VOICE IN MOTION

Voice in Motion Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England Gina Bloom Award for best monograph of 2007 from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women An achievement. . . . This book should be given pride of place on every feminist bookshelf.--Theatre Journal Blooms interest in voice in the theater is grounded in early modern ideas about the human body and the mechanics of vocal production. The range of plays on which she draws lets her combine new readings of canonical works with fresh attention to less well known texts. Voice in Motion is a book of interdisciplinary reach, solid scholarship, and imaginative resonance.--Bruce Smith, University of Southern California A valuable addition to recent work on the history of the senses and a significant contribution to early modern gender studies. Giving voice to women, Bloom convincingly argues, requires examining the cultrually-specific meanings of voice itself.--Renaissance Quarterly Meticulously researched and carefully argued.--H-Net Reviews Voice in Motion explores the human voice as a literary, historical, and performative motif in early modern English drama and culture, where the voice was frequently represented as struggling, even failing, to work. In a compelling and original argument, Gina Bloom demonstrates that early modern ideas about the efficacy of spoken communication spring from an understanding of the voices materiality. Voices can be cracked by the bodies that produce them, scattered by winds when transmitted as breath through their acoustic environment, stopped by clogged ears meant to receive them, and displaced by echoic resonances. The early modern theater underscored the voices volatility through the use of pubescent boy actors, whose vocal organs were especially vulnerable to malfunction. Reading plays by Shakespeare, Marston, and their contemporaries alongside a wide range of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century texts--including