II. “Musick in the House, Musick in the Heart, and Musick also in Heaven”: The

The , that ancient serious Matron-like instrument. RICHARD STEELE. The Tatler Once the virginals had been superseded by the larger wing-shaped with their more varied and brilliant sonoric possibilities, their sex appeal quickly faded. In 1710, Richard Steele called the vir- ginals “that ancient serious Matron-like instrument” (Tatler 2:157:380)! Playing a continued to be an essen- tial part of the canon of accomplishments (described in Lady Ann Fanshawe’s Memoirs as “working all sorts of fine works with my nee- dle, and learning French, singing, , the virginals and dancing”, 110), but as the seventeenth century wore on, the harpsichord took over, and the virginals and became a code for poverty and out- datedness. ’s diary mentions a “short, ugly, red-haired slut that plays upon the virginalls and sings, but after such a country manner, I was weary of it but could not but commend it” (4:242, 23/07/1663). Thomas Shadwell’s “silly affected Whore”, Mistress Jilt, hates London and insists on the equivalent “Breeding” that she has had in the country: “[C]ould I not play, I am the Duke of Norfolk, Green Sleeves, and the fourth Psalm upon the Virginals; and did I not learn, and could play six Lessons upon the de Gambo before I went to that nasty, stinking, wicked Town […]?” (Epsom-Wells 3:1, p. 41). In a comedy of 1691, two sisters bewail the inadequate tutoring of an “ignorant, illiterate hopping Puppy” of a dancing-master, an old and hoarse singer, and a music-master who comes “to teach one to twinkle out Lilly burlero upon an old pair of Virginals, that sound worse than a Tinkers” (Shadwell, Scowrers 2:1:10). Two years on, another comic character defends a lady’s virtue by saying: “I believe her as Virtuous as my self; but then she Sings, and Plays upon the Virginals so sweetly, and Dances Country Dances.” The doubtful rejoinder “Nay, doubtless she has all her motions to a miracle” (Southerne, 3:1:25) reveals that playing a keyboard instru- ment had become, within seventy years, a ‘motion’, genuine or not, that could signify domestic virtue even on the stage. The seventeenth century saw an emergent “redefinition of the family, which identified 34 Regula Hohl Trillini

women as partners with their husbands in the construction of the home as a place of warmth and virtue” (Belsey, 47) and added new cultural connotations to private music-making. A newly available discourse of musical domesticity is equally remote from scenarios of convention- alized courtship or illegitimate lust. In the emerging genres of prose fiction, particularly the courtship novel, domestic keyboard music remains erotically attractive but is also integrated into scenes of sentimental love, matrimonial affection – and matrimonial tedium. Delighted fathers and bored husbands are added to the virginals’ lecherous literary audiences. In Tobias Smollett’s Humphry Clinker, the unpleasantly patronizing husband Thomas Bullford, jolly but “of moderate intellects”, derides his wife who entertains the company “with a sonata on the harpsichord […] to admiration” (2:286). At first affecting “to be in raptures” and asking her to perform “an arietta of her own composing”, he then falls asleep when she plays, only to wake with a snort and exclaim: “’O cara! what d’ye think, gentlemen? Will you talk any more of your Pargolesi [sic] and your Corelli?’ – At the same time, he thrust his tongue in one cheek, and leered […]. – He concluded the pantomime with a loud laugh” (ibid.). This mocking of gentlemen connoisseurs is character- istic of yet another seventeenth-century development: as women con- tinued to play at home, men played less and could be annoyed more intensely by what they were less qualified to appreciate. Those men who did love music found it harder than ever to justify their passion.

1. Prescriptions

1.1. “Musick not worth a gentleman’s labor”

Music is not the labour, principal attention, or great business of a people. ANON. The London Magazine Male amateur music-making was not expected to contribute to the constitution of the newly defined domesticity. By 1650, music was no longer a subject that was taken for granted in schools, i. e. in boys’ education (cf. Raynor, 141), and Obadiah Walker’s 300-page On Edu- cation of 1673 dismisses music in two sentences: Musick I think not worth a Gentlemans labor, requiring much industry and time to learn, and little to lose, it. It is used chiefly to please others, who may receive the