ABSTRACT
Dictionaries of the future may record a new item under voice: voice terminal, a computerized telephone. Receiver and sender are at their terminals, voice terminated. The end of the voice and the beginning of the terminal: a technological image of the text, of this text, too, with its image of relays and circuits: of the short-circuiting of the voice. Voice implicates, weaves, and terminates a history that can be read back from it, read forward into it. The project described in this chapter shows the Renaissance text, voice-as-text and through a practice of voice terminated. The project begins with Marvell's 'The Nymph complaining for the death of her Faun', a text whose critical problem has always been its voice. The endplay of Marvell's 'The Nymph complaining' opens an inter-textual field into which what follows, the literary history recounted through Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton takes place and precedence.
