JACOBEAN ENGLAND

Chapter:

CHAPTER 3 Courts Resplendent, Overthrown, Restored

Source:

MUSIC IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

Author(s):

Richard Taruskin

Whether courtly or commercial, opera (or, for that matter, any full-blown music in the theater) simply did not take hold in England for most of the seventeenth century. “Spoken drama with musical decorations” was about as far as the English were prepared to go. Shakespeare’s plays made provision for a bit of incidental music, not only in occasional popular-song texts—for instance “It was a lover and his lass, with a hey and a ho and a hey nonny no” from Twelfth Night, of which Thomas Morley made a still-famous setting—but also in the stage directions, which call for trumpets, “hautboys” (high woodwinds, or what would later become oboes), and so on, playing “alarums” (signals for attention), or “sennets and tuckets” (flourishes and “toccatas,” as Monteverdi called them). And a stronger case of the same prejudice that prevented the French from tolerating a virtuoso aria from the mouth of a major character prevented the English from tolerating any music at all from such a mouth. Dramatic “verisimilitude”—sheer believability—would not stretch that far in England. Music, when used at all in the theater, was consigned to the gaudy periphery.

Citation (MLA):

Richard Taruskin. "Chapter 3 Courts Resplendent, Overthrown, Restored." The Oxford History of Western Music. Oxford University Press. New York, USA. n.d. Web. 21 Jan. 2025. <https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume2/actrade-9780195384826-div1-03006.xml>.

Citation (APA):

Taruskin, R. (n.d.). Chapter 3 Courts Resplendent, Overthrown, Restored. In Oxford University Press, Music In The Seventeenth And Eighteenth Centuries. New York, USA. Retrieved 21 Jan. 2025, from https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume2/actrade-9780195384826-div1-03006.xml

Citation (Chicago):

Richard Taruskin. "Chapter 3 Courts Resplendent, Overthrown, Restored." In Music In The Seventeenth And Eighteenth Centuries, Oxford University Press. (New York, USA, n.d.). Retrieved 21 Jan. 2025, from https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume2/actrade-9780195384826-div1-03006.xml