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Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England. By Gina Bloom. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007; pp. 288. $59.95 cloth.

“The term ‘person,’” Gina Bloom reminds us, “is derived from the Latin persona, meaning literally ‘through sound’. . .” (58). Although the overlap between the vocabulary of identity with that of the theatre has received much critical attention from scholars of the Renaissance, Bloom’s book Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England reveals the scientific, religious, and cultural forces that perform essential functions shaping this connection. Bloom enriches our understanding of dramatic engagement with the voice as well as the embodied spiritual and gendered components of vocal performance. Bloom aims to construct a “material history of [the] detached voice” (4), and indeed this elegant study expands the field of material history as it illuminates vocal and auditory practices key to early modern subject formation. As articulated in her Introduction, the chief fields in which a history of the voice holds significant consequence are materialism, performance, and gender. While embracing its aims and methods, Bloom challenges materialist scholarship to acknowledge the material properties of voice, which has “a history of production, ownership and exchange” (5) similar to the stage props of Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda’s influential Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama, and which shares with theatrical objects the epistemological instability that generates transgressive space on the Renaissance stage. The unpredictability of voice is emphasized by early modern representations of voice as “unruly matter” (6) that holds the potential to resist hierarchies of gender; to that end, Bloom yokes Judith Butler’s “politics of expression with Derrida’s emphasis on the materiality of the linguistic medium” (14), a theoretical approach that reinforces her central claim of subject formation per sona. The chapters of Voice in Motion follow a vocal trajectory in their focus, beginning with the production of sound in an unstable body, traveling through the air, and entering (or being blocked by) the listener’s equally unstable body. For Chapter 1, “Squeaky Voices: Marston, Mulcaster, and the Boy Actor,” the bodies in question are those of the pubescent boys on London’s stages. In light of social authority rooted in a rich, deep voice (as opposed to the high, trembling voice of women), the pubescent boy actor represents a body in flux, capable of moving between levels of gender hierarchy. Richard Mulcaster’s 1581 Positions Concerning the Training Up of Children reflects early modern priorities of “disciplining children’s unruly vocal systems” (32), a pedagogy aimed at maintaining clear boundaries between vocal agency in boys and girls as well as men and women. Nor did boys only perform in women’s roles; in her discussion of Cynthia’s Revels, Bloom highlights the anxieties of boy actors playing women, children, and men. Early modern references to boys (even a young Falstaff) as “cracks” indicate that the vocal performance of pubescent Book Reviews