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6 - Easter Sunday

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 January 2024

Jeremy L. Smith
Affiliation:
University of Colorado Boulder
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Summary

In their depiction of Easter Sunday, Tallis and Byrd continue narrating the events of Holy Week song by song, moving the story forward now with notable clarity (see Table 3 below). But this portion of the work marks a break in the previous pattern of section structuring. Earlier, Tallis and Byrd had shifted from tragedy to epic as the events of Good Friday pass to those of Holy Saturday. Now, in Dum transisset and throughout the four remaining songs that take us to the seventeenth work – and thus to the end of the first half of the collection of thirty-four – they keep the story in epic mode.

Instead of shifting Aristotelian-championed forms, they here provide, for their tale of the Resurrection, a quintessential example of the epic close. Since the latter is invariably depicted as a triumphant and otherworldly scene, Easter Day is a prime subject for such a treatment. Aristotle's writings firmly dictate that closing moments of an epic should excite feelings of wonder and devotion. To satisfy their audiences, therefore, writers of varying capabilities often resorted to staging a scene where a plot-resolving god, or deus ex machina, appears, in a somewhat contrived manner, to sort out or smooth over any lingering or unresolved details. For Tallis and Byrd’s audiences no such artifice was necessary, as the Resurrection was a genuine culminating moment of the utmost deific significance.

Satisfying closure is of course crucially important for all kinds of plot-driven art forms. But an epic ending is still special enough to be called a “privileged textual space” because “the process of writing a large-scale narrative … is typically a complex and strategic one involving considerable foresight and preparation.” The typical epic close is in fact, “freighted with readerly expectation,” and to meet the reader’s needs, the story at this point must “reinforce the feeling of finality and completion” as it also “announce[s] and justif[ies] the absence of further plot development.” Tallis and Byrd do go on to treat the Last Judgment as a separate, but related, story, but before that they move beyond their Passion tale to bring the whole tragic/epic story to a resounding close.

Type
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Information
Tallis and Byrd's Cantiones sacrae (1575)
A Sacred Argument
, pp. 125 - 150
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2023

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  • Easter Sunday
  • Jeremy L. Smith, University of Colorado Boulder
  • Book: Tallis and Byrd's <i>Cantiones sacrae</i> (1575)
  • Online publication: 11 January 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781800109568.007
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  • Easter Sunday
  • Jeremy L. Smith, University of Colorado Boulder
  • Book: Tallis and Byrd's <i>Cantiones sacrae</i> (1575)
  • Online publication: 11 January 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781800109568.007
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Easter Sunday
  • Jeremy L. Smith, University of Colorado Boulder
  • Book: Tallis and Byrd's <i>Cantiones sacrae</i> (1575)
  • Online publication: 11 January 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781800109568.007
Available formats
×