John Milton and Musical Abjection

In John Milton’s works, music is a powerful instigator of unsettling modes of poetry. From A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle to Samson Agonistes and Paradise Lost, Milton remains fascinated by the transformative potential of song, though he comes increasingly to eschew its uncontrollable qualities. In his later career, Milton found it increasingly pressing to subordinate music to his authorial voice. Yet his fantasies of bibliographic control did not prevent him from influencing the songbook movement of the 1650s or from becoming a source for Dryden’s unperformed opera The State of Innocence. Tracing Milton’s connections to his erstwhile collaborator Alice Egerton, to Cavalier songwriters including William Cartwright, and to music publishers including John Playford, Chapter 4 reveals that poetry retained its tendencies toward media adaptation notwithstanding the conflicted desires of poets.

Shakespeare’s Musical Thresholds

Song is accompanied by a persistent sense of dislocation from Shakespeare’s fictions, often fitting only loosely or incompletely into dramatic plots. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Titania’s four singing fairies connect the play to the children’s company repertoire that preceded it and foreground the question of how performing bodies are transformed into media. Dream’s playful, self-conscious inquiry into the nature of theatrical mediation anticipates Hamlet, where Ophelia is objectified as a medium by her father, brother, lover, and queen. Yet Ophelia trenchantly resists the logocentric representational economies that confront her. Through her recycled, nonauthorial balladry, Ophelia produces a musical form of poetry that is restlessly subversive and irreducibly performative, articulating a new understanding of poetic mediation that is imbued in its environment.

Introduction

What is lost when we imagine a lyric like this one by John Donne, usually titled “The Expiration,” exclusively in terms of script and speech? So, so, break off this last lamenting kiss, Which sucks two souls, and vapours both away. Turn thou, ghost, that way, and let me turn this,...

Child Singers’ Mediated Bodies

Boy vocalists in children’s company plays by Richard Edwards, John Marston, and Ben Jonson were portrayed as ideal vehicles for poetry, as though their charming, dainty music would provide a means of perfect transmission. Yet children’s singing was also understood to be highly sensuous and erotic—bringing out some of the most licentious dimensions of theatrical experience. This mismatch between ideal communication and embodied performance was often represented in terms of sexual violence, with boy servants graphically punished for altering the messages they were bound to convey. Plays including Edwards’s Damon and Pythias, Marston’s What You Will, and Jonson’s Epicene celebrate child singers’ virtuosity, including their capacity to reimagine their scripts and expose patterns of subjection to critical scrutiny. Song becomes a means of redirecting audiences to the extra-fictional boundaries of theatrical experience, and articulating new registers of poetic meaning grounded in the perspectives of boy performers.

Coda

Literary scholars are always on the lookout for autonomous domains of imaginative writing. Lukas Erne’s influential book Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, for instance, conceives of the “artistic ambition” of Shakespeare’s later career in terms of print, portraying Shakespeare as “an active participant in the theater’s gradual emancipation from an existence that is confined to the stage.”...

Philip Sidney and Musical Poesis

Music offered Philip Sidney and his milieu a unique form of communio, both in the sense of remote communication between souls and in the sense of social “community.” In The Defence of Poesy, in the eclogues of The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, and in the sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella, Sidney envisions an open-ended, experimental mediascape that neither begins nor ends with writing. This interest in media interactivity resurfaces, in turn, in the compositions of William Byrd, Thomas Campion, John Dowland, and others who translated Sidney’s poetry and his musical legacy into the medium of print. After Sidney’s death, print became a means not to oppose or transcend performance but to activate new sites of music making in amateur and household contexts, opening up new forms of collaboration among poets, performers, and composers.