Elizabethan Mythologies: Studies in Poetry, Drama and Music

ISBN-13: 9780521433853 / Angielski / Twarda / 1994 / 306 str.

Robin Headlam Wells

Opis

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. Dealing with plays, poems, songs, and the iconography of musical instruments, Robin Headlam Wells reexamines the myth, central to the Orpheus story, of the civilizing power of music and poetry. In doing so he acknowledges a debt to the New Historicism and its recovery of political meanings that traditional historical scholarship has sometimes been guilty of obscuring. But he is also critical of certain faulty premises in New Historicist criticism that have led to some radical misinterpretations of the period.

Recenzje

'… a slim but dense volume that covers a lot of ground in a thoughtful and thought-provoking manner. Having these essays collected into a single volume together with 41 black-and-white illustrations on high-quality trade paper is a real plus, and the organization into three sections makes dipping in easy enough.' The Lute

Spis treści

List of illustrations; Preface; List of Abbreviations; Introduction; Part I: Music, Myth and Politics: 1. Spenser and the politics of music; 2. Falstaff, Prince Hal and the New Song; 3. Prospero, King James and the myth of the musician-king; Part II: Defining the Essential: A Humanist Iconography: 4. The ladder of love: verbal and musical rhetoric in the Elizabethan lute song; 5. Microcosmos: symbolic geometry in the Renaissance lute rose; 6. The orpharion: 'a British shell'; Part III. The Game of Love: 7. Ars amatoria: Philip Rosseter and the Tudor court lyric; 8. Dowland, Ficino and Elizabethan melancholy; 9. 'Ydle shallowe things': love and song in Twelfth Night; Coda: floreat Orpheus; Notes; Index.