Historical revivalism has proved to be an ever-constant thread in the reception of Vaughan Williams and his contemporaries. Question of cultural heritage and national history were pressing ones during Vaughan Williams’s lifetime, both as topics of academic study and subjects of popular appeal. England in this period drew enormous pride from its literary and artistic history, and this history in turn fuelled a national image that helped create a sense of a unique national destiny. For the period’s perceived musical ‘renaissance’, similarly, the important influence of English heritage and the nation’s historical musical canon on new English works was a persistent trope.

It is important, however, to create more nuanced accounts of how historical revivalism figured in English musical modernism. In this chapter, I focus on three main elements in English musical revivalism during Vaughan Williams’s lifetime. First, I explore contemporary attitudes towards history, English musicological writing during the period, and new attitudes towards manuscripts and archival research. I then outline how the products of music historians and archival researchers created actual performances of early music via editions and concerts. Finally, I note the expansion of this ‘sounding’ early music into spaces where historical music could be marketed as an element of mass culture.

An emotive, haunting story of a community torn apart, the Essex witch accusations and trial of 1581-2 are, taken together, one of the pivotal instances of that malign and destructive wave of misogynistic persecution which periodically broke over early modern England. Yet, for all their importance in the overall study of witchcraft, the so-called witches of St Osyth have largely been overlooked by scholars. Marion Gibson now sets right that neglect. Using fresh archival sources – and investigating not just the village itself, but also its neighbouring Elizabethan hamlets and habitations – the author offers revelatory new insights into the sixteen women and one man accused of sorcery while asking wider, provocative questions about the way history is recollected and interpreted. Combining landscape detective work, a reconstruction of lost spaces and authoritative readings of newly identified key documents, Gibson skilfully unlocks the poignant personal histories of those denied the chance to speak for themselves.

From the moment Christopher Columbus used the tinkling of a hawk’s bell to excite the interest of the welcoming Taínos during the First Encounter, music became a weapon of both conquest and resistance in the struggle for America. Here we are introduced to the nightmare of the Spanish conquest as reflected in the recovered Aztec songs of the Cantares mexicanos describing the massacres at Tenochtitlan and Cholula in the 1520s. Following the Spanish mission to Christianize America through the imposition of church music against the holdouts of Indigenous song, the European scramble for the “New World” introduces British explorations of Canada and musical encounters with the Inuits – sometimes against a background of violence, and sometimes in a tenuous moment of peace.

In the revenge tragedies of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean period, the negotiation between the prodigal urge to act and, conversely, the necessity of patiently resisting action, is central to the presentation of the gendered identities of revenging characters and to the theatrical experience itself. In this chapter, I develop and complicate the ideas and arguments about patience and prodigality explored in Chapters 1 and 2 by analysing a number of revenge tragedies. The Spanish Tragedy (1585-89), Titus Andronicus (1590-92), Antonio’s Revenge (1600-1), The Tragedy of Hoffman (1602), Othello (1603-4), The Atheist’s Tragedy (1607-11), The Duchess of Malfi (1612-14) and The Changeling (1622) in different ways draw attention to both the patience and prodigality of the revenger. This chapter argues that male revengers are authorised whether they achieve vengeance (thus asserting their masculine authority and carrying out the filial duty which upholds patriarchal norms) or whether they delay revenge (and in doing so express a degree of Christian piety). Female revengers, on the other hand, seem to be denigrated whether they act to revenge (exposing themselves to accusations of sexual impropriety) or delay vengeance (therefore establishing their ineffectiveness and cruelty).

Chapter 1 focuses on the concept of patience and the figure of the patient wife, looking in detail at this identity of female delay in early modern conduct and religious literature, and in a group of plays from the turn of the century. I begin by thinking about the nature of performative endings in All’s Well that Ends Well (1603-4), going on to examine the figure of Patient Griselda as an exemplar of female virtuous inaction in medieval narratives and in Dekker, Chettle and Haughton’s The pleasant comodie of Patient Grissill (1600). I argue that patience is figured as a temporal framework of patriarchally authorised virtuous inaction (chastity, silence and obedience), and yet also that patience can be denigrated in order to define women as obstructing socially authorised male action on the early modern stage. This chapter also examines the temporality of characters defined as prostitutes and shrews, both in Patient Grissill and in Parts One and Two of The honest whore (1604, 1604-5) as well as the anomalous figure of the patient husband. It explores the ways in which a specific kind of active patience can complicate the binaries that set duration against the instant and passivity against agency.