Music and Emotion on the Caroline Stage

Music and Emotion on the Caroline Stage is a meticulously researched account of the power of music in seventeenth-century theatre. Bell deftly weaves together a wealth of historical evidence with nuanced and original analysis of dramatic texts. The book offers a compelling picture of the importance of music for understanding affect and meaning in Caroline drama, and is an indispensible resource for theatre and music historians alike. -- Susan Anderson, Mary Baldwin University, US

This book examines the relationship between music and emotion in the Caroline theatre. Music could be ravishing, it could be unsettling, it could be used as a way of depicting madness itself or of treating that madness. This book explores the many ways in which emotions were provoked, controlled and directed through music and its impact on the theatre audience in a range of Caroline drama. Music allows characters to express their emotions in ways that speech does not; it can be ironic, it can undermine the characters' dialogue, and it can affect the audience in many ways. This book brings together major recent work on emotions and synthesises this work with scholarship on music to demonstrate how music and emotions are intimately linked on the Caroline stage.

Shirley Bell is an associate lecturer and researcher in English at Sheffield Hallam University, UK, specialising in early modern literature, drama, and culture. Her doctoral thesis explored the use of instrumental music and song in the works of Richard Brome, James Shirley, and Ben Jonson's 'late plays' to determine how much of an impact the music had on a holistic understanding of the plays in performance. She has published a piece on Brome for Notes and Queries, and she has been a yearly contributor to the Year's Work in English Studies since 2016. She has presented her work at several conferences including the Society for Renaissance Studies conference, the British Graduate Shakespeare conference and the Medieval and Renaissance Music conference.