The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor.

Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor

Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999. xiv + 386 pp. $21. ISBN: 0-226-76377-3.

In a bravura performance, Bruce Smith makes audible a world of sound obscured by textualization -- which is also, for the most part, our only evidence of it. It has long been common to acknowledge that playgoers spoke of hearing, not seeing, a performance, and the large component of speaking in humanistic pedagogy has been well documented. But this book is the first to make a sophisticated, comprehensive argument that "the dominant term in early modern culture, even at the highest levels, was in fact 'orality' not literacy."

Speech is only one element in "the O-factor," the cycle of sound running from sub-verbal utterance to speech to music to ambient sound, that concerns Smith. He draws on physiology, phenomenology, systems theory, and linguistics to organize early modern England into speech communities and soundscapes. Queen and nobility, citizens, husbandmen and artisans: they each formed distinct speech communities. Each one spoke according to a common set of rules, stood in a different relationship to its inscription in graphic media, and interacted differently with its soundscape -- its local environment of sound. Smith gives lavish attention to the material dimensions of sound production, but takes pains to ground the material in the political. He sees the O-factor as "ultimately a political performance [governed by] the protocols of distance, power and rank," and he emphasizes "the embodiedness" of oral performance taking place in a community, a social body.

In a chapter surveying the soundscapes and speech communities of city, country, and court, Smith brings out the differentness of the early modern acoustic world from ours. Without the internal combustion engine and electricity to create today's urban din, in the absence of street sounds louder than that of a vacuum cleaner, Londoners could hear open air conversations from as much as a hundred feet away (as in Venice today, for example). In the country, "all sounds would be present with an intensity quite beyond anything imaginable on the same site today," and moreover, identifiable rather than anonymous. Smith even distinguishes the conversation, shouts, and songs of neighbors working together on the open-field system from the presumably sparser communications of farmers working individually on the enclosed-field system. At court, politics inhered as much in architecture as in speech: large ceremonial chambers were given over to public declamation, while in the warren of lodgings, offices and service rooms, rumor and gossip could be whispered.

A reader of this book, freshly reminded that print was a relatively recent, novel medium in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, learns how to identify sound and speech in the letter. Arguing against any tendency to reify and oppose writing and speech, Smith commands an extraordinarily broad range of texts, some familiar, some newly brought to light by his skillful research. For example, on the title page of the 1615 edition of The Spanish Tragedy, a woodcut of three characters serves to represent three moments from the play, scrolls above each character bearing lines from those moments. Smith comments: "What is quoted is only a tag that calls to mind a longer speech... Cued by the scroll, an absent voice is called into presence."

The most interesting and original chapters, those devoted to festivities and to ballads, move into the streets, fields, churchyards, and alehouses where May games, morris dances, Robin Hood plays and jigs might be performed and heard. Working from traces left in court records, pamphlets, woodcuts, music, and play texts, Smith shows how these events span the O-factor, cross generic boundaries, and "challenge the authority of language." He calls them "gests" to mark their extra-textual dimensions of gesture, bodily movements, music, noise, combat. Reporters of gests, by turning them into texts, turn them into objects of surveillance, Smith argues, and thus misrepresent them as readable in a visual field when they occupied an aural, kinetic, gestural field. Somewhat similarly, broadside ballads are only the printed indices of street performances that engaged lungs and larynx, arms and hands, legs and feet, inviting listeners to "jump in and dance." In them the singer/narrator's various personae solicited empath etic identification and offered listeners "the possibility of becoming many subjects, by internalizing those subjects' voices."

Chapters on public and private theaters as "instruments for the production and reception of sound," on oratory, sermons, and theatrical speech, and on the linguistic borderlands of Wales, Ireland, and North America, complete this fascinating, highly original attempt to recover a world we have lost. Such a multi-faceted study risks either becoming a history of everything or recapitulating the already-known in a different guise. Avoiding both pitfalls, Smith inaugurates a new field -- "a cultural poetics of listening."