The Poetics of the Wise Fool in the Music and Letters of Ignatius Sancho

Abstract

ABSTRACT While the correspondence of the Black British writer, musician, butler, and shopkeeper Ignatius Sancho has long been recognized as pioneering in its use of the sentimental literary style to articulate anti-racist and anti-slavery positions, his music has largely evaded serious interpretative consideration. This essay considers one way in which Sancho apparently used music to convey his moral messages. His song ‘Sweetest Bard’ and his instrumental dance piece ‘Mungo’s Delight’ suggest that he adopted and reappropriated the persona of the ‘wise fool’, a figure well known to eighteenth-century readers from characters such as Shakespeare’s Falstaff, Sterne’s Yorick, and Cervantes’s Sancho Panza. Understanding these two pieces of music through the lens of the wise fool helps to elucidate Sancho’s use of music as a means of calling attention to the prejudices of white British society.