Also

Juliet Fleming's paper will be called "The Pre-Historical Renaissance," and Leslie Dunn's title is "Catches and Snatches: Tuning In to the Early Modern Song Network."

Keynote Topics

Details about the talks from our visitors are coming in. Bruce Smith's title will be "Within, Without, Withinwards: The Circulation of Sound in Shakespeare's Theater," and Christopher Marsh will speak on "Balladry as a Multi-Media Matrix: Best-Selling Songs and Their Significance in Seventeeth-Century England."

Here is a synopsis of Christopher Marsh's paper:

The humble broadside ballad was many things: a song for singing; a text for reading; a picture to look at; a script for dramatic performance; and a piece of music for dancing (ballads were also recycled as linings for tins, fillers for book spines, and toilet paper). In this talk, an attempt will be made to reconstruct the multi-faceted system of signification through which early modern English people composed and comprehended ballads. It will focus in particular on the links between ballads and the capacity of this interconnectedness to generate meaning. Tunes moved from text to text. Pictures were used again and again in shifting combinations. Ballads were full of verbal references to one another. Successful songs were imitated and satirised. Rival composers engaged in ding-dong dialogues. In all these respects, the significance of a particular song cannot be imagined merely by reading its silent and unmoving text. This observation will be developed through an exploration of the period’s top 100 songs, as identified by the leading ballad publishers of the seventeenth century.

Abstract for "Musical Passports: the Circulation of Liturgical Sound in the Seventeenth Century"

Tessie Prakas, Yale University

My paper considers the relationship of seventeenth-century devotional poetry to the liturgical performance of sound. I wish to expand upon Ramie Targoff’s focus on the metrical psalms as notable exceptions to the exclusion of much versified material from reformed Protestant worship, and as potential instruments for its reinstitution, by suggesting that certain poets perceived and variously utilized the potency of such material. Though George Herbert and others may well have incorporated certain elements of liturgical music into their verse in the hope of facilitating its inclusion in divine worship, I suggest that we might also consider this a decentering of the liturgical space, a poetic re-appropriation of liturgical material that enables different and (perhaps) increased access to it. Herbert’s 'Antiphon (I)', for example, facilitates individual replication of attendance at an occasion of corporate worship through readerly ventriloquizing of both the congregational chorus and the ministerial versicle. I consider the potentially troubling repercussions of these multiple voicing possibilities, specifically the increased liturgical authority they seem to grant both clerical and, crucially, lay readers – authority that may also be figured as creative agency, as in Thomas Traherne’s hope, expressed in the dedication to his 'Centuries of Meditations', that the dedicatee, after reading the work, will ‘write ther[e]in’. I will question how such issues of textual generation and performance are complicated by verbal and textual circulation, positing the coteries in which these poets’ work probably circulated as further, more or less formalized alternatives to an ecclesiastical community.

A Queen's Masque in Chaucer's House (abstract)

Michael Plunkett, CUNY Graduate Center

Ben Jonson faced several challenges when he set about publishing The Masque of Queenes. Could a theatrical spectacle be set to page which at the event of its performance comprised dance, music, costume, royal pageantry, and, perhaps most difficultly, an elaborate architectural apparatus by Jonson's collaborator and rival, Inigo Jones? Could a playwright put his name on the text of a masque whose composition was not only thoroughly collaborative but of which verses for recitation, Jonson's contribution, comprised only a small part?

In this paper I argue that Jonson's elaborate ancillary apparatus to the quarto Masque of Queenes (1609)--his dedicatory preface and introduction, his massy stage directions and annotations far in excess of the masque's ostensible content--represent an attempt to transcend the event of its performance by subsuming multi-media spectacle into a fraught print poetics.

A related claim follows. In a stage direction Jonson sets his masque in Chaucer's House of Fame. That dream vision, I argue, concerning as it does collaborative authorship and the process of effacing the same, poetry's interrelationships with other media, the ephemeral and the problematically permanent in art, as well as aural architecture, constitutes a substantive ur- and inter-text for Jonson's masque-publishing project hitherto neglected by critics.

Abstract for "'Drown’d in noyse': Multi-Mediation in the Lord Mayor's Show"

Scott Trudell, Rutgers University

The annual pageants through the streets of London marking the inauguration of the Lord Mayor were among the most elaborate multi-media events of early modern England, replete with finely wrought pageant floats, polyphonic consorts, fireworks, lavish costumery, complex allegorical processions, and decorous oratory and song allusive to classical mythology. Many of the most prominent poets of the period composed verses and songs for these outdoor entertainments, took on a variety of organizational responsibilities in their production, and wrote narrative descriptions of them for the press. Like the printed masque in the hands of Ben Jonson, printed accounts of pageants presented a unique opportunity for poets to fashion a relatively privileged space of professionalized literary authorship. Yet the Lord Mayor’s Show remained one of the most radically performative of Renaissance artforms, defined by a collective and mediatory mode of production in which ideal humanistic visions proceeded alongside and even found themselves composed of popular carnival, ephemeral decay, mud-soaked crowds and drunken uproar. In this paper I suggest that the relationship between occasional Lord Mayor’s Shows embedded in multisensory outdoor contexts and the printed texts that claimed to mediate them provides a new way of thinking about the interdependence of print, script and performance in early modern culture.

Abstract for "Properti and Proper Voisez in Sikstįnþ Senturi Speling Reform"

Thomas Ward, University of Pennsylvania

This paper examines John Hart’s Orthographie (1569), a system of spelling that attempted “to use as many letters in our writing as we doe voyces or breathes in speaking, and no more.” In the increasingly polyphonic world of sixteenth-century England, where expanding international trade brought with it an influx of new words and accents, the question of how graphically to represent the “natural” English voice was inextricable from the problem of how to incorporate newly mobilized forms of property and personhood into existing social structures. Hart’s text itself attests to the embeddedness of spelling reform within these larger economic concerns with its comparisons of alphabetic letters to clothes, coats-of-arms, and other markers of social identity. Hart’s desire to eliminate what he calls lexical “superfluitie” by fixing voiced sound onto written letter reflects a broader cultural resistance to the increasingly fluid relations between people and the material things that had hitherto constituted them as subjects. At the same time, in offering to teach “straungers or the rude countrie English man” how to speak English “as the best sort do use to speake it,” his method threatened to unmoor voice from person as traditionally defined by things like property, lineage, and place of origin.