In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chapter 4 Echoic Sound: Sandys's Englished Ovid and Feminist Criticism DELIO. Hark, the dead stones seem to have pity on you And give you good counsel. ANTONIO. Echo, I will not talk with thee, For thou art a dead thing. ECHO Thou art a dead thing. -The Duchess ofMalfi' In this scene from John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, Delio's advice that Antonio avoid visiting the Cardinal is reiterated by an eerie echo that Antonio admits is "very like my wife's voice" (5.3.26). Earlier in the play, the Duchess unexpectedly revives from (presumed) death by strangulation to call for ''Antonio" and "mercy" (4.2.342, 345) in an echo of Desdemona's tell-all cry from her deathbed, "falsely, falsely murdered" (Othello 5.2.126). And yet even when the Duchess's death is final, her body buried, her sound seeps forth in act 5, reverberating the men's voices and warning Antonio that his life is in danger. The Duchess's echo offers us a most compelling example of the disembodied voice as a source of female agency. The headstrong Duchess, as it turns out, needs neither head nor body to continue to voice her concerns about the Cardinal's plot to destroy her family. Her body absent , her voice lingers on, offering wisdom and guidance for those she loved while she was alive. What is especially interesting about the Duchess's echoic voice is that it demonstrates how the auditory agency we examined in Chapter 3 can, with little effort on the part of the hearing subject, be converted into the kind of vocal agency we explored in Chapter 2. The echo in Webster 's play does not simply halt sounds, preventing them from penetrating a Echoic Sound 161 listener's body; it throws sounds back to their producer, creating what appears to be an independent vocal act. The echo's capacity to "speak" is precipitated by its capacity to "hear;' as hearing and speaking become two sides of the same disembodied vocal process, virtually indistinguishable from each another. Moreover, like the squeaky voice, breathed words, and fortressed ears (discussed in Chapters 1, 2, and 3, respectively), echoic sounds are defined by ambiguity and instability. Disjoining vocal sound from the speaking body and dispersing accountability for an utterance, echoes straddle the line between human voice and mere sound. Could this actually be the voice of the Duchess? the play asks. Or is this simply a sonic reverberation? Like other plays I've examined throughout this book, The Duchess ofMalfi leaves that question unresolved and, in doing so, intimates that the Duchess, even in death, possesses startling vocal power. The scene in Webster is interesting, moreover, for its dramatization of male reactions to the presence of a disembodied, ambiguous voice, a concern also explored in previous chapters. When the echo states hauntingly that Antonio will never see his wife again, Antonio and Delio are troubled. How can a sound reverberating off of a wall approximate so closely an intentional voice? To cope with the uncomfortable implications of this question , Delio and Antonio dismiss the phenomenon as nothing more than "fancy" (5.3.46). "I'll be out of this ague" (5.3-47), Antonio declares. Antonio and Delio's reactions to the echoic voice in this scene typify those of other early moderns, especially men, around the disembodied and uncontrollable voice. As the echo problematizes a binary between expressive voice and mere sound, it throws into question one of the central ways in which human beings in this period (and perhaps in our own) defined themselves against animals and objects. As we've seen, such distinctions were of particular importance to early modern men, whose claims to be able to control voice, their own and that of subordinates, iterated and perpetuated social and political hierarchies. Previous chapters have diagnosed how these anxieties emerge in relation to dramatic representations and other live performances of voice, which often underscore the unpredictability of communicative practices. This chapter follows a different, but parallel, trajectory by examining how one early modern poetic text deals with these anxieties. We shall consider how George Sandys-seventeenth-century poet, traveler, and mythographer-tackles the mythical figure ofEcho in his 1632 translation of and commentary on Ovid's Metamorphoses. My focus on Sandys calls for some explanation, given the emphasis of 31] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 05:55 GMT) 162 Chapter 4 previous chapters on drama and texts connected to live...

Share