Voice in Motion

Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England

Gina Bloom

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780812201314
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria nel teatro

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 voice's 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 voice's 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 anatomy books, acoustic science treatises, Protestant sermons, music manuals, and even translations of Ovid—Bloom maintains that cultural representations and theatrical enactments of the voice as "unruly matter" undermined early modern hierarchies of gender. The uncontrollable physical voice creates anxiety for men, whose masculinity is contingent on their capacity to discipline their voices and the voices of their subordinates. By contrast, for women the voice is most effective not when it is owned and mastered but when it is relinquished to the environment beyond. There, the voice's fragile material form assumes its full destabilizing potential and becomes a surprising source of female power. Indeed, Bloom goes further to query the boundary between the production and reception of vocal sound, suggesting provocatively that it is through active listening, not just speaking, that women on and off the stage reshape their world.Bringing together performance theory, theater history, theories of embodiment, and sound studies, this book makes a significant contribution to gender studies and feminist theory by challenging traditional conceptions of the links among voice, body, and self.

Chapter 1

Squeaky Voices: Marston, Mulcaster, and the Boy Actor

Perhaps because of the burgeoning industry of Shakespeare films and the late twentieth-century fascination with everything Elizabethan, new students of early modern English drama often are surprisingly familiar with the conditions under which Shakespeare’s plays were originally performed, even the very unmodern convention of using boys to play female parts. And though some consumers of Shakespeare still echo Stephen Orgel’s query about why the English professional stage took boys for women, another intriguing question concerns process: not why but how was gender negotiated on an all-male stage? Whereas work by Orgel and other scholars has been most attentive to the visual aspects of early modern gender performance, I am interested in how the aural dimensions of the Elizabethan theater shaped its representations of gender.¹ The impact of sound on the performance of gender is at the heart of two recent popular interpretations of Shakespearean theater, John Maddens Shakespeare in Love and Michael Hoffman’s William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.² In each of these Hollywood films, a major turning point of the plot involves a male actor realizing that his physiological state prevents him from mimicking a woman’s voice effectively, a failure that threatens to undermine the success of the play. Although Maddens and Hoffman’s films approach the Bard in distinct ways, they resolve this play-within-the-film vocal crisis in strikingly similar ways. In Shakespeare in Love, the cast of Romeo and Juliet is surprised to learn a few minutes before the curtain rises that the voice of the boy who will play Juliet has begun to change. The film maintains that this is cause enough to pull the actor from the part, even though the only possible substitute for him is a woman, whose presence on the stage thwarts royal decree.³ Hoffman’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream imagines what would happen if a postpubescent male actor, with a fully cracked voice, were allowed to play the female role. When the deep-voiced Flute uses a falsetto vocal style to personate Thisbe in the play within the film, his audience breaks into laughter at his aesthetically unpleasant, squeaking sound. The solution here is not to bring in a real woman’s voice, as in Shakespeare in Love, but to allow the grave voice to be used. Flute completes the play in his natural voice and the performance, like that of Romeo and Juliet, is portrayed as a smashing success. In Madden’s and Hoffman’s dramatizations of the boy-actor stage convention, the success of a play is contingent on the physiological state of the male body and its capacity to produce a satisfying aural experience for the audience. Both films suggest that it is better to risk legal censure or the audience’s distraction than to allow an unstable, squeaking male voice onstage.

In their displacement of squeaking voices, these modern performances diverge from early modern theatrical practice. For in contrast to today’s audiences, early modern theatergoers had ample opportunity to hear unstable male voices. Whether the frequent staging of squeaking voices in early modern plays points to a dramatic convention or offers evidence of a theatrical custom—that boy actors continued to perform while their voices were changing—there is much at stake in noting the role of these voices on the stage and in the culture at large.⁴ Onstage or off, a squeaking voice announced a boy’s transition into manhood at the same time that it indicated that the transition had yet to be completed. As it attested to a boy’s liminal position in a gradual and uneven process of pubescent change, the squeaking voice exposed the fragile condition of young male bodies and, as a corollary, the aleatory nature of gender differentiation.

This chapter examines how early modern authors, on and off the stage, figure the unstable voice as a function of an unmanageable body, focusing on the implications of these views for the dramatization of male masculinity.⁵ My approach to boy actors and the enactment of gender differs from that of prior scholars, most of whom have focused on the ramifications of boys playing the parts of women. I examine the implications of boys playing a range of male parts, including youth characters in plays by adult companies like the King’s Men and male adult roles in plays by the children’s companies that were popular in England in the first decade of the seventeenth century.⁶ Even when not playing women, boy actors were sites for complex cultural negotiations about gender identity. For as boy actors were approaching or undergoing puberty, their voices were on the verge or in the process of breaking. I argue that these unstable voices would have been a source of uneasiness for early modern male actors and audiences, for vocal control was a signifier of masculinity. As I noted in the introduction, ideal men were expected to exhibit command over their own voices as well as the voices of others—such as wives, servants, and children. Thus, the successful theatrical performance of masculinity would have been undermined by the particular vocal properties of the actors responsible for representing manliness. Rather than displacing the unstable voice from the stage—as Madden and Hoffman do in their interpretations of early modern theater—early modern plays and the theaters that presented them appear to cultivate a space onstage for these voices. In so doing, the early modern professional theater exploited men’s fears of losing control over not only the production of voice but the production of gender difference as well. Attending to the material practice of voice on the stage thus enables us to unpack the relation between vocal control and masculinity and to consider how early moderns coped theatrically with the volatility of the male performing body and concomitant anxieties about gender hierarchies.

Listening for Masculinity

To understand the role of the voice in cultural and dramatic performances of masculinity—that is, to listen for masculinity—we must recognize a historical difference between early modern and contemporary representations of the relation between gender and voice. Contemporary popular culture stereotypically depicts masculinity aurally through a bass voice. In Hoffman’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, for example, the hypermasculine Oberon (played by Rupert Everett) sports not only buff pectorals but a deep, sultry voice as well. Early modern texts also equate masculinity with a deep voice, but more is at stake in their understanding of this feature than aural aesthetics. According to early modern humoral theories, the quality of a man’s voice, as it testifies to the physiological state of his body, also denotes the condition of the social, political, and cosmic world he inhabits. Order in these macrocosmic spheres—order that is vital to a smoothly functioning patriarchal system—is intertwined with the body’s maintenance of a humoral equilibrium (balanced amounts of heat versus coldness, of wetness versus dryness).

Varying levels of body heat and moisture, explains Francis Bacon in Sylva Sylvarum (1626), determine the deepness of the voice: “Children, Women, Eunuchs have more small and shrill Voices, than Men. The Reason is … from the Dilatation of the Organ; which (it is true) is … caused by Heat. But the Cause of Changing the Voice, at the yeares of Puberty, is more obscure. It seemeth to be, for that when much of the Moysture of the Body, which did before irrigate the Parts, is drawne down to the Spermaticall vessels; it leaveth the Body more hot than it was; whence commeth the Dilatation of the Pipes.”⁷ In other words, when the testicles become “Spermaticall vessels” or agents of generation—one defining feature of early modern masculinity, notes Rebecca Ann Bach—they draw moisture away from the rest of body, causing it to become hotter. That heat subsequently dilates the vocal pipes, causing the voice to sound deeper. Levinus Lemnius in The Touchstone of Complexions (1576) considers how the body’s changing levels of heat have implications for vocal aesthetics and for character:

They therefore that have hoate bodyes, are also of nature variable, and chau[n]geable, ready, pro[m]pt, lively, lusty and applyable: of tongue, trowling, perfect, & perswasive: delyvering their words distinctly, plainlye and pleasauntlye, with a voyce thereto not squekinge and slender, but streynable, comely and audible. The thing that maketh the voyce bigge, is partlye the wydenes of the breast and vocall Artery, and partly the inwarde or internall heate, from whence proceedeth the earnest affections, vehemente motions, and fervent desyers of the mynde.⁸

The ideal voice being described in this passage, Bruce R. Smith points out, is a man’s voice, for according to humoral theory, only men have enough heat to produce what the passage suggests are aesthetically desirable vocal features.⁹ Women and children, having bodies that tend to be colder than men’s, are endowed with smaller vocal instruments; rather than producing a voice “perfect, & perswasive … comely and audible,” delivered “distinctly, plainlye and pleasauntlye,” women and children produce unpleasant, “squekinge” or inaudible, “slender” voices.

Although a voice “soft” and “low” may be, as Shakespeare’s King Lear claims, “an excellent thing in a woman” (King Lear 5.3.247, emphasis mine), the “squekinge” that characterizes the voices of women and children sets them, and anyone who sounds like them, apart, announcing the presence of an unmanageable body. Numerous early modern texts advance the notion that a squeaky voice is rooted in an uncontrollable body. For instance, Robert Herrick’s epigram mourning the state of the theater after Ben Jonson’s death laments that the stage became occupied with “men [who] did strut, and stride, and stare, not act. / Then temper flew from words; and men did squeake, / Looke red, and blow, and bluster, but not speake.”¹⁰ According to Herrick, the squeaking of an actor’s voice signals his inability to contain the emotion behind his words—”temper flew from words.” The uncontrollable squeak is not merely substandard vocal performance, Herrick maintains, but not speaking at all, a claim underscored by his end-rhyme contrasting men who “squeake” and men who “speake.” Indeed a squeaking sound is associated in the early modern period (as it continues to be today) with animals and inanimate objects. Bacon writes that objects emitting a squeaking sound include “Cart-Wheeles … when they are not liquored” and “a Doore upon the Hinges.”¹¹ The squeak is the sound made by animals, like “a pigge when he is sticked,”¹² and especially by rats.¹³ Not coincidentally, it is also the sound that women are imagined to make when in the throes of excitement, especially of a sexual nature. In Thomas Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West (1631), Roughman boasts that he will win the affections of Bess: “Ile have her … I will put her to the squeake.”¹⁴ The lusty gentleman Master Thornay of James Shirley’s Changes: or, Love in a Maze (1632) begs of Cupid’s arrow that it will “strike” his beloved and “make her squeake.”¹⁵ And Maquerelle in John Marston’s The Malcontent (1604) describes one gallant as “even one of the most busy-fingered lords. He will put the beauties to the squeak most hideously.”¹⁶ Squeaking is not just a signature of difference, but of inferiority—an aural symptom of the body’s surrender to irrational, lower passions.

As Gail Kern Paster has importantly demonstrated in The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England, early modern humoral physiology expects women, who are understood as physiologically colder than men, to lack control over their passions and their naturally leakier bodies.¹⁷ As a corollary, early modern men, who could not be “excused” in the same ways for physiological frailty, were expected to meet higher standards of bodily discipline. These differing expectations for men and women undoubtedly worked to reinforce a troubling hierarchical gender system and to propagate misogynist beliefs in women’s ostensibly “natural” inferiority to men. But the expectations also inflicted on men greater cultural pressures to maintain bodily control. Indeed, the management of bodily “flows” that Michael C. Schoenfeldt argues to be essential to identity formation in this period is imagined to be especially critical for early modern men.¹⁸ Insofar as a squeaky voice evinces an unruly body, it may be “natural”—ironically, as in the Lear example, even sometimes praised—in women but is a sign of deficiency in men.

This deficiency extends well beyond the particular male body concerned, for, as early modern writers frequently maintain, the body is a microcosm with concordances to macrocosmic spheres of family, nation, and God. Thus, a man unable to keep his voice from squeaking manifests a breakdown in patriarchal order. Male identity and, concurrently, male superiority are contingent on men maintaining control over the flow of their vocal sounds. A scene from John Marston’s play Antonio’s Revenge suggests as much. When Antonio, Pandulfo, and Alberto—the drama’s three disempowered men—join together to wail against the injustices that have brought disorder to their social and political lives, Antonio asks a page if he will “sing a dirge.” But Pandulfo discourages the singing: “No, no song; ’twill be vile out of tune” (4.2.88-89). Alberto thinks that Pandulfo is referring to the physiological state of the boy’s voice—”Indeed he’s hoarse; the poor boy’s voice is cracked” (90)—but Pandulfo, lamenting his failure to obtain retribution for the murder of his son and his banishment from the dukedom, has a more profound thought in mind:

Why, coz, why should it not be hoarse and cracked,

When all the strings of nature’s symphony

Are cracked and jar? Why should his voice keep tune,

When there’s no music in the breast of man? (4.2.91-94)

The boy’s hoarse voice is symptomatic of not only a physiological but also a social, political, and spiritual disturbance. The pubescent boy’s inability to control the microcosm of his body is figured as homologous with Pandulfo, Antonio, and Alberto’s failure to maintain macrocosmic order.

When Marston’s play was originally performed by the Children of Paul’s, a hoarse voice was not only a fictional concern for the pubescent boy represented in this scene; it may have been a real source of uneasiness for the pubescent actors playing the parts of Pandulfo, Antonio, and Alberto. Their fragile physiological condition threatened to disrupt their enactments of ideal male character. Since voice changes were considered in this period, as in our modern era, an inevitable experience of puberty, representations of and dramatic allusions to the cracked male voice served as reminders that the “homeostatic masculine body” was an impossible ideal.¹⁹ If early modern patriarchal systems were, as scholars have argued, predicated on clear and fixed differentiation between the sexes, then the pubescent voice—unpredictably modulating between (female) squeakiness and (male) gravity—not only upset binary gender systems but the logic and operation of early modern patriarchy itself.²⁰

The social significance of the voice and the theatrical production of gender difference have been examined as separate issues in feminist scholarship, but the relations between the two have rarely been discussed. Moreover, prominent work on each of these topics has been focused, in the first case, primarily on women’s bodies and, in the second case, on spectatorship and visual practice.²¹ One key exception is Dympna Callaghan’s essay on the transvestite stage, in which she examines how representations of men’s failure to control the voice can be read as attempts to grapple with the fraught process of sexual differentiation. Callaghan notes the practice of castration in barber surgeon houses that were located near the theaters, and she calls attention to the difference between the castrati of the Continent, whose vocal states are virtually fixed by surgery, and the prepubescent boys of the English stage, whose voices, subject to maturation, have the propensity to crack at any time. For Callaghan, the quality of the stage performer’s voice is ultimately symptomatic of the “presence or lack of male genital sexual equipment.”²² To be sure, male genitalia feature prominently in early modern assessments of the voice and its relation to gender. The production of voice and its relation to gender identity, however, were also thought to be influenced by and to have implications for less localized bodily processes. As I have already noted, early modern humoral physiology explains gender differences in voice as a function of the body’s heat level, which affects the size of the windpipe. Although texts associate increasing heat with the development of sexual organ function (the production of sperm), the presence or absence of these sexual organs is not the sole determinant of gender difference. Often putting genitalia aside, early modern texts present the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: From Excitable Speech to Voice in Motion
• 1 Squeaky Voices: Marston, Mulcaster, and the Boy Actor
• 2 Words Made of Breath: Shakespeare, Bacon, and Particulate Matter
• 3 Fortress of the Ear: Shakespeare’s Late Plays, Protestant Sermons, and Audience
• 4 Echoic Sound: Sandys s Englished Ovid and Feminist Criticism
• Epilogue: Performing the Voice of Queen Elizabeth
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments