevertheless focuses on Jonson's interest in the bodily production of sound. It follows work on the embodied voice as a sonic effect by both Bruce Smith and Gina Bloom, who separately consider the implications of ‘sounding through’, one possible etymology of the term ‘persona’ from the Latin per-sonare. For Smith, a human being is ‘through-sounding’, defined by the act of hearing the vibrations of external sounds; for Bloom, the term is more firmly associated with the masks of Latin and Greek drama that ‘helped amplify the actor's voice via a resonating chamber in its forehead’.¹⁸ For Jonson, the body of an actor (the dramatic persona) and the body of an instrument are interchangeable means through which he can produce sound.

Finally, Chapter 4 discusses sound in the plays of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare does employ sound effects (as shown throughout this book), the focus of this chapter is on his use of speech to describe and therefore create sound on stage. Following Ross Brown's claim that ‘Sound is a perceived phenomenon, nothing but subjective interference’, I examine ‘subjective’ sound effects, as created in the minds of an audience, entirely by rhetoric.¹⁹ This chapter ranges through Shakespeare's plays and discusses how the description of sound, here called ‘phonographic’ sound, can create complex and even contradictory soundscapes, heard in the mind. It examines speeches which serve an ekphrastic purpose in describing sound and suggests that the description of sound only emphasises its subjectivity. Shakespeare's plays ask for sound to be imagined rather than heard: his sound is neither fixed nor certain.

²⁰

Together, the four approaches taken by these chapters demonstrate the complexity of the use of sound onstage and offer ways of distinguishing between different kinds of sound effect. It also, crucially, frames those sounds in terms of the bodies which receive them: sound is not treated in the abstract, but rather as an affective experience. In this book, sound is not an idea, not only a phenomenon formed of vibrations in the air: it is an experience within the body, a relationship between instrument and ear, actor and audience, page and imagination.

an early modern soundwalk

Before the sounds replicated by the playhouses can be understood, those sounds themselves must be properly heard. Moreover, it is difficult to emphasise how creative, experimental, and complex the sounds of the early modern stage were without establishing the palette of sonic colours with which playwrights could paint (a mixed metaphor that will remerge in Chapter 4's discussion of art and sound). Before turning, in the rest of this introduction, to a taxonomy of sound in the period and a survey of medical, spiritual, and theatrical understandings of sound, I want to wander – I hope not unaccompanied – through the London soundworld surrounding the early modern playhouse. The study of sound has often required venturing outside, listening attentively to the environment: soundwalks were a frequent practice of early sound theorists. For Hildegard Westerkamp, ‘A soundwalk is any excursion whose main purpose is listening to the environment’.²¹ In other words, the study of sound is hard to accomplish inside a study.

In the fifth satire of his Skialethia (1598), Everard Guilpin describes a young man who avoids the city, hiding away amongst his books. This man will not be tempted into the deafening streets of London.

What more variety of pleasures can

An idle city-walk afford a man?

[…] Witness that hotch-potch of so many noises,

Black-saunts of so many several voices,

That chaos of rude sounds, that harmony,

And diapason of harsh Barbary.

²²

An idle city walk would expose the student's sheltered body to a ‘hotch-potch of so many noises’, a ‘chaos of rude sounds’. Guilpin compares the hum of the city to the hum of a diapason, or tuning fork, which should offer perfect pitch, but which is here conflated with the apparently displeasing sound of foreign languages, ‘harsh Barbary’. Voices themselves are ‘black-saunts’ (rough-music), as if each sounds out in a slightly different key. Noise, voice, sound, and harmony are elided, without distinction. The confusion runs deeper still: the reader is asked not to hear sounds, but to ‘witness’ them, suggesting a synaesthetic response to sensory stimuli and a desire to access sound without letting it in to the intimate channel of the ear. Listening is invasive, yet, to merely witness sound, like the cloistered student of Guilpin's satire, is to observe with a clinical distance. Even then, in a further contradiction typical of this ambivalent description of sound, distance in this satire is soon replaced with proximity, as the student leaves the safety of the study at last and moves from imagining sound to engaging with it.

I begin my soundwalk at the Globe, following the spatial model of Thomas Middleton's The Black Book (1606), a pamphlet which sees Lucifer himself rise and stalk the streets of London, beginning at that very playhouse, on the south bank of the Thames.²³ In the early seventeenth century, sound might come primarily from five locations in an outdoor playhouse: from offstage, or within the tiring house; from below the stage, the space often associated with hell; from the attic space, or heavens, where a heavy bell was set and cannons were fired; from the musicians’ balcony, at the back of the stage; or from the stage itself. For Middleton's Lucifer, however, rising from the hell-space in the middle of a plague year, the stage is silent. Silence was the sound of disapproval. It was, as John Day fears in The Isle of Gulls (1606), also the sign of an unsuccessful play, where mass walkouts might leave the ‘poor heartless children to speak their epilogue to the empty seats’.²⁴ A silent playhouse made poets and playwrights uneasy. In his fifth satire, once his cooped-up student has set out on that ‘idle city walk’, Guilpin describes a melancholy man roaming the streets of London: he, ‘like the unfrequented Theater / Walks in dark silence, and vast solitude’ (D6r). The epitome of silence is an empty theatre, which should be one of the noisiest places in the city. There is a shared sense of illness as the simile moves between building and body: there is, to Guilpin, something fatal about the silence of both.

Like the study in which the student gathers thoughts of disparate sounds in one place, the early modern playhouse also distilled the acoustic world of London; it captured the far-flung sounds of the city and contained them within the Wooden O. In this way, the playhouse offered a soundscape unlike any other: not specific to one place, not marked out by one sound, but able to shift between soundscapes, to collect and perform familiar aural phenomena within its bounds, and, crucially, to create new sounds altogether. Playhouses were a space in which sounds were stripped from their usual contexts. Only in the playhouses would city-dwellers, so used to following their ears towards the churn of the river or telling time by the familiar sound of bells, hear a mixture of mimetic sound effects, disconnected from their usual sources. Storms without clouds, clashing swords without battlefields, royal trumpets without real kings, hoofbeats without horses: all these sounds and more were created at the playhouses. In turn, those sounds, both the familiar and the uncanny, poured from the playhouse back into the streets. Jonas Barish notes an anecdote in Thomas Heywood's An Apology for Actors (1612), in which ‘marauding Spaniards off the Cornish coast’ were frightened away by what turned out to be sound effects of warfare, ‘emanating from a theatrical performance’, a story which did little to lessen concerns about playhouse noise pollution.²⁵ The open roof of the outdoor playhouse offered a porous boundary: the playhouse was a mouth, producing sound; it was an ear, penetrated by sound.

Beyond the playhouse (even if, as for Lucifer, the playhouse is silent), sound is found immediately. After all, in Middleton's Michaelmas Term (1607), the streets of London are so noisy that they could wake a dead lawyer.²⁶ Just to the west of the playhouse, any playgoer strolling along the south bank of the Thames would stumble upon the noise of Paris Garden, open to the public for bowling, bear-baiting, and other activities considered illicit. In Shakespeare and Fletcher's Henry VIII (1612), there are noisy rascals who ‘take the court for Paris Garden’ (5.3.2) and behave as if they were amongst its cacophony. Closer still to the Globe is the Bear Garden, another site for bear-baiting and one noisy enough even for Middleton's Lucifer to mention, when he speaks of being berated by an angry lieutenant who ‘sound[ed] base in mine ears like the Bear Garden drum’ (Black Book, 177–8). Middleton makes the same comparison in The Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinary (1604), when Shuttlecock warns of a tavern host whose ‘words will run about your brains louder than the drum at the Bear Garden’ (285–6). Such noise becomes shorthand for a violent burst of words or of blows, mimicking the violence of bear-baiting.

Near Paris Garden, the Swan and the Rose playhouses were well-situated to catch some of the foot traffic of those disembarking from boats at the banks of the Thames. To cross the river without paying for transport would involve walking east of the Globe, up to London Bridge. Below, although the river water would churn with noise enough, the Thames was often made the site of noisy entertainments, as monarchs and dignitaries travelled upstream towards Westminster. The entrance of Christian IV of Denmark into the capital in 1606 was marked by ceremonial gunfire from ships on the water:

By the way as they passed, they were saluted with great peals of ordnance from the merchants’ ships which ride in the Thames […] With these delights and other musical noise of drums and trumpets, they passed on until they came to