The song of the devil: Representation of evil across the seventeenth-century stage in London

Figuring prominently on the seventeenth century stage are the representations of the devil and his minions, witches, sorcerers, and lesser demons. As part of their nefarious activities, music usually is involved in their depiction in some way or form such as: singing, incanting, and evoking sound as a part of their supernatural atmosphere. Musicologists Curtis Price and Steven Plank have noted that from an extension of the earlier fascination with witches, most notably King James I, there came to be a proliferation of demons and witches portrayed on the English stage and in turn became a popular phenomenon. Later staged representations of the devil’s minions changed drastically from representations from the first part of the century. For instance, in Shakespeare’s Macbeth or even Middleton’s The Witch, representations were realistic and more frightening. In this paper I focus on the representation of the evil and associated characters, and how they are represented on the stage across the 1600s in England. I also focus on how the aesthetics changed between the beginning of the seventeenth century and the end of the century by the influence of early modern skepticism brought about by the introduction of the empirical method propagated by the Royal Society of London (est. 1660). The issue of witches also impacted the attitudes toward women and their involvement on the stage. I demonstrate this by focusing on two compositions. Robert Johnson’s “Come Away, Hecate!” written ce. 1609 as an example from the beginning of the century and Hennery Purecell’s opera Dido and Aeneas written in 1689 as an example from the latter half of the century. I show how the devil and his associated characters are represented musically using melodic and harmonic analysis, iconography, and contextual historical sources. I argue that with the encroaching Enlightenment, visions of the horrific were centered around the incorporation of Italianate music that represented the replacement of the fear of magic to a fear of antithetical Catholics.