Date/Time
Date(s) - 16 Nov 2015
5:15 PM - 5:15 PM
Location
Class of 1978 Pavilion, Special Collections Center
Category(ies) No Categories
The next meeting of the Workshop in the History of Material Texts will take place this Monday, November 16, at the usual time and place: 5:15pm in the Class of 1978 Pavilion in the Kislak Center on the 6th Floor of Van Pelt-Dietrich Library.
Thomas Ward (US Naval Academy) will give a talk entitled “Astrophil’s Trembling Voice: Between the Pages of *The Covntesse of Pembrokes Arcadia* (1598).”
Thomas writes:
Throughout Philip Sidney’s *Arcadia* (c. 1580), descriptions of impassioned bodies struggling for breath as they weep, sigh, and stammer their way through poems, songs, and orations repeatedly contradict what readers see on the page: not representations of fragmented and interrupted speech sounds but a steady stream of words knit together with that “flowing eloquence” for which Sidney is famous. In calling attention to the various forms of vocal difficulty that trouble the Arcadians’ utterances, Sidney’s narrator emphasizes the editorial labor he has ostensibly had to perform in order to present a clean, readable text. At the same time, the unstable, oratorical body itself, whose tics and tremors the act of writing effectively edits out, is also frequently represented as a source of oratorical power, a site for what Sidney refers to in his *Defense of Poesy* as a peculiar “forcibleness or *energia*.”
I would like to suggest that this self-conscious disconnect between sung performance and printed text provides a helpful framework for understanding the relationship between the lyrics (imperfectly) sung by the various characters within Sidney’s prose fiction and those comprising the sonnet sequence *Astrophil and Stella*, which circulated in unauthorized quartos in the early 1590s and was included in the 1598 folio edition of *Arcadia*. In my talk, I will argue that the *mise-en-page* of the sonnet sequence in the folio edition deliberately dramatizes the material contingencies of the print medium itself, finding a visual analog to the contingencies of voiced performance represented within the prose romance. But what I really look forward to discussing are the questions that animate my (provisional) claim: What (if anything) can the imagined performance situations of sonnets in the prose romance tell us about the relationship between text and performance in *Astrophil and Stella? *Do the poems in the sonnet sequence present themselves as a different kind of literary artifact from those sung by the inhabitants of Sidney’s fictional world? How might printers have responded to these competing notions of the literary text?
Thomas Ward is Assistant Professor of English at the United States Naval Academy. His book project, *Sounding Consent: Voice and Volition from Spenser to Milton*, studies the performance of consent in texts of the English Renaissance. His work on Spenser and the Irish war-cry has appeared recently in *English Literary History*, and his article on George Herbert and the sounds of devotion is forthcoming at *English Literary Renaissance*.
All are welcome! Those who do not hold University of Pennsylvania ID cards should bring another form of photo identification in order to enter the library building.