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

The latest offering from Penn Press's Material Texts series addresses a seemingly immaterial phenomenon, the human voice. While studies of print and manuscript history have proliferated in recent years, materialist accounts of performance practices have been few and far between. Gina Bloom's Voice in Motion begins to remedy this critical lacuna by examining vocal production, transmission, and reception in early modern England. Drawing on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sermons, acoustic experiments, and treatises on humoral physiology, Bloom interprets representations of speaking and hearing in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

The main strength of Bloom's analysis lies in her careful attention to gender. As she rightly notes in her introduction, "voice" frequently "functions as a shorthand metaphor for women's access to personal and political power," yet the metaphor rests on "an undertheorized system of analogies between voice, body, subjectivity, and agency" (13). Seeking to historicize these analogies and thus define them more precisely, Bloom examines a variety of fascinating materials. Chapter 1 of the book begins at the site of vocal production: the larynx and throat of the speaker. Juxtaposing a discussion on vocal instruction by Richard Mulcaster with Marston's Antonio and Mellida, a children's company play, Bloom shows that humoral theories regarding the unpredictable, "squeaky" voices of pubescent boy actors undermined the early modern male ideal of perfect vocal control. Whereas chapter 1 focuses primarily on constructions of masculinity, chapter 2 turns to questions of female agency. Bloom argues that early modern ideas about the instability of breath, as seen in Bacon's Sylva Sylvarum and other scientific writings, affected male and female dramatic characters differently. In plays such as Shakespeare's King John, men attempt to control and contain the instability of breath whereas women tend to call attention to its volatility. Doing so, Bloom provocatively suggests, allows female characters to display a surprising degree of agency. Detailed attention to nondramatic primary materials is also a hallmark of chapter 3. Here Bloom discusses Protestant sermons focused on aural receptivity. Although the cultural valences of hearing have been examined by other scholars, Bloom's account is noteworthy for its gender analysis. Her account of Shakespeare's late plays carefully traces themes of aural penetration and defense and suggests their different implications for male and female characters.

With chapter 4 and the subsequent epilogue, Bloom switches directions. Whereas the first three chapters offer exhaustive historical context for representations of voice in dramatic texts, the last two sections of the book are shorter and more focused on theoretical concerns related to gender. They form a neat complementary pair: chapter 4 considers the figure of Echo as reworked in George Sandys's 1632 English translation of Ovid, and the epilogue addresses George Gascoigne's interpretation of Echo in his 1575 entertainment for Queen Elizabeth at Kenilworth Castle. Tracing themes of control and volatility explored earlier in the book, both sections point to ways in which a materialist consideration of voice can shed light on issues of gender outside of early modern studies.

Bloom's book as a whole is solid and thought-provoking. Her command of previous scholarship in the field is impressive, her documentation extensive, and her literary interpretations interesting. Bloom should also be commended for her attention to drama as both text and performance. Although the implications of her research for performance theory could be explored further, her detailed account of voice lays important groundwork for future studies of theatrical perception and communication. This book is a valuable addition to recent work on the history of the senses and is a significant contribution to early modern gender studies. Giving voice to women, Bloom convincingly argues, requires examining the culturally-specific meanings of voice itself.