Trudell's nwritten Poetry is one of several books in this year's crop that especially impresses * Joseph Loewenstein, SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 * Trudell skilfully balances textual analysis, historical detail, and insightful applications of modern media theory to striking effect. Modern anachronisms and tastes are swept aside in order to address the full significance of early modern song and performance. Unwritten Poetry: Song, Performance, and Media in Early Modern England is essential for scholars interested in the period's poetry, music, and theatre. * Frank Swannack, Parergon * We can hope that this book with its focus on the canonical paves the way for exploration of further silenced histories, looking at the place of musical production in the work of authors who are more diverse in their social, gender and educational profile. For those interested in Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton and early modern poetry more widely, this book deftly captures the "simultaneous consternation and exhilaration that poets expressed over their inability
to govern the meanings of song". * Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, Times Literary Supplement * This valuable, thought-provoking work should inspire a lot of discussion. ...Highly Recommended * CHOICE * Unwritten Poetry offers major interventions not only in early modern literary studies but in musicology, gender studies, theater history, sexuality studies, book history, and media studies. What is more, each of the book's four chapters makes similarly important interventions in the particular subjects that Scott Trudell takes in hand: Sidney, boy actors, Shakespeare, and Milton. I can't overstate how ambitious Trudell's project is or overemphasize my
admiration for the solidity, dispatch, and imagination with which he has met the challenges posed by such a wide-ranging book. * Bruce R. Smith (University of Southern California), author of The Acoustic World of Early Modern England * Unwritten Poetry is a beautifully articulate study of how English Renaissance poetry and drama dis-articulate themselves, a finely written investigation of the myriad ways that written texts collaborate with and yield place to immaterial powers of song and music, music performed and music merely imagined, music sometimes lost but also surviving in silence, sounds 'buried and overwritten'- forms of beauty that carry their own kind of danger, whether they
belong to Orpheus or Ophelia. The book's scrupulous, resourceful scholarship and its probing critical readings bring one back to familiar works with fresh fascination, a fresh sense of their invention, intelligence, risk, strangeness, and powers of play. * Kenneth Gross (University of Rochester), author of Shakespeare's Noise *