Sounding Otherness in Early Modern Drama and Travel

Sounds are a vital dimension of transcultural encounters in the early modern period. Using the concept of the soundwave as a vibratory, uncanny, and transformative force, Jennifer Linhart Wood examines how sounds of foreign otherness are experienced and interpreted in cross-cultural interactions around the globe. Many of these same sounds are staged in the sonic laboratory of the English theater: rattles were shaken at Whitehall Palace and in Brazil; bells jingled in an English masque and in the New World; the Dallam organ resounded at Topkapi Palace in Istanbul and at King's College, Cambridge; and the drum thundered across India and throughout London theaters. This book offers a new way to conceptualize intercultural contact by arguing that sounds of otherness enmesh bodies and objects in assemblages formed by sonic events, calibrating foreign otherness with the familiar self on the same frequency of vibration.

Auteur
Jennifer Linhart Wood teaches at St. Mary's College of Maryland and works for Shakespeare Quarterly at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Résumé
Winner of the Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society's 2021 Bevington Award for Best New Book

Sounds are a vital dimension of transcultural encounters in the early modern period. Using the concept of the soundwave as a vibratory, uncanny, and transformative force, Jennifer Linhart Wood examines how sounds of foreign otherness are experienced and interpreted in cross-cultural interactions around the globe. Many of these same sounds are staged in the sonic laboratory of the English theater: rattles were shaken at Whitehall Palace and in Brazil; bells jingled in an English masque and in the New World; the Dallam organ resounded at Topkap Palace in Istanbul and at King's College, Cambridge; and the drum thundered across India and throughout London theaters. This book offers a new way to conceptualize intercultural contact by arguing that sounds of otherness enmesh bodies and objects in assemblages formed by sonic events, calibrating foreign otherness with the familiar self on the same frequency of vibration.

Contenu

1. Introduction: Soundings
   I. New World Symphony
2. Rattling Soundscapes of Witch Drama and the New World
3. Hell's Bells: Delight in Transatlantic Jinglings
4. Interlude: Intercultural Remixes
   II.- Songs of the Orient
   5. An Organ's Metamorphosis: Thomas Dallam's Sonic Transformations in the Ottoman Empire
5. "Drums rumble within": Embodied Experiences of Temples in the East and on the London Stage
6. Interlude: A Tale of Two Toms: Dallam and Coryate Speaking in Oriental Tongues
   III. World Music: East Is West
   8. Something Rich and Strange: Global Listening and The Tempest
7. Coda: "Songs from the Wood"