University of California Santa Cruz Figures of Voice In
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ FIGURES OF VOICE IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in LITERATURE by Ariane Nada Helou June 2015 The Dissertation of Ariane Nada Helou is approved: _______________________________________ Professor Deanna Shemek, chair _______________________________________ Professor Karen Bassi _______________________________________ Professor Carla Freccero _______________________________________ Professor Nina Treadwell ___________________________________ Tyrus Miller Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Copyright © by Ariane N. Helou 2015 FIGURES OF VOICE IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE Table of Contents Abstract v Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 I. Vocal Dispositions: Language, Music, and Rhetoric 13 Rhetoric: Inventio 14 Language: Elocutio and Variatio 20 Music: Dispositio 36 Figures of Voice: Memoria and Pronuntiatio 49 II. Divinity and the Ineffable: The Sibyl 53 Apollo’s Voice: The Sibyl in Antiquity 55 Early Modern Sibyls: Ariosto’s Prophetic Voices 68 Staged Sibyls: Florence, 1589 73 III. Voice and Violence: Philomela 88 Quid faciat Philomela? Ovid’s Nightingale 94 “Mad Through Sorrow”: Lavinia and Juliet 108 “The Poor Soul Sat Singing”: Ophelia and Desdemona 118 IV. (Dis)Embodied Voices: Orpheus and Echo 133 Orphea vox: Vergil and Ovid 137 Vox ipsa: Orphic Resonance in Orlando furioso 142 Vocalis nymphe: Isabella Andreini’s La Mirtilla 152 ! iii Un corpo solo di musica: Orpheus at the Opera 175 Conclusion 184 Bibliography 199 ! iv FIGURES OF VOICE IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE Ariane N. Helou ABSTRACT This multidisciplinary dissertation explores theories of vocality in modern and early modern sources and examines the status of voice as a nexus of lyrical expression, affect, and embodiment in Renaissance poetry, drama, and music. Renaissance writers were keenly aware of the power of the human voice: its persuasiveness, its capacity to move the affections, its uniqueness to the body from which it emanates. Yet modern philosophy and critical theory, fields that substantially inform Renaissance studies today, generally use the term “voice” as a metaphor that points to psychoanalytical, political, and structural questions. I argue that if we take voice to be only a metaphor, we overlook both its obvious bodily properties and the importance of oral culture and performance in Renaissance literary production; at the same time, if we consider only the faculty of vocalization, we miss the philosophical and poetic resonances of voice. In charting a genealogy of both embodied and literary voices in sixteenth-century literature, my project restores an often-overlooked dimension of vocality to considerations of early modern texts and their relation to bodies, gender, and power. Following a theoretical introductory chapter, each subsequent chapter presents case studies of vocal archetypes from ancient myth and their afterlives in Renaissance literature and culture: the Sibyl, Philomela, Orpheus, and Echo. These figures of voice were present in the humanist consciousness, articulating the tenacious, often v enigmatic relation of voice to body, affect, gender, and subjectivity that seems to have been so crucial to Renaissance theories of meaning. In these studies I draw upon literary and musicological scholarship, critical theory and philosophy, and performance histories and practices; my primary texts include sixteenth- and early- seventeenth-century literature in Italian, English, and French, in conversation with their ancient Latin and Greek sources. In tracing a more theoretically grounded relation between embodied and figurative voices, my study expands our understanding of early modern literature, music, and performance practices, and connects our contemporary culture’s attentiveness to voice to some of its most important historical roots. vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Research for this project was generously supported by the Mellon Foundation and the American Council for Learned Societies; the Huntington Library; the Italian Voices research group at the University of Leeds; and the Institute for Humanities Research and Department of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Only UC Santa Cruz could foster multidisciplinary graduate work such as this, and I am thankful to have found an intellectual home here. I am especially grateful to Karen Bassi, Carla Freccero, and Nina Treadwell for their generosity of intellect and of spirit. Mary-Kay Gamel offered invaluable counsel in the earliest stage of this project. Margaret Brose is the Virgilio to my Dante. I am indebted to Michael Warren both for his sage guidance through the labyrinth of Shakespeare scholarship and for introducing me to dramaturgy at Shakespeare Santa Cruz. My experiences there and with Santa Cruz Shakespeare fundamentally changed the course of my work; to the company members of the 2012-15 seasons, my love and gratitude. Indeed, this dissertation was shaped as much by art as by scholarship, and so great thanks are also due to Nina Treadwell and Linda Burman-Hall for many joyous sessions with UCSC’s Early Music Consort, and to Patty Gallagher, Paul Whitworth, and Danny Scheie for guiding my tentative first steps toward embodying and voicing Andreini’s and Shakespeare’s creations. For bringing arts and literature together in thought- provoking ways, many thanks to Sean Keilen and the members of Shakespeare Workshop. Finally, I owe more than I can express to Deanna Shemek for her vii! mentorship and friendship, and for modeling in everything she does how to be an exceptional scholar, a great teacher, and a caring citizen of the academic community. Dissertation writing is a lonely business, and I couldn’t have gotten through it without the support of friends and family. The gracious writers/readers of the Three Sentence Club (Eve Levavi Feinstein, Aviva Goldmann, Andrea Lankin, and Vivien Lee) shepherded early drafts, and the Lit Diss Writers’ Room cheered the latter stages. I am grateful to my insanely wonderful graduate colleagues at UCSC for their creative thinking and camaraderie: shout-outs to Shakespeare at the Edges, Apostasy, Poetry & Politics, Friday Forum, and the Sappho translators, with extra special thanks to Brenda Sanfilippo and the stupendous 2009 cohort. I treasure the love and inspiration of my friends and fellow academics who, though now scattered around the country, have been there since the very very beginning of this endeavor: Brenda Grell, Stephen Higa, and the rest of the Cal crew; and those for whose presence in my life I daily thank Providence, especially Amy Vegari, Katie Chenoweth, Teresa Villa- Ignacio, and Ghenwa Hayek. Serendipity led me to a home in Santa Cruz with the exuberantly welcoming Balassone clan, who, along with the incomparable Caroline Rodriguez, are the world’s greatest neighbors; for six years of friendship and spaghetti, mille grazie. I owe the very deepest debt of gratitude to my extraordinary family, to those far-flung across the globe and especially to those closest to home: to my brother Marc Helou and his partner Caroline Hochberg; and above all to my parents, George and Andrée Helou, whose unflagging love and support have been my rock and refuge. I dedicate this work to them. viii! INTRODUCTION Les petitz corps, culbutans de travers, Parmi leur cheute en byais vagabonde Hurtez ensemble, ont composé le monde, S’entracrochans d’acrochementz divers. L’ennuy, le soing, et les pensers ouvers, Choquans le vain de mon amour profonde, Ont façonné d’une attaché féconde, Dedans mon cuoeur l’amoureux univers. Mais s’il avient, que ce tresses orines, Ces doigtz rosins, et ces mains ivoyrines Froyssent ma vie, en quoy retournera Ce petit tout? En eau, air, terre, ou flamme? Non, mais en voix qui toujours de ma dame Par le grand Tout les honneurs sonnera.1 -- Pierre de Ronsard, Les Amours (1552) This sonnet by Pierre de Ronsard, one of the greatest poets of the French Renaissance, espouses an Epicurean materialist worldview: a universe made up of colliding, reeling, interlocking atoms. These infinitesimally tiny entities are capable of creating a cosmos vast enough to encompass all of creation and yet compact enough to be enclosed within a human heart. The blazon apportions the beloved—her golden hair, her rose-and-white hands—into an atomic assemblage. But Ronsard goes further in reducing the microcosmic petit tout into its fundamental components. He imagines that if the beloved’s beautiful atomic particles destroy the poet’s life, his material body, then the atoms that make up his body would be further reduced to their most basic, essential component. The quantum is not, as one would predict, one of the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 “These little bodies, tumbling about, collide together through their wandering sidelong fallings and created the world by intercrossing their crossed paths. Boredom, care, and open thoughts, shocking the void of my deep love, have fashioned from a fertile attachment the loving universe within my heart. But if it happens that these golden tresses, these rosy fingers, and these ivory hands shatter my life, to what shall this little all return? Into water, air, earth or fire? No, but into voice, which will always resound my lady’s honors throughout the great All.” All translations mine unless otherwise noted. Pierre de Ronsard, Les Amours (Paris: GF Flammarion, 1981), 73-74. ! 1 four elements of earth, air, fire, or water: it is the poet’s voice. Voice