Eros and Music in Early Modern Culture and Literature

Description

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. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Contents Acknowledgments Introduction PART I: Architectonics 1 ‘The Bond of All Things’: Neoplatonic Ideas of Eros and Music in the Early Modern Episteme Theories of Union: Discourses of Eros and Music Classical and Christian Theories of Eros and Music Speculative Music and the Neoplatonic Eros as Binding Agents Musical Harmony in the Microcosm and in the Political Body Unity as Poetic Principle 2 Empowering Eros: Embodied Harmonies and Erotic Mediation Eros and Music as Mediating Agents Sensual Love and Practical Music as Educational Agents Practical Music as Love’s Preferred Agent The Ambiguity of Music’s Erotic Action The Dual Action of Music and the Erotic Ear 3 ‘Love’s Proper Exercise’: Eros and the Dance Erotic Action and Temperate Dancing The Degradation of the Cosmic Dance: “Sellenger’s Round, or The Beginning of the World” The Erotic Dancing Body The Ambivalent Rhetorical Status of the Dancing Body 4 The Ambivalent Lute The Orphic Lute The Political Lute The Erotic Lute The Fair Lutenist PART II: Poetics 5 Ideas of Eros in the Early Modern Lute Ayre and Madrigal The Ethos of the Musical Genres and the Two Eros Ideas of Eros in Madrigal and Lute Song Lyrics ‘Infinite Volumes ’: Miscellanies of Love in Elizabethan Madrigal and Lute Ayre Lyrics Neoplatonic Ideas of Love in the Lyrics The Voice as Erotic Instrument Rhetoric and Eroticism 6 Erotic and Rhetorical Trivializations of Music in the English Epyllion Music and Eros in the English Epyllion Natural Music and the Harmonic World Erotic Trivializations of Music in the Epyllion ‘Love is Forme’: Fiction and Friction 7 Desire as Palimpsest, or the Myth of Philomel in The Rape of Lucrece and Titus Andronicus Philomel as Musical Myth Expressing the Unspeakable: Lavinia as Philomel Philomel, an ‘Innocent Siren’? Philomel as Failed Orpheus: Dismembering the Political Body 8 Specularity or Speculation? Echo and Eros in Venus and Adonis Echo/echo and the Music of the Spheres Transformative Encounters: Echo and the Twofold Nature of Eros Echo and Eros in Venus and Adonis The Speculating Echo Conclusion Bibliography Index