Overview

The 1613 marriage of Princess Elizabeth of England to Count Palatine was one of the most spectacular events of King James's court, lavishly celebrated with banquets, tournaments, fireworks, and most notably, with masques-extravagant entertainments with elaborate sets, costumes, dancing, and songs. Although the masque lyrics were all printed with the dialogue in 1613, music survives for only one song. In Unmasked, author Ross W. Duffin reconstructs music for the three wedding masques of Thomas Campion, George Chapman, and Francis Beaumont, revealing through close reading that the songs are partsongs sung by an ensemble, rather than an accompanied solo singer. His reconstruction enables complete performance of the masques for the first time in four centuries.Duffin's study also presents a fourth masque which survives from the Palatine wedding but was not published or performed in England at the time. Celebrating the joining of the two Protestant powers and urging the Protestant conversion of the rest of the world, it is also in French, with lyrics for singing, and dances called for at several points. The songs have been reconstructed using music from the French metrical psalm repertoire, and the dances from a collection of French dances published in Germany just months before the wedding.All four of the Palatine wedding masques appear in the book with complete dialogue and descriptions, along with reconstructed songs and dances, for the first time making them fully available for study and performance. In Unmasked, students, scholars, and renaissance readers of all stripes will find rich new material to use in their own research and teaching and a new perspective on these important court entertainments.

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9780197771488

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Reviews

No one has done more than Ross Duffin to recover the lost music of Shakespeare's England. This book does much more, and constitutes an essential contribution to Jacobean political and cultural history. * Stephen Orgel, J. E. Reynolds Professor in Humanities, Emeritus, Stanford University, author of The Jonsonian Masque and The Theatre of the Stuart Court * Building on the handful of examples of songs that provided dual service within a masque and in another context, Ross Duffin makes a strong case for there being more masque song settings hiding in plain sight. Unmasked explores this hypothesis (drawing on Duffin's longstanding scholarly interest in contrafacta) while also providing a practical edition for future reconstructions. * Peter Walls, Emeritus Professor of Music, Victoria University of Wellington, author of Music in the English Courtly Masque, 1604-1640 * This ground-breaking volume should be read by anyone interested in Jacobean drama. I hope it will also inspire performances of these extraordinary works. * Peter Holman, MBE, Emeritus Professor of Musicology, Leeds University, author of Four and Twenty Fiddlers: The Violin at the English Court, 1540-1690, Director, The Parley of Instruments * Through a combination of sheer hard work and aesthetic sensibility, along with no little practical poetic intelligence, Duffin has not merely given new voice to the masque performers of yesteryear, but has allowed them to sing once more. * Nadine Akkerman, Professor of Early Modern Literature & Culture, Leiden University, author of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Hearts and The Correspondence of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia *

Author Information

Ross W. Duffin led the Historical Performance Practice program at Case Western Reserve University from 1978 to 2018. His work has focused on reconstructing songs from English Renaissance plays and poetry collections, and on historical tuning. He has also published on musical iconography, historical pronunciation, theory, notation, and improvisation.

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