Singing, Acting, and Interacting in Early Modern English Drama

Abstract: The study examines ways in which singing figures as a strategy of action and interaction in early modern English drama. Inquiring into the dramatic role of song in plays performed on London’s public stages between c. 1590 and c. 1630, it draws on works by Francis Beaumont, Thomas Dekker, John Fletcher, Ben Jonson, John Marston, Thomas Middleton, William Shakespeare, and others, to trace diegetic motivations for and responses to songs and singing. The study finds that dramatic persons are portrayed employing song as a means to act, both in the sense of “taking action” and in the sense of “playacting”, presenting an image of themselves or stepping into a persona in order to achieve particular aims. They are also heard to employ it in attempts to create, maintain, or shape relationships to other dramatic persons, inviting to interaction, or enlisting the rhetorical and affective powers of song to move diegetic addressees. A chaste maid passing herself off as licentious, a beggar posing as an itinerant craftsman, a lover donning a disguise to get close to his beloved, a rogue setting out to pick pockets, a lecherous man attempting to seduce an honest wife – these dramatic persons are a motley crew by many counts, but they are all heard to turn to song as a strategy of acting and interacting. Considering singing as an act undertaken with particular objectives and motivations, and as an interaction with effects on the relationship between dramatic persons, means both shifting focus from and adding dimensions to scholarly discussions of song as an intimate, profound, and sincere emotional expression on stage. The examples explored emphasise that dramatic persons sing not only because of who they are or what they feel, but because of what they want to be, how they want to be perceived, and what they want others to do and feel. Singing, the study argues, is a way of doing, being, and becoming on the early modern English stage.