Early modern elegies

Abstract

Although death and mourning have been the subject of much research in early modern English literature and history, K. Dawn Grapes’s With mornefull musique is the first book-length study of the musical elegy in this period. While many of the elegies discussed are widely known (especially those of William Byrd), the book provides an opportunity for a broader contextual analysis of the genre and its functions in society. Exploring the emerging popularity of the musical elegy from c.1575–1650, With mornefull musique is organized around the types of people about whom musical elegies were written. Grapes begins with the earliest elegies, which were associated with courtier Sir Philip Sidney, and expands to consider those for further courtiers, knights, kings, queens and other women. Grapes sees the elegy as a ‘lens for viewing class and social structure’. The main strength of the book, therefore, is its illumination of the individuals who are commemorated, as well as the complex social connections between the composers, the deceased and the dedicatees of the printed music volumes in which the majority of elegies survive. Key to Grapes’s argument is that elegies were not only vehicles for mourning and commemoration, but also played a significant part in the initiation and development of patronage relationships. Indeed, she argues that the relationship of the deceased to the printed collection’s dedicatee is often more discernible than any relationship between the composer and the subject of the elegy. Grapes therefore suggests that elegies were used by composers to ‘strengthen an emotional bond to a patron through evocation of shared grief’, regardless of whether or not the composer had any personal connection to the deceased. Pointing to the typical placement of elegies at the end of music collections (and often with contrasting scoring), their limited circulation beyond the printed collections in which they first appear, and the lack of records of elegies being sung in any particular situation, Grapes also argues that elegies served as a ‘lasting musical monument’ that was both physical and aural.