Counterpoint: Musical Skill and Literary Practice in Early Modern England

Abstract

This dissertation provides an interdisciplinary history of skilled practice in early modern England as it explores the unlikely survival of medieval polyphony in the same spaces and communities as early forms of professional theatre and vernacular literary production. A recurring figure throughout the dissertation is the boy chorister, whose unbroken treble voice was key to the late-medieval expansion of choral polyphony. By tracing how the choristers’ activities changed in response to the successive reforms of the English liturgy during the 16th century, I show how musical practices shaped the development of new forms of poetry and drama. Chapter 1 traces the office of the chorister back to its origins in the late-medieval church. Through a case study of the composer Christopher Tye, I show how new forms of instrumental chamber music responded to the pressures of religious reformation by translating the choristers’ skills outside of ecclesiastical space and ritual time. Tye’s original music, however, also remembered the choristers’ role in medieval liturgical drama, marking their status as a community suspended between sacramental and secular practices of performance. Chapter 2 explores the changing soundscape of the Reformation church and, in particular, the importance of contrafacture – the practice of setting new words to existing music – for understanding the development of English as a literary language. I argue that contrafacture not only shaped the post-Reformation practice of the choir but also informed Thomas Sternhold’s creation of the metrical psalm. By reading the histories of musical and poetic metre together, the chapter demonstrates how the sound of Sternhold’s verse was entrained to the new rhythms of instrumental dance music, translating oral skills from the chamber onto the page and then into the church. Chapter 3 returns to the skilled community of the choir and explores their role in the development of professional London theatre. Although the surviving records of choristers’ drama are sparse, I read their lingering presence in Shakespeare’s works as an intimate record of a lost performance tradition: a late example against which Shakespeare measured the development of his own craft and the collaborative achievements of his company of adult players.