“LONGING EYES”
TWO EROTIC DEVOTIONS IN HENRY PLAYFORD’S
HARMONIA SACRA, 1688, 1693
By
Patrick David-Jung Bonczyk

A THESIS
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Musicology—Master of Arts
2014

ABSTRACT
“LONGING EYES”
TWO EROTIC DEVOTIONS IN HENRY PLAYFORD’S HARMONIA SACRA, 1688, 1693
By
Patrick David-Jung Bonczyk
Henry Playford’s two-book anthology of sacred song, Harmonia Sacra (London: 1688, 1693), is as
much a songbook of erotic love as it is a hymnbook of religious devotion. To clarify an early
modern conception of embodied devotion in England, I explore two songs from the collection with
an eye to the erotic, the carnal, and the material.
Chapter 1 examines the frontispiece of Book 2 (1693) on which sacred cherubs and secular
putti mingle under God’s name. Turning then to Henry Purcell’s Divine Hymn, “Lord, what is Man,”
Z. 192, the song that immediately follows the frontispiece, I explore how Purcell merges sacred
praise and erotic desire by combining two conventions of Restoration song for the stage: religious
enthusiasm and lovesick madness. Given the market for the public exhibition of madness and
insanity in early modern London, I conclude this chapter by suggesting that the merging of lovesick
madness and religious enthusiasm contributed to the commercial appeal of Harmonia Sacra.
In Chapter 2, I analyze another of Purcell’s devotional lovesick mad songs in Book 2. In
“The Blessed Virgin’s Expostulation,” Z. 196, Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ, expresses erotic
desire for her adolescent son. I draw from medieval and Renaissance representations of Christ as the
“infant spouse” as well as Alexander Ross’s 1654 reading of Christ as Ganymede, to argue that
portraying the Virgin in the throes of lovesickness was not unfounded.
Together, these two erotic songs suggest the spiritual and commercial importance of
religious music—as devotional practice and as entertainment for purchase—for the seventeenthcentury’s rising non-noble leisure class.

Copyright by
Patrick David-Jung Bonczyk
2014

This thesis is dedicated to my parents who brought me to church
and taught me all the motions.

iv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This project would not have been possible without the energy and support of several persons.
Special thanks goes to Dr. Jyotsna Singh for her helpful comments on my writing and for welcoming
a musicologist into her graduate seminar on Renaissance drama and poetry. I am grateful to Dr.
Kevin Bartig for his shrewd critiques on this and other projects. Lastly, I am indebted to the chair of
my thesis committee and major professor, Dr. Marcie Ray, for her steady intellectual and
professional support. Dr. Ray read dozens of drafts and wrote countless letters on my behalf, all
while entertaining my inchoate ideas with enthusiasm (and often, forgiveness). Her guidance has
refined my writing, sharpened my reasoning, and broadened my knowledge. Over and above that,
she has also taught me a great deal about dedication to others.
I also need to thank the “unofficials”: to Philip Rice, my roommate and friend of many years
and who is the first to hear my ideas. Many thanks to Nicholas Field and Alison DeSimone for being
readers and mentors. My appreciation goes to Sarah Tomlinson for her fresh perspectives on my
writing and her friendship. Gratitude goes to Lucy for her support and confidence this year.

v

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF TABLES ................................................................................................................ vii
LIST OF FIGURES ............................................................................................................ viii
KEY TO ABBREVIATIONS .............................................................................................. x
INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................ 1
CHAPTER 1 ............................................................................................................................ 5
“THE MOST PROPER ENTERTAINMENT” .............................................................. 5
Religious enthusiasm ................................................................................................. 7
Lovesick madness .................................................................................................... 14
Conclusion: Laughing and giving .......................................................................... 20
APPENDIX ............................................................................................................ 24
CHAPTER 2 .......................................................................................................................... 29
“LONGING EYES”: A MOTHER’S DEVOTION ..................................................... 29
Theological and visual contexts ............................................................................. 33
An erotic, agitated text ............................................................................................ 34
The literature of abandonment .............................................................................. 40
Volatility .................................................................................................................... 44
Temporal displacement........................................................................................... 45
Conclusion: “Where’s Gabriel now?”................................................................... 49
APPENDIX ............................................................................................................ 53
EPILOGUE ........................................................................................................................... 59
The book as a historical artifact............................................................................. 59
The book as an asylum............................................................................................ 61
APPENDIX ............................................................................................................ 69
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................ 71

vi

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1. Named Contributors to Harmonia Sacra (1688, 1693),
organized by death year .......................................................................................... 70

vii

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1. Henry Purcell, “Lord, what is Man,” H.S. 1, mm. 1-3................................... 11
Figure 2. Purcell, “Lord, what is Man,” mm. 7-13.......................................................... 12
Figure 3. Purcell, “Lord, what is Man,” mm. 17-28 ....................................................... 12
Figure 4. Purcell, “Lord, what is Man,” mm. 36-8.......................................................... 13
Figure 5. Purcell, “Lord, what is Man,” mm. 108-21 ..................................................... 14
Figure 6. Simon Gribelin II, frontispiece, Harmonia Sacra, Book 2, engraving,
(London: Henry Playford, 1693) ........................................................................... 25
Figure 7. Rembrandt van Rijn, Cupid (detail), unsigned, n.d. (ca. 1634) ...................... 25
Figure 8. Anthony van Dyck, Cupid (detail), 1620-40..................................................... 26
Figure 9. Title page (detail), Comes Amoris; or The Companion of Love, Book 1
(London: John Carr, 1687) ..................................................................................... 26
Figure 10. Circle of Jacques Stella, Triumph of Galatea (detail), 1596-1657................... 27
Figure 11. Louis Desplaces, Venus in the Water (detail), after 1717 ............................... 27
Figure 12. Israhel van Meckenem the Younger, Morris Dance (detail),
second half of the fifteenth century ...................................................................... 28
Figure 13. Henry Purcell, “The Blessed Virgin’s Expostulation,”
H.S. 2, mm. 1-3 ........................................................................................................ 39
Figure 14. Purcell, “The Blessed Virgin’s Expostulation,” mm. 4-7 ............................ 39
Figure 15. Purcell, “The Blessed Virgin’s Expostulation,” mm. 8-27 .......................... 41
Figure 15 (continued). Purcell, “The Blessed Virgin’s Expostulation,”
mm. 8-27 ................................................................................................................... 42
Figure 16. Purcell, “The Blessed Virgin’s Expostulation,” mm. 106-14 ..................... 42
Figure 17. Purcell, “The Blessed Virgin’s Expostulation,” mm. 42-56........................ 46
Figure 18. Purcell, “The Blessed Virgin’s Expostulation,” mm. 53-62........................ 47
Figure 19. Purcell, “The Blessed Virgin’s Expostulation,” mm. 69-87........................ 48
viii

Figure 20. Purcell, “The Blessed Virgin’s Expostulation,” mm. 92-105 ..................... 49
Figure 21. The scribe Thomas (illuminator and writer) of Eberbach, Germany,
Commentary on the Song of Songs (detail), twelfth century ...................................... 54
Figure 22. Bolognese Bible (detail), with text: beginning of the Song of Solomon,
historiated initial ‘O(sculetur me),’ thirteenth century ....................................... 54
Figure 23. Simone Martini, Boston polyptych: Madonna and Child (detail),
ca. 1321-25 ................................................................................................................. 55
Figure 24. Master of St. Veronica (Cologne School), Madonna with the
Sweet-pea Blossom (detail), middle panel of triptych altarpiece, ca. 1410 ............ 55
Figure 25. Marco Zoppo, Madonna and Child (detail), ca. 1470 ...................................... 56
Figure 26. Hans Baldung Grien, Holy Family (detail), 1511 ........................................... 56
Figure 27. Egyptian relief, Ramses [Ramesses] III and Concubine, 19th Dynasty .............. 57
Figure 28. Archaic Greek vase painting, Theseus Wooing Ariadne, 675-40 BCE .......... 57
Figure 29. Hellenistic, Cupid and Psyche, bronze statuette ............................................... 58
Figure 30. Romanesque, Herod and Salome, ca. 1140 ........................................................ 58
Figure 31. Unattributed, “A Divine Song on the Passion of our Savior,”
H.S. 2, mm. 26-30 .................................................................................................... 65
Figure 32. Unattributed, “A Divine Song on the Passion,” mm. 47-60 ...................... 66

ix

KEY TO ABBREVIATIONS
app. ...........................................................................................................................Appendix
ca. ........................................................................................................................................ Circa
fig(s). .......................................................................................................................... Figure(s)
fol. .....................................................................................................................................Folio
l(l). .................................................................................................................................. Line(s)
mm. ......................................................................................................................... Measure(s)
MS .......................................................................................................................... Manuscript
n.d. ...............................................................................................................................No date
H.S. 1 ....................................... Harmonia Sacra, Book 1 (London: Henry Playford, 1688)
H.S. 2 ....................................... Harmonia Sacra, Book 2 (London: Henry Playford, 1693)
posth. .................................................................................................................... Posthumous
sic ..................................................................................................................... Error in original
s.n. ............................................................................................................ No publisher listed
st. ..................................................................................................................................... Stanza

x

INTRODUCTION
To reproach mystics with loving God by means of the faculty of sexual love, is as though one were
to reproach a painter with making pictures by means of colors composed of material substances. We
haven’t anything else with which to love.
Simone Weil, “Notebooks” *
Musicologists have little difficulty identifying the exchanges between Monteverdi’s Nero and Poppea
as libidinal...But what of the church music of this period, much of which exceeds in its passionate
expressions of desire even the staged encounters between profane lovers?
Susan McClary, “Libidinous Theology” †
Scholarly studies of early modern sexuality have helped normalize discourses of the body in the
cultural analysis and performance of music. Studies by Robert Kendrick (Celestial Sirens, 1996), Susan
McClary (Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music, 2012), and Lindsay Johnson’s recent doctoral
dissertation (2013), have enthusiastically engaged the expression of sexuality (and its meaning) in
religious music.1 “Armed with theological and historical research,” writes McClary, “I no longer
seem to be personally responsible for dragging sex into the study of religion.”2 While these
musicologists are adjusting our understanding of music and early modern devotion, they have
limited their study to church and convent music of the Italian seicento. They have not, for instance,
addressed religious music of regions outside of Italy, such as England.
This thesis acknowledges the ordinary demands on early modern devotional practice in
England. I show two examples of how seventeenth-century devotional song invited the body to feel
desire, frustration, and a host of other physical sensations. Unsurprisingly, the dramatic conventions
* Simone Weil, The Notebooks of Simone Weil, trans. Arthur Willis (London: Routledge and Kegan, 1956), 132-3.
† Susan McClary, Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 12.
1 Lindsay Johnson, “Performed Embodiment, Sacred Eroticism, and Voice in Devotions by Early Seventeenth-Century
Italian Nuns” (PhD dissertation, UCLA, 2013), ProQuest (1377154275); also of note is Judith Peraino’s chapter on the
sexuality of chant and Hildegard of Bingen’s community of nuns, “Songs of the Sirens,” Listening to the Sirens (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2006).
2 Susan McClary, Desire and Pleasure, 130.

1

of music for the English stage inform the construction of embodied devotions in domestic settings.
Likewise, study of devotional song may also benefit our understanding of stage music, especially
when it represents religious institutions and practice as ridiculous or dangerous.
Henry Playford (d. 1709), London’s most prominent music publisher, issued from his shop
in the Savoy two books of religious songs and “dialogues” in 1688 and 1693. Harmonia Sacra (H.S.)
brought together some forty-six devotional solo songs and anthems from a diverse group of
seventeenth-century composers. Though scholars have often described the collection as consisting
of “domestic devotions,”—implying piety and privacy—these songs would have been performed
much like secular music for wealthy English households. The rising non-noble middle-class (or
gentry) often held musical gatherings for amateurs as well as professional musicians.3 Employing
musicians from the continent was especially prestigious, and sometimes the host and the servants
performed along with hired musicians.4
Domestic music gatherings were especially important to Samuel Pepys (d. 1703), a naval
officer, amateur musician, and a frequent patron of John Playford’s music shop (Henry Playford’s
father), which he simply referred to as “Playford’s.”5 Pepys wrote copiously about domestic music
making during the Restoration era, and he made music almost everyday, whether with friends in
their homes, with strangers in taverns, or in his dining room for passing neighbors:
21 November 1660
At night to my viallin (the first time that I have played on it since I came to this
house) in my dining room, and afterwards to my lute there, and I took much pleasure
to have the neighbors come forth into the yard to hear me.

Grace Tin-Yan Tam, “The Penitential Theology of Henry Purcell as Expressed in His Sacred Songs” (PhD Diss.,
UCLA, 2005), 18, ProQuest (908200522).
4 Ibid.
5 13 February 1660.
3

2

He paid for music lessons for himself, his wife, and his boy servant, whom he called, “my boy.”6
More than a mere pastime for Pepys, music was a means of projecting his wealth and increasing his
social cachet.
As Grace Tam has shown, H.S. targeted London’s rising middle classes, people like Pepys, as
another tool of “self-fashioning”:7
It [is] inaccurate [to] picture a dichotomy between the feigned and the godly. If good
manners could be construed as theatrical and dissimulative, so could religiosity and
piety be a persona for self-fashioning. Even activities that are ostensibly private and
inward might be used to project a front; private worship (except closet devotion) was
rarely performed without audience.8
Domestic devotional music was as much for worship as it was a way to display the wealth and
cultural competency of the host. This explains the varied skill levels required to perform H.S.’s
contents—from professional solo songs to four-part anthems suitable for amateurs. But the music
was also a guidebook for how to perform the motions of religion and how to feel toward God. In
what follows, I explore two of H.S.’s solo songs with an eye to the erotic, the carnal, and the
material. In analyzing these songs for their erotic content, two important ideas about seventeenthcentury religious practice arise: religion was a form of entertainment, and the body intensified
devotions rather than hindered them.
Chapter 1 shows how piety can so easily embrace eroticism in seventeenth-century song. I
argue that religious zeal and erotic desire join together in the first song of Book 2 to form a hybrid
devotion. Henry Purcell’s Divine Hymn “Lord, what is Man” employs two conventions of

Music was so important for Pepys that he reserved a special room (the “musique-room”) in his home for his boy
servant to study music: “And with so much disorder, among others, in the musique-room the boy that was to sing a
song, not singing it right, his master fell about his eares and beat him so, that it put the whole house in an uprore” (23
March 1660); “Comes Mr. Caesar, my boy’s lute-master, whom I have not seen since the plague before” (12 February
1665).
7 Tam, of course, uses Stephen Greenblatt’s term, “self-fashioning,” or the construction of personal identity through the
adoption and display of socially authorized behaviors and appearances. Writers of conduct manuals disseminated socially
acceptable behaviors while artists projected appearance in religious iconographies of Christ (for men) and the Virgin (for
women). See Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
8 Tam, “The Penitential Theology,” 26.
6

3

representing Restoration madness on the stage: religious enthusiasm and lovesick madness. Given
the market for the public exhibition of madness and insanity in early modern London, I conclude
this chapter by suggesting that the merging of lovesick madness and religious enthusiasm
contributed to the commercial appeal of H.S.
Chapter 2 then examines one of Purcell’s best-known mad songs, “The Blessed Virgin’s
Expostulation” (H.S. 2). The song fits easily within the stylistic and topical conventions of
Restoration mad songs for the stage, especially the lovesick madwoman. However, rather than
projecting these tropes onto a faceless poet, such as in “Lord, what is Man,” the song depicts the
Virgin Mary in the throes of lovesick devotion for her son. Drawing from contemporary theological
writing about and visual representations of the sexuality of Jesus Christ, I argue that portraying the
Virgin Mary as a lovesick mad woman humanized her, thus grounding devotion in the body.
In the final section of this thesis, I attempt to work in my ideas about the immediacy,
pleasure, humor, and theatricality of erotic devotions into two ways of understanding the collection
as a whole. On the one hand the moralizing aims of H.S. resemble other moral and religious
institutions in late seventeenth-century London. On the other, its conservationist approach to
anthologizing song aspired to a record of religion not bound to any particular moment in English
history. The erotic currents that run through H.S. accord with both interpretations: in the first case,
erotic devotions trigger the late seventeenth-century impulse to institutionalize transgression and in
the second, the flexibility of erotic content assists in capturing a half-century of English religious
practice.

4

CHAPTER 1
“THE MOST PROPER ENTERTAINMENT”
Unlike the undecorated first book of Henry Playford’s Harmonia Sacra (1688), the second book
(1693) opens with an engraving by Simon Gribelin II (d. 1733).1 Above an empty landscape, three
cherubs (or archangels) play the lyre, lute, and gamba on clouds (app., fig. 6). Higher still, two putti,
or secular angels, brandish a banner bearing the anthology’s title. Overseeing all is the
Tetragrammaton: the unspoken name of God. While the frontispiece clearly shows that the reader is
opening a volume of sacred music, the placement of putti next to cherubs also declares that the
book is a new meeting place for both sacred and secular music. Though painters and engravers of
the period often depicted secular putti in nudis, they were sometimes clothed. Rembrandt van Rijn’s
Cupid (1634) and Anthony Van Dyck’s Cupid (1620-40) are contemporaneous examples of covered
secular angels, indeed the god of erotic love himself (app., figs. 7-8).2 Partially clothed musical putti
also crowed the title page to John Carr’s 1687 book of popular love songs, Comes Amoris: Or, the
Companion of Love (app., fig. 9).3
In the end, Gribelin’s angels are putti not because they are bare or dressed, but because of
what they brandish. Putti often festoon their secular deities with garlands of flowers or banners of
fabric. The connection to profane love becomes obvious when collocated with contemporaneous
Elizabeth Miller writes that “[Gribelin’s] prints had a significant influence on the development of printmaking in
England…[He] engraved illustrations after his own or others’ designs for John Dryden’s translation of Charles Alphonse
Du Fresnoy’s De Arte Graphica (London: J. Heptinstall for W. Rogers at the Sun against St. Dunstan’s Church in
Fleetstreet, 1695 and 1716); Lord Shaftesbury’s Characteristics (London: no printer listed, 1711 and 1714); Alexander
Pope’s Works (London: W. Bowyer for Bernard Linton between the Temple-Gates, 1717)… His designs were still being
reprinted in the 1750s,” “Gribelin, Simon, II,” Grove Art Online, Oxford Art Online (Oxford University Press),
[accessed November 5, 2013], http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T034886.
2 Conversely, naked putti often populated sacred settings as well, such as in Titian’s paintings of the “Assumption”
(1516-18) with swarming throngs of putti in nudis or in his “Madonna of the Pesaro Family” (1519-26) in which putti use
the cross of Christ as a kind of plaything.
3 John Carr, Comes amoris, or, The companion of love being a choice collection of the newest songs now in use: with a thorow bass to each
song for the harpsichord, theorbo, or bass-viol, vol. 4 (London: Printed by Nat. Thompson for John Carr and Sam. Scott, and
are to be sold by John Carr at his shop, 1687-94), digital facsimile of the original in the Huntington Library, Early English
Books Online (UMI bibliography/reel positions: Wing/274:07, 136:4-7).
1

5

paintings and engravings of Galatea and Venus with putti waving banners, such as the midseventeenth-century Triumph of Galatea from the circle of Jacques Stella (d. 1657) or Louis
Desplaces’s (d. 1739) early eighteenth-century engraving of Venus in the Water after Antoine Coypel
(app., figs. 10-11). Against the images of Galatea and Venus—the first, an object of desire, the
second, desire incarnate—Gribelin’s putti twosome suggests secular themes of sensuality and carnal
desire. Indeed, the frontispiece introduces (and instructs) that H.S. is both a hymnbook of religious
devotion as well as a song collection of erotic entertainment. Poetry and song come together in H.S.
to form a hybrid devotion for God, one that both edifies with religion and amuses with erotica.
Though much study has been devoted to sexualized devotion, or sacred eroticism, in early
modern poetry, little attention has been given to, as Playford writes in his letter “To the Reader,”
how musicians “heighten[ed] their Devotion” with music that “[darts] it self through the Organs of
Sense…[warming] and [actuating] all the Powers of the Soul.”4 In this chapter, I examine how Henry
Purcell, the most prolific contributor and editor of both books of H.S., accomplishes this merging
of the sacred and erotic in his Divine Hymn, “Lord, what is Man,” by combining two conventions of
Restoration song: religious enthusiasm and lovesick madness.5 During the English Restoration, two
types of musical mad characters dominated the stage: the religious fanatic and the lovesick man or
woman.6 The questioning, persistent, and euphoric text of “Lord, what is Man” tells of Christ’s

Henry Playford, “To The Reader,” Harmonia Sacra, Book 1, ed. (in part) Henry Purcell (London in the
Savoy: Printed by Edward Jones for Henry Playford at his shop near the Temple Church, 1688), [iv-v], digital facsimile
of the original in the University of Illinois Library, Early English Books Online (UMI bibliography/reel positions:
Wing/506:08, 1709:06).
5 Henry Playford’s preface “To the Reader” states that “the Musical Part, though some of them are now dead, yet their
Composures have been review’d by Mr. Henry Purcell, whose tender Regard for the Reputation of those great Men made
him careful that nothing should be published, which, through the negligence of Transcribers, might reflect upon their
Memory” (H.S. 1, 1688); Margaret Campbell, Henry Purcell: Glory of His Age (London: Hutchinson, 1993), 109.
6 For more on these two distinct types of musical mad characters see Amanda Eubanks Winkler, “Society and Disorder,”
in The Ashgate Research Companion to Henry Purcell, ed. Rebecca Herrissone (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 269-302 and
Winkler, “O Let Us Howle Some Heavy Note”: Music for Witches, the Melancholic, and the Mad on the Seventeenth-Century English
Stage (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). Notable examples of lovesick mad characters include Celania in
William Davenant’s The Rivals (“My Lodging it is on the Cold Ground,” popular tune, 1667), Dido from Nahum Tate’s
Dido and Aeneas, Z. 626 (“Thy Hand Belinda…When I am Laid,” Henry Purcell, ca. 1688), Lyonel who sings several
notable lovesick mad songs (“I’ll Sail upon the Dog Star,” “I Sigh’d and I Pin’d,” and “There’s Nothing so Fatal as
4

6

“wond’rous Love” but also invokes Cupid to inspire the lovesick poet. With sudden shifts of affect
and meter, hyperbolic speech, chromatic intervals, virtuosic coloratura, delirious ranting, and
dancing, Purcell’s setting of “Lord, what is Man” has all the musical excess and agitation of the
lovesick mad song, but also the elated devotion of the religious song. As in the frontispiece, “Lord,
what is Man,” situates profane love between music and God’s name. That is, before our music can
ascend to God it must first pass through the body.

Religious enthusiasm
Religious “enthusiasm” was understood as an expression of madness even before Purcell’s time. M.
Andreas Laurentius explained in his Discourse of the preservation of the Sight: of Melancholike diseases; of
Reumes, and of Old age (1599) that heating the humor black bile could arouse aspirations to become a
“Philosophere,” “Poet,” and to “prophesie,” a condition he called “Enthousiasma.”7As Amanda
Eubanks Winkler explains: “[Religious] Enthusiasm … allowed the sufferer to circumvent reason, to
create great works of art, or even to communicate with the divine.”8 Madhouses for the insane often
treated religious enthusiasts, such as at the infamous Bethlem Hospital in London (known as
Woman”) in Thomas D’Urfey’s A Fool’s Preferment; or the Three Dukes of Dunstable (1688), Cardenio in D’Urfey’s The
Comical History of Don Quixote, Part 1 (“Let the Dreadful Engines,” Purcell, 1694), Marcella in Don Quixote, Part 2 (“I Burn,
I Burn,” John Eccles, 1694), Altisadora from Don Quixote, Part 3 (“From Rosie Bow’rs,” Purcell, 1694), Phylante in John
Oldmixon’s opera, The Grove, or, Love’s Paradice (“Underneath a Gloomy Shade,” Purcell, 1700), and Memnon in Peter
Motteux’s revival of John Fletcher’s The Mad Lover (1701) with new music by Eccles. For a catalogue of Restoration
musical drama see Curtis Price, Music in the Restoration Theatre: With a Catalogue of Instrumental Music in the Plays, 1665-1713
(Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1979). Also see Lucyle Hook, “Motteux and the Classical Masque,” in British Theatre
and the Other Arts, 1610-1681, ed. Shirley Strum Kenny (Washington, D.C.: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1984), 105-15.
Examples of religious enthusiastic characters include the prophetess, Cumana, in Nathanial Lee’s Sophinisba (“Beneath a
Poplar’s Shadow Lay Me,” Purcell, early 1690s) and the Brahmin priest in Motteux’s revised The Island Princess
(“Enthusiastick Song,” Richard Leveridge, 1699), see Winkler, “Enthusiasm and Its Discontents: Religion, Prophecy,
and Madness in the Music for Sophonisba and The Island Princess,” The Journal of Musicology 23, no. 2 (Spring 2006): 307-330,
doi: 10.1525/jm.2006.23.2.307.
7 “when this humour groweth hot, by the vapours of blood, it causeth as it were, a kind of divine ravishment, commonly
called Enthousiasma, which stirretth men up to plaie Philosopheres, Poets, and also to prophesie: in such maner, as that it
may seeme to containe in it some divine parts,” M. Andreas Laurentius, Discourse of the preservation of the Sight: of
Melancholike diseases; of Reumes, and of Old age, trans. from the French by Richard Suphlet (London: Imprinted by Felix
Kingston, for Ralph Iacson, dwelling in Paules Church yard at the signe of the Swan, 1599), 86, digital facsimile of the
original in the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, Early English Books Online (UMI bibliography/reel position:
STC/290:02).
8 Winkler, “O Let Us Howle Some Heavy Note,” 118.

7

“Bedlam” at the time but now Bethlem Royal Hospital). In their book, The History of Bethlem,
Jonathan Andrews (et al.) traces a growing public skepticism of religious inspiration in the
seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. Those who shouted prayers loudly, such as the poet
Christopher Smart (d. 1771),9 or disturbed public meetings or neighbors with their vehement praying
were “seen as vainglorious and deluded” and confined to hospitals, such as Bethlem, St. Luke’s
Hospital for Lunatics, or in private madhouses for the well-to-do.10
For some, religion was not just an expression of madness but also a frequent cause of it.
Mere exposure to religious instruction could drive one mad, especially the weak minded.11 By 1810,
William Black had already recorded that ten percent of Bethlem Hospital’s insane suffered from
“Religion and Methodism.”12 This figure exceeds other causes that Black tallied, including
lovesickness (“Love”), substance abuse (“Drinks and Intoxication”), and “Venereal” disease (“Small
pox,” “Ulcers and Scabs dried up”).13
At the same time, English playwrights made use of religious madmen and women as a
dramatic device on the stage. As a general rule, the inclusion of madmen in plays indicated moral
decline but also added an element of entertainment. Jacobean drama was particularly eager to
represent religion as a gateway to madness, perhaps because two important London theaters, The
Curtain and The Theater, were right next door to Bethlem.14 Correspondingly, in John Webster’s The
tragedy of the Dutchesse of Malfy (1623)—a drama about religious corruption, murder, and sibling
incest—eight madmen, among them a “priest,”15 perform a disorderly dance and sing the dissonant

Smart was confined from May 1757 to January 1763 in St. Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics (Bethnel Green, London).
Jonathan Andrews, et al., The History of Bethlem (London: Routledge, 1997), 337.
11 Winkler, “O Let Us Howle Some Heavy Note,” 118.
12 Roy Porter, Mind-Forg’d Manacles: A history of madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1987), 33-4.
13 Ibid.
14 Andrews, et al., The History of Bethlem, 132.
15 John Webster, The tragedy of the Dutchesse of Malfy As it was presented priuatly, at the Black-Friers; and publiquely at the Globe, by
the Kings Maiesties Seruants. The perfect and exact coppy, with diuerse things printed, that the length of the play would not beare in the
presentment (London: Printed by Nicholas Okes, for Iohn Waterson, and are to be sold at the signe of the Crowne, in
9

10

8

song: “O let us howle some heavy note!” The Duchess’s twin brother (who is also suffering from
lycanthropia) sends the madmen to purge his sister’s “mellancholly” with laughter. Notable too is
that the sister knows that the dance will not cure her, though she permits them to sing and dance
anyway for entertainment value:
Seruant.
Your brother hath entended you some sport:
A great Physitian, when the Pope was sicke
Of a deepe mellancholly, presented him
With seuerall sorts of mad-men, which wilde obiect
(Being full of change, and sport,) forc’d him to laugh,
And so th’impost-hume broke: the selfe same cure,
The Duke intends on you…
Duchess.
Let them loose when you please,
For I am chain’d to endure all your tyranny.16
The literary critic Frederick Kiefer argues that the actors danced the morris, a disruptive dance with
a host of subversive associations, including folk paganism, witchcraft, Satanism, sexual perversion,
chaotic noise, and ethnic debasement17 (cross dressing and black facing were common while dancers
also wore characteristic leg bells).18 According to Philip Stubbes (d. 1610?), the morris had a tense
relationship with the church: dancers often invaded sanctuaries or churchyards with clamorous
singing and contorted bodies in a display of physical and audible noise (app., fig. 12).19 In addition,
their uncoordinated movement and lack of uniform clothing undercut the church’s supposed
homogeneous approach to ceremony.
Musical and rhetorical characteristics that indicated religious enthusiasm on the stage
included hyperbolic speech, incoherent ranting on religious matters, feverish singing and dancing,
Paules Church-yard, 1623), 35-6, digital facsimile of the original in the British Library, Early English Books Online (UMI
bibliography/reel position: STC/944:18).
16 John Webster, The tragedy of the Dutchesse of Malfy (1623).
17 It is thought that the name of the dances comes from the word, “Moor.”
18 Frederick Kiefer, “The Dance of Madmen in the Duchess of Malfi,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 17 (1987):
211-33, in Winkler, “O Let Us Howle Some Heavy Note,” 35-8, 128; Philip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses (London:
Printed…by Richard Jones, 1583), M2r—v, in Winkler, “O Let Us Howle Some Heavy Note,” 36.
19 Ibid.

9

and chromaticism in their music, which connoted effeminacy and melancholy.20 In Thomas
Middleton and William Rowley’s The Changeling (1653) the character Lollio, a madhouse assistant,
explains that he could identify madmen by their fine dancing:
and ‘tis no wonder, your best Dancers are not the wisest men, the reason is, with
often jumping they joult their brains down into their feet, that their wits lie more in
their heels then in their heads.21
The dancing madmen and fools in The Changeling are also aware that they are performing for
payment, whether for earthly “coin” or spiritual “credit.” Act three closes with a sobering scene of
madmen and fools literally dancing “for their supper”:
The Madmen and Fools dance.
‘Tis perfect well fit, but once these strains,
We shall have coin and credit for our pains.22
When combined with religious topics, dancing to dissonant songs marked the character as a religious
fanatic and closely tied it with other theatrical portrayals of the mad.23
Henry Purcell composed several songs for religious enthusiastic characters, including
“Beneath a poplars shadow lay me,” Z. 590. Written for a revival of Nathaniel Lee’s Sophonisba in the
early 1690s, the song appears as, “A Mad SONG” in Playford’s song collection, Orpheus Britannicus
(1698, posth.). In this mad song the erstwhile divinely inspired prophetess, Cumana, becomes a
ranting lunatic.24 “Sleepy” with the smell of “Poppies,” Cumana seeks relief from “raging Fires” and
divine thoughts that “blind” her. Underneath the shade of a tree, she performs a self-exorcism:
lest my Bosom shou’d bur’st, for the secret to pass, and the Fury get out;
I cannot, I will not, I cannot, I will not be vext any longer.

Winkler, “Society and Disorder,” 294.
Thomas Midleton and William Rowley, The changeling as it was acted (with great applause) at the Privat house in Drury-Lane, and
Salisbury Court (London: Humfrey Moseley, sold at his shop at the sign of the Princes-Armes in St. Paul’s Church-yard,
1653), 16-7, digital facsimile of the original in the Folger Library, Early English Books Online (UMI bibliography/reel
position: Wing/75:05).
22 Rowley and Middleton, The Changeling (Act 3).
23 Winkler, “Society and Disorder,” 294.
24 Ibid.
20
21

10

Significantly, Cumana’s signals her divine madness with bursts of incoherent coloratura (mm. 1-5,
29-30, 38-9, 41), chromatic figures that droop and sigh (mm. 7-10), ecstatic, feverish speech (mm.
26-30) and a curtailed dance. While court culture increasingly associated dance with disciplining the
body and aligning it with the social mores of the royal courts, the rapid shifts from a duple song to a
triple dance (mm. 14-26) and back again (mm. 27-end) mark this as a dance for the disorderly,
disturbed, and at the very least, undisciplined. Finally, because it was later extracted and included in
Playford’s Orpheus Britannicus (1698) this mad song had a performance history similar to the songs in
Playford’s H.S.
Published at the same time that Sophonisba went to the stage, “Lord, what is Man” is Purcell’s
setting of a devotional lyric by William Fuller, Lord Bishop of Lincoln (d. 1675). Questioning God
directly, the text speaks with a persistent, direct voice: “Lord, what is Man, lost Man, that thou
should’st be so mindful of him!” Purcell sets the text dissonantly with an eerie succession of
descending intervals that end on a grating F-sharp above the G-minor continuo foundation—
emphatic of the fall of “lost Man” (fig. 1).
Figure 1. Henry Purcell, “Lord, what is Man,” H.S. 1, mm. 1-3.

As in “Beneath a poplars shadow lay me,” chromaticism pervades Purcell’s setting of “Lord,
what is Man,” indicating the unsteadiness of the singer. The vocal line croons “poor tormented
Man” (mm. 9-10) over a chromatically falling bass line (F—E-natural—E-flat—D) (fig. 2).25

There is also a deliberate cross relationship (B-natural over a G-minor chord) that ends the phrase, “that Man shou’d
be assum’d into the Deity” (mm. 39-40).
25

11

Figure 2. Purcell, “Lord, what is Man,” mm. 7-13.

With rising chromatic intervals, the singer eventually answers the opening question: Christ
died out of “wondr’ous Love! for me” (mm. 21-6) (fig. 3).
Figure 3. Purcell, “Lord, what is Man,” mm. 17-28.

Virtuosic vocal displays are also a musical expression of the religious enthusiast’s feverishness. The
febrile coloratura that ends the recitative section (on the word, “Joy”) anticipates the song’s wild
ending (fig. 4). The speech here is also hyperbolic. Extending over a range of an octave and a fourth,

12

Purcell juxtaposes divine “Joy” and “Astonishment” with leaps of fourths in a high tessitura and the
repetitious striking on D-natural. The octave descent on the final word brings the statement to a
dramatic close.
Figure 4. Purcell, “Lord, what is Man,” mm. 36-8.

Similar to Cumana, the singer moves from an expository section in duple to an ungainly
dance in triple meter (mm. 46-92). A final section of twenty-six iterations of “Hallelujah” reinforces
this expression of religious enthusiasm—an impassioned display of delirious ranting and excess
(mm. 92-121). Notable, too, is that Purcell seems to have added the “Hallelujah” section for ecstatic
impact (fig. 5). Fuller’s poem, which Nahum Tate late published in his textual companion, Miscellanea
Sacra (1696), does not close with a “Hallelujah.”26
The hyperbolic speech on religious matters, chromaticism, effusive coloratura, the ungainly
dance in triple meter, and the final ranting “Hallelujah” all mark this song as one of religious fervor,
and the singer a religious enthusiast.

Nahum Tate, comp., Miscellanea Sacra, or, Poems on Divine and Moral Subjects (London: Hen. Playford in the TempleChange, in Fleetstreet, 1696), 5, digital facsimile of the original in Union Theological Seminary Library, New York, Early
English Books Online (UMI bibliography/reel position: Wing/370:04).
26

13

Figure 5. Purcell, “Lord, what is Man,” mm. 108-21.

Lovesick madness
Though some of these musical features, when combined with religious subject matter, indicate one
kind of madness known as religious enthusiasm, “Lord, what is Man” is also evocative of
lovesickness madness. Driven mad from disappointed love, the lovesick mad character exhibited
14

obsessive, irrational, and melancholic behavior while also relishing the excesses of passion that
undercut the cultural elite’s principled self-control and moderation. Though indebted to
Shakespeare’s lovesick Ophelia (1603), conventions of portraying lovesick madness crystallized
during the Restoration with the emergence of specialist actresses, especially Letitia Cross, Anne
Bracegirdle, and Moll Davis.27
Actors and actresses required mastery of their text, music, and comportment to portray
lovesick madness on the Restoration stage convincingly. Though physicians, such as Jacques Ferrand
and Thomas Burton, contested the boundaries between melancholy and madness, the physical
expression of lovesick madness bound itself to women’s bodies.28 Principally disseminated by
Renaissance Neoplatonists, such as Marsilio Ficino and others, lovesickness in men, or “lovesick
melancholy,” became cultivated intellectualism rather than a disorder of the body.29 While causing
social alienation, masculine melancholy improved retention of memory, sharpened one’s mind, and
was a mark of creative genius.30 In his groundbreaking book, Mind Forg’d Manacles, Roy Porter
synthesizes several views on melancholy and creativity:
In Aristotle’s formulation, the man superabundant in black bile [melancholic] was of
course prey to fear, suspicion and misanthropy; yet such a melancholy would also
characteristically be sharp of intellect, trenchant in criticism, acute in perfection,
pungent in expression—a genius no less.31
In exchange for their isolation, melancholic men received enriching and productive private thoughts.

For more on the careers of Anne Bracegirdle and Moll Davis see, Curtis Price, Henry Purcell and the London Stage
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 86-9, and Winkler, “O Let Us Howle Some Heavy Note,” 96-105. For a
discussion on celebrity in the eighteenth century, see Cheryl Wanko, Roles of Authority: Thespian Biography and Celebrity in
Eighteenth-Century Britain (Lubbock: Texas Tech University, 2003).
28 Winkler, “O Let Us Howle Some Heavy Note,” 116.
29 Ibid., see also ibid., “Society and Disorder,” 294.
30 Ibid., “O Let Us Howle Some Heavy Note,” 116 quoting Marsilio Fincino’s reading of Aristotle’s Problemata, “Why is it
that all those who have become eminent in philosophy or politics or poetry or the arts are clearly melancholics?” Saturn
and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art (New York: Basic Books, 1964), 18-29; Andreas
Laurentius who claimed that melancholy “maketh men witty, and causeth them to excel others,” A Discourse in the
Preservation of the Sight… (London: Imprinted by Felix Kingston for Ralph Jacson, 1599), 86; and Robert Burton, “their
memories are most part good, they have happy wits an[d] excellent apprehensions,” The Anatomy of Melancholy, book 1
(Oxford: Printed by Iohn Lichfield and Iames Short for Henry Cripps, 1621), 383-84.
31 Porter, Mind Forg’d Manacles, 21.
27

15

Back to women. In The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault theorizes that the late early
modern female body—in a process he calls, “hysterization”—came to be understood as “thoroughly
saturated with sexuality.”32 From then on, medical knowledge and practices absorbed women’s
bodies, and because medical knowledge is civic knowledge, it is at this juncture that women’s bodies
entered public discourse. The female body was then—as both a subject of medical intrigue and the
reproductive center of society—the most visible body that stood at the vector of sex and public
knowledge. Perhaps this is why mad songs for women characters greatly outnumbered those for
men of the period. 33 That is, the madness of women rather than that of men was far more visible
and available to public audiences in late seventeenth-century drama.
With the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, women appeared more frequently on stage as
boys no longer played female roles to preserve the actresses’ propriety.34 Permitted to perform on
stage for the first time, the mad woman used music and text but also her body to signal her
lovesickness. Erratic motions, aimless wandering, and stripping and tearing at her clothing signified
the irrationality of the character and its close association with women’s bodies. As Winkler points
out, embodied lovesickness also created a “sexually charged fantasy of female transgression” for the
appetites of Restoration audiences.35
Adding to the sexual fantasy of actresses, rumors of the sexual escapades of actresses off the
stage infused the spectacle of performing lovesick mad songs on the stage. Winkler writes that
increasingly, “actresses made their names playing bawdy roles in comedies, cross-dressing
(sometimes singing and dancing) in breeches to show off their legs, which under normal
circumstances were modestly hidden.”36 She continues that “while this performance practice

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (New York: Random House, 1978), 103-4.
Winkler, “Society and Disorder,” 291.
34 Ibid., “O Let Us Howle Some Heavy Note,” 64.
35 Ibid., 85-6.
36 Ibid., “Society and Disorder,” 278.
32
33

16

increased [actresses] popularity…it also cause them to be labeled as whores.”37 This may have been
true to some degree as reports of actresses being paid for sex survive. Letitia Cross (d. 1737), for
instance, who became famous for her portrayals of lovesick women and for whom Purcell wrote the
song, “From Rosie Bow’rs” in Thomas Durfey’s The Comical History of Don Quixote, Part 3 (1694) may
have received 500 English guineas for performing sexual favors for Peter the Great during his 1698
visit to London.38 Rumors of actresses’ lasciviousness, true or not, gave their stage characters an
erotic intrigue even before they began to sing.
Perhaps only twelve years old at the time that Don Quixote premiered in 1694, the young
Letitia Cross’s portrayal of Altisadora demanded erotic and ribald use of her body. “Perhaps too
young [to be Don Quixote’s lover],” begins Altisadora,
but I’ll so swell my Breasts, and heave and fall, and mould ‘em with my Hands to
make ‘em grow—pull down my Stays, that they may shew themselves, and Jett it up
and down.39
Here, expressing Altisadora’s lovesick madness demands bawdy exhibition of the body. Typical of
Restoration mad songs, ragged Altisadora also indicates her lovesick madness by wanting to “lay
down [her] Love-sick Head,” and threatens to “thaw” her frozen heart or “drown” while pulling out
her hair and disrobing (“Robes, Locks shall thus be tore”).
In addition, D’Urfey’s stage directions in the original publication of the play indicate how
Cross was to perform lovesickness physically. Altisadora is to “[Iett] up and down the Stage,” in a
“freakish Fit.”40 In the middle of her conversation with Don Quixote she must also stop suddenly to
“[Sigh], and [look] amorously on him.”41 Thus, Cross’s success at transmitting Altisadora’s

Winkler, “Society and Disorder,” 278.
Olive Baldwin and Thelma Wilson, “Cross, Letitia,” Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online (Oxford University Press),
[accessed March 18, 2014], http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/06873.
39 Thomas D’Urfey, The comical history of Don Quixote as it is acted at the Queens Theatre in Dorset-Garden, by Their Majesties
servants, Part 3 (London: Printed for Samuel Briscoe, 1694-1696), 48, digital facsimile of the original in the Henry E.
Huntington Library and Art Gallery, Early English Books Online (UMI bibliography/reel position: Wing/93:01).
40 Ibid., 47-8
41 Ibid.
37
38

17

lovesickness to audiences depended as much on her physically delivery of her character as on her
music and text.
It is no surprise, then, that the tensions between effeminizing sexuality and creativity in
“Lord, what is Man” come to a head in a dance. To begin to see the erotic strains that grow into
lovesickness in “Lord, what is Man,” we need to take a closer look at the text of the dance:
Oh! for a Quill drawn from your Wing,
To write the Praises of th’Eternal Love,
Oh! for a Voice, like Yours, to sing
That Anthem here, which once you sung Above.

[ll. 15-8]

But whose wing? And what kind of “quill” would be worthy to write of love that is “Eternal”? I
suggest that the wing is that of the blind son of Venus and god of Love, Cupid. To be sure, the
depluming of Cupid’s wings to write of love has antecedents in earlier poetry. Richard Crashaw’s
collection of sacred epigrams, Epigrammatum sacrorum liber (1634), opens with just such a reference in
the “Lectori” (“To the reader”):
Saepe puer dubias circum me moverat alas;
Jecit & incertas nostra sub ora faces.
Saepe vel ipse sua calamum mihi blandus ab ala,
Vel matris cygno de meliore dedit.
Saepe Dionaeae pactus mihi serta coronae;
Saepe, Meus vates tu, mihi dixit, eris.42

[ll. 43-8]

[Often the boy moved his fluttering wings around me and hurled his unpredictable
darts around my face. Often that flatterer gave me a quill from his own wing or a
better one from his mother’s swan. Often he promises me garlands from the
Dionaean crown; often he said to me “You will be my poet.”]43

Richard Crashaw, Epigrammatum sacrorum liber (Cantabrigriæ: Academiae celeberrimae typographeo, 1634), digital
facsimile of the original in the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, Early English Books Online (UMI
bibliography/reel position: STC/830:10).
43 Claire Warwick, trans., “‘Love Thou Art Absolute’: Richard Crashaw and the Discourse of Human and Divine Love,”
in Sacred and Profane: Secular and Devotional Interplay in Early Modern British Literature, ed. Helen Wilcox, Richard Todd, and
Alasdair MacDonald (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1996), 240; Crashaw would later publish a poem in his Steps to
the Temple. Sacred Poems, With other Delights of the Muses (1646), demonstrating how devotional poetry could serve erotic
ends. In “On Mr. G. Herberts book,” the speaker presents George Herbert’s book of sacred lyrics, The Temple (1633), as
a gift to a “Gentlewoman.”
42

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Here, the poet takes a quill from either Cupid or the swan of Venus. That Cupid invades
Fuller/Purcell’s sacred song in much the same way charges it with a similar erotic energy. As in
Crashaw’s sacred epigrams, the poet in “Lord, what is Man” is similarly struggling to express divine
love and calls on Cupid to inspire his pen.
In fact, Cupid freely invades both secular and sacred literature of the period, including
Purcell’s mad songs for the irrational and obsessed lovesick mad characters. One of Purcell’s bestknown lovesick mad songs, “From Rosie Bow’rs where Sleep’s the God of Love” is the final song in
D’Urfey’s Don Quixote (1694). “From Rosie Bow’rs” exhibits many of the same musical and
rhetorical features of the religious enthusiast but is about disappointed love. Altisadora’s song shifts
wildly from an invocation of Cupid, the god of love, beseeching “little waiting Cupids” to come
“hither” to a “brisk and Airy” dance. Performed on stage the year after the publication of H.S. 2,
Altisadora’s mad song is similar to “Lord, what is Man,” in that it also features eruptions of
coloratura (mm. 6, 35-6) and two short dances in triple time that call on Cupid and putti for support
before moving into a final section of excessive ranting that begins with feverish iterations of the
words “No, no, no, no, no” and “Mad, mad, mad, mad, mad” (mm. 134-6).44 This chatter-style
establishes a clear relationship between language and comedy, and within the context of Bedlamites
as a source of humor, the chatter-text is meant to be humorous rather than frightening. Indeed, the
tongue twisting, “chatter-style” texts of these devotional and theatrical songs may even anticipate the
patter songs of eighteenth-century opera buffa.
Illustrating that mad songs were comical is the fact that Altisadora’s mad song is “feigned.”
That is, Altisodora intends to appear lovesick to Don Quixote to “teize” and mock him, creating a
comical “Scene” for onlookers:
I intend to teize him now with a whimsical variety, as if I were possess’d with several
degrees of Passion—sometimes I’ll be fond, and sometimes freakish; sometimes
44

Winkler, “Society and Disorder,” 292.

19

merry, and sometimes melancholy,—sometimes treat him with Singing and Dancing,
and sometimes scold and rail as if I were ready to tear his eyes out. Go you to your
peeping place, and you shall see such a Scene.45
Not only does this scene suggest that audiences understood the behaviors of madness, but that stage
actors emulated the insane in the service of comedy.
When compared to Purcell’s religious and lovesick mad songs, we see that in “Lord, what is
Man” religious enthusiasm and lovesickness merge. Thematically, the song exhibits the fanaticism of
the religious song but resonates with mid-century erotic poetry and dance by invoking Cupid.
Textually, the song exhibits the excess of the mad song in its hyperbolic language and excessive
iterations of “Hallelujah.” Finally, the dramatic shifts in meter and affect, the wide intervallic leaps
and chromaticism, and torrid vocal virtuosity are musically evocative of both lovesickness and
religious enthusiasm concurrently portrayed on the English stage. Moreover, understanding these
devotional songs as theatrical performances of madness opens up new ways to hear and see them as
devotional comedy.

Conclusion: Laughing and giving
Early modern madhouses, such as Bethlem, served a double-function as edifying institutions of
Christian charity and as sites for secular entertainment.46 A place to contain and care for the insane,
sightseers in London considered Bethlem Hospital a “must see.” A popular seventeenth-century
tour through the city, called Crook’s tour, stopped at Westminster Abbey, Whitehall, London
Bridge, the Tower, the theaters and the gardens of London, The Zoo, and Bethlem, and two known
travel guides for foreign visitors featured it—Les Délices d’Angleterre (1707) and Travels in London

D’Urfey, The Comical History of Don Quixote, Part 3, 46.
The motivations to give to charity were diverse, from Christian duty to the community to building credit in Heaven,
from securing family legacies to affirming non-religious loyalties, see Andrews, et al., The History of Bethlem, 170.
45
46

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(1710).47 Visitors as diverse as Samuel Pepys, Lord Percy, Ben Jonson, and Abraham Cowley wrote
about their recreational visits to Bedlam.48 As reported by these writers, the public came to donate to
London’s poor insane as much as to laugh at them, thereby satisfying their moral obligation to
improve their community while also affirming their social superiority.49
Seizing the public demand for voyeurism, Bethlem nurtured a culture of spectacle around
the mad: they boosted their donations by commissioning priests to deliver sermons, sponsored
processions of dignitaries, hospital staff, and poor children, while (not unlike today) vanity plaques
displayed the names of wealthy benefactors to hospital visitors that secured their legacy among the
moral elite.50 Around 1670, the governors of Bethlem constructed a more opulent building and
moved to Moorfields.51 The new building privileged the appetites of visitors over the needs of the
patients that resided there; thus, the galleries and the front gardens were off limits to patients, and in
the latter case eliminated the need to build an impenetrable wall so that the hospital was more visible
to the passing public.52 Though the pamphleteer Thomas Tryon admonished those who visited
Bedlam for entertainment alone, he also “[acknowledged] that Gallant Structure of New Bethlam to

Quarell and Mare, op. cit. 51-2; J. Beeverell, Les Délices de la Grand Bretagne (Leidon: P. vander Aa, 1707), in Andrews, et
al., The History of Bethlem, 186-7.
48 Samuel Pepys in 1669, paid for a holiday in London for his cousin’s children “to see Bedlam” and to shop, dance,
dine, and visit the theater, op. cit. ix, 19 February 1669, 454; Thomas Tryon recorded in his Dreams and Visions (1689),
that the hospital “[admitted] such Swarms of People, of all Ages and Degrees” visiting during their spare time and on
“Holy-dayes,” A treatise of dreams & visions (London: s.n., 1689), 289, digital facsimile of the original in the Huntington
Library and Gallery, Early English Books Online (UMI bibliography/reel position: Wing/2158:25); an Irish visitor to
London (Mockmode) in George Farquhar’s Love and a Bottle (1697), mentions only two places he wants to see:
Westminster Abbey “and Bedlam”: “Of all the Rarities of the Town, I long to see nothing more than the Poets [Corner in
Westminster Abbey] and Bedlam,” George Farquhar, Love and a bottle a comedy, as it is acted at the Theatre-Royal in Drury-Lane
by His Majesty’s servants, (London: Richard Standfast, next door to the Three-Tun Tavern, near Temple-Bar; and Francis
Coggen, in the Inner-Temple-lane, 1699), 20, digital facsimile of the original in the Huntington Library and Art Gallery,
Early English Books Online (UMI bibliography/reel position: Wing/379:37); in Andrews, et al., The History of Bethlem, 187.
49 See Tryon’s admonishment of visitors to Bethlem that provoke the unwell: “First, Tis a very Undecent, Inhumane
thing to make, as it were, a Show of those Unhappy Objects of Charity…to the Idle Curiosity of every Boy, petulant
Wench, or Drunken Companion, going along from one Apartment to the other, and Crying out; This Woman is in for
Love; That Man for Jealousie; He has Over-studied himself, and the Like. Secondly, This staring Rabble seldom fail of
asking more then an hundred impertinent Questions. --- As, what are you here for? How Long have you been here, &c.
…the wicked people, who think it a rare Diversion…fall a Laughing and Hooting,” A treatise of dreams & visions, 291-2.
50 Andrews, et al., The History of Bethlem, 170, 182.
51 Ibid., 152.
52 Ibid., 170, 182.
47

21

be one of the Prime Ornaments of the City of London, and a Noble Monument of Charity.”53 Still, the
joining of Christian obligations and the exploitation of the sick for entertainment bothered few.
Harmonia Sacra, as a new anthology, aligns well with a culture that comfortably combines
religion with leisure. Just as Bethlem Hospital exploited the insane for social and spiritual capital, so
did Henry Purcell’s “Lord, what is Man” exploit conventions of the religiously and lovesick mad to
amuse while it edified. In both cases, the rising non-noble leisure class could advance their spiritual
wellness by observing the unwell. It should be noted too that as a published book for sale, H.S. was
a commercial enterprise as much as it was fine religious art.54 In every edition, Playford advertised
secular and sacred songbook collections next to each other;55 in the prefatory material, Playford calls
the anthology, “the most proper Entertainment” for the “best of Men.”56 And so we come back to
what the frontispiece had introduced from the beginning: Early Moderns had no trouble merging
the sacred and the secular, and they sought new formats (songbooks) and new venues (the home) in
which to do so. Said another way, the public had no qualms about purchasing a piece of sacred
erotica for domestic entertainment.
Lovesick madness is not only a condition of the inspired poet. Though “Lord, what is Man”
does not have a dramatic context, devotional songs of lovesickness often have historical settings
with well-defined characters. In the next chapter, I argue that the erotic currents in H.S. leave no
religious subjects untouched. I engage not only gendered lovesick devotion but also a mother’s

Tryon, A treatise of dreams & visions, 290.
The London Gazette and The Term Catalogue first advertised the anthology, and subscription buyers could feel that they
were patrons of nuanced London art. In his “To the Reader,” (H.S. 1), Playford calls his subscribers “worthy” and “the
best of Men,” London Gazette 2253, (20-23 June 1687), in ibid., 2291 (31 October-3 November 1687); Susan Tara Brown,
“English Devotional Song as a Mirror of Seventeenth-Century Anglicanism: A Thematic and Musical-Rhetorical
Analysis of Henry Playford’s Harmonia Sacra” (PhD diss., Claremont Graduate School, 1995), 96-9, Proquest
(907531522).
55 Playford advertises Apollo’s Banquet, a collection of secular instrumental music, just above “a Large Imperial Bible…fit
for any cathedral or chapel,” Playford, H.S. 2 (1693), viii.
56 Ibid., “To the Reader,” H.S. 1 (1688).
53
54

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devotion in examining the longing of the Virgin for her child Jesus in Purcell’s “The Blessed Virgin’s
Expostulation,” Z. 196.

23

APPENDIX

24

Figure 6.
Simon Gribelin II, frontispiece, H.S. 2, engraving (London: Henry Playford, 1693).

Figure 7.
Rembrandt van Rijn, Cupid (detail), unsigned, n.d. (ca. 1634), canvas, 74.5 x 92 cm., Bredius 470,
Vienna Museum, Lichtenstein, in Gary Schwartz, The Rembrandt Book (New York: Harry N. Abrams,
2006), 276.

25

Figure 8.
Anthony van Dyck, Cupid (detail), 1620-40, in Gustav Glück, Van Dyck: Des Meisters Gemälde in 571
Abbildungen (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlag-Anstalt, 1931), 266.

Figure 9.
Title page (detail), Comes Amoris; or The Companion of Love, the first book (London: John Carr, 1687).

26

Figure 10.
Circle of Jacques Stella, Triumph of Galatea (detail), 1596-1657, oil on canvas, unframed: 109.9 x 97.8
cm., The J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center (78.PA.194), Los Angeles.

Figure 11.
Louis Desplaces, Venus in the Water (detail), after 1717, engraving, Bibliothèque National, Paris (cat.
no 72), in Nicole Garnier, Antoine Coypel, 1661-1722 (Paris: Arthena, 1989), fig. 142.

27

Figure 12.
Israhel van Meckenem the Younger, Morris Dance (detail), second half of the fifteenth century,
copper plate engraving, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

28

CHAPTER 2
“LONGING EYES”
A MOTHER’S DEVOTION
Nahum Tate’s poem, “The Blessed Virgin’s Expostulation” carries the subtitle: “When our Saviour
(at Twelve Years of Age) had withdrawn himself, &c. Luke 2. V. 42.” The biblical allusion appended to
the subtitle tells the story of the Virgin Mary frantically searching for her missing son. She later finds
him teaching rabbis in the temple:
And when he was twelve years old, as they returned, the child Jesus tarried behind in
Jerusalem; and Joseph and his mother knew not of it…
And it came to pass, that after three days they found him in the temple, sitting in the
midst of the doctors, both hearing them, and asking them questions.
And all that heard him were astonished at his understanding and answers.
And when they say him, they were amazed.1
[Bible, 1680; Lk 2: 42, 46-8]
As the only canonical account of Christ’s adolescence, it marks a significant moment for both
mother and child: Jesus separates from his mother for the first time, and in a precocious display of
rhetorical power, it is also the first act that signals his maturation from Jesus to the Christ. In reading
Jesus’ life through his relationship with his mother, Albert Korschorke points out that
the stages in the life of the Christian Messiah can be read as stages in a process of
detachment, which compels the grown son, filled by the sense of spiritual mission, to
alienate himself from his origins and his mother…the Gospels present something
like a model of emancipation, and their power lies in the fact they do not conceal the
resulting conflicts.2
Conflicts indeed, for Jesus ultimately rejects his earthly family, only to be rejected by his disciples on
the eve of his passion, and finally recovered by his mother at the foot of the cross in those iconic

The Holy Bible containing the Old Testament and the New, Newly translated out of the original tongues and with the former translations
diligently compared and revised by His Majesties speciall command; appointed to be read in churches (Cambridge: Printed by John
Hayes, printer to the Universitie, 1683; New Testament has special title page dated at 1680), digital facsimile of the
original in the National Library of Scotland, Early English Books Online (UMI bibliography/reel position: Wing/2714:03).
2 Albert Korschorke, The Holy Family and Its Legacy: Religious Imagination from the Gospels to Star Wars (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2000), 28.
1

29

images of the Pietà. While Korschorke notes that these family conflicts arise from Christ’s growing
spirituality, they also arise from his maturing body.
As a human being, Jesus’ adolescence is not only the beginning of his intellectual maturation,
but also his development into manhood.3 Literature and the visual arts directed strong attention to
the adolescence of boys in the early modern period, and their bodies became a symbol of erotic love.
As Roger Freitas writes, the image of “the boyish male lover” was idealized in early modern
literature and art, but was “also the object of much real-life desire, by both men and women.”4
Luciano Marcello noted in his Societé maschile e sodomia that Florentine men often prowled the streets
looking for adolescent boys to sodomize as a “right of passage.”5 Other seventeenth-century writers
asserted a medical dimension, arguing that sex with boys was both natural and clean (i.e., free of
venereal disease), as in Antonio Rocco’s L’Alcibiadefanciulloa scola (ca. 1651).6
In such a culture that celebrated and idolized the bodies of adolescent boys as sexually
desirable, we can be assured that early modern writers took notice of this biblical juncture, when
Jesus becomes both engaged in his ministry and, perhaps, physically beautiful. In the early modern
interpretive literature of the Bible, Christ becomes not only a formidable spiritual leader, but also a
desirable young man. Scottish poet Alexander Ross (d. 1654) devoted an entire chapter in his
Mystagogvs poeticvs, or, The muses interpreter explaining the historicall mysteries and mysticall histories of the ancient
Greek and Latine poets (1647) to explicating how the mythological story of “Ganimedes”—the
beautiful boy-Prince of Troy—applies to his conception of Christ’s desirable body. “Our Saviour

The second chapter of Luke’s Gospel ends with the verse: “And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature [Or, age], and in
favour with God and men,” The Holy Bible containing the Old Testament and the New, Newly translated (1680).
4 Roger Freitas, “The Eroticism of Emasculation: Confronting the Baroque Body of the Castrato,” Journal of Musicology
20, No. 2 (Spring 2003): 210.
5 Luciano Marcello, Societé maschile e sodomia (n.d.), 122-24, quoted in ibid., 211-12.
6 Antonio Rocco, L'Alcibiadefanciulloa scola (ca. 1651), quoted in ibid., 212.
3

30

Christ is the true Ganimede,” claims Ross, he is “the fairest among the sons of men.”7 Never far from
royal circles, Ross was once Chaplain-in-Ordinary to the conservative court of Charles I (d. 1649).
Though imagining Christ as Ganymede may seem fanciful, members of court may have deemed
Ross’s religious writing acceptable.
While Ross was working the classical literature of Ganymede into a Christian theology of the
body, Ganymede was also a loaded term with immediate social meaning. Thomas Blount explained
in his dictionary, Glossographia (1661), that the word was slang in seventeenth-century English. A
“Ganymede,” according to Blount, was a “Catamite,” an “Ingle,” or “any Boy, loved for carnal
abuse.”8 As apparatus to flagrant sexuality, ganymedes appear frequently in contemporaneous poetry
and satires. In John Marston’s “Satyre III: Redde, age, quae deiceps risisti” (1598), the character
Luscus
hath his Ganimede,
His perfum’d shee-goate, smooth kemb’d, high fed
At Hogsdon now his monstrous lust he feasts,
For there he keepes a baudy-house of beasts.9
And in Ben Jonson’s “On Sir Volvptvovs Beast” (1616):
In the past pleasures of his sensuall life,
Telling the motions of each petticote,
And how his GANIMEDE mou’d, and how his goate.10

Alexander Ross, Mystagogvs poeticvs, or, The muses interpreter explaining the historicall mysteries and mysticall histories of the ancient
Greek and Latine poets (London: Printed by Richard Whitaker, 1647), 96-7, digital facsimile of the original in the Henry E.
Huntington Library and Art Gallery, Early English Books Online (Bibliography Name/Number: Wing/R1964).
8 Blount also cross-referenced “Ganymede” in his definitions for a “catamite” and an “ingle,” Glossographia, or, A
dictionary interpreting all such hard words of whatsoever language now used in our refined English tongue with etymologies, definitions and
historical observations on the same: also the terms of divinity, law, physick, mathematicks and other arts and sciences (London: Printed by
Tho. Newcombe for George Sawbridge, 1661), digital facsimile of the original in the Bodleian Library, Early English
Books Online (Bibliography Name/Number: Wing/B3335).
9 John Marston, “Satyre III: Redde, age, quae deinceps risisti,” from The scourge of villanie Three bookes of satyres
(London: Printed by I[ames] R[oberts] and are to be sold by Iohn Buzbie, in Paules Church-yard, at the signe of the
Crane, 1598), digital facsimile of the original in the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, Early English Books
Online (Bibliography Name/Number: Pforzheimer/II:664).
10 Benjamin Jonson, The Works of Beniamin Ionson (London: Printed by W. Stansby, and are to be sould [sic] by Rich:
Meighen, Ano D. 1616), 775, digital facsimile of the original in British Library, Early English Books Online (UMI
bibliography/reel position: STC/756:01).
7

31

A Ganymede is a trapping of the “sensuall life”: they belong in the company of “baudy” men who
“pleasure” themselves with boys and beasts. As literary critic Richard Rambuss suggests, if Christ is
a Ganymede, then his body must take on both religious and erotic meanings.11
Nahum Tate chose this precise biblical moment in Christ’s maturity, midway between boy
and man, to transform the familiar Bible story into a scene of amorous rejection, informed by the
theological and artistic contexts of the Mary/Christ dyad as well as the contemporaneous literature
of disappointed love. Hardly studied for its erotic content, Henry Purcell’s setting of Tate’s
erotically-inflected, agitated poem, “The Blessed Virgin’s Expostulation” (H.S. 2, 1693), follows this
line in employing all the tropes of lovesick madness used on the Restoration stage: raging coloratura,
chatty text, obsessive repetition of musical content, harmonic volatility, and the unpredictable swings
from recitative to dance-like aria. In addition, the evocations of dance rhythms provide a physical
basis to the Virgin’s jarring temporal displacements between present and past. However, unlike in
Purcell’s “Lord, what is Man,” which expresses amorous longing for an immaterial godhead, here
the Virgin aims her lovesick devotion at a warm body: her son. Thus, even the most sacred couple,
the Virgin and her son, makes contact with the erotic currents that permeate Harmonia Sacra. More
than a mere mixing of religious distress and erotic devotion, I argue that in setting the “Virgin’s
Expostulation” as a lovesick mad song, a genre he exploited on the stage, Purcell was activating a
humanizing strategy for (re-)embodying devotional practice. To understand the interplay of
madness, sexuality, and sacred devotion in “The Blessed Virgin’s Expostulation,” we need to visit
the theological and visual contexts that inform it.

11

Richard Rambuss, Closet Devotions (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), n. 66, 152.

32

Theological and visual contexts
Visual representations of the Virgin and Christ that predate Purcell’s musical setting of Tate’s poem
convey the profound flexibility of their union. From the Middle Ages emerge icons of Mary as the
earthly spouse or lover of Christ. Sponsus-sponsa imagery unites Christ and Mary as sovereigns of the
spiritual and secular world: Jesus, the Prince of Peace and Mary, the Queen of Heaven.12 In
illuminated manuscripts of The Song of Songs, Mary appears as the personification of Christ’s “bride”
(app., figs. 21-22). The scene in which Christ and his spouse embrace within illuminated capitals
makes the sensuality of this topos visible: “Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth: for thy
breasts are better than wine” (“Osculetur me osculo oris sui quia meliora sunt ubera tua vino,” Sg. 1).
Similarly, Renaissance visual representations of the child Jesus often emphasized his
sexuality, evidence that Christ was God made man. Through the Renaissance, visual artists drew,
painted, and engraved infant Christ reaching for his mother’s chin—an encoded gesture of carnal
desire (app., figs. 23-26).13 Though the gesture hardly seems erotic to modern eyes, the “chin-chuck”
motif has symbolized amorous affection and erotic persuasion between lovers since antiquity. It
appears in Egyptian reliefs of Ramses [Ramesses] III with his concubine (app., fig. 27), on Greek
shields of Priam and Achilles (600-550 BCE), and on Greek vase paintings of Theseus and Ariadne
(app., fig. 28). We also see it in Hellenistic bronze statues of Cupid and Psyche (app., fig. 29) and a
twelfth-century Romanesque cloister capital of Herod and Salome from the Cathédrale de SaintÉtienne de Toulouse (app., fig. 30).
Leo Steinberg has mapped out this tradition in visual art as not just an aesthetic conceit, but
as a completely coherent corporeal theology.

Korschorke, The Holy Family and Its Legacy, 36.
Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1996), 3-5.
12
13

33

By assigning [a gesture of erotic persuasion] to the Christ Child, the artist was
designating Mary’s son as the Heavenly Bridegroom who, having chosen her for his
mother was choosing her for his eternal consort in heaven.14
Steinberg traces these erotic motifs to Saint Augustine’s “Infant Spouse”: “His Appearance as an
Infant Spouse, from his bridal chamber, that is, from the womb of a virgin.”15 Moreover, Christ’s
sexual agency becomes critical if his sacrifice is to be solvent. For Christ to be an acceptable
sacrifice, he must be fully man. Images of Christ affectionately cupping a woman’s chin (even if his
mother’s) are a sign of his human agency, his completeness from birth, and his capacity to love.
These artists demonstrated that incarnate Christ was truly a “lamb without blemish” (1 Pet. 1:19);
that is, he was not a man without sin but without impairment. In addition, the strength of this double
union between mother and son, wife and husband, could be the source of the Virgin’s possessive
devotion when separation threatens her bond with Jesus.

An erotic, agitated text
Nahum Tate’s poem reflects the same sensual energy that permeated medieval and Renaissance
visual representations of the Virgin and Christ.16 While expressing the Virgin’s distress in searching
for her son, Tate also inflected her text with erotically charged language:
Where does my Soul’s sweet Darling stray[?]…
Why, fairest Object of my Love,
Why dost Thou from my longing Eyes remove?

[ll. 2, 8-9]

“Fairest, “sweet,” and “Darling,” are terms normally reserved for addressing a lover. For instance,
Venus calls young Adonis both faire and “sweet” in William Shakespeare’s long love-poem, Venus
and Adonis (1593):
Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ, 3-5.
Saint Augustine, “Sermon IX, 2, Ben 1.91” Sermons for Christmas and Epiphany, trans. Thomas Comerford, Lawler
(Ancient Christian Writers: Westminster, Maryland, and London, 1952), 109, quoted in ibid., 5.
16 Tate later collaborated with Henry Playford to produce Miscellanea Sacra or, Poems on divine & moral subjects (London:
Henry Playford, 1696), a textual companion to H.S. Also containing a frontispiece engraved by Thomas Gribelin II, the
miscellany was the first publishing of some of Tate’s poems while also reproducing many of the poetic texts that appear
in H.S.
14
15

34

Thrise fairer then my selfe, (thus she began)
The fields chiefe flower, sweet aboue compare,
Staine to all Nimphs, more louely then a man,
More white, and red, then doues, or roses are:
Nature that made thee with her selfe at strife,
Saith that the world hath ending with thy life.17

[st. 2]

The young Adonis, the object of her love, is both “more louely then [sic] a man” and exceeds the beauty
of Venus, the goddess of carnal love. Consider also how a groom addresses his young bride in John
Donne’s “The Brides going to bed” (1633):
Therefore thou maist, faire Bride, to bed depart,
Thou art not gone, being gone, where e’r thou art,
Thou leav’st in him thy watchfull eyes, in him thy loving heart.18

[ll. 9-11]

Even after the body departs, it is the fairness, according to Donne, that we remember. Notice how
Andrew Marvell’s “Fair Singer” (1681) conquers men with her double “Beauties” of “Eyes” and
“Voice.”19 Finally, recall how Alexander Ross describes Christ as Ganimede who is “fairest
among…men.”
In addition to employing the idioms of desire, The Virgin’s text also uses rhythmic and
metric deviations to express her intense agitation. While Tate sets the poem, for the most part, in the
common iambic pentameter, the high frequency of trochaic substitutions complicates the
categorization of the poem as truly iambic. The first line, indeed the first disyllable, immediately
departs from the dominant meter with a trochaic substitution:

William Shakespeare, Venvs and Adonis (London: Imprinted by Richard Field, and are to be sold [By J. Harrison I] at
the signe of the white Greyhound in Paules Church-yard, 1593), digital facsimile of the original in the Bodleian Library,
Early English Books Online (UMI bibliography/reel position: STC/081:03).
18 John Donne, “IX. The Brides going to bed,” from “Ecclogue: 1613. December 26,” in Poems, by J.D. VVith elegies on
the authors death (London: Printed by M[iles] F[lesher] for Iohn Marriot, and are to be sold at his shop in St Dunstans
Church-yard in Fleet-street, 1633), 133, digital facsimile of the original in the Harvard University Library, Early English
Books Online (UMI bibliography/reel position: STC/881:25).
19 Andrew Marvell, “The Fair Singer,” Miscellaneous poems (London: Printed for Robert Boulter, 1681), 25, digital facsimile
of the original in the British Library, Early English Books Online (Bibliography Name/Number: Wing/M872).
17

35

/ ˘
˘ / ˘
/ ˘ / ˘
/
Tell me some pitying Angel, quickly say
/
˘
˘
/ /
/ ˘
/
Where does my Soul’s sweet Darling stray,
Writers typically associated iambs, or an unstressed syllable followed by one that is stressed ( ˘ / ),
with natural speech as iambs generally agree with the cadence of spoken English; lines of iambs have
the added benefit of providing an easy flow toward the end of the line. Unsurprisingly, poets usually
assigned iambic meters in English to topics of balance, tranquility, eminence, and justice. John Ash
would later explain in his New and Complete Dictionary of the English Tongue (1775) that the iambic
measure “as to sound, has all the majesty and perfection,” and is “best suited to the more important
and serious subjects.”20
Conversely, writers on poetry and meter associated the hammering quality of trochees, a
stressed syllable followed by one that is unstressed ( / ˘ ), with negative emotions, inversions,
exclamations, and upset. Though John Mason did not expressly link trochaics to femininity in his
Essay on the power of numbers, and the principles of harmony in poetical compositions (1749), he used the
language of femininity when he described trochees as “languid,” “flowing,” the “melting [of] Love,”
and “Sorrow.”21 As an example, he then quoted a poem by John Dryden (d. 1700) about a woman
abandoned by her lover. The river in Dryden’s poem is significant because it reinforces the cultural
notions of the watery nature of feminine despair.
Observ. VIII. This Measure which is naturally languid and flowing is extremely well
fitted for the Description of the most tender and melting Passions either of Love or
Sorrow…

John Ash, The new and complete dictionary of the English language. In Which All The Words are introduced, The Different Spellings
preserved. The Sound of the Letters occasionally distinguished, The Obsolete and Uncommon Words supported by Authorities, And the
Different Construction and Uses illustrated by Examples. To which is prefixed, a comprehensive grammar, In two volumes, vol. 1
(London: printed for Edward and Charles Dilly In The Poultry; and R. Baldwin In Pater-Noster Row, 1775), 25-6, digital
facsimile of the original in the British Library, Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (Gale document: CW114965944).
21 John Mason, An essay on the power of numbers, and the principles of harmony in poetical compositions (London: printed by James
Waugh, for M. Cooper, at the Globe in Pater-Noster Row, 1749), 67, digital facsimile of the original in the Harvard
University Houghton Library, Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (Gale document: CW3316872858).
20

36

On a bank beside a Willow,
Heaven her Covering, Earth her Pillow,
Sad Amynta sighs alone!
From the cheerless Dawn of Morning
‘Till the Dews of Night returning;
Singing thus she made her Moan,
“Hope is banish’d,
“Joys are vanish’d,
“Damon my Belov’d is gone!” 22
Poetic meters also have connections to the humoral system; in this case, trochees and
trochaics correspond to the cold, moist, watery “phlegmatic” humor, often linked to femininity.23
Dryden formed a relationship between poetic meters and the four humors in his Pythagorean poem,
“A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day,” written for the 1687 feast of Saint Cecilia. Giovanni Battista Draghi
(d. 1708) set the poem to music for the occasion; later, George Frederic Handel famously set the
poem into the cantata, Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day, HWV 76 (1739). The first stanza of Dryden’s poem
lists the possible combinations of hot and dry, cold and moist that form the four humors (sanguine,
choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic). The speaker commands them to “leap” to their positions
(“stations”) and obey “MUSICK’S Pow’r.”
FRom Harmony, from Heav’nly Harmony
This Universal Frame began.
When Nature underneath a heap
Of jarring Atoms lay,
And cou’d not heave her Head,
The tuneful Voice was heard from high,
Arise ye more than dead.
Then cold, and hot, and moist, and dry,

Mason, An essay on the power of numbers, 67.
Thomas Walkington explained that “if water bee in his vigour, the body is said to be phlegmaticke.” He continued that
the “phlegmaticke” will even “dreame of surou[n]ding waters, of swimming in riuers of torrents and suddaine showers,
&c.,” The optick glasse of humors. Or The touchstone of a golden temperature, or the Philosophers stone to make a golden temper wherein
the foure complections sanguine, cholericke, phlegmaticke, melancholicke are succinctly painted forth, and their externall intimates laide open to
the purblind eye of ignorance it selfe, by which euery one may iudge of what complection he is, and answerably learne what is most sutable to his
nature (London: Imprinted by Iohn Windet for Martin Clerke, and are to be sold at his shop without Aldersgate, 1607),
39, 77, digital facsimile of the original in Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, Early English Books Online (UMI
bibliography/reel position: STC/724:01).
22
23

37

In order to their stations leap,
And MUSICK’S Pow’r obey.24
Stanzas two through five of Dryden’s “Song” then demonstrate with rhythm, meter, and rhyme the
character of each humor, a combination of hot and cold, dry and moist. For instance, Dryden writes
stanza four in trochaic tetrameter and mentions the “jealousy,” “desperation,” and “frantick” “fury”
that align with the phlegmatic humor (cold and moist). Notable too, is that Dryden equates this
collection of despair with femininity (a “disdainful Dame”):
Sharp VIOLINS proclaim
Their jealous Pangs, and Desperation,
Fury, frantick Indignation,
Depth of Pains, and height of Passion,
For the fair, disdainful Dame.25
As Katherine Hodgekin writes, “within the humoral system women are constructed as the unruly
sex: female bodies, composed predominantly of cold and wet humours…[they are] apt to go out of
frame” (emphasis mine).26 Thus, the first trochaic demand we hear in Tate’s “Expostulation” is a
particularly feminine cry of distress. Conscious of the disruption from the poetic meter, Purcell
repeats the trochee, separating them with the dramatic use of rests (fig. 13). To intensify the effect of
the repetition, Purcell also doubles the pitches (G-G) and then raises it a fourth (C-C). The setting
balloons the trochaic substitution into a breathy, hammering imperative that sets the impatient tone
for the entire poem:

John Dryden, “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day, 1687,” Examen poeticum being the third part of miscellany poems containing variety
of new translations of the ancient poets, together with many original copies by the most eminent hands (London: Printed for R.E. by
Jacob Tonson, 1693), 242-3, digital facsimile of the original in the Harvard University Library, Early English Books Online
(UMI bibliography/number: Wing/D2277).
25 Ibid., 245.
26 Katherine Hodgekin, ed., Women, Madness and Sin in Early Modern England (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited,
2010), 67.
24

38

Figure 13. Henry Purcell, “The Blessed Virgin’s Expostulation,” H.S. 2, mm. 1-3.

Much like how “Lord, what is Man” begins with an eerie succession of intervals to signal spiritual
disquiet, the Virgin’s expostulation in Tate/Purcell immediately opens with metric dissonance that
reflects maternal despair.
As mentioned above, the poem is full of trochaic substitutions, appearing most often when
the Virgin makes demands of her missing angel. The next trochee (“quickly”) is also in lines 1 and 2:
“quickly, say|Where does my Soul’s sweet Darling stray.” Appropriately, Purcell sets the trochee,
“quickly” much like the opening, “Tell me,” by repeating the word three times (fig. 14), correctly
placing stress on the forward syllable in three different ways: a descending interval of a fourth (tonic
accent), a tierce (or ascending coulée), and an ornament (trill):27
Figure 14. Purcell, “The Blessed Virgin’s Expostulation,” mm. 4-7.

These transgressions from the dominant meter of the poem produce a rhythm that sounds uneven
and persistent, fitting for an expostulation. However, dissonance arises when we consider that this is
a monologue for the Virgin Mary, the complaisant maiden whose room (and womb) is invaded and
who demurely obeys instruction: “Behold, the handmaid of the Lord: Let it be done unto me
27

The letter “t” is missing from the abbreviation for trill (tr.) in the first edition (1693).

39

according to thy will” (Lk 1:38). Rather, Tate/Purcell’s Virgin is demanding and agitated. Contained
in these beginning lines is the first indication that the Virgin has lost control, transgressing into fury,
rage, and desperation for her son. Indeed, she more closely resembles Queen Phaedra and
Phoebus’s nymph, two literary women who also express frustration in profane love.

The literature of abandonment
“The Expostulation” also draws from contemporaneous literary-musical sources on the amorous
rejection of women. The first is a mid-seventeenth-century English translation of the Heroides,
Ovid’s letters “penned” by women addressed to their male lovers who have abandoned them.
Appearing shortly before the printing of H.S. 1 and 2 (1688, 1693), Nahum Tate, along with Carr
Scope, John Dryden, and Thomas Otway newly translated the Heroides as Ovid’s epistles translated by
several hands (1680).28 The most striking likeness to Tate’s Virgin is in Otway’s translation of
Phaedra’s letter to Hippolytus (Epistle IV). Queen Phaedra, wife of Theseus, falls in love with her
young stepson, Hippolytus. Unable to admit her love for Hippolytus openly, she writes a letter
expressing her desire for her “Lovely Boy.” Notably, she compares her love for Hippolytus to the
idealized love of Venus for young Adonis:
IF Thou’rt unkind, I ne’re shall health Enjoy;
Yet much I wish to thee, my Lovely Boy:
[…]
Under the spreading shades her Am’rous Boy
The fair Adonis Venus could enjoy,
Atlanta’s Love too Meleager sought,
And to her Tribute paid of all he caught;
Be Thou and I the next blest Sylvan pair:
Where Love’s a Stranger Woods but Desarts are.29

Jacob Tonson the Elder (d. 1736) reprinted this collaborative translation in 1681, 1683, 1688, and 1693, all in London;
erroneously, Johnson in 1681.
29 Ovid's epistles translated by several hands (Heroides), trans. Dryden, Scope, Tate, et al. (London: Printed for Jacob Tonson at
the Sign of the Judges Head Chancery Lane, near Fleet-Street, 1680), 203, 209, digital facsimile of the original in the
Princeton University Library, Early English Books Online (UMI bibliography/number: Wing/O659).
28

40

Phaedra’s love for her stepson is just as noble as Venus’s love for adolescent Adonis: “Be Thou and
I the next blest Sylvan pair.” Much like in Tate’s “Expostulation,” in which the Virgin Mary wishes
her lost “Love” to return unharmed from dangerous “Desarts” and “the Wilderness,
where…Salvages resort” (ll. 5-7), Phaedra also wishes Hippolytus safety from the “Desarts” where
love is scarce. In Purcell’s song, the Virgin fears for her child in bouts of paranoia, expertly set with
sudden effusions of coloratura, especially when imagining him trapped in “a Tyrant’s [Herod’s]
Court” (fig. 15).
Figure 15. Purcell, “The Blessed Virgin’s Expostulation,” mm. 8-27.

41

Figure 15 (continued). Purcell, “The Blessed Virgin’s Expostulation,” mm. 8-27.

Likewise, the song also ends with inconsolable “fear” (fig. 16). Because we know that Jesus is safe in
the temple, we hear her hopelessness as excessive panic.
Figure 16. Purcell, “The Blessed Virgin’s Expostulation,” mm. 106-14.

Phaedra’s likeness to the Virgin is clearest when Phaedra admits that her unrequited love has
driven her mad, wilder than the ribald of a Bacchanal and as mad as “Cybele’s Priests”:
Now like a Bacchanal more wild I stray,
Or Old Cybele’s Priests, as mad as They
When under Ida’s Hill They Offrings pay:
Ev’n mad as those the Deities of Night
And Water, Fauns and Dryards do afright.30

30

Ovid’s epistles translated by several hands, 206.

42

The following stanza is, by far, Phaedra’s boldest proposition and merits lengthy quotation.
Phaedra claims that incest is but a notion that does not disgust (“[afright]”) her but excites
(“enflames”) her. She argues that there is no better way for Hippolytus to honor Theseus’s memory
than to copulate with her in his father’s bed (“Though in my Bed Thou’rt seen, ‘twill gain
Applause”).31 Moreover, carnal love between family members is natural, as is practiced by the gods.
Rather thou fairest Thing the Earth contains,
I wish at first ‘had dy’d of Mothers pains:
How canst thou rev’rence then thy Fathers Bed,
From which himself so Abjectly is fled?
The thought afrights not me, but me enflames;
Mother and son are notions, very Names
Of worn out Piety, in fashion Then
When Old dull Saturn Rul’d the Race of men:
But braver Iove taught pleasure was no sin,
And with his Sister did himself begin.
Nearness of Blood, and Kindred best we prove,
When we express it in the closest Love.
Nor need we fear our Fault should be reveal’d;
‘Twill under near Relation be conceal’d,
And all who hear our Loves, with praise shall Crown
A Mothers kindness to a grateful Son.32
Incestuous desire does not dissolve the boundary between mother and son. Rather, incest reinforces
and strengthens familial ties. In reading Tate, then, we see how the Virgin’s erotic desire for Jesus is
not so much a perversion of familial love but an intensification of it.
Purcell’s setting of Tate’s poem also bears striking topical resemblance to seicento amorous
vocal music. Claudio Monteverdi’s ninth “madrigal of love,” Lamento della ninfa (1638) is also an
“expostulation” in which a lovesick nymph wanders aimlessly when her divine lover, Phoebus—god
of art, music, and poetry, and paragon of male beauty—abandons her. In her examination of
representations of madwomen, Susan McClary writes that Monteverdi’s Lamento is a
prolonged soliloquy sung by the nymph, and it is for this segment that the piece is
justly famous. The particular brand of madness generating the lament is that of
31
32

Ovid’s epistles translated by several hands, 212.
Ibid., 211.

43

obsession: the nymph is fixated on memories of a lover who has abandoned
her…Her responses and reminiscences range widely with respect to affect (self-pity,
anger, grief, envy, erotic longing, hopelessness, etc.).33
Much like in Tate’s “Expostulation,” Monteverdi’s madrigal of romantic abandonment catapults the
nymph into paroxysms of lovesickness. Thus, the religious characters in Tate’s “Expostulation”
parallel those in Monteverdi’s secular dyad. Just as Mary is to the abandoned maiden (Ninfa), so too
is Christ the Ninfa’s lover (Phoebus): divine and endowed with rhetorical skill and physical beauty.

Volatility
While Purcell’s musical setting is in many ways a typical mad song—with a chatty, paranoid text and
raging coloratura—Purcell also employs structural conventions to assist in setting this distraught,
amorous poem. First, Purcell chose the chamber cantata of seicento Rome to accommodate the
Virgin’s volatility. Colin Timms (et al.) write(s) that the chamber cantatas of Giancarlo Rossi (d.
1692), Giacomo Carissimi (d. 1674), and Antonio Cesti (d. 1669) were particularly popular with
English composers both before and after Purcell:
John Blow and William Croft are known to have copied Italian cantatas, and Purcell
too must have been acquainted with them. Several of his later solo vocal pieces
outside the plays—for example…The Blessed Virgin’s Expostulation—reveal in points
of both style and structure some attempt to emulate cantatas emanating from Rome
and Venice in the middle of the seventeenth century. These extended alternations of
declamatory arioso and formalized air with a distinct Italianate flavour are cantatas in
all but name.34
In addition, Peter Holman (et al.) writes that the “Virgin’s Expostulation” “is perhaps the closest
Purcell came to writing an Italianate cantata.”35 The texts of the seicento Roman cantata are “normally
lyrical monologues, i.e. the direct expression of a named or unnamed personage, articulated by a
Susan McClary, “Excess and Frame: The Music Representation of Madwomen,” in Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and
Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 86-7.
34 Colin Timms, et al., “Cantata,” Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online (Oxford University Press), [accessed March 14,
2014], http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/04748pg4.
35 Peter Holman, et al., “Purcell,” Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, (Oxford University Press), [accessed March 27,
2014], http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/41799pg3.
33

44

poet and composer and delivered by a singer.”36 Accommodating the uninterrupted complaints of
the Virgin, Tate’s monologic text is an ideal candidate for a solo cantata setting.
Of the solo cantata varieties, arie di più parti were the most flexible. Meaning “arias in several
sections,” arie di più parti were characteristic for their blending and juxtapositions of aria, arioso, and
recitative depending on the demands of the text. Thus, arie di più parti writing is particularly well
suited to Tate’s poem, with its volatile shifts in mood and time. Accordingly, Purcell’s setting
features no fewer than four shifts between recitative, arioso, and lyrical aria in contrasting keys and
tempi. While most other cantata writers, such as Rossi, preferred the strophic “short aria” cantatas
or ariette corte, Carissimi devoted the majority of his cantata output to these arie di più parti. Indeed,
Henry Playford aligned his publications with Italian song writing when he included a setting of
Carissimi’s, “Lucifer, Cælestis” in H.S. 2.

Temporal displacement
Throughout the five sections of the song, the Virgin continually swings her focus between the
present and the past, an experience perhaps related to psychotic hallucinations. These displacements
in time, assisted by shifts in tempo, meter, and keys, are concurrent with the delirious ranting
common in the Restoration mad song, and are fitting for the Italian arie di più parti that blends
recitative, arioso, and dance-like aria. The song is roughly divided into five parts: 1) a long
exclamatory recitative that explores both the present and past in C minor (mm. 1-55); 2) a dance-like
aria in triple entirely set in the past in C major follows (mm. 56-75); 3) a short recitative section that
shifts back to the present in C minor (mm. 76-81); 4) another aria/dance that carries on her
thoughts about the present, but this time in duple (mm. 82-105); 5) a final recitative on her
hopelessness over the fate of her son in the key of C minor (mm. 106-114).
36

Holman, et al., “Purcell,” Grove Music Online.

45

The above breakdown shows how Purcell’s construction links the perception of time to the
key orientation of each section. In short, C minor is for present terror and C major is for bygone
peace. The most striking example of this is between the first recitative and the following dance in
triple. The long recitative section has several subdivisions but concludes resolutely with despair. She
calls to the Angel Gabriel who had announced Jesus’ coming with a flattering salute: “Hail Mary, full
of grace.” After her shrieking calls for Gabriel—on repeated high G’s—go unanswered, the Virgin
bids “farewell” to her “flatt’ring Hopes” with “sighing” melodic figures at mm. 51 (fig. 17).
Figure 17. Purcell, “The Blessed Virgin’s Expostulation,” mm. 42-56.

The next section begins immediately in the parallel C major and recounts in dance-like
triadic melodies at mm. 56 the glorious past when “Me Judah’s Daughters once Cares’d” (fig. 18). An
accompanied aria in triple differentiates this section from the one prior—a sparsely accompanied
secco recitative, illustrating her solitude.

46

Figure 18. Purcell, “The Blessed Virgin’s Expostulation,” mm. 53-62.

The modal shifts from C minor to its parallel major assist in aural differentiation, but they
also embed the sections of the text with their own affective meanings. At the surface level, key areas
had an emotional and psychological impact for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century listeners.37 In
his Méthode Claire of 1691, Jean Rousseau called C minor the key of “complaints and lamentations,”
and Marc-Antoine Charpentier claimed in his Nouveau traité (1696) that C Minor is effective for
expressing the “gloomy and sad.”38 Accordingly, C minor is the key that Purcell gives to the Virgin’s
complaints that bookend the blissful arias in C major and jolts her back to the present gloom.
Likewise, Johann Jakob Heinse most clearly articulated the character of the key C major in
his Hildegard von Hohenthal (1795-6). Heinse describes C major as the “[signifier] for us, as it were, the
state of nature; virginal chastity and purity, lovely innocence of youth, patriarchal living, golden
age…Young joyful life…Innocence…the soul as pure, [and a] completely beautiful nature.”39 He
also stresses that the tone C is the proverbial “beginning” as both the starting place of most tuning
systems and, often, the lowest note in the vocal range of a soprano.40 Though Heinse was writing a
century after the publication of H.S., it is striking that Purcell also chose C major to express the
Rita Steblin has compiled a comprehensive list of commentary on the affective signification of keys in her book, A
History of Key Characteristics in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries, 2nd ed. (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester
Press, 2002).
38 Ibid., 230.
39 Johann Jakob Heinse, Hildegard von Hohenthal (1795-6), in Steblin, A History of Key Characteristics, 106-7, Appendix: 227.
40 Ibid.
37

47

virginity, purity, patriarchal complaisance, and innocence of the Immaculate Conception, especially
as the Virgin remembers when all of Judah “called [her] of Mothers, the most Bless’d.”
The clearest example of how modal shifts aid in the dramatic flailing to and away from the
present is between the reminiscence of the “Bless’d” pregnancy in C major and the following
recitative section (mm. 66) that moves to a dance/aria in C minor at mm. 73 (fig. 19). The text jerks
suddenly into a recitative that moves through several sonorities (F-minor41—[C-minor]—+6—G)
while the vocal line sings more “sighing” figures on “Now fatal Change of Mothers most Distress’d”
(mm. 76-81). Wandering through keys sonorities works to dissolve the C major affect and pulls us
from the past to the present in C minor.
Figure 19. Purcell, “The Blessed Virgin’s Expostulation,” mm. 69-87.

The first edition (1693) included an E-flat in the basso continuo part; later editions corrected the error as an F-minor
chord tied over two measures (mm. 76-77).
41

48

Another dance section in C minor on the Virgin’s present distress (mm. 82-105) follows this short
recitative. In addition, the rapid coloratura of this section (especially on the word “Laboring,” mm.
100-3) and the obsessive repetition on the word, “How, how, how, how?” at mm. 93-5 contrasts
with the easy lyricism and triadic skipping of the earlier dance in triple on past glory (fig. 20).
Figure 20. Purcell, “The Blessed Virgin’s Expostulation,” mm. 92-105.

Conclusion: “Where’s Gabriel now?”
It is significant that the Virgin calls for Gabriel in her moment of distress. Shrieking for a second
visitation or another “Waking Dream” she is ostensibly asking for a second pregnancy—for to
conceive again is to be filled with God’s favor. How else will she be able to “stem the various Tide”
and tame her wandering soul (“How shall my Soul its Motions guide?”)? The Virgin’s obsessive
retelling of her pregnancy and childbirth, then, does not express her desire to return to the past so
much as it pulls the past forward into the present. “Where’s Gabriel now?” Her calls are in the

49

present (“I call, I call!”) and indicate that the moment for intervention is now. To be filled again with
the Holy Spirit, to conceive, and have another “Wondrous birth” is to return her body to its position
of glory and peace.
The notion that pregnancy and childbirth are the highest attainment of women (and perhaps
of mankind) has historical precedence in the gendered treatises of mid-sixteenth-century
theologians. Of note are Henricus Cornelius Agrippa Knight von Nettesheim’s (d. 1535) writings on
the mysteries of the female body. His fanciful treatise, The glory of women: or, A treatise declaring the
excellency and preheminence [sic] of women above men, which is proved both by scripture, law, reason, and authority,
divine, and humane draws from occult philosophy, astrology, theology, and alchemical belief to
construct theories of the beauty, wholeness, and superiority of women. In 1652, Edward Fleetwood
of Ghent translated Agrippa’s The glory of women into English “for the vertuous and beautifull female
sex of the Commonwelth of England.”
Do not we see that in the procreation of mankind, nature preferreth women before
men? […] For, as the law saith, that is the greatest and cheifest office of women, to
conceive, and to nourish the thing conceived.42
In another treatise, Agrippa argues that men are “imperfect” and incomplete because, among other
reasons, they cannot produce offspring.43 Using the example of the Virgin Mary’s spontaneous
pregnancy, Agrippa writes that women are “a Draught of the whole Creation in Miniature, or a Copy of
that vast Volume done in exquisite Short-hand.”44 Running against the early modern “one-sex model”
championed in Thomas Laqueur’s, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1992) that

Henricus Cornelius Agrippa Knight, The glory of women: or, A treatise declaring the excellency and preheminence [sic]
of women above men, which is proved both by scripture, law, reason, and authority, divine, and humane, trans. Edward Fleetwood
(London: printed for Robert Ibbitson, 1652), 10, digital facsimile of the original in the British Library, Early English Books
Online (UMI bibliography/reel position: Wing/100:E.655[7]).
43 Ibid., Female pre-eminence, or, The dignity and excellency of that sex above the male an ingenious discourse, trans. H.C.
(London: Printed by T. R. and M. D. and are to be sold by Henry Million, 1670), 14, digital facsimile of the original in
the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, Early English Books Online (UMI bibliography/number: Wing/A784).
44 Ibid., 17.
42

50

ventured women as incomplete, Agrippa’s treatises purport that women are wholly perfect (and
perfectly whole) by nature of their ability to produce children independent of man’s influence.
Tate/Purcell’s Virgin is expressly concerned with returning to physical wholeness,
completeness, and “glory.” In recalling Gabriel’s private visitation (and demanding a second), her
virgin pregnancy, and childbirth, she raises the question of her own sexuality. By definition, she had
never had intercourse with a man, but this does not make her a sexless woman. As Judith Peraino
explains, the Virgin was a highly sexualized symbol:
As the ultimate symbol of sanctified inwardness, the Virgin Mary not only redeemed
(virgin) women from the curse of Eve, she also placed them beyond the physical, in
the realm of the pure idea. But in this realm the relationship to the idea of sexuality
was still strong.45
Peraino continues by quoting R. Howard Bloch who notes that “in the patristic totalizing scheme of
desire, there can be no difference between the state of desiring and of being desired.”46 Here,
Peraino argues that virginity assumes sexual desire. Moreover, the boundary between sex and sexless
collapses in the ideal of the virgin, for “to look at, to speak of, to think about a virgin was to defile
her.”47
Just as early interpretive literature of the Bible sexualizes Christ as a Ganymede, and thus
humanizes him, so too does this song sexualize his mother as a lovesick madwoman. She, like
anyone, has desires, complaints, moments of hopelessness, and grieves when rejected. In setting
Tate’s poem as a lovesick mad song, Purcell calls attention to the Virgin’s human body, her sexuality,
and her devotion to Jesus as both lover and son. In inviting us into her desire, Tate and Purcell
present a human figure that entertains and startles us, while, at the same time, resides with us. Unlike
most Restoration era mad songs that isolate the subject as an irrational and disorderly “other,” this
Judith Peraino, Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to Hedwig (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2006), 45.
46 R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1991), 99.
47 Peraino, Listening to the Sirens, 45.
45

51

mad song does the opposite. Rather than alienate the Virgin as an entirely mystical being free of sin,
her mad song instead allows us to recognize her as an entirely mortal, devoted body.

52

APPENDIX

53

Figure 21.
The scribe Thomas (illuminator and writer) of Eberbach, Germany, Commentary on the Song of Songs
(detail), twelfth century, The Bodleian Library (MS. Laud Misc. 150, fol. 003r.), London.

Figure 22.
Bolognese Bible (detail), with text: beginning of the Song of Solomon, historiated initial ‘O(sculetur me),’
thirteenth century, The Bodleian Library (MS. Canon. Bibl. Lat. 48, fol. 238r.), London.

54

Figure 23.
Simone Martini, Boston polyptych: Madonna and Child (detail), ca. 1321-25, tempura on panel, 113 x 63
cm., Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, in Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance
Art and in Modern Oblivion, 2nd ed., revised and expanded (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1996), 7.

Figure 24.
Master of St. Veronica (Cologne School), Madonna with the Sweet-pea Blossom (detail), middle panel of
triptych altarpiece, ca. 1410, tempura on panel, 53 x 34 cm., Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne, in
ibid., 111.

55

Figure 25.
Marco Zoppo, Madonna and Child (detail), ca. 1470, oil on canvas, 40.8 x 29 cm., The National
Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., in Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ, 7.

Figure 26.
Hans Baldung Grien, Holy Family (detail), 1511, woodcut, 37.5 x 24 cm., Geisberg 59, in ibid., 9.

56

Figure 27.
Egyptian relief, Ramses [Ramesses] III and Concubine, 19th Dynasty, Medinut Habu: Mortuary Temple
of Ramesses III, in Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ, 110.

Figure 28.
Archaic Greek vase painting, Theseus Wooing Ariadne, 675-40 BCE, height: 31.8 cm., Heraklion
Archaeological Museum, Crete, in ibid., 111.

57

Figure 29.
Hellenistic, Cupid and Psyche, bronze statuette, Musée du Louvre, Paris, in Steinberg, The Sexuality of
Christ, 6.

Figure 30.
Romanesque, Herod and Salome, ca. 1140, Cathédrale Saint-Étienne de Toulouse, in ibid., 6.

58

EPILOGUE

The book as a historical artifact
The past thus conjured up is, to be sure, largely an artifact of the present.
David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country ‡

More than a collection that provided immediate amusement, Harmonia Sacra was also a preservation
project. It brought together poets and composers from every strata of English society: the
contributors were courtiers, diplomats, prominent academicians, clergymen, and a king.1 Of the
twenty-two named contributors, about half were dead before the publication of Book 1 (app., Table
1).2 Between its earliest poems (collections by George Herbert and John Donne in 1633) and the
publication of H.S. 1, England underwent a Civil War that ended in regicide (1649), reconfiguration
of the government into a republic (1649-60), and the restoration of the monarchy (1660). Late in
1688, the Protestants William III of Orange and his wife, Mary II, dethroned her Catholic father,
James II (and VII).
H.S. was a testament to English religious diversity and conflict. Reflecting the tumultuous
shifts in religious sympathies over four governments, contributors to H.S. were Anglican, Puritan,
converts to and away from Catholicism, and mystics. Playford’s dedication of Book 2 to the
Reverend Henry Aldrich, D.D., dean of Christ-Church, Oxford, affirms that it was the publisher’s
“care indeed to save [these Papers] from Oblivion.” Thus, in buying H.S., one was investing in the
conservation of English religious music history of the past half-century, ensuring its performance,

‡ David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), xvi.
1 Purcell, for instance, set a poem attributed to Charles I in H.S. 1., 77.
2 Every title page reads, “Composed by the Best Masters of the last and Present Age.” It should also be noted that many
of the texts do not attribute authorship and several of the songs do not name the composer.

59

or, at least, its ownership, into perpetuity. Though, the question of how the publishing market might
benefit from H.S. still remains.
The publishing of H.S. coincided with a printing boom in England during the seventeenthcentury. The easy reproduction of past documents coupled with the new ability to compare
historical texts created an impression in modern print cultures of dominating over the past.3 As
David Lowenthal explains, “the diffusion of printed materials engendered confidence that men
would transcend their predecessors’ achievements.”4 That is why the panegyrics that open H.S. 2
begin by denigrating the past:
Long had Dark Ignorance our isle o’erspread,
Our Musick and our Poetry lay dead:
But the dull Malice of a Barb’rous Age,
Fell most severe on David’s Sacred Page.5

[ll. 1-4]

Musick and Verse have been abus’d too long,
Idly to furnish out some Wanton Song;
To varnish Vice, to make loose Folly shine,
And gild the vain Delights of Love, or Wine:
Both Heav’nly-born, but both constrain’d to fall
So far below their great Original,
The Erring World, not knowing how to trace
Through Vile Employments their Celestial Race.6

[ll. 1-8]

And:

While publishing ensure the preservation of history, it also provided moderns an opportunity to
challenge the credibility of the past.7 Lowenthal, again: “Since each present could now build on all
preceding pasts, their accumulated inheritance made moderns ipso facto superior.”8

Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country, 88-9.
Ibid.
5 T. Brown, “To his unknown Friend, Mr. Henry Purcell, upon his excellent compositions in the First and Second Books of Harmonia
Sacra,” H.S. 2 (London: Henry Playford, 1693).
6 An Unknown Hand, “To my Worthy Friend, Mr. Henry Playford, upon his Harmonia Sacra,” in ibid.
7 Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country, 89.
8 Ibid.
3
4

60

Accordingly, the panegyrics in H.S. 2 not only acknowledge the skill of Playford and Purcell
(et al.), but also their skill above all predecessors:
What Praises, Purcell, to thy Skill are due;
Who has to Judah’s Monarch been so True?
[…]
This Tribute from each British Muse is due,
Our whole Poetic Tribe’s oblig’d to you.
For where the Author’s scant Words have fail’d
Your happier Graces, Purcell, have prevail’d.
And surely none but you have equal Ease
Could add to David, and make Durfy please.9

[ll. 1-2, 27-32]

And:
The Church as yet could never boast but Two
Of all the Tuneful Race, from Jubal down to You.10

[ll. 45-6]

Perhaps, then, we read H.S. differently—that from a conservationist spirit emerged a reparative
orientation to history. The above lyrics clearly construct a binary of a past that had lapsed into
inadequacy and a present that can (or has) correct(ed) it. The contributors to H.S. represent the
merits of the present; accordingly, all of Britain thanks them for their efforts (“Our whole Poetic
Tribe’s oblig’d to you”). They were so successful, in fact, that they even corrected the biblical canon
(“And surely none…Could add to David”). As we have seen, H.S. supports a range of cultural elitist
strategies: from sanism to chronocentricity.

The book as an asylum
While we can understand H.S. as a religious history and an object with which to measure the merits
of the present against the past, a more complex matter is making sense of these two religious
songbooks that are full of dangerous spiritual experiences. Crucial to the above is a coherent
taxonomy that includes lovesick madwomen, religious enthusiastic poets, crucifixion scenes, and
9

T. Brown, “To his unknown Friend, Mr. Henry Purcell,” H.S. 2.
H. Sacheverell, “To Dr. John Blow, and Mr. Henry Purcell, upon the Frist and Second Books of Harmonia Sacra,” in ibid.

10

61

divine séances (“In guilty Night,” H.S. 2). These are the very epistemological questions of
classification that troubled Foucault in The Order of Things (1966) when he looked for coherence in
“other” taxonomies of knowledge. Foucault ultimately concludes that “the fundament codes of a
culture” govern the epistemologies of “language, its schemas of perception, its exchanges, its
techniques, its values, the hierarchy of its practices.”11
Foucault had five years earlier detailed a taxonomy of madness and insanity in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.12 Beginning in the seventeenth century, religious, political,
and moral institutions rounded up the fools, the lovesick, the destitute, the diseased, and the overzealous and confined them together in madhouses. Though owing their madness to dissimilar
causes, one trait seemed to unite them: all were unproductive laborers and thus, poor. The fear of
insanity alone did not motivate confinement; rather, rampant unemployment initiated an effort to
contain poverty:
In the classical age, for the first time, madness was perceived through a
condemnation of idleness and in a social immanence guaranteed by the community
of labor. This community acquired an ethical power of segregation, which permitted
it to eject, as into another world, all forms of social uselessness. It was in this other
world, encircled by the sacred power of labor, that madness would assume the status
we now attribute to it.13
But rampant poverty, unemployment, and idleness were merely symptoms of a larger moral
crisis. Foucault continues:
In fact, the relation between the practice of confinement and the insistence on work
is not defined by economic conditions; far from it. A moral perception sustains and
animates it. When the Board of Trade published its report on the poor in which it
proposed the means “to render them useful to the public,” it was made quite clear
that the origin of poverty was neither scarcity of commodities nor unemployment,
but “the weakening of discipline and the relaxation of morals.”14
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, Inc., 1970), xx.
Foucault refers to the period between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment—roughly the entire seventeenth
century—as the “classical” age, epoch, or period.
13 Ibid., Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Random
House, Inc., 1965), 54, 58-9.
14 Ibid.
11
12

62

It is at this same moment that H.S. appears in print available to the public. The songbook may be its
own madhouse for each song is a window into a cell in which resides a subject of great spiritual
need. In the same moralistic impulse that established the asylum, Playford expressly aspired to a
moral cause, positioning the collection against undisciplined and immoral employments of music
that merely “[gratified] a delicate Ear, and a wanton Curiosity.”15 Instead, in marketing it to “pious
Persons” who wished to “heighten their Devotion,” Playford moralized and sanctified commercial
art .16 Buying H.S. thus affirmed the economic and spiritual assets of the purchaser.
In this way, H.S. diverges from other songbooks published at the same time. For instance,
songs in John Carr’s five volume anthology of love songs, Comes Amoris; or the Companion of Love
(1687-94) limit themselves to lighthearted topics: frivolous love and courtship, and musical catches
with ribald word play. Few songs exceed two pages, and none require the high levels of vocal skill,
stamina, and the histrionics of “The Blessed Virgin’s Expostulation” or “Lord, what is Man.”
Notably, the notation in Comes Amoris is also quite large, requiring little effort to read. The
publication seemed to codify that love was simple, fast, and obvious. In addition, publishing five
volumes of love songs seems to say that love is faddish.
Though the letter to the reader in the first book is unreadable in the British Library’s copy,
the fourth book (1693) contains a dedication to Lionell Duckett that gives us some indication of the
purpose of the collection. “‘Tis the utmost of our Ambition,” write John Carr and Samuell Scott,
that the volume serve as “a Diversion of Gentlemen whose souls are refin’d enough to relish the
Charms of Musick.”17 Quite different than Henry Playford’s lofty “Letter to the Reader,” whose

Henry Playford, “To the Reader,” H.S. 1.
Ibid.
17 “Dedication page to Lionell Duckett,” Comes amoris, or, The companion of love being a choice collection of the newest songs now in
use: with a thorow bass to each song for the harpsichord, theorbo, or bass-viol, Volume Four (London: Printed by Nat. Thompson for
John Carr and Sam. Scott, and are to be sold by John Carr at his shop, 1687-94), digital facsimile of the original in the
Huntington Library, Early English Books Online (UMI bibliography/reel positions: Wing/274:07, 136:4-7).
15
16

63

goals were to “Heighten” devotions, to “[actuate] the Powers of the Soul, and fill the Mind with the
brightest and most ravishing Contemplations.”18
The most solemn song in Comes Amoris is the first printing of Henry Purcell’s lengthy song,
“O, Solitude” in volume 1 (1687) that does require considerable stamina to accommodate its long
phrases. However, the song’s melody is almost entirely stepwise over a simple diatonic ground bass.
There is neither coloratura nor difficult recitative while much of the opening melodic material
appears again at the close. Though “O, Solitude” was exceptional in the collection for its
considerable length (modern recordings run anywhere from four to six minutes), it also exemplifies
the “melody-centered,” unornamented, and easy styles of the songs found in Comes Amoris.19
Harmonia Sacra differs from Comes Amoris in nearly every way. Unlike John Carr’s love songs
“currently in use,” never to be reprinted after their initial publication, Playford (et al.) continuously
edited and reprinted H.S. into the eighteenth century.20 According to Nahum Tate, projects like H.S.
(along with his textual companion, Miscellanea Sacra) preserved the work of the English “divines”
into perpetuity; conversely, Comes Amoris was ephemera.21 Playford and Purcell carefully considered,
compiled, and edited the music found within H.S. In a way, the collection was its own kind of
roundup, and it served as, like in Foucault’s assessment of the “great hospitals” of the classical age, a
“[house] of confinement, [an establishment] of religion and public order, of assistance and
punishment, of governmental charity and welfare measures.”22 H.S. offered the public several
exhibitions of unproductive devotion. As the previous fifty years of English history had shown,
devotional practice was neither easy nor was it always successful.
Playford, “To the Reader,” H.S. 1.
Matthew Head’s term, “melody-centered,” is useful here for describing the easiness of Comes Amoris, “‘If the Pretty
Little Hand Won’t Stretch’: Music for the Fair Sex in Eighteenth-Century Germany,” Journal of the American Musicological
Society 52, No. 2 (Summer, 1999): 214.
20 Known new editions and reprintings appeared in 1703, 1714, 1726, 1757, 1760, 1780, 1781, 1790, and 1800.
21 Nahum Tate, “Preface,” Miscellanea Sacra, or, Poems on Divine & Moral Subjects (London: Printed for Henry Playford,
1696), unnumbered page, digital facsimile of the original in the Union Theological Seminary Library (New York), Early
English Books Online (UMI bibliography/number: Wing/T195).
22 Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 43.
18
19

64

The “Divine Song on the Passion of our Savior,” (H.S. 2), an anonymous musical setting of
an unattributed text, exhibits just this kind of static, unproductive devotion. The song is essentially a
series of short, descriptive statements that lead nowhere. Transfixed at the foot of the cross (“My
op’ning Eyes are purg’d”), the melodic setting is strangely dispassionate. In several places, the slow,
calm melodic writing seems more interested in describing the scene than forcing an impassioned
reaction of grief. The anonymous composer set the twice repeated line, “See, see the streams
trickling down,” in unhurried cascading figures that merely reflect the blood “[gushing] from their
wide Wound” (fig. 31):
Figure 31. Unattributed, “A Divine Song on the Passion of our Savior,” H.S. 2, mm. 26-30.

While this song is odd for its disturbing text and expressionless melody, the fixation on
Christ’s body is also worrying. The speaker first identifies his body on the cross by his physical
signifiers:
With ghastly Wounds his Body torn, his Limbs with ruder Scourges worn, no room
for Doubt, Alas! Alas! ‘tis He!
His body then becomes a landscape, which the speaker maps painstakingly.
See, see the Streams that haste to meet another head-long bloody Tide, from his
Hands, and from his Side, to his no less wounded Feet, trickling down, trickling
down.

65

Like so many other songs in H.S., this song finds no resolution, no revelation. What we get, instead,
is nauseating repetition. It is difficult in writing to recreate the song’s sickening close with its seven
slow repetitions of “Ah see ‘em [streams of blood] how they fall!” (fig. 32):
Figure 32. Unattributed, “A Divine Song on the Passion,” mm. 47-60.

This Passion song is one of the most transgressive in the collection not just because of the grotesque
text, but because it replaces spiritual advancement with goalless fixation.
Many of the other songs in the collection feature a despondent subject who is incapable of
finding spiritual resolution. Indeed, the most memorable line in Purcell’s “In the Black dismal
Dungeon of Despair” (H.S. 1) is an angry cry of hopelessness: “Jesu! is there no Redemption, no
Relief!” The texts cry desperately for redemption, such as in “With sick and famish’d Eyes,” (H.S. 1)

66

(“Lord, hear! Shall he that made the Ear, not hear?”), but receive no reply (“The Blessed Virgin’s
Expostulation,” H.S. 2).
If confinement of these transgressors was a “police matter” as Foucault understands it, then
the careful editing stands as the policing of the book.23 Purcell and Playford, compiled (confined),
edited (corrected), and published (presented) the book for a public eager to hear, see, and perform it.
Like many religious publications of the time, Tate’s Miscellanea Sacra (1696), which reproduced many
of the song texts in H.S., also claimed to be “a Book design’d for Publick Benefit.”24 If
understanding H.S. as, in part, a project to assist the poor still seems dubious, Playford appended to
the second edition of H.S. 1 (1703) Henry Purcell’s choral anthem setting of Psalm 41: 31, “Blessed
is he that considereth the Poor and needy.” Here at the end of the book is a collective summons (in
four parts) to the “welfare [measure]” that the songbook aspired.25 Amateurs at home could sing this
anthem together to remind themselves to give generously to the poor while resting assured that they
would be rewarded handsomely: “the Lord shall deliver,” “preserve,” and “comfort him.”
***
Where Musick and Devotion joyn
The Way to Canaan pleasant is;
We travel on with Songs Divine,
Ravish’d with Sacred Extasies.
Epigraph, H.S. 1 (2nd ed., 1703)
Erotica does more than excite us toward ecstasy; it also opens up ways to feel a range of emotions
and sensations: from pleasure to frustration, from humor to somberness. The erotic devotions in
H.S. allowed persons of non-noble pedigree to perform songs of fixation, uninhibited zeal, and
excessive desire under a moral and religious aegis. Moreover, as the title epigraph suggests (1703),

Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 43.
Tate, “Dedication to: Her Royal Highness, the Princess Anne of Denmark,” Miscellanea Sacra, unnumbered page.
25 Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 43.
23
24

67

performing devotional songs erotically is a “Way” of spiritual “travel.” Far from simple hedonism,
physical pleasure felt in music is a direction and an orientation in devotions: a “[Path] to Heav’n
above led thro’ a Heav’n below” (l. 8).26 Ecstatic song delivers us to Canaan, the proverbial
Promised Land, while making the journey more “pleasant.” As George Herbert wrote of “ChurchMusick”: “SWeetest of sweets…if I travell in your companie, you know the way to heavens doore”
(1633, ll. 1, 11-2).27
There is more work to be done on the entire collection as a cultural artifact, such as a study
of its editing and publication history, as well as a critical comparison with Playford’s Divine Companion
(1701). His second collection of devotional songs—a collection of new songs that he commissioned
himself—the Divine Companion’s release ran concurrently with subsequent editions of H.S. Despite
these openings for future investigation, exploring the erotic discourses at key moments in H.S.
clarifies what the body was required, forbidden, and, perhaps, longed to do in seventeenth-century
devotional song.

Title epigraph, H.S. 1, 2nd ed. (1703).
George Herbert, “Church-Musick,” The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations (Cambridge: Thom. Buck and Roger
Daniel, 1633), 57, digital facsimile of the original in the British Library, Early English Books Online (UMI bibliography
name/reel position: STC/890:03).
26
27

68

APPENDIX

69

Table 1. Named Contributors to Harmonia Sacra (1688, 1693), organized by death year.
Poet

Death year

Composer

Death year

Unnamed Lady

?

[Bonifatio] Gratiani

1664

John Dunne [Donne]

1631

Giacomo Carissime [Carissimi]

1674

George Herbert

1633

Pelham Humphrey

1674

Charles I

1649

Matthew Locke [Lock]

1677

Abraham Cowley

1667

Henry Purcell

1695

Jeremy [Jeremiah] Taylor

1667

John Blow

1708

William Fuller

1675

Daniel Purcell

1717

Thomas Flatman

1688

Robert King

1726?

William Crofts [Croft]

1727

William Turner

1740

[Bernard Martin]
Barrincloe [Berenclow]

1704?

Thomas Ken

1711

John Norris

1711

Nahum Tate

1715

Thomas Dereham

1739

70

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