Elizabethan Mythologies: Studies in Poetry, Drama and MusicFor lovers of music and poetry the legendary figure of Orpheus probably suggests a romantic ideal. But for the Renaissance he is essentially a political figure. Mythographers interpreted the Orpheus story as an allegory of the birth of civilization because they recognized in the arts in which Orpheus excelled an instrument of social control so powerful that with it you could, as one writer put it, 'winne Cities and whole Countries'. Dealing with plays, poems, songs and the iconography of musical instruments, Robin Headlam Wells re-examines the myth, central to the Orpheus story, of the transforming power of music and poetry. Elizabethan Mythologies, first published in 1994, contains numerous illustrations from the period and will be of interest to scholars and students of Renaissance poetry, drama and music, and of the history of ideas. |
Contents
Introduction I | 1 |
Spenser and the politics of music | 25 |
Music as a symbol of profane love Illustration from | 52 |
Prospero King James and the myth of the musicianking | 63 |
verbal and musical rhetoric in | 83 |
The Great Chain of Being Didacus Valades Rhetorica | 90 |
Medieval ladder of virtue Herrad of Landsberg | 98 |
symbolic geometry in the Renaissance | 113 |
a British shell | 143 |
Philip Rosseter and the Tudor court lyric | 169 |
Dowland Ficino and Elizabethan melancholy | 189 |
love and song in Twelfth Night | 208 |
floreat Orpheus | 225 |
Notes | 231 |
102 | 252 |
107 | 266 |
Other editions - View all
Elizabethan Mythologies: Studies in Poetry, Drama and Music Robin Headlam Wells No preview available - 2006 |
Common terms and phrases
ancient argues Arte of English audience Booke of Ayres Booke of Songs Bower of Bliss Cambridge University Press Chaucer cittern claim Clarendon Press classical contemporary cosmos criticism Dollimore doth Dowland elements Elizabethan emotions England English Poesie expressed Faerie Queene Falstaff Ficino figure Flow my teares game of love harmony Henry historicism History human nature humanist Ibid ideas illus instrument John John Donne John Dowland John Gower ladder literary literature London loue lover lute rose lute song magic masque meaning medieval melancholy Methuen microcosm Middle Ages musica mundana musician-king myth Neoplatonic orpharion Orpheus Oxford passion Philip Rosseter Philosophy play Poems poet poetic poetry political post-structuralist Prospero Puttenham Pythagorean Renaissance repr rhetoric romantic love Rosseter's scallop Shakespeare shell Sidney sing singer Sir Thomas sixteenth century social soul Spenser stanza Studies sweet symbolic Tempest theory thou thought traditional trans Tudor Twelfth Night Venus vols words writes York