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

Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England, by Gina Bloom. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Pp. 277. Cloth: $59.95. Reviewer: Genevieve Love Gina Bloom's Voice in Motion takes the movement of the voice - "from the speaker's body, through the air, and to the listener's body" (17) - as its principle of organization; this trajectory is both satisfyingly clear and unpredictably illuminating. As she develops the book's fundamental argument, that "it is the voice's distance from, rather than presence in, the body that constitutes the conditions of agency" (17), this guiding structure allows Bloom to decenter her readings of early modern plays. That is, the book is not patterned around sustained readings of particular plays; rather, each chapter integrates a range of readings - some brief, some extended - of literary texts with analysis of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century nondramatic texts. Bloom's introduction emphasizes that her readings of these nondramatic texts, which include writings on vocal training and performance, scientific writings on acoustics, and Protestant sermons, are not treated as "simply an historical 'context' to facilitate the contemporary critic's reading of drama" (36). As Bloom elegantly marshals a wide range of dramatic and nondramatic texts into her cogent "voice-in-motion" structure, engaging materialist, performance studies, and feminist methodologies and incorporating appealing close readings, the book's method is as intriguing as its matter. Following an introduction that establishes the methodological stakes of the book's "effort to theorize the relation between voice and agency" (5), chapter 1, "Squeaky Voices: Marston, Mulcaster, and the Boy Actor," examines the challenges to early modem gender hierarchies posed by instances of the unstable male voice. Unlike the book's other chapters, which address both male and female figures, this chapter focuses exclusively on the male voice as Bloom explores a range of "texts in which the volatile voice is a function of the unmanageable body of its speaker" (17). While the chapter's argument that patriarchal structures are compromised by the "unchoreographable, squeaking voice" (40) takes shape through readings of multiple plays, Bloom engages in extended readings of Richard Mulcaster's Positions Concerning the Training Up of Children, a pedagogical treatise that presents "a view of human vocal organs as fragile and vulnerable to malfunction" (36), and John Marston's Antonio and Mellida, which "links failing patriarchal power structures . with unstable male voices" (50). The chapter's exacting etymological treatment of vocal terminology like "squeake" and "cracke" is characteristic of Bloom's invigorating combination of OED-inspired (and OED-expanding) close reading and theoretical sophistication. In chapter 2, "Words Made of Breath: Shakespeare, Bacon, and Particulate Matter," Bloom's analysis of both male and female characters in Shakespearean plays tackles head-on the book's thesis that "the disarticulation of voice from body generates vocal power" (68, emphasis in original). Turning to early modern theorists of acoustics enables Bloom to expand chapter l's analysis of the problematics of men's control over voice, as she examines "how the particular material processes of vocal transmission destabilize a speaker's control over an utterance" (67). Most incisively, Bloom uses the early modem experimental scientist Walter Charleton's theories of sound as particulate matter to establish a "redefinition of voice" (101) - breath as voice - that provides "silenced" female characters with a "more capacious model of agency" (68). While the chapter focuses most on King John and especially on Eleanor and Constance, the examples of Desdemona and Lavinia are among the book's most powerful. When Othello pauses over Desdemona's "balmy breath" (5.2.16) and when Marcus describes the "rise and fall" of the "crimson river. …