In Staging Harmony, Katherine Steele Brokaw reveals how the
relationship between drama, music, and religious change across England's
long sixteenth century moved religious discourse to more moderate
positions. It did so by reproducing the complex personal attachments,
nostalgic overtones, and bodily effects that allow performed music to
evoke the feeling, if not always the reality, of social harmony. Brokaw
demonstrates how theatrical music from the late fifteenth to the early
seventeenth centuries contributed to contemporary discourses on the
power and morality of music and its proper role in religious life,
shaping the changes made to church music as well as people's reception
of those changes. In representing social, affective, and religious life
in all its intricacy, and in unifying auditors in shared acoustic
experiences, staged musical moments suggested the value of complexity,
resolution, and compromise rather than oversimplified, absolutist
binaries worth killing or dying for.The theater represented the music of
the church's present and past. By bringing medieval and early Tudor
drama into conversation with Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, Brokaw
uncovers connections and continuities across diverse dramatic forms and
demonstrates the staying power of musical performance traditions. In
analyzing musical practices and discourses, theological debates,
devotional practices, and early staging conditions, Brokaw offers new
readings of well-known plays (Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Shakespeare's
The Tempest and The Winter's Tale) as well as Tudor dramas by
playwrights including John Bale, Nicholas Udall, and William Wager.
