Early modern echo is an extraordinarily capacious category whose functions spread across practical, theoretical, aesthetic and moral realms. Echo effects on stage enhance the pleasure of the listener even as echo, on a broader level, operates as a creative and structural principle within literary works. Echo is imitative, but it can also modify the meaning of the sounds it imitates. It can be musical and indeed can be considered as part of the modus operandi of music, an art form based on pleasurable sonic repetitions. 1 Echo highlights the arbitrary sonic properties of language and can uncover alternative meaning within words already sounded. It can make what is unsaid, said and can even stand in for the process of historical recovery. It exceeds temporal boundaries by coming after the end, and thus, like historical inquiry, it is inherently belated.
This book uses the trope of echo to explore the ways in which sound and music in performance were meaningful in early modern culture even if we can no longer hear them. For twenty-first century auditors, understanding early modern music often entails imaginatively reconstructing from sparse evidence ‘what it actually sounded like’. But ‘what it actually sounded like’ is itself a proposition that requires dismantling 2 because sound is no more outside discourse than language is. We cannot recreate original performance conditions, firstly on the pedantic grounds that absolute identicality is impossible. As Benjamin notes, ‘even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be’ (Benjamin [1936] 2007, 220). Secondly, our own presence within such performance conditions is entirely anachronistic: we cannot detach our context from the text we are listening to (Burstyn 1997). 3 Furthermore, our conceptualisation of the nature of music, the way we describe it and the effects we expect from it have a material effect on our response to it. For instance, Dolscheid et al. (2013) have shown that concepts of music embedded in language do verifiably influence the response of listeners. Thus, since the early modern understanding of music was different to our own, the early modern experience of music must, too, have differed considerably. Despite these seemingly insurmountable barriers, however, the concept of echo allows us to retrieve the possibility of analysis. Reading the textual traces left by these soundings as echoic means recognising that they both imitate and modify their unrecoverable originating moments. These traces include not only notated music where it exists, to be sure, but also lyrics, commentary and other archival material which does not record music and sound so much as reflect it.
This book attends to these echoes by focusing on iterations of the figure of Echo in early modern descriptions of theatrical drama, progress entertainments and masques. As well as appearing as a personification, echo rebounds through these texts in forms of adaptation, translation and invention, which all create echoic effects, particularly in relation to the way that meaning operates intertextually. 4 Writers of the texts discussed here all draw on pre-existing stories, including that of Echo herself, as well as other tropes and characters to combine and recombine in the manner of a kaleidoscope, creating infinite variations made up of the same recognisable materials. 5 The technique enables creators of entertainments to balance the joint aesthetic priorities of tradition and novelty, 6 as well as similarly conflicting criteria such as variety and restraint, and conformity and exceptionality, values which are constantly in tension with each other in early modern culture. Echo is the fundamental mechanism by which these values are negotiated and through which meaning is created in early modern cultural artefacts.
Furthermore, the conditions of the source materials consulted by this book offer parallels with echo in several ways. The instability and multiple statuses of the texts I discuss present echoic relations to lost originals, whether that original is considered to be a one-off performance event or an ur-text. For example, texts describing Elizabethan progress entertainments are often assembled from fragmentary poems, songs, dramatic vignettes and partial descriptions to create a piecemeal narrative of events that took place over several days, or were planned and did not take place. Even where entertainment texts are organised by an authorial hand, as became de rigueur in the court masque of the seventeenth century, such accounts show clear partiality. For example, they tend not to focus on music and rarely provide notation. 7 (In some cases songs were printed separately, published in adapted form for private use.) Even playtexts, which might seem to offer a stable key to multiple performances of the same play soon recede into plurality and indeterminacy under scrutiny. For instance, one of the plays discussed in Chap. 3, Cynthia’s Revels , exists in at least two significantly distinct textual forms which may or may not reflect evidence of court and public performances, and the differences between them. The Duchess of Malfi , discussed in Chap. 5, contains song lyrics disavowed by Webster which may have been heard at some performances and not others. Rather than imposing an in/out model of textual authenticity, however, I prefer a paradigm of degrees of likeness (Kirwan 2015, Chap. 3). Performance sounds reverberate, then, in plural iterative forms across time, their textual traces recapitulating and distorting the sounds, words and actions heard and seen at a particular event or events. The idea of distortion is not to be understood negatively here. Rather, it is a creative and distinctive feature of the development of these texts, and akin to the reworking of the myth of Echo found in the texts themselves.
Nevertheless, before these echoes dissipate so far as to become unintelligible, there remains within them a level of coherence which can offer a degree of concrete evidence about the past. This book attends to this evidence for the purpose of understanding how music and sound interacted with other elements of performance, and what kinds of meaning they conveyed, even where they are not archivally preserved. The book uncovers a variety of ways in which individuals engaged with music and sound in the period, and shows that they were significant elements in creating a public self for a range of different kinds of people. The book is organised by genre and, in the next chapter, starts by examining echo’s presence in progress entertainments staged for Queen Elizabeth , focusing in particular on the entertainments at Elvetham and Kenilworth . These events, although unusual in terms of their scale, show how performances become exemplary and therefore subject to repetition. In particular, the use of echo as a performance device at Kenilworth is repeated or referenced in several later entertainments. The sounds heard at prior events are thus revisited, revised and reheard in different locations and contexts, developing an acoustics of courtly entertainments in which the signs of musical sophistication become political assertions.
Chapter 3 examines the portrayal and use of echo in drama more broadly, surveying a range of texts to demonstrate the ways that form and content overlap. It then focuses at length on the 1601 Quarto of Ben Jonson’s Cynthia’s Revels in which Echo appears as a character on stage. In revivifying her, this play turns Ovid’s version of the myth into a tool of moral, as opposed to aesthetic, expression. In doing so, Jonson repeatedly invokes Neoplatonic notions of music’s spiritual and ethical functions, and this chapter explores Jonson’s transformations of these ideas.
Chapter 4 discusses the use of echo and repetition in the Jacobean court masque. Jonson’s texts are again a focus, as both the Masques of Blackness and of Beauty include echo effects which, in Ferrabosco’s songs, convey moral meaning through their aural aesthetic. It is Thomas Campion, however, who, as this chapter demonstrates, exploits echoic effects most clearly in his Lord Hay’s Masque and Lords’ Masque . Most importantly, this chapter reads the masque ...