Elizabethan Mythologies: Studies in Poetry, Drama and Music

by Robin Headlam Wells

Overview

For 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. Dealing with plays, poems, songs, and the iconography of musical instruments, Robin Headlam Wells reexamines the myth, central to the Orpheus story, of the civilizing power of music and poetry. In doing so he acknowledges a debt to the New Historicism and its recovery of political meanings that traditional historical scholarship has sometimes been guilty of obscuring. But he is also critical of certain faulty premises in New Historicist criticism that have led to some radical misinterpretations of the period.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521035026
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	12/14/2006
Edition description:	Revised ed.
Pages:	308
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.67(d)

Table of Contents

List of illustrations; Preface; List of Abbreviations; Introduction; Part I: Music, Myth and Politics: 1. Spenser and the politics of music; 2. Falstaff, Prince Hal and the New Song; 3. Prospero, King James and the myth of the musician-king; Part II: Defining the Essential: A Humanist Iconography: 4. The ladder of love: verbal and musical rhetoric in the Elizabethan lute song; 5. Microcosmos: symbolic geometry in the Renaissance lute rose; 6. The orpharion: 'a British shell'; Part III. The Game of Love: 7. Ars amatoria: Philip Rosseter and the Tudor court lyric; 8. Dowland, Ficino and Elizabethan melancholy; 9. 'Ydle shallowe things': love and song in Twelfth Night; Coda: floreat Orpheus; Notes; Index.

Editorial Reviews

"Elizabethan Mythologies is a highly intelligent look at the dominant myths that inform the theory and practice of music in the Tudor age." Essays in Theatre

"Seasoned, thoughtful, at times provocative, and inevitably astute, Wells imparts a truly interdiscipinary view of Renaissance thought in this collection of essays." Raphael Falco, Renaissance Quarterly

From the Publisher