Tracing Musical Compulsion

The paratexts of printed music books are strikingly suggestive of widespread ideas, assumptions and beliefs concerning music. A full examination of these sources reveals consistent, repeated uses of particular terms of musical compulsion, which under close scrutiny bear specific significations that no longer obtain in late modern usage. These paratexts are extremely clear about how best to describe the experience of music: the term ‘delight’ is used in its various forms (delight; delightful; delighting) in relation to music at least forty-five times in the paratexts of one hundred and fifty-nine musical works of the period, substantially more than any comparable word or phrase. For early modern writers, the experience of music is delight, and the two words are paired constantly both in these paratexts and elsewhere.³ This was a linguistic commonplace so familiar to early modern subjects that any reference to one must surely have evoked its connections with the other.

However, simply tracing the association of delight with music tells us very little about early modern musical compulsion. Whilst the connection is amply preserved in the textual record, the response that musical delight actually describes is by no means self-evident to a modern reader. Nonetheless, careful consideration of exactly how and when the term is used in early modern writings allows us to recover what it meant to early seventeenth-century subjects. To twenty-first century ears, ‘delight’ indicates extreme gratification: ‘To give great pleasure or enjoyment to; to please highly’ (OED, ‘delight, v. 1.a’). This was not the full story in early modern England, though, and a clue towards its earlier sense appears in its etymology, the OED citing the Latin verbs ‘delectare’, meaning ‘to allure, attract, delight, charm, or please’, and ‘delicere’, meaning ‘to entice away or allure’ (my emphasis). These italicized senses underlie an early modern delight not just pleasurable but also irresistible to the delighted subject. Music book paratexts confirm the term’s close association with compulsive experiences. A dedicatory poem to Thomas Greaves’s Songs of Sundry Kinds (1604) claims that his music ‘[d]elightes the sences, captiuates the braines’, and ‘is a charme against despight’, aligning charm and captivation with delight as descriptors of music’s affective power.⁴ ‘Charm’ and ‘captivate’ are both acknowledged early modern terms of musical enforcement: Linda Phyllis Austern traces them in some detail alongside the mythical ‘Siren’ model of engagement with female musical performance, for instance.⁵ Likewise, this 1604 paratext foregrounds the compulsive element of musical delight by pairing the senses’ delight with the brain’s captivation.

‘Delight’ also denotes attention seizing when paratexts tell their readers that a volume of music will ‘delight thee with varietie’.⁶ This popular phrase presupposes the reader’s full awareness of the mixture of attention seizing and pleasure that ‘delight’ denotes, upon which the claim of delighting ‘with varietie’ depends. Variety was a widely valued quality in early modern music and literature, and Thomas Morley offers a memorable account of how and why to offer it in his Plain and Easy Introduction to Practical Music (1597):

To complete the picture of delight’s distinctive early modern signification, we can trace its rhetorical conjunction with another term of musical compulsion. Here, rather than joining the charms and enchantments of harmony, delight is linked to the forceful, more threatening compulsion of ravishment, another common descriptor of musical experience in paratexts and elsewhere. Accordingly, Jacques Gohory, in a preface translated into English in 1574, pauses to ‘protest vnto you that if the songes of other Musitians do delight mee, those of Orland do rauish me’.⁸ As we shall see, ‘ravish’ is another significant term for musical compulsion, and Gohory’s construction here is illuminating. In showing how certain songs outstrip all others, he indicates that ‘to ravish’ is a yet stronger form of ‘to delight’. His comparison completes our reconstruction of early modern musical delight as a compulsive, pleasurable experience central to successful musical response, these paratextual moments offering glimpses of how delight was understood, particularly in relation to musical experience, in early modern England. This in turn allows us to make sense of the utter prevalence of the term as a description of musical response, and to re-read texts with an understanding that approximates a little better to that of early readers. It is in accordance with the preference of the sources, then, that ‘delight’ is taken up in this chapter to describe the compulsive musical experience that held such sway in early modern English thought.

‘Ravish’ was itself a widespread and familiar term for musical enforcement, though not quite as popular as ‘delight’: as Christopher Marsh notes, ‘[m]any music-lovers felt ravished in this period’. Even the king himself experienced the phenomenon, according to the printed account of James I’s journey from Edinburgh to London in 1603, for at the Earl of Shrewsbury’s house in Worksop, Nottinghamshire, an afternoon’s hunting was apparently followed by ‘most excellent soule-rauishing musique, wherewith his Highness was not a little delighted’.⁹ Once again, we can better understand musical compulsion through an excavation of how the term was used. Today, ‘ravish’ and ‘rape’ signify a different set of relations amongst a group of related ideas than they did four centuries ago, when the idea of unlawfully seizing someone’s property was often a primary sense, rather than sexual assault as we would expect today (OED, ‘ravish, v. 1.a’; ‘ravish, v. 1.b.i’; ‘rape, v.² 2.a’). The violation was both the taking of a woman seen as a possession of her husband, family or wider community, and the abuse that she would suffer.¹⁰ Thomas Heywood makes repeated use of the former sense in his Classical plays, in which Hesione is ‘rapt hence to Greece’, and ‘Pluto hath rap’t hence’ Proserpine. The same idea is explicit in William Corkine’s claim that his patrons Ursula Stapleton and Elizabeth Cope ‘are ledde away with a more then ordinarie delight’ in music.¹¹ Musical ravishment involves being carried away by harmony, a notion also encompassed by ‘charm’, ‘allure’ and ‘delight’. Together, this cluster of terms suggests that music seizes and possesses a subject’s attention, regardless of whether they wish to be so affected. Significantly, writers of the period – even when not concerned with praising music or selling a volume of compositions – repeatedly seek to appear both convinced and convincing that musical ravishment of this kind is a genuine, everyday response to music.

Of course, the concept of musical ravishment remained strongly dependent upon the sexual sense of ravish, in conjunction with the idea of being ‘stolen away’. In a Restoration context, argues Marsh, ‘the words of Samuel Pepys reveal there was only a thin line separating the soulful from the sexual’.¹² In pre-1642 usage, however, it seems that musical ravishment does not make a primary association between sexual and musical pleasure, but rather draws an analogy between the physiological processes of hearing and sex. Early modern sense theory understood hearing as a physical penetration of the ear: sound was not a wave, but a substantial species. As Penelope Gouk observes, ‘[t]he Aristotelian idea [is] that sound was produced by the striking of two bodies one against the other, carried through a medium to the ear’, and ‘the species of sound […is…] the concrete image thrown off by the sounding body’. Within the ear, this aural species then struck the spiritus, which ‘was the instrument of the incorporeal, rational soul’. As the species and spiritus mingled, the latter ‘immediately perceived whether it was pleasurable or painful’, in an extremely physical process.¹³ This provides a metaphor of hearing as male-female penetration recurrent across descriptions of compulsive musical experience, concurrent with and complementary to the seizing and leading away of musical ravishment. Many writers exploited this penetrative association, including Edward Sharpham in Cupid’s Whirligig (CKR, 1607), where Peg complains that a ‘voyce doth pierce the eare’ (K1^v; 5.3.76–77).¹⁴ The ear is even bypassed by Baldassarre Castiglioni in one graphic metaphor: in Thomas Hoby’s influential translation of Il Cortegiano, he instructs readers that ‘many thynges are taken in hande to please women withal, whose tender and soft breastes are soone perced with melody and fylled with swetenesse’.¹⁵

Why did this sexual sense of ravishment strike so many writers as an apt figure for musical experience? Like the related notion of seizing and leading away, it seems to be a metaphor in part for the difficulty of resisting music. Unlike visual stimuli that might be shut out with eyelids, it is relatively hard to prevent sound entering the ear. And, of course, early modern witnesses are often clear that music makes particularly irresistible demands for attention. For twenty-first-century readers this is an uncomfortable metaphor, yet the analogy between hearing and ravishment was a central means through which seventeenth-century listeners comprehended musical sound. Indeed, the penetrability and, often, defencelessness of the ear seems to have appealed greatly to the early modern imagination even away from music, and Shakespeare’s Old Hamlet and Ben Jonson’s Morose present versions of this vulnerability as contrasting as their respective progenitors.¹⁶ Perhaps the primary reason why early modern writers found the term apt, however, is that the idea of the ear as passive receptor of sound species – contrasting with far more dynamic contemporaneous theories of visual perception – meant that the metaphor of musical ravishment united the experience of seized attention with the physiological process that was believed to cause this very response.¹⁷

One final example of musical ravishment completes this initial examination of the term. In his 1611 account of continental travel, Thomas Coryate describes a musical performance, ‘both vocall and instrumentall’, that was ‘so good, so delectable, so rare, so admirable, so superexcellent, that it did euen rauish and stupefie all those strangers that neuer heard the like’; indeed, this music was so powerful that he ‘was for the time euen rapt vp with Saint Paul into the third heauen’.¹⁸ Whilst the sense of being physically moved and taken to another place – the third heaven – depends upon one kind of ravishment, the use of ‘rauish’ alongside ‘stupefie’ also suggests the idea of being physically struck – and then ‘struck dumb’ – by the music, in a physiological process of hearing that resembles bodily ravishment. Coryate’s raptures demonstrate that the penetrative and kidnapping senses co-existed in seventeenth-century usage, and it is fortunate that he separates the two ideas, for it makes clear that both were at work when early modern subjects were ravished by music.

Having excavated ‘delight’ and ‘ravish’ from printed music books and other texts, we can pursue these and other related terms through the tropes and figures of quotidian language. As we shall see, musical enforcement was part of the fabric of early modern conversation, where terms of musical compulsion were applied metaphorically to non-musical responses with regularity, and often in sources otherwise displaying little interest in music. Such allusions were part of everyday parlance, indicating the familiarity of musical delight even away from actual harmony. To explore this circulation, we can turn from printed music books to early modern dramatic dialogue and a range of other sources unrelated to music.

The meaning of ‘music to your ears’ has narrowed considerably since the seventeenth century. Today, the phrase takes music as a welcome, soothing sound: pleasure is at the fore. Yet in early modern usage, there is an equally strong sense that something is music to your ears because it will compel: aptly chosen words can recreate the experience of music – delight – by forcefully and pleasurably possessing the listener’s attention. Thus, in 2 The Honest Whore (PHM, 1605), when Bellafront exclaims, ‘My father? Any tongue that sounds his name, | Speakes Musicke to me: welcome, good old man’ (C3^r; 2.1.64–65), her point is that her father’s name seizes her attention, as music would do, as well as giving her pleasure.¹⁹ The phrase is used in early modern drama with particularly clear reference to the compulsive effect of music when characters of lower status ask a monarch or figure of power to listen to their pleas. An instance in The Conspiracy of Charles Duke of Byron (CQR, 1608) frames a royal pardon in precisely these terms when the king declares, ‘Tis musique to mine eares: rise then for euer, | Quit of what guilt soeuer, till this houre’ (H3^v; 5.2.107–08).²⁰ Byron’s speech is so compelling that it transcends the power imbalance and persuades the king to listen to and accept his words, thus granting the forgiveness requested: royal attention is enforced, as it would be by music. The textual record indicates the phrase’s currency across early modern culture, circulating the idea of musically compelled ears well beyond discussions of harmony. Beside these dramatic examples, variants of the phrase (music to my/mine/your/his/her ears) appear in printed texts ranging from ‘pleasant history’ to accounts of African travel, via translated Italian pastoral drama.²¹

‘Music to your ears’ is even evoked in non-musical dedications, where it serves a consistent and distinctive rhetorical purpose. In the ‘Epistle Dedicatory’ of a religious pamphlet, Samuel Garey tells Francis Bacon, ‘I know the sound of the trumpet of your praises is no musick to your eares’, whilst in 1636 Francis Gray addresses the various dedicatees of his sermon with almost identical words, protesting, ‘I might not be judged basely to flatter, as knowing that the sou[n]ding out of your Praises is no such pleasing Musicke to your eares.’²² The metaphor contends, in both cases, that whilst others take pleasure in flattery and thus cannot avoid giving it attention, the worthy patron of the text suffers from no such temptation, and can ignore sycophancy with ease. For lesser patrons, perhaps, praise would be music to their ears in replicating the effects of musical delight and pleasurably compelling their attention. But, as Bacon and company give no attention to praise, they will have no experience analogous to musical delight, and so flattery is in no sense music to their ears. These two dedicatory examples are particularly useful in the way they invoke musical delight casually and incidentally: the writers are interested in emphasizing their patrons’ modesty, not in articulating theories of musical affect. By mentioning ‘music to their ears’ in passing, the dedications locate musical compulsion in the linguistic and conceptual frameworks through which subjects encountered their world. The phrase is considered immediately comprehensible in casual invocation, understood fully without foregrounding or explication, as the thrust of the dedicator’s flattery moves quickly on. This is vital in establishing that musical delight was a casual commonplace of the period.

‘Music to your ears’ is generally evoked with earnestness, and often with sycophancy. Dramatic texts take a contrasting tone in their many jokes about musical ravishment, yet they similarly rely upon widespread cultural familiarity with musical compulsion. In one case, Thomas Middleton alludes clearly to musical compulsion whilst indulging in some misogynistic humour in More Dissemblers Besides Women (KM, 1614), when the manservant Dondolo responds to a song by declaring ironically that the performers ‘deserve to be hang’d for ravishing of me’ (E1^v; 4.2.83), punning on the sexual and musical senses of the term.²³ This pun reappears in a striking passage in S. S.’s The Honest Lawyer (QAM, 1615), in which the gallant Nice shows the servile Thirsty his latest sonnet, intended to seduce his ‘Mistresse’. He advises his man to ‘[l]ay thine eare close to my musicall tongue, I shall rauish her’, to which Thirsty responds, ‘You shall be hang’d for’t then’ (E4^v). Nice alludes to the musical ravishment of Thirsty’s ear, gendered female in accordance with its receptive status, whilst Thirsty puns instead upon the separate, criminal act of ravishment, perhaps reassigning ‘her’ to Nice’s ‘Mistresse’ rather than his own ear. To understand the joke, playgoers must be aware that ravishment is a commonly described effect of music; that this is distinct from the sense to which the threat of hanging alludes; and, finally, that the use of the term to describe music draws upon a sense of compulsive irresistibility, producing the gap in meaning upon which the joke depends. This is a common piece of wordplay, repeatedly used in commercial playhouses, indicating an awareness of musical ravishment in early modern culture far beyond specialist thought.

A third and final version of musical enforcement appears in the period’s many references to Sirens. As Linda Phyllis Austern and Inna Naroditskaya have explored, these mythical singers seem to have captured the popular imagination in a broader range of cultural contexts than any other musically compulsive performers: ‘[v]irtually all human cultures seem to have invented myths or tales of enchantment that involve fairy-like stories of water-beings, or at least the cosmic love between some water-woman and an earthly or celestial man’.²⁴ Sirens were widely familiar in early modern culture, Geffrey Whitney’s popular emblem book of 1586 providing a visual example of their circulation (Figure 2).²⁵ Published two decades later, George Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois (CQR, 1604) outlines the Siren myth as it would continue to circulate in England, when Mountsurry exclaims:

Sirens became early modern shorthand for those able to grasp one’s attention, particularly with their voices. Once again, this presupposes a widespread awareness of the Sirens’ musical compulsion, if the reference is to be understood. Sirens are not the only classical figures connected with forceful music, but they do appear to have been amongst the most widely circulated in early modern England. Sirens illustrate compulsive allure even when unrelated to music in texts as diverse as plays, sermons, children’s textbooks and even (twice) in an account of the lives and deaths of nineteen recently executed pirates.²⁷ The wide familiarity presupposed by this range of genres demonstrates the importance of the Siren myth in circulating the concept of musical enforcement through vernacular culture.

Figure 2 Sirens luring Odysseus with vocal and instrumental music. Geffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes, and Other Deuises (Leiden, 1586), p. 10.

If the pleasure and compulsion of delight was seen as a universal musical response, as appears to have been the case in the early modern period, then the gender specificity of the Siren myth might be problematic. Unlike ‘music to your ears’, Sirens model musical compulsion specifically through female singers and male auditors. Yet intriguingly, Siren references reveal an unexpected and thoroughgoing site of gender flexibility in early modern thought, for the term is readily applied to performers of any gender. Indeed, early modern play-texts are particularly quick to label men as irresistibly persuasive in this way. In A Christian Turned Turk (??, 1610), Voada has no qualms in telling Captain Ward to ‘keepe off false Syren’, when he asks her to ‘[w]ith patience heare me Lady’, telling him, ‘False knight, I haue giuen too calm an eare already | To thy inchanted notes’ (E4^r-v; sc. 7.134–42).²⁸ Similarly, in The Two Merry Milkmaids (RB1, 1619) Julia tells Callowe to go ‘[a]way my Lord, I am bound to stop mine eares; the Syrens sing in you’ (F3^v; 2.2.315–16).²⁹ Both Voada and Julia invoke the Siren myth casually to describe male characters (Captain Ward and Callowe), in so doing figuring the men as ‘female’ seductive performers and the two woman speakers as ‘male’ seduced receivers. In these examples and elsewhere, musical participants were gendered through the ‘Siren’ label without regard for biological sex.

A neat pair of references occurs in The Renegado (LEM, 1624), when Vitelli, a Venetian gentleman disguised as a merchant, calls the Ottoman lady Donusa ‘this second Siren’ (G4^r; 3.5.22), and conversely, Donusa herself notes she has ‘stopte mine eares | Against all Siren notes lust euer sung’ when overwhelmed with desire for Vitelli (D1^v; 2.1.29–30). Similarly, in The Turk (CKR, 1607), Muleasses (the titular male character) calls the female Timoclea ‘Syren’ (H3^r; 4.1.279), whilst Julia in turn tells Muleasses that ‘Syrens haue left the Sea and sing on shore’ in his voice (I4^v; 5.3.10).³⁰ Such parallel invocations of male and female Sirens emphasize the detachability with which this term of musical enforcement could apply to a performer, regardless of sex.

John Marston is particularly playful in invoking sirens in The Malcontent (CQR/KM, 1604), emphasizing gender flexibility through meta-theatricality. A page attending Duke Pietro claims that he has lost his voice ‘[w]ith dreaming faith’, and so offers alternatively ‘a couple of Syrenicall rascals [who] shall inchaunt yee’ (F2^v; 3.4.34–37). These ‘Syrenicall’ parts were presumably played by young boys with unbroken voices and thus also likely to perform female roles for the Children of the Queen’s Revels. When Pietro asks them to ‘[s]ing of the nature of women’ (F2^v; 3.4.39), gender performativity comes to the fore. This resonates powerfully with the Siren reference: these ‘Syrennicall rascals’ are both male and female, being simultaneously real-life boys, male dramatic characters, seductively female Siren singers, and potential actors of female dramatic parts. The gender flexibility often associated with Sirens in early modern contexts and particularly in drama offers playful comic possibilities to a boy company.

Like Siren song, musical ravishment genders performer and receiver, albeit through a more localized bodily metaphor. Gender roles are interchangeable in the aforementioned ravishment pun taken up by Nice and Thirsty in The Honest Lawyer, with Nice’s instruction to ‘[l]ay thine eare close to my musicall tongue, I shall rauish her’ (E4^v, my emphasis). Crucially, Nice genders his male companion’s ear as female in accordance with its receptive role in the process of hearing: the species that Nice’s aural performance generates becomes a metaphoric phallus, as the concrete image of the sound penetrates Thirsty’s ear. Like Siren metaphors, ravishment genders performer and compelled auditor not by anatomy but by role: whether man, woman, boy or girl, all that matters is whether one has a penetrated (female) ear or rather generates a penetrating (male) species. Early modern commentators insist that both men and women can experience musical ravishment, William Corkine referring to his female patrons being ‘ledde away’ by music, and John Northbrooke offers a converse description of music’s ability to ‘rapte and ravishe men in a maner wholy’.³¹ Andreas Ornithoparchus makes this universality completely explicit in an epistle prefacing his Micrologus, claiming that the ‘power’ of music to delight ‘is so great, that it refuseth neither any sexe, nor any age’.³²

Male and female Sirens have profound and useful implications for the early modern relationship between gender and musical compulsion, particularly when considered in conjunction with ravishment. Even whilst Siren analogies gender a performer as seductively female and musical ravishment genders the same performer as obtrusively male, both models apply to performers and auditors of either sex, based solely on the ‘masculine’ penetration or ‘feminine’ allure of ravisher and Siren respectively. This suggests that early modern subjects saw musical gender roles as performed and detachable, rather than inherent, unchanging or determined by biological sex. It is consistent with early modern understandings, then, to think of the response modelled so pervasively, that of compulsion through musical delight, as fully applicable to both male and female musical respondents. In early modern England, anyone could be a Siren. Through this term and the other phrases traced above, the notion of musical compulsion circulated in wider early modern culture as part of the fabric of common parlance.

Delighted Characters

The previous section traced terms of musical enforcement familiar across early modern culture. Now, we can ask what exactly a delighted response to music might involve. Some clues appear in the compelled responses to harmony that were staged with regularity in the playhouse, in which characters often announce their enforced pleasure even as diegetic music sounds. Not only do such dramatizations show what musical compulsion might have looked like, but by presenting this process occurring successfully and repeatedly, they also suggest that such responses were real and familiar in early modern England. Moreover, these dramatizations recur in the repertory of the company with which this chapter is centrally concerned, demonstrating one specific way in which musical enforcement became familiar to the King’s Men’s audiences. A wide range of plays performed by the company include dramatic representations of musical delighting: Philip Massinger and John Fletcher’s The Custom of the Country (1620); Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611) and Julius Caesar (LCM, 1599); Barnabe Barnes’s The Devil’s Charter (1606); and, the anonymous 1 Jeronimo (1604). We can turn to these plays, then, with a question in mind: what do these dramatic representations suggest about the compelled musical responses of real early modern subjects, particularly their responses in the playhouse?

Perhaps the most striking representation of musical ‘delighting’ occurs in Fletcher and Massinger’s The Custom of the Country. Arnoldo is seeking to establish whether he is being deceived, for various people he does not recognize claim to be his servants. He asks, ‘Good Gentle Sir, give me leave to thinke a little | For either I am much abus’d’ – yet before he can finish this thought, he is hastily interrupted by the music’s organizer, Zabulon, who calls, ‘Strike Musick | And sing that lusty Song’. As the ‘Musick Song’ sounds, Arnoldo’s attention is entirely possessed and his concerns forgotten, leaving him to cry, ‘Bewitching harmony! | Sure I am turn’d into another Creature’ (2B2^r; 3.2.57–60).³³ This is a remarkably clear dramatic presentation of musical enforcement in action. Without any magical or mythical suggestion within the dramatic world, a character is completely possessed and absorbed by a musical performance, losing the train of thought that overwhelmed him a few seconds previously. His apostrophizing cry, ‘Bewitching harmony!’, indicates that this compulsive delight is emphatically pleasurable, and even suggests that its force is akin to magic in its potency, perhaps evoking the Circe myth in the claim to be turned, or bewitched, into ‘another Creature’.³⁴ From the opposite perspective Zabulon must distract Arnoldo, and relies on music to seize his attention. He is convinced that the performance will have the desired effect, and is not disappointed.

The pleasure and compulsion that delight Arnoldo are stimulating, vivifying and exciting him. Yet the King’s Men also portrayed music relaxing and soothing staged listeners, even causing them to fall asleep. Ariel’s charming of Gonzalo is a familiar example, the sprite first sending Alonso’s adviser to sleep with ‘solemne Musicke’, then awakening him with a song ‘in Gonzaloes eare’, ‘While you here do snoaring lie’ (The Tempest, TLN 862–1009; 2.1.189–310). This is not, however, a unique feature of Shakespeare’s enchanted island; in the decade or so preceding The Tempest’s first performance, music put listeners to sleep in at least two other plays staged by the company. Notably, whilst Ariel’s music appears to have magical properties within the dramatic fiction, these earlier plays offer soporific music as a naturalistic and believable element of their dramatic representation. Julius Caesar, probably first performed around the time that Shakespeare’s company moved to the Globe, sees Brutus call for music from his page, Lucius. After a tender exchange, in which Brutus finds that the book he has been ardently requesting is in fact ‘in the pocket of my Gowne’ and asks Lucius to forgive his ‘forgetfull[ness]’, the page performs ‘Musicke, and a Song’ (TLN 2263–78; 4.2.306–19). The boy actor probably sang and self-accompanied on the lute: David Daniell’s assertion that ‘since no words are given, [it is] probably a melody on a lute’, with Lucius ‘more likely to fall asleep mid-strum than mid-warble’, seems unconvincing, particularly since Tiffany Stern has demonstrated the practical reasons for songs’ words so often being absent from printed play-texts. Moreover, it was far more common in commercial drama for boy actors – such as the player performing as Lucius – to be sent on stage to sing than to perform instrumental music.³⁵ Brutus remarks that ‘[t]his is a sleepy Tune’, but before he can nod off himself he observes that ‘slumber’ has laid its ‘Leaden Mace vpon my Boy, | That playes thee Musicke’ (TLN 2279–81; 4.2.320–22). The page does all he can to stay awake and to play for Brutus as instructed, but cannot resist the enticement to sleep of his own song. Thomas Platter and the many others who watched a performance of this scene at the first Globe may perhaps have been more struck by Caesar’s ghost a few lines later, whilst the staging of an (over)effective lullaby may have seemed so familiar as almost to be banal.³⁶ Yet it is precisely this familiarity that makes the scene such valuable evidence: in dramatizing music’s power to send a listener to sleep, Shakespeare’s play helped circulate delight as part of a wider cultural belief about music, as an expected convention of the early modern stage in general, and as a practice of the King’s Men’s repertory in particular.

In Barnabe Barnes’s The Devil’s Charter, performed by the company a few years later in the mid-1600s, musical compulsion once again sends a listener to sleep, this time in conjunction with a sleeping draught. Music draws drugged victims into a slumber before Pope Alexander the Sixth performs some heavily stylized murders with a pair of asps. Two young brothers, Astor and Philippo Manfredi, enter exhausted from a game of tennis, and lie down upon a conveniently placed bed, where they drink wine drugged with a sleeping draught. Philippo calls for ‘[m]ore musick there’, and ‘after one straine of musicke they fall a sleepe’ as the sounds seize their attention and tip them into a slumber. That this is pleasurable, and that the music has grasped their attention absolutely, is made explicit by Philippo’s declaration ‘[i]n his sleepe’ that his ‘soule is rapt, | Into the ioyes of heauen with harmony’ (I2^v-I4^r; 4.5).³⁷ In Philippo’s sleepy words, the neoplatonic view of music is reworked as a slumberous rapture in which he dreams of, or perhaps experiences, the ‘divine musics’.³⁸

With the captive brothers asleep, the musicians are duly dismissed. The Pope’s man Bernardo calls ‘musicke depart’, and the stage is set for Alexander’s serpentine malevolence. Alexander immediately ‘stirreth them’, ascertaining that music has helped enforce a sleep so deep that his victims will not awake. Once again, a character successfully relies upon a response of delight, as musical compulsion helps keep the duo asleep whilst he ‘putteth to either of their brests an Aspike’, and instructs the snakes, ‘Take your repast vpon these Princely paps’ (I3^r-I4^r; 4.5). Barnes’s spectacular stagecraft echoes the musical enforcements staged in Shakespeare’s scenes, music captivating, pleasing and ultimately debilitating youths and adults alike.

Finally, a more prosaic delighting occurs in 1 Jeronimo, using the competing demands of musical compulsion and love to generate dramatic tension. Here, it is military music that compels the attention of a soldier: Andrea is departing for war, and must leave Bellimperia behind. He tells her, ‘the drum beckens me; sweet deere farwell’. She tells him that she wishes to ‘kisse thee first’, but Andrea is drawn once more by ‘[t]he drum agen’. Bellimperia challenges the power of musical compulsion directly, asking, ‘Hath that more power then I?’ Her remark directly acknowledges the musical force that she is competing with. Yet despite the fact he is leaving perhaps for ever, Andrea can no longer ignore the drum in favour of her kiss, and so tells her that she must ‘[d]oot quickly then: farwell’, before promptly exiting. Whilst the sound represents military authority, Andrea refers to ‘the drum’ itself calling him away from Bellimperia’s kiss (D4^v).³⁹ Just like the vivifying and soporific examples of Fletcher and Massinger, Shakespeare, and Barnes, this military music seizes attention, drawing Andrea away to war.

These examples, making use of different musical forms, show the diversity of delight: accompanied song likely to be sophisticated art music; instrumental music (or possibly another song); and, a simple drum rhythm.⁴⁰ Characters respond just as clearly with delight to a complex song setting as they do to military drum signals, one of the simplest sounds that could be considered music. Moreover, these reactions share common features likely to reappear when other early modern characters and subjects are delighted. The blend of compulsion and pleasure is explicit in both Arnoldo and Philippo’s responses, demonstrating the purchase of ‘delight’ as an early modern term for their reactions. Moreover, all of the characters save Lucius (who is busy singing) comment on their own compulsion. This certainly clarifies their responses for playgoers, underlining the importance of musical delighting to each plot. However, it also emphasizes the emotive force of musical delight: two scenes even characterize such outbursts as spontaneous overflows of feeling, in Arnoldo’s apostrophizing and Philippo’s sleep-talking. Such strength of emotion is a hallmark of musical delight.

When asking how and why playhouse performers might seek to compel actual playgoers, one point of continuity amongst these dramatic examples becomes particularly important: many of the musically delighted parties cease what they are doing and saying, and focus completely on the music. Their attention is redirected to the harmony, its source and its significations, and the characters arranging the musical intervention can manipulate them further; in the case of Pope Alexander VI, this has murderous consequences. Significantly, playgoers were themselves targeted by music with precisely this focus of attention in mind: even as play-makers dramatized compelled responses, they also sought to delight their audiences through musical performances, with particular dramatic effects intended. It is to these attempts at playhouse delighting that we can now turn.

Compelled Playgoers

Early modern subjects believed strongly in music’s power to delight, and so playhouse musical engagements were likely to follow these expectations. Whilst direct early modern references to playgoers’ musical responses are rare, Prynne’s claim in Histriomastix that ‘Spectators’ were ‘oft-times ravished’ by ‘obscene lascivious Love-songs’ and ‘ribaldrous pleasing Ditties’ certainly endorses the view that audiences were regularly delighted by music (2L3^v). Moreover, if we accept Angela Hobart and Bruce Kapferer’s suggestion that culturally prevalent ideas of musical response can themselves ‘materialize experience’ when practical music sounds, it would seem a valid supposition that quotidian reference to musical compulsion predisposed hearers to respond accordingly, making playgoers more receptive to musical delighting.⁴¹

We can also take note of some twenty-first century models of musical affect that resonate productively with the early modern accounts explored above, offering another view of how musical enforcement might work upon a playgoer in Jacobean England. Much recent research in music psychology has examined the phenomenon of ‘entrainment’, a pleasurable, compelled reaction to music that may have been similarly recognizable to an early modern subject. Entrainment ‘describes an action whereby two oscillatory processes interact with one another in such a way that they adjust towards and eventually lock into a common phase and/or periodicity’, for example when ‘[t]he thunder of applause […] turns quite suddenly into synchronized clapping’.⁴² This encompasses the ensemble of a group of musicians playing in time together, but can also apply to the responses of listeners aligning to the pulse and rhythm of a piece of music. Particularly visible examples of the latter might involve movement in time to the performance, from tapping a foot to dancing a gavotte. Studies of musical entrainment have argued that brains are ‘wired to respond to […] rhythmic sounds in particular’, and that both entrainment and the resistance that, for instance, a syncopated rhythm might provide, are musical experiences particularly associated with pleasure.⁴³ Studies of entrainment offer a suggestion, then, with reference primarily to rhythm, as to how music might ‘delight’ a listener.

Entrainment models one way music might compel listeners in a playhouse, and it also provides a helpful rubric for exploring collective playhouse experience in the synchronization of responses that it describes, be that applause resolving into rhythmic clapping, or audience members together entrained to the rhythm of a musical performance. Without reducing playgoers to an undifferentiated mass, we might think of the moments at which music sounded in the playhouse as points of conjunction where the responses of different playgoers were particularly likely to align, at least in some regards, both with one another and, potentially, with reactions within the diegetic world of a play.

How and why did play-makers seek to compel playgoers with music, then, and what might this suggest about the dramatic significance of playhouse music? Working from the premise that play-makers believed they could delight their audiences, and that this may well have been true, the remainder of the chapter investigates the ways in which playhouse music invited delighted responses, and how these responses would shape playgoers’ wider engagements with drama. Three plays from across the Jacobean period, all performed at the Globe by the King’s Men, make clear attempts to delight playgoers with music: The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606); The Winter’s Tale (1609); and, A Game at Chess (1624). We can begin by asking when in a play it was considered fruitful to evoke musical delight from playgoers.

Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy appeared in print over the winter of 1607–8, its title page claiming it to have ‘beene sundry times Acted, by the Kings Maiesties Seruants’, placing its performances on Bankside prior to the company’s Blackfriars winter residencies.⁴⁴ Middleton offers two dramatic set-pieces that coincide with the performance of diegetic courtly music: Vindice’s killing of the Duke for murdering his betrothed Gloriana (F3^r-v; 3.5.123–223), and Vindice’s killing of the Duke’s son Lussurioso for trying to have sex with Vindice’s sister Castiza (I3^v; 5.3.40–42). The scenes share an emphasis on memorable spectacle, the use of court pomp, and the sounding of music as revenge is taken; moreover, in both cases, delighted responses are clear within the dramatic world. In the first instance, violence builds towards a musical climax. The Duke’s murder involves tricking him into kissing the poison-laced skull of the woman he himself poisoned years earlier, then revealing that his wife is having an affair with his illegitimate son, and finally giving him a fatal wound, probably with a dagger. Before the fatal blow is struck, music sounds offstage and the Duchess and Spurio approach:

The offstage music associated with the Duchess grasps the attention of Vindice, his brother Hippolito and the Duke, despite onstage events that we might expect to dominate their concerns: Vindice has already tricked the Duke into kissing the poison-laced skull of Gloriana, and as the music sounds the Duke’s lips and teeth are ‘eaten out’ by the poison (F3^r; 3.5.160). As the Duke’s face is dissolving too slowly for Vindice’s liking, however, the revenger directs Hippolito to ‘Naile downe his tongue’ to keep him quiet even as the Duchess approaches (F3^r; 3.5.196). Yet despite this striking sequence of events, the brothers are repeatedly drawn to the music as they tell one another to ‘Harke’ and ‘Whist’. Even the Duke is distracted from his own rapidly disintegrating facial features by the musical announcement of his wife and son’s pseudo-incestuous adultery.

The Duchess makes a separate call for ‘Lowdst Musick’ as she and Spurio go in for their banquet. Peter Walls argues that in court performance contexts ‘loud music’ indicated a wind ensemble, likely to be a shawm and sackbut, cornett and sackbut, or possibly even flute and sackbut consort.⁴⁵ We can surmise, then, that the music sounding offstage – described by Hippolito, too, as ‘lowd Musick’ – may have been performed on wind instruments. As Hippolito and Vindice’s macabre imagery indicates, this music accompanies the Duke’s death:

Dramatic characters aside, how might playgoers have responded to this loud music? Within the diegetic world, music draws the Duke’s and the revengers’ attention to the Duchess, exposing her infidelity to her dying husband, but this is not a revelation for playgoers who are already well aware of the affair. Rather, from an audience member’s point of view, music’s principal effect is to highlight a structurally critical moment of revenge, as the Duke’s words (‘brooke’) give way to death (‘bloud’). Hippolito links the murder directly to the music: one is ‘[t]hanks to’ the other. In a play that appears repeatedly and meta-theatrically struck by its own dramatic construction, particularly in its manipulation of generic tropes, Hippolito’s remarks appear to look outward, emphasizing the playwright’s decision to pair compulsive music with the long-awaited death of the Duke. Enforced attention to playhouse music becomes a dramatic tool in the scene, underlining the significance of the gruesome stage actions. Diegetically, characters are similarly preoccupied with the music, to some extent modelling compelled responses to non-diegetic hearers even as their relationships with the music and its signification remain distinct from the engagements of playgoers beyond the dramatic world.

Vindice’s second stab at revenge occurs in the final scene, when he and his accomplices perform a masque for the new Duke Lussurioso and his sycophants:

The revengers enter and dance before enacting wild justice with their swords, a visually striking combination of violence, choreographed movement and (presumably) masque costumes. Once more, music – this time for a masque – is intended to cause delight, compelling attention to the stage performance and foregrounding another significant narrative development. Musical delight is again dramatized even as it is sought from playgoers, for Lussurioso and his courtiers are compelled by the masque long enough for Vindice to kill them. Playgoers have a radically different understanding of what is occurring, having heard Vindice outline his plan in minute detail to his co-conspirators in the preceding scene: Lussurioso is compelled to watch what he believes is simply a court entertainment; playgoers, however, have their attention drawn to what they know will shortly become a bloodbath. Middleton plays upon the tropes of revenge tragedy here, as in the earlier scene, but his masque of revengers also typifies how music was used to direct playgoers’ attention in Jacobean commercial drama: moments of musical delighting have a structural significance to the plot; the precise sounding of their music usually correlates with a visually appealing piece of stage spectacle; and, the importance of this music was sufficiently clear to textual producers that they bothered to record stage directions (either separate, or embedded and extremely explicit). The play includes musical delight in its final scene both upon the stage and – if it is effective – across the rest of the playhouse, compelling playgoers’ attention to the drama at a moment of narrative significance.

Middleton’s last work for the commercial stage, A Game at Chess, is a complex topical satire representing contemporary politics in terms of chess pieces. The play repeatedly seeks to delight playgoers, in scenes sharing several features with Vindice’s acts of vengeance. Chess was a smash hit, with early title pages claiming a run of ‘nine days to gether at the Globe on the banks side’ in August 1624.⁴⁶ As one of the most scandalous and most popular pieces of commercial drama brought to production in the Jacobean period, the play is particularly helpful to this investigation; most obviously, its popularity implies success in performance at the Globe, and it is helpful (and unusual) to know that a play was as gripping for first audiences as it is central to later critical endeavour. Furthermore, the whirl of discussion that the play generated – much of which survives in letters and other documents – allows us a clearer than usual sense of what interested early audiences. These contemporary reports refer directly to ‘popular opinion’ of the play, indicating what early witnesses found particularly significant. With a sense, then, of the dramatic moments most likely to have particularly interested playgoers, we can pursue the ways in which playhouse music might contribute to Middleton’s dramatic structure.

John Holles, politician and Nottinghamshire landowner, describes contemporary interpretations of A Game at Chess in a letter to the Earl of Somerset following his own eye-witness experience. He is clear that ‘y^e descant [of the play] was built uppon y^e popular opinion, y^t y^e Iesuits mark is to bring all y^e christian world vnder Rome for y^e spirituality, & vnder Spayn for y^e temporalty’.⁴⁷ Holles recognizes that ‘y^e poet’ Middleton echoes a truculent ‘popular opinion’ of Spanish Jesuitism fuelled by the pamphlets of Thomas Scott.⁴⁸ Indeed, his musical metaphor is particularly resonant in its suggestion that Middleton is embellishing and improvising on top of a clear and established view, just as a musical descant, in the sense used here, would be extemporized over the plainsong.⁴⁹ Holles’s suggestion is confirmed in the play’s induction, where Middleton makes explicit that the Black House represents a seductive threat of ever-spreading Catholicism, or, more specifically, Jesuitism. The sixteenth-century founder of the Society of Jesus, Ignatius Loyola, appears before the start of the play proper to express surprise that his ‘Disciples’ have not yet ‘spread ouer the World […] | Like the Egyptian Grasse-hoppers’, describing the black pieces as ‘the children of my cunning’ (B1^r-v; Induction.4–51). Through this frame, Middleton instructs playgoers to read the ‘diuilish plotts and deuices’ of the Black Knight and his colleagues as seductive, imperialist attempts at Catholic conversion.⁵⁰ It follows, then, that structurally key scenes will include the points at which the Black House project succeeds or fails.

A Game at Chess follows a typical Jacobean dramatic narrative structure, with two separate plot strands – or a main plot and subplot – dealing with related themes and subject matter, one in relation to characters of lower social status than those involved in the other. The two strands interrelate by offering complementary versions of attempted conversion to the ‘Spanish Catholic’ side – ‘y^e descant’ of the play – enacted through various forms of seduction and dissemblance. Given the persistent theme of Catholic temptation, playgoers would see the Black Bishop’s Pawn’s attempted seduction of the White Queen’s Pawn as parallel to the Black Knight’s invitations for the White Knight to join the Black House. The two plots subtly mirror one another throughout, as White House pieces are tempted to convert, only to escape at the last moment, preserving their ‘innocent’ status. In each plot, both the moment of temptation and the moment of escape is accompanied by music that seeks delighted, compelled attention from playgoers.

The temptation and escape of the White Queen’s Pawn take place in acts three and four. She is of low status, both as a character and as a chess piece, yet nonetheless presented as important: she is the most vocal member of the White House (only the Black Knight has more lines), and she delivers the epilogue. Earlier in the play, the Black Bishop’s Pawn attempts first to seduce and then to rape her, before teaming up with the Black Queen’s Pawn in act three, tempting the white piece with supposed magic. The Black Queen’s Pawn begins by convincing her opposite that powerful incantations will conjure the likeness of her future husband in a mirror. The incantations are first answered with ‘sweet notes’, described as ‘the ayre inchanted with your prayses’, before the Black Bishop’s Pawn enters, ‘stands before the glasse’ and leaves (G2^v; 3.1.394–95.iii). The White Queen’s Pawn, forbidden to turn around, readily accepts that she has seen an apparition of her destined partner in the mirror. Deceived, she agrees to the Black Queen’s Pawn’s suggestion: sexual union with the Black Bishop’s Pawn. Her agreement is as critical to Chess as is Vindice’s revenging to Middleton’s earlier play. Moreover, just as Lussurioso was compelled by Vindice’s masque, so the White Queen’s Pawn is delighted by the ‘sweet notes’ and supposed apparition. Outside of the dramatic world, playgoers are not deceived by musical delight, but rather have their attention directed to the music and the concurrent stage spectacle. Audience members have a markedly different understanding of and relationship to the music than that of the delighted stage character, yet once again musical enforcement works both diegetically and non-diegetically to shape the engagements of character and playgoer alike. This technique of simultaneous delighting is used systematically in A Game at Chess, just as it recurs across scenes of revenge in Middleton’s earlier play.

Music is not cued again until 4.3, when the three pawns meet at night to enact their several intentions:

Several of the early texts specify music for this dumb show; indeed, music for dumb show was conventional, as is clear from Thomas Heywood’s direction in The Golden Age (QAM, 1610) to ‘[s]ound a dumbe shew’ (K2^v).⁵¹ There is much at stake here for playgoers sympathetic to the White House, for the Black Queen’s Pawn’s deception of both the White Queen’s Pawn and the Black Bishop’s Pawn has been established in her earlier aside, ‘ile enioy the sport, and cousen you both’ (H1^v; 4.1.148). Playgoers do not know, however, that her specific intention is to trick her Black House colleague into her own bed. The loss of the White Queen’s Pawn’s virginity remains a plausible outcome until finally, having ‘fetch[ed] in the Blacke Bishops Pawne’, the Black Queen’s Pawn ‘conueyes him to an other’ room and follows him in herself (H4^r; 4.3.0.vi-viii). Only at the conclusion of this scene do playgoers understand that the White House representative has escaped the Black Bishop’s Pawn’s bed.

Unlike the music earlier invoked by the Black Queen’s Pawn in front of the mirror, or indeed that of Vindice’s masque at the denouement of The Revenger’s Tragedy, this is non-diegetic music, audible to playgoers but not heard by the characters. In scenes of diegetic music, harmony’s effects are usually important within the dramatic world, seducing the White Queen’s Pawn in front of the mirror, or grasping first the Duke and then Lussurioso’s attention, even whilst that same music acts upon playgoers outside the dramatic world, compelling their attention to critical moments of plot development. In this dumb show, however, the recorders play solely to affect playgoers, as the characters cannot hear the music. This is a particularly significant example of enforcement, then, because Middleton and the King’s Men aim exclusively at delighting their audience: this is categorically about playhouse response, rather than fictionalized reactions. Other instances, as we shall see, pursue more sophisticated interactions between playgoer delight and character delight, but by exploiting only the former, this scene makes particularly clear how compulsive music shaped playgoer engagements with dramatic performance.

The White Knight’s plot follows similar contours to that of the White Queen’s Pawn’s. In deference to his status, his story concludes the play itself, reaching its climax after the White Queen’s Pawn’s escape in the fourth act. The same pattern of musical delighting recurs in this ‘main’ plot, with a pair of musical cues. The fifth act begins as the White Knight and Duke arrive at the enemy court, having accepted an invitation to ‘see, | The Black-house pleasure, state and dignitie’ (H4^v; 4.4.45–46). The Black Knight makes his definitive attempt to convert his white counterpart in the scene, beginning with a spectacular greeting. This stylized invitation to switch sides is the most significant proposition of the entire play, given the status of the White Knight relative to the White Queen’s Pawn and the positioning of this moment at the start of the final act (I2^r-v; 5.1.1–50). The scene culminates in a song ‘[t]o welcome thee, the faire White House Knight, | And to bring our hopes about’, followed by quickened statues dancing around an altar (I2^v; 5.1.37–46). This recalls Vindice’s masque as well as the Black Queen’s Pawn’s mirror in its combination of delighting music and visual spectacle. The lengthy musical performance that accompanies the statues both compels attention and, as it continues, creates tension by deferring the White Knight’s response. Fittingly for such a structurally significant moment, this could be the most powerful instance of musical delighting in the entire play. Just as in the subplot, however, playgoers are made to wait for an outcome: the music and the scene conclude with the White Knight’s reply unvoiced.

Not until the final scene does the plot reach its conclusion, and it does so in a further moment of musical enforcement. Before giving his answer, the White Knight first suggests that he is receptive to the advances. He confesses to a series of increasingly serious vices, each of which is warmly welcomed by the Black Knight. Upon reaching the ‘hidden’st poyson’ of all his faults, that he is ‘an Arch-dissembler’, he draws an eager confidence from his counterpart: ‘What we haue done, has bin dissemblance euer’ (K2^v-K3^r; 5.3.71–159). With this admission, the White Knight gives his ultimate response:

As the White House triumphs, music captivates playgoers’ attention for the fourth time with a ‘flourish’ supported by ‘a great shout’, adding brief yet powerful musical compulsion to the precise moment at which the White Knight’s rejection of Black House deception is confirmed, and the chess game ends.⁵² As in the White Queen’s Pawn’s plot, the early texts cue no music between the tempting dance and song and the final compulsive flourish of escape, giving further prominence to these sounds.⁵³ With surgical precision, Middleton and the King’s Men shape a soundscape in which musical delight guides playgoers through the complex, mirrored narrative structure and remarkably abstract staging of the White Knight’s escape and the White Queen’s Pawn’s subplot. The play was written for a Globe audience, and it clearly tapped into popular political feeling to achieve unprecedented popularity at that playhouse. Certainly, early modern subjects went for the satire rather than the music, yet the fact that the playhouse filled to capacity day after day until the play was suppressed indicates the success of this dramatic work in performance. Musical delight is central to its dramaturgy, helping the play succeed by compelling playhouse attention at four significant narrative moments.

In light of the musical delighting in Middleton’s Game at Chess and Revenger’s Tragedy, one moment stands out from a familiar Shakespearean text composed between the two plays. At the conclusion of The Winter’s Tale, Paulina reanimates the statue of Hermione with the command, ‘Musick; awake her: Strike’ (TLN 3306; 5.3.98). Playgoers’ responses to this music are critical to the success of the scene in performance; indeed, this moment is so central to the overall shape of the play that the whole work’s impact is to some extent defined by the level of this success. Russ McDonald argues that ‘[w]hat distinguishes The Winter’s Tale is that much of the poetic language is organized periodically: convoluted sentences or difficult speeches become coherent and meaningful only in their final clauses or movements’, and a ‘similar principle governs the arrangement of dramatic action: the shape and meaning of events become apparent only in the final moments of the tragicomedy’. Thus, ‘the play […] surprises us, denying us knowledge of Hermione’s survival until the very end of the work, challenging our confidence in our superior understanding and thus transforming our comprehension of the world we thought we knew’.⁵⁴ As McDonald shows, much weight is brought to bear upon the statue and its reanimation: only in this moment do playgoers learn that Hermione lives, and that the narrative can conclude with a final reconciliation. We might add to this the ‘suspension’ of action in the previous scene (5.2), when resolutions including the father-daughter meeting are only reported verbally, allowing the fully mimetic representation of Hermione’s return to have maximum impact and enact the ‘discharge’ of reconciliation at precisely the same point as the narratorial ‘discharge’ that McDonald identifies: when music sounds and the statue moves.

Music appears at a key playhouse moment in The Winter’s Tale, occupying a ‘dramatic position’ at ‘the climax of the play’ just as it does in the closing scenes of Middleton’s plays.⁵⁵ Once again, if successful the music ‘[d]elights the sences’ and ‘captiuates the braines’ of playgoers, compelling their attention to a piece of dramatic representation of particular fabular significance.⁵⁶ At this moment, the suspension of knowledge of the plot is relieved as Hermione moves, and the suspension of reconciliation is discharged, with the previous scene’s narrative accounts upstaged by a moment of mimesis. Music draws playgoers’ scattered attention to a single symbolic moment of stage business, metonymically enacting the many reversals upon which the conclusion of the narrative depends. The play then concludes somewhat hastily within sixty lines, allowing for little more than verbal acknowledgement of the reconciliations contingent upon Hermione’s survival. Until this point playgoers are denied the knowledge that such a reconciliatory conclusion is even possible, let alone likely; thus, musical compulsion is required to support an abrupt end with a sharp, even jarring, shift in dramatic direction. Shakespeare’s precise use of delighting music is structurally analogous to that of the closing scenes in A Game at Chess and The Revenger’s Tragedy, all three plays using musical delight to draw playhouse attention to their narrative climax. Intriguingly, the constants in all three examples are the playing company performing, and the playing space of the Globe. Personnel including company members, playwrights and playgoers changed between 1606 and 1624, yet the King’s Men appear to have delighted playgoers with music at the Globe throughout the Jacobean period.

The Sound of Delight

Early modern play-texts are generally much better at indicating when music was played than what that music sounded like, and we have already seen how clearly the structural location of music cues can be preserved in printed playbooks. This is not to say, however, that more specific features of particular cues cannot be pursued as well. Whilst our knowledge of dramatic music must always be recognized as partial, we can establish more from the textual record than might be expected about the music used for playhouse delighting. Moreover, some of these aural choices reveal further dramatic nuances, again emphasizing the significance of musical delight to Jacobean play-makers. This section will investigate instrument choices and, more speculatively, possible formal features of delighting music.

Four moments of musical compulsion in A Game at Chess indicate the range of instruments that were believed to compel playgoers, also offering textual clues as to why particular instruments might be appropriate in particular contexts. This varied music echoes the diversity of diegetically delighting sounds used by the King’s Men in The Custom of the Country, The Tempest, Julius Caesar, The Devil’s Charter and 1 Jeronimo. As we have seen, the two plot strands of Chess each begin with a moment of Black House seduction supported by musical compulsion (3.1; 5.1), and follow this with a moment of White House escape accompanied by delighting music (4.3; 5.3). The previous section considered the two plot strands separately, but here we can pair analogous moments: the seduction of the White Queen’s Pawn matches the temptation of the White Knight; her dumb show escape is echoed in his concluding ‘checke mate | By discouery’ (K3^v; 5.3.160–61). The climaxes of the two plots, in scenes 4.3 and 5.3, illustrate the contrasting instruments that could evoke musical delight.

Scene 4.3 is a dumb show without dialogue and set at night, indicated to the audience by the Black Queen’s Pawn’s use of a taper when ‘conducting’ the other characters to separate chambers (H4^r; 4.3.0.i). Recorders support this wordless, supposedly dark scene, the instrument noted in both 1625 quarto editions of the play as well as the Bridgewater and Rosenbach manuscripts.⁵⁷ The instrument’s mellow tone and gentle attack are reflected in Gary Taylor’s addition that the recorders are ‘within, playing soft music’ (4.3.0.i), following Alan C. Dessen and Leslie Thomson’s suggestion that such music was associated with the instruments.⁵⁸ In an early modern context ‘soft’ did not simply mean ‘quiet’; Peter Walls notes, for instance, that the call for ‘a soft musique of twelue Lutes and twelue voyces’ in Samuel Daniel’s Tethys Festival masque ‘is probably intended to indicate something about sophistication and quality rather than volume’.⁵⁹ Taylor’s addition is therefore apt in supporting the sentiment of the dumb show: this is a performance of gentle and probably quite sophisticated music for recorder consort, to accompany a night scene.

The analogous scene in the White Knight’s plot is far more emphatic, with his claim of ‘checke mate | By discouery’ indicating White House victory in the chess game. Accordingly, it uses not recorders but a ‘great shout | and flourish’: a trumpet fanfare that compels attention to a final, decisive narrative turn (K3^v; 5.3.160–62.i). There could not be a more contrasting choice of instruments for the two moments of musical delight, indicating the range of musical sounds expected to compel playgoers. This seizing of attention reflects an attraction to harmony – a culturally reinforced desire to engage closely with musical sound – rather than certain instruments’ abilities to shock, or to drown out other noises. For early modern play-makers, both gentle recorder music and a sharp brass fanfare could equally compel attention during critical stage business, with either sound world available to help focus playhouse attention. Recorders fit the stealthy atmosphere of the dumb show even as they compel playgoers, whilst a brass flourish evokes a similarly delighted response in keeping with a vivacious, cacophonic final scene of triumph and bagging. Moreover, recorders are well suited to sustained, continuous playing during the important yet somewhat convoluted movements of the pawns, requiring ongoing playhouse attention. In contrast, a short, sharp fanfare is far more appropriate to accompany the four (or three) words that mark the moment of victory in the final scene, ‘checke mate | By discouery’ (K3^v; 5.3.160–61). Even in their length, then, these two cues are differently appropriate for contrasting dramatic contexts, yet could be equally compelling.

The temptation scenes that respectively precede bed trick and bagging introduce further sounds. As explored above, the Black Queen’s Pawn’s mirror deception (3.1) corresponds to the Black Knight’s song and dancing statues (5.1): these are Black House attempts to convert, or overcome, the White House pieces. There are significant similarities between the scenes, from which we can make further suggestions about the sounds of delighting music. First, both rely on spectacle. The White Queen’s Pawn looks in what she is repeatedly told is a ‘Magicall glasse’, and sees the Black Bishop’s Pawn ‘like an Aparitian’ (G1^r-G2^v; 3.1.329–95.i). As she has been forbidden to turn round, she does not share the playgoers’ knowledge that he enters the stage and stands behind her in the flesh. Likewise, the Black Knight’s presentation ‘[t]o enlarge’ the White Knight’s ‘welcome’ concludes visually with the dance of the statues, apparently ‘[q]uickned by some Power aboue, | Or what is more strange to show our Loue’ (I2^v; 5.1.37–46). Both uses of spectacle accompany Black House claims that supernatural forces are at work, invoking ‘some Power aboue’ (I2^v; 5.1.45), and the ‘powerfull name […] | of the mighty blacke House Queene’ (G2^r; 3.1.370–72). Significantly, the music that delights playgoers and prompts ‘supernatural’ spectacle is song in both instances; indeed, the music of the mirror scene is described in detail by the Black Queen’s Pawn before it sounds. She invites her white counterpart to listen, as:

Such ‘Vocall Sounds’ reappear in the Black Knight’s welcome of 5.1: he describes ‘sweet-sounding aires’ from ‘all parts’ as he introduces the song, ‘Wonder worke some strange delight’ (I2^v; 5.1.31–46), the words of which are preserved in the text. Where the conclusions of the two plots used contrasting musical sound worlds to evoke delight, then, the preceding temptation scenes actually share an aural register of vocal performance as they attempt to compel playgoers.

Middleton and the King’s Men may have considered vocal performance particularly compelling, given its appearance at two separate moments of narrative significance. Moreover, there may be yet more specific dramaturgical intentions behind the choice of vocal music: perhaps the shared soundscape of the two temptation scenes is intended to shape playgoers’ understandings of the two plots’ interrelationship. Structure is significant here, for the vocal performances are the first and third of four key moments of musical delighting, and the intervening dumb show (4.3) has the completely different sound of recorders. By returning in the final act to ‘Vocall Sounds’ similar to those used two acts previously, the welcome song can recall the mirror scene and avoid recalling the more recent musical delight of the recorders. The shared sound of vocal performance means the seizing of playgoers’ attention at the Black House court will not evoke the sound of the White Queen’s Pawn’s escape, but rather that of the Black Queen’s Pawn’s earlier tempting. The aural connection is supported by other continuities: not only did the mirror temptation sound similar as it evoked delight from character and audience, but it looked equally spectacular, and the Black Queen’s Pawn made analogous claims of supernatural activity. The shared vocal sounds make one scene a precedent for the other, and this would have concerned an early audience. In the first scene, the White Queen’s Pawn is deceived by the display and only avoids the loss of her virginity thanks to her counterpart’s desire for the Black Bishop’s Pawn. The possibility of a similarly naïve White Knight repeating her mistake alongside sounds echoing those of the mirror scene would build dramatic tension before he makes his ultimate escape. Thus, the experience of musical delight in act five tells playgoers something about the possible direction of the plot: in Middleton’s climatic ceremony of the horsemen, even echoes of a tempted pawn can carry narrative significance. Music thus shapes meaning at the conclusion of the play through instrumentation that binds together the delightful sounds of two separate scenes, encouraging playgoers to engage carefully with every component of playhouse performance including music.

The sole textual witness to The Winter’s Tale, the 1623 Folio, has far less to tell us about instrument choices than do the multiple manuscript and print versions of A Game at Chess. But whilst recovering delighting sounds in The Winter’s Tale is by no means straightforward, we can nonetheless make some informed suggestions as to the King’s Men’s musical decisions. We lack textual detail beyond the word ‘Musick’ when considering what was originally played, but through close consideration of the contents of the scene, of the play’s early stage history at court and at the Globe and of other plays in the King’s Men’s repertory to 1609, a hitherto unexplored musical possibility emerges.⁶¹ In the final scene of The Winter’s Tale, music is given the apparent diegetic power to compel life into an inanimate statue. It is long established that the scene bears strong similarities to the description of animated statues found in a hermetic-alchemical text well known in Jacobean England: Frances A. Yates avers that ‘[i]t seems obvious […] that Shakespeare is alluding […] to the famous god-making passage in the Asclepius’. Named for the classical god of healing (himself renowned in some traditions for performing resurrections, including that of Hippolytus at the request of Artemis), the Asclepius was part of the Corpus Hermeticum. This group of writings was attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, who was revered by alchemists as their founder, and whose name is perhaps even echoed in Hermione’s.⁶² Yates refers to a much-studied passage describing Egyptian ‘statues […] made alive by consciousness, and […] filled with breath. They do mighty deeds. They have knowledge of the future […] They bring illnesses to men and cure them’. The nature of these ‘terrestrial’ gods ‘is derived from herbs, stones and spices’, and ‘[b]ecause of this these gods are delighted by frequent sacrifices’, as well as by ‘hymns, praises and sweet sounds in tune with the celestial harmony’.⁶³ The statue of Hermione certainly fulfils the criteria to be a ‘terrestrial’ god; most significantly here, it comes to life in response to ‘sweet sounds in tune with the celestial harmony’, when Paulina calls for music.

Significantly, The Winter’s Tale is not the only Shakespearean text that alludes to Asclepian musical animation. Shakespeare and George Wilkins’s Pericles, Prince of Tyre (KM, 1608), a staple of the King’s Men’s later 1600s repertory, includes a similar musical resurrection that draws yet more explicitly upon hermetic-alchemical ideas. This time, it is the corpse of Thaisa, Pericles’s wife, that the physician Lord Cerimon works frantically, and ultimately successfully, to revive, she having washed ashore in a coffin:

Cerimon is extremely clear that music is key to this resurrection. Just as in The Winter’s Tale, then, here the King’s Men stage compulsive musical resurrection at a key moment in which a dead character is given new life. Cerimon’s request that ‘Escelapius guide vs’ is a prayer to the Classical god of healing, but it also gestures towards the hermetic-alchemical text of musical animation that bears the god’s name as its title: Asclepius. Cerimon’s words and the nature of Thaisa’s resurrection indicate that Wilkins, Shakespeare and the King’s Men were familiar with the hermetic-alchemical model of musical animation by 1608. The delight mythologized both in Pericles and The Winter’s Tale, then, takes an exceptionally specific form, that of hermetic-alchemical resurrection through music.

If both Pericles and The Winter’s Tale include scenes of Asclepian resurrection, perhaps extant hermetic-alchemical texts can help us identify a musical form that would have been appropriate for use in early performances of The Winter’s Tale. The reference in Pericles to ‘rough and | Wofull Musick’ is a helpful first step towards identifying appropriate musical forms for scenes of musical resurrection, but as F. Elizabeth Hart notes, Cerimon’s request is suggestive rather than specific. More recently, B. J. Sokol has traced musical styles of the period that might be associated with these adjectives, concluding that works by Gesualdo, Monteverdi and Dowland could ‘provide models for the styles we are seeking’. However, neither in this claim, nor in his suggestion that ‘[i]n accord with Hermione’s inward as well as outward Majesty, the music that Paulina commands for Hermione’s entry music would most appropriately be magnificent, perhaps a tucket or fanfare’, does he explore the possibility that music with Asclepian resonances sounded in either play.⁶⁵

Music from the tradition of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century hermetic-alchemical practice would have been extremely fitting for use here, and the work of prominent hermetic-alchemical author Michael Maier includes much music that is therefore of interest. Amongst early modern German alchemists, Maier was ‘the chief exponent of the prisca sapientia doctrine’, in which the Corpus Hermeticum was taken to contain sacred wisdom revealed to the ancients by a Christian God.⁶⁶ His Atalanta Fugiens, published in 1617 (2nd edn 1618), incorporates fifty pieces of fugal music that, he suggests, both represent and enact alchemy.⁶⁷ This work ‘holds a special position amongst the host of alchemical treatises’, due to ‘its presentation of the alchemical process in the form of musical fugues, emblematic copper-engravings and the accompanying discourses’.⁶⁸ As Loren Ludwig and others have recently explored, Maier often fits the words of his obscure hermetic discourses to subtly adjusted versions of existing compositions, in such a way that both the words and the musical form of the fugues might convey alchemical meanings.⁶⁹ Thus, study of the fugues and their structural symbolism alongside the emblems and writings allows the initiated reader access to alchemical secrets hidden within.

Through music, Maier represents the myth of Atalanta collecting the golden apples as she flees Hippomenes, announcing:

As Hildemarie Streich notes, these parts ‘symbolize the alchemical raw materials: Mercury, Sulphur, and Salt’, thus relating the myth of ‘Atalanta Fugiens’ to alchemical practice.⁷¹ Maier’s comments on these fugues are extremely helpful in their indication of how much meaningful symbolic weight could be borne by musical structure and harmonic relations during the period, also seen in the ‘falling tear’ motif in Dowland’s ‘Lachrimae Pavan’ that appears both visually as notes descending a stave, and aurally as the falling pitches of those notes (see Figure 3).⁷² Any music sounding during the statue scene would have to bear some relation in its musical structure to the hermetic-alchemical reanimation that is apparently occurring. Maier’s Atalanta Fugiens and the alchemical symbolism borne by its canons thus indicate one highly appropriate musical form for the King’s Men’s early performances.⁷³

Figure 3 The descending ‘tear’ motif of Dowland’s ‘Lachrimae Antiquae’ pavan.

Detail from John Dowland, Lachrimæ, or Seauen Teares Figured in Seauen Passionate Pauans (1604), B1^v, British Library K.2.i.16. © The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved.

There may even be some close connections between Michael Maier, hermetic-alchemical canons and two specific early performances of The Winter’s Tale at the court of James I, in November 1611 and in winter 1612/13. Appointed Imperial Count Palatine by Kaiser Rudolf II of Habsburg in September 1609, Maier journeyed to London in 1611, where he would remain for some five years working actively on numerous alchemical publications, likely to have included Atalanta Fugiens. Upon arrival in London, Maier presented James I with a Christmas greeting in the form of a large, ornate manuscript, now held in the National Archives of Scotland.⁷⁴ Along with a rose-shaped emblem and four Latin poems, it includes a fugue with the cantus firmus in the voice of two Shepherds attending the nativity, and four fugal parts in the voices of the Archangels (Figure 4), musically similar to the fifty canons Maier would publish in Atalanta Fugiens. Indeed, the first and second emblems of his 1617 printed work depict Boreas, god of the north wind, and Amalthaea, the goat who nursed Zeus, both of whom are referenced verbally in the earlier text. Whilst not quite an early draft of his emblem book, then, Maier’s 1611 manuscript is an exercise in the conjunction of alchemically emblematic figures, music, visual puzzles and Latin verses that he would later revive in Atalanta Fugiens.

Figure 4 A canon for Christmas, voiced by archangels and shepherds. Transcribed from ‘MS. Poems and music dedicated to King James VI by Michael Maier (the German alchemist and Rosicrucian), Count Palatine and doctor of medicine and philosophy’, National Archives of Scotland, MS GD241/212.

Maier’s arrival at the English court, fugue in hand, was contemporaneous with the first known court performance of The Winter’s Tale in November 1611. Maier’s new acquaintances in London included figures with medical and religious roles at James I’s court, as well as alchemists certainly including Francis Anthony, although perhaps not Robert Fludd.⁷⁵ Maier even attended Prince Henry’s funeral on 6 November 1612 as one of Frederick V, Elector Palatine’s ‘gentlemen’, as the English court prepared for Frederick’s marriage to James’s daughter, Princess Elizabeth, in February 1613.⁷⁶ Thus, by the time of The Winter’s Tale’s second known court showing in the winter 1612/13 season, Maier had spent a year in the right company for his conjunction of music and hermetic thought to be known at court and to the King’s Men.

Significantly, this second performance was part of the nuptial celebrations for Frederick and Elizabeth, whose rather short reign has been characterized as ‘a Hermetic golden age, nourished on the alchemical movement led by Michael Maier’.⁷⁷ Given the interchangeability of much early modern stage music, perhaps Maier could have helped provide music for the 1612/13 performance, emphasizing overtones of Asclepius in the statue scene for a guest of honour – Frederick – attuned to such resonances. Indeed, if one were to accept the case for the final scene being a later addition to the play, taking the 1612/13 performance as the occasion for revision, as W. W. Greg found more plausible than the November 1611 showing, then the hermetic-alchemical overtones of the statue’s animation are extremely significant.⁷⁸ A play performed for the celebration of this couple’s wedding would seem an ideal opportunity to add a living statue recalling the Asclepius and a suitable alchemical fugue, similar to that which Maier presented to James the previous year. The significance to The Winter’s Tale of the alchemical fugues in Maier’s Atalanta Fugiens are thus threefold: as structural and stylistic examples of the kind of music appropriate to an early performance of the scene; as works with links, through Maier, to the English court leading up to the 1612/13 performance; and, perhaps, even as part of the impetus for the play’s revision in 1612/13, if one were to accept the various circumstantial arguments for the scene’s later addition.

The hermetic-alchemical canons of Atalanta Fugiens hint at the possible sound of musical delighting in The Winter’s Tale. But what instruments might have been used for music of this nature when the scene was performed at an outdoor playhouse such as the Globe? Paulina calls simply for ‘Musick’ (TLN 3306; 5.3.98), a common play-text cue. As A Game at Chess indicates, the term does not rule out song, for the ‘Trinity’ manuscript of Middleton’s play speaks of ‘Vocall Sounds’ even as it cues ‘Musique’ (TLN 1536–1576; 3.1.360–92.i). Shakespeare’s ‘Musick’ could therefore be song, and the Atalanta Fugiens canons are indeed for voice. Vocal rather than instrumental performance would of course also allow hermetic-alchemical words to be sung, encoding yet more Asclepian suggestion in the scene. If it were instrumental music, however, then a consort of viols would perhaps be most likely. There are several reasons for this. First, a 1595 drawing of an alchemist’s laboratory includes a treble viol in its foreground (Figure 5), clearly associating the instrument with Hermeticism.⁷⁹ Similarly, there is Cerimon’s call for a viol (or perhaps a vial of medicine) to help resurrect in the scene of Pericles analogous to that of Hermione’s resurrection.⁸⁰ Finally, and more pragmatically, there is the fact that numerous title pages of printed music books claim prominently that their music is ‘[a]pt both for Viols and Voyces’, demonstrating the suitability of viols for performing vocal music.⁸¹ This is due, at least in part, to the capacity of bowed string instruments to sustain notes as a voice can, but a plucked string instrument, for instance, cannot. It is the sound of the alchemical fugue, then, performed ideally by voices, but perhaps on viols, that may have been used to delight early modern playgoers in the final scene of The Winter’s Tale.

Figure 5 An alchemist’s laboratory with treble viol and other instruments in foreground. Heinrich Khunrath, Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae (Hamburg, 1595), unpaginated illustration.

In tracing musical possibilities for one scene of musical delighting we have arrived at very specific suggestions, following the precise needs of a particular dramatic moment. If we place Hermione’s statue alongside the four scenes considered from A Game at Chess, however, it is instead the potential variety of sounds for such moments that stands out. The five scenes could use as many as four different instruments (trumpet, recorders, voice, viols), performing five different musical forms (a flourish, soft music, ‘sweet Vocall Sounds’, a hermetic-alchemical canon, and perhaps an ayre in ‘Wonder worke some strange delight’). Early modern play-makers were confident that various musical sounds could compel the attention of playgoers at dramatically significant moments, provided that the music was appropriate to the dramatic tone of the scene. The particular choice in each case may well have added specific and precise significations to a broader response of delight, from the soft music of a night scene to a victory fanfare, via the Asclepian resonances of a carefully chosen fugue. Regardless of its local resonances, however, it seems that almost any available music would be deemed delightful when used appropriately upon the early modern stage.

Shared Responses

We have considered both where in an early modern play music might be used to enforce the attention of playgoers, and what this delighting may have sounded like at the Globe, tracing a clear and repeated use of compelling music to command attention at moments of narrative significance. Examples have encompassed several scenes in which playgoers and stage characters are together delighted by the same music, these moments raising further questions about music’s contribution to playhouse dramaturgy: how might the dramatizing of compelled responses affect playhouse interpretation?; how far can responses to music shared by character and playgoer shape meaning?; and, if music did indeed shape meaning in early modern performance, how was this non-verbal medium utilized in a commercial context where the authority to perform was generally granted with reference to the play-text alone?⁸² The final part of this chapter pursues these questions by considering scenes in which playgoers and characters are simultaneously delighted, returning first to Shakespeare and then to Middleton.

In the final scene of The Winter’s Tale, playgoers’ delighted responses are given an amplified, mythical co-presentation in the statue’s compelled reaction to the same music. As we have seen, musical delight directs playhouse attention even as Hermione’s statue comes to life in a dramatization of extreme musical compulsion. Having traced a musical form appropriate to the statue’s reanimation, we can explore how this moment of delighting music shaped playhouse understandings of the narrative. A major interpretative issue in The Winter’s Tale is whether an inanimate statue is really brought to life. Key to any experience of the play, then, is how far this moment of heightened musical stagecraft is taken as a convincing presentation of fantastical resurrection, and how far as Paulina and Hermione’s elaborate deception of Leontes.

In drama heavily reliant on audience imagination, it is often difficult to distinguish between the deception of characters onstage that must not fool playgoers, and the deceptions that playgoers must themselves acquiesce to in order to conceive a bare stage as various locations or, in this case, to accept staged actions as supernatural activity. A. D. Nuttall argued that Shakespeare utilizes this ambiguity in King Lear, such that playgoers could not have been quite sure that Gloucester is on level ground, that the stage is not representing a real clifftop with a sheer drop over which he leaps (TLN 2430–525; 4.5.1–80).⁸³ The first hundred lines of The Winter’s Tale’s final scene exploits a similar ambiguity about the nature of the statue. The breathing that Leontes thinks he sees may hint that Paulina and Hermione are deceiving him, or it may equally be a joke at the expense of the actor attempting to portray a stone statue for several minutes (TLN 3278–80; 5.3.63–65). Tiffany Stern’s vivid description of how at Blackfriars, ‘the sparkling audience – and actors – will have emerged through a delicate haze; a confusion of smoke from candles and tobacco’ indicates how a lack of visual clarity could have exacerbated this ambiguity at indoor venues.⁸⁴ The scene is shaped to raise questions, then, rather than to offer categorical answers as to what takes place.

Within this context of ambiguity, however, conventions of playhouse music use would predispose regular playgoers to take the statue’s supernatural transformation rather more seriously, for the moment at which magic or illusion takes place in The Winter’s Tale recalls the widespread use of music on the early modern stage to facilitate ‘authentic’ supernatural activity, in plays such as Sophonisba, Macbeth and The Tempest. The very fact that the conjunction of music and real magic within staged worlds was a commonplace of the early modern playhouse, something a playgoer may have seen a dozen times before, suggests that the possibility of real supernatural activity would remain in playgoers’ minds when music sounded. David Lindley, in a discussion of the statue scene, argues that ‘[f]or a Renaissance audience, much more than a modern one, these beliefs in music’s powers were possible and powerful’.⁸⁵ Music was constantly, diversely, being presented as having real power, encouraging playgoers to interpret Hermione’s transformation as genuine. For those well versed in the Asclepius, moreover, this interpretation would be further supported by the Hermetic resonances of the animation and the alchemical signification of the canon form, if such music was indeed used.

The statue’s nature must always remain ambiguous, for this enigma gives the scene its vitality. Yet even whilst two interpretations remained plausible, Jacobean playgoers’ responses of musical delight would foreground one reading over the other. As they watched musical enforcement seize and animate the statue, many audience members might feel their own attention pleasurably compelled. Critically, Paulina’s command encourages playgoers to relate their own delighted musical response to the statue’s concurrent reaction. By instructing the music specifically to ‘awake’ Hermione (TLN 3306; 5.3.98), she characterizes the resurrection as extreme compulsion, framing the statue’s forced awakening as a vigorous seizing of attention precisely as playgoers’ attention is seized. If playgoers perceived their own delighted response to the play’s music as a representation of the statue’s reanimation, providing a particularly engaged encounter with the resurrection, then one conclusion must surely have seemed particularly appealing in the moment of performance: the miracle is genuine. Real magic would be perfectly fitting, given the numerous rehearsals of musical compulsion and of supernatural music on the early modern stage and elsewhere, from the King’s Men’s own Pericles to popular circulations of the Siren myth. The verbal niggles that follow the music, likening the story to ‘an old Tale’ (TLN 3328; 5.3.118), may have functioned less as sceptical asides and more as attempts to heighten early playgoers’ astonishment at the genuine magic that seems to have taken place within this fantastical story. In the stagecraft of the scene, Shakespeare and the King’s Men combine playhouse responses of delight with a stage representation of compulsive resurrection, directing early playgoers’ understandings of what actually happens in a key plot event – perhaps even the key plot event – of The Winter’s Tale. This has significance for our own readings of Shakespeare’s play, as well as for our understanding of musical delight in the early modern playhouse.

A similar pairing of playgoer delight and staged compulsion occurs in A Game at Chess. In act five, statues are again animated by music, however it is not their enforced dancing that aligns with playgoers’ responses in this case. Rather, audience members are encouraged to echo the reaction of the White Knight as he arrives at the Black House court. Contemporary discussions of the play considered above indicate that the analogy of white and black to England and Spain was widely understood; it is likely, therefore, that many London playgoers would have been sympathetic towards the White Knight as he faced musical temptation. Unlike Hermione’s resurrection, Middleton’s scene is not contingent upon the veracity of its living statues. The Black House’s use of illusion is already clear to playgoers from the Queen’s Pawn’s mirror trick, and indeed throughout the play black pieces follow a maxim that their knight ultimately confirms: ‘What we haue done, has bin dissemblance euer’ (K3^r; 5.3.158–59). Instead, the central question is whether the White Knight is going to be seduced by the musical invitation and end up taken by the Black House – a response of musical delight that could have serious consequences. We have seen how the music of this scene recalls that of the Queen’s Pawn’s mirror temptation, emphasizing a worrying precedent of White House submission. If the Knight submitted too, then the outcome – within the chess game – would be yet more catastrophic, with a more important chess piece at risk.

Literal chess-play aside, the final act of Middleton’s work relates most significantly to ‘[t]hree interrelated foreign policy questions’ that were ‘being debated before August 1624 [when it was staged]: (1) the Spanish match, (2) the situation of the Protestants in Europe, particularly the position of Frederick and Elizabeth, and (3) the general question of going to war with Spain’.⁸⁶ The play is not a blow-by-blow allegory of Prince Charles’s marriage negotiations with the Spanish Infanta Maria, yet contemporary commentators were still clear that it ‘describes Gondomar and all the Spanish proceedings very boldly and broadly’.⁸⁷ By the time the play was staged, it was common knowledge that the marriage itself and even Charles’s conversion to Catholicism had been real possibilities in 1623. If this were a direct analogy, then, we would see a White Knight who is receptive to Black House advances. However, by August 1624 the English court was scrambling to distance itself from Spain and the fiasco of the failed marriage negotiations, in the face of the violently anti-Spanish popular feeling to which Holles’s letter refers (see p. 46). The Florentine ambassador, Amerigo Salvetti, suggested that by ‘revealing’ Gondomar’s ‘fashion of dealing’ (he was the Spanish marriage negotiator), the players were ‘reflecting weakness on those that gave him credence’.⁸⁸ It would have been suicidal for the play-makers if this imputation were completely explicit, and so the play could only hint at White House receptiveness through more displaced means of representation. Richard Burt has argued that early modern playwrights worked with a ‘model of censorship involving dispersal and displacement’, rather than ‘removal and replacement’, and indeed, Salvetti’s comments indicate that playgoers were used to reading dramatic performance accordingly.⁸⁹ In this interpretative context, it is unsurprising that the play’s most subversive suggestions about English foreign policy are indeed dispersed and displaced: such imputations appear in the ostensibly separate plot of the White Queen’s Pawn; in the precedent of the musically similar mirror temptation, suggesting that a White House piece will again be seduced in act five; and, in the significant yet deniable form of the White Knight’s response to the song and statue music.

Various textual clues point towards the White Knight’s delight at the Black House’s music. Before harmony sounds, the previous, successful vocal compulsion of the White Queen’s Pawn in front of the mirror is a substantial precedent for the Knight’s response. Even the song itself alludes to his delight, calling on ‘Wonder’ to ‘worke some strange delight […] | To welcome thee the faire White House Knight’ (I2^v; 5.1.37–39). These lines suggest that the white piece will be successfully drawn – or ‘welcome[d]’ – into the Black House by the ‘strange delight’ he feels. Whilst musical enforcement is modelled for the knight in the form of statue animation (ll. 44.i-46.i), the song refers explicitly to ‘some Power aboue’ that has apparently ‘Quickned’ the statues (l. 45). But as well as evoking a supernatural or heavenly power as the source of the life-giving, this line perhaps offered a further, meta-theatrical observation in performance at the Globe. The song was sung on the stage, if the Black Queen was the performer as editor Gary Taylor argues (l. 37n). Above the stage is the music room. Perhaps, then, audiences would also take this as a reference to the power of accompanying music played above, that vivifies the statues even as it compels playgoers and delights the White Knight.

The black pieces certainly think the White Knight is musically delighted. Immediately upon the conclusion of the set-piece song and dance, the Black Knight declares that a ‘happy Omen waytes vpon this houre’ (I2^v; 5.1.47). His further comment that ‘[a]ll moue portentuously the Right-hand way’ suggests not only that the statues have adhered to the agreed choreography, but that the White Knight has been suitably ‘moue[d]’ by the music in the ‘Right’ direction: towards acceptance of Black House advances (l. 48). The Black King ends the scene by associating this ‘moue’ directly with the ‘delight’ mentioned at the start of the song, as his concluding couplet rhymes ‘Nights’ with ‘delights’ (ll. 49–50). This echoes the phonemes of the ‘Right-hand’ movement, and evokes the ‘strange delight’ which began the song, intended ‘[t]o welcome thee the faire White House Knight’ (ll. 37–39). Significantly, playgoers’ responses to the scene would mirror the White Knight’s dilemma, if they faced their own musical experience of Black House seduction even as the character was wooed by music. Just as those at The Winter’s Tale could experience a version of compulsive resurrection in their own response to Paulina’s music, so those attending Chess could experience ‘Spanish Jesuit’ Black House seduction as musical delight. There is even the possibility here for divergent engagements with the Black House song, if some playgoers sought to resist the music’s compulsive, pleasurable appeal whilst others fully embraced its delights in the moment of performance.

Just as we saw in The Winter’s Tale, playgoers’ musical delight aligns with a character’s delight in A Game at Chess: like the White Knight, playgoers experience the seductive appeal of the Black House in musical form. But how would this experience shape meanings found by playgoers in the temptation scene, and in A Game at Chess more broadly? Perhaps ideas are posited that are too critical of English politicking to be introduced any more overtly. Just as the White Queen’s Pawn’s plot suggested that Black House, Jesuit seduction is hard to resist, so too could playgoers’ delight at the Black Queen’s song indicate the same irresistibility. If playgoers and the White Knight together felt the music’s allure, perhaps the former would leave the playhouse with the sense that neither white triumph in the play nor indeed the rejection of the real Spanish match actually resulted from White House or English agency. In fact, playgoers’ own musical experiences would point towards the kind of lucky escape modelled in the White Queen’s Pawn’s plot, leaving the protagonists unscathed, but by no means covered in glory. Like Shakespeare’s musical statue, Middleton’s song, dance and spectacle align playgoer and character responses in order to suggest playhouse meanings that dissolve into uncertainty and – crucially – deniability when the performance ends. In the case of The Winter’s Tale, this adds to the fantastical, otherworldly tone of the statue scene, emphasizing supernatural possibility in a context of uncertainty. For Middleton, the mercurial meaning shaped by musical delight has plausible deniability, even whilst implying criticism of English royal policy. In performances of both works, playgoers’ compelled responses to music could shape dramatically significant meanings that could not be conveyed through other means.

This discussion has situated musical response in early modern culture as a ground from which to consider its role in the playhouse and for playgoers. In doing so, it has explored some of the study’s main questions. A Game at Chess, The Winter’s Tale and The Revenger’s Tragedy all reveal a culturally familiar idea directly shaping playhouse music use, demonstrating how the recovery of widespread cultural understandings of musical response can offer insights into familiar Jacobean play-texts. Indeed, these scenes suggest that whilst early modern commercial drama often treated music as a ‘detachable’ component, once it was ‘attached’ it could be as integral and important to the play as any other element of playhouse performance. Both Middleton and Shakespeare articulate their dramatic narratives with delighting music at major plot turns, leading playgoers through complex or fantastical stories with the help of music’s compelling sounds. Moreover, collaborative rather than oppositional relationships amongst playwright, composer, playing company and musician have emerged in the chapter’s investigations, which also offer the significant suggestion that the meanings that might emerge from these plays in early performance cannot be communicated entirely through a written text, but were shaped by music as well as language. In scenes from A Game at Chess and The Winter’s Tale, playhouse performance does not generate a conflict between a text bearing authorial intent and the rigid conventions of playhouse music use, and neither does it offer a platform for disseminating straightforwardly verbal ideas. Rather, the scenes incorporate music into their strategies for conveying narrative meaning, making full use of the resources of the playhouse for which they were written. Middleton and Shakespeare write performance texts that require playhouse music – and a culturally familiar musical response from playgoers – in order to make their most subtle suggestions.