The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 16.1724 Monday, 10 October 2005
[1] From: Jack Heller <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 7 Oct 2005 09:02:54 -0500 (EST)
Subj: Re: SHK 16.1718 Clocks and Bells
[2] From: Steve Sohmer <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 7 Oct 2005 12:07:31 EDT
Subj: Re: SHK 16.1718 Clocks and Bells
[3] From: Michael Egan <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 7 Oct 2005 06:11:42 -1000
Subj: Re: SHK 16.1718 Clocks and Bells
[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Jack Heller <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 7 Oct 2005 09:02:54 -0500 (EST)
Subject: 16.1718 Clocks and Bells
Comment: Re: SHK 16.1718 Clocks and Bells
If I may append a related question to this thread:
In the play A Mad World, My Masters (by Middleton), Follywit has his
theft of a watch discovered by the ringing of its alarm. As I supposed
that timepieces were far more rudimentary in 1606, how would the
illusion of a watch alarm have been created to have the sound occur on cue?
Jack Heller
[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Steve Sohmer <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 7 Oct 2005 12:07:31 EDT
Subject: 16.1718 Clocks and Bells
Comment: Re: SHK 16.1718 Clocks and Bells
Dear Friends,
I would like to try to satisfy Martin Steward about bells which might
intrude on an audience attending a performance at the Bankside Globe.
The stage direction "Clocke strikes" at line 826 of the Folio 'Julius
Caesar' comes "about" an hour into a play which started "about" two
o'clock. But, surely, we would not expect the bells of Saints Bennett or
M.Overy to chime on cue. And, no doubt, someone in the wings struck the
bell which sounds on the prompt book's cue. So how to reconcile the two?
The tower clocks of Shakespeare's era were notorious bad time-keepers;
these mechanical clocks were could lose one hour in every twenty-four.
They were reset at dawn and sunset by sextons using a local almanac, of
which there were many. Shakespeare glances at the practice in 'King
John' 3.1.250 ... and, of course, his sexton in 'Hamlet' is 'absolute.'
Elizabethans were used to having tower clocks chiming well out of synch.
There was such a cacophony of bell-noise in Paris that Charles V ordered
all the churches in the city to take their cue from the bells of the
Palais-Royal. And (somewhere) Montaigne writes about the cacophony of
church bells in Italy. When I was at Oxford (1995), late at night when
the city was quiet I used to listen to some four or five steeple clocks
chiming out-of-synch.
This is a roundabout way saying that bells ringing three at 2:50 or 3:10
-- or bells ringing three fifteen minutes apart -- which we would find
maddening -- would not faze Elizabethans.
Hope this helps.
Steve
[3]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Michael Egan <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 7 Oct 2005 06:11:42 -1000
Subject: 16.1718 Clocks and Bells
Comment: Re: SHK 16.1718 Clocks and Bells
This very interesting question can be extended further. For instance,
the subterranean travels of the ghost show that Hamlet was intended for
performance on a stage with a cellar. The darkness (and other
references) in Macbeth imply indoor performance in a hall lit spookily
by candles. In 1 Richard II a man rides a horse onto the set suggesting
that the action was intended for the outdoors, perhaps the provincial
tour, a speculation reinforced by the maneuverings of the two large
armies which fight things out at the end. (Cf. Hodges: Enter the Whole
Army.)
What further inferences about staging context can be drawn from details
in other plays?
--Michael
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