“O’erwhelmed with Noise”: Sound-Houses and Sonic Experiments in Ben Jonson’s Epicene

Abstract

In his unfinished text, New Atlantis (1627), Sir Francis Bacon indulges in a fantasy of dedicated spaces in utopian colleges in which [w]e practice and demonstrate all sounds and their generation ... represent Small Sounds as Great and Deepe; Likewise Great Sounds, Extenuate and Sharpe; Wee make diuerse Tremblings and Warblings of Sounds, which in their Originall are Entire ... Wee haue also diuerse Strange and Artificiall Eccho's, Reflecting the Voice many times ... rendring the Voice, Differing in the Letters or Articulate Sound ... Wee haue also meanes to conuey Sounds in Trunks and Pipes, in strange Lines, and Distances (182).These "Sound-Houses" are imaged as part of a sensory laboratory, in which all senses can be stimulated and tested.Such a learning environment is predicated upon a pre-Cartesian philosophy that "all knowledge begins with sense experience" (B.Smith, Key of Green 100).Prevalent in early modern medical and philosophical discourses that followed the doctrines of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, this theory distinguished between two types of senses, both recognised as "preliminary to the intellect": the internal and the external senses (Aquinas 1: 411).The scholars of the colleges serve as loose figures for these sensory groups and their connecting pathways.The "demonstration of all sounds and their generation" is practiced upon the "Pioneers"; it reflects the stimulation of one of the external senses-hearingwhich "establish[es] contact [thereby blurring the boundaries between auricular and tactile impressions] with the world through sensation" (Griffin 149, emphasis added). 1 This excites the humors, which move the passions, and the response is documented by the "Compilers" or internal senses: common sense, imagination, and memory.These internal senses allow the externally perceived sensations to be received, often synaesthetically, by the "Benefactors," the rational soul, "to "draw out of them things of use and practice for man's life and knowledge" (Bacon, New Atlantis 184; Griffin 149).Scholarship on early modern sensory experience has increasingly focused on illuminating the period's cultural understanding of the sensorium through performance: how it is presented and prioritized, understood, and enacted on stage in diverse, isolated, and interactive, temporally specific ways.Site-specifics, too, are being probed: the prospects for reconstructing through theatrical representations the early modern urban soundscape and its subcultures, and the visual, aural, olfactory, and tactile environments-particularly Blackfriars and the Globe-in which the performances took place.Ben Jonson's Epicene, famous for its "sonic theme," is often found among the focal points in these studies for its generous depiction of London acoustics, its class-stratified and gendered sonic communities, and its portrait of the ideal auditor (Cockayne, Hubbub 109). 2 More recently, though, studies have turned toward the sensible body which, due to the receptive quality of sense perception, is open and vulnerable in the "wild and complex sensorium" of the theater (Karim-Cooper 269)."The presentation of drama," writes Farah Karim-Cooper, "seem[s] to have the capacity to infect or affect its spectators, potentially producing changes in their humoural constitution, their emotional states, and even their behaviour" (269).To my knowledge, less attention has been given in Epicene to how the play's sensory bodies, both real and imagined, are affected by the specific

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