The Matter of Song in Early Modern England: Texts in and of the Air by Katherine R. Larson;

Author:Katherine R. Larson; [Larson, Katherine R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192581945
Publisher: OxfordUP
Published: 2019-08-07T00:00:00+00:00

Making the Room Rattle: Pamphilia in Performance

Unlike the discrete lyrics included in the Folger manuscript, it is perhaps easier to imagine the songs scattered throughout Urania as sung, if only because readers are suddenly confronted with vivid depictions of singers in performance that underscore the rhetorical significance of music for Wroth’s protagonists. Song appears in Urania and in other romances of the period primarily as a privileged and enabling mode of communication and self-expression that makes possible the articulation of otherwise inexpressible feelings.57 Although non-musical lyric utterance assumes a similar role, exemplified by the sonnets Wroth’s protagonists carve on trees or recite to themselves and to each other, song performance seems to have been associated in the period with an especially vulnerable mode of self-expression.58 In John Donne’s “The Triple Fool” (pub. 1633), the speaker describes verse as “tam[ing]” and “fetter[ing]” his amorous pain: “Grief brought to numbers cannot be so fierce.” But then, he laments, that poem is set to music, and then sung, a transformation that “increased” both his love and his sorrow:

Some man, his art and voice to show,

Doth set and sing my pain,

And, by delighting many, frees again

Grief, which verse did restrain.59

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