The Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music

Volume 27 (2021) No. 2

Music, Dance, and Drama in Early Modern English Schools. By Amanda Eubanks Winkler. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020. [xvii, 242 pp. ISBN 978-1-108-49086-3.]

Reviewed by Sarah F. Williams*

1. Issues and Methodology

2. Pedagogical Performance in Early Modern Culture

3. Epilogue

1. Issues and Methodology

1.1 How do we, as scholars, theorize the gaps between surviving documentation of musical composition and performative contexts? How can we arrive at a method for understanding the impact of liminal spaces and performing bodies on early modern audiences? Recent scholarship in musicology, theater history, and literary history delves into these intriguing research questions. Rebecca Herissone’s Musical Creativity in Restoration England (Cambridge University Press, 2013) examines surviving manuscripts of musical compositions, but places them within a broader social context to shift focus away from composers and their works toward issues of process and change. The Matter of Song in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2019) by literary historian Katherine R. Larson, and Boccherini’s Body (University of California Press, 2005) by musicologist Elisabeth LeGuin, combine experimental recordings and ethnographic methods to document rehearsal experiences and arrive at ways of understanding historical performance through embodied reenactment. Tiffany Stern’s Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2009) redefines the playwriting and playacting processes through previously neglected artifacts such as playbills, prologues, epilogues, songs, letters, and scenarios. Amanda Eubanks Winkler’s newest book, Music, Dance, and Drama in Early Modern English Schools, joins this innovative body of work to theorize performance at the margins of early modern English theater culture: by children in educational institutions. Inspired by developments in interdisciplinary scholarship and even by informal conversations, Eubanks Winkler’s carefully crafted method moves beyond musicology’s disciplinary tendency toward surety; we are encouraged instead to become “comfortable with the ‘perhaps,’ the ‘maybe’ ” (p. 3).

1.2 Eubanks Winkler’s study asks six research questions to investigate the spaces pedagogical performance occupied in the early modern English cultural imagination (p. 4). These questions occupy Chapters 2 through 7 while Chapter 1 lays out the methodological orientation of the project and its scope. Eubanks Winkler begins by parsing the differences between educational institutions in post-Reformation England (grammar school, charity school, academy, boarding school) and addressing the ways in which audiences would have understood performances in schools. Audiences had different ways of consuming and understanding schoolroom performances depending on who they were: parents, the public, or potential suitors. For example, for parents school performances were innocent diversions and pedagogical tools, while suitors saw boarding school musical entertainments as sites to observe and admire potential mates. Musical skill, of course, was aligned with gentlemanly behavior according to the English translation of Baldassare Castiglione’s The Courtier, and engaging in creative outlets that combined spiritual endeavors with the ornamental arts allowed girls to secure good marriages and thus maintain the social order (p. 23).

1.3 Eubanks Winkler interrogates pedagogical performance spanning an ambitious chronological scope, from post-Reformation England to the beginning of the eighteenth century. The study, however, reaches beyond the early modern era; we are brought into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as she considers vestiges of historical practice still in use in English pedagogical and religious institutions. Incorporating performance studies methodologies from Richard Schechner, Joseph Roach, and Rebecca Schneider, Eubanks Winkler develops a theory of absence as a means of wrestling with the gaps in early modern evidence. Schechner has described performance as “restored behavior”: that is, performers can “recover” and “remember” past behaviors. Thus, by “time traveling” beyond the early modern era, Eubanks Winkler demonstrates Joseph Roach’s assertion that, through performance, we can access “flesh memory,” reanimating the past with each new reenactment. By marrying historical documents (scores, librettos, plays with music, diary entries, letters, eyewitness accounts) with these phenomenological approaches, Eubanks Winkler considers the “archival remains” of performance, to use Rebecca Schneider’s term, and asks how those remains could have been animated by early modern children. When possible, she recovers the individuality and agency of her child musicians, actors, and dancers, and she attends to their social circumstances and identities very sensitively.

2.  Pedagogical Performance in Early Modern Culture

2.1 Chapters 2 through 7 demonstrate how the schoolroom interacted with other performance spaces. Each chapter begins with an excerpt from an archival source—a letter, a review, a statute, a diary entry—and then reacts to a specific element of children’s performances. Chapter 2 (“Performing Piety”) examines the blurred boundaries between schoolroom and church, and the purposes of religious music-making. The role of psalmody in Tudor-Stuart England has a long history of musicological study; this chapter, however, outlines how schoolmasters used psalmody for their own pedagogical goals in new and innovative ways. For example, the singing of Easter psalms at Christ’s Hospital by children at “Saint Mary Spittle” on Easter Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday is a practice that continues to this day. Blending observations from current practice, eyewitness accounts from 1553, and printed broadsides containing service music, Eubanks Winkler demonstrates Gertrude Stein’s notion of “syncopated time” through the performing and reperforming of the Spital service. As the past “punctuates the present,” Eubanks Winkler shows us how modern bodies reenact this “ancient script”: the ceremonial movement of the children and their masters from the school to the pulpit cross in the churchyard of St. Mary Spital (pp. 63–4, 50).

2.2 Chapter 3 asks how pedagogical institutions performed prestige. Aligning educational institutions with the court could of course be advantageous for both music masters and students. Schools repurposed music from court and state occasions, professional musicians mingled with student performers, board members interacted with powerful figures (such as the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Lord Chancellor), and children imitated Elizabethan courtly demeanor. Through these imitative acts, children learned skills that could allow them to climb, or even subvert, the social ladder. Through the medium of print, their teachers could advertise the institution and its connection with courtly practices (p. 97). Missing from the bibliography is Katherine Butler’s recent book, Music in Elizabethan Court Politics (Boydell & Brewer, 2015), which could have lent additional insight into the politics of courtly genres and practices.

2.3 Chapter 4 (“Performing Accomplishment”) draws upon Eubanks Winkler’s expertise in gender studies methodologies and the history of early modern women. She employs various primary source materials as evidence, including Mary Burwell Walpole’s manuscript lute book, 1654/5–1711 (facsimile edition: The Burwell Lute Tutor, Boethius Press, 1974), keyboard manuscripts for boys’ schools, and the music and dance curriculum at the Chelsea boarding school, to demonstrate what “accomplishment” meant in early modern English culture, how it was communicated, and how it was attained. Not surprisingly, music functioned as a means through which school children could perform both virtue and vice. Chapter 5 delves into the thorny issue of casting children as “rule-breakers, sexual deviants, and seducers in a pedagogical context” (p. 132). The material in this chapter is quite elegantly introduced with a discussion of the discomfort modern audiences feel at productions of Benjamin Britten’s Turn of the Screw. The manuscript sources that proved most fascinating were those discussing the seventeenth-century school play Oedipus (US-NH Eliz. 294) and William Hawkins’s Apollo Shroving (1627), through which we learn the chilling story of Wentworth Randall, the boy charged with portraying the latter play’s transgressive Siren. In a highlight of the book, this chapter asks whether it was safe for children to perform vice. Eubanks Winkler’s careful and nuanced consideration of this delicate subject is an engrossing read. The pervasive explicit content and unruly characters in pedagogical entertainments perhaps demonstrate to us that seventeenth-century teachers were not as concerned about presenting vice on stage as we might like to believe. In fact, “vice was good entertainment” (p. 161).

2.4 The final two chapters navigate the tension between the pedagogical and the professional, as well as the past and the present (“Performing the Professional,” “Performing the Past”). Children performed with, and learned from, professional musicians, actors, and dancers in the early modern era, a fact that complicates the boundary between public and private in pedagogical performance. Chapter 6 includes an interesting analysis of a manuscript apparently intended for a school ball, containing musical excerpts from The Libertine, a violent retelling of the Don Juan story. The manuscript makes no mention of the public stage origins of the entertainment, begging the question: would the audience at the ball remember the original context of these songs? One of the songs (“Nymphs and Shepherds”) enjoyed an innocuous life as a concert piece for centuries until a BBC interview with the satirist Dame Edna and an accompanying online playlist restored the connection to its smutty origins. In this way, a forgotten past can re-emerge in the present. The final chapter continues to examine the pull of the past through performance and memory.

3. Epilogue

3.1 References to Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas surface often, like a recurring refrain, throughout Eubanks Winkler’s narrative, creating an inventive thread that culminates in a final fascinating discussion of a recent production by William Christie and Deborah Warner at the Opéra Comique’s Salle Favart in Paris. Eubanks Winkler re-reads the production through the lens of Gertrude Stein’s “syncopated time,” pointing out the temporal tension created when the specter of Josias Priest’s school hovers over the present (p. 197). Throughout this monograph, close readings of performances, such as the DVD version of this 2018 production, are expertly interwoven with the study of historical sources. The effect is thoroughly informative, but also entertaining. Eubanks Winkler’s case studies are satisfying but also open-ended enough to spark continued curiosity. Like Tiffany Stern’s documents of performance, “they occlude as much as they reveal” (p. 191).

3.2 Those familiar with Eubanks Winkler’s scholarly work will recognize familiar themes. Woven into the current study is expertise developed in her previous work on gender, Purcell, the fluid boundaries between public and private, musical theater, performance, and memory. It is also delightful to experience the way she enriches theories of schoolroom performance with references to Britten’s Turn of the Screw, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, a BBC interview with the outrageous Dame Edna, and the 2018 Dido and Aeneas at the Salle Favart. This is the mark of not just an attentive scholar but also a musical theater devotee, a true fan.

3.3 Eubanks Winkler makes us comfortable with historical gaps and temporal tension. She shows us that it is possible to reconceive and reevaluate some of the most familiar early modern works, and she demonstrates the richness of previously undiscovered sources. Most significantly, perhaps, Eubanks Winkler presents us with a methodology to reanimate the past through the lens of our own experiences.

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^[*] Sarah F. Williams (swilliams@mozart.sc.edu) is Associate Professor of Music History at the University of South Carolina School of Music. She is the author of Damnable Practises: Witches, Dangerous Women, and Music in Seventeenth-Century English Broadside Ballads (Ashgate, 2015), and articles on female transgression and the supernatural in early modern English theatrical and popular music, in the Journal for Musicological Research, the Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music, and several essay collections. Her current research explores the role of memory in the circulation of popular song in seventeenth-century England. She is currently Member-at-Large on the Governing Board of the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music.