Chapter 2 - Communities of Voices

Summary

Chapter 2 turns to examine early modern song culture at Wilton House. The work of Herbert’s aristocratic cousin William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke (1580–1630), provides a focal point for ideas about the collaborative enterprise of poets and musicians in the early seventeenth century. Pembroke was a patron of poets and musicians, and much of his verse survived in songbooks and musical settings by some of the leading composers of his day. In Pembroke’s collected Poems (London, 1660) we have a volume in which the voices of poets and musicians – those who compose and sing and preserve these poems – meet and combine and compete with one another. Noting George Herbert’s involvement in this literary and musical coterie, the chapter examines the implications of Pembroke’s patronage on Herbert’s verse, and demonstrates how Herbert’s verse critiques and transforms the worldly dynamics of patronage operating within the Wilton coterie.