Staging Harmony: Music and Religious Change in Late Medieval and Early Modern English Drama by Katherine Steele Brokaw (review)

Since the time of Augustine, theologians from multiple religious confessions have struggled to account for music's affective power. Does sacred polyphony focus attention on the mass, or idolatrously distract from God's word? Should the psalms be set to popular melodies, or does this practice taint religious texts with worldly concerns? Katherine Steele Brokaw's Staging Harmony: Music and Religious Change in Late Medieval and Early Modern English Drama insists that 'stage songs and dances reveal that music's defenders and detractors were often both right' (3). The book analyzes how playwrights responded through music to shifting religious cultures during England's reformations. While Brokaw demonstrates that dramatists often used music to reflect their religious outlooks, she rejects reductive approaches that oppose music-loving traditionalists to music-hating reformers and instead argues that music has an inherent tendency to produce social as well as sonic harmony. The book asserts that shared auditory experiences in the theatre unified audiences with mixed religious beliefs and furthered the 'affective fusion of musical and devotional practice characteristic of Anglicanism' (11).

Brokaw offers a carefully diachronic account of how makers of music and theatre innovated in the face of religious change from the late fifteenth to early seventeenth centuries. Chapter 1 situates two fifteenth-century sacred dramas, Wisdom and the Digby Mary Magdalene, in the context of late medieval East Anglia's 'devotional cosmopolitanism' (15).¹ The plays each use music to represent both the sacred and the profane, and so at once evoke the musical liturgy and Wycliffite critiques of song's sensual dimension. In Wisdom, the same actors perform processional antiphons from the Canticles to represent spiritual purity and bawdy songs to figure the fall into sin. Brokaw argues that the play draws attention to similarities between sacred and profane polyphony, and hence to music's ambiguous moral status as both spur to devotion and inducement to sin. Rather than come down definitively on one side or the other, Wisdom offers a hybrid resolution that is both sensory and intellectual and is capable of multiple doctrinal interpretations, depending on a viewer's sympathies. In her discussion of Mary Magdalene, Brokaw addresses a concept that is key to her larger argument: parody. The staging of a Saracen mock-Latin mass produces comedy by highlighting the absurdity of Christian ritual even as it presents the sacrament as a positive alternative to paganism.

The second chapter—one of the strongest in the book—focuses on the seeming contradictions of John Bale's career. Brokaw makes a persuasive case that Bale's early musical training as a Carmelite monk remained crucially influential after his reinvention as a militantly Protestant dramatist. Although in his polemical writing Bale objects to 'evensonges, howres, processions, lightes, masses, ryngynges, synginges, sensynges and the devyll and all of such hethnyshe wares', his anti-musical stance is only inconsistently maintained in his drama.² When he parodies liturgical music to mock Catholic practice in King Johan, he still relies on his musical experiences in the monastery to conceive of the songs and, as lead actor of his troupe, perform them. In Three Laws and God's Promises, he uses sacred musical traditions pragmatically to represent religious harmony in apparent contravention of his polemical prohibitions. I have some reservations about the term 'hypocrisy' that Brokaw uses to characterize Bale's stance. The intimation of bad faith—along with the implication that one stance towards music represents the deceptive surface and the other the inner truth—threatens to flatten the argument that anti- and pro-music position were implicated in one another during this period. Generally, however, this chapter demonstrates how music exposes complexities in the confessional identity of even one of the most polemical partisans of the Henrican Reformation. In chapter 3, Brokaw presents Nicholas Udall as a near inversion of Bale: a 'cagey and adaptable' advocate of 'musical...