Sonic, Polyphonic, and Architectonic Sounds: Listening to the Echoes of Lady Mary Wroth's Urania.

Highlighting a tendency in literary criticism to sever the performing voice from its surrounding space, this article argues for a reading practice that exposes and listens to what I identify as the "auditory space" behind words. It will follow that rereading texts with a particularly sonic sensitivity allows for a more privileged understanding of how the voice functions when subject to the acoustic conditions of space; as such, this article analyses Mary Wroth's Urania in light of its opening echo poem, situating it in a culture of musical and architectural echoic staging. It will be argued that Wroth's familiarity with the acoustic space of Penshurst Place - her childhood home - and the madrigal and cori spezzati forms directly shapes her ability to invest words with a polyphonic, multi-voiced sound and to project them into a landscape specially crafted to encourage their capacity to resound. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]