Introduction

Sometime before 1616, Ben Jonson thoroughly revised his Every Man in His Humour, which had first been performed in 1598. In addition to editing the dialogue, changing the play's setting from Italy to England, and Anglicising the names of his characters, Jonson added a lengthy new prologue that pays theatregoers a backhanded compliment: applaud my play, Jonson writes, and ‘there's hope left then, / You, that have so grac'd monsters, may like men’ (Prologue, ll. 29–30). The monsters referred to here are the wildly popular, larger-than-life creations of the previous century still stalking the Jacobean stage, most notably Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine and Hieronimo of Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy. Instead of such absurdly fantastic ‘monsters’, Jonson promises to present London's real-life ones: its fools, fops and most of its women. Though many of Jonson's complaints about contemporary theatre are conventional, the playwright saves much of his vitriol for a surprising subject: sound effects. Unlike other productions, Every Man In features no ‘nimble squib’, or firecracker, ‘to make afear'd / The gentlewomen’:

Brash sound effects (a ‘rolled bullet’ signifying thunder, or a rumbling drum mimicking a tempest) are here to be replaced with a new set of noises, including, most importantly, a new kind of speech: ‘language such as men do use’ rather than ‘some few foot-and-half-foot words’ (Prologue, ll. 21, 10). It is this aural difference that Jonson insists will distinguish his Every Man In from the supposedly ‘monstrous’ productions on offer elsewhere. By replacing antiquated language and booming sound effects with contemporary speech, Jonson promises his audiences an altogether new theatrical sound.

I open with Jonson's 1616 Prologue because it demonstrates just how fully poetic style, sound and dramatic form were associated in the playwright's thinking. Consider the Prologue's jab at Shakespeare's Henry VI plays, in which actors ‘with three rusty swords, / And help of some few foot-and-half-foot words, / Fight over York and Lancaster's long jars’ (ll. 9–11).