Conference Agenda

After forty-five years of Elizabethan reign, the 1603 accession of James I to the English throne created a new governmental power structure with different expectations, expressions of loyalty, and separation of households within the ascending royal family. While methods of music transmission through manuscript and print dissemination and courtly entertainments continued much as they had before, the devotional objects of artistic expression shifted to align with the interests of individual courtiers, exposing institutional biases, sexual preferences, and new cultural norms.

The papers in this session each focus on representation and meaning found within the music and lyrics of popular madrigals, anthems, and masque songs of the era, as linked to specific individuals. For instance, “The Countess of Bedford,” posits masque production as a means of establishing courtly identity and influence in the Cult of Anna. “Spying on Oriana” identifies the queen’s favorite Jane Drummond with the codename Amadís, revealing her place within Spanish spy networks and female homoerotic relationships at court, as illuminated through madrigals in published collections. Finally, through examination of semantic linkages and musical-sexual metaphors, “Passing the Love” asserts that the Jonathan Lamentations constitute a site for legitimation of King James’s homoerotic feelings as an extension of his monarchical power.

Collectively, the papers demonstrate the importance of music in conveying both public and private messages, forming political and artistic alliances, and granting agency to valued courtiers. Further, findings allow for a reassessment and discussion of oft-portrayed gender roles, while introducing previously overlooked arbiters of political influence, thus revealing new considerations of hidden musical and literary semantics in the early seventeenth-century courts of King James I and his consort Queen Anna of Denmark.

The second half of the sixteenth-century in England is often noted for its so-called “Cult of Elizabeth,” as perpetuated by the era’s panegyric poetry, songs, and entertainments. Yet factionalism also produced a number of Elizabethan sub-cults heralding specific courtiers who wielded influence and held the power to advance the careers of those outside the nobility. Attached to the Sidney-Essex circle, Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford, stood as a leading patroness of literature and the arts from the earliest days of her youthful marriage. The prefatory material of John Dowland’s Second Booke of Songs (1600) provides just one example of directed praise, extended with a hope for reward and recognition from the esteemed lady. Lady Bedford’s courtly ambitions, however, were not fully realized until the accession of James I. Upon the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603, Bedford, through her own initiative, became the first and highest ranked lady in the new Queen Anna’s entourage, a position she mostly retained for more than twenty-five years.

Building upon the work of biographers Lawson and Barroll, as well as Jacobean masque scholarship by Winkler, McManus, Walls, and others, this paper briefly examines Bedford’s activities in the age of Elizabeth, endeavors through which she solidified connections that placed her in an especially advantageous position in the subsequent Jacobean regime. Greater in-depth consideration of her role within the newly established seventeenth-century court of James and Anna follows, highlighting the importance of the Countess’s participation as patroness, commissioner, performer, and even director and producer for Anna’s courtly masques. From Daniel’s Vision of the Twelve Goddesses (1603) to Jonson’s Masque of Queens (1608) to White’s Cupid’s Banishment (1617), productions tied to Bedford influenced an entire generation of musical, theatrical, and literary artistry, while supporting the efforts of contemporaneous playwrights, poets, and musicians. In this environment, Lady Bedford was instrumental in enabling a new “Cult of Anna” from 1603 onward, transferring pastoral adoration from Elizabeth to the ascending queen, overseeing a coterie of royal admirers, and firmly establishing a separate public identity for Anna, apart from that of her husband James I.

The Spanish romance Amadís de Gaula gained a significant following in the aristocratic circles of Elizabethan and Jacobean England, where it was enjoyed for its many plot twists and chivalric adventures. At the same time, its characters were also placed at the center of a far more serious and dangerous endeavor: the lovers Amadís and Oriana, as well as their son Beltenebros and others were used as codenames by Spanish spymasters for real-life Elizabethan and Jacobean nobles of the upper echelons of court who enjoyed almost unlimited access to England’s monarchs.

The connections between the English monarchy and the Spanish chivalric tale have been most notably established through a collection of popular madrigals of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century honoring Amadís’s lover, Oriana. Oriana’s identity in the madrigals has been a contentious topic among musicologists, and both Elizabeth I and Anna of Denmark have been put forward as possible Orianas. New evidence gleaned from Spanish archives suggests, however, that the true identity of Oriana lies within the overlooked espionage system that protected Spanish interests in England through the covert work of female spies, including, most crucially, Jane Drummond: Lady of the Queen’s Bedchamber, favorite of the queen, and Catholic informant.

By exposing Drummond’s secret role as “Amadís,” this paper illuminates the way female relationships in royal circles were manipulated by spymasters to influence international policy. Furthermore, it uncovers hitherto unnoted thematic connections in visual, literary, and musical arts that open a new homoerotic strain in the treatment of the “nymphs of Diana,” who co-star in the Oriana madrigals, expanding thereby on the findings of Laurie Stras and Laura Macy as well as those of queer theorists such as Valerie Traub. Through a study of Drummond’s position and influence, this paper brings forth evidence to identify Anna of Denmark’s role within the Spanish spy network as “Oriana” and shows that fictive homoerotic images could help create and cement the actual sociopolitical and sexual alliances cultivated in espionage networks, which in turn influenced policymaking in the era’s most vital affairs of state.

Though scholars have argued that “in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, sexuality was not […] the starting place for anyone’s self-definition,” King James I may well have been an exception to the rule. He consistently exhibited homoerotic behavior, and at the same time used his power to elevate male favorites such as George Villiers to the Duke of Buckingham. Through his actions, James subverted expectations by reconfiguring his homoerotic desires into a fundamental extension of his monarchical power.

In this paper, I argue for the existence of an early modern English interpretive community that heard representation of James’s fascination with Buckingham in the sacred musical setting of King David’s Laments. I begin by noting that a subset of the Davidic Laments focus not on the death of David’s son Absalom—an event many scholars relate to James’s loss of his son Prince Henry (d. 1614)—but rather on the loss of Jonathan. It was the latter whom David described as a “brother” and also as someone whose “love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women” (2 Samuel 1:26). Acknowledging that Di Grazia’s archival work on the Lamentations demonstrates the impossibility of linking the works’ production directly to events in James’s life, I instead attend to semantic similarities. Tracing depictions of James’s homoerotic behavior in courtly accounts, poetry, and invectives, as well as his self-fashioning of divine authority through a Davidic frame, reveals resonances between James’s behavior and the text of the Lamentation. Not only do the familial and homoerotic elements of this biblical text evoke James and Buckingham’s relationship, a theological reading of David and Jonathan’s love, as a form of covenant, fits precisely the Foucauldian notion of sexuality as a “discourse that transmits and produces power.” Employing Morley’s A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke, I consider musical enactments and embodiments of erotic pleasures within Weelkes’s and Ramsey’s settings. As a space for musical-sexual metaphor and linked semantically to James’s proclivities, I argue that the Jonathan Lamentations constituted a site for the legitimization of homoerotic feelings and for queer-world making in the Jacobean Era.