Words Made of Breath: Gender and Vocal Agency in King John (2005)

WHEN PHILIP, the conflicted French monarch of Shakespeare's King John, swears to a peace agreement with England, he gives weight to his words by emphasizing that they are made of breath. Standing beside England's monarch, he declares: This royal hand and mine are newly knit, And the of our inward souls Married in league, coupled and linked together With all religious strength of sacred vows; The latest breath that gave the sound of words Was faith, peace, amity, true love Between our kingdoms and our royal selves. (3.1.226-32) (1) In his recollection that breath enables words to be sounded and promises to be kept, Philip presents his vocal expression as, at once, a physical and a spiritual act. On the one hand, breath is the airy matter that, from a physical perspective, must be released in order for vocal sounds to be produced and heard. The actor who plays Philip on the stage cannot help but recognize this material reality, as he would need to decipher the best places to pause and breathe while delivering this key speech. Yet as Philip insists upon the inviolability of the vow of peace he has sworn to his ally, he emphasizes less the physical properties of breath than its spiritual significance. In claiming that his breath carries deep-sworn faith, peace, amity, true love, Philip thematizes his breath as the guarantor of steadfastness. While the joining of hands may be symbolic of an agreement, the exchange and coupling of breath enacts a deeper commitment, a conjunction of ... souls. (2) As Philip's lines invoke the notion that speech is breath--a trope prevalent throughout Shakespeare's plays and in early modern writing more generally--they suggest a tension between Philip's thematization of speech (breath being a metaphor for voice) and his performance of speech (breath being the physical substance that enables the actor playing Philip to be heard). On a thematic level, the trope of breath represents to Philip's audiences the depth of his promise, but from a material, performance perspective, where Philip's words are in essence mere ephemeral air, Philip's promises seem far more uncertain. Such promises, as the audience will soon learn, are only as staunch as the actual breath Philip, and the actor playing him, use to communicate. In its simultaneous acceptance and suspicion of the agency of the breath, King John stands in good historical company. Early modern anatomists and natural philosophers embrace similarly ambivalent positions on the nature of breath--an ambivalence, I would argue, that is animated by their uneasy divergence from Aristotelian theories of vocal sound. (3) Aristotle establishes that the human voice acquires its capacity to create meaning when the soul stirs the air within the body, causing that air to strike the vocal organs and the speaker to emit the breath that carries words; soul is effectively contained in the breath expelled during voiced speech. (4) Early seventeenth-century anatomists like Helkiah Crooke and natural philosophers like Frances Bacon diverge from Aristotle in their emphasis on the physical properties of breath and the environment through which it moves. Using tools like dissection, observation, and experiment, they move beyond abstract theorizing of the soul to describe, for instance, how changes in the temperature and moisture of the air delay the reception of a voice. Yet, as many have pointed out about the seventeenth century revolution in science, such practical, materialist explanations by no means point to a clear break with ancient thought. For one thing, even anti-scholastic explanations of vocal sound are grounded in ancient theories of matter. (5) Moreover, as Bruce R. Smith notes, many early modern writers try to reconcile Aristotelean views of voice as soul with their own observations about the voice's physical properties. (6) Aristotelean and new scientific perspectives did not always coexist without friction, however. …