Judith Pascoe's third monograph appealingly unites the major preoccupations of her prior two, and reveals more of her innovative methodology. Her first book, Romantic Theatricality: Gender, Poetry, and Spectatorship (Cornell UP, 1997), examines theatricality and performative behavior in venues outside of the theatre. Her second book, The Hummingbird Cabinet: A Rare and Curious History of Romantic Collectors (Cornell UP, 2005), critiques the practice of collecting material objects. From her fascination with the public personae that permeated Romantic society, to her study of a whimsical, original, and materialist subject, Pascoe has progressed to a whimsical, materialist exploration of a theatrical persona. Chronicling her obsession with learning about the sound of Sarah Siddons's voice, Pascoe's new work—winner of the 2012 Barnard Hewitt prize from ASTR—is a quirky and unorthodox enterprise in cultural studies, endeavoring to theorize how the Romantic audioscape differed from that of today.
In this ground-breaking investigation of the importance of voice in Romantic culture, Pascoe provides a cogent, thoroughly researched argument that Romantic theatregoers were far more attuned to the sounds, and more discriminating of the qualities and nuances, of the human voice than we are today. She posits that, before recording technology, one would be more aware of the ephemerality of the voice, its qualities that vary with venue and circumstance, and its eventual decay and loss to posterity. Today, the trivial reproducibility of sounds results in their cheapened status.
What is unexpected in Pascoe's analysis is her foregrounding of her ardent and quixotic research process: she incorporates both scholarly language and an anecdotal tone, relating pedagogical ruminations and quotidian experiences. These sections potentially exemplify how innovative interdisciplinary work can be combined with honesty and humility to produce a galvanizing set of insights for both students and peers. No doubt some will perceive Pascoe's methodology as an unapologetic validation of the personal and an acknowledgment of the idiosyncratic nature of scholarly pursuit; others will likely grow impatient with the banal nature of some of her disclosures. Scholars of composition and rhetoric have long disparaged traditional literary scholars for their abstruse and arcane work and their exclusion of the personal from the realm of the academic. What this reviewer finds nearly as intriguing as Pascoe's analysis is the fact that a major university press has published such an unorthodox study. Perhaps Pascoe's book adumbrates a more respected place for the personal within scholarly exchange. No doubt in these economic times, marketability and audience appeal also account for this shift.
Regardless, one wishes that Pascoe had theorized the construction of her book as clearly as she has delineated the process of her research. Her revelation of the mundane logistics, frustrations, and discoveries inherent in the process of writing a book will hold few surprises for scholarly readers, although they may be invaluable to graduate students. What might have been more illuminating is a discussion of how she came to decide upon such a revelatory voice of her own in a book about voice, and whether she encountered difficulties in persuading her editor of its value.
Pascoe's study fruitfully joins scholarship on sound and acoustics (such as Sound Theory Sound Practice, edited by Rick Altman [Routledge, 1992]) with other studies focusing upon a cultural or literary period (including those by Emily Thompson, John M. Picker, Bruce R. Smith, Wes Folkerth, and Laury Magnus). She begins by rehearsing the overdetermined nature of Romantic audiences’ literally hysterical reactions to hearing Siddons's voice, arguing that an actor during the Romantic age was heard like a musician is today, by an audience appreciative of the voice's cadences and aware of its imperfections. She adduces thorough and well-chosen evidence taken from reviews, letters, and theatrical memoirs, such as a review complaining that Thomas Sheridan's voice sounded only C-sharp and B-flat (35), thus instancing the reviewer's presumption of his readership's knowledge of music.
In terms of Romanticism, Pascoe's most intriguing element is her discussion of William Wordsworth's “The Solitary Reaper.” Pascoe points out that the poem was inspired not by a live woman, but by a lyrical phrase in a travel memoir. She compares Wordsworth's quest to recapture a voice never heard with her own, using his poem as a validation for the quintessentially Romantic project of nostalgic imaginative recreation that they both undertake. Pascoe might have expanded on this confluence and positioned her study more explicitly as an extension of the reconceptualization of Wordsworth; no longer viewed critically as the solitary poetic genius, ensconced amid Nature and withdrawn from the world, Wordsworth has now been rehistoricized, his process of poetic creation assessed dialogically. More reference to Wordsworthian scholarship would have highlighted how Pascoe contributes to the growing links between canonical Romanticism and the theatrical and performative realms.
Pascoe's juxtaposition of today's technological age with an era predating voice recording serves to deepen our understanding of each through the lens of the other. She insightfully notes that today's theatres and auditoriums are built so “the voice can travel unimpeded from the performer's mouth to the listener's ear” (64), whereas Siddons's contemporaries experienced a different set of acoustical aesthetics. The reverberation that gave Drury Lane its “distinct acoustic signatur[e]” has today been “reconceived as noise and erased by acoustic materials aimed at stopping sounds from careening around a room and reinforcing a voice with echoey ghost versions of itself” (64). This multiply echoed sound may have been crucial to audiences’ admiration for Siddons's voice, and through her very self-conscious research process Pascoe deepens her understanding of what it must have been like for Siddons's fans to know her voice and the lines in her oeuvre so well that they could distinguish among its minute variations. Pascoe contrasts such aural attentiveness to today's environment, in which we are so bombarded by sounds that we often ignore them just to function.
A source of real delight in Pascoe's book is her luminous wit and love of language, both of which elegantly ornament her discussion, as when she heralds “[t]he brash arrival of critical theory, wearing a garter belt and smoking Galoises” (30). Quite beyond such superficial pleasures, however, by anatomizing the function of the aural within a period long ignored by theatre historians, Pascoe contributes valuably to our understanding of stage performance and audience response in the nineteenth century and beyond.
