'Now rise infernal tones': The representations of early modern English witchcraft in sound and music

From Shakespeare's Weird Sisters to the marketplace balladeers singing broadsides about popular witch trials, musical representations of witches shocked and entertained Tudor-Stuart audiences. Early modern English witchcraft, both the historical practices of malediction and their artistic representations, had musical and other aural qualities.;This dissertation examines music by witches in performative arts---popular song, dramatic music, broadside ballad texts and theatrical poetry---that crossed various social boundaries at the height of increased persecutions from the ascension of Elizabeth I to the English Civil War. The dimension of sound in the performance of witchcraft has not previously been studied in earnest. This dissertation contributes to both historical musicology and the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of acoustic environment studies by cataloguing the musical codes used to represent early modern English witches for both unlettered and elite audiences, and introduces a methodology for including ephemera and performativity in serious musicological research on the early modern period.;Elizabethan and early Stuart England was a nation in transition---from predominantly oral to printed culture, from uniform Catholicism to religious diversity, from occult to more scientific epistemologies. A foundation is laid for analyzing the efficacy of early modern witch sounds and music with a preliminary examination of the linguistic, social, gender, and religious controversies that defined sound, music, and magic at the turn of the seventeenth century. Genre conventions are investigated with respect to the various representations of witches within popular and elite categories of music. Persistent popular tunes associated with broadside ballads representing witches are catalogued and analyzed for recurring sonic tropes. The theatrical music and poetry in witchcraft productions by Shakespeare (c. 1606), John Marston (c. 1609) Thomas Middleton (c. 1609-16), Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome (c. 1634), and Ben Jonson (c. 1603) are compared for similarities in witch characters' poetic, tonal, and gestural languages. By reading the music and acoustic properties of witches in this manner, this dissertation suggests a bridge between early modern English popular and elite cultures, and posits that certain witches were categorized and represented not only by their social status or gender, but also by their musical habits.