© 2012 Scott A. Trudell ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
© 2012 Scott A. Trudell ALL RIGHTS RESERVED LITERARY SONG: POETRY, DRAMA AND ACOUSTIC PERFORMANCE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND by SCOTT A. TRUDELL A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Literatures in English written under the direction of Henry S. Turner and approved by ______________________________________ ______________________________________ ______________________________________ ______________________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey May, 2012 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Literary Song: Poetry, Drama and Acoustic Performance in Early Modern England by SCOTT A. TRUDELL Dissertation Director: Henry S. Turner This dissertation traces the development of verse with a musical dimension from Sidney and Shakespeare to Jonson and Milton, in genres ranging from prose romance and printed songbooks to outdoor pageantry and professional theater. Song was an essential part of the early modern literary canon, and it circulated ubiquitously in written format. Yet it was also highly performative, inseparable from the rhythmic, vocal and instrumental conditions of its recital. As such, song brings out the extensive interaction between writing and sound in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literary culture. Drawing on media theory, I argue that song reveals a continual struggle to define literature, from Sidney’s emphasis on the musical properties of writing in The Defence of Poesie to Milton’s conception of the printed book as a profoundly performative medium in Areopagitica. I use song to rethink Shakespeare’s Ophelia, whom I see as a disruptive, non-scriptive versifier whose mad songs amount to an extreme type of poetry. And I follow song to less familiar territory, including the pageants that paraded music and verse through the streets of London, mixing the belletristic writings of England’s leading poets with the cacophonous disorder of popular crowds. Focusing on song’s place at the threshold of script and acoustic performance, I theorize literature as a process of mediation – an intersection of technologies, performers, formats and authors in which writing was an important but by no means exclusive component. ii For my parents iii Acknowledgements There are many people whose generosity and support I would like to acknowledge. The intellectual community at Rutgers made this dissertation possible in all kinds of ways. Candice Amich, Sarah Balkin, Riccardo Capoferro, Kevin Cattrell, Michael Hardy, Jesse Hoffman, Meghan Lau, Colleen Rosenfeld, Debapriya Sarkar and Katherine Williams have been good friends and brilliant interlocutors. Emily Bartels, Chris Chism, Harriet Davidson, Thomas Fulton, William Galperin, Greg Jackson, Ron Levao, Michael McKeon and Meredith McGill have been superb mentors. This dissertation is dedicated to my parents, David and Cindy Trudell, for their kindness and encouragement. My sister and brother Ashley and Michael, and my grandparents Marvin and Mary Lou, have also been loving and thoughtful. Thanks also to Elizabeth Trudell, Dennis Oliver and the Palo Alto Saturday Morning Coffee Group, and to Ariel Dumas, Stephen Procter, Will Reece and Thomas Ward. I would especially like to thank Isabel Brito Farré, Jonathan Strong and Jeremy Wang-Iverson for their support. I have been very fortunate in my dissertation committee. Bruce Smith has guided this project indirectly, through his scholarship, and directly, as my outside reader. Jacqueline Miller has been a close and extremely thoughtful advisor since I began graduate study. Ann Baynes Coiro has been an invaluable, shaping influence on my work and on my professional development. And Henry Turner has been an exceptional iv mentor; his commitment to the quality of my work has been tireless, and his intellectual generosity is extraordinary. My third chapter has been published in a similar version as “The Mediation of Poesie: Ophelia’s Orphic Song,” Shakespeare Quarterly 63, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 46-76. Sections of my fourth chapter will appear in “Occasion,” in Early Modern Theatricality: Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature, ed. Henry S. Turner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013-14). v Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................ iv List of Illustrations ............................................................................................................ vii Introduction ..........................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1: Philip Sidney and Acoustic Form ....................................................................22 Chapter 2: Performing the Book in the Seventeenth Century ............................................79 Chapter 3: Ophelia’s Orphic Song ...................................................................................128 Chapter 4: Networks of Occasional Entertainment .........................................................170 Epilogue: “Solus Rex, and Poeta”: The Politics of Literary Form ..................................228 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................245 vi List of Illustrations John Dowland, “Sorrow sorrow stay” ...............................................................................99 Thomas Campion, “Come away, arm’d with loues delights” ..........................................102 Chrysanaleia: The Fourth Pageant, or The Lemon Tree .................................................206 Chrysanaleia: The Great Pageant ....................................................................................207 vii 1 Introduction I am two fools, I know, For loving, and for saying so In whining poetry; But where’s that wiseman, that would not be I, If she would not deny? 5 Then as th’earth’s inward narrow crooked lanes Do purge sea water’s fretful salt away, I thought, if I could draw my pains Through rhyme’s vexation, I should them allay. Grief brought to numbers cannot be so fierce, 10 For, he tames it, that fetters it in verse. But when I have done so, Some man, his art and voice to show, Doth set and sing my pain, And, by delighting many, frees again 15 Grief, which verse did restrain. To love and grief tribute of verse belongs, But not of such as pleases when ‘tis read, Both are increased by such songs: For both their triumphs so are published. 20 And I, which was two fools, do grow three; Who are a little wise, the best fools be.1 Donne’s “The Triple Fool” finds humor in the mediation of a sentiment through its environment. The speaker is a fool for loving – for allowing the calm pools of his 1 Donne, The Complete English Poems, 81. 2 subjectivity to flow to the sea, setting himself up for rejection by another. He is a fool for composing verses – for exposing his love to others, which transforms it to whining and “grief.” And he is a fool for allowing his pain to be sung – for admitting his sentiments into a larger sphere of interpretation and performance where they are “increased” into diverse meanings and experiences. The speaker is foolish because he fails to grasp the complex process involved in the circulation of poetic meaning through early modern England. “The Triple Fool” stages a negotiation over who and what controls and determines that meaning as it circulates through technologies and bodies ranging from manuscripts to vocalists. Poetic thoughts, writings, revisions and performances develop significance only insofar as they travel through this environment, so that meaning is refashioned even – or especially – after it has been transmitted. Donne is playful about the degree to which a poet is able assert or assert control over his or her verse: if there is genuine concern in “The Triple Fool” about the re- or mis-adaptation of a poem in musical culture, there is also a sly sense of confidence that a skillful poet can “tame” or “fetter” sensibilities in writing. Yet the poem acknowledges the shaping influence of the process by which a poet’s “invention” or “fore-conceit” (terms that Sidney employs in the Defence of Poesie) is set down in verse, performed, altered or misinterpreted by any number of readers, singers, instrumentalists and auditors.2 What is more, “The Triple Fool” raises the question of whether literature is governed by a stable invention in the first place. It is one thing to claim that literature 2 The word “invention,” which was commonly used to refer to poetic making in early modern England, derives mainly but not exclusively from inventio, traditionally the first part or stage of rhetoric. Whereas inventio referred to the finding out of the subject of oratory and could also be translated as the “discovery” of topics that already existed, the English term “invention” more strongly connoted the fable or fiction contrived or devised by an author; see the Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed February 2012). For a helpful account of early modern terminology for poetic invention, see D. J. Gordon, “The Poet as Architect.” 3 involves a hierarchical progression from authorial invention to worldly manifestation. Philosophers of mimesis from Plato to Girolamo Fracastoro acknowledge that