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

A collection of essays on a shared topic does not require a unifying theme, and so the one that emerges from the eleven original essays gathered here is an unexpected pleasure. Read them individually to appreciate how “gender informs our understanding of song as both textual and musical practice” (8). Read together, they begin to speak to one another about the ways in which a song can be a slippery and subversive thing. Music in the early modern period was regarded as “an emblem of concord and proportion” (2), studied alongside arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy as the fourth subject in the quadrivium. From the mundane requirement of keeping time to the lofty goal of creating celestial harmonies, music was aligned with rationality and control, harmony and hierarchy, and so deployed in the service of preserving order. On the other hand, as these essays demonstrate, song, especially female or feminized song, could be a powerful force for shaking up that order. This rich collection teases out the complexities of gender and song in early modern England, demonstrating the power of song to subvert traditional hierarchies and to complicate the binaries by which the early moderns organized their world.

Several essays focus on male singers and the role of song in the construction and performance of masculinity, a welcome change from the more common focus on women. The subject of Scott A. Trudell’s “Performing Women in English Books of Ayres,” one of the strongest essays, is the “flexibility of gender as it was performed in the ayre movement” (29) of the early seventeenth century, and he argues that “singers shifted along what remained during this period a continuum, rather than a binary, between male and female gender roles” (24). Linda Phyllis Austern similarly draws attention to male singers in “Domestic Song and the Circulation of Masculine Social Energy in Early Modern England.” Austern looks at masculine song in domestic settings, especially among the elite classes, to show how “a man’s choice of song and his manner of participation in it helped to indicate his place in a complex social hierarchy that increasingly valued skill and training as much as birth” (123). Her analysis of the late-night revelry scene in Act 2, scene 3 of Twelfth Night shows the power of male singing to disrupt both social class and gender boundaries as Sir Toby sings a song associated with “low-class drinking establishments” and also introduces “unapproved manly revelry into and through a house headed by a woman” (137).

Two essays consider some of the more puzzling songs by male singers in early modern drama, addressing issues of gender in less direct ways. Angela Heetderks examines Feste’s singing in Twelfth Night through the lens of disability studies in “‘Better a Witty Fool Than a Foolish Wit’: Song, Fooling, and Intellectual Disability in Shakespearean Drama,” offering valuable insight into how song in Shakespeare often marks characters as marginalized. Her questions about “who becomes marginalized, how societies determine central and marginal categories, and how such categories can be challenged” (64) are important ones. In “Song, Political Resistance, and Masculinity in Thomas Heywood’s The Rape of Lucrece,” Nora L. Corrigan examines the “frankly bizarre” musical interludes in this tragedy. She argues that the songs are a form of political protest; a deliberate rejection of “a masculine, aristocratic code that demands civic engagement and high seriousness about matters of state,” they replace this code with “a more expansive and egalitarian form of male bonding through communal performance and appreciation of song” (140).

Many essays do, of course, consider songs associated with female singers or subjects, viewing these within the context of anxieties surrounding female musical performance. Tessie L. Prakas, in “Unimportant Women: The ‘Sweet Descants’ of Mary Sidney and Richard Crashaw,” compares these different poets—one Protestant and one Catholic—in order to find...