Elizabethan Mythologies: Studies in Poetry, Drama and Music.by Wells HB<|

Elizabethan MythologiesStudies in Poetry, Drama and Music\nAuthor(s): Robin Headlam Wells\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom\nImprint: Cambridge University Press\nISBN-13: 9780521433853, 978-0521433853\nSynopsis\nFor lovers of music and poetry the legendary figure of Orpheus probably suggests a romantic ideal. But for the Renaissance he is essentially a political figure. Mythographers interpreted the Orpheus story as an allegory of the birth of civilization because they recognized in the arts in which Orpheus excelled an instrument of social control so powerful that with it you could, as one writer put it, 'winne Cities and whole Countries'. Dealing with plays, poems, songs and the iconography of musical instruments, Robin Headlam Wells re-examines the myth, central to the Orpheus story, of the transforming power of music and poetry. Elizabethan Mythologies, first published in 1994, contains numerous illustrations from the period and will be of i.