Abstract
In Words and Music in the Middle Ages: Song, Narrative, Dance, and Drama, 1050–1350, John Stevens refers to medieval traditions of dance-song as he describes the many variants associated with pastourelle, which combines “the courtly chanson and dance-song.” He further suggests, “The pastourelle is a sophisticated genre where several traditions meet; it is an imaginative literary and musical plaything.” He notes the genre’s “aural geometry,” which “derives [its elaborate sense of pattern] in part from verbal factors.” Stevens also observes that the verbal designs intersect structurally with musical patterns.1 Conventional scholarly reliance upon Virgilian origins for the literary histories of pastoral literature obscures its connections to other powerful performance and visual traditions associated with the genre, at least for its early modern compositors, performers, authors, readers, and viewers. Placing Wroth’s play Love’s Victory into conversation with the aesthetics and stylistics that permeate musical and dance production allows attention to its strengths, its artifice and ornament, its manipulation of rhythm and meter, its composed fusion of sources and genres. In particular, the dance performance practices embedded in this pastoral tragicomedy, manifested in its groupings of characters, its shifts in tempo, and its symmetries, offer a means to interpret its performance. Wroth constructs a play text with enormous potential for performance once its choreographies come to the surface, and this essay begins the analysis of how an appreciation of early modern composed dance forms can and should suffuse our understanding of Wroth.2
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Notes
John Stevens, Words and Music in the Middle Ages: Song, Narrative, Dance, and Drama, 1050–1350 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 476 and 483.
Margaret P. Hannay surveys these theories in Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 220–1.
Michael Brennan, The Sidneys of Penshurst and the Monarchy, 1500–1700 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), esp. 114–32.
The portrait of Mary Wroth is reprinted by the kind permission of Lord De L’Isle in various texts associated with Wroth, among them Love’s Victory in Renaissance Drama by Women: Texts and Documents, ed. S. P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies (London: Routledge, 1996). It is to their edition of Love’s Victory that I refer parenthetically throughout this essay.
For continental practices, see, for example, Margaret M. McGowan, Dance in the Renaissance: European Fashion, French Obsession (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008);
and Ewa Kociszewska, “War and Seduction in Cybele’s Garden: Contextualizing the Ballet des Polonais,” RQ 65, no. 3 (Fall 2012): 809–63. Stage directions associated with Robert White’s “Cupid’s Banishment: A Maske Presented to Her Majesty by the young Gentlewomen of the Ladies Hall in Deptford at Greenwich The 4th of May 1617,” included in Renaissance Drama by Women, 76–89, are indicative of the importance of this training for those who performed for the queen.
Roy Strong defined the field with such works as Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals, 1450–1650 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 1984) and The Tudor and Stuart Monarchy: Pageantry, Painting, Iconography (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 1995).
Other entries include studies of Inigo Jones and such work as David Bevington and Peter Holbrook, eds, The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
For women as patrons and participants, see especially Leeds Barroll, Anna of Denmark, Queen of England: A Cultural Biography (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000);
and Karen Britland, Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
See also Susan Lauffer O’Hara, The Theatricality of Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus: Unmasking Conventions in Context (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2011).
Fabrito Caroso, Courtly Dance of the Renaissance: A New Translation and Edition of the “Nobilità di Dame” (1600), trans. and ed. Julia Sutton, music ed. F. Marian Walker, appendix with Labanotation Manual of Dance Step-Types by Julia Sutton and Rachelle Palnick Tsachor (New York: Dover Publications, 1995);
Thoinot Arbeau, Orchesography: Sixteenth-Century French Dance from Court to Countryside (1589), trans. M. Stewart Evans, introduction and notes by Julia Sutton, Labanotation section by M. Backer and J. Sutton (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2011).
For dancing as part of the grammar school curriculum, see Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), electronic edition, position 928 and notes 101 and 102. (Hadfield cites the head of Spenser’s school, the Merchant Taylors’ School, R. Mulcaster, Positions Wherein those Primitiue Circumstances be Examined, Which are Necessary for Training vp of Children, either for Skill in their Booke, or Health in Their Body [London, 1581].)
Elizabeth Aldrich, “Renaissance Dance,” in Western Social Dance: An Overview of the Collection (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1998) and at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/dihtml/dihome.html.
See Linda Phyllis Austern, “Women’s Musical Voices in Sixteenth-Century England,” EMWJ 3 (2008): 127–52.
Scholars include Mary Wroth’s texts in the canon of early modern women’s writing in part because of their easy insertion into narratives regarding literary history. See especially Paul Salzman, “Mary Wroth: From Obscurity to Canonization,” in Reading Early Modern Women’s Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
For an excellent survey of Wroth scholarship, see Katherine R. Larson, “Recent Studies in Mary Wroth,” ELR 44, no. 2 (Spring 2014): 328–59.
Cerasano and Wynne-Davies are among those who articulate these connections; see their introduction to the play in Renaissance Drama by Women, 92. See also, for example, Alexandra G. Bennett, “Playing By and With the Rules: Genre, Politics, and Perception in Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victorie,” in Women and Culture at the Courts of the Stuart Queens, ed. Clare McManus (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 122–39;
Barbara K. Lewalski, “Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory and Pastoral Tragicomedy,” in Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England, ed. Naomi J. Miller and Gary Waller (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 88–108;
and Joyce Green MacDonald, “Ovid and Women’s Pastoral in Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory,” SEL 51, no. 2 (Spring 2011): 447–63.
Visionaries in the field of early modern women’s texts in performance are Alison Findlay, Gweno Williams, and Stephanie Hodgson-Wright. Their collaborative volume Women and Dramatic Production 1550–1700 (London: Longman, 2000) serves as a useful handbook. Other outstanding practitioners include Poculi Ludique Societas, the group at the University of Toronto that has spent the last 50 years “rediscovering theatrical traditions of the Middle Ages and Renaissance” (http://groups.chass.utoronto.ca/plspls/). Many commercial theaters are committed to expanding their repertoire with non-Shakespearean Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, including the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Virginia; the Folger Theater in Washington, DC; the Oregon Shakespeare Festival; the Royal Shakespeare Company; Shakespeare’s Globe in London; and the Stratford Festival in Ontario. To date, however, only the Globe’s “Read Not Dead” series seems to have tackled Wroth; Love’s Victory was performed in the Great Hall at Penshurst Place on 8 June 2014 as part of a conference organized by Alison Findlay, “Dramatizing Penshurst: Site, Scripts, Sidneys.”
Among those who read Wroth against Shakespeare are Julie D. Campbell, “Love’s Victory and La Mirtilla in the Canon of Renaissance Tragicomedy: An Examination of the Influence of Salon and Social Debates,” Women’s Writing 4, no. 1 (1997): 103–25;
Marion Wynne-Davies, “‘Here is a sport will well befit this time and place’: Allusion and Delusion in Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory,” Women’s Writing 6, no. 1 (1999): 47–64;
and Katherine R. Larson, “Conversational Games and the Articulation of Desire in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost and Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory,” ELR 40, no. 2 (2010): 165–90.
Walter Wilson Greg, Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama: A Literary Inquiry with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration Stage in England (London: A. H. Bullen, 1906), 332.
I remain indebted to Sukanta Chaudhuri, Renaissance Pastoral and Its English Developments (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
See also Paul Alpers, What Is Pastoral? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
Susan Lauffer O’Hara advances a similar argument for the relationship between Wroth’s sonnet sequence and masquing conventions. See “Reading the Stage Rubrics of Mary Wroth’s Folger Manuscript of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus,” in New Ways of Looking at Old Texts, IV, ed. Michael Denbo (Tempe, AZ: ACMRS/RETS, 2008), 165–77. She expands upon this discussion in The Theatricality of Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus.
Readings of Wroth’s Petrarchanism largely focus upon links between her sonnet sequence and Petrarch’s, and resonances between the sequence and the play. See, for example, Wynne-Davies, “‘Here is a sport,’” 47–64. While Lewalski reads Love’s Victory against all of these pastoral plays in Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), her concern is primarily with the group as exemplars of pastoral tragicomedy as a genre, and Wroth’s manipulations of those conventions. See especially 296–310.
Gary Waller, “Mother/Son, Father/Daughter, Brother/Sister, Cousins: The Sidney Family Romance,” MP 88, no. 4 (May 1991): 401–14, 402.
See, for example, “Cupid’s Court of Equity,” Euing Ballads 38, University of Glasgow Library, English Broadside Ballad Archive ID 31698; Edith Wyss “Matthaus Greuter’s Engravings for Petrarch’s Triumphs,” Print Quarterly 17, no. 4 (December 2000): 347–63;
Konrad Eisenbichler and Amilcare A. Iannucci, Petrarch’s Triumphs: Allegory and Spectacle (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990);
G. H. French & Co., The Triumphs of Petrarch: Two Late Gothic Tapestries Woven by French-Flemish Weavers in the Latter Part of the Fifteenth Century (New York: The Company, 1917).
For useful discussions of conventions associated with Petrarch’s Triumphs, see especially Cristelle L. Baskins, Cassone Painting, Humanism, and Gender in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),
and Cristelle L. Baskins, with Adrian W. B. Randolph, Jacqueline Marie Musacchio, and Alan Chong, The Triumph of Marriage: Painted Cassoni of the Renaissance (Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2008).
For a nuanced and in-depth analysis of this painting, see Rab Hatfield, “Botticelli’s Mystic Nativity, Savonarola, and the Millennium,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 58 (1995): 88–114.
See Barbara Sparti, “Improvisation and Embellishment in Popular and Art Dances in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Italy,” and Keith Polk, “Instrumentalists and Performance Practices in Dance Music, c. 1500,” both in Improvisation in the Arts of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Timothy J. McGee (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2003), 117–44, 98–114.
For music see, for example, James Haar, The Science and Art of Renaissance Music, ed. Paul Corneilson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), esp. “The Courtier as Musician: Castiglione’s View ofthe Science and Art ofMusic,” 20–37.
For dance, see Françoise Carter, “Number Symbolism and Renaissance Choreography,” Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research, 10, no. 1 (Spring, 1992): 21–39,
and Gunter Berghaus, “Neoplatonic and Pythagorean Notions of World Harmony and Unity and Their Influence on Renaissance Dance Theory,” Dance Research 10, no. 2 (Autumn 1992): 43–70.
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© 2015 Katherine R. Larson and Naomi J. Miller with Andrew Strycharski
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Nelson, K.L. (2015). “Change Partners and Dance”: Pastoral Virtuosity in Wroth’s Love’s Victory. In: Larson, K.R., Miller, N.J., Strycharski, A. (eds) Re-Reading Mary Wroth. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137473349_9
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