Read more
Vocal music was at the heart of English Renaissance poetry and drama. Virtuosic actor-singers redefined the theatrical culture of William Shakespeare and his peers. Composers including William Byrd and Henry Lawes shaped the transmission of Renaissance lyric verse. Poets from Philip Sidney to John Milton were fascinated by the disorienting influx of musical performance into their works. Musical performance was a driving force behind the period's theatrical and poetic movements, yet its importance to literary history has long been ignored or effaced.
This book reveals the impact of vocalists and composers upon the poetic culture of early modern England by studying the media through which--and by whom--its songs were made. In a literary field that was never confined to writing, media were not limited to material texts. Scott Trudell argues that the media of Renaissance poetry can be conceived as any node of transmission from singer's larynx to actor's body. Through his study of song, Trudell outlines a new approach to Renaissance poetry and drama that is grounded not simply in performance history or book history but in a more synthetic media history.
List of contents
- Introduction
- 1. Philip Sidney and Musical Poesis
- i: Redefining Poetry: Mediation in Sidney's Defence
- ii: "Theatre Public": Performance and Communio in Sidney's Arcadia
- iii: Musical Experimentation: William Byrd, Astrophil and Stella, and Sidneian Song
- iv: Echoes of Sidney: The Lute Song Movement and Bibliographic Performance
- 2. Child Singers' Mediated Bodies
- i: Musical Abuse: The Case of Richard Edwards
- ii: Naughty Putti: John Marston's Unsettling Choristers
- iii: Jonson's Cracks: Attenuated Bodies in Cynthia's Revels and Epicene
- 3. Shakespeare's Musical Thresholds
- i.: Twelfth Night and Musical Paratext
- ii.: Performing Objects in A Midsummer Night's Dream
- iii.: "More than Matter": Ophelia's Orphic Song
- 4. John Milton and Musical Abjection
- i: Song and Evanescence in A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle
- ii: Milton and the Cavaliers: Henry Lawes, Alice Egerton, and Interregnum Song
- iii: "Hideous Noise": Performance Anxiety in Samson Agonistes and Paradise Lost
- Coda: Spenser and the Uninvention of Literature
About the author
Scott A. Trudell is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. His research focuses on early modern poetry, drama, music, and pageantry, as well as media studies, sound studies, performance studies, and gender studies. His publications have appeared in journals including PMLA, Renaissance Studies, Shakespeare Quarterly, and Studies in Philology, and he is a co-principal investigator of Early Modern Songscapes, an interdisciplinary digital humanities project on the musical performance of English Renaissance poetry.
Summary
Musical performance was a driving force behind theatrical and poetic movements of the early modern period, yet its importance to literary history has long been ignored. This book explores the media through which songs of the period were made. It provides a new approach to Renaissance poetry and drama that is grounded in a synthetic media history.
Additional text
Unwritten Poetry is a beautifully articulate study of how English Renaissance poetry and drama dis-articulate themselves, a finely written investigation of the myriad ways that written texts collaborate with and yield place to immaterial powers of song and music, music performed and music merely imagined, music sometimes lost but also surviving in silence, sounds 'buried and overwritten'-- forms of beauty that carry their own kind of danger, whether they belong to Orpheus or Ophelia. The book's scrupulous, resourceful scholarship and its probing critical readings bring one back to familiar works with fresh fascination, a fresh sense of their invention, intelligence, risk, strangeness, and powers of play.
Report
Trudell's nwritten Poetry is one of several books in this year's crop that especially impresses Joseph Loewenstein, SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900
