Seeking the historical listener

This article considers questions relating to the performance practice of listening to music in early modern contexts. The evidence of paintings by Pieter Lastman, Gerard ter Borch and Hendrik Sorgh, poetry by Robert Herrick, William Shakespeare and Edmund Waller, and accounts of performances by Francesco da Milano, Nicola Matteis and Queen Elizabeth I all help to bring into focus questions of attentiveness, affective response and analogical understanding. The source material also interestingly raises the possibility of occasionally understanding the act of listening within a frame of erotic relationship modelled on Laura Mulvey’s well-known concept of the ‘male gaze’.

‘The Nausea of Sin’: The Early Modern Hangover

The chapter pursues the representation of the hangover in poetry and drama, religious and political writing and in the culture wars of the seventeenth century in England. It begins by exploring why the hangover has been obscured in writing about early modern depictions of drunkenness through a study of Anacreontic verse by Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick and Richard Lovelace. Hangovers, it contends, are more prominent in other forms of literature such as Protestant tracts and sermons and in bawdy verse and drama of the Restoration. They also feature regularly in what the chapter terms ‘anti-symposiastic’ verse written by Whigs in the 1690s. The chapter argues throughout that the hangover – whether leading to feelings of guilt and shame or defiance – takes us beyond studies of male fellowship and tavern culture, increasing our understanding of the way that the body becomes a route to discuss moral and spiritual failings in this period. It also gives examples of the way Withdrawal-Relief recovery methods – sometimes known as the hair of the dog – became associated with defiance.

Ben Jonson

This chapter shows that Ben Jonson’s practice in imitating classical poetry was far more deeply indebted to the kinds of ‘formal’ imitation described in Chapter 6 than Jonson himself would have wished to admit. The epigrams of Martial in particular were not in a simple sense ‘sources’ of material for Jonson’s poetry: rather he sought to imitate the rhetorical figurations and manner of Martial and other authors. The chapter argues Jonson’s own (highly derivative) remarks on imitation in the Discoveries should not be simply taken as guides to his practice. It argues for strong affinities between Jonson’s work as a translator and his practice as an imitator. As both an imitator and as a translator Jonson responded not just to the vocabulary and sense of his originals but also to what Cicero in De Optimo Genere Oratorum had termed their ‘figura’, or rhetorical shape. The chapter concludes by showing how Jonson’s mode of ‘formal’ imitation enabled him to create a style which subsequent imitators—both of his works and of classical poetry—could imitate, and how Thomas Randolph, Robert Herrick, and others imitated Jonson’s style and practice.

The Parson’s Country House Poem

This article demonstrates how early modern English poet-priest Robert Herrick uses verse form to examine tensions arising from food scarcity. I uncover Herrick’s creation of the “parsonage poem,” a subcategory of the country house poem through which he examines the impossible demands parsons faced in times of dearth. Living on agricultural tithes yet expected to redistribute food to feed their parishes, parsons struggled to measure resources and restrict consumption to make insufficient stores stretch further. Through careful manipulations of meter, rhyme, syntax, and syllable, Herrick articulates the unsustainability of the parson’s position and explores its relationship to declining rural communities.

Street Songs

The Introduction presents an overview of the topic of street song and summarizes the main chapters of the book. It begins by discussing poems by Robert Herrick and Thomas Campion based on the traditional street-vendor’s cry of ‘Cherry Ripe’ as an example of the way in which writers appropriate street songs for their own purposes, and includes discussions of other images and texts such as Donald Davie’s poem ‘Cherry Ripe’. ‘Cherrie-ripe’ traces an arc from the sixteenth century to the twentieth, encompassing literature, art, music, and social history. It suggests the broad scope of the subject, but although attention is paid to its rich and varied contexts, the focus of this book is on the ways in which street song has found its way into works of literature.