Unwritten Poetry
Song, Performance, and Media in Early Modern England
- Author: Trudell, Scott A.
We can hope that this book with its focus on the canonical paves the way for exploration of further silenced histories, looking at the place of musical production in the work of authors who...
Unwritten Poetry
Song, Performance, and Media in Early Modern England
- Author: Trudell, Scott A.
Purchase product
We can hope that this book with its focus on the canonical paves the way for exploration of further silenced histories, looking at the place of musical production in the work of authors who...
About
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.
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. Children's Mediated Bodies
- i Musical Abuse: The Case of Richard Edwards
- ii Naughty Exercise: 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 Un-Invention of Literature
Awards and reviews
We can hope that this book with its focus on the canonical paves the way for exploration of further silenced histories, looking at the place of musical production in the work of authors who are more diverse in their social, gender and educational profile. For those interested in Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton and early modern poetry more widely, this book deftly captures the "simultaneous consternation and exhilaration that poets expressed over their inability to govern the meanings of song
