Sounding Otherness in Early Modern Drama and Travel

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 Topkapi Palace in Istanbul and at Kings 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 thefamiliar self on the same frequency of vibration.

Jennifer Linhart Wood teaches at St. Marys College of Maryland and works for Shakespeare Quarterly at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

“This impressively wide-ranging study offers both a fresh interpretation of well-trodden texts and vibrant readings of lesser-known works. … This book is bursting with insights and, as if to illustrate how … helpful QR codes enable the reader-listener to hear the sounds under discussion. This important book offers a reassessment of how we understand the sounds of drama and the sounds of the travel narrative, begging us to reassess global sounds and their impact upon the body.” (Rachel Willie, Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, Vol. 174 (259), 2022)

“In her exciting and innovative book, Wood theorizes the phenomenology of ‘sounding’ otherness both in early modern drama and travel encounters, providing an expansive model for interdisciplinary engagement across performance communities. Particularly powerful is her development of the notion of ‘sounding,’ with sections focused on specific kinds of instruments and how they would have vibrated, literallyand figuratively, in different contexts. … More expansively, Wood provides a model for how the field might move forward by bringing Indigenous Studies and Premodern Critical Race Studies into fruitful dialogue.” (MRDS, Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society, 2021)