Tudor Musical Theater: Staging Religious Difference from 'Wisdom' to 'The Winter's Tale'.

摘要

"Tudor Musical Theater" argues that music in early English plays significantly affects how plays create social meanings. From fifteenth-century Lollardy to early seventeenth-century Puritanism, music continued to be a contested matter in religious reform movements; and theatrical representations of liturgical music, ballads, and dances often forged social compromises for diverse audiences. Although music is typically detached from inquiries about the social and religious meanings of early drama, this study argues that dramatic music is precisely the locus of urgent negotiations of competing ideologies. In its historical range, this project also emphasizes the crucial continuities between the arbitrarily divided fields of medieval and early modern drama.;The first chapter explores the range of historical audience expectations for the heterogeneous population of fifteenth-century East Anglian drama. In Wisdom, the re-performance of Catholic musical ritual, the reformist sermon, and the profane songs of the vices collectively project the compatibility of the sacred and profane, and of orthodox and heterodox practice. The Digby Mary Magdalene's parodied Catholic ritual, drinking songs, and Te Deum offer a similar reconciliation, but the play sets this local, hybridized faith system against religious alterities of the Orient. The plays and writings of John Bale (chapter 2) evidence both sides of early Protestant controversies regarding music. Like many sixteenth-century English people, the reformer Bale was torn between nostalgia for Catholic music and a desire for ceremonial reform. Christopher Marlowe's theologically indeterminate Doctor Faustus (chapter 3) is ambiguous about the question of sonic efficacy. It stages a hermeneutic crisis that leaves audiences to consider the powers church rites and bawdy music have on their souls. The Winter's Tale (chapter 4) ends with contemporary ballads and dances that interrupt the aural stoicism of the tragic first three acts, suggesting music's redemptive power. In the play's final scene, instrumental music accompanying Hermione's re-animation suggests the divinity of man-made art, including both religious and secular musical creation.