An Intermedia Approach to Seventeenth-Century English Popular Song Culture

Abstract: This essay sets forth examples for multidisciplinary approaches to seventeenth-century English popular song and its presentations across media by tracing the contextual histories of popular tunes. Historical musicology and literary studies have given priority to notated works written by composers or authors supported by powerful institutions like the church, aristocratic patrons, or the crown. Yet, to truly understand English musical culture means engaging with not only canonical behemoths like the dramatic works of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries, the poetry of John Milton, the Italian operas of G. F. Handel, John Dowland’s lute music, the English virginal school, and ballad opera, but also how these works draw on popular songs circulating in London’s theaters, streets, and homes. Seventeenth-century English popular music and its transmission, reception, and preservation defy the notion of discrete categories of elite and popular, oral and written, high and low, public and private. Our methodologies for studying it should acknowledge this circulation and transformation.

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