Unwritten Poetry: Song, Performance, and Media in Early Modern England by Scott A. Trudell (review)

Recent scholarship has focused on the disparity between what early modern texts signified at the time of composition and postmodern critical assumptions. These studies counter theoretical thinking that considers a progressive literary history at the expense of early modern innovation. Unwritten Poetry: Song, Performance, and Media in Early Modern England discovers critical oversights through privileging 'a bibliographic fantasy' (p. 210). The book reveals how the modern notion of multimedia is already prevalent in early modern England, as poets and playwrights combine music, song, poetry, and theatrical bodies to startling, often puzzling, effect.

Trudell challenges critical thinking that regards early modern texts as preserving a rigid historical literary imagination. His book examines how early modern poets and playwrights not only considered different forms of communication, but also the lingering emotional effects of their work on their audience.

Thus Trudell finds fresh insights in Sir Philip Sidney's The Defence of Poesy (1595). His argument highlights Sidney's practical approach to music. Trudell even speculates that Sidney may have been a musician himself, as Sidney conceived poetry by embracing all forms of musical composition and performance beyond a bibliographic circle. The appearance of songs in the sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella, Trudell asserts, indicates Sidney's notion of poetry that is not simply to be read. With the emergence of printed songbooks, Trudell also entertains the intriguing notion of Sidney's poetry being experienced 'in domestic settings across England' (p. 29). He suggests the possibility of illiterate households enjoying Sidney's poetry through music and song.

Another overlooked aspect of early modern life is the teaching of drama in English grammar schools. Trudell surmises that because Sidney was a student at Shrewsbury School, he would have been made aware of drama from a young age. The Elizabethan poet even performed in Accession Day tilts. The crux of Trudell's argument is how dramatic performance is ensconced in Sidney's poetic imagination to become fused with literary endeavours.

Within the theatre, Trudell tackles pederasty surrounding boy actor-singers. His first important point is to differentiate early modern pederasty from the modern psychological disorder of pedophilia. Rather than being an aberration, pederasty refers to an established practice of eroticizing women, servants, and children. It is a practice, Trudell argues, the theatre uses to capture audiences in pederasty fantasies. The mediation of poetry through a boy's singing and sexualized body objectifies them, conversely, as monstrous receptacles encouraging abuse.

Trudell also unearths a musical pederasty in Shakespeare's plays. With Twelfth Night, Trudell implies that the play's music functions like bawdy 'muzak'. Its miscellaneous frivolities create tension by often impinging on the play's action. Trudell's thesis finds a rich source in A Midsummer Night's Dream. The eroticized infantile musical fairies provide historical detail on how childhood could last into an actor's twenties. While contemporary media theory, particularly how information encodes messages deciphered by modern communication systems, is already present through how the disembodied changeling transmits sexual fantasies.

A similar analysis of Hamlet's Ophelia leads Trudell to reconsider her mysterious feminized madness as an effervescing multimedia presence. In a fascinating discussion, Trudell asserts that her melancholic songs are derived from the popular anonymous ballad tradition. Her transformative singing and subsequent drowning combine the environment, the sexual violence of Ovid's Orpheus in the Metamorphoses, and music's lingering aftertaste to communicate emotive meaning.

Finally, Trudell charts John Milton's love–hate relationship with song. Although present in Milton's work, singers haunt his texts as subdued voices. Ironically, Trudell also identifies Milton's removal from printed songbooks in the late seventeenth century. Milton's conspicuous absence from the period's musical community inspires Trudell's investigation of songbooks featuring the music of Milton's collaborator Henry Lawes. Trudell uncovers 'intriguing echoes' of Milton's A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle (1637 and 1645) in Lawes's songbooks and in three editions...