The playhouses of early modern London often resounded with music, from Bankside to Shoreditch via Whitefriars, Blackfriars and other locations within and without the city walls. Elizabethan youth companies kept choirboys from St Paul’s Cathedral and the Chapel Royal busy between services, and their drama is as rich in song as we might expect.1 Barely a Jacobean play-text survives which does not include at least one cue for practical music. Throughout the period, songs performed by sprites, clowns, wastrels and passionate lords put questions about the cultural place of music at the heart of canonical and less familiar plays. This study responds to the abundance of music in early modern drama with a straightforward question: what might have been the dramatic rationale for music in Jacobean plays by Fletcher, Heywood, Marston, Middleton, Shakespeare and others? It seeks answers in the material conditions of early modern commercial playing, in the dramatic possibilities offered by playhouse music, and, above all, in quotidian early modern ideas of how one might respond to a musical performance. Following these lines of enquiry, it argues that many plays first staged between 1603 and 1625 used music deliberately and precisely as a dramatic tool, doing so by inviting culturally familiar responses to music from the multifarious group of early modern subjects that together constituted a playhouse audience.
We can begin with a practical example involving familiar early modern playing venues but a relatively unfamiliar text. John Fletcher’s Beggars’ Bush belonged to the King’s Men, who would have played it indoors at Blackfriars and outdoors at the Globe around 1622, also performing it at court as part of the Christmas entertainments on 27 December that year.2 Perhaps its relative unfamiliarity today, on the page and particularly upon the stage, makes it easier to consider its historical distance, asking how playwright and playing company expected seventeenth-century playgoers to respond to a group of singing beggars:
The beggars sing in order to ‘crowne’ Clause (2K4r; 2.1.141), who has just been elected their King. In fact, he is really Gerrard, the rightful ruler of Flanders, in disguise, but for now he will lead a utopian ‘Common-wealth’ of beggars at the margins of society (2K3v; 1.3.163). It would be easy to treat this song as slightly separate from the rest of the drama, a musical interlude offering a kind of entertainment distinct from the containing scene’s concerns with political structures, the struggle for power in the beggars’ community, and Clause’s consolidation of his own status within a group whose support is later instrumental in his regaining control of Flanders.
But what if Fletcher and the King’s Men saw music not as a diversion but another dramatic tool available to them – a means of encouraging local responses to one performance aspect that could in turn shape wider engagements with a play? Several ideas of musical response, familiar across early modern culture and likely to have been known to playgoers and play-makers alike, indicate the kinds of reactions that might be incorporated in this way. For instance, music was widely believed to command notice above other sounds in early modern England. Perhaps, then, playhouse songs like ‘Cast our Caps’ were expected to focus attention upon the stage at critical dramatic moments, in this case when Clause’s grip on power amongst the beggars, essential to the plot, is formally acknowledged. Rather than distracting from the thrust of the narrative with a change of mode and, to an extent, of subject matter, the song could instead be a way of marking and even conveying a key narrative development.
If this moment of practical music is not a distraction but an important restatement of the drama’s wider concerns, then we can also consider what the words of ‘Cast our Caps’ might suggest about Fletcher’s broader dramatic purpose in Beggars’ Bush. The beggars are particularly keen to outline the carefree lifestyle of ‘ease and rest’ that they enjoy. Another very common belief about music was that song allowed listeners as well as singers to inhabit the perspective being performed. A group of socially marginal and physically bedraggled characters (see Figure 1) might seem like the very last creations of the Jacobean stage with whom early playgoers would identify, yet by making them sing, playwright and playing company may have hoped to encourage ‘fantasies of identity’ in which audience members temporarily and imaginatively inhabited the perspective of these Othered stage-beggars.4 As they listened to the song, playgoers could share an implausible vision of freedom and happiness on the fringes of contemporary society and, crucially, align themselves with a group of characters who will eventually prove to be amongst the heroes of the drama. Cultural expectations about how to listen to a song reframe marginal, even dangerous characters as figures of identification, doing so at the very point at which the narrative requires such a shift in perspective.
Figure 1 An early visual depiction of Clause from Beggars’ Bush (bottom right). The Wits, or, Sport upon Sport (1662), frontispiece illustration.
Two widespread early modern ideas about everyday engagements with music thus reframe a song that could seem dramatically extraneous, perhaps even detrimental, as an important component of the drama: the music is intended to work together with the rest of the play and its staging to shape playhouse meanings that are less apparent when the scene is encountered in print some four centuries later. This study argues that Beggars’ Bush and many other Jacobean plays incorporated music in the hope of evoking particular responses from playgoers, these responses in turn shaping wider playhouse engagements with drama. In the case of Fletcher’s play, song encourages temporary identification with a group of marginal but ultimately heroic characters, but in other plays music is put to a whole range of varied dramatic uses. By tracing common early modern ideas of musical response, we can better understand the rationale for uses of playhouse music, and, in turn, re-read canonical and less familiar Jacobean plays with a clearer sense of how playwrights and playing companies hoped to shape playhouse engagements with drama.
As the example from Beggars’ Bush suggests, the playgoers for whom commercial dramatic performances were mounted are at the heart of this study. When shaping plays for the stage, playwrights and playing companies gave careful thought not only to the playhouse resources available, but also to the expected responses of playgoers, and nowhere is this clearer than in their uses of music. William Prynne describes this rationale, combining staging practicality and playgoer response, in his 1633 condemnation of the early modern stage:
[T]here being nothing more frequent, in all our Stage-playes […] then amorous Pastorals, or obscene lascivious Love-songs, most melodiously cha[n]ted out upon the Stage betweene each seueral Action; both to supply that Chasme or vacant Interim which the Tyring-house takes up, in changing the Actors robes, to fit them for some other part in the ensuing Scene: […] as likewise to please the itching eares, if not to inflame the outragious lusts of lewde Spectators, who are oft-times ravished with these ribaldrous pleasing Ditties, and transported by them into a[n …] extasie of uncleanesse.5
Even this sceptical observer is adamant that play-makers think of audience response as well as staging practicality when incorporating ‘Love-songs’ into outdoor playhouse performance: such songs are there ‘both to supply that Chasme’ in the action necessitated by a costume change, and ‘to please the itching eares’ of playgoers. The suggestion that audiences were particularly interested in playhouse music is a common one in the period; perhaps most memorably, an early Jacobean rogue pamphlet, Ratsey’s Ghost (1605?), describes Gamaliel Ratsey, a famous prankster, meeting a group of a players at an inn outside London. Ratsey demands, ‘let me heare your musicke, for I haue often gone to plaies more for musicke sake, then for action’.6 Prynne not only echoes this suggestion that playgoers are desperate to hear music (their itch must presumably be scratched), but also claims that commercial play-texts are shaped in precise anticipation of particular playgoer responses to that music, in this case ‘ravished’ reactions to ‘Love-songs’.
What shaped early modern expectations of playhouse musical response? Classical tradition? Contemporary music theory? Popular culture? Strikingly, Prynne’s comments draw most immediately on the last of these categories. Like his anti-theatrical forebears of the 1570s and 80s, Prynne places considerably more emphasis on the sexual pleasure of ‘lascivious’ song than other contemporary commentators. Yet even as he displays the idiosyncrasies of religious objection, he follows patterns of wider early modern thought, introducing an idea of musical response that, we will see, was familiar across an exhaustive range of cultural contexts: his description of playgoers ‘ravished’ by song follows a specific and precise sense of ‘ravishment’ that was in everyday early modern use, describing the irresistible, pleasurable compelling of attention touched upon above in relation to Beggars’ Bush. Prynne’s comments provide one instance, then, of an early modern subject using a widespread cultural understanding of musical response to explain music choices in the playhouse, and the evidence suggests that it was precisely such non-specialist thought about music that informed the decisions of playwrights and play-makers most directly. This study asks how a range of early modern subjects typically thought about response to musical performance, in order to relate this wider thinking to the musical practices of Jacobean playwrights and playing companies. It argues that it was their clear and habitual intention to evoke particular responses from playgoers through musical performance, responses often central to the dramaturgy of the play being performed. Put simply, play-makers repeatedly used music to ask playgoers to listen, look, imagine or remember. As we might expect, these invitations follow the ideas about musical response most prevalent in wider early modern culture.
In approaching the music of Jacobean drama through the playhouse, I follow in the footsteps of literary and theatre-historical scholars including David Lindley, Bruce R. Smith and Tiffany Stern, and musicologists including Linda Phyllis Austern and Christopher R. Wilson, who have all significantly advanced our understanding of music in early modern dramatic performance.7 However, in focusing specifically on playgoer reactions to music, this study is substantially shaped by recent work on playhouse responses more generally, including that of Alison P. Hobgood, Matthew Steggle, Katherine A. Craik, Tanya Pollard, Nova Myhill and Jennifer A. Low,8 and builds upon an important and emergent strand of scholarship, inspired by Bruce R. Smith’s The Acoustic World of Early Modern England, that pursues sensory experience in the early modern theatre.9 It is also informed by recent investigations of music as performance and as cultural practice undertaken by Susan McClary, Mark Evan Bonds, Carol MacClintock, Nicholas Cook and others, whose work has reinvigorated the wider field of musicology in recent years.10 This is a study of music, then, but it is also a phenomenological enquiry into playhouse experience, into sensory encounters in early modern culture, and into relationships amongst playwrights, playing companies and playgoers at a range of venues in Jacobean London.
Quotidian Musical Responses
It may not be self-evident how we would go about recovering views of musical response popular in early modern England, nor even clear that such matters provided a topic of conversation in wider discourse. Helpfully, however, early modern writers with specialist understandings of music theory and practice often make reference to the widespread circulation of musical ideas, at times with a degree of weariness, if not disdain. Such remarks offer glimpses of particular views gaining cultural currency and becoming prevalent across early modern society. One text, a familiar proto-scientific publication of the 1620s, offers a particularly vivid and opinionated account of how such ideas circulated in wider English culture. Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum, published posthumously in 1627, outlines many experiments of empirical observation through which the author builds his ‘naturall historie’. In his detailed consideration of the processes of sound and hearing, which includes much attention to the experience of music, he complains that:
MVSICKE in the Practise, hath bin well pursued; And in good Variety; But in the Theory, and especially in the Yeelding of the Causes of the Practique, very weakly; Being reduced into certaine Mysticall Subtilties, of no vse, and not much Truth.
For Bacon, making the case for experimental empiricism as the primary basis of knowledge, widespread, vague notions of how practical music works are a constant irritation. Hot on the heels of this first remark comes a further observation:
The Cause giuen of Sound, that it should be an Elision of the Aire (wherby, if they meane any thing, they meane a Cutting, or Diuiding, or else an Attenuating of the Aire) is but a Terme of Ignorance: And the Motion is but a Catch of the Wit vpon a few Instances; As the Manner is in the Philosophy Receiued. And it is common with Men, that if they haue gotten a Pretty Expression, by a Word of Art, that Expression goeth currant; though it be empty of Matter.11
Once again, Bacon is concerned that an idea holds vast cultural currency, or ‘goeth currant’, amongst subjects who lack a secure grasp of the underlying detail.12 Significantly, if, as Bacon repeatedly asserts, it was ‘common with Men’, and, one assumes, women, to accept certain broad ideas about how music works, general in character and held without drawing upon deep theoretical knowledge, then it is this collection of ‘Mysticall Subtilties’ that we must recover in order to elucidate broader cultural understandings of music. This is particularly true if that discourse rehearsed typical responses to practical music. Disregarding Bacon’s polemical tone for a moment, whilst a seventeenth century ‘Terme of Ignorance’, or Expression, may have rather less to offer scientific methodology today than does Bacon’s work, if such a ‘Terme’ is part of the framework through which a large number of people comprehended their world, then it is a no less valuable component of early modern culture than the methodologically seminal Sylva Sylvarum. Several such ‘Expression[s]’ describing everyday responses to music can be traced in the textual record of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. What is more, both the precise form of these ideas and their movement through wider culture can be demonstrably established. Significantly, these musical responses, likely to have been familiar to a broad range of early modern playgoers, were at the centre of interactions amongst playwrights, performers and their audiences in the Jacobean playhouse.
Bacon’s complaint indicates that non-specialist ideas about music circulated widely, but tells us little about where we might look for them in the textual record. In an account of early modern musical culture encompassing a striking range of social contexts, Christopher Marsh argues that ‘sophisticated ideas about the power of music circulated amongst a substantial cross-section of the population’, and moreover, ‘such ideas were part of the common stock upon which Shakespeare and his contemporaries drew with impressive regularity’.13 Treatises written in Latin and occasionally in the vernacular were produced in England and continental Europe between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, offering clues about musical response rooted in detailed contemporary harmonic theory and articulated through a handful of foundational Classical and Biblical myths: Midas’s asinine ears; Orpheus moving rocks; the music of the spheres; David’s harp.14 However, if we are to pursue widespread thinking about musical response then there is a methodological risk in approaching less specialist sources via theoretically sophisticated material, particularly if culturally prevalent ideas about musical response had origins elsewhere. There is a danger of obscuring the full contours of everyday early modern thought about musical response if a reconstruction is framed substantially by writings that are just one component of the wider picture.
David Lindley notes, too, the danger of applying what are often fairly abstract theoretical models to the socially and sensorially vibrant space of the playhouse. Considering the ‘neoplatonic view’, according to which the affective power of earthly music was a result of its analogies with ‘divine musics’, Lindley argues that whilst ‘[f]or many critics over the years it has been The Tempest’s exemplification’ of this view ‘which has been central to their readings of the play’, when it is ‘considered as a work in the theatre, the safely insulated view of Prospero’s celestial music which such an understanding seems to afford the literary critic is put under considerable pressure from different directions’.15 Joseph M. Ortiz similarly emphasizes ‘the power of heard music to disrupt Neoplatonic models of harmony’ in Shakespearean drama.16 Whilst of inarguable significance to early modern specialist musical cultures, taking a central role, for instance, in the anonymous Praise of Musicke’s account of music’s divine and mythic origins (A1v), theoretical accounts like the neoplatonic view have neither the demonstrably widespread familiarity across a range of early modern cultural contexts nor the clear application to practical playhouse encounters with music to be of help in this investigation. Indeed, it is in keeping with Bacon’s observation to heed the warnings of Lindley and Ortiz; the father of scientific method is extremely careful to emphasize the lack of continuity between a ‘Pretty Expression’ that ‘goeth currant’ and more theoretically grounded understandings of the same music-related issue, suggesting that ideas with widespread cultural currency may not be best understood in the first instance through their continuities or otherwise with contemporary music theory and specialist writing. A ‘Catch of the Wit vpon a few instances’ implies an idea born of casual observation, rather than one distilled from sophisticated accounts or theories (F4r-v). Such a disjuncture between specialist understandings and wider thinking about music suggests that an investigation of quotidian musical responses must look in the first instance not to specialist material but elsewhere.
We can begin, then, by putting early modern theoretical writings to one side and interrogating other sources more likely to consider everyday contexts in which subjects might respond to music. These alternative sources are organized into three categories, each providing substantial relevant evidence: the descriptions, accounts and imaginings of musical response that appear in the paratexts of printed music books; the dramatizations of musical response that appear in plays of the period; and, the elliptical and incidental references to musical response to be found in a diverse range of early modern texts. Together, these sources offer ample evidence of early modern subjects’ thinking about everyday responses to music, indicating some of the reactions expected in the playhouse that in turn shaped choices about practical music use. However, this material must be handled with care if it is to yield helpful insights into wider early modern culture. In order to make the claim that a particular idea had widespread influence on the thinking of early modern subjects, a more precise method is required than simply identifying references to that idea.
To demonstrate that certain musical responses were widely recognized, we need to establish that they circulated beyond the specific textual traces that remain. It is not enough simply to note their familiarity to the writer of a single text, if we are to suggest that these ideas shaped playhouse engagements with musical performance. We also need evidence of their wider familiarity, or cultural currency: borrowing Bacon’s phrase once more, we must somehow establish that each ‘goeth currant’ in early modern England (F4v). Three features of the textual record help establish an idea’s wider cultural currency: repetition, consistency and casual allusion. When an idea appears recurrently and consistently in a diverse range of sources, this suggests that what remains is just part of a far wider oral and textual transmission across early modern culture. Moreover, incidental, oblique or elliptical references to musical response are yet stronger evidence of widespread familiarity, for partial allusion presupposes a reader or listener acquainted with the idea gestured towards. If a model of everyday musical response can be utilized in passing or in part to serve an unrelated topic of discussion, then its familiarity, both to the writer and to his or her anticipated audience, is hard to deny.
In seeking continuities across a broad range of sources, many of which make only oblique reference to musical response, this study echoes a methodology emergent amongst European historians of the Classical world around the turn of the seventeenth century. As Nicholas Popper has recently explored, early modern scholars including Abraham Ortelius and particularly François Baudouin eschewed a more typical focus on fewer, trusted materials in favour of gathering ‘a vast and indiscriminate range of sources’, each treated ‘not as a single monument, but rather as a collection of potential evidence’. Elements of each text were to be ‘scrutinized and made to yield insights into the past that could be verified by comparison with other, similar sources’.17 This project makes similar attempts to bring a multiplicity of voices into play, the continuities amongst them, rather than the authority of any one writer, indicating which ideas about music were most familiar across early modern culture. Baudouin himself argues that ‘the testimonies of many great things which otherwise are lost to us can be excerpted from the commentaries of other writers, even if these do not claim to be historians’.18 This study proceeds from the belief that similarly rich discoveries about early modern musical culture are to be made in the writings of those that do not claim to be musicians.
With principles of repetition, consistency and casual allusion in mind, an analysis of early modern textual evidence reveals the sheer prevalence of a few clear ideas of everyday musical response, appearing in sources with relevance to a broad array of cultural settings. This study recovers four particularly widespread ideas, each chapter excavating one of these before considering its influence on playhouse musical performance and the possible responses of playgoers. Together, the chapters offer a picture of what exactly constituted musical response in the view of many early modern subjects, and this picture is, in places, rather less familiar than we might expect. The first idea, and the most common account of musical response in the period, is that music irresistibly and pleasurably compels attention. Prynne’s ‘ravished’ playgoers provide an initial example of this remarkably widespread belief in music’s power (2L3v). Elements of the view are well established in the current critical picture, but the precise form and nature of its circulation in wider culture requires further excavation. The second belief – perhaps more unexpected – is that music is not solely an aural phenomenon, but should also be experienced visually. The third view, concerned specifically with song, is that imaginative adoption of a singer’s perspective can be central to an audience’s engagement with vocal performance. The final suggestion is that the sense of touch contributes significantly to the experience of instrumental music, particularly upon plucked strings. Even without actually touching an instrument, musical receivers were at times expected to respond to instrumental music through tactile memory, recalling their own experiences of touching similar instruments and using this memory as a point of imaginative identification with the performer. This study proposes that the four ideas shaped playhouse requests for playgoers to listen, look, imagine and remember in response to musical performance. Each chapter begins by recovering an idea of musical response, before suggesting how it might elucidate moments of playhouse music in various Jacobean plays, both canonical and less familiar.
We can turn now to consider the evidence for these models of musical response. The three sets of material mentioned above – printed music book paratexts, commercial play-texts and incidental textual allusions – offer distinct, complementary insights. Paratextual descriptions and playhouse dramatizations often give the clearest accounts of precisely how the imagined responses to music might work, whilst elliptical references indicate most directly the wider cultural familiarity of the models as they move into common parlance as figurative image or convenient reference point. A consideration of each evidence set in turn clarifies their respective contributions to this study.
Printed music book paratexts form the first category of evidence, providing a substantial body of primary material from which to recover beliefs about everyday response to music. London had a buoyant market for books of printed music from the late sixteenth century onwards, whilst from an even earlier date musical psalm settings, including four-part settings such as those by William Daman, enjoyed enormous popularity.19 Between 1530 and 1649, everyday responses to music were described repeatedly and consistently in a wide range of such books, appearing in texts like Richard Alison’s Psalms of David in Meter, John Dowland’s Pilgrim’s Solace, and many others, often in paratexts orientating potential purchasers, readers and performers to the music that followed.20 The sheer prevalence of these paratextual imaginings suggests that they are exactly the kind of ‘Pretty Expression, by a Word of Art’ that helped to construct experiential frameworks for the consumers of such books, much to the frustration of Francis Bacon (F4v).
Printed music books sold well, and, significantly, appear to have found a relatively diverse audience. Such volumes were often intended for amateur, domestic performance, reaching many musically literate subjects; David C. Price describes a ‘widespread and often intensely experienced extension of musical literacy throughout the upper regions of English society’ in the second half of the sixteenth century.21 Moreover, printed music book paratexts themselves gesture towards a market with a yet wider social composition and breadth. Nicholas Yonge’s two popular volumes of translated madrigals, Musica Transalpina, claim to be published at the respective requests of ‘a great number of Gentlemen and Merchants of good accompt’ (1588), and ‘sundry ciuill Gentlemen, and Marchants of good sorte’ (1597).22 Yonge gestures towards the widespread recreational use of music by the mercantile classes, suggesting a socially diverse market for printed music, not limited to aristocratic enthusiasts and music professionals. Amongst composers of printed music we also find professional and social diversity, Tobias Hume emphasizing his amateur status and military background in prefaces of 1605 and 1607 that earned him the attention – and wrath – of John Dowland.23 It is appropriate to think of the various producers and consumers of printed music books in early modern England as a broad group, not just in size but also in the range of social and professional backgrounds represented on demand and supply sides of the market. Moreover, we find both men and women closely involved with these publications as consumers and patrons, if not as composers.24
In recent years, literary scholars have become increasingly sensitive to the significance of the paratext, whilst methodologies exhaustively examining a whole range of tangential sources have simultaneously come into prominence, most notably, in studies of early modern drama, through the work of Tiffany Stern.25 Music book paratexts are no less rich than the dedications and epistles of other print genres, preserving – amongst other things – invaluable evidence of ideas about music that reached a wide early modern audience. These paratexts have received most attention in scholarly accounts of music publishing, whilst recent studies by Lindley and Elizabeth Ketterer make judicious use of individual paratexts to illuminate various aspects of early modern musical culture, and Marsh also considers some pre-1642 paratexts in his examination of English musical cultures to the end of the eighteenth century.26 However, these paratexts have not yet been examined systematically in order to ask the questions about musical response with which this study is concerned.
Much remains to be learnt about early modern culture through concerted study of music book paratexts, and they provide essential evidence of widespread understandings of response to music in the seventeenth century. However, the uses to which these understandings are put by composers, publishers and other contributors of paratextual material mean that the texts require careful handling. Prefatory material is never extraneous; costly paper is expended on dedications to patrons, title pages, praises of the author in verse and prose forms, and addresses to the consumer, because these components are a key part of the marketing of the book, the orientation of the reader or performer once they have purchased it, the professional advancement and self-fashioning of the composer, and the ongoing production and maintenance of a market for future publishing ventures. Paratext writers draw upon ideas familiar to their readers as and when they serve the purpose of the book that they frame, invoking flatly contradictory notions when rhetorically expedient: such authors value an idea’s familiarity and comprehensibility, not its significance as part of wider schemata. Furthermore, flattery, self-degradation, flippancy, sarcasm, insincerity and optimistic overstatement are often the guiding principles of dedications and addresses to the reader, which must always be approached with the question of their purpose in mind. Yet the very fact that ideas of musical response retain consistent form in texts with such a slippery nature itself indicates their cultural currency, their familiarity, and, ultimately, their significance to our view of wider early modern musical cultures.
Jacobean commercial play-texts provide a second set of materials to interrogate, distinct from printed music book paratexts in format and in evidentiary value. Dramatic sources invite a different approach to recovery, focused on playhouse dissemination of ideas as well as textual circulation. A systematic examination of all extant plays with a posited first performance at a commercial playhouse between 1603 and 1625 reveals an array of references, allusions and dramatizations all rehearsing and circulating ideas of everyday musical response.27 Any ideas found in commercial plays are of particular relevance to the dramatic use of music in Jacobean playhouses and the possible engagements of playgoers; it is therefore particularly significant that models of everyday musical response are so often rehearsed in this material.
Printed play-texts offer suggestions that complement those available from music book paratexts. Many plays dramatize responses only described or alluded to elsewhere, in so doing foregrounding nuances obscured in paratextual accounts. Moreover, by habitually representing these everyday responses to music, dramatic texts imply that the responses were plausible to playgoers. Perhaps most importantly of all, when ideas of musical response are rehearsed regularly in play-texts, we can surmise that habitual playgoers were familiar with them from the stage regardless of their cultural circulation in other contexts, and this is particularly important given the multifarious composition of early modern playhouse audiences. Audience diversity is suggested in The Gull’s Hornbook (1609), a satirical guide to foolish London living by playwright Thomas Dekker. Dekker offers a particularly rich imagining of the various subjects who might attend a playhouse:
[t]he place is so free in entertainement, allowing a stoole as well to the Farmers sonne as to your Templer: that your Stinkard has the selfe same libertie to be there in his Tobacco-Fumes, which your sweet Courtier hath: and that your Car-man and Tinker claime as strong a voice in their suffrage, and sit to giue iudgement on the plaies life and death, as well as the prowdest Momus among the tribe of Critick[.]28
The professional, social and economic diversity amongst these characters, introduced by Dekker as typical, if caricatured, playgoers, suggests that a greater variety of early modern subjects encountered ideas of musical response through commercial dramatic performance than did so through music book paratexts. Indeed, when words are spoken in a playhouse rather than printed on a page even illiteracy is no barrier to comprehension.
As Lucy Munro observes, ‘Dekker does not discriminate between the audiences of the different playhouses’, but rather offers an interchangeable description of ‘the gatherers of the publique or priuate Play-house’ (E2v).29 Munro makes a persuasive case for the social breadth of theatre attendees indoors as well as outdoors; indeed, whilst the composition of dramatic audiences and the continuities or otherwise amongst those of different playhouses and playing companies remain subject to dispute, the typical diversity of audiences has been increasingly argued for in recent studies.30 To take Queen Anna’s Men at the Red Bull playhouse as an example, Eva Griffith has recently demonstrated that, despite the venue’s strong association with citizen playgoers, the company’s plays were in fact demonstrably ‘directed at more than one sector of society’.31 A play in performance at any early modern commercial theatre would reach an audience of far greater social breadth than would a printed music book paratext, and, as we shall see, playgoers were likely to have encountered dramatizations and verbal explorations of all four musical responses at the very same playhouses – often during the very same performances – in which they were invited to respond to practical music by listening, looking, imagining or remembering.
Casual allusions provide a third body of evidence that is substantial, revealing and largely untapped by research. In a range of sources not limited to printed music books and commercial drama, we can trace incidental allusions to musical response, as well as metaphoric, aphoristic and comic constructions, all of which presuppose the cultural currency of the idea evoked. References to musical response that occur in passing, as metaphoric accounts of non-musical reactions, or even as the basis of a joke, indicate not only the broad circulation of a phrase itself as a linguistic trope, but also, crucially, a correspondingly wide awareness of the idea upon which it relies. For example, the proliferation of puns equating skilled musical touch with sexual contact suggest that this idea was sufficiently familiar for the joke to be comprehensible even to those inexperienced with practical music. Many such puns appear in early modern plays such as Edward Sharpham’s Cupid’s Whirligig (CKR, 1607), in which Sir Timothy Troublesome crudely observes that Master Nuecome’s Mistress looks ‘like a Lute, and you like a skilfull musitian haue bin fingring it’ (D3v; 2.3.137–38).32 Dramatic writing often utilizes a conversational tone less common in other genres, resulting in regular elliptical, metaphoric and even sexualized references to ideas of musical response. This makes dramatic texts of particular help, for allusive remarks demonstrate most clearly the cultural familiarity of the responses they presuppose. This in turn complements the clarity with which the same ideas can be recovered from paratextual descriptions and dramatizations, offering a different – but equally significant – kind of evidence.
Musical responses tend to look slightly different in each of the three evidence sets. The paratextual imaginings of printed music books are often positive or idealized, where dramatic representations range from the romanticized to the flippant, via the more naturalistic. In contrast to these often-detailed depictions, elliptical references are not centrally interested in the responses themselves, their evidentiary value rather stemming from their allusive mode. Yet when considered collectively, these diverse materials reveal a widespread, shared cultural familiarity with a few particular musical responses. A playwright dramatizes one reaction that is elsewhere imagined by a composer in a sycophantic dedication, whilst a glancing conversational allusion to another presupposes a familiarity with the more detailed articulations of that response found in a publisher’s address to the reader. These notions circulated through the widest possible variety of cultural contexts, and would have been familiar to the full range of play-makers and playgoers involved with the consumption and production of Jacobean commercial drama.
Playhouse Responses
Early modern ideas of quotidian musical response (listening; looking; imagining; remembering) can tell us much about playhouse musical performance between 1603 and 1625, for these ideas regularly shaped music cues that in turn invited responses from playgoers. Playwright John Marston indicates his awareness of wider musical thought when claiming that ‘the Entrances and Musique’ in the printed text of Sophonisba (CQR, 1605) reflect ‘the fashion of the priuate stage’, invoking not just the conventional practices of the Children of the Queen’s Revels, but also what is preferable, popular and fashionable with their customers.33 But even if expected playgoer reactions are central to this Jacobean dramatist’s thinking about practical music cues, how far would a playwright’s expectations match the reality of playgoer responses? To consider actual playhouse engagements with music, we are forced to think beyond recoverable evidence and to entertain at least some degree of inference, a step requiring careful negotiation. It is one thing to speculate about playwrights’ intentions, especially when their invitations to listen, look, imagine and remember relate so clearly to wider early modern thinking about music. Far more complex is to establish how far – and how consistently – playgoers accepted these invitations. Scholars have often emphasized the diversity and multiplicity of playhouse response, as well as the gap between how consumers and producers understood engagements with performance. Charles Whitney, for instance, notes the contrast between what playgoer Simon Forman’s ‘Bocke of Plaies’ (1610–1611) suggests about his responses at the Globe, and how Thomas Heywood imagines an audience engaging with dramatic performance in his Apology for Actors (1612).34 Is there any place in this study, then, for a consideration of what actual playhouse responses may have looked like, or does this move too far beyond the surviving evidence? It is certainly more productive to think of performances inviting playgoers to respond in particular ways than it is to imagine music mechanistically generating certain experiences, regardless of an audience’s collective or individual volition. Yet from this premise of invitation we can think quite productively about audience reactions. There are a number of reasons to believe that playhouse attendees indeed accepted invitations to listen, look, imagine or remember with regularity, responding as playwrights and play-makers hoped.
Theorizing responses to any performance art is not straightforward; indeed, scholars have at times found rather more questions than answers emerging from investigations of musical experience, or aesthetics of music. However, in recent interdisciplinary work examining ‘aesthetics in performance’, Angela Hobart and Bruce Kapferer make some helpful suggestions about the relationship between the cultural prevalence of an idea of musical response and the lived experiences that might occur in that culture. These proposed interactions in turn suggest how ideas about music might have interacted with actual responses in the early modern playhouse. Considering a broad array of contemporary cultural practices, Hobart and Kapferer emphasize ‘the capacity of symbolic compositions to materialize experience’, arguing that ‘the constructed reality of the symbolic process becomes thoroughly integral to participants so that they are completely one with the formed experience’. Thus, for instance, during ritual drumming in certain cultures, the ‘illusion’ of an external agent entering the body ‘is not unreal but real in its experiencing (along the same lines as maya or illusion, which is a factuality of consciousness in the Buddhist or Hindu sense)’.35 The example of ritual drumming is at several removes from early modern subjects hearing a song in the playhouse, not least because there is far less cultural investment in playgoers’ responses to a singing dramatic character than in the symbolic experience that Hobart and Kapferer describe. Extremely relevant, however, is the relationship they propose between a culturally prevalent idea of response and lived experience. In their view, the very familiarity of an idea about experience itself shapes real responses, or ‘materialize[s] experience’, when music is performed. Drawing on this model, we can think of a mutually constructive relationship between ideas and practices of musical response in early modern culture. Not only will lived experiences contribute to the form and prevalence of circulating ideas, but these ideas can in turn shape actual experiences by predisposing subjects to respond accordingly.
In the early modern playhouse, responses to music were shaped by the broader cultural currency of particular notions of quotidian response, and through more specific, targeted encounters with those same ideas during a performance. Whilst widespread cultural familiarity would predispose early modern subjects to listen, look, imagine or remember in encounters with practical music, there is also substantial evidence of specific and overt playhouse attempts to evoke these responses from playgoers, even as a musical performance is staged. These manipulations could be complex, or they could be as simple as a character in John Fletcher’s Bonduca (KM, 1613) declaring that he is compelled to ‘attend’ to the music that sounds offstage (4H1v; 3.3.22–24), thus encouraging playgoers to listen to the hidden harmony themselves.36 Playwrights did not simply hope that the appropriate reaction would occur when convenient, but made precise manoeuvres intended to steer playgoers’ responses. From play-text evidence, then, we can do far more than simply recover culturally prevalent notions and point out where they might fit with playhouse musical performance: we can also trace how playwrights sought to orientate playgoers towards particular responses. Nor should it be forgotten that invitations to listen, look, imagine and remember recur consistently across more than two decades of commercial practice between 1603 and 1625. The persistence of these techniques over so many years suggests their efficacy in prompting the desired reactions from playgoers.
What musical resources were available to shape playgoers’ responses at indoor and outdoor theatres? Cues in plays first performed between 1603 and 1625 call for an extremely wide range of instruments, including pipe and tabor, hunting horns, drums, trumpets, cornetts, hautboys, sackbuts, fiddles, bass and treble viols, lutes, recorders, organ and harp.37 Singing was widespread in youth and adult playing companies, ranging from unaccompanied scraps, like the tinker’s street cry (C4r; sc. 11.11–12) and stanzas of popular ballad ‘Mary Ambree’ (D3r; sc. 12.43–46) in The Two Maids of Moreclacke (CKR, 1606), to complex ayres and part songs, such as the ‘new ayre’ (I1r; 4.2.45–58) sung by Aymer in The Fatal Dowry (KM, 1619), and the funeral ‘[s]ong in parts’ (G2r; 4.2.54) in Swetnam the Woman-Hater (QAM, 1618).38 Boy actors sang more often than men, whilst accompaniment was typically provided by a lute or bass viol but could fall to other instruments, as the ‘Song to the Cornets’ (I1r; 5.5.65.i) in The Malcontent (CQR/KM, 1604) and the ‘song to the Organs’ (C1r; 2.1.170.ii) in A Mad World, My Masters (PB2, 1605) demonstrate.39
Drums were used to indicate approaching armies, whilst trumpet fanfares described military manoeuvres and announced royal entries.40 Indoors, cornetts and occasionally hautboys appear generally to have replaced trumpets for this purpose, although a stray trumpet cue amongst cornett fanfares in The Two Noble Kinsmen (KM, 1613), advertised as a Blackfriars play on its title page, suggests that trumpets were not completely absent from the indoor stage, if the text is accurate.41 Whilst differing habits of trumpet and cornett use are relatively straightforward to trace from play-texts, other differences in musical resources and performance conventions indoors and out have proved a little more difficult to establish categorically. However, there is evidence of youth companies using rather more music at their indoor venues than in immediately contemporary outdoor adult performances at least until around 1608. Particularly powerful is a well-known account of Blackfriars music in 1602, from the perspective of a foreign visitor, Frederick Gerschow, attending in the train of the Duke of Stettin-Pomerania:
For an entire hour before one hears an exquisite instrumental concert of organs, lutes, pandoras, mandoras, bowed strings, and woodwind, such as this time when a boy sang so beautifully in a warbling voice to a bass viol[.]42
The pre-show concert, together with the convention of musical act breaks not adopted on the outdoor stage until the later 1600s, indicates just how harmonious Blackfriars must have been in 1602, and indeed how musically rich youth company plays would remain in their years of Jacobean performance to 1613.43 Moreover, Gerschow appears to describe the components of a ‘mixed consort’: three plucked strings (‘lutes’; ‘pandoras’; ‘mandoras’), two bowed strings (‘bass viol’; ‘bowed strings’) and a recorder or transverse flute (‘woodwind’).44 This may suggest a standing consort of musicians playing contemporary art music such as that published in Thomas Morley’s First Book of Consort Lessons (1599; 2nd edn 1611), providing another form of high status music alongside the vocal talents of the Children of the Queen’s Revels’s youthful actor-singers.45
The pre-1609 period in which the adult companies’ London venues were exclusively outdoors has not left traces of quite such sophisticated musical resources amongst the men, although the Queen’s Men do seem to have hired musicians on tour in 1587 and again in 1592.46 Philip Henslowe records no payment for musicians in his ‘diary’ or account book, yet his inventory of the Admiral’s Men’s assets on 10 March 1598 itemises instruments including trumpets and drum, treble and bass viols, a bandora, a cittern and a sackbut. These were company property, listed amongst costumes, props and playbooks (the ‘sack-bute’ is part of a single ‘Item’ otherwise consisting of a ‘lyone’, two ‘lyon heades’ and a ‘great horse with his leages’) which, together with the lack of payments to musicians in what is an admittedly partial account book, suggests we may be more secure imagining musically capable actors rather than hired professional musicians playing for the Admiral’s Men and other adult companies for much of the period of exclusive outdoor performance to 1608.47 Indeed, the 1605 bequest of a lute and other string instruments from King’s Men actor Augustine Phillips to his current and former apprentices James Sands and Samuel Gilburne further suggests a degree of musical expertise amongst the players of an adult company.48
The King’s Men’s acquisition of Blackfriars from the Children of the Queen’s Revels in 1609 has been identified as a catalyst for their adoption of more sophisticated musical resources at the Globe, with a knock-on effect for other adult companies outdoors and, later, indoors (Christopher Beeston’s converted Cockpit playhouse was used variously by Queen Anna’s Men, Prince Charles’s Men and Lady Elizabeth’s Men between 1616 and 1625). The best evidence for thoroughgoing use of professionally performed instrumental music in adult company productions emerges towards the end of the period, albeit at the slight remove of court. Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels, records the names of twenty-four ‘Musitions and other necessary attendantes’ required for the King’s Men’s 1624–25 Winter court performances, and therefore not ‘to bee arested, or deteyned’ at any time ‘dureinge the tyme of the Revells’.49 John P. Cutts notes that ‘of the twenty-four […] seven can definitely be identified as musicians’ known from other sources, and suggests that the list indicates ‘a potential band of eleven musicians’.50 It is not clear whether Herbert is offering legal protection to regular Globe and Blackfriars musicians during the season of court performance or to supernumerary hires required only for the Revels, but his records do demonstrate the willingness of an adult company to make substantial use of professional musicians by the end of the Jacobean period.
Andrew Gurr has been a particularly influential advocate of Richard Hosley’s view that the King’s Men added a music room above the Globe stage in order to accommodate Blackfriars’ consort of musicians, acquired along with the indoor venue itself.51 Whilst the suggestion is entirely consistent with a general trend towards more complex and plentiful music cues in this and other adult companies’ repertories indoors and out after 1609, David Mann has recently suggested that the distinction may be a little too neat. He argues that, contrary to Hosley’s long-accepted analysis, musicians did perform from above the stage at the Globe before the Blackfriars acquisition; that ‘instrumental/consort music in the amphitheatres’ in fact ‘did exist’ before 1609; and that overall, the musical contrast between ‘the early days of the revived children ca 1599–1603’ and ‘Shakespeare’s plays in their outdoor performance […] was not as extreme as has been portrayed’.52 Mann’s arguments are as speculative as those he critiques, but in challenging a generally accepted scholarly position that, given the nature of the evidence, must involve some guesswork, he does offer a timely reminder to take these broader paradigms as a rough guide only, and where possible to focus on specific instances of playhouse performance when describing music’s dramatic possibilities.
With specificity in mind, then, how much can we recover about particular music cues in a given play? Our main sources in this regard are the play-texts themselves, the 193 extant plays with a posited first performance date between 1603 and 1625 providing a substantial body of evidence. However, there are limits to what such material can tell us. Play-texts often indicate when and suggest why music was included, but it is far more challenging to recover actual compositions used for a particular cue. Early modern play-texts do not include musical notation, so melodies for songs must be traced in material at least one remove from the playhouse, be that books of printed music, contemporary manuscript song collections, or later sources. And when play-texts cue instrumental music without words, we cannot even match lyrics with other sources that might include both ‘the Note, and Ditty’.53 It is inevitable, then, that limited musical notation relating categorically to playhouse performance survives. Yet whilst the loss of so much early playhouse music is unfortunate, it is perhaps of less concern to this study than might be expected. Play-text evidence suggests that Jacobean playwrights often thought quite generically about how ‘Infernall Musicke’, or ‘a sad Song’, might be helpful in performance.54 Even if early modern playing companies had followed the rigorous archival policy of today’s reconstructed Globe, the knowledge about dramatic music that would emerge from playhouse documents of musical performance may not elucidate the dramatic intentions of playwrights quite as substantially as we might hope.
Perhaps more challenging than the loss of playhouse musical notation is the nature of the extant play-texts, and their relationship with early performance. A handful of plays are known from manuscript sources, but the overwhelming majority survive only in printed quarto and folio playbooks; the most recent Annals of English Drama, 975–1700 records just nineteen extant manuscripts for plays thought first to have been performed commercially between 1603 and 1625, whilst Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser’s Database of Early English Playbooks identifies 185 printed plays with likely performance origins in the same period. Amongst the manuscripts, there are eight complete texts for plays otherwise unknown, and nine plays for which we have both manuscript and printed versions.55 This pales in comparison to the 176 plays extant only in early printed texts. Unfortunately, printed playbooks very rarely – if ever – offer a comprehensive record of the music used in playhouse performances. This is in part due to the variety of texts that might have served as the basis for a printed edition, ranging from a playwright’s working manuscript to a playing company’s allowed book, via verbal reconstruction from the memories of actors involved in the play’s performance, or even – as Tiffany Stern has recently argued – from playgoers’ notes.56 We cannot even be sure precisely how much or little playhouse music is absent from a particular printed playbook without access to prompt-books or other records of performance for comparison.
As Stern demonstrates, songs have a particular tendency to disappear between performance and print. There are material reasons for this phenomenon, as songs were likely to exist on pieces of paper physically detachable from the various versions of the play-text from which a printed edition might be prepared, and conceptual reasons, Stern arguing that even in dramatic performance songs were at times seen as ‘detachable’ from the rest of the play.57 Cues for instrumental music are recorded with no more consistency – or indeed detail – in early modern playbooks. For instance, the 1623 Folio text of Richard III preserves a systematic and dramatically central use of trumpet calls to announce a series of unusual royal entrances throughout the play, yet the eight quarto texts all omit fully half of these cues, probably reflecting – amongst other things – quite different provenances of the manuscripts upon which the folio and quarto editions were based.58 The textual evidence for early modern playhouse music is unquestionably partial, and it is certain that far more music was used than we can ever hope to identify with precision from the textual record. The implication is that positive evidence must take priority over negative. This study prefers cases in which music use is relatively clear from the extant printed text, and does not generally make arguments about a lack of music being significant. Moreover, its primary focus is on scenes where music is also the subject of close attention in the surrounding dialogue, for such moments suggest more integration between dramatic scene and practical music. The texts under consideration preserve the clearest available evidence of playwrights using music with the playhouse in mind.
This study departs from much previous work on music in early modern drama in its chronological scope, and in its focus on a range of playwrights including but not limited to Shakespeare. The years it covers, 1603–1625, encompass several distinct phases in the development of early modern commercial drama, demonstrating both continuities and contrasts in London playhouse musical practices across a period of twenty-two years. This encompasses the mature phases of youth company performance indoors (1603–1613) and adult company performance exclusively outdoors (1603–1608), as well as later years in which adult companies began moving between indoor and outdoor playhouses with increasingly sophisticated musical resources (1609–1625). It thus reaches from one of the decades most often studied in relation to playhouse music, through to a decade that has received less such attention than it deserves, bringing plays such as The Spanish Gypsy (LEM, 1623) and A Game at Chess (KM, 1624) into a conversation about playhouse music from which they have too often been excluded.59 The 193 extant commercial plays thought first to have been performed between 1603 and 1625 provide a body of evidence that is finite enough to be examined in its entirety, yet varied enough to demonstrate that the uses of playhouse music that emerge are not the preserve of a single playwright, company or performance space, but rather wider practices current across twenty-two years of ever-evolving commercial dramatic performance. The date span of James I’s reign is helpful for the performance contexts it encompasses, not because shifts in musical practice – in the commercial playhouse at least – were influenced centrally by changes of monarch.
Each of the following chapters considers a separate idea of musical response, focusing on texts that respond particularly productively to the idea under consideration. The selection of plays is also intended to emphasize both specificity and wider continuity, in terms of play-makers, of venue, and of date. Commercial drama changed considerably in the Jacobean period, yet despite many differences, the underlying understandings of playhouse response and of music’s dramatic possibilities are often surprisingly consistent. One thread running through the study is adult performance outdoors, with at least one play produced under such auspices considered at length in every chapter, beginning with a focus on a particular playhouse (the Globe) and playing company (the King’s Men) in Chapter One. However, plays from indoor venues are also well represented in later chapters, including children’s company drama, a play probably performed at the Cockpit by Lady Elizabeth’s Men, and many texts that the King’s Men transported between the Globe and Blackfriars. This selection permits both narrow and broad accounts of music use in Jacobean commercial playhouses, presenting some distinctive contours of the King’s Men’s work whilst also demonstrating continuities between these practices and those of other playing companies. Likewise, attention in various chapters to Shakespeare’s musical dramaturgy is counterbalanced by exploration of plays by Fletcher, Heywood, Marston, Middleton and others with comparable dramatic intentions.
Chapter One, ‘Listening’, traces musical compulsion, this response being the single most prevalent in the textual record. With an exclusive focus on the King’s Men at the Globe, it takes plays from across the decades covered by this study – Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy (KM, 1606), Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (KM, 1609), and Middleton’s A Game at Chess (KM, 1624) – to examine how compulsive music shaped playhouse dramaturgy. Chapter Two, ‘Looking’, explores the significance of senses other than hearing in the experience of music, with a particular focus on sight. Tracing distinctive playhouse responses to hidden music, the chapter puts outdoor, adult Globe performance alongside indoor, youth Blackfriars performance through two contemporaneous plays: Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (KM, 1606), and Marston’s Sophonisba (CQR, 1605). Distinct musical resources and playhouse conventions result in two plays with extremely contrasting musical sound-worlds, yet they share dramatic intentions in their uses of hidden music. Examples from other plays of various dates are interwoven, demonstrating the persistence of unseen music as a dramatic tool into the 1610s and 1620s. Chapter Three, ‘Imagining’, explores early modern engagements with song where listeners adopt the perspective of a singer through imaginative identification or fantasy. Considering Ford, Dekker, Middleton and Rowley’s The Spanish Gypsy (LEM, 1623), Middleton and (possibly) Fletcher’s The Nice Valour (??, 1622) and Shakespeare’s Othello (KM, 1604), it considers engagements through song with subversive or socially marginal states, as well as identifications across gender boundaries. Chapter Four, ‘Remembering’, explores instrumental performances at which listeners recalled their own tactile encounters with similar instruments, in turn offering a point of imaginative identification with staged musicians. It traces a lute that invites this response in Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness (WM, 1603), popular in the repertory of Worcester’s Men and later Queen Anna’s Men, probably at the Rose, Curtain and Red Bull until at least the late 1610s.
This study pursues an extremely specific question about Jacobean drama: how did culturally prevalent ideas of musical response shape playhouse performance practices? Yet the interactions amongst playwrights, play-makers and playgoers that emerge facilitate wider thinking about early modern culture, playhouses and plays. The concluding ‘Coda’ therefore returns to some broader questions: how can we best balance distinctions and continuities amongst the output of different playwrights, playing companies and playhouses in our accounts of early modern drama? What kind of cultural space was the playhouse, and why did early modern subjects go there? How far is it possible to recover ideas prevalent in a given culture yet separate from the carefully articulated views of specialists and theorists? Looking towards these wider questions, we can consider a central term – ‘play’. The word itself appears in several forms throughout this study: ‘playhouse’; ‘playwright’; ‘playing company’; ‘play-maker’; ‘playgoer’. There are particular reasons to use these terms. ‘Playhouse’ is a common early modern word for the purpose-built venues in which commercial drama was performed. ‘Playwright’ usefully suggests a skilled craftsman producing a commercial good in the form of a play-text, whereas the alternative, ‘author’, would introduce a number of ideas about authority – and perhaps about the literary nature of early modern dramatic writing – that would be unhelpful here.60 ‘Play-maker’ serves as a useful umbrella term for everyone involved in producing commercial drama. ‘Playgoer’ avoids the homogeneity that the collective singular ‘audience’ might suggest, as well as sidestepping the implicit privileging of sight or hearing in ‘audience’, ‘auditor’ or ‘spectator’. Indeed, a ‘playgoer’ is defined only by his or her presence in the playhouse, not by the level of attention he or she gives to the dramatic performance. But together, these terms place helpful emphasis on the notion of ‘play’ itself, reflecting a central characteristic of the cultural space explored in this study. The early modern playhouse appears repeatedly as a place of imagination, fantasy and ‘play’, with musical performance central to the distinctively playful engagements expected therein. With this thought in mind, we can turn to the detailed excavation of particular ideas of everyday musical response, and the close examination of each idea’s influence on the dramaturgy of the early modern stage.
