ABSTRACT
This chapter developed out of my teaching on a module called Early Modern Cultures. One of the topics we explore on this module is the early modern city, and one of the texts we use for that exploration is a brief section from Everard Guilpin’s 1598 collection of poems, Skialetheia, Or A Shadowe of Truth in Certain Epigrams and Satyres. When preparing my teaching on this material, I was struck by the resonant ambiguities generated by Guilpin’s use of literary devices to evoke London life, especially devices that had a disturbing acoustic power: alliteration, onomatopoeia, rhythm, homophones. In other words, I became fascinated by the ways Guilpin’s poetry merges aurality and literacy, through realizing the sites and sounds of the city. How can a writer deplore such sounds without echoing them? How did the city’s sounds constitute and compromise urban and satiric subjectivities?
