Household Songs

Abstract

This chapter illuminates the affective significance of music and song within household drama, a genre that early modern scholarship has found difficult to detach from the page and that continues to be undervalued in performance terms. Drawing on the notion of the closet, understood both as an architectural and acoustic space within the early modern household and as a generic marker for women’s dramatic productions, it explores the range of musical practices encompassed under the broad category of “household plays.” Focusing on Jane Lumley’s Iphigenia at Aulis, Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure, and Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory, it then considers how recent staging experiments help to illuminate textual markers of music and song that have too often been silenced.

Approaching Playhouse Song in the Archive: The Case of Dekker, Ford, Middleton, and Rowley’s The Spanish Gypsy

“…Such an augmentation allows us to avoid what Katherine R. Larson has memorably termed "a methodological quagmire," into which there is a risk of sinking if the focus on "[t]rying to fill these gaps from a contemporary perspective" becomes too narrow and insistent. 12 Generally speaking, the surviving evidence responds more readily to some questions than to others: what is the dramatic function of this theatrical song? How might it have been approached in early modern English cultural contexts?…”