Early Audiences Research Articles

Europe's Languages on England's Stages, 1590-1620 by Marianne Montgomery (review)

Reviewed by: Europe's Languages on England's Stages, 1590-1620 by Marianne Montgomery Peter Kirwan (bio) Marianne Montgomery . Europe's Languages on England's Stages, 1590-1620. Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. Pp. xii + 150. $89.95. The variety of spoken languages other than English preserved in the early modern dramatic corpus poses a series of questions for the critic, few of which have straightforward answers. A stage direction such as "The Lady speakes in Welsh" in Shakespeare's 1 Henry IV gives no instruction for the precise words to be spoken, the duration of the speech, or its tone. It implies that accurate Welsh is to be spoken, but this accuracy is left to be determined by the speaker/reader/ auditor, as is the form—verse or prose. The direction itself can be read either as an instruction to a Welsh speaker to ad-lib appropriately, or as indicating the intended effect on an audience. The editor, meanwhile, is faced with the dilemma of presenting substantial speech acts without dialogue. How can the unscripted language maintain a presence in the printed text without being implicitly deprioritized alongside the English dialogue already substituting for and translating the Welsh? Marianne Montgomery's new volume takes as its subject the multiple significations of foreign languages on the early modern London stage. Within a focused thirty-year period, Montgomery ambitiously attends to both the theatrical significance of spoken languages for early audiences, and the implications for an understanding of London's conception of the "foreign." Across chapters predominantly dealing with French, Dutch, Spanish, and Latin, she teases out the complexities of the meanings presented by the staging of these languages, which go far beyond markers of national identity. Montgomery's thesis may be summed up thus: the instances of staged non-English languages "offer audiences a cosmopolitan engagement with the foreign that does not simply reinforce difference in audible terms but instead complicates distinctions between self and other as unknown languages are made comprehensible" (4). Thus, it is not the specific accuracy of the language used that is the priority, but the ways in which it is made sense of for/by the early modern audience. The process of decodification, in Montgomery's argument, is itself the point, drawing attention to the "ethics of exchange" (20) in an increasingly globalized world. Rather than attempt systematically to cover all the implications of language as an exchange system, Montgomery uses each of the languages with a major early modern stage presence to tackle a different set of issues. She treats French and Welsh as gendered in Shakespeare's history plays, and makes an association between conquered female figures and subjugated nations/languages. Dutch, in a range of city comedies, signifies a language of commerce and mercantilism that places London at the center of European trade. Spanish is read as a racialized discourse that comes to stand as its own generic marker within a range of [End Page 138] dramas. Finally, Latin signifies religious and authoritarian knowledge, its use in comedies particularly pointing to layers of social stratification that distinguish aspects of society from one another, while at the same time satirizing the artificial distinctions drawn. Drawing on William Camden and John Speed's contemporary descriptions of Welsh invaders in France marrying native women and cutting out their tongues "lest their children should corrupt their language with their mothers' tongues" (21), Montgomery argues that the conquered female body poses a threat to the conqueror's linguistic victory, offering as examples Henry V's strategic linguistic interplay with Katherine and the presence of the Welshwoman in 1 Henry IV (whom Montgomery carefully avoids describing as either Glendower's daughter or Mortimer's wife) at the point of the contestation of land boundaries. In the latter case, it is the performance of Welshness that is the purpose (though Montgomery does not explore the possibility that the lack of content may indicate space left for a Welsh-speaking actor to insert meaningful lines), whereas in the French-speaking scenes a plurality of meanings is opened up for audiences whose fluency may vary. However, "[n]either can be fully taken as Other" (47), and...

Collaboration is the Key

Often considered places of solemn contemplation, quiet inspiration and personal reflection, art museums seem among the most reluctant to embrace early childhood audiences. Melina Mallos discusses action research at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Australia, as a means of gaining new insight into children's learning and ways to embrace this audience. The article focuses on three artist projects to describe the collaboration between artists and museums necessary to create memorable encounters with contemporary art for young audiences.

Introduction: Early Modern Horror

Every confrontation with horror is, in essence, a confrontation with the unknown. Bringing together an abiding concern for what Noel Carroll defined as art-horror, what Slavoj Zizek referred to as the enjoyment of non-meaning, this course will explore the way early modern audiences grappled with unknown entities and territories through the very process of representation. Forcing ourselves to look with critical attention at early modern representations of horror, students in this course will push beyond the staid cliches about the Renaissance as a period of extraordinary beauty and order, turning instead to embrace a messier, murkier, experimental, and experiential (both an affective and sensate) history that focuses on the status of representation in a historical context before the Modernist imposition of Art and Science as twin systems of rationalization and containment.

Science and Eccentricity: Collecting, Writing and Performing Science for Early Nineteenth-Century Audiences/Immortal Longings: F W H Myers and the Victorian Search for Life After Death

Science and Eccentricity: Collecting, Writing and Performing Science for Early Nineteenth-Century Audiences, by Victoria Carroll, London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008, x + 354 pp., £60.00 (hardback), I...

How to become a bioscope model: Transition, mediation and the language of film performance

The bioscope or film ‘model’ was an early term used to designate the fiction film performer. Making its relatively brief appearance in film discourse around 1910, before the theatrical terminology of ‘actors’ and ‘acting’ had fully taken hold, the film ‘model’ hints at an alternative understanding of fiction film performance on the part of early audiences. This article traces the possible genealogy of the film ‘model’, relating it to the activities of models in adjacent cultural fields, including painting, photography and magic lantern practice. It also seeks to situate the film ‘model’ in the context of the discursive and formal changes that attended the cinema’s media ‘constitution’ as a platform for narrative.

Translating the Past: bridging the gap between the early post-Reformation Scottish subject and archaeology's audiences

Translating the Past: bridging the gap between the early post-Reformation Scottish subject and archaeology's audiences

Daniel Starch's 1928 Survey: A First Glimpse of the U.S. Radio Audience

In 1928, the fledgling National Broadcasting Company hired Boston-based marketing consultant Daniel Starch to conduct the first wide-ranging survey of the national radio audience. Starch oversaw more than 5,000 interviews of U.S. radio families living in states east of the Rocky Mountains. The survey's findings provide a glimpse of the early network radio audience prior to the Federal Radio Commission's 1928 reorganization of frequency and power allocations and the industry's subsequent expansion. This paper examines Starch's findings and places them within the historical context of the developing radio industry.

“As the cony that you see”: Rosalind's risqué rabbits in As You Like It

In As You Like It, Rosalind makes a passing comment in response to Orlando's questioning which seems, in all innocence, to refer to rabbits gambolling contentedly in Arden's idyllic forest. Assuring him that she is native to the place, Rosalind invokes the image of the “coney” that dwells near where it is kindled as proof of her local heritage. Twenty-first-century actors delivering this line regularly use a pronunciation for “coney” that would, for any early modern audience, seem particularly alien. This article traces the history of the word “coney”, its banishment from later editions of Bowdler's Family Shakspeare, as well as its reinstatement following alteration by a nineteenth-century lexicographer who sought to make it sound acceptable for family reading. In doing so, it highlights the overtly sexual meaning of the word, linked as it appears to slang terminology for the female pudenda and thus the commodification of the female body, so restoring its potential as Rosalind's cryptic pun about the hidden truth of her “Ganymede” disguise.

Darwin's Flinch: Sensation Theatre and Scientific Looking in 1872

Abstract This article explores the relationship between Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (London: Murray, 1872) and the debates surrounding audiences of sensation theatre. It takes as its starting point a flinch performed by Darwin in a self-experiment at London Zoological Gardens. Darwin's flinch combined the act of scientific observation with a self-consciously staged emotional gesture. In the 1860s and early 1870s, the passionate and demonstrative audiences of sensation plays were similarly understood to watch themselves feeling. In this economy of emotional surfaces, actors and audience were caught up in unsettling relations between outwards expression and the remote landscape of interior feeling. Entangled in this theatrical instability, Darwin's scientific observation reflected broader cultural concerns about the reliability of the emotional body. Thus the article offers Darwin's Expression as an unusual but nonetheless suggestive artefact of theatrical spectatorship in 1872, while also contributing to recent debates about the history of objectivity and its supposedly unemotional and restrained scientific observer. It argues that the technique of self-conscious emotional spectatorship, shared by Darwin and theatre audiences, constituted a distinctive model of late Victorian emotion and visuality, in which communities of spectators were also spectators of themselves.

Tempest in the Tea Leaves: Broadcasting the Esoteric Arts and Mystic Sciences, 1937–1953

Abstract: From 1937 until 1953, it was contrary to Canadian broadcasting regulations to broadcast programs with speakers claiming to have supernatural abilities, or to offer personal advice over the airwaves. As the broadcast regulator, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation was responsible for enforcing the ban, which meant preventing privately operated stations from producing such programs. The struggle over what sort of programming was suitable not only mirrored the differences between audiences and regulators or broadcasters and regulators, but also attitudes toward esoteric lifestyles, religion, science, and the place of entertainment on the air. Regulators uncomfortable with the potential for exploitation or exposure of listeners' private affairs repeatedly turned back attempts by broadcasters to circumvent the regulation, and in the process revealed some deep-seated class and gender-based assumptions about radio's early audiences.

Tempest in the Tea Leaves: Broadcasting the Esoteric Arts and Mystic Sciences, 1937–1953

From 1937 until 1953, it was contrary to Canadian broadcasting regulations to broadcast programs with speakers claiming to have supernatural abilities, or to offer personal advice over the airwaves. As the broadcast regulator, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation was responsible for enforcing the ban, which meant preventing privately operated stations from producing such programs. The struggle over what sort of programming was suitable not only mirrored the differences between audiences and regulators or broadcasters and regulators, but also attitudes toward esoteric lifestyles, religion, science, and the place of entertainment on the air. Regulators uncomfortable with the potential for exploitation or exposure of listeners' private affairs repeatedly turned back attempts by broadcasters to circumvent the regulation, and in the process revealed some deep-seated class and gender-based assumptions about radio's early audiences.

Dante as "Auctor" in Musée Condé MS 597

The prefatory miniatures in Chantilly, Musee Conde, MS 597, a manuscript that dates from about 1327-28 and comprises an uninterrupted text of Dante's Inferno followed by a presentation copy of Guido da Pisa's commentary on it, offer an extraordinarily articulate response to perhaps the most hotly contested issue in Dante studies—the poet's claims to truth and authority. Critics have long debated the degree to which Dante may have expected audiences to believe that he actually experienced a divinely sanctioned trip through the afterlife. Some scholars have sought to bolster their position by invoking one or more of the eighteen commentaries that survive from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but few have examined the responses of another early audience, manuscript illuminators. By manipulating perspective and other pictorial elements, miniaturists often expressed viewpoints that are distinct from those of the commentators, including the many commentators who were hired to select the iconography of th...

Idolatry, Iconoclasm and Agency: Visual Experience in Works by Lyly and Shakespeare

Studies of early modern English drama which refer to the Reformation often assume that religious changes had a destructive impact on English visual culture. Recent research in art history has, however, suggested that the Reformation should be understood as a part of the development of English visual culture. Applying this latter understanding of the Reformation to an analysis of John Lyly's Campaspe and Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, it is possible to argue that these plays draw on notions of viewer agency fostered by idolatrous and iconoclastic visual experiences. The discussion of plays as a part of the 're-formation' of English visual culture expands current understanding of early modern playhouse audience experiences.

Fever and Dysentery in Acts 28:8 and Ancient Medicine

Abstract This article explores ancient views about the character of fever and dysentery, as well as both natural and supernatural treatments sometimes prescribed for them. This information affords us greater sensitivity to how Luke's earliest audiences would have conceived the severity of this ailment and hence appreciated the healing reported here.

The Synoptic Problem? An Old Testament Perspective

Abstract The synoptic phenomenon is neither a uniquely NT issue nor a new issue, because there are many parallel stories, laws, and poems in the Hebrew Bible/OT. This study examines the literary technique of imitatio or mimesis in the classical and ancient Near Eastern worlds to see what the employment of this technique may tell us about why ancient writers reused, retold, and expanded select older works and how their early audiences may have understood these parallel stories. After discussing the esteem with which ancient writers viewed the accomplishments of earlier ages and defining what the technique of literary imitation is and is not (e.g., epitomization, inner-biblical exegesis, rewritten Bible), this article proceeds to discuss various dangers and disputes in the application of mimesis in the context of the ancient Mediterranean world (e.g., parody, plagiarism). The article concludes that study of creative imitation holds much promise for elucidating the significance of parallel laws, poems, lists, and stories in the Old and New Testaments. Scholars can gain an added appreciation of the literary craft practiced by the authors of synoptic Scriptures through an acute awareness of the techniques by which writers reworked, rewrote, and supplemented their sources.

The Synoptic Problem? An Old Testament Perspective

Abstract The synoptic phenomenon is neither a uniquely NT issue nor a new issue, because there are many parallel stories, laws, and poems in the Hebrew Bible/OT. This study examines the literary technique of imitatio or mimesis in the classical and ancient Near Eastern worlds to see what the employment of this technique may tell us about why ancient writers reused, retold, and expanded select older works and how their early audiences may have understood these parallel stories. After discussing the esteem with which ancient writers viewed the accomplishments of earlier ages and defining what the technique of literary imitation is and is not (e.g., epitomization, inner-biblical exegesis, rewritten Bible), this article proceeds to discuss various dangers and disputes in the application of mimesis in the context of the ancient Mediterranean world (e.g., parody, plagiarism). The article concludes that study of creative imitation holds much promise for elucidating the significance of parallel laws, poems, lists, and stories in the Old and New Testaments. Scholars can gain an added appreciation of the literary craft practiced by the authors of synoptic Scriptures through an acute awareness of the techniques by which writers reworked, rewrote, and supplemented their sources.

Early child development and care in Tanzania: challenges for the future

Much remains unknown about the status of early child development and care in Tanzania. The little information available has never been put together to provide a holistic picture of the progress so far made in this important area. This paper intends to synchronise the information available in Tanzania for the purpose of depicting the country's holistic situation. This will serve as an important database for future actions as well as making early child development and care audiences in Tanzania aware of the challenges ahead. Overall, the type, quantity and quality of services delivered to young children in Tanzania tend to differ according to programme ownership, location of programmes and children's ages.

A word from our viewers: reflections from early television audiences

A word from our viewers: reflections from early television audiences

Voting for Pleasure, Or a View from a Victorian Theatre Gallery

Voting for Pleasure, Or a View from a Victorian Theatre Gallery

Voting for Pleasure, Or a View from a Victorian Theatre Gallery

Voting for Pleasure, Or a View from a Victorian Theatre Gallery