The Rhythm of Resistance: Music and Popular Politics in Early-Modern England

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'The grievances of the commons' was a rallying cry for many of the political elite of early-modern England, but for whom did the elite claim to speak and did they really reflect the grievances of the people? Music and song offer us insight into non-elite agency, ideas and identities. Music's ability to combine oral, aural and literary transmission, to be emotive, and to capitalise on tradition, opens a window onto popular politics and audiences of grievance.There is a wealth of literature on popular protest in seventeenth-century England (Erskine-Hill and Storey 1983, Fox 1994, Walter 2015), and increasing interest in the ballad and broadside (Nebeker 2011, McShane 2016); but less bringing them into combination. Dealing exclusively with the textual relegates the music, stripping expressions of popular grievance of their emotive power. As a conduit for transmission, music is key to identifying how successful song was as a medium for change. By the same token, ironically, music is central to understanding how visceral discontent was sated, being sublimated into a containable and self-satiating corral. If the aggrieved could retire to the ale-house, drink, sing andforget their troubles, dissent was contained. Thus, I will use music and song together to exploit its value as a determinate of popular politics between c.1550 and c.1800.Recently, Christopher Marsh (2016) and Jenni Hyde (2018) advocated an interdisciplinary approach, using musicological elements to inform their analyses of broadside ballads, and several CRAASH symposia have explored music as a tool to unlock knowledge and understanding. However, Marsh does not use this to penetrate popular politics, and Hyde concentrates on mid-Tudor ballads. This study builds on the work of Marsh and Hyde, combining a longue durée study of music and words with corpus data analysis to define and foreground 'popular' music in the identities and expression of non-elites in England.My research questions focus around how we identify popular protest, and the forms of grievance within song. There are multiple fluid concepts to be identified, such as 'popular', 'dissent', 'agency', as well as the parallel, overlapping means of expression and transmission. How can I define without being overly reductive, and, using these terms alongside musicological analysis, what can be learnt about the songs' context and impact on popular politics? HistoriographyThe use of song as a medium for political study has increased in recent years, with Angela McShane (2016) exploring oppositional politics, and Eric Nebeker (2011) challenging Habermas' view of the public sphere. However, even Nebeker, who suggests that song was able to reach beyond the bourgeois, encompassing the illiterate, neglects music. Much like McShane his study is exclusively textual.Specific broadside ballad study also favours text: Wurzbach (19 0) explores the context of the broadsides, and Fumerton (2010) takes a literary approach to the thematic content, but both largely exclude musicology. Recently, Marsh has raised questions about ballads as multimedia sources combining word, image and sound. Hyde (2018) is one of the first to bring together these elements in practice, but there is still great scope for ballad study, especially in its application to politics. Being inherently interdisciplinary, my thesis will go further than existing works, using music in conjunction with popular print to illuminate non-elite political agency and identity.MethodologyRather than being linear, I propose a circular, interwoven methodology, facilitating continuous reflection and reassessment.