Bruce R. Smith

How Sound is Sound History? A Response to Mark Smith

Sound provides the most forceful stimulus that human beings experience, and the most evanescent. Periodic waves of air molecules strike against the listener’s eardrums and create vibrations inside the body. If the waves are strong enough (as, for example, when a large drum is struck), the vibrations can be felt in the viscera of the gut as well as in the ears. At the same time, sounds rapidly dissipate into nothing. For an historian interested in the sounds of the past, there would seem to be nothing there to study, at least until the advent of electromagnetic recording devices early in the twentieth century. Mark M. Smith’s article “Listening to the Heard Worlds of Antebellum America” thus represents a triumph of mind over matter.1 Smith draws on taped interviews with former slaves made in the 1930s, but he has had to reconstruct most of the sounds he studies from written sources. One may readily sympathize with the daunting problems of documentation and interpretation that Smith faced. In writing The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (1999), I assembled evidence from travelers’ accounts, estate maps, letters, diaries, sermons, plays, poems, fictional narratives, ballads from oral tradition, and architectural remains and interpreted that evidence in relation to sixteenthand seventeenth-century ideas about sound and the human body, and in

Putting the "Ball" Back in Ballads

Considering early modern ballads in terms of social history, print history, and music can distract us from the fact that ballads, even in print, were kinetic experiences for the people who wrote them, bought them, and sang them. The very word ballad derives from the Old French baler, to dance. “Putting the ‘Ball’ Back in Ballads” analyzes explicit dance motifs in a half dozen early modern ballads, to make the case that bodily cues remain vestigial presences even in ballads that seem to have nothing to do with dance.

Word vs Image: Cognitive Hunger in Shakespeare's England (review)

troilus’s reference to “cognition” is the only such instance in all of Shakespeare’s texts—“cognitive” is absent, too—but already present are the key concerns of modern cognitive theory: (1) sensing; (2) making sense; (3) the feeling of sensing and making sense; (4) the experience of a self that is doing the sensing, the making sense, and the feeling; and (5) an intuition that language does not tell the whole story. Cognition is a coword: it implies knowing “together” or knowing “at the same time.”2 Cognition is not knowledge but “knowingness.” A distinction between knowing-through-seeing and knowing-through-words is Ellen Spolsky’s subject in Word vs image. She begins with Genesis. God creates the world by speaking the right words, but Adam and Eve’s attempt to rival God’s knowledge is presented as a matter of seeing. Eat the forbidden fruit, Satan promises Adam and Eve in Genesis 3:5, and “then your eyes shalbe opened, & ye shalbe as gods, knowing good and euil.”3 Spolsky refers this primordial distinction between word and image to theories of “the modular mind” that are explored in her 1993 book Gaps in Nature. There, Spolsky explains how gaps among sensations are filled in, first by groups of neurons, then by modules adapted to receive different kinds of information (from eyes, ears, fingers, and other receptors), then by higher-level

The Sound of Shakespeare (review)

Orgel continues his defense of Jones in “The Renaissance Poet as Plagiarist,” this time not against Jonson, but against modern scholars’ charges of plagiarism, elaborating that defense into a wonderfully extensive survey of imitation in the Renaissance that treats painting as much as poetry. In this and other essays, Orgel shows that his interest in the visual is not just that of masque-man. In “Gendering the Crown,” his subject is an impresa in a frontispiece. The essay on Marlowe,“Tobacco and Boys,” begins with discussion of a picture sometimes, but not here, said to be of Marlowe as a Cambridge student, before turning to the translation of Ovid’s Amores and to Doctor Faustus. Returning in the final essay, “The Authentic Shakespeare,” to questions like those that open the book, Orgel asks,“what does a play represent?” (245), and offers an answer in terms of several pictures of a Garrick Macbeth. My own descriptions of these essays are, partly because of space constraints, woefully superficial, and so I conclude by remarking that the range and heft of Orgel’s scholarship sometimes takes the reader’s breath away. For example, “The Play of Conscience,” a mere fourteen pages, surveys the entire reception of Aristotle’s passage on catharsis in the Poetics to conclude that English dramatists, for the most part, are trenchantly skeptical about their art’s power to induce catharsis in its beholders. It is very good to have these fifteen essays together in a book—fifteen selected from a list of over fifty. It would be better to have even more.

Shakespeare and Masculinity

List of Illustrations Introduction Persons Ideals Passages Others Coalescences Notes Suggestions for Further Reading Index

Renaissance Politics and Pageantry@@@Splendor at Court: Renaissance Spectacle and the Theater of Power.

The festival as a form of theatre has been dealt with largely by theatre historians who have a penchant for the dramatic and the scenic aspects. Roy Strong, director of Londons National Portrait Gallery and a professor of fine arts, takes the more objective position of the festival as public display. He deals with dance, decor, drama, architecture, allegory and symbol as it functions in each event.