Music in Elizabethan Court Politics by Katherine Butler (review)

Much attention has been devoted in early modern studies to the significance of the arts — notably literature and pageantry — as “constructive acts” (5) that shaped Elizabethan court politics. Music’s political influence, however, remains underexplored, a comparative silence that is all the more surprising given the centrality of music within the soundscapes of the Elizabethan court. Music was integral to masques, plays, feasts, and other entertainments. It was a frequent vehicle for commemorations and petitions presented to the monarch by courtiers and visiting dignitaries and a crucial sonic signifier for the mobile court as the queen moved through her realm on royal progresses. Music also emanated from more intimate, though no less politicized, spaces within the royal household.

Presiding over these sites of musical encounter, of course, was Elizabeth herself, an avid amateur musician and shrewd patron of the musical arts. Katherine Butler’s excellent study reveals the extent to which the queen drew on music to craft her self-representation. More significantly, however, the book situates the secular music of the Elizabethan court — vocal repertoire in particular — as a political tool that was adeptly utilized by the courtiers, aristocratic households, musicians, and foreign visitors vying for Elizabeth’s attention.

Music’s effectiveness as a signifier, Butler demonstrates, was closely bound up with its cultural flexibility and its capacity to hold multiple and often contradictory meanings. On a metaphorical level, music was idealized in early modern England as a reflection of political stability and harmony. In performance, however, it was at once more potent and more capricious. Music was believed to hold the capacity to manipulate hearers, but it could also penetrate ears and bodies in unexpected ways. As an art form, therefore, music was capable of serving varied political interests, while conveniently evading control and consistent interpretation. When combined with its ephemerality, it offered an attractive medium for individuals attempting to toe the line between flattery and critique within the charged court atmosphere.

Music was also profoundly gendered (though it was no less contradictory in this regard), associated at once with sensuality and effeminacy, logic and rational judgment. Butler takes up this issue in chapter one, which explores representations of the queen’s musicality. Drawing on period songs and panegyrics, Butler demonstrates that court poets, musicians, visual artists, and Elizabeth herself made the most of music’s gendered spectrum to uphold the paradoxical image of the virgin queen. When combined with imagery that presented Elizabeth as the embodiment of political harmony and order, music’s contradictions became a vital “catalyst for creativity” (28) in negotiating the gendered expectations concerning the queen’s rule. Although these representations had to be carefully controlled to counter cultural anxieties associated with musical women, Elizabeth’s royal image emerges in this chapter as carefully wrought from both speculative and practical music, a “political harmony made audible” (32) that capitalized on the ambiguities underpinning music’s gendered dimensions.

Reflecting music’s ability to permeate physiological and architectural boundaries, Butler structures the ensuing sections of her study as a movement outward in both spatial and sonic terms, while also gradually shifting away from the figure of the queen to consider the political function of music for members of the nobility, civic hosts, and individual performers. In chapter two, Butler explores Elizabeth’s more “private” musical encounters, focusing especially on Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex, as a “musical politician” (65) and tracing the function of music in the queen’s marriage negotiations. In chapter three, she concentrates on the royal household, probing Elizabeth’s role as musical patron and illuminating the significance of music and musical instruments as gifts and tokens of diplomatic exchange. This chapter also begins to open up the question of how music — here focusing on the masque and on the musical plays performed by the choirboy companies — combined praise with political counsel.

In chapter four, Butler offers a fascinating examination of tournament music, a topic that also enriches her...