Overview

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.

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9780191874031

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Reviews

Unwritten Poetry offers major interventions not only in early modern literary studies but in musicology, gender studies, theater history, sexuality studies, book history, and media studies. What is more, each of the book's four chapters makes similarly important interventions in the particular subjects that Scott Trudell takes in hand: Sidney, boy actors, Shakespeare, and Milton. I can't overstate how ambitious Trudell's project is or overemphasize my admiration for the solidity, dispatch, and imagination with which he has met the challenges posed by such a wide-ranging book. --Bruce R. Smith (University of Southern California), author of The Acoustic World of Early Modern England 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 dmusic 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. --Kenneth Gross (University of Rochester), author of Shakespeare's Noise

Author Information

Scott A. Trudell, University of Maryland Scott A. Trudell is Assistant Professor 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, gender studies, and theories of the lyric. He has published in journals including 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.

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