Sweet Echo

Although music was integral to masques, the genre’s visual extravagance tends to overshadow its acoustic elements in scholarly and classroom discussions. This chapter focuses on “Sweet Echo,” the Lady’s song in Milton’s A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle (Comus), which was performed in 1634 by 15-year-old Alice Egerton. The unusual level of detail that survives about this masque’s performance history, combined with the musical settings extant in Henry Lawes’s autograph manuscript, now held at the British Library, facilitates a suggestive evaluation of early modern song in terms of the rhetorical interplay between lyric, musical setting, and performance context. It also constitutes a striking case study for considering the acoustic impact of women’s singing voices. Milton’s depiction of temptation and self-discipline in Comus, whose moral message is encapsulated in miniature in the Lady’s performance of “Sweet Echo,” hinges on his audience’s experience of song as an acoustic, embodied, and gendered phenomenon.

Household Songs

This chapter illuminates the affective significance of music and song within household drama, a genre that early modern scholarship has found difficult to detach from the page and that continues to be undervalued in performance terms. Drawing on the notion of the closet, understood both as an architectural and acoustic space within the early modern household and as a generic marker for women’s dramatic productions, it explores the range of musical practices encompassed under the broad category of “household plays.” Focusing on Jane Lumley’s Iphigenia at Aulis, Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure, and Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory, it then considers how recent staging experiments help to illuminate textual markers of music and song that have too often been silenced.

Epilogue

The Epilogue presents two central conclusions: (1) that song is a slippery and multidimensional form that demands to be considered in embodied, gendered, and performance-based terms, and (2) that song constituted a vital, and vitally charged, rhetorical medium for women writers, performers, and patrons in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Epilogue also open up future areas of critical inquiry, both in relation to early modern women’s writing and literary studies more broadly. In particular, it introduces Early Modern Songscapes, an emergent collaborative and interdisciplinary digital initiative that is responding directly to the methodological questions raised by The Matter of Song in Early Modern England.

Breath of Sirens

This chapter dissects the physiological matter of song by attending to the gendered mechanisms and rhetorical effects of the musical breath. It explores how early moderns conceptualized the acoustic medium of the breath, charts its movement through the vocal mechanism of the body, and examines the traces of that process preserved in physiological treatises, singing handbooks, and surviving manuscript and print scores. While these documents provide rich insight into singing as a physical and acoustic phenomenon in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, they testify equally powerfully to song’s airy intangibility, particularly at moments where language and musical notation strain to represent the physical experience of singing. Reading the ambivalent figure of the singing siren alongside the prolific output of Margaret Cavendish, the final section of the chapter considers the acoustic impact of the musical breath in relation to the culturally fraught phenomenon of women’s song performance.

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.

Voicing Lyric

Although not every lyric produced in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England was intended to be sung, unpacking the musical facets of lyric circulation holds tremendous implications for our understanding of the performance-based facets of early modern poetics. In confronting these questions, this chapter takes as its focus the literary–musical nexus of the Sidney circle and, in particular, the writings of Mary Wroth, an accomplished musician whose writings abound with musical lyrics and allusions to song performance. Focusing on the manuscript collection of Wroth’s poems now preserved at the Folger Shakespeare Library and on the songs scattered throughout Urania, this chapter considers how reading Wroth’s songs as songs—as metrical compositions written with a tune in mind, adapted for musical setting and performance, or simply meant to be imagined as sung—sheds new light on the affective impact of the musical moments in her writings.

Airy Forms

This chapter probes the lexical slipperiness of “song” in relation to the dynamic interplay between early modern lyric production and musical practice. It also activates the resonances at play within the equally elusive notion of “form” further to animate song as an embodied genre straddling the boundary between poetic and musical expression. Larson considers the implications these taxonomical reflections hold for an analysis of the anonymous settings of Mary Sidney Herbert’s translations of Psalms 51 and 130, preserved in the British Library. These pieces offer an opportunity to bring a musical approach to lyric form to bear on psalm translations that are typically studied and taught from a visual, rather than an acoustic, perspective. Reading the psalms in terms of sung performance transforms our understanding of Pembroke’s experimental translations and of women’s broader engagement with the genre in the early modern English context.