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

Leslie C. Dunn and Katherine R. Larson have brought together an impressive number and range of essays which, as they argue in their introduction, “draw attention to the multiple functions of early modern English song as lyric text, as musical genre, and as moments of embodied performance within specific acoustic and social environments” (8). The collection’s introduction and eleven essays all examine gender’s influence on early modern song, and early modern song’s influence on gender. The focus here is not on music in general, but rather song: written, performed, and theorized. Such a sharp and necessary focus alone makes the volume unique and valuable, but the close attention to the relationship between gender and song adds even more nuance and urgency to the book. For, the editors rightly contend, “[d]espite important work in feminist musicology and in early modern sound studies, the gendered dimensions of song’s production, circulation, and performance within the English context have yet to be fully explored” (6).

The collection then delivers on the promises made in the introduction. The first essay, by Scott A. Trudell, examines the relationship between authors, composers, male and female performers, and women’s bodies in English Books of Ayres. Sarah F. Williams analyzes the fascinating history of one broadside melody and its implications for unruly women. Drawing upon masques, Shakespearean drama, and accounts from the New World, Jennifer Linhart Wood theorizes the relationship between early modern devilish song by witches at home and natives abroad. Drawing on disability studies, Angela Heetderks demonstrates how musical performance in Shakespeare’s plays emphasizes the hypermarginalization of his fools. Continuing the theme of song and gender in performance, Amanda Eubanks Winkler explores singing and dancing in two masques featuring the lascivious and troubling Cupid. Joseph M. Ortiz’s chapter on Samuel Rowley’s When You See Me, You Know Me skilfully traces the philosophical, political, and gendered implications of the music lesson in the play.

Tessie L. Prakas shifts the emphasis away from musical performance in drama, to focus instead on the interplay between written music, devotional poetry, and the nature of reading in the works of Mary Sidney and Richard Crashaw. Linda Phyllis Austern, too, though she briefly mentions Twelfth Night and Knight of the Burning Pestle, examines such non-dramatic texts as music manuals, etiquette books, and diaries to theorize the role of music in defining masculinity in the public/private sphere. Nora L. Corrigan returns to consider drama, this time Thomas Heywood’s The Rape of Lucrece, with its uncomfortably jovial songs in the midst of outrageous tragedy. Erin Minear’s original and persuasive analysis of Cressida in Troilus and Cressida is followed by Kendra Preston Leonard’s compelling account of the gendered implications of the musical scoring of three filmed representations of Elizabeth I.

The editors and authors are to be commended for the difficulty of the task they undertake in this collection. As Minear reminds, “Performance . . . is elusive, a projection of subjectivity and secrets, things that, like music, can be known only partly, known only in fits” (168). The unknowability of (particularly historical) music in performance is especially apparent when the first ten chapters of the collection are compared to the eleventh. Leonard’s essay, because it can, performs a particularly close reading of the implications of the scoring of Elizabeth R, Orlando, and Elizabeth. The level of detail that she can achieve is impossible in the rest of the essays, which can do no more than speculate (albeit, with extraordinary erudition) on the exact nature of musical performance in early modern England. Because of the difficulty of the task, many literary scholars have shied away from analyzing music, especially music in performance. Dunn and Larson’s collection embraces the challenge of engaging with performance, and the results are convincing.

This fascinating collection brings together a range of...