Gender and Song in Early Modern England ed. by Leslie C. Dunn and Katherine R. Larson (review)

This is the second musical volume in Ashgate’s series ‘Women and Gender in the Early Modern World’. Like the first volume, Many-Headed Voices, it includes contributions by both established and younger academics and ranges over a wide variety of materials. Singing is represented and practised by men as well as by women, in broadside ballads, poems, travel writings, Shakespearean and other plays, educational Masque stagings, domestic ayres, and biopics of Elizabeth I. In spite of this diversity, the clear focus on ‘England’ and ‘Song’ gives these eleven articles a remarkable coherence. They are not grouped into titled sections, because the numerous motifs and concerns that resonate across the volume in several dimensions would be simplified by such a linear arrangement. Some of the connections are made explicit in the introduction, but it is to be regretted that there is no cross-referencing in the articles themselves to put the rich connections into clearer relief.

The diversity in Gender and Song is one of the many fruits of musicology’s ‘sea change’, as Martha Feldman called it in her much-quoted foreword to Routledge’s Critical and Cultural Musicology series (from 1999 onwards). Canons have expanded and notions of ‘texts’ have shifted; sexuality, race, narrativity, and politics are now firmly established as possible topics of inquiry; and Word and Music Studies are here to stay. The variety explored in Gender and Song is a welcome symptom of the discipline having come to terms with and profited from wider horizons, and these well-aligned contributions come from four musicologists and seven scholars of English literature, who all speak a common language. Finally, the investigation of male singing, both fictional and real, complements a trajectory which generally focused on the recovery of female voices in its earlier years.

The one remaining trace of the effort that these seismic shifts within the discipline have cost its practitioners is a slight tendency to over-rehearse pioneering insights and the now classic publications from the 1980s and 1990s. This is evident in the introduction and in, for example, Angela Eubanks Winkler’s discussion of Cupid’s appearances in Early Modern masques. In both chapters, less time could have been spent summarizing, and more pulling valuable observations and materials together in ways that build on as well as move on from received wisdom. Classic claims that are rehearsed in Gender and Song include the following: performed music crosses the Western mind–body divide in disturbing ways and most alarmingly as song, with its unavoidable physicality; theory is a male prerogative, while performance belongs to the feminine sphere, and so men of authority and rank were practically banned from singing; singing is associated not only with femininity and the body but also with further categories of the Other such as witches, the New World, mad people, and fools. More than twenty years on, these once shocking and now axiomatic tenets about English culture could have been assumed as the basis of in-depth discussion of the materials, which are invariably of considerable interest.

The term ‘hypermarginalized’ for musical performers who are not male but also not sane, powerful, or white, is an inspired borrowing from feminist scholars by Angela Heetderks (p. 63). The disruptive aspects of music are exemplified by a range of Others: the ‘howling’ of New World Indians (Jennifer Linhart Wood), the broadside ballads that give witches and fallen women a voice (Sarah F. Williams), and the singing of Shakespeare’s fools, which is ‘dissident’ or marginal, but less reprehensibly so, particularly that of Feste in Twelfth Night, who is not quite as ‘intellectually disabled’ as Heetderk’s subtitle leads the reader to expect. Tessie L. Prakas discusses marginal voices in religion in her parallel reading of poems by Richard Crashaw and Mary Sidney. Overburdened by complex revisionist agendas linking...