Musical self‐fashioning and the ‘theatre of death’ in late Elizabethan and Jacobean England

Abstract

AbstractThe spectacle of the scaffold and theatre of punishment has received a great deal of attention and revision in recent scholarship. This article adds to the existing body of work on the actions of the condemned and argues that sites of execution were performative spaces, which were adapted and appropriated by English Catholics. This article reveals how martyrs subverted the authority of the state through musical performance and transformed persecution space. Scaffold singing was part of a tradition of martyrological fashioning and emphasizes how the martyrs' legacy was directed by the martyrs themselves as much as their martyrologists. The influence of musical self‐fashioning is visible in multiple performance spaces: in exile, at arraignments, in prisons, and within the households of the English Catholic community. Finally, English Catholics performed the music of martyrs in their households to enhance their devotion, as the scaffold scene was recreated through music in the domestic setting. In this way, the beleaguered Catholic laity memorialized their martyrs with a politically subversive performance, and framed martyrs' final moments with song.