Sounding Otherness in Early Modern Drama and Travel: Uncanny Vibrations in the English Archive

Description

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 Topkapı 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. Front Matter ....Pages i-xxii Introduction: Soundings (Jennifer Linhart Wood)....Pages 1-56 Part I: New World Symphony (Jennifer Linhart Wood)....Pages 57-63 Rattling Soundscapes of Witch Drama and the New World (Jennifer Linhart Wood)....Pages 65-102 Hell’s Bells: Delight in Transatlantic Jinglings (Jennifer Linhart Wood)....Pages 103-153 Interlude: Intercultural Remixes (Jennifer Linhart Wood)....Pages 155-160 Part II: Songs of the Orient (Jennifer Linhart Wood)....Pages 161-165 An Organ’s Metamorphosis: Thomas Dallam’s Sonic Transformations in the Ottoman Empire (Jennifer Linhart Wood)....Pages 167-203 “Drums Rumble Within”: Embodied Experiences of Temples in the East and on the London Stage (Jennifer Linhart Wood)....Pages 205-258 Interlude: A Tale of Two Toms: Dallam and Coryate Speaking in Oriental Tongues (Jennifer Linhart Wood)....Pages 259-267 Part III: World Music: East Is West (Jennifer Linhart Wood)....Pages 269-273 “Something Rich and Strange”: Global Listening and The Tempest (Jennifer Linhart Wood)....Pages 275-318 Coda: “Songs from the Wood” (Jennifer Linhart Wood)....Pages 319-331 Back Matter ....Pages 333-373