The conference went splendidly, and I’m very grateful for the thoughtful contributions of all of the speakers, participants, and questioners! Thanks also to the many folks (including those who attended virtually) who have offered positive feedback since the event.
As I mentioned earlier, this blog might serve to continue the conversation, or to recall it for us as we continue to pore over the issues of the conference in our own work. In this spirit, I’ll reflect a bit on the day, using R. Malcolm Smuts’s and Gary Tomlinson’s rich and productive responses to the papers as my guide.
Chrisopher Marsh’s multi-media presentation (which involved typescript, larynx and fiddle) began the day by drawing our attention to the musical and bibliographic networks in which early modern broadside ballads circulated. These networks, Marsh showed, were thoroughly conditioned by technological endeavors including the reprinting and recycling of the same woodcut figures in numerous ballads, a practice that granted these stock figures intriguing careers of influence. Ballad networks also included tunes that were repurposed or combined to suit diverse ballad texts – a practice that would have linked ballads together for early modern audiences familiar with the tunes. As Gary Tomlinson observed, Marsh uncovered a world of social activity that is parsed anew with each technological innovation: print brought in new possibilities only to close down others. Marsh’s discussion of ballad networks thus opened up for us the broad problem of how technologies and (as Malcolm Smuts put it) “hard-wired” physiological influences condition – and are themselves conditioned by – social activity and artforms.
As Smuts suggested, all of the papers grappled with how to recover, think about, or come to terms with the vast field of lived experience, sensation and information that writing – and language itself – fails to record. Juliet Fleming’s provocative paper, Smuts went on to note, worked to theorize this problem at its broadest level, asking us to consider not only that literature itself is not always, or necessarily, a written art – but that we still do not even know what writing is in the first place. Fleming offered the category of adaptation – derived from evolutionary biology in order to describe how the human “makes do” amidst the pressures of a constantly changing environment – and the intertwining of technology and biology that is involved in this process. Building on and (ambitiously) re-conceptualizing the theory of writing articulated in her book Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England, Fleming unsettled us from the assumption that the purview of literary scholarship is the study of letters and moved us (as Tomlinson noted) towards a more capacious theory of the archive as a cultural process embedded in a historical environment.
My own way into problems of writing and textuality in early modern “poesie” was through the seventeenth-century Lord Mayor’s Show, whose poets were paid not only for writing but for a complex host of performative and artisinal responsibilities ranging from overseeing the design of pageant floats to making breakfast for the child actors. Tomlinson wondered whether my notion of the “network” of mediation in which these poets worked might be described instead as a taskscape – Tim Ingold’s theory of all of the interlocking activities and actions that unfold through a constant series of feedback loops with an environment. I’ve enjoyed some stimulating reading thanks to Tomlinson – and I’ve also found myself turning back to Bruno Latour (from whom I derive the notion of a “network”) with Tomlinson’s observations in mind. For me, Latour’s “Actor-Network Theory” remains a uniquely helpful means of describing the social formation of early modern poesie because (more so than Ingold, for whom action is fundamentally about movement, dwelling, pattern and practice), Latour allows forms the status of “actors.” The concept of “immaterial couplings” in the Parisian subway system, the narrative of British history derived from Troy, the myth of Orpheus: all potentially act within a Latourian network alongside people, things, habits and structures – and Latour’s attention to the ways in which such ideas and forces move through the social world seems to me helpful for coming to terms with the unique way in which literature interacts with its environment.
Michael Plunkett’s discussion of multi-mediation in Ben Jonson concluded the morning panels by exploring a question that emerged in Christopher Marsh’s paper, namely how one medium (in this case, print) remediates another (here, visual or acoustic experience). Jonson’s elaborate paratextual apparatus in the printed record of Masque of Queenes, Plunkett argued, “sets” the masque in Chaucer’s House of Fame, moving a world of allusion into the page as a physical structure of sorts. Plunkett showed how Jonson crams every possible learned gloss into marginal blocks that threaten to overwhelm the masque text itself, creating an “aural architecture” by literally setting one poem into another. For my part, I’d like to know how more about the type of allusion (if it is allusion) that Plunkett described – since it seems to me to challenge what we think of as discursive or symbolic “reference” in literary texts. His paper seems to reveal, instead, a process of incorporating structures and media into other works – which is perhaps why architectural metaphors are appropriate.
Bruce Smith’s paper on the circulation of sound in the Shakespearean theater was a particular treat for those of us who know his book The Acoustic World of Early Modern England well, since (as Tomlinson pointed out) Smith worked to develop and expand some of the key arguments of this project in the context of a multifarious, interactive, circulatory world in which sound overlaps with other kinds of sensory experiences and movements, including visual experience. Smith asked us to consider how sound on the Shakespearean stage conditions where we look, and how the disassociation of sight and sound fashions our experience of space as audience members. Sounds that we cannot see (which are rife in Shakespeare) have a series of important effects on an audience – sometimes directing our attention within spaces of social intimacy or confinement, sometimes inspiring us with a fascination over what is without the fictional locus of the stage, sometimes even turning us withinwards, to an experience of our own consciousness. For early moderns, all of these sensory experiences were tied together through the air, that element that (not unlike what we call “mass” media today) was understood to mediate all sensory experience.
Thomas Ward’s innovative paper, which discussed the ways in which sixteenth-century spelling reform brought out early modern concerns about the unmooring of the voice from social identity and sumptuary order, helped draw our attention to some of the political dimensions of multi-mediation. Not least because of its longstanding and fundamental role in Western conceptions of subjectivity, the voice is a particularly crucial site of contestation over social degree. John Hart’s insistence that sounds must correspond to letters thus depends upon and even derives from the notion of the “autonomous individual” that can be stabilized within the social hierarchy. But, at the same time, Hart’s system introduces a surprising degree of subversiveness into the concept of individuation through the voice – threatening to unravel (as Ward put it) “pronunciation’s capacity to mark social difference.”
Leslie Dunn’s discussion of the “unfreezing” tendencies of theatrical song brought us back to the category of the network in a new way. Dunn allowed us to see how the many textual problems surrounding written evidence of song – in which it is extremely difficult to tell what was and was not sung – is not simply about loss or deteriorization. Instead, snatches of song, which are often indistinguishable from speech in printed editions of plays, amount to moments or nodes of connection to a “larger, polyphonic cultural discourse.” Snatches thus offer rich insight into a “molten” poetic and musical culture from which parts were continually breaking off, gesturing back at, or returning to a larger network. And as Tomlinson, Smuts, and others emphasized, the category of the “snatch” as Dunn elaborated it – a discrete metonym of a larger cultural process – provides an especially helpful means of accounting for the relationship between early modern poesie and its environment.
Tessie Prakas’s paper explored the fine and porous line between musical ideas and musical habits in seventeenth century devotional poetry – locating a “social music” in George Herbert’s The Temple that is conditioned by liturgical practice. Prakas asked us to consider the ways in which multi-mediation operates in a social and environmental space – and how it unsettles boundaries between individuals. To my ear, her paper offered a way of thinking about the interaction between speculative and practical music less in terms of John Hollander’s classic account of the “untuning” of the sky (in which seventeenth century literary culture grew gradually disenchanted with the abstract system of the music of the spheres) and more in terms of the continual interaction and interplay between idealized discourse or harmony and the performative process of music.
In sum, a very rewarding day! My brief “record” here aims only for the loosest of sketches or recollections – to paraphrase Thomas Ward, it offers the tiniest fraction of the social information at stake – and others are very welcome to offer further comments or posts as they wish.
Above all, many thanks again to all of those who generously participated in the conference!
