A Musical Allusion in the Faerie Queene

Abstract

We owe a great debt to Judith Anderson for teasing out so many meanings in the first line of The Faerie Queene, ‘A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine.’1 But there is yet more to discover. The line surely alludes to ‘pricksong’, music sung from notes ‘pricked out’ on a page, and ‘plainsong’, music ‘developed for the unaccompanied unison singing of Christian liturgies’ (plainsong, n., OED 1). The two invariably appeared together in treatises on music. The Protestant theologian Thomas Becon (1512/1513–1567), in his Relikes of Rome (originally published in 1560), argued that neither form of signing, enjoyable as they undoubtedly were, should have been permitted into the true church: Pope Gelasius, Pope Gregory ye fyrste S. Ambrose with other, brought in fyrst of all ye playne song into the churches … Pope Vitalian being a lustye singer and freshe couragious musition hymself, brought into the church pricksong descant, & all kynde of sweete and pleasaunt melodye. And bycause nothing should wante to delight the vayne, folysh and ye idle eares of fond & fantastical men, he ioyned ye Organs to ye curious musike. Thus was Paules preaching & Peters praying tourned into vaine singing & childysh playing, unto ye great losse of time, & unto ye utter undoing of Christen mens soules, whiche live not by singing & pipyng, but by every worde yt coometh out of ye mouthe of God.2