Noises off: Some Sound-Effects in Virgil

Extract

Among the scanty stage directions in the present text of Shakespeare's plays one reads things like ‘Alarums’ or ‘Drum heard’ or ‘Noise and tumult within’ or ‘March afar off and shot within’. The Elizabethan producer had, it seems, little apparatus and made much play with such a device as ‘noises off’. The simplicity, not to say crudity, of the means at his disposal may not have served him ill. Perhaps an audience is more easily stirred to pity and terror by the sound of distant gunfire than by a realistic battle-scene elaborately produced on a modern stage with its many resources of furniture and lighting. The eyes of the ignorant may be more learned than their ears, but the ears are more imaginative: at least they were when Agamemnon and Henry VIII first walked the stage. Aeschylus, at any rate, and Shakespeare did make effective use of sound effects. It is not altogether fanciful to suppose that all ancient poets practise a similar technique. Homer, Od. 1. 351: