The Acoustic World of Early Modern England

Bruce R. Smith is also the author of the interesting Ancient Scripts and Modern Experience on the English Stage, 1500-1700 (1988), but anyone who expects this book to be focused on the theatre is in for a surprise. There is a forty-page chapter on the theatre, dramatic entertainments of various kinds are discussed elsewhere in the book, and plays are a source for comments on many customs and behaviors. Yet this book, which might more clearly have been titled Aural Experience in Early Modern England, is of astonishing breadth. It is not just that there are chapters on Elizabethan concepts of writing and of speaking, on ballads, on village pastimes, and even on communications in New England between colonists and Indians, but also what Smith brings to writing on those topics. He draws on such varied writers as the linguist Dell Hymes; Jan Vansina, who writes on African oral traditions; Steven Feld, on what one hears in Papuan forests; and Hugh Murray Baillie on the planning of state apartments in baroque palaces. He also uses a multitude of printed and manuscript sources, including collections of music, from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Smith seems to have a particular interest in music and prints a number of musical examples in the book

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