In Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor, Sir Hugh, waiting for a duel, calms his nerves by singing to himself: ‘There dwelt a man in Babylon,/ To shallow riuers and to falles,/ Melodious birds sing Madrigalles.’ He is quoting Christopher Marlowe’s popular (and often parodied) poem ‘The Passionate Shepherd to his Love’. He is also quoting psalm 137 ‘By the riuers of Babel we sate, and there wee wept, when we remembred Zion’ (Geneva Bible, 1560). Sir Hugh garbles both poem and psalm as he goes on, misremembering and mismatching religious and secular material. This coupling becomes even more problematic when we hear, rather than read, the passage: the ballad version of the psalm was often sung to the tune of the King Solomon ballad, a decidedly worldly song on sexual love. How, then, do psalms and poems converge in the sixteenth-century? And how does this relationship change when we consider both their musical existence? Do our perceptions of the psalms, especially those on exile, alter when we take into account the musical memories they evoke? This paper proposes to examine early modern psalm culture through music. It will scrutinize how separation from a home land, or a recent past, is bridged sonically through musical associations, for example in terms of the recycling of tunes. It will also adjust the conference’s textual bias by a contribution on the full-bodied sense experience of exile, including nostalgia for sights and sounds. Be it a Babylon ballad or a Byrd mass, music, this paper will argue, negotiates ideas of separation and belonging which would only sound too familiar to a Sir Hugh, sitting alone as he does in a wood clearing somewhere in Windsor.
Prison/Exile: Controlled Spaces in Early Modern Europe 