Sound Effects - (Revels Plays Companion Library) by Laura Jayne Wright (Hardcover)

About the Book

Blending theatre history and sensory studies this book recaptures the sound of early modern drama, acknowledging its intangibility while attempting to both describe those sounds heard on the stage and to try and identify those sound's effects on the playgoers.

Book Synopsis

Blending theatre history and sensory studies this book recaptures the sound of early modern drama, acknowledging its intangibility while attempting to both describe those sounds heard on the stage and to try and identify those sound's effects on the playgoers.

From the Back Cover

Sound effects uncovers the soundworld of early modern drama and turns up the volume. Offering new vocabulary, it offers innovative ways of listening to the distinct and subtle kinds of sound which echo from play to play, from sounds that invoke memories, to sounds that are divided from sight, to sounds conjured only in the mind.

Over the fifty years of theatrical history discussed (1576-1625), the use of sound on the early modern stage was radically experimental, from the brash noise of explosions and trumpets to the increasingly allusive and unreliable sonic markers of later Stuart drama. Ranging from the particular sound effects (trumpets, gunshots, fireworks, thunder, bells) to particular settings (nocturnal scenes and noises in the night) to particular playwrights (from Jonson's violent use of sound to Shakespeare's narrated and imagined sonic worlds), this book insists that sound effects are not homogenous bangs and crashes. Together, the chapters argue that sound is not only spatial, understood in terms of where it is heard within the playhouse, and material, constructed by instruments or voices, but also, crucially, bodily.

Far from being an intangible phenomenon which cannot be traced beyond the moment of its performance, Sound effects shows sound to be a system, produced by bodies and received by the open ear, the memory, and the emotions. Sound is given meaning by the bodies which make it and the bodies which receive it; transformed when it is heard, sound is both effect and affective.

Review Quotes

'"Listen. Follow the Noise." So begins Laura Jayne Wright's landmark study of theatrical sound (1). Do so with Wright as your guide, and you will be rewarded with a startlingly fresh perspective on the importance of sound in the early modern playhouse.'
Shakespeare Bulletin

'If you have not previously given much thought to sonic effects in early modern plays, reading this book will ensure that you do so in the future; it will open your ears and your imagination to meanings and ambiguities you did not hear before. It will make you a better audience, in the true sense of the word.'
Shakespeare Quarterly

About the Author

Laura Jayne Wright is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Newcastle University