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Article: How Music Matters: Some Songs of Robert Johnson in the Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher.(Critical Essay)
- Article from:
- Comparative Drama
- Article date:
- March 22, 2000
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2000 www.wmich.edu/compdr. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Musicke I say the most divine striker of the senses.
--Sir Phillip Sidney, The Defence of Poesie (1595)
Music, according to Italian Renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino, "by its nature, both spiritual and material ... at once seizes and claims as its own, man in his entirety."(1) Music is so powerful in the drama of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher that it becomes the direct onstage cause of an attempted murder and suicide, a marriage proposal to a whore, and an attempted gang rape(2)--as well as numerous more subtle changes in the plays' actions. My argument in this paper is not that music in Beaumont and Fletcher's plays is by the composer Robert ...