Prologue
The Prologue confronts the volatility and airy capriciousness of song as a performance medium and considers the methodological challenges of locating song’s musical and performance-based traces. Nuancing Carolyn Abbate’s influential notion of the “drastic” nature of musical performance, it argues for the necessity of factoring the embodied experience of song into literary analysis. The Prologue devotes particular attention to women’s engagement with song as a performance-based—and performative—genre in early modern England, a history whose richness is reflected in the companion recording. Even as the recording process exemplifies the impossibility of pinpointing the “drastic” in definitive terms, this acoustic archive—as well as the performers’ reflections on their experience of inhabiting the featured pieces—underscores the importance of tuning our ears to the musical matter of early modern literary texts, many of which were the products of embodied and musical processes of circulation.