- "O Let Us Howle Some Heavy Note": Music for Witches, the Melancholic and the Mad on the Seventeenth-Century English Stage
Investigations into seventeenth-century English literature, music, melancholy, and theatrical representation have come to the fore in recent years in the fields of literary studies, cultural history, musicology, the history of science, and philosophy. Few full-length studies have adequately united these disciplines, mediating the shifting sensibilities of seventeenth-century English theatre-going audiences and engaging the fluid medium of music. In her new book, Amanda Eubanks Winkler weaves an impressive array of interdisciplinary sources—including music, politics, religion, medicine, and gender studies—to examine theatrical characterizations of disorder from Shakespeare's plays to Henry Purcell's opera and Restoration-era masques.
Winkler begins with a chapter devoted to outlining the early modern English concepts of microcosmic and macrocosmic relationship—that is, one must examine and understand perfect, cosmic harmonies before demonic discords. The author moves swiftly through the history of disorder—political, mental, and musical—including early modern definitions of concord and discord. This chapter is a useful summary for any scholar of the humanities seeking to embark on a study of the affective powers of music and the philosophies surrounding its efficacy in seventeenth-century England. Non-musicians [End Page 68] need not fear the specialized language of musical analysis in this chapter especially, nor indeed throughout the entire work; Winkler wisely does not impose twentieth century analytical techniques on this late Renaissance and early Baroque repertoire.
In her effort to examine English theatre throughout the entire seventeenth century, Winkler is very careful to chart the differences in theatrical representation from pre- and post-Civil War England. At the conclusion of each chapter, she historicizes her arguments to foreshadow the trajectory of musical disorder into the eighteenth century. She limits the scope of her study to vocal and dance music for three distinct, but related, character types—witches, melancholics, and the mad—as represented on the seventeenth-century public and private stage. These character types are linked through seventeenth-century discourses on mental illness, shifting gender economies, and humoral theories. Winkler cites several seventeenth-century treatises outlining witchcraft as representative of female irrationality, which skeptics like Johann Weyer and Reginald Scot believed was caused by melancholy. Melancholy, when left untreated, could lead to madness.
Despite a brief summary of early modern English discourses on gender and sexuality in Chapter 1, Winkler's second chapter on witches assumes a working knowledge of the Aristotelian-Galenic one-sex model as well as more contemporary theories, including Stephen Orgel and Linda Austern's work on boy actors. This chapter deals with the ideological contradictions in representing witchcraft both theatrically and musically. Witches' music in seventeenth-century stage plays was depicted in several ways so as to represent disorder: through noise, lack of sound, or rural and agrarian tropes. Again, following these trends through the century, the author notes that later in the Restoration these musical gestures became more stylized and began to incorporate popular anti-Catholic rhetoric as a representation of witches as political, sexual, and spiritual transgression.
To elucidate the second character type in Chapter 3, female madwomen and melancholics, Winkler again uses Purcell's opera as a case study. Here the author briefly moves through the medical history of lovesickness and the associations with lasciviousness, singing women, effeminacy, and irrationality, reminding us once again that in the seventeenth century, a good woman was silent and chaste. The lament was the chief medium through which a deserted, melancholic woman could express her misery; the falling tear-like musical structure of which has been expertly explored by musicologists Ellen Rosand (1979) and Suzanne Cusick (1994).1 The author enters into a discussion on ventriloquism as a strategy wherein "servants give air to the grief of their mistresses" (82). This device is employed as a way to express the grief of a chaste character and, at the same time, spare her the lascivious trappings of...