‘Caviare to the General’?: Taste, Hearing and Genre in Hamlet

This chapter turns to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, an early modern play deeply interested in, and highly self-consciously about, hearing. Possibly a revision of an earlier revenge tragedy, Hamlet is vitally shaped by the formal contests emerging at the turn of the century. Hamlet himself articulates a Jonsonian model of selective and tasteful theatrical reception, but his own hearing trouble frequently, tragically, undermines his ability to perform such audition. The Prince’s longing for complete and absolute control over his body’s sonic circulation is juxtaposed against Horatio’s more measured, partial reception; it is only in the play’s final moments that the dying Hamlet is released from this doomed, tortured struggle. Hamlet recuperates revenge from charges of embarrassing obsolescence by suggesting that all sounds can be processed thoughtfully, consciously, and carefully -- that no one dramatic sound or form forces its audiences to hear it so unthinkingly, or so violently. The chapter closes by examining Hamlet’s influence on the sound and structure of a handful of Jacobean revenge tragedies and city comedies, with particular attention to the highly sophisticated, generically self-aware The Revenger’s Tragedy.

‘Sprinkled Among your Ears’: Ben Jonson, John Marston and the Cultivation of the Listening Connoisseur

This chapter argues that Ben Jonson, John Marston, and others positioned city comedy as a sophisticated sonic alternative to the booming (in every sense) revenge plays of the 1580s and 90s. To hear and appreciate city comedy was said to require a more selective ear, being able to tune out unwanted noises while making sense of the sounds that matter. Listening well becomes in these plays one of the social skills that must be mastered in order to participate fully in city life -- in short, it becomes the stuff, or the subject matter, of city comedy. Ultimately, city comedies train men and women to hear in the very ways they suggest only the privileged few could, introducing playgoers to new auditory practices that could fundamentally transform their experience of London’s soundscapes.

Listening for Form at the Cockpit Theatre

This chapter focuses on the repertoire of a single West End playhouse, the Cockpit, during the final decade of the early modern theatre’s existence. In this somewhat seedy rival to the more fashionable Blackfriars, new revenge tragedies and city comedies continued to be written and performed, but the two forms were becoming increasingly hybridized, their sonic and auditory investments less distinct. A set of supra-generic conventions, each deeply attentive to sound and space, began to emerge across the plays performed within this playhouse; collectively, these helped to a shape a kind of Cockpit brand. Combining a survey of the Cockpit’s 1630s repertoire with focused attention to two representatively hybrid plays (James Shirley’s revenge-comedy The Ball and John Ford’s urban tragedy, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore), the chapter asks how this playhouse’s scrutiny of formal and sonic contests participated in the development of early modern theatre as a cultural institution.

Introduction: ‘Audiences to this Act’

The book’s introduction maps out its contribution to ongoing critical conversations surrounding literary form, the history of the body and the senses, the experience and effects of sound, and historical phenomenology. Through brief readings of The Revenger’s Tragedy and Epicoene, it introduces the two forms, and the two auditory models, that are at the heart of this analysis. How these two forms developed, and how and why hearing became so central to their content, plot, and structure, are introduced as the key questions that motivate this study.

Epilogue

This chapter glances ahead to the Restoration and beyond, tracing the continued influence of the early modern theatre’s formal and thematic investments in sound and its reception.

Sound in Mind and Body: Hearing Early Modern Revenge Tragedy

This chapter traces how revenge tragedy took shape on the early modern stage, outlining the model of violent, invasive hearing on which the genre would increasingly depend. Many late-sixteenth century plays delight in sonic excess, combining cannon fire, trumpets, and alarums with the rumbling thunder of bombastic speech. In these productions, loud noises are often associated with violence, and particularly vengeance. Revenge is said to ‘thunder’ into bodies, or to ‘shriek’ and ‘cry’ out; noise itself becomes a weapon. Contemporary anatomy texts support such thinking, as do early modern theories of theatrical influence and effects. Increasingly, revengers’ speeches become weapons to be wielded precisely -- that is, directly into the ears of specific, intended victims --rather than released indiscriminately into crowds of hearers. Through Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy andShakespeare’s 3 Henry VI and Titus Andronicus, this chapter argues that revenge tragedy is intimately bound up in thinking about what sound can do to listeners both on and off the stage. The theatrical form proves explicitly invested in the question of what it means to hear plays in performance.