Music and Festival Culture in Shakespearean Comedy

Abstract

This thesis argues that Saturnalian festival practice is central to the representation of both vernacular and rhetorical forms of music in Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic texts. Since the early twentieth century, scholarly attention has largely focused on the representation of elaborate and rhetorical courtly styles of music in early modern theatre. As such, there has yet to be a study of music in stage drama where vernacular culture is the primary focus. This thesis examines the influence of vernacular music that arises from Saturnalian festival culture in six comedies written by Shakespeare, performed by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and the King’s Men between the years 1594 and 1611. I have developed a cross-disciplinary methodology for examining music in early modern playtexts using a combination of literary and linguistic analysis, musicology and historically-informed performance practice. I present close readings of six Shakespearean comedies with the aim of developing a new form of musical dramaturgy, that challenges our current assumptions about literary and musical forms represented in stage drama. Each of the chapters explore the meanings and dramaturgical purposes of music in each play which have currently been overlooked due to a lack of an appropriate level of focus on vernacular music culture in the study of early modern dramatic texts. By placing the musical styles of early modern festivals at the centre of my readings of each play, I hope to challenge assumptions that have been made in the past about Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre music and move toward a more diverse consideration of musical influence in dramatic works at the turn of the seventeenth century.