Choreographing voice: Agency and the staging of gender in early modern England.

The capacity for the human voice to express a speaker's desires and shape a listener's will is a concern of both sixteenth and seventeenth-century English writers and contemporary literary and social theorists. Choreographing Voice contends that early modern representations of the voice as a bodily product and a material substance can sharpen our understanding of the relationship between speaking, agency, and gender. My analysis of early modern narratives about vocal communication---in medical books, scientific treatises, music manuals, religious sermons, pronunciation guides, and especially stage plays---reveals a pervasive concern about the reliability of the voice. Ephemeral by nature, alienated from a speaker's body, and vulnerable to the will of listeners, the voice is a mercurial substance that is always moving away from and beyond the control of speakers. While this disembodied, unpredictable voice can be a site of anxiety, especially for early modern men who rely on self-mediated models of vocal agency, it also enables alternate forms of agency that are particularly accessible to early modern women. The further from a speaker's body the voice is imagined to be located, the less it can be accounted for by a speaker, the less it can be counted on to perform a speaker's will, and the more it can be a source of power to members of early modern culture who were discouraged from vocal participation. My readings of early modern materials enable me to question a conflation in feminist theory of speaking and agency---most evident in scholars' prevalent use of the term voice to signal personal and political empowerment. In the works of William Shakespeare, Frances Bacon, John Marston, Thomas Taylor, and their contemporaries, the effectiveness of the voice depends less on the will or intentions of an individual speaker and more on the environment outside the body. Described sometimes as a bodily emission or a planted seed and other times as a whiff of air or an ephemeral echo, the early modern voice is rarely a simple vehicle for self-expression. Indeed, early modern texts provide an historical lineage for poststructuralist theories of vocal power.PhDCommunication and the ArtsEnglish literatureLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsTheaterUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/127233/2/3029302.pd