Inciting Fear: Unsettling Sounds Onstage
摘要
This chapter explores how both vocal and instrumental music were used on the stage to create an unsettling effect for the audience. Using Brome and Heywood’s The Late Lancashire Witches as a case study, this chapter demonstrates how early modern witch plays used music to provoke a fear response, which would have been particularly heightened for theatregoers who believed in the reality of witches and witchcraft. The chapter surveys the ways in which Brome and Heywood envision a society where everything is backwards because of supernatural intervention. The first section of the chapter focuses on the play’s two songs and how song can be used as a demonstration of witchcraft on the stage, firstly, through perceived supernatural control over the singer and, secondly, through incantation and the summoning of familiars. The second section discusses how instrumental music was used on the stage to incite tension through the ringing of church bells backwards, the powerlessness of stringed instruments compared to the strength of wind instruments, and the threatening sound of the banging together of household utensils, before considering how silence can, at once, be unsettling but also provide a sense of relief from cacophony.