History of Applause

de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception

Once, people measured their leaders -- and themselves -- one clap at a time.

The Dionysus Theater in Greece, from a German encyclopedia, 1891 (Wikimedia Commons)

And then, suddenly, just when the colors and outlines settle at last to their various duties -- smiling, frivolous duties -- some knob is touched and a torrent of sounds comes to life: voices speaking all together, a walnut cracked, the click of a nutcracker carelessly passed, thirty human hearts drowning mine with their regular beats; the sough and sigh of a thousand trees, the local concord of loud summer birds, and, beyond the river, behind the rhythmic trees, the confused and enthusiastic hullabaloo of bathing young villagers, like a background of wild applause.
-- Vladimir Nabokov

In the seventh century, as the Roman empire was in the period of its decline, the emperor Heraclius made plans to meet with a barbarian king. Heraclius wanted to intimidate his opponent but he knew that the Roman army, in its weakened state, was no longer intimidating, particularly when the intended intimidatee was a barbarian. So the emperor hired a group of men to augment his legions -- but for purposes that were less military than they were musical. He hired the men to applaud.

Heraclius's tactic of intimidation-by-noisemaking, the audible version of a Potemkin Village, did nothing to stanch the wounds of a bleeding empire but it made a fitting postscript to that empire's long relationship with one of the earliest and most universal systems people have used to interact each other - the clapping of hands. Applause, in the ancient world, was acclamation and it was also communication. It was, in its own way, power. A way for frail little humans to recreate, with hands made "thunderous," the rumbles of nature.

Applause, today, is much the same. In the studio, in the theater, in places where people become publics, we still smack our palms together to show our appreciation -- to create, in cavernous spaces, a connection. "When we applaud a performer," argues the sociobiologist Desmond Morris, "we are, in effect, patting him on the back from a distance." We applaud dutifully. We applaud politely. We applaud, in the best of circumstances, enthusiastically. We applaud, in the worst, ironically.

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We find ways, in short, to represent ourselves as crowds -- through the very medium of our crowd-iness.

We are reinventing applause, too, for a world where there are, technically, no hands. We clap for each others' updates on Facebook. We share. We link. We retweet and reblog the good stuff to amplify the noise it makes. We find new ways to express our enthusiasms, to communicate our desires, to encode our emotions for transmission. Our methods are serendipitous and also driven by the subtle dynamics of the crowd. We clap because we are expected to. We clap because we are compelled to. We clap because something is totally awesome. We clap because we are generous and selfish and compliant and excitable and human.

'This Is How You Gauge the People'
Scholars are not quite sure of the origins of applause. What they do know is that clapping is very old, and very common, and very tenacious -- "a remarkably stable facet of human culture." Babies do it, seemingly instinctually. The Bible makes many mentions of applause - as acclamation, and as celebration. "And they proclaimed him king and anointed him, and they clapped their hands and said, 'Long live the king!'"

Clapping was formalized in Western culture, at least in the theater. "Plaudits" - a word from the Latin "to strike," and also "to explode" were common at the ending of a play. At the close of the performance, the chief actor would yell, "Valete et plaudite!" ("Goodbye and applause!") signaling to the audience, in the subtle manner preferred by centuries of thespians, that it was time to give praise. Turning himself into the world's first human applause signs.

Roman mosaic of choregos and actors, from the House of the Tragic Poet, Pompeii (Wikimedia Commons)

As theater and politics merged and particularly as the Roman Republic gave way to the Roman Empire, applause became a way for leaders to interact directly and also indirectly with their citizens. One of the chief methods used by politicians to evaluate their standing was by gauging the greetings as they entered the arena. Cicero's letters seem to take for granted the fact that "the feelings of the Roman people are best shown in the theater." Leaders became astute human applause-o-meters, reading the volume, speed,  rhythm, and length of the crowd's claps for clues about their political fortunes.

"You can almost think of this as an ancient poll," says Greg Aldrete, a professor of history and humanistic studies at the University of Wisconsin, and the author of Gestures and Acclamations in Ancient Rome. "This is how you gauge the people. This is how you poll their feelings." Before telephones allowed for Gallup-style surveys and SMS for real-time voting, or the Web allowed for "buy" buttons and cookies, Roman leaders were gathering data about people by listening to their applause. As humans and politicians, they compared their results to other's polls and to the applause inspired by fellow performers.

Once, after an actor received favorable plaudits than he, the emperor Caligula, while clutching his sword, remarked "I wish that the Roman people had one neck." Caligula was neither the first nor the last politician to find himself on the business end of an opinion poll just as Shakespeare was neither first nor last to see the world and its doings as an ongoing performance.

In Rome, as in the republics that would attempt to replicate it, theater was politics, and vice versa. There "even being a ruler is being an actor," Aldrete points out. "And what he's trying to gain is the approval of the audience." Legend holds that the dying words of Augustus, were: "If I've played my part well, then clap your hands, and dismiss me from the stage with applause."

Savvy politicians of the ancient world relied as do savvy politicians of today. Cicero, the ur-politico, would send friends of his to loiter around the theater, taking notes to see what kind of greeting each politician got when he entered the arena, the better to see who was beloved by the people, and who was not. His human clap-o-meters had much information to assess. "Ancient crowds tended to be more interactive than they are today," Aldrete points out. "There was much back and forth between speakers and crowds and particularly in the Greco-Roman world, crowds - especially in the cities - were good at communicating messages through rhythmic clapping, sometimes coupled with shouts." The coding was, "a pretty sophisticated thing."

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Tiles, Bricks, Beeeeeeeees!

In the late days of the Republic and early days of the Empire, that is the first centuries BC to the first centuries AD -  systems of applause became more elaborate. As power was consolidated, passing from Caesar to Caesar to Caesar, plaudits became both more systematized and nuanced. Applause no longer meant, simply, "claps."

While Greco-Roman audiences smacked their palms as we do today, classics professor David Levene pointed to Plautus's play Casina, whose conclusion specifies applauding "with hands." Their overall strategies of applause were more varied than mere clapping alone. Plaudits thundered but they also buzzed and trilled. Crowds developed ways to express degrees of approval, ranging from claps to snaps of the finger and thumb, and waves of the edge of a toga. The last gesture of which the emperor Aurelian decided would be replaced by the wave of a special handkerchief (orarium), a prop which he distributed to all Roman citizens, so they would never lack a way to praise him.

Applause rituals were influenced by Rome's expansion too. Nero, amended Rome's clapping style after a trip to Alexandria, where he was impressed by the Egyptian method of noise-making. The emperor, on account of the historian Suetonius,

summoned more men from Alexandria. Not content with that, he selected some young men of the order of equites and more than five thousand sturdy young plebeians, to be divided into groups and learn the Alexandrian styles of applause ... and to ply them vigorously whenever he sang. These men were noticeable for their thick hair and fine apparel; their left hands were bare and without rings, and the leaders were paid four hundred thousand sesterces each.

Nero wished to replicate the Alexandrians' varied style of noise-making, which texts of the time broke down into three categories: "the bricks," "the roof tiles," and "the bees." The first referred to clapping as we do today or "bricks" - a flat-palmed clap; "roof tiles" - from the curved roof tiles common in Roman architecture - was described as a cup-palmed version; and the third referred to vocal rather than mechanical applause or to humming or trilling that made an assembled crowd sound like an enormous swarm of bees, or: BEEEEEEEES!

The AMA, in the Roman Arena
Applause became a political technology, a tool used by rulers and the ruled to communicate with each other. This is not specific, of course, to Rome or, for that matter, the ancient world.

In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn describes a district party conference attended by Josef Stalin at which attendees rose to greet the leader, leading to applause that lasted for ten minutes. Stalin's reputation had preceded him and no-one wanted to be the first to stop applauding the dictator. Finally, the director of a paper factory sat down, allowing the rest of the crowd to follow and after the meeting, the director was arrested.

Soviet-style dictatorship is difficult to maintain especially in an empire as large as Rome's. One reason Roman leaders systematically built amphitheaters and racetracks throughout the conquered lands was to foster a sense of "Romanness" among subjects and also to offer a place where the public could become, publicly, "the governed." The amphitheater was a place of conversion. "To be a legitimate emperor," Aldrete says, "you have to appear in public and receive the applause of the people." So the arenas were Rome's early answer to radio and televison, the ancient incarnation of  Twitter Q&A, YouTube hangout and Reddit AMA. They allowed the powerful to interact with their constituents, en masse and offered the illusion of political freedom.

Applause became the vehicle for people to answer their leaders with buzzes that mimicked bees and claps that sounded like thunder. The spectacle, in turn, ratified and amplified Rome's power. "When a crowd chanted 'Hail, Caesar,'" Aldrete noted, "it makes someone Caesar."

Joe Biden applauds the president during the 2013 State of the Union. John Boehner does not. (Reuters)

'See, I Told You It Was Funny!'
No surprise that the powerful began manipulating crowds, which are, for all their wisdom, notoriously manipulable.

Rome and its theaters, Aldrete shared, ushered the rise of a professional class of public instigators or laudiceni - "people who clapped for their dinner" - hired to infiltrate crowds and manipulate their reaction to performances. The practice apparently began when actors would hire a dozen or so shills to disperse among audiences to prolong applause or, if feeling especially bold or indignant, to start "spontaneous" chants of praise in the crowd. Actors may have also hired laudiceni to instigate boos and hisses following the performances of competitors.

The practice spread to the courts where lawyers hired professional rabble-rousers to react to arguments and thus sway juries. The practice bled, as many elements of theater do, into politics.

Nero, legend goes, enlisted 5,000 soldiers to praise his acting performances. Centuries later, Milton Berle asked Charles Douglass, founder of the laugh track, to edit in post-facto guffaws to recordings of his comedy routines that had fallen flat. Douglass would fulfill the request. "See, I told you it was funny!" the comedian would reply. Romans, did the same editing but had to be content with real-time manipulations.

Centuries later, French performers institutionalized shillery further with a practice known as "the claque." The 16th-century French poet Jean Daurat is credited with or blamed for the resurrection. He bought tickets to his own plays and handed them to people who promised to applaud at the end of his performances. By the early 1820s, claques were institutionalized with an agency in Paris specialized in the distribution of the shills' services. In Urban Government and the Rise of the French City, the historian William B. Cohen describes the intricate price lists these faux flatterers would hand to would-be patrons: polite clapping cost this many francs, enthusiastic applause this many, heckles directed at a competitor at another cost.

The claque later became categorized, as rieurs or "laughers" who laughed loudly at jokes; pleureurs or "criers" who feigned tears in reaction to performances; commissaires or "officers", who learned a play or piece of music by heart and called attention to its best parts; chatouilleurs or "ticklers" who kept an audience in satiated mood - in the manner of later drink minimums; and the bisseurs  or "encore-ers" who would request encore performances - the first having been so obviously delightful.

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Like Douglass's 20th-century "Laff Box," which allowed an operator to select from pre-recorded titters, teehees and guffaws, the claqueurs offered a range of reactions to perform for and within Parisian crowds. Their practice spread to Milan, Vienna, London, and New York before falling out of fashion. The claque, like many scams both before and after, lost power once people became savvy to its tricks.

Slow Claps
And clapping itself evolved. Symphonies and operas became serious, aligning themselves with the reverence and spirituality associated with religious ceremonies. With the advent of sound recording of performances i.e. mechanical reproduction they further quieted down. Knowing when to stay silent and when to clap, became a mark of sophistication, a new kind of code for audiences to learn.

Applause became a matter of "do" or "don't" - "all" or "nothing" - "silence" or "elation"- losing many of its historic shades and nuances. A 1784 report in Carl Friederich Cramer's Magazin der Musik noted, "It is not uncommon that after a perfect opera, [the Romans] remain in the theater for an hour or more in incessant clapping and rejoicing.... Sometimes also the composer of such an Opera is taken [in triumph] in this chair from the orchestra pit."

The changes changed performers. Applause became less a dialoge and more a brute transaction with the audience. It promised and teased. "The point," Gustav Mahler explained, "is not to take the world's opinion as a guiding star but to go one's way in life and working unerringly, neither depressed by failure nor seduced by applause." The word "claptrap" - literally, "nonsense," but commonly, "showy language" comes from the mid-18th century stage and it refers to a "trick to 'catch' applause."

The subtleties of the Roman arena, it's claps and snaps and shades of meaning gave way in later centuries to standardized and institutionalized applause and, as a result, a bit promiscuous. Laugh tracks guffawed with mechanized abandon. Applause became an expectation rather than a reward and artists saw it as ritual, rote. As Barbra Streisand once complained: "What does it mean when people applaud? Should I give 'em money? Say thank you? Lift my dress?" The lack of applause, on the other hand -- the unexpected thing, the relatively communicative thing -- "that I can respond to."

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Now, we are putting the nuances back and reinventing applause, to make it what it used to be: a coded, collective form of communication. We invented, of course, the slow clap - that the linguist John Haiman, in his book Talk Is Cheap: Sarcasm, Alienation, and the Evolution of Language, dutifully describes as "a heavy monotonous, thoroughly controlled repetition of the clapping gesture." We have delivered unto the world The Clapper, the device that lets human hands talk to electric light, deserving of wonder and awe. We have created new ways to outsource our applause.

Mostly we have used the the digital world to remake public praise. We link and like and share our thumbs-ups through our networks. Within the great arena of the Internet, we become part of the performance simply by participating, demonstrating our appreciation and our approval by amplifying and extending, the show. Our applause is part of the spectacle. We are all claqueurs.

Our claps matter more now because they are no longer ephemeral. They are performances, their praises preserved, their rhythms tracked, their patterns analyzed and exploited. They send messages far beyond the applause itself. Our applause, when given, is silent and also thunderous.