Henry Lawes Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Lydia Hamessley

Critical Essay by Lydia Hamessley

SOURCE: Hamessley, Lydia. “Henry Lawes's Setting of Katherine Philips's Friendship Poetry in His Second Book of Ayres and Dialogues, 1655: A Musical Misreading?” In Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, edited by Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood and Gary C. Thomas, pp. 115-38. New York: Routledge, 1994.

In the following excerpt, an expanded version of a lecture delivered in 1991, Hamessley considers whether, in setting Katherine Philip's poetry to music, Lawes projected, masked, or suppressed the lesbian voice.

But as the morning sun to drooping flowers, As weary travellers a shade do find, As to the parched violet evening showers; Such is from thee to me a look that's kind.

But when that look is drest in words, tis like The mystic pow'r of music's unison; Which when the finger doth one viol strike, The other's string heaves to reflection.

To My Lucasia, in Defence of...
(read more)