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‘Art to Enchant’: Musical Magic and its Practitioners in English Renaissance Drama

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Linda Phyllis Austern
Linda Phyllis Austern*
Affiliation:
University of Notre Dame
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Extract

Many practitioners of the magical arts in English Renaissance drama rely on music to achieve their occult goals. Indeed, music often comes to represent the audible sound of arcane forces at work, for to the Renaissance music itself was a dual art with both obvious and hidden properties. On one hand, music was a delightful, practical science concerned with the production of ordered sound by the human voice or artificial instruments. On the other hand, music, like magic, was a powerful numerical art capable of unlocking the obvious and hidden aspects of all creation. As Thomas Morley carefully reminds his readers in the most famous contemporary English treatise on music theory,

Musicke is either speculative or practicall. Speculative is that kinde of musicke which by Mathematicall helpes, seeketh out causes, properties, and natures of soundes by themselves, and compared with others, proceeding no further, but content with onlie contemplation of that Art. Practicall is that which teacheth al that may be knowne in songs, eyther for the understanding of other mens or the making of ones owne.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 115 , Issue 2 , 1990 , pp. 191 - 206
Copyright
Copyright © 1990 Royal Musical Association

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References

An earlier, shorter version of this paper was presented under the title “Harmonious Enchantment” at the National Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in Tempe, Arizona, in March 1987.Google Scholar

1 Morley, Thomas, A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (London, 1597), 195–6 In quotations from sixteenth and seventeenth-century sources in this article I have retained the original spellings but altered letter shapes to accord with modern typography and usage.Google Scholar

2 Several landmark studies of music in the Elizabethan and early Stuart theatres noted the strong connection between music and elements of fantasy or the supernatural, but failed to seek an explanation beyond literary convention or theatrical necessity, see, for example, William R Bowden, The English Dramatic Lyric, 1603–42 (New Haven, 1951), 11, Willa McClung Evans, Ben Jonson and Elizabethan Music (n p., 1951, repr. New York, 1965), 4–5 and 8, John H Long, Shakespeare's Use of Music The Final Comedies (New York 1977), 95–7, and John S Manifold, The Music in English Drama from Shakespeare to Purcell (London, 1956), 68–71Google Scholar

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4 Walker, Daniel Pickering, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (London, 1958), 47.Google Scholar

5 Witchcraft and sorcery are often difficult to separate from the more philosophical traditions of magic, and what is often broadly classified today as ‘neo-Platonic’ or ‘Hermetic’ magic exhibits traits borrowed from both as well as Orphism, Pythagoreanism, pseudo-Aristotelianism, astrology, alchemy and cabala, see, for example, Giambattista Della Porta [John Baptista Porta], Natural Magick in Twenty Books, anon, trans (London, 1658), 1, James I, Daemonologie, informe of a Dialogue (London, 1603), 8–11; [Theophrastus] Paracelsus, Of the Supreme Mysteries of Nature, trans Robert Turner (London, 1656), 29–32 and 81–90; and Walter Raleigh, The History of the World (London, 1614), i, 201–9 For more modern analyses of the terminological ambiguities and complexities inherent in the broad category of Renaissance magic and its study in modern times, see Katharine M. Briggs, Pale Hecate's Team An Examination on the Beliefs of Witchcraft and Magic among Shakespeare's Contemporaries and his Immediate Successors (London, 1962), 2; Ioan P. Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, trans Margaret Cook (Chicago and London, 1987), 156–62; Anthony Harris, Night's Black Agents Witchcraft and Magic in Seventeenth-Century English Drama (Manchester, 1980), 109; Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England A Regional and Comparative Study (London, 1970), 3, Rosen, Witchcraft, 4–9, Wayne Shumaker, The Occult Sciences in the Renaissance A Study in Intellectual Patterns (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1972), 108–9; Lynn Thorndyke, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, vi. The Sixteenth Century (New York, 1941), 390–436 and 515–59; Barbara Howard Traister, Heavenly Necromancers The Magician in English Renaissance Drama (Columbia, MO, 1984), 8–9, Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic, 36 and 75–84, and Francis A. Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London, 1979), 1.Google Scholar

6 See Johnson, W. Stacy, ‘The Genesis of Ariel’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 2 (1951), 205–10 (p 205); Rosen, Witchcraft, 3; Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (London, 1971), 225; and Traister, Heavenly Necromancers, 11–12Google Scholar

7 The English Renaissance conception of practical music as representative of a greater universal harmony has been discussed in numerous scholarly works A representative sample includes Linda Phyllis Austern, ‘Sweet Meats with Sour Sauce The Genesis of Musical Irony in English Renaissance Drama after 1600’, The Journal of Musicology, 4 (1985–6), 472–90 (pp. 488–9), Mary Chan, Music in the Theatre of Ben Jonson (Oxford, 1980), 9–15, Gretchen L. Finney, Musical Backgrounds for English Literature, 1580–1650 (New Brunswick, 1962), 21–46, John Hollander, The Untuning of the Sky. Ideas of Music in English Poetry, 1500–1700 (Princeton, 1961), 20–50 and 162–80, James Hutton, ‘Some English Poems in Praise of Music’, English Miscellany, 2 (1951), 1–65, John H Long, Shakespeare's Use of Music, 25–34; Wilfred Mellers, Harmonious Meeting (London, 1965), 135–7; Frederick W Sternfeld, ‘Le symbolisme musical dans quelques pièces de Shakespeare’, Les fêtes de la renaissance (Paris, 1956), 320–33, and Robin Headlam Wells, ‘The Ladder of Love’, Early Music, 12 (1984), 173–89 (pp. 176–80)Google Scholar

8 See Couliano, , Eros and Magic, xx; Shumaker, The Occult Sciences, 145; Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 223; Traister, Heavenly Necromancers, 6, Brian Vickers, ‘Analogy versus Identity. The Rejection of Occult Symbolism, 1580–1680’, Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, ed. Bnan Vickers (Cambridge, 1984), 95–163 (pp 95, 127–8); and idem, Introduction to Occult and Scientific Mentalities, 9Google Scholar

9 The Praise of Musicke (Oxford, 1586), 2Google Scholar

10 Ingpen, William, The Secrets of Numbers (London, 1624), 94 For comparison, see Henry Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, De occulta philosophia libri tres (Cologne, 1533), 155, trans into a seventeenth-century English edition whose wording of this passage is remarkably similar to Ingpen's, Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, trans ‘J F ’ (London, 1651), 255, and Marsilio Ficino, Opera (Basel, [1576]), De vita coelitus comparanda, book 3, 563Google Scholar

11 See Shumaker, , The Occult Sciences, 145, Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic, 12–24, 60–72, 124–6, 138–9 and 207, and Robin Headlam Wells, ‘John Dowland and Elizabethan Melancholy’, Early Music, 13 (1985), 514–28 (pp 515–16)Google Scholar

12 [Henry Reynolds], Mythomystes (London, [1632]), 53Google Scholar

13 Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, 171 See also, for example, Charles Butler, The Principles of Musik in Singing and Setting (London, 1636), sig. qq3, John Dowland, The First Booke of Songes or Ayres (London, 1597), dedication, sig A, Morley, A Plaine and Easie Introduction, 195–6, and L[eonard] Wright, A Display of Dutie, Dect with Sage Sayings, Pythie Sentences, and Proper Similes (London, 1589), sig C4v.Google Scholar

14 Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, 2–3 See also Paracelsus, Of the Supreme Mysteries of Nature, 81Google Scholar

15 Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, 167–9.Google Scholar

16 Reynolds, Mythomystes, 37Google Scholar

17 The substantive relationship between the human soul and music, and the auditory pathway to spiritual ecstasy, were widely discussed by Renaissance neo-Platonists, most notably Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, long before they were adopted by English writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see Finney, Gretchen L, ‘Ecstasy and Music in Seventeenth-Century England’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 8 (1947), 153–88 (pp. 157, 176–86), Finney, Musical Backgrounds, 102–3 and 109, Hollander, The Untuning of the Sky, 262–72, Shumaker, The Occult Sciences, 132–3; and Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic, 6–12 and 25–9. The most comprehensive discussion of this highly influential music-spirit theory published in England during the Renaissance is Agrippa, Of the Vanitie and Uncertaintie of Artes and Sciences, trans ‘Ja San’ (London, 1569), ff. 66v–70Google Scholar

18 Ingpen, The Secrets of Numbers, 95Google Scholar

19 The Praise of Musicke, 40–1Google Scholar

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21 England remained on the periphery of the Renaissance revival of neo-Platonism and related philosophical doctrines of magic, and so their influence remained far closer to the highly cerebral world of intellectual speculation than to actual practice, see Feingold, Mordechai, ‘The Occult Tradition in the English Universities of the Renaissance A Reassessment’, Occult and Scientific Mentalities, 73–94, Shumaker, The Occult Sciences, 246, Traister, Heavenly Necromancers, 11–12, and Wells, John Dowland and Elizabethan Melancholy', 518Google Scholar

22 Couliano, Eros and Magic, 5–6Google Scholar

23 See, for example, Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, 256, Francis Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum, or a Naturall Historie (London, 1629), 38; Della Porta, Natural Magick, 402, Francis Meres, Witts Academy A Treasurie of Goulden Sentences, Similes and Examples (London, 1635), 288, G[eorge] S[andys], Ovid's Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologiz'd, and Represented in Figures (Oxford, 1632), 356, and Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde in Generall, Corrected, Enlarged, and with Sundry New Discourses Augmented (London, 1604), 170–1Google Scholar

24 See Dee, John, Preface to [Euclid], The Elements of Geometrie of the Most Auncient Philosopher Euclid of Megara, trans Henry Billingsley (London, 1570), sig B2v, Stephen Gosson, The Schoole of Abuse (London, 1579), ff 8r-v, Morley, A Plaine and Easie Introduction, 195–6, and Sandys, Ovid's Metamorphosis, 390Google Scholar

25 The Praise of Musicke, 44–5.Google Scholar

26 For further information on the stock English Renaissance literary conception of the magician and his literary and philosophical antecedents, see Traister, Heavenly Necromancers, 27–9Google Scholar

27 Paracelsus, Of the Supreme Mysteries of Nature, 82Google Scholar

28 Fairies were often described by contemporary experts as a specific sort of spirit or were simply categorized with ‘spirits’ in general, but their single most distinctive and recognizable trait was a preternatural predilection for music and dance: see Lavaterus, Lewes, Of Ghostes and Spirits Walking by Night, trans ‘R H’ (London, 1572), 193; James I, Daemonologie, 72–6, Thomas Nashe, The Terrors of the Night, or A Discourse of Apparitions (London, 1594), sig. B2v, and Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft ([London], 1584), 153Google Scholar

29 Couliano, Eros and Magic, xviiiGoogle Scholar

30 The Wisdom of Dr Dodypoll (London, 1600), Act 3, scene iii, sig. E2vGoogle Scholar

31 Ibid., sig E3v.Google Scholar

32 Ibid., sigs. ESv–E4Google Scholar

33 See Austern, Linda Phyllis, ‘Thomas Ravenscroft Musical Chronicler of an Elizabethan Theater Company’, Journal of the American Mustcological Society, 38 (1985), 238–63 (pp 245–6).Google Scholar

34 Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, 257 For further information on the importance of song-text to magical operations, see Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic, 6–7 and 9–10Google Scholar

35 The Wisdom of Dr Dodypoll, Act 3, scene iii, sig. E2.Google Scholar

36 The dichotomy between witchcraft and natural or ‘white’ magic is articulated with especial clarity in Paracelsus, Of the Supreme Mysteries of Nature, 29–32 and 81–90, Raleigh, The History of the World, i, 201–9; and Alexander Roberts, A Treatise of Witchcraft (London, 1616), 23–4. For more modern information on this definitional dichotomy, which was far from universally accepted, see Shumaker, The Occult Sciences, 70–102 and 108–9Google Scholar

37 See Briggs, , Pale Hecate's Team, 16 and 26, Harris, Night's Black Agents, 1–2, Angela J C. Ingram, In the Posture of a Whore Changing Attitudes to ‘Bad’ Women in Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama (Salzburg, 1984), 191, Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England, 310–12; and Rosen, Witchcraft, 21. An interesting early seventeenth-century account is provided in John Stearne, A Confirmation and Discovery of Witch-Craft (London, 1648), 5, in which any learned study of occult matters is regarded as a prelude to witchcraftGoogle Scholar

38 Rosen, Witchcraft, 7.Google Scholar

39 Roberts, Alexander, A Treatise of Witchcraft (London, 1616), 40, and James I, Daemonologie, 44Google Scholar

40 See Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement, The Newly-Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis, 1986), 5, Rosen, Witchcraft, 8, and Peter Stallybrass, ‘Macbeth and Witchcraft’, Focus on Macbeth, ed John Russell Brown (London, 1982), 189–209 (pp 195, 201, 203)Google Scholar

41 Three Jacobean Witchcraft Plays, ed Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge (Manchester, 1986), 2, Rosen, Witchcraft, 20 and 29, and Stallybrass, ‘Macbeth and Witchcraft’, 190–1 For the contrast between native English and continental witchcraft persecutions, see Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England, 6–7, Rosen, Witchcraft, 9–19; and Shumaker, The Occult Sciences, 60–70Google Scholar

42 Although music has not specifically been cited as one of the principal components of more spectacular dramatic witchcraft, neither has the parallel to the contemporary stage magician been drawn by previous commentators see Bradbrook, Muriel C, ‘Sources of Macbeth’, Macbeth 4 (1951), 35–48 (p 41), Ingram, In the Posture of a Whore, 191–209, and Rosen, Witchcraft, 21Google Scholar

43 For more information on Middleton's sources for the witchcraft presented in The Witch, see Briggs, Pale Hecate's Team, 81, Norman A Brittin, Thomas Middleton (New York, 1972), 89; The Works of Thomas Middleton, ed Arthur Henry Bullen (New York, 1964), v, 366–7, 369, 372–3, 375 and 442–3, Three Jacobean Witchcraft Plays, 15, Walter Wilson Greg, Introduction to Thomas Middleton, The Witch, ed W W Greg (Oxford, 1950), xi–xii, and Ingram, In the Posture of a Whore, 194–5Google Scholar

44 See Shumaker, , The Occult Sciences, 89, and compare with the famous descriptive passage in the antimasque to Ben Jonson's Masque of Queens (The Worhes of Benjamin Jonson (London, 1616), 945–6 and 956), and anon., A Pleasant Treatise of Witches (London, 1673), 5–6Google Scholar

45 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Malone 12: ‘A Tragi-Coomodie Called the Witch, long since Acted by his Maties Servants at the Black-Friers, written by Tho[mas] Middleton’, Act 3, scene in, ff. 87–8; also The Works of Thomas Middleton, ed Bullen, v, The Witch, Act 3, scene in, pp 445–6 No seventeenth-century printed edition of this play has survived The manuscript is known to be in the hand of Ralph Crane, ‘an impecunious scrivener who was employed from time to time by the King's players’, see Middleton, The Witch, ed Greg, vi–viiGoogle Scholar

46 For more information on the often incompatible written conventions of music and drama in the English Renaissance, see Austern, ‘Thomas Ravenscroft’, 238–9Google Scholar

47 Shakespeare, William, Comedies, Histories and Tragedies (London, 1623), Macbeth, Act 4, scene i, p 144 see Cutts, John P, ‘The Original Music to Middleton's The Witch’, The Witch 7 (1956), 203–9 (p 203); and Brittin, Thomas Middleton, 89Google Scholar

48 Although no contemporary extant dance tune can be connected with any certainty to ‘ye Witches Dance’ called for by the stage directions, it has been suggested that the First Witches' Dance from Ben Jonson's Masque of Queens may have been reappropriated for this scene, which was first presented between several months and six years after Jonson's celebrated masque, see Cutts, John P, ‘Jacobean Masque and Stage Music’, Music and Letters, 35 (1954), 185–200 (pp 192–3), La musique de scène de la troupe de Shakespeare The King's Men sous la règne de Jacques Ier, ed John P Cutts (Paris, 1959; 2nd rev edn, Paris, 1971), 125; and William John Lawrence, ‘Notes of a Collection of Masque Music’, Music and Letters, 3 (1922), 49–58 (p 53). The Masque of Queens was presented in February 1609, and The Witch is thought to have been presented between later that year and 1615, see Brittin, Thomas Middleton, 89, Alfred Harbage, Annals of English Drama 975–1700, rev Samuel Schoenbaum (Philadelphia, 1964), 104; and Lawrence, ‘Notes on a Collection of Masque Music’, 53 Modern transcriptions of this dance, most often attributed to King's Musician and theatrical composer Robert Johnson, are available in La musique de scène de la troupe de Shakespeare, 14, and Four Hundred Songs and Dances from the Stuart Masque, ed. Sabol, 186–7 For further information on Robert Johnson's dramatic music, see La musique de scène de la troupe de Shakespeare, 125–6, Cutts, ‘The Original Music to Middleton's The Witch’, 204–7; idem, ‘Robert Johnson King's Musician in His Majesty's Public Entertainment’, Music and Letters, 36 (1955), 110–25, and idem, ‘Robert Johnson and the Court Masque’, Music and Letters, 41 (1960), 111–26Google Scholar

49 Couliano, Eros and Magic, 87; Morley, A Plaine and Easie Introduction, 195, and Thomas Ravenscroft, A Briefe Discourse of the True (but neglected) Use of Charact'ring the Degrees (London, 1614), sig A3v See also, for example, George Puttenham (attrib), The Arte of English Poesie (London, 1589), 36, Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (4th edn, Oxford, 1632), 540, Charles Butler, The Principles of Musik in Singing and Setting (London, 1636), 109; Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury (London, 1598), ff 287v–288, and Reynolds, Mythomystes, 57.Google Scholar

50 Butler, The Principles of Musik, 1Google Scholar

51 Roberts, A Treatise of Witchcraft, 18–19Google Scholar

52 The direct quotation is from The Praise of Musicke, 3 For information concerning English ideas about the strong connection between feminine music and the magic of seduction, see Austern, Linda Phyllis, ‘“Sing Againe Syren” The Female Musician and Sexual Enchantment in Elizabethan Life and Literature’, Renaissance Quarterly, 42 (1989), 420–48Google Scholar

53 E. William Monter, ‘The Pedestal and the Stake. Courtly Love and Witchcraft’, Becoming Visible Women in European History, ed Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (Boston, 1977), 119–36Google Scholar

54 See Dusinberre, Juliet, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women (London, 1975), 70–1 and 135, and Ingram, In the Posture of a Whore, 193–4Google Scholar

55 William Rowley, Thomas Dekker, John Ford, etc., The Witch of Edmonton A Known True Story (London 1658), Act 4, scene i, p 41.Google Scholar

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57 See Ingram, , In the Posture of a Whore, 41Google Scholar

58 [Thomas Coryat], Coryats Crudities (London, 1611), 267Google Scholar

59 Tommaso Buoni [Tho Buoni], Problems of Beawtie and all Humane Affections, trans ‘S. L’ (London, 1606), 21–2.Google Scholar

60 [John Marston], The Workes of Mr John Marston (London, 1633), The Dutch Courtesan, Act 1, scene ii, sig. [A]Av.Google Scholar

61 Ibid., sig [A]A2 For further information on the distinctive signs and step-by-step progress of Platonic love as recognized widely in the Renaissance, see Craig, Hardin, The Enchanted Glass The Elizabethan Mind in Literature (New York, 1936), 43–4 and 46, Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman (Cambridge, 1980), 24–5, and Mary Beth Rose, ‘Moral Conceptions of Sexual Love in Elizabethan Comedy’, Renaissance Drama, new series, 15 (1984), 1–29 (p 8)Google Scholar

62 Two arrangements of an early seventeenth-century setting of this song remain extant, one for voice and unfigured bass in British Library, Add MS 24665, ‘Giles Earle his booke’, pp. 59 and 61; and a more elaborate setting for voice and consort of viols in British Library, MS Egerton 2971, ff. 8v–9 The former, written in a disorderly manner by the scribe, was transcribed by Andrew Sabol with the mensuration sign in the bass part interpreted as a flat sign that had been omitted from the cantus which then imposed a misleading G minor tonality on the edited version; Sabol, Andrew, ‘Two Unpublished Stage Songs for the “Aery of Children”’, Renaissance News, 13 (1960), 222–32 (p 230). The Egerton version, which adds two lively instrumental parts to what are essentially the same two outer parts as the Additional version, is transcribed and edited in its entirety in Consort Songs, ed Philip Brett, Musica Britannica, 22 (London, 1967), 95Google Scholar