Eros and Music in Early Modern Culture and Literature

What is the relationship between Eros and music? How does the intersection of love and music contribute to define the perimeter of Early Modern love? The Early Moderns hold parallel discourses on the metaphysical doctrines of love and music as theories of harmony. Statements of love as music, of music as love, and of both as harmonic ideals, are found across a wide range of cultural contexts, highlighting the understanding of love as a cultural construct. The book assesses the complexity of cultural discourses on this linkage of Eros and music. The ambivalence of music as an erotic agent is enacted in the controversy over dancing and reflected in the ubiquitous symbolism of music instruments. Likewise, the trivialization of musical imagery in madrigal lyrics and love poetry highlights a sense of degradation and places the love-music relationship at the meeting point of two epistemes. The book also shows the symbolic deployment of the intertwined ideas of love and music in the English epyllion, and offers close readings of Shakespeare’s poems __The Rape of Lucrece__ and __Venus and Adonis__. The book is the first to propose an overview of the theoretical, cultural and poetical intersections of Eros and music in Early Modern England. It discusses the connections in a richly interdisciplinary manner, drawing on a wealth of primary material which includes rhetoric, natural philosophy, educational literature, medicine, music theory and musical performance, dance books, performance politics, Protestant pamphlets and sermons, and emblem books. MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict Cover 1 Half Title 2 Title Page 4 Copyright Page 5 Dedication 6 Contents 8 Acknowledgments 12 Introduction 14 PART I: Architectonics 24 1 ‘The Bond of All Things’: Neoplatonic Ideas of Eros and Music in the Early Modern Episteme 26 Theories of Union: Discourses of Eros and Music 26 Classical and Christian Theories of Eros and Music 29 Speculative Music and the Neoplatonic Eros as Binding Agents 34 Musical Harmony in the Microcosm and in the Political Body 35 Unity as Poetic Principle 36 2 Empowering Eros: Embodied Harmonies and Erotic Mediation 44 Eros and Music as Mediating Agents 44 Sensual Love and Practical Music as Educational Agents 48 Practical Music as Love’s Preferred Agent 51 The Ambiguity of Music’s Erotic Action 55 The Dual Action of Music and the Erotic Ear 58 3 ‘Love’s Proper Exercise’: Eros and the Dance 67 Erotic Action and Temperate Dancing 68 The Degradation of the Cosmic Dance: “Sellenger’s Round, or The Beginning of the World” 73 The Erotic Dancing Body 81 The Ambivalent Rhetorical Status of the Dancing Body 83 4 The Ambivalent Lute 92 The Orphic Lute 92 The Political Lute 100 The Erotic Lute 103 The Fair Lutenist 110 PART II: Poetics 132 5 Ideas of Eros in the Early Modern Lute Ayre and Madrigal 134 The Ethos of the Musical Genres and the Two Eros 134 Ideas of Eros in Madrigal and Lute Song Lyrics 137 ‘Infinite Volumes ’: Miscellanies of Love in Elizabethan Madrigal and Lute Ayre Lyrics 141 Neoplatonic Ideas of Love in the Lyrics 144 The Voice as Erotic Instrument 149 Rhetoric and Eroticism 154 6 Erotic and Rhetorical Trivializations of Music in the English Epyllion 174 Music and Eros in the English Epyllion 174 Natural Music and the Harmonic World 178 Erotic Trivializations of Music in the Epyllion 185 ‘Love is Forme’: Fiction and Friction 192 7 Desire as Palimpsest, or the Myth of Philomel in The Rape of Lucrece and Titus Andronicus 206 Philomel as Musical Myth 206 Expressing the Unspeakable: Lavinia as Philomel 211 Philomel, an ‘Innocent Siren’? 218 Philomel as Failed Orpheus: Dismembering the Political Body 222 8 Specularity or Speculation? Echo and Eros in Venus and Adonis 228 Echo/echo and the Music of the Spheres 229 Transformative Encounters: Echo and the Twofold Nature of Eros 232 Echo and Eros in Venus and Adonis 235 The Speculating Echo 241 Conclusion 251 Bibliography 256 Index 274