Jennifer Richards, Voices and Books in the English Renaissance: A New History of Reading. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. 352 pp + 24 illustrations. ISBN: 9780198809067. £65 hardback.
Jennifer Richards’ new study is a belated but most welcome intervention into a discussion initiated in the twentieth century through ground-breaking studies by scholars like Marshall McLuhan and Walter J. Ong on concepts like ‘orality’ and ‘print culture’. While book history is a firmly established element of early modern studies and the study of ‘material culture’ continues to inform scholarship, Richards’ rich book re-focuses and re-theorises the discussion in relation to something seemingly much more elusive: the voice as embodied in print. In particular, Richards offers a challenge to the widespread notion that the advent of print contributed to the silencing of the reader. On the contrary, she argues, there is ample evidence for a wide array of features that facilitate the empowerment of the reader on the printed page – which should not be simply read as ‘oral residue’ in the vein of Ong. Instead of seeing ‘oral’ elements as part of something soon to be surpassed, Richards reads ‘vocality’ – her preferred term – into the seemingly silent world of print and reading. This term, less suggestive of ‘illiteracy’ according to Richards, provides the cue for a wide-ranging investigation into how even silent reading came with its own embodiment of the spoken voice.
The book is divided into two main sections, with three more general chapters in the first and two ‘case studies’ in the second. Richards’ Introduction situates her project in the context of debates concerning orality and print culture in the early modern period. She observes that many of the claims by scholars like McLuhan, Ong and Elizabeth Eisenstein have been challenged, except for the point that print ‘finalized a shift from the ear to the eye’ (8). This is precisely where Richards’ own challenge is located: in the insistence that the voice continued to be a presence on the printed page in the English Renaissance. Richards’ discussion does not aim for full coverage of the scholarly discussion of voice versus writing – indeed, Derrida’s entire discussion of voice is quickly sidestepped in a paragraph that only cites him through Jonathan Goldberg (23) – but demonstrates a welcome focus on specific historical and empirical evidence. In particular, Richards signals, her interest lies in prose writing because, she says, ‘its authors often assume that their work will or could be read aloud and imagine the effects of the voice on interpretation in ways we have been slow to notice’ (25).
Chapter 1, ‘The Voice on the Page’, provides much of the theoretical scaffolding for the subsequent discussion. While much ground-breaking scholarly work has gone into parsing the traces that Renaissance readers left on books, such work, Richards suggests, also privileges the visual dimension. However, the vocal cues of printed books are ubiquitous, including fonts, punctuation and even the alphabet itself, ‘the letters of which, after all, are the signs of the sounds involved in the articulation of the words which we use when speaking’ (43). One significant context here is the extensive debate on spelling and punctuation in the latter part of the sixteenth century, and a book like Edmund Coote’s The English Schoole-Maister (1596), which was republished extensively in the seventeenth century and contained numerous examples of specifically vocal cues (e.g., the hyphen), serves as an example of ‘what students learning to read may have sounded like’ (51). Importantly, reading in this way produces an ‘embodied understanding’ (67), in which attendance to performance makes the reader comprehend the text, and writers like Nashe seem to have thought very carefully about how to use punctuation rhetorically and performatively rather than strictly grammatically.
Naturally, the debate on spelling was also one of education, and Richards’ next chapter, ‘The Voice in the Schoolroom’, takes on this vital context. Again, ‘vocality’ rather than ‘orality’ is the preferred term here since it emphasises the aspect of voice-training in grammar schools. Richards suggests that pronuntiatio has been overlooked in the modern study of rhetoric, and that the separation of elocutio from pronuntiatio has had the unfortunate result of silencing the Renaissance classroom: ‘once these two parts of rhetoric are reintegrated […] it is possible to “hear” the voices in the schoolroom again’ (87). Classical manuals on rhetoric like Quintilian’s and the Rhetorica ad Herennium did cover pronuntiatio, but Richards suggests that we should also look closer into the aspect of elocutio to recover the dynamics of the voice. It is of course a matter of discussion whether the lofty ideals of humanist educators reflected the noisy reality of schoolrooms. Moreover, Richards covers not only grammar schools but also the presence of women’s voices in the classroom and on the page. Indeed, women did articulate the idea of bringing the written word to life with their voice, and women can also be seen to explore male as well as female voices.
Of course, no discussion of reading and the voice in Renaissance England can escape the context of the Reformation and religious practice. This is at the focus of Richards’ third chapter, ‘The Voice in the Church’, which recognizes the central question of ‘who has access to the word of God’ (133) and the contested issue of how best to communicate it. Anglicans would have defended a plain style of preaching that eschewed reliance on charismatic preachers – in other words suggesting that the word of God was accessible to everyone, including silent readers. This is not to say, however, that their puritan opponents merely relied on preaching in a literal sense: in fact, Richards argues, the Marprelate pamphlets form an important context since they suggest a model of ‘oral reading’ according to which puritan preaching can be embodied on the printed page. Voicing the word of God became not just a matter of sermons versus silent reading; both the Anglican and puritan positions involved a crucial element of recognizing and embodying the voice on the printed page. This is evident, Richards suggests, in both the Marprelate pamphlets and in the attacks on them. Of course, Thomas Nashe was one of the most vocal enemies of Martin Marprelate, and Richards also draws on his later Christs Teares over Jerusalem (1593) in a discussion that is attentive to the sermonising, vocal qualities of the text but perhaps ignores the intimacy of its setting and the relation of Nashe to his pious patroness Lady Elizabeth Carey. Nashe’s pamphlet is certainly meant to be experienced as a ‘performance’ (178), but for whom and for what purpose?
Chapter 4, the first of the two chapters focusing on case studies, sustains the focus from Part 1, in that it examines how the voice was represented on the printed page, specifically in John Bale’s paratextual commentary on Anne Askew’s Examinations and in relation to William Baldwin’s activities as a writer and as a corrector in the printing house. Bale’s representation of Askew ‘turns the written form of her oral testimony into a Reformation script in print that can be embodied and re-animated by its readers’ (188). Such a reading is attentive to the complexity of the situation: Bale may be a loud and intrusive annotator, but the book also has Askew assume the voice of King David. This, Richards suggests, complicates both the narrative of women’s voices being silenced, and the narrative of the presumed shift from ear to eye. In the second half of the chapter, Richards turns to Baldwin’s representation of illiterate men and ‘makes the idea of the corrector the model for his listening reader, alert to the risks of the printed voice’ (189). Baldwin’s work as a corrector on Erasmus’s Paraphrases influenced his own work as a writer in the pamphlet Westerne Wyll, often attributed to him, and the more well-known Myrroure for Magistrates, which he compiled. This work, Richards suggests, reflects ‘Baldwin’s preoccupation with the effects of delivery – and sympathy – on moral-political judgements’ (219). Similarly, the pamphlet Beware the Cat betrays a preoccupation with how the voice can be deceptive and therefore trains us to be ‘discriminating listening readers’ (225).
If Baldwin was attentive to the potential and risks of the embodied voice, this is even more true, Richards suggests, of Thomas Nashe, the subject of her last chapter. As Richards serves as one of the general editors for the forthcoming Oxford edition of Nashe’s works (and one of her previous books, Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern English Literature, also dealt with the Nashe-Harvey quarrel), it is no coincidence that Voices and Books focuses quite a great deal on the Elizabethan pamphleteer. Indeed, Richards’ fondness of and erudition on Nashe are in evidence throughout. Picking up at a spot where many Nashe critics have begun, namely C. S. Lewis’s long infamous claim that Nashe had nothing to say, Richards de-centres the creation of meaning to the ears and mouths of readers, also focusing on the aspect of performance in Nashe’s prose. It may not be a ground-breaking new insight that a pamphlet like Have with you to Saffron-Walden ‘is imagined by Nashe almost as a theatrical experience’ (29); indeed, the performative aspects of Nashe’s prose are something that scholars, including myself, have previously tried to address. But the range and comprehensiveness of Richards’ contextualisation make for genuine insight. It is Nashe’s attention to voice, Richards moreover suggests, that sets him apart from his arch-enemy Gabriel Harvey, whose extensive written annotations were famously discussed by Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton in a now-classic article. In Richards’ reading, Harvey becomes a fundamental representative of the silent reader, whereas Nashe places (vocal) performance at the centre of attention. Her version of Harvey reads like a somewhat obsessed pedant for whom the edge of the world – or perhaps rather its centre – is the margin of the page. Such a representation of Nashe and Harvey can border on the overly Manichean and makes little of the extent to which Harvey too was aware of the voice in the text. However, her readings of Nashe’s works – particularly Pierce Penilesse, Summers Last Will and Testament, The Unfortunate Traveller and Have with you to Saffron-walden – are illuminating in their insistence that we recover the vocal, performative dimension of reading Nashe. Such an insistence also informs Richards’ brief conclusion, which brings her book up to date in suggesting that the digital age may not necessarily replace the printed book so much as make us recover its fundamental vocal dimension. This is a genuine call for future research: ‘no technology’, Richards concludes, ‘can yet compare with the human voice’ (289).
As this overview suggests, this is a wide-ranging, intriguing study that, by its very focus on the seemingly irrecoverable voices of the past, demonstrates the vital importance of early modern literature to the present time. This relevance is not discussed at length, which only makes Richards’ study the better: indeed, it raises questions as much as it answers them. Generally, it may seem flippant to ask for more in a study as rich as this, but those very questions, I believe, testify to the strengths of Richards’ book rather than to its weaknesses. For example, one could have wished for more consideration of how vocal cues affect the reading of printed drama, where the connection with voice is even more obvious (apart from a brief discussion of Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedie of Miriam in Chapter 2 and a subsection on Summers Last Will and Testament in the Nashe chapter, plays only furnish occasional examples in the book). The parallels to music are another little explored area: potentially, the reading of musical notation for vocal scores, which is touched upon briefly in Chapter 3 in the context of how to intone the Lord’s Prayer, could perhaps have offered additional insight into how voice was embodied in print. At an even more general level, there is reason to think about how far-reaching Richards’ claims are. Indeed, the subtitle of the book, A New History of Reading, is somehow both too wide and too narrow: it is clearly about more than reading yet covers almost exclusively the English context. Why and how Renaissance voices were embodied on the printed page in other political, religious, and educational contexts is a question that would no doubt make for other, equally interesting studies.
The organisation of the volume generally makes very good sense, and the attention Richards pays to the educational and religious contexts of the voice is obviously motivated. At times, the very range of Richards’ topic and interests can make her argument somewhat entangled: for example, the lengthy detour over printing-house practice in Chapter 4 makes the chapter creak somewhat under the weight of its own complexity. But these are minuscule complaints when compared to the insight, erudition and intellectual excitement that inform Richards’ study. Voices and Books in the English Renaissance picks up on a still vital discussion, and, more importantly, transforms it in doing so.
Per Sivefors
Linnaeus University
51.1.11
Comments
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