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Author Brokaw, Katherine Steele, 1980- author.

Title Staging harmony : music and religious change in late medieval and early modern English drama / Katherine Steele Brokaw
Published London : Cornell University Press, 2016
©2016

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Description 1 online resource
Contents Sacred, sensual, and social music: wisdom and the Digby Mary Magdalene -- Musical hypocrisy: the plays of John Bale -- Learning to sing: the plays of Nicholas Udall -- Propaganda and psalms: early Elizabethan drama -- Sound effects: Doctor Faustus -- Arts to enchant: The Tempest and The Winter's Tale
Summary In Staging Harmony, Katherine Steele Brokaw reveals how the relationship between drama, music, and religious change across England's long sixteenth century moved religious discourse to more moderate positions. It did so by reproducing the complex personal attachments, nostalgic overtones, and bodily effects that allow performed music to evoke the feeling, if not always the reality, of social harmony. Brokaw demonstrates how theatrical music from the late fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries contributed to contemporary discourses on the power and morality of music and its proper role in religious life, shaping the changes made to church music as well as people's reception of those changes. In representing social, affective, and religious life in all its intricacy, and in unifying auditors in shared acoustic experiences, staged musical moments suggested the value of complexity, resolution, and compromise rather than oversimplified, absolutist binaries worth killing or dying for. The theater represented the music of the church's present and past. By bringing medieval and early Tudor drama into conversation with Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, Brokaw uncovers connections and continuities across diverse dramatic forms and demonstrates the staying power of musical performance traditions. In analyzing musical practices and discourses, theological debates, devotional practices, and early staging conditions, Brokaw offers new readings of well-known plays (Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Shakespeare's The Tempest and The Winter's Tale) as well as Tudor dramas by playwrights including John Bale, Nicholas Udall, and William Wager
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes In English
Print version record
Subject Dramatic music -- England -- 16th century -- History and criticism
Religion and drama -- History -- 16th century
DRAMA -- English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh.
LITERARY CRITICISM -- European -- English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh.
Dramatic music
Religion and drama
England
Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc.
History
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9781501705915
1501705911
1501706462
9781501706462