Poetics and beyond: noisy bodies and aural variations in medieval English outdoor performance

King, P. (2016) Poetics and beyond: noisy bodies and aural variations in medieval English outdoor performance. Medieval English Theatre, 38,

Abstract

The essays opens by demonstrating how sound is thematic in the Tapiters' and Couchers' pageant of Christ before Pilate in the York Cycle of Mystery Plays. It then moves from textual and metrical considerations to look at the aural in relation to civic festivals more widely, considering not only what the festive world sounded like, but what sounds both incidental and deliberative, as well as references to sounds, might have meant to the fifteenth-century civic community. Critical explorations of audience and reception of early plays has tended to concentrate on visual arrangement and effects. Historians of the senses suggest, however, that the primacy of the visual is a post-print, post-Enlightenment, phenomenon; ‘audience’ etymologically refers to listeners, and the recent interest in theatrical noise therefore invites the consideration of aural production in festivity.

• Item Type: Articles
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: King, Professor Pamela
• Authors: King, P.
• College/School: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Critical Studies > English Language and Linguistics
• Journal Name: Medieval English Theatre
• Journal Abbr.: METh
• Publisher: Boydell and Brewer
• ISSN: 0143-3784