This book shows that the sounds of the early modern stage do not only signify but are also significant. Sounds are weighted with meaning, offering a complex system of allusions. Playwrights such as Jonson and Shakespeare developed increasingly experimental soundscapes, from the storms of King Lear (1605) and Pericles (1607) to the explosive laboratory of The Alchemist (1610). Yet, sound is dependent on the subjectivity of listeners; this book is conscious of the complex relationship between sound as made and sound as heard. Sound effects should not resound from scene to scene without examination, any more than a pun can be reshaped in dialogue without acknowledgement of its shifting connotations. This book listens to sound as a rhetorical device, able to penetrate the ears and persuade the mind, to influence and to affect.

Introduction: Follow the noise
1 Soundgrams on stage: sonic allusions and commonplace sounds
2 Hearing the night: nocturnal scenes and unsound effects
3 The head and the (play)house: bodies and sound in Ben Jonson
4 'Unheard' and 'untold': the promise of sound in Shakespeare
Conclusion
Conclusion