ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses how actual music in the Chester play encapsulates how the shrew’s voice registered in late medieval culture. It discusses the fact that the dyadic portrayal of gendered linguistic modes, the topos of the Philosopher and the Shrew, gestures toward another tradition that represents the feminized realm of the voice as a collective organism, a group of women whose plurality nevertheless creates a singular identity: sirens, bacchantes, gossips, fishwives. Uxor Noah’s loyalty to her friends, her gossips, is her most distinctive and puzzling feature in both the York and Chester plays. The account of the Deluge offered in the Chester play presents a version of the story that attributes Uxor’s rebellion directly to her identity as a gossip who is elaborated as another sonic feature in the medieval soundscape. The gossips’ song in the Chester play must be contextualized in terms of medieval discourse about gossips.
