IN 1640, the bishop and writer Edward Reynolds wrote that God gave us ‘musical, poetical, and mythological persuasions’ to arouse our imaginations, with an end to teach and moralise. He saw music, poetry and myth as means to make lofty spiritual matters tangible to mortals, as these three fictions ‘best affect the imagination’. He justified this in biblical terms, explaining:

He described how these arts functioned in subtle ways by ‘secretly instilling [morality] into the will, that it might at last find itself reformed, and yet [we] hardly perceive how it came to be so’. Reynolds explained that imagination worked to ‘open and unbind the thoughts’, as imagination is freer than the ‘rigor and strictness’ of reason or the ‘severity of truth’. Like many of his contemporaries, Reynolds upheld an essentially Aristotelian approach to the arts, maintaining that as long as music, poetry and myth worked to teach us virtue, these imitative, metaphoric arts were worthy pursuits. Whether a force for gaining knowledge or for deception, myth, music and poetry were thought to be the key modes for accessing and stimulating imagination, the internal sense responsible for feigning reality.

This chapter considers three case studies from Thomas Weelkes's Ayres or Fantastic Spirits (1608), in which established tropes of music, poetry and mythology are manipulated to satirical ends, as both satire and mythologies were contemporarily understood as discursive processes related to truth. Myth, for example, was a highly metaphorical form, and therefore allowed authors to use its tropes as a ‘palette’ to veil and colour a variety of themes, often topical, political, erotic or of religious and moral allegory. Eero Tarasti reports, ‘there is no doubt that the main cultural function of mythology is the establishment of precedent, the vindication of the truth of magic, of the binding forces of morality and law, and the real value of religious ritual by referring to events which have occurred in a dim past, in the Golden Age’. One might argue that mythologies and pastorals, by rooting present behaviour in an ahistorical past, urge people to question the nature of knowledge through self-examination.