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Music and The Mad Lover

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2019

John P. Cutts
John P. Cutts*
Affiliation:
University of Oklahoma
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Extract

Whilst musical imagery is to some extent resorted to in attempts by Elizabethan writers to define madness, the efficacy of music as sound is also sought for resolving the discord in man's microcosmos. Music's power over the emotions has been praised throughout all civilized ages. The best known example is, perhaps, Alexander who ‘was sometimes excited by it so passionately, that he was forced almost against his will to leave the banquet table and rush to arms; and when the musician changed the temper of the tune, he grew calm again, lay aside his arms, and returned to the banquet table'. Another stirring example is that of King Saul whose madness is spoken of as the result of possession by an evil spirit for his sins before God.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in the Renaissance , Volume 8 , 1961 , pp. 236 - 248
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1961

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References

1 Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier (Prose and Poetry of the Continental Renaissance in Translation, ed. H. H. Blanchard, New York, 1949), p. 354. Treatises on music seem never to fail to describe the powerful effect of music on Alexander and Saul. The treatises were essentially imitative in this respect; nevertheless, the assumption holds good that they found no reason to disagree with the claims made for music's power by the ancients.

2 I Samuel xvi, 23; see also 1 Samuel xviii, 10.

3 Henry VIII III.i.3 ff. (folio text). The song is introduced by the following speech of the queen:

Take thy Lute wench,

My Soule growes sad with troubles,

Sing, and disperse ‘em if thou canst: leaue working.

Music is not here being called for to restore harmony, for the king's actions have made this impossible for Queen Katherine, but its gentle soothing powers are sought to allay melancholy.

4 For the musical settings of the songs of the play see Cutts, John P., La Musique de scène de la troupe de Shakespeare (Paris, 1959)Google Scholar. The sources of these settings are specified PP. 154 ff.

5 Quotations from The Mad Lover follow the text of the folio of 1647. The division into acts and scenes and the line-numbering are those of R. Warwick Bond's edition (1908, Variorum Beaumont and Fletcher, ed. A. H. Bullen, III).

6 During this scene the following lyric is read, according to the dialogue, to the princess:

Goe happy heart for thou shalt ly

Intomb'd in her for whom I dy

Example of her cruelty.

Tell her if she chance to chide

Me for slownes in her pride

That it was for her I died.

If a teare escape her eye

’ Tis not for my memory

But thy rights of obsequy

The Altar was my loving brest

My heart the sacrificed beast

And I was my selfe the Preist

Your body was the sacred shrine

Your cruell mind the power divine

Pleas'd with hearts of men not kine

There is reason to suppose, however, that in the original performance these words were

sung. A ‘through’-setting by John Wilson, a King's musician responsible for some of the stage music of the King's men at this time, exists in several manuscripts containing stage music of this period (Bodleian MSS. Don. c. 57, f. 63v; Mus. b. 1, ff. 27v-28; Ch. Ch. Mus. 87, ff. 7v-8: Fitzwilliam Museum MS. 52D (Bull MS.), ff. 98v-99). In the Bull MS. it stands in close proximity of the original music for another song from The Mad Lover, ‘Orpheus I am'. This manuscript also contains original music for The Squires’ Masque (1614), Valentinian (1614), and The Witch (c. 1609), all in close proximity.

7 This is the punctuation of F2; FI reads ‘Orpheus, I am’.

8 The clever use of rests before and after ‘hark’ lends greater insistency and urgency to the advice. The correspondences of down the scale for Hell, at the mention of crossing over, and of going up the scale at ‘Come from the deep's below’ help to give realistic seriousness to the warning.

9 There is no indication of this in the text itself. But a bass singer is already present on the stage and later joins Stremon in the musical dialogue. Obviously it is he also who joins Stremon in the last-line chorus of this song.

10 Ben Jonson's masque, Lovers Made Men, was presented 22 Feb. 1617 at Lord Hay's, ‘And the whole Maske was sung (after the Italian manner) Stylo recitativo, by Master Nicholas Lanier; who ordered and made both the Scene, and the Musicke’. The Vision of Delight of the previous month had, however, set the precedent, an interesting specimen of the music of which has been brought to light. See John P. Cutts, ‘Ben Jonson's Masque The Vision of Delight’, Notes & Queries n.s. III (1956), 64-67.

11 This is frequently a topic for lyrical outbursts in plays. Perhaps the best example occurs in May's Old Couple II:

Song.

This is not the Elysian Grove,

Nor can I meet my slaughtered Love

Within these shades; come death, and be

At last as mercifull to me,

As in my dearest Scudmore's fall,

Thou shewd'st thyself tyrannical,

Then did I die, when he was slain:

But kill me now, I live again;

And shall go meet him in a grove,

Fairer then any here, above.

Oh! let this woful breath expire:

Why should I wish Evadne's fire

Sad Portia's coals, or Lucrece knife,

To rid me of a loathed life

'Tis shame enough that grief alone,

Kils me not now, when thou art gone.

But life, since thou art slow to go,

He punish thee for lasting so,

And make thee piece-meal every day,

Dissolve to tears and melt away

The idea of the bereaved lady's joining her lover in the Elysian Fields is inherited, of course, from the ancients as best expressed in the stories of Dido and Aeneas and Orpheus and Eurydice.

12 The text gives no indication of the chorus found for the last three lines in the music manuscript.

13 This mixture—a dog, an ass, a lion, and a bush—shows the influence of the antimasque. Beaumont's Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray's Inn (1613) presented ‘an Antimasque … not of one kinde or liverie (because that had been so much in use heretofore) but as it were in consort like to broken Musicke’ (The Works of Beaumont and Fletcher, ed. A. Glover and A. R. Waller, Cambridge, 1905-1912, x, 379).Antimasques had hitherto been uniform, for example all witches, all satyrs, all madmen, dressed in one livery, like music played by a number of instruments of the same kind. The use of motley antimasques, like music in consort played by different instruments, originated in Beaumont's masque. The use of animals here is, of course, partly symbolical, signifying the untamed beasts of passion, the stubborn will of an ass, the fierceness of a Hon.

14 The music manuscript has ‘all’ for ‘Still’.

15 W. R. Bowden, The English Dramatic Lyric, 1603-1642 (1951, Yale Stud, in English no. 118), does not list this as a dramatic lyric, but I think it ought to be considered as such since it was almost certainly declaimed to music.

16 Cf. ‘the musick changed into a very solemne ayre, which they softly played, while Orpheus spake’ in Campion's Lords’ Masque, 1613 ﹛Works, ed. P. Vivian, Oxford, 1909), p. 90. The word spake began at this time in masques to mean ‘spake in music', as is evidenced by The Vision of Delight.

17 N. Y. P. L. Drexel MS. 4041 (Earl Ferrers MS.), f. 87v.

18 Editors have pointed out that these ‘expletives’ are printed in the margin in roman type in both folios because, though they are part of the song, they are also stage-directions.

19 The realism of this setting is extraordinary, as is that of most of Johnson's stage music (exclusively for the King's men), whether it be the bell effects in the Tempest songs, the suggestion of mental derangement in the madmen's song in The Duchess of Malfi, ghostliness in ‘Myn Ost's Song’ in The Lovers Progress, or the evocation of the melancholy sadness of distressed lovers in several plays. His approach to the dramatic lyric seems always to have been vigorous and fresh, and rhythmic experimentation suggested by word and speech rhythms is a distinguishing feature of his work. See John P. Cutts, ‘Robert Johnson, King's Musician’, Musk & Letters xxxvi (1955), 110-125.

20 The Jacobean and Caroline Stage (Oxford, 1941), II, 479.

21 Believe as you list, ed. C. J. Sisson (1928, Malone Soc. Reprints), p. xxxiii.

22 II, 360-361.

23 A Plaint and Easie Introduction to Practkall Musicke (1597), p. 178.

24 La Musique de scène de la troupe de Shakespeare, appendix B.

25 Records of Lincoln's Inn, 1586-1660, ed. J. Douglas-Walker (London, 1897-1902), II, 154.

26 Cf., e.g., the double ‘1’ reproduced by S. A. Tannenbaum, The Handwriting of the Renaissance (N. Y., 1930) on p. 53 (no. 11) and the ‘x’ on p. 84 (no. 10).