Music, Dance and Drama in Early Modern English Schools by Amanda Eubanks Winkler (review)

Scholars have largely investigated sixteenth- and seventeenth-century music pedagogy within other kinds of studies, including those on compositional process, music transmission, historical performance practice, or a musician's biography. Literature and theatre scholars have explored both the training of boy actors, who sometimes sang and played instruments, and the representation of schools and students in Elizabethan and Stuart drama. But academics have rarely touched on how school performances intersected with wider educational trends, or with social, economic, and regional differences. And with the notable exception of debates on sources and early performances of canonic Early Modern English operas—most famously Henry Purcell's and Nahum Tate's Dido and Aeneas—schools have mostly been overlooked as sites of musical performance or acquisition of knowledge.

Amanda Eubanks Winkler's engaging new monograph fills these lacunae, contributing, in strikingly original ways, not only to the histories of music, dance, and drama in England from the mid-Elizabethan era through the Stuart dynasty, but also to the history of education and to performance studies more broadly. She shows that schools' importance to music was on a par with that of the court, church, home, and theatre. She also demonstrates how, during an era when music and dance were thought advantageous to both sexes, and to all social classes, diverse places where music's consumption, training, and performance were nurtured became interconnected. In doing so, she illuminates how many musicians earned livings by patching together several complementary positions for a range of patrons.

What did it mean for Early Modern students to learn music, and to perform on stage—music, dance, and drama—either at an English school, or offsite for dignitaries and other important personages? Winkler demonstrates that there are many answers to this question. She brings together an impressive range of primary documents, most previously unknown or unstudied, from schools throughout England, applying scholarly methodologies from musicology, theatre history, and performance studies. Grammar schools, academies, charity schools, and boarding schools throughout England routinely offered opportunities to learn and execute music and dance and to participate in various sorts of dramatic entertainment. Although each institution maintained its own traditions and generally served a specific community, schools collectively educated children of both sexes from across the socio-economic spectrum. In a status-conscious culture that had begun to witness a certain amount of social mobility, a child was usually destined for an appropriate, pre-determined place with exacting expectations about public speaking, service to the state, musical knowledge, and presentation of self.

Throughout the book, Winkler tackles an issue that has plagued music scholars who rely on historical and archival methodologies: how to discuss performances we know of, but for which scores, libretti, song-texts or other music-related material records have not survived. She looks holistically at traces of performance in what are conventionally considered non-musical documents—school records, personal letters, and public advertisements—and considers pedagogical performance as a multi-faceted activity enacted by seven- to seventeen-year-olds under a variety of circumstances. Winkler brings out nuanced readings of how paradoxical conceptions of music, childhood, and embodiment influenced what kind of pedagogical fare was deemed acceptable in one context and potentially scurrilous in another. She considers also how memories of past performances successively affected new ones, a practice not only of the Early Modern era but one still current today.

Winkler reveals that school-based instruction and practice in music, dance, and drama were not only more widespread than previously imagined, but central to many Tudor and Stuart conceptions of a well-rounded education, complementing other studies to deliver vital social skills. For instance, poise and deportment would enhance an adult's status, allowing young men and women to uphold their designated places in society, and, especially for women, enhance chances of an advantageous marriage. Some of the schools in Winkler's study were specifically founded to help orphans and...