Susan L. Anderson

Sound and Precedent in Elizabethan Progress Entertainments

This chapter examines the way echo was used in progress entertainments staged for Queen Elizabeth, focusing in particular on the hospitality staged at Elvetham (1591) and Kenilworth (1575). Anderson demonstrates the patterns of repetition that can be traced through these events. In particular, the use of echo as a performance device at Kenilworth is repeated or referenced in several later entertainments, including Bisham (1592), and adapted into a musical device at Elvetham. This chapter explores the ways sounds, musical ensembles and musical genres heard at prior events are revisited, revised and re-heard in different locations and contexts, developing an acoustics of courtly entertainments in which the signs of musical sophistication are also political assertions.

Echo and Meaning on Early Modern English Stages

This book examines the trope of echo in early modern literature and drama, exploring the musical, sonic, and verbal effects generated by forms of repetition on stage and in print. Focusing on examples where Echo herself appears as a character, this study shows how echoic techniques permeated literary, dramatic, and musical performance in the period, and puts forward echo as a model for engaging with sounds and texts from the past. Starting with sixteenth century translations of myths of Echo from Ovid and Longus, the book moves through the uses of echo in Elizabethan progress entertainments, commercial and court drama, Jacobean court masques, and prose romance. It places the work of well-known dramatists, such as Ben Jonson and John Webster, in the context of broader cultures of performance. The book will be of interest to scholars and students of early modern drama, music, and dance.

Introduction: Echo and Meaning

Anderson outlines the range of meanings made available by the use of echo techniques in early modern drama and poetry. This chapter establishes different levels of echoic meaning, including musical repetitions, verbal alterations, intertextual references and textual revisions. This chapter draws attention to variations between early modern translations of Ovid’s version of Echo’s origin myth and within different editions of Golding’s translation of the Metamorphosis. Anderson also examines the use of echoic techniques in Sidney’s Old Arcadia and the alternative origin story of Echo in Longus’ Greek prose narrative Daphnis and Chloe. This chapter argues that Echo is a figure of distortion and adaptation as well as repetition, and serves as a productive way to represent historical inquiry itself.

Conclusion: Disenchanted Echoes in The Duchess of Malfi and The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania

Anderson explores the ways John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi uses echo to stage disillusionment with Neoplatonic ideals, examining the play’s use of liminal kinds of noise, such as prattle, groans and cries that blur distinctions between speech and sound. The chapter argues that the play’s echo scene presents a cynical abandonment of ideals of sound and meaning. The chapter then explores the way in which Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania uses echo to recapitulate and capitalise on poetic, literary and family precedent. Anderson argues that echo provides the opportunity for a specifically feminised intervention in masculinist literary genealogies, and that Echo is, simultaneously, a woman speaking and a woman silenced, and can stand in for both.

Echo and Drama: Cynthia’s Revels (1601)

Anderson examines the portrayal and use of echo in a broad range of theatrical and court drama, including The Maydes Metamorphosis and The Arraignment of Paris, showing how echo is used as an oracular voice, a comic foil and a structural principle, primarily in pastoral settings. This chapter focuses at length on the 1601 Quarto of Ben Jonson’s Cynthia’s Revels in which Echo appears as a character on stage. This chapter explores Echo’s use of song and its relationship to Neoplatonic models of music’s spiritual and ethical functions, showing that Jonson both invokes and satirises Renaissance theories of music’s power in the service of his broader understanding of the ways reality and art interact.

Echo, Dance and Song in Jacobean Masques

Anderson discusses the use of echo and repetition in the Jacobean court masque, starting with Thomas Campion’s Lord Hay’s Masque (1607) and Lords’ Masque (1613) which both use echo as amplification to represent union. This chapter then examines several of Ben Jonson’s masques, including the Masques of Blackness (1605) and of Beauty (1608)‚ which include echo effects in Ferrabosco’s song settings. This chapter reads the masque as a dance genre, and one in which music is indivisibly linked to repetitive physical movement. In both music and dance, successful performance includes both variation and repetition. Anderson argues that both dance and song are the means for the masque genre’s focus on mingling fictional and social personae.

Review of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (directed by Robert Hastie for Sheffield Theatres) at the Crucible, 31 May 2017

In the late spring of 2017, with a “snap” election looming, a febrile political atmosphere provided an apposite context for Sheffield Theatres’ Julius Caesar. The production’s resonances with the situation in the UK and with wider recent political and social upheavals were made immediately obvious through a set that resembled a modern conference facility or a purpose-built parliament like the European Union or the United Nations. The thrust stage pulled the audience into political responsibility by turning the auditorium into the senate, with the sunken seats in front of the front row set up as desks with neatly arranged papers and microphones. Centre stage, an enormous mahogany table dominated the opening tableau, its obvious solidity and opulence made menacing by the seven Sheffield steel knives laid out across it with absolute precision. This orderly vision of ruthless bureaucracy at the outset progressively deteriorated across the first half in preparation for the chaos and anarchy of a second half that played out the terrifying consequences of the “burn it down” nihilism of political disaffection. The table was repurposed several times during the first half, operating variously as a debating table, Brutus’ private study, the breakfast table at Caesar’s grand residence and the backdrop to Caesar’s throne as he sat above the rest of the senate. Its obvious quality and expense brought status to the scenes it furnished. It came in between the play’s married couples, dividing first Brutus and Portia, and then Caesar and Calpurnia. The conspirators gathered round it, clutching its sides like a life raft as the intensity of their discussion pulled them together. Its disappearance from the play after the first half seemed to signify the loss of solidity, another victim of the destructive forces of social change. Once it was gone, along with their object of hatred, the conspiracy became unmoored, their discussions taking place amid flimsy, hastily assembled camp beds, or the trashed senate. Briefcases were also a key element of the first half’s exploration of the semiotics of objects of power. They were a constant accoutrement of the conspirators, and, having seen Cinna pick up, brandish and then put away the knives into a briefcase in the opening tableau, it was clear to the audience what these objects signified, even before we saw the conspirators each take one of the knives and stow it in a briefcase. This yoking of bureaucracy and violence seemed to suggest that the orderly society of the first half was powered by threats as real as the anarchy of the second half, albeit ones that were repressed enough to stay polite. The ominous click of the locks as the conspirators opened their cases to retrieve their knives ramped up the tension effectively as the play started to hurtle towards the assassination. Within this world dominated by objects of power, the actors’ performances revealed the impotence of those who try to control the repercussions of wielding such power. Zoë Waites was particularly compelling as Cassius, bringing out a clear strand of long-standing resentment in her relationship to Caesar. Her barely concealed rage at his presumption propelled her initial recruitment of Brutus, but once Caesar had been eliminated, her clarity of purpose was too, and her outrage lost its focus, as did the conspirators’ mission. Sam West’s Brutus was a careful, sensitive figure, an “overthinker” whose hesitations made him seem rather pathetic, in all senses of the word. His speech

Generic Spaces in Middleton's The Triumphs of Truth (1613) and Michaelmas Term (1607)

This article compares Middletons The Triumphs of Truth (1613) and Michaelmas Term (printed 1607), in order to examine the representation of places of display in different kinds of space, and to determine some of the ways in which genres of performance and writing influence the way that space is defined. In particular, it examines the status of the shop as a type of space. It offers the concept of situation as a way of accounting for the interrelationships between text, time, place and space, and the structuring of habit and perception within those contexts.