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Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England.

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Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England

By Gina Bloom

Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2O07

Gina Bloom's Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England is on very interesting terrain. It follows in the footsteps of Bruce R. Smith's The Acoustic World of Early Modern England (1999), which asserts the importance of sound as a material factor in the early modern theater. Bloom's book aims to overcome the "limits" of Smith's book, and that of a related work by Wes Fokerth and Kenneth Gross, which "universalize the auditory experiences of male characters" (115), by focusing on the relationship of gender and voice on the early modern stage. Its three-pronged investigation considers the challenges facing the boy actor, who had to deal with the threat of a "cracked" or "squeaking" voice as he personated women on the early modern stage (chapter 1); Shakespeare's representations of the powers of women to exercise agency through the wielding of breath (chapter 2); and the representation of women as auditors in late Shakespeare (chapter 3). The fourth chapter analyzes the representation of Echo in George Sandys's seventeenth-century translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses.

On the one hand, Bloom seeks to contribute to the material history of early modern England by tracing "the materiality of spoken articulations" (2); on the other, to contribute to performance history, not only by investigating how the boy actor seeks to control his voice, but also by fashioning a theory of audience based on the relationship of audience members to the representation of female characters as "acoustic subjects" (18). The fourth chapter, although not about a dramatic text, aims to contribute to the overall investigation by extending the discussion in earlier chapters of the "vocal agency" of women. In the figure of Echo wresting from Narcissus's words the sounds and language that she needs to express her own desires, Bloom finds evidence of an "uncanny female vocal agency" (163). Given that three of the four chapters revolve, in one way or one another, around the question of female agency, and the fourth chapter is about a nondramatic text, the book's emphasis seems to fall on its gender concerns, rather than (as the introduction suggests) its contributions to performance theory. But it is in regard to the latter that this book extends a challenge that other scholars of early modern culture will want to take up.

The book's opening paragraph, which discusses the sounds frozen in ice in Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel (1534), suggests one of the ways in which Bloom's book pursues Smith's into an "acoustic world": the tale, which involves sounds of a sea fight frozen in ice that are set free when the ice thaws, testifies to the enduring materiality of sound. Bloom reads the tale, however, for its hints of "the instabilities [that] render the voice susceptible to a range of forces beyond speakers' control" (2). Where Smith aimed (among other things) to consider how the Globe's wooden O functioned as an organ within which audience members were immersed in a heightened acoustic environment, and subject to the power of sound, Bloom's initial focus is on the instability of voice and the potential failure of all communication. Among the questions she asks at the outset is "If the voiced is produced by unstable bodies, transmitted through volatile air, and received by sometimes disobedient hearers, how can voice be trusted to convey an individual's thoughts to a listener?" (3). The question, while both fair and stimulating, suggests that Bloom has a predisposition toward the materials of her investigation that may affect how she pursues her project of theorizing the relation between voice and agency in early modern culture.

In chapter 1, "Squeaky Voices: Marston, Mulcaster and the Boy Actor," for example, Bloom is not so much interested in the powers of "voice" and how they are harnessed either by actors or characters in the early modern theater, but rather in where they fail or risk failing. This means that while the book has a cogent, in-depth and persuasive discussion of how King John's Constance harnesses breath to do things with words, the greater part of the book focuses on "how early modern authors ... figure the unstable voice as a function of an unmanageable body" (22). In chapter 1, this takes the form of readings of Coriolanus and Antonio and Mellida that focus on the uncertain masculinity of male characters as expressed in relation to voices that they cannot properly or fully control. The project of "[l]istening for masculinity" (25) on the early modern stage, and in particular for the ways in which "a man unable to keep his voice from...

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