Song is integral to Richard Brome’s The Northern Lass (1629), which was performed to great acclaim by the King’s Men at the Globe and Blackfriars theaters, and restaged and reprinted into the eighteenth century.1 The play is not unique among Caroline dramatic works in featuring song as a structural device.2 It stands out, however, for its attention to the spatial dimensions of early modern song performance and, in particular, to the question of how gender shapes the settings framing—and framed by—the songs sung by Brome’s musical protagonists. As he charts the movements of his characters through the streets and households of London, Brome both elides and reimagines ostensible architectural and sociocultural boundaries. In doing so, he establishes a vital interplay between musical self-expression and spatial production.
The Northern Lass hinges on a mix-up between two women named Constance, both of whom are singers: Brome’s titular heroine and Constance Holdup, introduced in the dramatis personae as a “cunning Whore.”3 When the virtuous Constance sends a letter to her presumed betrothed, Sir Philip Luckless, soliciting his favor, he assumes the missive is a request from Holdup seeking support for her “Bastard” (1.4.246). He denounces Constance and expedites his marriage to the widow Mistress Fitchow to avoid further entreaties. In response, Brome’s lovesick northern lass falls into a melancholy-induced madness. The comic denouement again relies on the confusion of these characters as Holdup’s impersonation of the melancholic Constance paves the way for Luckless’s divorce from Fitchow and his reunion with his beloved. Musical settings of three of the songs performed by Constance and one by Holdup are extant, attributed to John Wilson.4 The play’s popularity is also attested to by the songs composed for new print editions and by several ballads centering on the northern lass.5
The Northern Lass repeatedly enacts song’s ability spatially to construct social relationships. As such, it constitutes a useful case study for considering music’s role in negotiating and even dissolving seemingly fixed boundaries in the early modern context. This essay will explore these issues by focusing on three pivotal scenes that use song to reconfigure the domestic spaces framing them and that depict musical boundary making (and unmaking) in explicitly gendered terms: Constance’s first song performance in act 2, scene 3; Holdup’s impersonation of Constance in act 4, scene 4; and the misogynist song performed by Widgin and his friends in act 3, scene 3. Song emerges in The Northern Lass as a powerful mechanism for spatial and sociocultural mediation, one that holds particular ramifications for Brome’s female protagonists.
The interrelationship between sound and space is dynamic and potentially transformative. Location and setting tend to determine the nature and the scope of the sounds produced within particular boundaries. If space holds a powerful capacity to delimit sound, however, sound likewise can alter spatial and social parameters. Spaces—and the perceived boundaries between them—are shaped moment by moment by their inhabitants even as those inhabitants are shaped by the spaces they occupy.6 Sound, however, is a tricky spatial phenomenon. It overflows the boundaries that seemingly delimit it and penetrates walls and bodies in unexpected ways. Judith Butler has traced the “insurrectionary” force of non-normative sounds and gestures introduced into spatial and social settings.7 Such interventions, she argues, can “jam the machinery” of those sites, thereby redrawing their boundaries.8 Butler locates a similarly disruptive force in the excess of the sounding body, accentuating the inability wholly to command the signification and impact of one’s gestures and language: “No act of speech can fully control or determine the rhetorical effects of the body which speaks.”9 Her approach provides a valuable lens through which to consider how song—the product of the body as instrument—might create and reconstitute seemingly fixed boundaries.
Song’s affective potential was certainly recognized in early modern England. Sound was believed to act directly on the body as the vibrating air generated by singer or instrument penetrated the vulnerable ear of the listener.10 Song was understood to be an especially powerful medium, its union of text and tune equally capable of seducing hearers or elevating them to the divine. This rhetorical spectrum underscores the cultural ambivalence associated with song performance, an ambivalence regularly articulated in gendered terms. On one level, music was lauded as a marker of good breeding, integral to educational precepts aimed at preparing young gentlemen for public roles and gentlewomen for the marriage market. At the same time, its association with seduction, sensuality, and effeminacy posed risks for performer and listener alike.11 The conflation of the female singer with the siren, a paradoxical figure represented in the period as a celestial deity responsible for the music of the spheres and as a singing seductress, exemplifies this tension.12 If music was understood as an emblem of universal, sociopolitical, and physiological harmony—that is, a marker of well-ordered boundaries—the performing body activated music’s “insurrectionary” force.13
Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century spatial practices likewise resist straightforward—and straightforwardly gendered—demarcation. Recent work in literary studies has helped to trouble the limiting binaries of private/feminine and public/masculine space in the period, charting the movements and rhetorical interventions of men and women within and through an array of indoor and outdoor settings.14 Early moderns recognized the moderating effects of spatial boundaries on acoustic production. The sonic and gestural rules touted by prescriptive writers were carefully tailored to setting: “I know not,” declares Castiglione’s Unico, “who is so fonde to go about his fence, whan the rest be in their musicke: or to goe about the streetes daunsing the Morisco, though he could do it never so well.”15 Other documents suggest a correlation between location, choice of musical activity, and even musical genre. Samuel Pepys, whose musical proclivities were such that he converted his “Wardrobe” into a “room for Musique,” includes tantalizing spatial details in his accounts of his musical pastimes.16 He describes singing catches and other songs at clubs and taverns, and retiring to his bedchamber to sing psalms, record songs in manuscript notebooks, and dabble in music theory. He also frequently gathered with family and friends to sing after dinner, both in his own house and when visiting others.17 Thomas Morley provides further evidence of the centrality of song in dining spaces in A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke, when Philomathes recounts his embarrassment at being presented with a partbook at a dinner party and being unable to sight sing.18
In practice, however, songs moved fluidly across spatial boundaries, obscuring divisions of gender and class. Men and women came together in the home to sing part-songs and lute songs made popular by commercial theater performances and court entertainments. Psalms were sung in churches, streets, and closets.19 Ballads and bawdy catches were hawked in urban and rural areas and performed in taverns as well as in domestic settings across the social spectrum. Vocal genres also evinced a powerful capacity to complicate and even reshape the boundaries of their settings, as recent interventions in musicology and literary studies are beginning to illuminate. Linda Austern, for instance, has shown how all-male musical gatherings within the home fostered communal identity and reinforced masculine authority within and beyond the household.20 Sandra Clark and Bruce Smith, meanwhile, have explored how the ballad’s flexible “I” enabled women to experiment with new subject positions and critique gender and social hierarchies.21
Such musical acts—and the resultant spaces they generated or reshaped—were often short-lived. Yet song’s transience does not detract from its performative force. It is precisely the fleeting and untamable elements of music, so often overlooked in formal analysis, that account for its affective impact.22 If early modern song was shaped by the contexts of its production and circulation, it also constituted a rhetorical medium that, in performance, held the capacity to disrupt, dissolve, and shift—however briefly—the seemingly rigid boundaries of those sites. In so doing, song laid claim to new spaces of social encounter.
Richard Brome’s extant dramatic works reveal a level of interest in space and location unusual even within what has been termed the “place-realism” vogue of the Caroline period.23 Writing from the unique perspective of a former servant (Brome worked for Ben Jonson), he also interrogates the relationship between social and geographical positioning. In The Antipodes (1638), for instance, Brome imagines an “AntiLondon” that satirizes early modern English hierarchies through a fantastical travel narrative.24 Above all, Brome was “fascinated by the dynamic possibilities of space and place and the ways in which geography can be contested and manipulated.”25 If drama constituted a key mode whereby early moderns expressed and experimented with spatial practice, Brome’s works exemplify this phenomenon.26
Song is central to Brome’s crafting of social and architectural space. In A Jovial Crew (1641–1642), the last of his plays printed during his lifetime, Brome uses song as a sonic framework for the barn the beggars occupy on Oldrents’s estate. The beggars’ music provides ironic commentary on early modern class divisions, at once romanticizing their antics and masking their hardship. In one memorable scene, the crew sings loudly to cover up the screams of a beggar woman in labor: “’tis their Custome,” Randall explains to Oldrents as they hover anxiously outside the barn, “With songs and shouts to drown the woman’s cries. / A Ceremony which they use, not for / Devotion, but to keep off Notice of / The Work, they have in hand.”27 A Jovial Crew remained popular into the eighteenth century in large part because of its singing beggars; it was adapted into a comic opera in 1731.28
This musical-spatial interplay is most fully realized in The Northern Lass, one of Brome’s early triumphs and a work that has received surprisingly little critical attention.29 Audiences were enamored with the music of the northern lass’s voice, understood both terms of her songs and her northern dialect:
Shee came out of the cold North, thinly clad. But Wit had pitty on her; Action apparrell’d her, and Plaudits clap’d her cheekes warme. Shee is honest, and modest, though she speake broad: And though Art never strung her tongue; yet once it yeelded a delightfull sound, which gain’d her many Lovers and Friends, by whose good liking she prosperously lived. (sig. A2r–v)
Brome’s commendation of the lass’s “delightfull sound” in this dedicatory epistle signals the play’s preoccupation with the singing and speaking voice as a marker of location and identity. The northern lass’s voice is a remarkably consistent signifier in the midst of the play’s mix-ups and disguises. It is her singing which prompts her uncle to recognize her in act 2, when she appears as a masque performer: “The Womans voice had much in’t like my Neece” (2.6.1207). Holdup’s impersonation of Constance hinges on her ability to mimic her sound, exemplified by Fitchow’s confident “recognition” of Holdup-as-Constance: “I know it is shee by her tongue, though I never heard her before” (5.7.2668).
Brome’s conflation of Constance’s musicality and her geographical dislocation also invites her audience to read her as a potentially contradictory character, intensifying the ambivalence registered by the female singer and by musical performance in the period. Northern English registered a fraught relationship between language and national identity.30 Constance’s dialect situates her as pure and honest—she is introduced as a “Virgin, of a most hopefull goodnesse” (1.5.320–321)—but also as Other. Her foreignness, however, also contributes to her sexual appeal. Before Constance makes her first appearance in act 2, Mistress Fitchow, hoping to secure a match between Constance and her brother Widgin, commends the lass in precisely these terms: “[She] sings, and speakes so pretty northernly they say” (2.1.714). Widgin’s eager reply, meanwhile, transforms Constance into an acoustic commodity as he imagines her as a new addition to his ballad collection: “I have a great many Southerne songs already. But Northern ayres nips it dead. Yorke Yorke for my money” (2.1.731–732). By using dialect and song to accentuate Constance’s displacement and attractiveness, Brome places the question of how spatial boundaries, musical expression, and gender inform each other at the heart of his play.
Brome’s portrayal of his northern lass is complicated by the sonic and geographical slippage between the two Constances. For the audience, Fitchow’s approbation of the virtuous northern lass would be difficult to dissociate from Sir Luckless’s act 1 tirade against Constance, whose letter he has mistaken for Holdup’s. Luckless does not refer explicitly to Holdup’s singing voice here, but he clearly has music on his mind as he laments her exclusion from a satirical ballad, “Cupid’s Muster”: “Constance! shee had a Bastard tother day too. What a mischievous Maw has this shee Caniball that gapes for mee! Slight a common trader, with I know not how many! I marvell she was left out of Cupids Muster. Sure shee bribd the Ballat-maker” (1.1.246–249). Positioned alongside a ballad that likely offered a musical catalog of London prostitutes, the threat of Holdup’s gaping “Maw” evokes both her genitalia and the open mouth of a singer.31 Before either Constance appears on stage, therefore, Brome uses music—and the ballad genre in particular—to trouble the boundaries that normally would render them distinct foils: north/south, rural/urban, virgin/whore. The line between “pretty” singing and the threatening “Maw[s]” of “Cupids Muster” could be dangerously thin.
Constance’s acoustic presence is substantiated immediately after Fitchow and Widgin’s interchange about her voice. Her first appearance, in act 2, scene 3, also features her first song performance. The scene takes place in the home of Constance’s uncle Squelch, where she is living. At this point in the play, Beavis (a servant to Constance’s governess) has tricked Anvil (Widgin’s governor) into visiting the house by implying that it is in fact the brothel out of which Holdup operates. As he enters, Anvil’s assumptions about the space shape his first impressions, comically revealing the disparity between Constance’s residence and the places of ill repute Anvil has visited in the past:
A place of fair promising! How have I liv’d that never discover’d this place before? This place royall! But sought my recreation in by-lanes, and sluttish corners, unsavory Allies and Ditch-sides? when here the whole house is perfum’d: An Earle might thinke it his owne lodging. (2.3.818–822)
The arrival of Constance’s governess, Mistress Trainwell, does nothing to dispel his illusions. Ironically, her horrified response only serves to highlight the power that his preconceptions have to shape his interpretation of the building he has entered: “If you can imagine what you are, where you are, what you would have, or where you would be, I pray tell mee sir” (2.3.840–842).
Constance’s singing at first seems to reify these imagined boundaries. She appears above in her “Chamber” (2.2.813), confiding her feelings for Luckless in what, she assumes, is a musical soliloquy. This is the first of several moments in the play that testify to the importance of song as a privileged mode of self-expression for Constance. Here, however, Brome’s spatial positioning of Constance relative to Anvil—although both are visible to the audience, she is in a separate room, and he overhears her from below—combined with Anvil’s expectations about his location, transforms the impact of Constance’s performance: “Sweet prologue to the insuing Interlude!” (2.3.913), he proclaims, “Shee has rais’d my desire above her noates. Why am I thus ravishd, and yet delayd?” (2.3.916–917). Constance’s musical disclosure of her love for Luckless results in double signification, as her lovesickness collides with Anvil’s sexualized misinterpretation of her performance. Anvil figures her music as a quintessential seduction.
The effect is comic, but the scene is important not only in confirming the slippage between Constance and Holdup that has, to this point, been implicit, but also in underscoring the powerful—and powerfully gendered—interworkings of music and space in the play. Constance’s song is spatially delimited from the rest of the scene. This is reinforced not only by her physical separation from Anvil but also by Anvil’s verbal framing of the performance in terms of the imagined boundaries of the brothel. “There is no government under the Sunne, like the politique government of a Bawdy-house” (2.3.902–903), he pronounces before Constance begins to sing. Playing on early modern analogies that likened the structure of the household to the structure of the state, the statement ironically evokes the careful maintenance of domestic, physical, and civic boundaries; the word government last appeared in act 1 in reference to Constance’s well-regulated upbringing (1.5.320). Anvil echoes himself at the end of the scene—“The politique government of this little common wealth!” (2.3.932)—placing spatial markers around Constance’s performance.
Anvil’s preconceived notions of “place”—the word appears three times in his speech that opens the scene—are crucial in shaping his reaction to the song, but Constance’s performance literalizes the brief transformation of Squelch’s home from place into space, house to brothel. Her song goes so far as to emblematize the sexual encounter Anvil came to the house to experience. Her ecstasy mirrors his as she is transported by the “divine” beauty of Luckless’s “shape”: “I can find more ods / Twixt him and others then I can, / find betweene him and Gods” (2.3.904–912). John Wilson’s musical setting (musical example 6.1) reinforces her naïve longing through its simple harmonies and predominantly major mode. Even in her melancholy, Constance’s music remains remarkably hopeful, though the interesting tension in the piece between duple and triple time arguably hints at her inner torment.
From the audience’s perspective, however, the scene showcases the manipulative and destabilizing potential of song. Witnessing Constance’s performance, they experience multiple spaces at once—Squelch’s house, as well as the imagined brothel—and a song that conveys Constance’s yearning while also playing into every stereotype of the period concerning the sensuality of women’s musical performances. These two levels of signification operate to some degree independently, but they cohere in the figure of Constance. Although Brome’s lovesick heroine emerges from this scene still virtuous, her singing body is nonetheless marked by the sensual and erotic effects of Anvil’s recontextualization and the articulation of her own desire.
Brome further capitalizes on song’s ability to elide boundaries and reconstitute new spaces in his musical conflation of Constance and Holdup. Constance confides her feelings for Sir Luckless again through song later in act 2, witnessed by Luckless himself as she performs, disguised, in a household masque. As she descends further into melancholy, beginning in act 3, she turns increasingly to song to express her emotional deterioration.32 Holdup’s song performance in act 4, scene 4, taps into Constance’s favored mode of communication and the musical manifestation of her melancholy as she strives to replicate her counterpart’s “fit” (4.3.2179). Brome’s conflation of Constance-as-singer and as-whore reaches its apex at this point. Structurally, the scene mirrors Constance’s first musical appearance in act 2. It takes place in the house of one of Squelch’s tenants, where Squelch is keeping Holdup (disguised as his niece) for his own pleasure. Once again, a man—Widgin in this case—enters under false pretenses, tricked into thinking that he is about to meet his hoped-for betrothed, the balladeering northern lass, to help heal her melancholy. Unlike Constance, however, Holdup is a knowing participant in this deception. The spatial workings of this scene play out very differently as a result, accentuating the performativity of her encounter with Widgin and his resultant humiliation.
Richard Brome |
John Wilson |
Musical Example 6.1 “Some Say My Love Is Butt a Man,” by John Wilson. Transcribed from NYp Drexel MS 4041, fol. 10r.
In the brothel scene, Anvil remains distanced from Constance by his misinterpretation of the setting, Constance’s song contained—even as it is transformed—by his commentary on the “government” of the supposed bawdy house. Holdup, too, is initially separated from her audience; the stage directions note that she is concealed behind a “hanging” (4.3.2180, stage direction). Here, however, spatial demarcation serves to accentuate the self-consciousness of her role-play. The house becomes, in effect, a theater. Before Holdup withdraws, she announces her transformation: “They come most fitly, and I must into my fit” (4.3.2178–2179).33 She appears, as planned, first mimicking the throes of childbirth and then singing a lullaby, “Peace Wayward Barne,” to her baby. At this point, Widgin actually enters Holdup’s performance space, bringing the illusion created by her impersonation and his misperception of the situation into direct contact. Tapping into the notion that lovesickness could be cured by sexual intimacy with the beloved, Widgin addresses Holdup immediately after she has finished her lullaby, pretending to be Sir Philip and promising her marriage. The consummation of their relationship is confirmed in act 5, when Widgin boasts to his sister that he “phillipt her” (5.7.2694).
As in the brothel scene, song plays a crucial role in delimiting the space of their encounter. Most significantly, Brome makes music integral to the performative force of their marriage vows, as Holdup and Widgin woo each other with fragments of songs:
Hol. Marry mee, marry mee, quoth the bonny Lasse; and when will you beginne.
Wid. As for thy Wedding Lasse wee’ll do ewell [sic] enough in, spight o’the best o’thy Kinne. (4.4.2258–2261)
Later, confiding the consummation of the relationship to his sister, Widgin again resorts to song to convey the “delight” of the moment (5.7.2698). Widgin, however, fails to recognize the spatial performativity of Holdup’s songs, overestimating as a result his own ability to maintain control either of Holdup or of the presumed boundaries framing their musical exchange. He sees his impersonation of Sir Philip within the space created by Holdup’s melancholy ballads as transient, and securely delimited by the circumstances: “Shee may perhaps, when shee comes to her selfe, and finds me to be no sir Phillip, be a little startled” (4.4.2311–2312). It is he, however, who is astonished to discover that he has in fact married a whore.
While the scene literalizes the sexualization and seductive potential of the female singing body introduced in the brothel mix-up, it is important to note that Holdup’s songs, like Constance’s earlier in the play, offer a poignant commentary on her own circumstances. As such, her impersonation further complicates the interplay between the domestic space in which Squelch maintains her and the boundaries established by the deliberate staging of her ballads, also situating her performance as private lament. Matthew Steggle persuasively reads Holdup’s songs as evidence of Brome’s sympathetic portrayal of his “cunning Whore” and, by extension, the overlooked affinities between the two Constances: “The Lass sings about men who desert women, and Holdup sings about the singleparenting which for her has been the consequence.”34 Holdup’s second song, “As I Was Gathering Aprill Flowers,” sung directly to Widgin after their vows have supposedly instigated the “cure” of her melancholy, offers an especially bitter example. Playing on Widgin’s earlier acoustic commodification of Constance, Holdup offers the song as her dowry. The song is blatantly phallic, relating the speaker’s encounter with a “subtile Serpent” in an arbor (4.4.2283): “the Snake beneath me stir’d; / And with his sting gave me a clap, / That swole my belly not my lap” (4.4.2290–2292). Wilson’s relatively cheerful setting (musical example 6.2), which echoes Constance’s earlier encomium to Luckless in its opening motive and overall harmonic and metrical structure, offers ironic commentary on the much darker text.35 Even as Holdup’s appropriation of the ballad’s first-person perspective enables her to impersonate Constance, it simultaneously affords her a position from which to voice her own vulnerability to men like Squelch as well as the sexual vulnerability of all women. Holdup reinforces the multilayered function of her performance and its associated critique in her ensuing interchange with Widgin: “by my conscience, tis true, twere made i’ Durham, on a Lasse of my bignesse” (4.4.2294–2295). Widgin’s inane response, “By my troth ’tis pretty” (4.4.2293), highlights his obliviousness to his own role in such tales.
The ballads sung by Constance and Holdup draw compelling attention to the expressive significance of song as a mode of truth telling for women in The Northern Lass. As the framing of these scenes through Anvil’s and Widgin’s lustful eyes suggests, however, song is not a straightforwardly authorizing discourse for Brome’s female protagonists. When produced by male characters, songs assume a very different—and arguably much less flexible—narrative and spatial function. Widgin’s determination to possess Constance/Holdup musically and sexually is ominously intensified in act 3, when he rebels against his domineering sister. Unlike the two Constances, Fitchow never sings, but she is a formidable speaker, memorably revealing in soliloquy her determination to “Controle, controvert, contradict, and be contraruy to all conformity” (1.6.417–419) after her marriage to Luckless. Her servant Howdee also testifies to her capacity for physical violence (2.5.1050–1065); Steggle likens her mourning ring to a “knuckleduster.”36
Richard Brome |
John Wilson |
Musical Example 6.2 “As I Was Gathering Aprill Flowers,” by John Wilson. Transcribed from NYp Drexel MS 4257, no. 47 and MS 4041, fol. 16v.
As her relationship with Luckless progresses, Fitchow lays claim to her authority in both musical and spatial terms. In act 2, learning that revelers are arriving at her doorstep to present a masque, she positions herself as an exceptionally loud singer capable of overpowering the ensuing entertainment: “if they enter to make a Taverne of my house, ile add a voice to their consort shall drowne all their fidling” (2.6.1151–1153). The subsequent argument with Luckless figures marital authority as literal control of household boundaries:
Fit: Locke up the dores, and keepe them out.
Luc: Breake them open, and let them in.
Fit: Shall I not bee Master of my owne house?
Luc: Am not I the Master of it and you. (2.6.1155–1158)
Although Fitchow loses this particular squabble, she reclaims her domestic authority in act 3, locking Luckless out. “My sister,” declares Widgin, “hath fortified her lodging with locks, bolts, barres, and barricados” (3.1.1398–1399). Control of the thresholds of the home becomes synonymous here with the sanctity of the thresholds of Fitchow’s body.
When Luckless finally resigns his claim to the widow, he does so in terms that again highlight her sonic and spatial agency: “Oh I tremble to thinke on her; her presence shakes the house like an earthquake; the outrage of Prentizes is not so terrible to a Bawd or a Cutpurse, as her voyce is to me” (3.3.1779–1782). The audience immediately experiences the full force of that voice as Fitchow explodes onto the stage, again locking horns with Luckless as she seeks to bar him from her threshold. This time, however, Brome does not allow her railing to continue unchecked. Branded as a scold, Fitchow experiences the brunt of song’s capacity not only to comment on but to delimit social relationships when she finds herself shut out of a moment of male musical bonding.
Tired of his sister’s insults, Widgin calls his companions to help “Keepe her . . . off” (3.3.1852). They join hands and begin a circle dance, creating a site that functioned as an important mechanism of cohesion and segregation in the period. Dancing, like music, brought men and women together across boundaries of age and social class. It could also, however, exclude. Circle dances performed by men alone were a relatively rare occurrence; Christopher Marsh suggests that they tended to emphasize virility.37 His hypothesis is consistent with the space created by the dancing men in The Northern Lass.
Here, though, song combines with dance to intensify the establishment of a distinctly gendered communal space.38 The men mock Fitchow with a rendition of “Hee that marries a Scold,” a misogynist song that pokes fun at the torments suffered by men who “wed[] with a Roaring Girle / That will both scratch and bite.” While the scold may dominate her husband verbally, he enjoys full control of her body: “Though he study all day to make her away, / Will be glad to please her at night” (3.3.1871–1874). When Bullfinch—who is, ironically, a justice of the peace—enters partway through the entertainment, he is physically and musically “pull[ed] . . . into the Round” (3.3.1865, stage direction). Joining the dance, he, like the other male participants, helps to “bear the burden” (3.3.1852, stage direction) of Widgin’s song. The stage direction indicates that Fitchow, meanwhile, “scolds and strives to be amongst ’hem” (3.3.1852, stage direction).
If Fitchow’s exclusion is reinforced spatially by the gleefully spinning bodies of Widgin and his friends, it is underscored musically by the song’s refrain structure. In her discussion of women’s singing in Othello, Heather Dubrow argues that song “establishes and strengthens gendered bonds” in part by laying claim to a ritualistic space that “resist[s] interruption.”39 The communal repetition demanded by the refrain, “But he that marries a Scold, a Scold,” exemplifies this phenomenon.40 In a reversal of the sonic and spatial domination she hoped to achieve in act 2, Fitchow is quite literally drowned out—and shut out. Although the scene ends with her expelling Widgin and his companions from her home, the men exit the stage still singing, their masculine community intact—at least for the moment. As Katherine Steele Brokaw suggests in her essay in this volume, the harmony enacted by communal song and dance ultimately offers temporary respite from underlying social tensions. Widgin’s performance nonetheless establishes song as a powerfully gendered tool for spatial control.
Fitchow’s silencing anticipates Constance’s surprising reticence in the last scenes of the play. Act 5 begins by again reminding the audience of her acoustic and musical presence. Echoing Fitchow’s initial endorsement of the lass, Luckless’s servant Pate notes that, “she prattles very prettilie” (5.1.2452). After Constance has been united with Luckless, however, we do not hear from her again, though she reappears on stage “disguis’d and Masqu’d” (5.9.2787, stage direction) in the final scene. That she remains silent on stage throughout these final machinations may have been in part a practical move; if the same actor played both Constances, he would have been needed in this scene to voice Holdup’s final lines.41 Introduced from the outset as a beautiful singer and speaker, however, Constance’s silence cannot be taken as a straightforward cure of her melancholy. With the sounds of Fitchow’s railing and Widgin’s circle dance still ringing in the audience’s ears, does this moment offer acoustic commentary on the subjugation of women within marriage? Julie Sanders sees it as “a performance of social containment that leaves a rather sour taste in the mouth.”42 Like other ambiguous depictions of silent women in early modern drama, however, such a reading would depend in part on the staging of the scene. It is also complicated by Holdup’s lucky release from her union with Widgin following the revelation of her identity and Tridewell’s insinuations that he is not as excited about his impending nuptials with the seemingly unattainable Fitchow as he expected to be.
This is a strange conclusion to a play that has consistently emphasized Constance’s musical voice. Perhaps, though, it ultimately works to underscore music’s disturbing capacity to affect architectural and social spaces elsewhere in the play. The emphasis in the final scene is on the redrawing of relational boundaries. Brome continues to highlight the illusions of performance here, because nearly every character—including Constance—appears in disguise as they arrive at Squelch’s home. “This is some inchaunted Place, and the people are charm’d. I have mistaken the house sure” (5.9.2807–2808), marvels a dazed Luckless. Brome’s focus, however, is on visual, rather than musical, misinterpretation. As character after character throws off his or her disguise—a sequence that recalls the layered revelations underpinning the comedy in Jonson’s Epicoene—boundaries begin to reestablish themselves. It is easier, it seems, to reverse the tricks of the eye than the ear in The Northern Lass.
Indeed, as the play achieves comic closure, Brome tacitly leaves the spatial and relational potency of musical sound that has dominated the play unchecked. In doing so, he continues to remind his audience of music’s capacity both to shape individual sites of encounter and to trouble and exceed those boundaries. When Constance and Luckless leave the stage in act 5, scene 2, for instance, the quarto specifies that the music that plays throughout their reunion continues unabated into the next scene, refusing containment. Constance’s “Masqu’d” appearance in the final scene, meanwhile, maintains her association with sensory manipulation. (Recall that one of Constance’s early musical performances in the play occurs when she is similarly disguised for the household masque at Mistress Fitchow’s.) Although the play’s conclusion relies on the affirmation of her marriage to Luckless, who is revealed partway through the scene, nowhere do the stage directions indicate that she takes off her own disguise.
Confronting the interplay between sound and space in early modern culture is, ultimately, predicated on absence, a quest for silent traces of transient sound and the settings within which they echoed.43 Constance’s ambiguous reticence in this final scene evokes such methodological challenges. Still, it is difficult to imagine a character defined in terms of her voice remaining silent indefinitely. In the printed version of the play, Brome suggests that Constance is fully capable of a sonic return. Writing to his dedicatee Richard Holford, he insists that the “late long Silence” (sig. A2v) of the lass—the three-year gap between the play’s initial staging and its publication—is temporary, and one she is eager to end. Audiences concurred; in at least one late-seventeenth-century production, Constance (played by the talented singer-actress Charlotte Butler) was responsible for an epilogue. It is likely, too, that some productions featured musical entertainments following the play’s conclusion in which the actor playing Constance participated. Constance’s final positioning, therefore, is not easily synonymous with either spatial or social containment. Even in silence, Brome’s musical heroine offers an eerie reminder of the unruly potential of musical sound and of the singing bodies that affect spatial and sociocultural boundaries so powerfully in The Northern Lass and in early modern English culture.
1. For summaries of the play’s early stage and print history, see Fried, Critical Edition, ix–xiii, xix–xxiv; and Bentley, Jacobean and Caroline Stage, vol. 3, 81–84. More recently, Julie Sanders has edited the play for Richard Brome Online, with the 1632 quarto text and a modern-spelling text viewable side-by-side; she is currently preparing a print edition for Oxford University Press. The Richard Brome Online edition also includes a helpful stage history of The Northern Lass, prepared by Elizabeth Schafer (http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/brome/history.jsp?play=NL).
2. Ingram, “Operatic Tendencies,” 489–502.
3. Brome, The Northern Lass, sig. A1v. I follow the quarto text, edited by Julie Sanders, modernizing the long s.
4. Jorgens, English Song, vols. 9 and 10, facsimiles of US-NYp Drexel MS 4041 and MS 4257. The songs in question are “A Bonny, Bonny Bird I Have” (Drexel MS 4041, fol. 11r, and MS 4257, No. 45); “As I Was Gathering April Flowers” (Drexel MS 4041, fol. 16v, and MS 4257, no. 47); “Nor Love nor Fate Dare I Accuse” (Drexel MS 4041, fol. 10v, and MS 4257, no. 99); and “Some Say My Love Is but a Man” (Drexel MS 4041, fol. 10r). Although the survival of these settings helps to document the play’s popularity, dramatic music often circulated only in performance; see Stern, Documents of Performance, 120–173.
5. See Fried, Critical Edition, xix. The English Broadside Ballad Archive (http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu) documents a number of “northern lass” ballads in the seventeenth century, testifying to the reciprocal influence between northern (especially Scottish) ballad culture and Brome’s heroine. See Wales, Northern English, 79.
6. See Lefebvre, The Production of Space, esp. 142; and Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, esp. 117–118.
7. Butler, Excitable Speech, 145. Smith has also drawn valuable attention to the slipperiness of sonic experience in his archaeology of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sound, Acoustic World. I emphasize Butler’s work here, however, because of her attention to the transformative potential of this unruliness. For an excellent discussion of how gender shaped the sociocultural interventions of vocal sound in early modern England, see Bloom, Voice in Motion.
8. The phrase is Irigaray’s, This Sex Which Is Not One, 78.
9. Butler, Excitable Speech, 155.
10. See Gouk, “Raising Spirits,” 87–105, and “Some English Theories of Hearing,” 95–113; Smith, Acoustic World, 101–106. See also Bloom, Voice in Motion, chapters 2 and 3, which trace the interplay between voiced breath and listening ear (66–159).
11. On the gendering of music and of musical sound, see Austern, “‘Alluring the Auditorie to Effeminacie,’” 343–354; “‘For, Love’s a Good Musician,’” 614–653; “The Siren, the Muse, and the God of Love,” 95–138; Music, Sensation, and Sensuality, 285–317; Dunn and Larson, ed., Gender and Song; and Wong, Music and Gender.
12. See Austern, “‘Sing Againe Syren,’” 420–448; Austern and Naroditskaya, Music of the Sirens, esp. Calogero, “‘Sweet Aluring Harmony,’” 140–175; and Larson, “‘Blest Pair of Sirens,’” 81–106.
13. On the tension between music as philosophical ideal and performance practice, see Ortiz, Broken Harmony, and Minear, Reverberating Song, esp. 19–22.
14. See, for example, Chedgzoy, “Politics of Location,” 137–149; Findlay, Playing Spaces;Kolentsis and Larson, Gendering Time and Space; Flather, Gender and Space; Larson, Early Modern Women in Conversation, 39–59; McMullan, Renaissance Configurations; Orlin, Locating Privacy, esp. 296–323; and Trull, Performing Privacy and Gender.
15. Castiglione, The Courtyer, sig. L.iii.v.
16. Pepys, Diary, vol. 5, 230.
17. For examples of these activities, see Pepys, Diary, vol. 1, 111, 194, 205, 302; vol. 3, 94, 99; vol. 8, 4, 206; vol. 9, 125, 151.
18. Morley, A Plaine and Easie Introduction, sig. B2r.
19. For a helpful introduction to the performance of psalms in domestic and church settings, see Temperley, “‘If Any of You Be Mery,’” 90–100.
20. Austern, “Domestic Song,” 123–138.
21. See Clark, “The Broadside Ballad and the Woman’s Voice,” 103–120; and Smith, “Female Impersonation,” 284–301.
22. See Abbate, “Music: Drastic or Gnostic?,” 505–536.
23. Steggle, Richard Brome, esp. 8–9. See also Miles, “Place-Realism,” 428–440; Sanders, Caroline Drama, 43–55, and “Spaces and Sites in the Play,” in her introduction to The Northern Lass; and Kaufmann, Richard Brome, 13–14.
24. Brome, The Antipodes (1640 text), sig. Ev.
25. Steggle, Richard Brome, 9.
26. On drama and spatial practice in the period, see Findlay, Playing Spaces; Hiscock, The Uses of This World; and Sanders, The Cultural Geography of Early Modern Drama.
27. Brome, A Jovial Crew (1652 text), sig. F2.
28. Kaufmann (Richard Brome, 36) describes A Jovial Crew as “something close to operetta or musical comedy.” For an analysis of the songs in A Jovial Crew, see “Appendix 1: Songs” in Tiffany Stern’s recent Arden edition (256–259).
29. On the music of the play, see Sanders, “Music, Song, and Ballad-Culture,” in her introduction to The Northern Lass; and Shaw, Richard Brome, 40–41. Shaw notes that Brome “employs song in The Northern Lass with an ingeniousness rarely shown by his contemporaries” (40).
30. Blank, Broken English, 104–108, and Wales, Northern English, 77–88.
31. On the “promiscuity” of the ballad form, see Bruster, “The Jailer’s Daughter,” 293; and Ortiz, Broken Harmony, 207.
32. Brome draws on close associations linking melancholy and song in his treatment of Constance’s later songs, reinforced by their overt allusions to Ophelia’s ballads; Constance’s penchant for ballad discourse also recalls the jailer’s daughter in The Two Noble Kinsmen. See Bruster, “The Jailer’s Daughter,” 277–300. On the relationship between melancholy and song in the early modern context, see Dunn, “Ophelia’s Songs,” 50–64; and Eubanks Winkler, O Let Us Howle Some Heavy Note, 114–165. These echoes are reinforced in the workshop staging of act 3, scene 3, developed for Richard Brome Online. The Northern Lass, Videos (act 3, scene 2), Richard Brome Online (http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/brome).
33. The word fit playfully connects Holdup’s staged melancholic lunacy with Widgin’s well-timed appearance. Fit also denotes a section of a song or a tune, thus anticipating Holdup’s musical performance.
34. Steggle, Richard Brome, 26.
35. On the potentially contradictory signification of ballad tunes and texts, see Marsh, “The Sound of Print,” 171–190.
36. Steggle, Richard Brome, 22.
37. Marsh, Music and Society, 333–337.
38. On the importance of song for the creation of masculine identity in domestic settings, see Austern, “Domestic Song,” 123–138.
39. Dubrow, The Challenges of Orpheus, 225.
40. Fitchow’s musical humiliation would have been further intensified if the audience joined in singing the refrain.
41. This is purely speculative; there is no firm evidence for such a doubling. However, given the scripting of the two characters, the vocal requirements they demand, and the sonic slippage between them, their doubling is nonetheless an intriguing possibility to consider and one that was explored (though not ultimately used) during the staging workshops undertaken in conjunction with Richard Brome Online. I am grateful to Julie Sanders and Tiffany Stern for their insights into this issue. On the acting resources of the King’s Men in the late 1620s and early 1630s, see Bentley, Jacobean and Caroline Stage, vol. 1, 16–26.
42. Sanders, “Introduction,” para 24.
43. See Smith, Acoustic World, 110–114.
