ELIZABETHAN MYTHOLOGIES Studies in poetry,drama and music

For lovers of music and poetry the legendary figure of Orpheus probably suggests a romantic ideal. But for the Renaissance he is essentially a political figure. Dealing with plays, poems, songs, and the iconography of musical instruments, Robin Headlam Wells reexamines the myth, central to the Orpheus story, of the civilizing power of music and poetry. In doing so he acknowledges a debt to the New Historicism and its recovery of political meanings that traditional historical scholarship has sometimes been guilty of obscuring. But he is also critical of certain faulty premises in New Historicist criticism that have led to some radical misinterpretations of the period. Dealing with plays, poems, songs and the iconography of musical instruments, Robin Headlam Wells re-examines the myth, central to the Orpheus story, of the civilizing power of music and poetry. This book was first published in 1994. These words were written not to Queen Elizabeth, but to her successor James I.