Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-ndw9j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T15:01:45.913Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

12 - ‘Fantastic Spirits’: Myth and Satire in the Ayres of Thomas Weelkes

from VI - MYTH AND MUSIC AS FORMS OF KNOWLEDGE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2019

Katie Bank
Affiliation:
University College London
Get access

Summary

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:

we find some room in the Holy Scriptures for mythologies; as that of the vine, the fig-tree, and the bramble, for riddles, for parables, similitudes … whereby heavenly doctrines are shadowed forth, and do condescend unto human frailties.

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.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

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 Dropbox.

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.

Available formats
×