In Small Proportions: A Poetics of the English Ayre, 1596-1622.

Daniel Fischlin. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998.25 pls. + 404 pp. $39.95. ISBN: 0-8143-2693-5.

Two recent books on music and poetry in songs of the English Renaissance give evidence of the seemingly endless fascination this relatively limited body of work continues to generate. Far from repeating the lessons of earlier scholarship, these authors prove anew that our fascination is justified, that the peculiar force of the vocal music of the period lies in the richness of its musico-poetic dialectic which we have not yet fully plumbed.

Diane Kelsey McColley's Poetry and Music in Seventeenth-Century England proceeds by analogy, focusing on "the relationship between the poetic language of Donne, Herbert, Milton, and other British poets, and the choral music and part-songs of composers including Tallis, Byrd, Gibbons, Weelkes, and Tomkins" (jacket notes). Her work is related in this respect to Louise Schleiner's The Living Lyre in English Verse from Elizabeth through the Restoration (University of Missouri Press, 1984). Both choose to explore deep patterns of aesthetic construction infusing both the music and the literature of the age rather than examining the interactions of the two arts as they come together in song. McColley's book is further set apart from much recent scholarship in this area in its focus on choral music rather than solo song and on the poetry of metaphysical and religious poets of the period rather than on the lyrics written for musical setting. Instead of asking how poetry influences music, she asks "how church music and other part-music contribute to the verbal close-weaving of seventeenth-century verse" (2). The book thus presents a welcome expansion of our view.

The overarching premise of the book rests on the little-used term concinnity, referring to harmony or cohesion that arises from multiplicity. The notion is explored most explicitly in chapter 2, "The concinnity of the arts and the church music controversy," where McColley notes, for example, the role played by chapel windows, music, and liturgy together in inviting meditation (58). Analogously, the role played by music and musical training, and specifically of choral singing, is adduced throughout the study as significantly shaping the aesthetic sensibilities of poets. While it is difficult to single out a short passage to exemplify the method, a few quotations from the discussion of Herbert will suggest its texture: "Herbert's poems are as thoroughly attentive to each word's tonal relation to each other word as a composer of part-music is to harmonic configurations and their fitness to texts. He practiced, perhaps invented, a form of language analogous to polyphonic music sung in pure intonation, in which linear arrangements of words form vertical consonances whose overtones, as well as fundamental meanings, are in tune" (136); "What music, specifically, may have taken Herbert to heavens door? Many compositions come to mind with his description of rising and falling with music's wings, especially the whole history of alleluias. A likely example of English service music is the Nunc Dimittis of Byrd's Great Service" (148).

I cannot, in this brief space, give adequate coverage of the range of musical elements that McColley finds latent in the period's poetry, giving it the harmony she sees as defining, nor of the sweep of her literary and historical perspective in this study. Her experience of the music includes acoustics and compositional technique as well as musical genres and performance practices. Often her readings of specific poems, using these elements, are sensitive and enlightening. Although the analogies by means of which she arrives at these readings are sometimes strained or startling, their very complexity is thought-provoking and does, in some tenuous fashion, capture valid aesthetic premises of the period.

Daniel Fischlin's In Small Proportions: A Poetics of the English Ayre, 1596-1622 is, by contrast, a closely argued, detailed "poetics" of the ayre. From a critical stance that builds on earlier scholarship while making good use of a number of postmodern perspectives, the author develops a fresh and interesting account of the intensity and appeal of the short-lived phenomenon of the ayre or lute song. While the presence of music in the genre is fully acknowledged, Fischlin's subject is not music, nor even musical setting, but the literary aspects of the ayre as song.

Central to Fischlin's understanding of the distinctive poetic characteristic of the ayre is what he calls its "inexpressibility topos" (51). Developed through the ayre's predominant subjects (love and death) and exemplified in various elements of diction, metrics, figural predilections (the "opposition between epigrammatic concision . . . and copious expression" [51]), and association with the non-denotative language of music, the capacity of the ayre to make a virtue of what cannot be said becomes one of its greatest strengths. Ultimately, the very paradox of public performance of private emotion makes of the lute song a locus for the "expressive subversion of conventional cultural values" (269).

The middle chapters of the book take up specific subject groups in the ayres. Thus, chapter 2 examines the patterns of metaphor in lyrics from John Dowland's First Book of Ayres. Fischlin shows that a number of these lyrics focus first on the personas experience of passion, then move to his acknowledgment of "the other." This movement, Fischlin asserts, conflates private emotion with non-private, exterior meditation, thereby betraying the lyric's ultimate inability to represent fully either the experience of passion or the precise nature of the object of that passion. The lyric's figurative structure, in other words, insists on inexpressibility. Subsequent chapters perform similar analysis of lyrics whose subjects are desire, eroticism, and the purgation of grief, in each instance showing the point at which these lyrics can only surround their subject but cannot fully state it.

It is in this pervasive evasion, seen by Fischlin as specifically characteristic of the lyrics of the ayre, that he finds its force as a vehicle for subverting cultural values. In the final section or Postlude, he compares the ayre to the more directly public genre of the masque, concluding that "The ayre metonymizes the social value of performance and its paradoxical ability to resist the chaotic social forces that produce the various forms of manic behavior articulated by the masque. Again, where the ayre is invoked, there is a turn away from the public, as if to suggest that the power embodied in musico-poetic performance is the power to assert the salutary and solitary dimensions of self" (281).

If In Small Proportions has limitations, they arise from the author's generally successful effort to bring the best of postmodern theory to bear on these lyrics. In particular, Fischlin falls prey on occasion to our eras tendency to take itself and its critical analyses too seriously. Occasionally he is so persuaded by the complex arguments he spins that he misses what must have been playfulness on the part of the lyricist, a playfulness that delights in the absurdity of the logical circles drawn in some of these lyrics. Thus, while Fischlin's analysis of the anonymous poem set as song 11 in John Attey's collection of 1622 concludes that "death represents, ironically, the ultimate constancy in the face of life's flux" (123), it seems likely to me that there is also tongue-in-cheek laughter behind a lover's statement that goes something like this: "The only reason I regret that you are 'all of life' to me is that when I die, you will then die too, and [thus] if you are so cruel as to kill me, you will also kill yourself."

While it would be difficult to show that the conditions Fischlin ascribes to the lyrics of the ayre are unique to them, that they appear in significant concentration is amply demonstrated in this book. This is the first attempt I am aware of to analyze the deeply grounded literary nature of the genre, and overall it is very well done, giving us much that is revealing and provocative to ponder.

Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo