From the late sixteenth century to our own time, depictions of Queen Elizabeth I and her court have granted a prominent place to music. On film, stage and audio recordings as well as in documentary accounts, music has been woven into the pageantry of Elizabethan court life and showcased the queen's and leading court figures’ refined taste and participation in the legendary native flowering of the arts. As with her mother, Anne Boleyn, music was incorporated into Elizabeth's legend shortly after her death and transmitted with it to successive generations. By the years leading up to the Second World War, ‘[of] Elizabeth's musical capacities it [was] hardly necessary to say anything as they [had] become so familiar by frequent reference’.Footnote ¹ Music has most often served the image of Elizabeth as an accomplished woman, beloved ruler and example for her (common) people. It has also helped to bridge her personal and political faces, especially for eras in which gender roles were rigidly delineated and the womanly virtues did not include effective governance. In the words of one presenter to the General Federation of [American] Women's Clubs near the end of the First World War, ‘Queen Elizabeth became [sic] less heartless when we hear her playing on the harpsichord.’Footnote ² Perhaps this is less anachronistic than it seems. Perhaps, as Butler's book suggests, this capacity of music to sound across the divide between body politic and individual sensate body, and between public and more intimate spaces and occasions, was a large part of its appeal to Elizabeth and those around her in an era in which music was more than a pleasant pastime. Perhaps mastery of music equated to mastery of statecraft and nationhood as well as sublimation of personal passions.

Less than a century after Elizabeth's death, following civil war and the restoration of the English monarchy, John Playford already upheld her as a historical model for ideal musical practice across civic and ecclesiastical contexts. He tells us that Elizabeth ‘was not only a lover of this Art [of music], but a good Proficient therein’; ‘nor did she delight only in the Civil, but took especial care for the Divine use thereof in the Worship and Service of God’.Footnote ³ For John Hawkins in the eighteenth century, Elizabeth was the child and sibling of three other musical monarchs, a skilled performer and patron whose love of ‘state and magnificence’ guided secular and especially sacred musical practices during her reign.Footnote ⁴ For the Victorian William Chappell, Elizabeth was the royal trendsetter for a nation in which ‘music seems to have been in universal cultivation, as well as universal esteem’. Her ‘singing and playing upon the lute and virginals [had] been so often mentioned’ that he did not need to elaborate on them beyond reference to ‘popular’ songs and ballad tunes she purportedly played on her keyboard for recreation suspiciously similar to that of well-bred ladies of his own time.Footnote ⁵ Following the First World War, Elizabeth's performance and patronage of music became especially noteworthy for their political dimensions across the class spectrum. ‘The extraordinary affection of her subjects for Queen Elizabeth’, wrote Herbert Antcliffe in the Musical Times in 1920,

Although Jeremy Smith has since cast doubt on Elizabeth as the intended Oriana of The Triumphs in 1601, interest in the extent of national and regional ‘political songs’ and in courtly manipulation of music as a tool for power during her reign have continued.Footnote ⁷ Butler's meticulously researched monograph is the first book to demonstrate the extent to which Elizabeth and those around her understood and harnessed the capacities of music as recognized by early modern thinkers and applied them to their own ends. It makes an original and important contribution to the study of early modern music. With its thorough foundation in multidisciplinary scholarship on Elizabeth and its appended glossary of musical terms for non-specialist readers, this book also allows music to take its place in early modern court studies and Tudor political history. At its centre stands Elizabeth as the royal patron, performer and possessor of the appropriately feminine musical skills for which she has been recognized for centuries. Yet she is also presented as recipient of musical petitions of various sorts, and, perhaps most importantly, as master of the speculative and philosophic understanding of the art most often separated by scholars from the era's performance practices. Butler, in fact, shows how Elizabeth and those around her carefully brought what her chapel musician Thomas Morley still famously maintained as distinct kinds of musical knowledge – the practical and the speculative – into contact.Footnote ⁸

Queen Elizabeth I succeeded her sister Mary to the throne of England at a time when the ‘regimen’ of women was both novel and considered ‘monstrous’, especially by factions who did not adhere to their lady monarch's religious denomination.Footnote ⁹ It was also an era in which formalized literary debates about the nature of the female sex proved lucrative for Western European authors and printers.Footnote ¹⁰ To be a woman, as numerous commonplaces and treatises reminded readers, was to be weak of mind and body, foolish, impressionable and in need of firm manly guidance. It was also to possess potentially dangerous erotic power, especially by those considered marriageable, attractive or outside direct patriarchal control. However, anatomy was not destiny. The sex of the body was to some extent malleable by behaviour and by such invasive influences as music and drugs. ‘I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman,’ declared Elizabeth in her famous Armada speech to her troops on 9 August 1588, ‘but I have the heart and stomach of a king and of a king of England too.’Footnote ¹¹ She knew well how to serve as a queen and as prince of her realm by manipulating her place on what was for her era a fluid gender spectrum. Music, which also possessed feminine and masculine elements and enhanced each person's gendered aspects, was one of Elizabeth's own and her supplicants’ chief tools in negotiating the evident paradox between her queenly exterior and ‘the heart and stomach of a king and of a king of England too’.

Elizabeth's father and grandfather, the first Tudor monarchs, worked to establish their courts as international musical centres and to provide music education for their children. Like her father and her siblings, the young Elizabeth was trained in the practicalities of contemporary music and was heir to an Aristotelian ideal of royalty as recreational performers and expert judges of professional music. During her father's reign, international standards of courtiership placed renewed emphasis on musical knowledge which, if anything, escalated throughout the sixteenth century.Footnote ¹² Programmes of humanist education across Europe also increased exposure to ancient and early medieval texts on the powers of music to affect visible and invisible aspects of the universe, living beings and social collectives. The rise and meteoric spread of Neoplatonic thought and the religious debates of the sixteenth century further propelled these ideas into a wide range of translations, treatises and glosses, as well as new artistic products. Not coincidentally, from around the time of the first Tudor ruler and peaking in England at the end of the dynasty, another favourite subject for Western European literary defence and debate was music as both practical art and intangible force.Footnote ¹³ When Elizabeth ascended to the monarchy, it was therefore expected that music should serve as a signifier not only of the international standing of her court but also of the harmony of her nation and her personal embodiment of its ‘civil and divine’ aspects. As a sixteenth-century head of state and in the tradition of her Tudor predecessors, Elizabeth employed a large number of professional musicians for her court and royal chapel. These singers and instrumentalists were featured in functions ranging from intimate gatherings that conferred power on those invited to participate to public ceremonies shared with international diplomatic visitors. Because Elizabeth's courtiers and the foreign diplomats who frequented her realm were largely brought up under the same educational ideals as she, musical skill, especially critical faculties and knowledge of the powers of music, could generally be presumed. This is where Elizabeth had to be especially cautious about her gender. It is also where she possessed certain advantages as a woman and as a prince.

Butler points out that the perils and powers of music were highly gendered, but that, like gender itself, belonged to a continuity. Music was an ancient liberal art and science, especially suited to ‘free men’ and members of the early modern diplomatic classes. On both Aristotelian and Platonic authority, the art had the capacity to affect not only individual souls and bodies, but also social collectives and the nation state. Especially through ceremonial use, sounding music literally re-presented the harmonious unity made from the accord of diverse individuals. As a literal and metaphorical force for moral order, it inspired good and just governance from heads of state, their regional designees and their foreign representatives. But music was also a slippery, seductive entity increasingly recognized to enhance dominant character traits and the underlying moral qualities of its performers and listeners, many of which were tied to gender. Elizabeth's father's musical reputation had led to the preparation of diplomatic gifts, whereas her mother's had contributed to fatal charges of adultery and a posthumous reputation as a siren-like performer.Footnote ¹⁴ Especially early in Elizabeth's reign, before music had become a positive, exemplary aspect of her legend and when she remained available for courtship and marriage, there was real danger that her reputation could suffer from the wrong sort of indulgence in it. On Platonic authority, and as increasingly emphasized by mass-market vernacular ‘how-to’ music books, music was an art of love, of erotic dalliance and courtship.Footnote ¹⁵ According to numerous of the era's moralists, it therefore posed a double threat to women's virtue. The sensuous, pre-rational aspects of the art could undermine (male) authority through excessive use or through performance by women, especially those considered beautiful as all royal or noble women must be. Females were also held to be particularly susceptible to musical blandishments because, as the first English translation of Castiglione's Libro del cortegiano put it not long after Elizabeth's ascent to the throne, their ‘tender and soft breastes are soone perced with melody and fylled with sweetnesse’.Footnote ¹⁶ This notion became, if anything, more widely known throughout Elizabeth's reign; one of the main complaints Shakespeare's Egeus makes to his sovereign in A Midsummer Night's Dream (c.1595) about an unapproved suitor who had ‘bewitched’ his daughter is that he ‘hast by moonlight at her window sung / With feigning voice verses of feigning love / And stol'n the impression of her fantasy’.Footnote ¹⁷ Women's fantasies (the malleable forelobe of the brain which received sensory impressions to convey to interior faculties) were, of course, far more tender, soft, feeble and literally impressionable than those of men.

One way in which Elizabeth could negotiate these contradictory associations between symbolic meanings of music and the range of musical skills in which she had been trained was to maintain careful control over her image as exceptional woman and divinely appointed head of state, and as (female) performer and recipient of performances. As practising musician, patron and embodiment of the virtues of her nation, she had to demonstrate in every aspect of her music the good judgment expected of a prince even – maybe especially – when she appeared as ‘a weak and feeble woman’ who could still be wooed and won. Directing the invasive powers of music into silent, enduring objects such as images or inscriptions was a particularly powerful way of maintaining control and also reminding viewers, readers and recipients about the inaudible significance of the art. Such items also allowed music to ‘sound’ at further distance from Elizabeth's presence. Butler uses evidence from travellers’ accounts to show that some of the most beautiful instruments used by royal musicians in court ceremonies were at other times displayed as museum pieces in the queen's palaces. Some of these instruments gained emblematic significance through engraved mottoes praising Elizabeth and her musical capacities. Guides seem to have drawn foreign visitors’ attention to these splendid objects, full of musical meaning even in silence.

When Elizabeth served as subject or recipient of music, or verbal or pictorial evocations of the art, circulation of such items further became a form of propaganda to enhance her ‘brand’. Literary works such as Edmund Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar (1579) and John Davies's Hymn of Astraea (1599) use mythic and ancient cosmological images of the powers of music to show Elizabeth as conduit of heavenly harmony to her earthly kingdom, the embodied medium for political concord. Writers like Michael Drayton and Richard Mulcaster liken her in poetry and prose to the orderly mythic Muses. The most shrewdly written dedications of music to the queen, such as Byrd's and Tallis's in Cantiones sacrae of 1575, emphasize her intellectual musical skills above the practical ones at which she is also said to excel, privileging her capacities to render judgment above the more feminine capacities of her body. Butler shows how these powerful, positive verbal evocations of Elizabeth's superhuman musical capacities transferred into performed and performable musical works destined for her, such as multimedia entertainments along her progress routes throughout her reign, and the madrigals and canzonets produced in her honour towards the end of it. In printed form, these works enabled even wider audiences to participate in what rose to the level of national celebrations of royal harmony.

Although painted images such as Nicholas Hilliard's famous miniature of Elizabeth playing the lute (c.1580) circulated less widely, they were, as Butler argues, even more powerful and immediate distillations of the queen's carefully crafted musical image as admirable performer and representative of her kingdom's earthly and heavenly harmonies. Hilliard's image perfectly tempers the physicality of female performance with royal authority and with all silent but omnipresent meanings of harmony beyond sensory apprehension. The figure in Hilliard's image is immediately recognizable as the person of the queen and the embodiment of royal authority. She is framed by her throne. The visual medium imposes silence on the lute played by her graceful, long-fingered hands, and her mouth is chastely closed as she holds the viewer's gaze with a sidelong one of her own. Her body is visible only from shoulder height. Even her breasts are covered by her instrument. It may be possible to see through this image a merger of King David, biblical channeller of divine harmony and player of plucked strings, and Lady Music, chaste female embodiment of the art and its powers, ‘fitte to wedde mens eares and heartes unto her’, as both were ubiquitous images during Elizabeth's era.Footnote ¹⁸

It is unfortunate that the sound and specific repertoire of Elizabeth's legendary performances have been lost, in spite of wishful claims to the contrary by earlier generations of scholars such as Chappell. Such performances constituted the most potentially fraught aspect of Elizabeth's musicality. As ephemeral, sensuous products emanating from her female body, they had potential to undermine her reputation as prince of her realm and head of her body politic. They were also, Butler argues, the component of Elizabeth's musical image over which she had most direct control. The queen's own music-making was no less propagandistic than more evidently imaginative products such as the literary tributes and paintings celebrating polyvalent meanings of the queen's musicality. Because Elizabeth was a woman and a monarch whose music was necessarily limited to recreational pastime, her performances were intimate events for select audiences. Yet, because of the constant surveillance to which members of royalty were subjected, at least some were destined to be recounted and circulated as further enhancement to her reputation. In addition, music was well documented to leak through opaque architectural features such as doors and walls, permitting it to sound beyond visible confines. Nobody was more aware of the ramifications of these facts than Elizabeth herself, as she carefully chose time, space and audience for her performances over a period of at least 42 years. Musical performance, because of its directly embodied and ephemeral nature, constituted an especially confidential gift to the recipient and, as such, had to be framed with special mindfulness.

Although sixteenth-century English elite architecture and social practice had begun to set the stage for private interests apart from public service, whatever any European crowned head or diplomatic official did in any space eventually became public, and often international, knowledge.Footnote ¹⁹ Elizabeth set enduring patterns for her music-making early in her reign when she was not only still establishing her authority, but was also available for marriage. Her performances were further cloaked in elaborate early modern rituals of secrecy, meticulously planned to give the paradoxical appearance of spontaneity and intimacy. They were, however, genuine expressions of trust and favour in which the lines between prince and private woman were carefully blurred.Footnote ²⁰ So were lines between the performance of music and monarchy. Elizabeth's most famous musical performance, first described by its 1564 recipient in his manuscript memoirs from which it passed to a wide range of scholarly and more imaginative products, turns out to have been part of a larger pattern set no later than the year after her ascent to the throne. In this episode, after showing other ‘secret’ favouritism to the Scottish ambassador Sir James Melville as part of his mission to her court from that of Mary Queen of Scots, Elizabeth enquired after Mary's personal recreations. She was told that, among other activities, her royal cousin played lute and virginals for her own refreshment. Enabled by two of her most trusted courtiers, one of whom was also her maternal cousin, Elizabeth arranged shortly thereafter to be overheard, evidently unaware of Melville's presence, practising the virginals alone in a sealed room ‘to shun melancholy’. As he reports, she stopped playing and called for a female attendant as soon as he made his presence known. Melville, for his part, responded to Elizabeth's highly scripted text about avoiding the appearance of impropriety with equally predictable reference to the sense-ravishing power of her music: all part of the game of international diplomacy in which Elizabeth was at once an individual royal woman and the (genderless) embodiment of her nation.Footnote ²¹

Like Melville, most known recipients of Elizabeth's performances were foreign dignitaries on whom she wished to bestow public favouritism. Some were engaged in proxy courtship on behalf of royal suitors early in her reign. On occasion, Elizabeth invited her chosen audience to hear her, or decided to remain visible as well as audible throughout the performance, rather than indulge in the kind of ruse she used with Melville. Butler shows that all of these performances fit superficial patterns of display of (nubile) female accomplishment. She also definitively answers the open question as to whether Elizabeth actually played the lute or was merely represented as doing so in visual media (she did).Footnote ²² More importantly, Butler shows the extent to which the queen used her own musical performances to emphasize her political authority and the growing international power of her kingdom. This is where Elizabeth's musicality contrasted with that of other royal women of her century, including not only her English and Scottish relatives, but Catherine de Medici, Margaret of Valois and Margaret of Austria, among others. Furthermore, by continuing to display practical musical skills into her sixties, Elizabeth broke established patterns not only of gender but also of female ageing. Musical performance thus became one more art through which the final Tudor monarch continued to the end of her reign to project an image of being ‘queen of beauty, queen of love, the just virgin of the golden age returned, whose mind is an object of contemplation by her votaries’.Footnote ²³

Careful juxtaposition of queenly body and the ‘heart and stomach of a king’ enabled Elizabeth to encode monarchic authority within the trope of sexual enchantment of men by women's music. The same gender/power paradox affected musical petitions directed to her. As a listener whose ‘tender and soft breastes are soone perced with melody and fylled with sweetnesse’, Elizabeth was an obvious target for conventional rituals of musical courtship – but one whose ‘suitors’ could hope for the political favours a king could bestow. Furthermore, by virtue of being the (female) centre of a court whose (mostly male) members owed obeisance, Elizabeth was easily cast as the unyielding beloved of courtly love. As such, she was subject to musical-rhetorical performance of eternal devotion in return for the slightest sign of favour, or perhaps for nothing at all. Yet beneath the conventional gestures from supplicant and longed-for ‘mistress’ alike were high-stakes negotiations between a monarch and subjects jockeying for position. Some of Butler's most original work shows the extent to which male courtiers used the performance of new songs to influence the queen or gain her favour for matters large and small, in a range of locations ranging from intimate interior rooms to outdoor public spaces. Because of Elizabeth's gender, a majority of the attendants who served her personal needs and staffed her privy chamber were women. It was therefore more difficult for men to gain personal access to her than to her male predecessors. To make music before Elizabeth was to move past other men to gain her ear. It was also to give her a gift at once more intimate and fleeting than a letter, poem, notated musical work or miniature portrait – and, in the early modern gifting economy, some sort of reciprocity was expected.

Depending on the occasion and the urgency of his needs, an ambitious courtier could either perform a song himself or hire one or more professionals to deliver his musical message. Some, such as Walter Ralegh, set new poems to pre-existing tunes, while others, such as Robert Cecil, entrusted settings of their verses to court musicians already in the queen's favour. The most prolific musical politician of the era, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, used musical settings of his original verses by some of the leading English composers as a regular tool of communication with Elizabeth. Less intimate multimedia performances before Elizabeth, at court or in the homes of those who welcomed her along her national progress routes, also served as means to seek royal favour or make political comments. These endeavours generally united music and poetry with image and action and, as Butler points out, sometimes counselled courtiers about wise governance or gently expressed ideas counter to the queen's stated desires. Some such works moved between court, theatre and printing press, reaching ever larger audiences. The grandest and most elaborately political entertainments, such as royal entries into towns or other public celebrations of Elizabeth's queenship, were witnessed by subjects of all social classes who sometimes lined the streets for miles. On occasion, performers included local people or servants to noble hosts. Thus, the most impressive musical spectacles served the interests of Elizabeth, the political elite and the nation state at large, though not necessarily at the same time. Elizabeth accepted political counsel and individual or group petitions as well as reinforcement of her royal majesty and reputation through entertainment that featured music. Whether through the petition of one man or a multitude, audible music signified and was held to make manifest the underlying harmonies and concord between diverse elements, including a ruler and her people.

In spite of the widespread use of music for political persuasion among the power elite of Elizabethan England, the art was still sometimes attributed with the capacity to ‘transnature’ a man ‘into a woman or worse’.Footnote ²⁴ Music was believed to affect women more easily than men, but over-indulgence ran the risk of undermining virility. For music as for other forms of invention and performance, the realms of love and war, or court and battlefield, were increasingly cast as opposite aesthetic and practical poles. Castiglione and his international imitators emphasized both the tensions and the continuities between these loci of sixteenth-century courtiership, especially in relation to displays of virility. One of the most outstanding chapters in Butler's book shows how music was incorporated into the most masculine of spectacles, the formal tournament. Unlike her father and her brother, Elizabeth was barred by her gender from competing in these ancient rituals of manly power and physical skill. Like the battlefield for which it still nominally served as preparation, the tournament tiltyard limited women to the passive safety of its physical margins or to symbolic presence. However, just as Elizabeth was able to ‘commit [her]self to armed multitudes’ to address her troops at Tilbury on their way to repel the Spanish Armada, there were well-established ways in which she could be a central participant in tournaments.Footnote ²⁵ Royalty had long served as recipients of these stylized multimedia pageants, and, long before Elizabeth's era, participants had created for themselves original chivalric personae who often competed for the favours of a courtly (female) beloved. Once again, Elizabeth served a dual role by virtue of her gender and her status as prince of her realm. And once again, an overt aim of the show was to praise the queen. Especially because paying spectators were admitted to the specially constructed outdoor space in which these rituals took place, and because the Elizabethan format began with presentation and detailed explanation of the assumed identity of each competitor, the opportunities for political petition or comment were too good to ignore. In contrast to other forms of spectacle, the aristocratic participants had to perform the main characters and their very real deeds themselves. The same competitors could, and did, make use of additional support staff during their performances, including musicians who played a range of conventional ‘outdoor’ and military instruments as well as softer ones, and who sang a range of vocal genres. Music especially enhanced a general aura of magnificent nobility and showcased each participant's refined taste to contrast with his athletic prowess. In tournaments as in other unities of arts, song and instrumental music reinforced with varying degrees of subtlety the polyvalent messages also conveyed through image, word and action. Music was also used, as Butler shows, to accompany metamorphic transformation and evoke wonder as it did in other dramatic contexts. The very incongruity of courtly song and instrumental music within the military context of the tiltyard enabled each knightly persona, and the nobleman who embodied him, to express multiple aspects of his selfhood and his public service to queen and nation state. And, no matter what he hoped to gain from the clever display of his courtly and military masculinities to his monarch and assembled spectators, the accompanying music suggested both the audible and the idealized harmony that coalesced around Elizabeth's ultimate and timeless authority. Even when ageing knights such as Sir Henry Lee utilized tournament pageantry to stage retirement from courtly life, the queen still remained the ageless object of their veneration and respect, reinforced by music.