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Chapter 1
as "a figure which takes a couple of words to play with in a verse and by making
them to change and shift one into others place they do very prettily exchange and
shift the sense. "1 to
Henry Peacham the Younger also referred to the rhetorical figure
prosopopoeia, "[... ] a type of vivid personification in which the inner thoughts
and feelings of a fictitious or absent person are presented in such a convincing
fashion that the audience is made to believe that that person is present in the
person of the orator. ""' He also related prosopopoeia to the `passionate airs'
inherent to the affective delivery of the early seventeenth-century song. 112
Prosopopoeia belongs to the group of rhetorical figures known as hypotyposis
figures, which referred to the singer's task to identify closely with the character
portrayed, in order to achieve a highly affective utterance (pronuntiatio) and
arouse the emotions of the audience. In order to accomplish this task, the singer
should first comprehend the words and the related music, arousing, by these
means, in the heart of the listener the passions reflected by the text. 113 This was
stressed by Emilio de Cavalieri, who, in 1600, stated:
Let the singer have a beautiful voice with good intonation, and well
supported, and let him sing with expression, soft and loud, and without
passagework; and in particular he should express the words well, so
that they may be understood, and accompany them with gestures and
110 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London: Field, 1589); repr. ed by G. D.
Willcock and A. Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936; 1970), p. 208, cited in
Sonnino, A Handbook to Sixteenth-Century Rhetoric, p. 42. See also Robin Headlam Wells, 'The
Ladder of Love: Verbal and Musical Rhetoric in the Elizabethan Lute-Song', Early Music, 12
(May 1984), 173-88 (p. 176).
111 Butler, 'Music and Rhetoric', pp. 59-60. See also Sonnino, pp. 54-56. For a detailed analysis of
the prosopopoeia, particularly when related to funeral music, see Gregory S. Johnston, 'Musical-
Rhetorical Prosopopoeia and the Animation of the Dead in Seventeenth-Century German Funeral
Music', Canadian University Music Review, 10 (1990), 12-39; and by the same author, 'Rhetorical
Personification of the Dead in 17th-Century German Funeral Music: Heinrich Schatz's
Musikalische Exequien (1636) and Three Works by Michael Wiedemann (1693)', The Journal of
Musicology, 9.2 (Spring 1991), 186-213.
112 "Yea, in my opinion no rhetoric more persuadeth or hath greater power over the mind; nay,
hath not music her figures, the same which rhetoric? What is a revert but her antistrophe? her
reports, but sweet anaphoras? her counterchange of points, antimetaboles? her passionate airs, but
prosopopoeias? with infinite other of the same nature" (Henry Peacham, The Compleat
Gentleman, as it appears in Strunk, p. 337).
113 Robert Toft, 'Musicke a Sister to Poetrie: Rhetorical Artifice in the Passionate Airs of John
Dowland', Early Music, 12 (May 1984), 191-99 (p. 191).
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