Elizabethan Mythologies: Studies in Poetry, Drama and Music

by Robin Headlam Wells

• ISBN13: 9780521035026
• ISBN10: 0521035023
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-12-14
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

For lovers of music and poetry the legendary figure of Orpheus probably suggests a romantic ideal. But for the Renaissance he is essentially a political figure. Mythographers interpreted the Orpheus story as an allegory of the birth of civilization because they recognized in the arts in which Orpheus excelled an instrument of social control so powerful that with it you could, as one writer put it, 'winne Cities and whole Countries'. Dealing with plays, poems, songs and the iconography of musical instruments, Robin Headlam Wells re-examines the myth, central to the Orpheus story, of the transforming power of music and poetry. Elizabethan Mythologies contains numerous illustrations from the period and will be of interest to scholars and students of Renaissance poetry, drama and music, and of the history of ideas.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations

Preface

List of abbreviations

Introduction

Music , Myth and Politics

Spenser and the politics of music

Falstaff, Prince Hal and the New Song

Prospero, King James and the myth of the musician-king

Defining the Essential: A Humanist Iconography

The ladder of love: verbal and musical rhetoric in the Elizabethan lute song

Microcosmos: symbolic geometry in the Renaissance lute rose

The orpharion: -a British shell-

The Game of Love

Ars amatoria: Philip Rosseter and the Tudor court lyric

Dowland, Ficino and Elizabethan melancholy

-Ydle shallowe things-: love and song in Twelfth Night

Coda: floreat Orpheus

Notes

Index

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