[In the following excerpt, an expanded version of a lecture delivered in 1991, Hamessley considers whether, in setting Katherine Philip's poetry to music, Lawes projected, masked, or suppressed the lesbian voice.]

But as the morning sun to drooping flowers,
As weary travellers a shade do find,
As to the parched violet evening showers;
Such is from thee to me a look that's kind.
But when that look is drest in words, tis like
The mystic pow'r of music's unison;
Which when the finger doth one viol strike,
The other's string heaves to reflection.

To My Lucasia, in Defence of Declared Friendship—Katherine Philips (1631-1664)¹

Throughout the histories of music Henry Lawes has been viewed as a composer who was quite skilled at setting the poetic texts of numerous Cavalier writers, among them Herrick, Carew, Suckling, Lovelace, Waller, and Milton.² Many of these poets wrote praises to him detailing his skill and offering their gratitude for the way he elevated and, in a sense, completed their poetry with his music. Katherine Philips, another of Lawes's contemporaries, was among the many poets impressed with him. Her poem of praise to Lawes was printed in the opening pages of his Second Book of Ayres and Dialogues of 1655, and it pays homage to his ability to uplift the poetic text through music.³ She writes:

Nature which is the vast Creation's Soule,
The Art of Heav'n the Order of this Frame,
Is only Musick in another Name: …
Thou dost above the Poets Prayses live,
Who fetch from Thee th' Eternity they give;
And as true Reason triumph's over Sense,
Yet is subjected to Intelligence;
So Poets on the lower World look down,
But Lawes on them, his height is all his own:
For (like Divinity it selfe) his Lyre
Reward's the wit it did at first inspire:
And thus by double right Poets allow
Their and His Lawrells to adorn his brow.

Philips's connection with Lawes, however, goes far beyond her commendatory poem. Indeed, one poem by Philips was set to music for this collection, and her circle of friends played a significant role in Lawes's Second Book of Ayres, a fact which has been brought forward by literary historians and musicologists alike.⁴ What has not been considered by scholars, however, is the way in which the Philips/Lawes artistic collaboration operated, and if Lawes in fact did for Philips's poetry what so many other poets claimed he did for theirs. Also, since Philips's work is at least woman-identified, if not actually lesbian, several theoretically interesting questions arise. How is Philips's lesbian stance delineated in her poetry? What was the seventeenth-century's understanding of female friendship and love, the subject of most of Philips's poetry? And finally, how did Lawes set her verses, and did his musical response project, mask, or suppress the lesbian voice?

Philips's poetry is usually viewed as a minor contribution to the storehouse of seventeenth-century verse. Her writing is lyric and is informed by the literary conventions of French préciosité, the Metaphysical poets (in particular John Donne), and the neoclassical and pastoral rhetoric of the Cavalier poets.⁵ She wrote political poetry, poems of praise, elegies, and meditative verses. But her best poetry, by far, is that which chronicles her passionate relationships with women.⁶ To express her intensely passionate and erotic feelings for the women in her life, Philips used literary conventions usually employed by male poets to address their female lovers: “the courtly love address to the beloved and her response, the idealized pattern of Platonic same-sex friendship, and the hermaphrodite perfection of the beloved who incorporates the best of both sexes.”⁷ But Philips also “challenge[s] the conventional male/female structure of a conquest poem,” and “create[s] a woman's voice that can be simultaneously submissive and aggressive.”⁸

In her poetry she assigned pseudoclassical names to her friends; she herself took the name Orinda. The majority of this verse is directed to two women in particular. The first is Mary Aubrey, whom Philips dubbed Rosania. Philips's verses to Rosania followed the course of their five-year relationship. Of their first days of happiness she wrote, “Soul of my soul, my Joy, my Crown, my Friend, / … How happy are we now, whose souls are grown, / By an incomparable mixture, one.”⁹ As Rosania's affection cooled, Philips declared, “Divided rivers lose their name; / And so our too unequal flame / Parted, will Passion be in me, / And an indifference in thee.”¹⁰ And when Rosania married in a private ceremony in 1652, Philips recorded her heartbreak with the words: “Yet I'll adore the author of my death, / And kiss the hand that robs me of my breath.”¹¹

Happily, though, as her relationship with Rosania diminished, Philips met Anne Owen in 1651. Anne, or Lucasia as she was called by Philips, was the object of her affection and poetry for eleven years, until she too married and the friendship withered. Typical of Philips's lines to Lucasia are these:

I did not live until this time
Crown'd my felicity,
When I could say without a crime,
I am not thine, but Thee. …
For as a watch by art is wound
To motion, such was mine:
But never had Orinda found
A soul till she found thine.(12)

In this poem Philips demonstrates her use of standard literary conventions: the elaborate analogy of the watch is a conceit typical of Donne. Yet, while taking Donne's erotic poetry as her model, Philips “channels a passionate emotional intensity into acceptable metaphysical images and argument,”¹³ and she reshapes these conventions to suit her own intent. A striking example is found in one of her best-known poems, “To my Lucasia, in Defence of Declared Friendship.”

Although we know we love, yet while our soule
Is thus imprison'd by the flesh we wear,
There's no way left that bondage to controul,
But to convey transactions through the Eare.
Nay, though we read our passions in the Ey,
It will obleige and please to tell them too:
Such joys as these by motion multiply,
Were't but to find that our soul told us true.
Believe not then, that being now secure
Of either's ear, we have no more to doe:
The Sphaeres themselves by motion do endure,
And they move on by Circulation too.
And as a River, when it once has pay'd
The tribute which it to the Ocean ow's,
Stops not, but turns, and having curl'd and play'd
On its own waves, the shore it overflows:
So the soul's motion does not end in bliss,
But on her self she scatters and dilates,
And on the Object doubles, till by this
She finds new Joys, which that reflux creates.(14)

The metaphysical images in this poem are typical “of the male discourse of metaphysical passion for women.” But Philips adds her own images, in particular the “female and subliminally erotic analogy of a river's flow, which captures the rhythms of female sexual passion.”¹⁵

In other poems, Philips reveals significant differences between her erotic relationships and those of which Donne wrote. In order to delineate an egalitarian relationship, as opposed to a hierarchical one, she reworks the conventions of metaphysical love poetry. In “The Canonization” Donne writes that he and his lady “prove / Mysterious by this love,” while in “Friendship's Mystery, to My Dearest Lucasia,” Philips and Lucasia “prove / There's a Religion in our Love.” Even more striking is the difference Philips makes when she reworks Donne's poem “The Sun Rising” in which Donne declares that “She is all States, all Princes, I, / Nothing else is.” By contrast, Philips imagines an equality between herself and Lucasia, as in the line “all our Titles [are] shuffled so, / Both Princes, and both Subjects too.”¹⁶

It is to this passionate poetry of Philips that Henry Lawes seems to have been drawn. How did Lawes respond to Philips's poetry when faced with her particular use of conventional language? Did he reflect the unique way she recast familiar metaphysical images—including the implicit lesbian erotic elements? He set three of her poems to music, but only his setting of “Friendship's Mystery, to My Dearest Lucasia” is extant (see text in Appendix A).¹⁷ Lawes included his setting of this poem in his Second Book of Ayres, and he retitled the poem “Mutuall Affection Between Orinda and Lucasia.”

The piece falls into the category of “tuneful song” or ballad, as opposed to declamatory song,¹⁸ and like many of Lawes's tuneful songs, this piece is in triple meter and is strophic. Ian Spink has demonstrated that songs set in this strictly metrical and strophic manner usually fail to bridge the points of enjambment satisfactorily, bringing about a musical halt where the literary motion is at its greatest.¹⁹ The intense metaphysical language of “Friendship's Mystery” suffers from this phenomenon. Each stanza consists of five lines that are linked by the rhyme scheme in a 3 + 2 arrangement. However, this formal structure is not reflected in the semantic arrangement of every stanza: according to the meaning of the text, the first stanza is 3 + 2 while the second stanza is clearly 2 + 3. It is no surprise that Lawes chooses a 3 + 2 musical form, reflecting the rhyme scheme as well as the meaning of the first verse, since strophic settings typically take their musical cue from the first stanza. The result, of course, is that the sense of the text of some stanzas is maintained, while at other times it is interrupted, in this case, by the placement of the strong cadence after line three. For instance, in the first stanza, the lines “That miracles men's faith do move / By wonder and by prodigie” are joined by the forward motion brought about by the first-inversion pause on the word move. By not grounding the poetry at that juncture on the expected cadence, a root-position D major triad, Lawes propels and extends the music through to the rhetorically stronger point made in the line, “By wonder and by prodigie.” Similarly, Lawes calls on the first-inversion triad at the cadence that ends the line, “To the fierce angry world let's prove.” Again the musical line cannot halt completely but must move forward through the last line of the stanza. Nevertheless, the limitations of this strophic setting become apparent in the second stanza. Here the first-inversion cadence coincides with the line that completes the first thought of the stanza, “That Fate no liberty destroys.” The stronger root-position cadence that occurs at the end of the third line, “But our Election is as free,” interrupts the obvious enjambment between the third and fourth lines which should be understood as “But our Election is as free / As Angels' …”²⁰

Lawes's harmonic procedures are also significant in reading this piece. Through parallel first-inversion triads and cadences in first inversion, Lawes articulates a gentle, almost tentative, feeling in this song.²¹ Thus the text is delineated without force, determination, or strong goal orientation, with the exception of the one strong cadence at the end of line three in each stanza. Such a song, imbued with diffusive cadences and sweet parallel thirds and sixths, is aptly described as elegant and refined. As is typical of this type of setting, the meaning of the words take a secondary position to the music, which, in this case, gracefully glides over them. The question remains though, did Lawes capture the sense of these words with his music?

Philip Brett points out that such procedures have a long history in English song. In his study on text-setting in William Byrd's songs, Brett suggests that strophic settings are expressive of the form of a poem rather than of its meaning, and that they are perhaps better solutions for setting texts containing moral statements than a madrigalian treatment, which “tends to reduce verse to a prose reading,” or a declamatory setting, which masks the formal structure of the poem and emphasizes meaning. Thus, in his treatment of Philips's text, Lawes recalls a musical tradition that Brett refers to as “nonrepresentational.”²²

However, it can also be argued that poetry such as “Friendship's Mystery” is better suited to a declamatory setting. Spink suggests that “… metaphysical verse tends to be unmusical. The language of philosophy, theology, or science is not suited to music, and thus the elaboration of a conceit is nothing more than misplaced ingenuity in a song, for music is a language of the emotions, not of verbal ideas.” Furthermore, Lawes's solution to this challenge was often to set such metaphysical verses to declamatory, through-composed music.²³

Clearly, Lawes had a choice in setting “Friendship's Mystery”; he could have used a setting that emphasized either the form (a strophic setting) or the meaning (a declamatory one). That he chose a strophic setting reveals his privileging of form and his elision of meaning, in this case the love between women. The strophic setting is especially striking since Philips's poem is clearly more complicated both in content and in structure than some that Lawes gives a declamatory, through-composed setting.²⁴ One such poem and its musical setting is of particular interest at this point because it, like “Friendship's Mystery,” is addressed to Lucasia, and included in the Second Book of Ayres and Dialogues, but it is by a male poet.

“No Reprieve,” as Lawes titled it, was written by John Berkenhead, a friend of Philips and Lucasia (see the complete text in Appendix B). According to Berkenhead's biographer, the poem is “a conventional persuasive to an unwilling mistress. [It] is distastefully melodramatic, and exhibits the masochistic self-pity of the Platonic lover at its worst. One is not sorry when ‘Charon's boat’ heaves in sight to carry off the expiring swain to the accompaniment of an execrable refrain.”²⁵ The poem consists of four stanzas separated by the refrain, “Alas, undone to Fate, I bow my head / Ready to die, now die, and now, now, now am dead.”²⁶ Lawes sets these stanzas in a declamatory style that is through-composed, except for the triple-meter refrain that returns throughout the piece unchanged. His mastery of text-setting is evident throughout the song. In the third stanza he captures the gasping of the soul with a well-placed minor sixth, and a few notes later he depicts Nature's vain striving through chromatic motion and unexpected harmonic twists. Surely such a poem, much less abstract in its imagery than Philips's and with very little enjambment, is ripe for a strophic setting. To follow the line of thinking Spink suggests, one would expect the Berkenhead poem to have a more “musical,” i.e., metrical, strophic, setting since it is a poem of emotions. Philips's metaphysical verses, replete with conceits, philosophy, and science (alchemy), would seem more suitable for a declamatory setting.

What can we make of the difference in the settings of these two poems? One might suggest that the difference is a purely practical one. Willetts has written that “tuneful songs” were intended for his pupils, “most of whom would not have had the vocal ability or dramatic gifts necessary for the performance of monodies or even serious songs,” and Lawes was dependent on his private teaching late in his life after he lost his position at court following the Civil War.²⁷ Although it seems somewhat unlikely, perhaps Philips's poem was to be sung by a particular performer who was less accomplished than the intended performer of Berkenhead's piece.

As must be clear by now, I am arguing that these very different settings reveal the way not only Lawes, but the seventeenth century in general, might have received and interpreted these two poems. Verses such as Berkenhead's are common throughout this period, so the theme is well known: a male lover is thwarted by a cruel woman who will have no pity on him. Some are full of hateful revenge, others full of masochistic suffering, but all play out an accepted script for love relationships between men and women. Lawes's setting of this poetry is likewise full of conventions. He matches the dramatic, even extreme, language Berkenhead uses by setting it in a declamatory style and articulating such standard musical conventions as the descending sixth for gasping and the tritone and chromatic descending line for the inexorable dying of the refrain.²⁸ In short, the musical language that Lawes speaks in this setting is also an accepted script or set of musical procedures for a man to declare his love for his female lover.

While Berkenhead's poetry is typical of, if inferior to, much seventeenth-century verse, Philips's poetry is radically different. She wrote about same-sex friendship and love by appropriating a male, heterosexual poetic discourse and nonetheless stated her ideas passionately, erotically, and with determination.²⁹ That Lawes's setting does not support or articulate Philips's resolve and daring is not surprising. He was setting the familiar metaphysical language of love, but the participants in such a text were not typical. Philips may have been speaking in a conventional literary style that made her ideas more acceptable, but she was nevertheless a woman, and thus not really to be taken too seriously, particularly in matters of friendship and love. So in order to account for the discrepancy between the two settings and the reasons for the choices Lawes made, we must analyze his treatment of Philips's verses in light of the seventeenth century's beliefs about both friendship and love between women.

The notion of women as participants in friendship is a concept virtually unheard-of in the seventeenth century. Montaigne suggests that female friendships were weak since women were not “endued [endowed] with firmness of mind to endure the constraint of so hard and durable a knot.” It was further believed that women could not participate in the Greek tradition of classical friendship because they lacked “the passion, sense of individuality, and presence of a common world and worldliness that make friendship possible.” Women's supposed incapacity for thought was another obstacle.³⁰ Philips must have come up against this belief with some regularity since she argues against it in her poem “A Friend” (see text in Appendix C):

If souls no sexes have, for men t'exclude
Woman from Friendship's vast capacity,
Is a design injurious or rude,
Only maintain'd by partial tyranny.
Love is allow'd to us and Innocence,
And noblest friendships do proceed from thence.(31)

A number of writings from the seventeenth century reveal the strong opinions that Philips was trying to counter. In his essay on friendship written for Philips, Jeremy Taylor writes,

[Y]ou may see how much I differ from the morosity of those cynics, who would not admit your sex into the communities of a noble friendship. I believe some wives have been the best friends in the world …³²

Nowhere in the essay does Taylor ever consider the possibility of friendship between women; he seems only concerned with possible friendships between men and those between husband and wife. After a short discussion about women as friends he concludes:

I cannot say that women are capable of those excellencies by which men can oblige the world; and therefore a female friend in some cases is not so good a councellor as a wise man, and cannot so well defend my honour, nor dispose of reliefs and assistances if she be under the power of another. … A man is the best friend in trouble, but a woman may be equal to him in the days of joy: a woman can as well increase our comforts, but cannot so well lessen our sorrows. … virtuous women are the beauties of society and the prettinesses of friendship.³³

Edmund Waller, the Cavalier poet and author of such memorable verses as “Go Lovely Rose,” set out his ideas on female friendship in his poem, “On the Friendship Betwixt Two Ladies” (see the complete text in Appendix D).³⁴ As the first stanza clearly demonstrates, Waller considers female friendship only insofar as it affects male desire. Lillian Faderman explains:

… [Waller] decides that their ostensible love for each other is only cunning; they display their passion for male benefit in order to “control” men's love. They are like debtors who, not wanting to pay a debt (give themselves up to a man), avoid the law by signing away all their property (their store of love) to a friend. The debtor and the friend understand, of course, that the gesture is only a pretense. Waller implies that romantic friendship is charming to observe but has little substance, and it would not exist at all if women did not desire a playful tool with which to tease their male lovers.³⁵

Certainly this opinion of female friendship was pervasive, and it seems reasonable to suggest that this seventeenth-century view of female friendship was brought to bear in Lawes's setting of “Friendship's Mystery.”

As for love between women, there were literary conventions for representing it, but they diffuse and control the potential threat of lesbianism.³⁶ In his study of the poetry of Andrew Marvell, John Milton, and John Donne that depicts lesbians, James Holstun identifies two poetic techniques, periodization and mirroring, that “simultaneously acknowledge and master lesbian sexuality.”³⁷ Through periodization, “in each [poem] lesbian sexuality becomes a phenomenon of the past which can be discussed only in retrospect.”³⁸ This technique is obvious in Donne's poem, “Sapho to Philaenis,” in which Donne “turns the love of gay women into little more than a classical allusion.” By distancing discussions of love between women through the invocation of Sappho, poets could control the expressions of lesbian love. “We need only imagine the radical effect of anglicizing the poem—say, as ‘Joan to Julia,’” to appreciate the effect of periodization.³⁹

While Philips herself used pseudoclassical names, she also used the real name of her beloved at times. Further, her poetry was circulated within a small circle where it was taken to be autobiographical and of the present moment. The names might be understood to be protective and indicative of a special circle of friends, but they do not bring about the kind of historical and personal distancing found in Donne's poetry.

Periodization was also used to “protect” Philips's reputation. When her poetry was collected and published in 1667, three years after her death, she was dubbed “The English Sappho” in the book's preface, and several poets wrote verses in praise of Philips using this same sobriquet. However, this comparison itself was problematic, for although Sappho's poems were considered the pinnacle of literary achievement in lyric poetry by a woman, seventeenth-century poets believed her subject matter to be highly suspect.⁴⁰ To downplay the sexual implications of the comparison, many writers insisted that Philips's moral virtues far surpassed Sappho's. Abraham Cowley, for example:

They talk of Sappho, but, alas! the shame
Ill Manners soil the lustre of her fame.
Orinda's inward Vertue is so bright,
That, like a Lantern's fair enclosed light,
It through the Paper shines where she doth write.(41)

The strategy of periodization is clearly in evidence in verse such as this. While Philips is meant to gain by comparison to the ancient Sappho (equal in skill, superior in virtue), the lesbian character of her poetry is virtually erased.

Lesbian sexuality was also diffused in Donne's poetry through the image of Sappho imagining her lover's body as she gazes at her own reflection in a mirror. Donne thus turns lesbian desire into “autoerotic” desire:⁴²

My two lips, eyes, thighs, differ from thy two,
But so, as thine from one another do;
And, oh, no more; the likeness being such,
Why should they not alike in all parts touch?
Hand to strange hand, lip to lip none denies;
Why should they breast to breast, or thighs to thighs?
Likeness begets such strange self flattery,
That touching myself, all seems done to thee.
Myself I embrace, and mine own hands I kiss,
And amorously thank myself for this.
Me, in my glass, I call thee; but alas,
When I would kiss, tears dim mine eyes, and glass.(43)

In many ways, mutuality defined this lesbian sensibility. But, for Donne, spiritual and physical love was hierarchical—remember the lines mentioned earlier from “The Canonization”: “She is all States, and all Princes, I, / Nothing else is.” Since lesbian love according to Donne is symmetrical and autoerotic, a love between two equal persons, lesbian sexuality could not possibly participate in Donne's metaphor of political and erotic domination.⁴⁴

Philips herself reworked this idea in the fifth stanza of “Friendship's Mystery,” and the concept of mutuality fills the entire poem, including the last stanza, which was not set by Lawes. Thus, one might argue that Philips also participated in this mirroring device. However, her concept of mutuality differs from Donne's. Philips often describes her relationship with Lucasia or Rosania as one in which they possess “twin-souls.” For Philips, the phenomenon is not so much one of mirroring, but of joining or entwining. She and her beloved are alike, not because they reflect one another's image, but because they share one soul and metaphorically inhabit one another's body. The joining is so complete at times that they lose a sense of individual identity, and through what Celia Easton calls “a fluidity of roles, she [Philips] dismantles the power relations of erotic expression.”⁴⁵ Several excerpts from her poetry demonstrate the difference between Philips's and Donne's notions of mutuality and mirroring:⁴⁶

Our chang'd and mingled souls are grown
To such acquaintance now,
That if each would resume their own,
Alas! we know not how.
We have each other so engrost,
That each is in the union lost.
Thus our twin-souls in one shall grow,
And teach the World new love …(47)
The Compasses that stand above,
Express this great immortal Love;
For friends, like them, can prove this true,
They are, and yet they are not, two.(48)
Your own destruction gives you now Content:
For our twin-spirits did so long agree,
You must undo yourself to ruin me.
And, like some frantic Goddess, you're inclin'd
To raze the temple where you are enshrin'd.(49)
O may good Heav'n but so much virtue lend,
To make me fit to be Lucasia's Friend!
But I'll forsake myself, and seek a new
Self in her breast that's far more rich and true.(50)

Beyond periodization and mirroring, Elizabeth D. Harvey suggests that in “Sapho and Philaenis,” Donne also “domesticates” the lesbian “image of the self, a process that is mediated both by ventriloquism and by voyeurism.”⁵¹ Again, Philips does not call on these devices; she is speaking in her own voice, based on what we know of her relationships with these women.⁵² Philips writes realistically of the women in her life and her relationships with them; she refers to specific events they have shared, their disagreements, and her own feelings of joy, rejection, or loss. Her emotional goal in her poetry is to make an impact on her beloved. She writes verses that in effect are seductive, and she often implores her friend to speak of their love. In times of trouble, Philips expresses her disappointment, anger, or loss, often in the hope that the relationship will improve. Furthermore, her longing for her lovers never results in an objectifying gaze, while in Donne's poetry, the “dislocation of voice reveals both the ventriloquist and the voyeur, the first producing speech that appears to emanate from a source other than the real speaker, and the other deriving pleasure from a looking that requires no participation.”⁵³

I would argue that Lawes's setting of “Friendship's Mystery” is part of the set of techniques outlined above that aim to control lesbian sexuality. By setting Philips's words to music, Lawes inescapably blurs the authorial voice and thus rewrites the relationship as he wishes to view it. As we have already seen, his setting invokes no possibility of power or erotic strength. Further, it must be remembered that he retitled her poem “Mutuall Affection Between Orinda and Lucasia.” While Philips certainly played into his hands by using classical names for herself and her friends, she still gave the poem the title “Friendship's Mystery, To My Dearest Lucasia.” Her emphasis is upon the mystery of their union, not the mere fact of its mutuality. His voyeuristic stance is emphasized by the strophic setting of “Friendship's Mystery,” one that privileges structure over content and relieves the composer of his own “subjective responses.”⁵⁴ Thus, Lawes was able to remain detached from the emotional level of Philips's verse, delighting instead in the form of her verse.

In contemplating the connection between Lawes and Philips it is clear that Lawes was aware of her relationships with Lucasia and Rosania. He set a number of her poems to these women, and he was intimately connected with her circle of friends. Furthermore, Philips must have approved of Lawes's musical expression of the “Mutuall Affection Between Orinda and Lucasia” in light of the commendatory poem she addressed to him, as well as other compliments she is known to have paid him.⁵⁵ Yet despite his proximity to Philips, it is also clear that Lawes did not come close to expressing the depth of feeling and strength of commitment that she avows in her poetry. This situation may be due to his own lack of understanding of what Philips's relationships meant to her, given the social conventions at the time. Or perhaps he felt a need to resolve the tension between Philips's strong language and the currently accepted notion of what female friendship and love between women entailed. In any case, for Philips, in 1655, her relationship with Lucasia was primary; it was her emotional lifeline, and it was adorned, but neither understood nor expressed, by Henry Lawes's music in the Second Book of Ayres and Dialogues.

Instead of matching Philips's impassioned argument with a strong musical discourse, Lawes seems to match the seventeenth-century view of female friendship with his elegant setting. In this song her verses are adorned with music that embodies refinement, charm, tentativeness, and gentleness. Nevertheless, her words are those of action, of articulating an elaborate, intellectual, and emotional philosophy of friendship. But Lawes wrote music to charm, not to move to action. In short, Philips's appropriation of a male poetic discourse is not articulated musically. If Lawes had set her poem to a musical discourse reserved for passion between men and women, he would have given her words the kind of power not in currency for either friendship or love between women. With this setting he instead represented musically what seventeenth-century men imagined female friendship and love to be.

Aside from what these facts and speculations tell us about Lawes's working relationship with Philips and his manner of setting her poetry, the issues I have explored raise questions that I believe are pertinent to any number of other situations. Whenever a composer sets a text, she or he is performing an act of interpretation, and we hear the text from that new perspective. It seems crucial that we take time to examine the social conventions that affect the way a composer might choose to interpret a text, especially when the texts of women are interpreted by men, or vice versa. By posing these questions, we open the possibility of learning more about the lives and beliefs of composers we have come to know so well. And just as exciting, we can begin to learn about the many people whose names and lives remain unknown to us, even though we may already know their words through someone else's music.

APPENDIX A

FRIENDSHIP'S MYSTERY, TO MY DEAREST LUCASIA⁵⁶

Come, my Lucasia, since we see
That miracles men's faith do move,
By wonder and by prodigy
To the dull angry world let's prove
There's a religion in our Love.
For though we were design'd t'agree,
That Fate no liberty destroys,
But our Election is as free
As Angels', who with greedy choice
Are yet determin'd to their joys
Our hearts are doubled by the loss,
Here mixture is addition grown;
We both diffuse, and both ingross:
And we whose minds are so much one,
Never, yet ever are alone.
We court our own captivity
Than thrones more great and innocent:
Twere banishment to be set free,
Since we wear fetters whose intent
Not bondage is but ornament.
Divided joys are tedious found,
And griefs united easier grow:
We are ourselves but by rebound,
And all our titles shuffled so,
Both Princes, and both subjects too.
Our hearts are mutual victims laid,
While they (such power in Friendship lies)
Are Altars, Priests, and Off'rings made:
And each heart which thus kindly dies,
Grows deathless by the sacrifice.

APPENDIX B

NO REPRIEVE⁵⁷

Now, now Lucatia, now make haste,
If thou wilt see how strong thou art,
There needs but one frown more to waste
The whole remainder of my heart.
                    Alas undone, to Fate I bow my head
                    Ready to die, now die, and now now now am dead.
You looke to have an age of tryal
Ere you a Lover will repay,
But my state brooks no more deniall;
I cannot this one minute stay.
                    Alas undone, to Fate I bow my head
                    Ready to die, now die, and now now now am dead.
Look in my wound and see how cold,
How pale and gasping my Soule lies,
Which nature strives in vain to hold,
Whil'st wing'd with sighs away it flies.
                    Alas undone, to Fate I bow my head
                    Ready to die, now die, and now now now am dead.
See, see already Charon's boat,
Who grimly asks why all this stay?
Hark how the fatal sisters shout,
And now they call, away, away,
                    Alas undone, to Fate I bow my head
                    Ready to die, now die, and now now now am dead.

APPENDIX C

A FRIEND⁵⁸

The chiefest thing in friends is Sympathy:
There is a secret that doth friendship guide,
Which makes two souls before they know agree,
Who by a thousand mixtures are allied,
And chang'd and lost, so that it is not known
Within which breast doth now reside their own.
Thick waters show no images of things:
Friends are each other's mirrors, and should be
Clearer than crystal or the mountain springs,
And free from clouds, design or flattery.
For vulgar souls no part of Friendship share:
Poets and friends are born to what they are.
Absence doth not from Friendship's right excuse:
Them who preserve each other's heart and fame,
Parting can ne'er divide, it may diffuse;
As a far stretch'd-out river's still the same.
Though presence help'd then at the first to greet,
Their souls know now without those aids to meet.

APPENDIX D

ON THE FRIENDSHIP BETWIXT TWO LADIES⁵⁹

Tell me, lovely, loving pair!
Why so kind, and so severe?
Why so careless of our care,
Only to yourselves so dear?
By this cunning change of hearts,
You the power of love control;
While the boy's deluded darts
Can arrive at neither soul.
For in vain to either breast
Still beguiled love does come,
Where he finds a foreign guest,
Neither of your hearts at home.
Debtors thus with like design,
When they never mean to pay,
That they may the law decline,
To some friend make all away.
Not the silver doves that fly,
Yoked in Cytherea's car;
Not the wings that lift so high,
And convey her son so far;
Are so lovely, sweet, and fair,
Or do more ennoble love;
Are so choicely matched a pair,
Or with more consent to move.

APPENDIX E

CONTENT, TO MY DEAREST LUCASIA⁶⁰

Then, my Lucasia, we who have
Whatever Love can give or crave;
Who can with pitying scorn survey
The trifles which the most betray;
With innocence and perfect friendship fir'd
Be Virtue join'd, and by our choice retir'd.
Whose mirrors are the crystal brooks,
Or else each other's hearts and looks;
Who cannot wish for other things
Than privacy and friendship brings:
Whose thoughts and persons chang'd and mixt are one,
Enjoy Content, or else the World hath none.

Notes

1. Quoted in George Saintsbury, Minor Poets of the Caroline Period, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1905), I: 555. This is a reprint of Katherine Philips, Poems (London: J. M. for H. Herringman, 1667). All quotations of Philips's poetry are taken from this source unless otherwise noted.

2. See Willa McClung Evans, Henry Lawes, Musician and Friend of Poets (New York: Modern Language Association, 1941; reprint, New York, 1966), R. J. McGrady, “Henry Lawes and the Concept of ‘Just Note and Accent,’ Music and Letters 50 (1969): 86-102, and Wilfrid Mellers, “Henry Lawes and the Caroline Ayre,” in his Harmonious Meeting: A Study of Music, Poetry and Theatre in England, 1600-1900 (London: Dobson, 1965), 107-17. Milton's sonnet first appeared in print in Henry Lawes and William Lawes, Choice Psalms (London: James Young, 1648); see Evans, Henry Lawes, 181 for a facsimile. A modern edition of the poem is in John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey, 1957), 144. For critical analyses of the poem see Audrey Davidson, “Milton on the Music of Henry Lawes,” Milton Newsletter 2, no. 2 (1968): 19-23 (also printed as “Milton's Encomiastic Sonnet to Henry Lawes,” in her Substance and Manner: Studies in Music and the Other Arts, [St. Paul: Hiawatha, 1977]: 13-20); Nan Cooke Carpenter, “Milton and Music: Henry Lawes, Dante, and Casella,” English Literary Renaissance 2 (1972): 237-42.

3. “To Mr. Henry Lawes,” Saintsbury, Minor Poets, I: 518-19.

4. Philips's circle of friends included a number of people who appear in Henry Lawes's Second Book of Ayres and Dialogues (London: T. Harper, 1655). Lawes dedicated the book to Lady Dering, a student of his. Lady Dering also composed the music for three songs that Lawes included in his collection. The poetry for these songs was written by her husband, Sir Edward. Lady Dering was a school friend of Philips's, and both she and her husband received poetic tributes from Philips. Two other friends of Philips's, Francis Finch and John Berkenhead, also provided poetry for several of the songs that Lawes set in the collection and were the recipients of poems by Philips. Sir Edward, Finch, Berkenhead, and Philips wrote commendatory verses to Lawes for the preface of the book. The Second Book of Ayres was not the first time these poets had come together. In 1651, these men decided to publish a collection of the late William Cartwright's poetry. They each wrote a poem in Cartwright's memory and asked Philips to do the same. (Evidently, by age twenty Philips's talent as a poet was well known; her poetry was circulating in manuscript form well before her poem to Cartwright appeared.) From this evidence it may seem that Philips was included in Lawes's collection only through their mutual acquaintances, particularly since there is no record of an actual meeting between Lawes and Philips. However, it is probable that Philips attended one of the many private concerts Lawes held at his home in London. Lady Dering, as well as other friends of hers, are known to have attended these evening concerts. Although we can not be certain that Philips was ever present at these events, it is nonetheless likely that Lawes knew her personally. See Allan Pritchard and Patrick Thomas, “Orinda, Vaughan and Watkyns: Anglo-Welsh Literary Relationships During the Interregnum,” The Anglo-Welsh Review 62 (1976): 96-102. For biographies of Philips, see Philip Webster Souers, The Matchless Orinda, Harvard Studies in English 5 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1931); Lucy Brashear, “The Forgotten Legacy of the ‘Matchless Orinda,’” The Anglo-Welsh Review 65 (1979): 68-76.

5. However, her poetry differs from much Cavalier verse in significant ways. In his “Introduction to Henry Lawes,” (Music and Letters 4 [1951]: 217-25 and 328-44), Eric Ford Hart suggests that “Cavalier poets were … flippant … because in their poetry they ignored the realities of the age in which they were living, and confined their attention to purely personal matters, the most important of which was love,” (223). Whether or not one agrees with Hart's assessment, Philips was certainly not typical in this regard.

6. See Claudia A. Limbert, “Woman to Woman: The Female Friendship Poems of Katherine Philips,” Volumes 1-3, Dissertation Abstracts International 49, no. 6 (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1988): 1463A-64A.

7. Arlene Stiebel, “Not Since Sappho: The Erotic in Poems of Katherine Philips and Aphra Behn,” Journal of Homosexuality 23, nos. 1/2 (1992): 161-78. I would like to thank Stiebel for providing me with a copy of her article before its publication. For further discussion of Philips's use of literary conventions see Harriette Andreadis, “The Sapphic-Platonics of Katherine Philips,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 15 (1989): 34-60, especially 39.

8. Celia A. Easton, “Excusing the Breach of Nature's Laws: The Discourse of Denial and Disguise in Katherine Philips' Friendship Poetry,” Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, vol. 14 1660-1700 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 1990): 4. Easton, Stiebel, and Andreadis all advance, although each somewhat differently, a lesbian interpretation of Philips's poetry. They also address the issue of the problematic term “lesbian” and argue convincingly for its use.

9. “To Mrs. Mary Aubrey,” Saintsbury, Minor Poets, I: 548-49.

10. “To Rosania, now Mrs. Montague, being with her,” Saintsbury, Minor Poets, I: 540-41.

11. “Injuria Amicitiae,” Saintsbury, Minor Poets, I: 538-39.

12. “To my Excellent Lucasia, on our Friendship,” Saintsbury, Minor Poets, I: 537-38.

13. Andreadis, “Sapphic-Platonics,” 40.

14. “To my Lucasia, in defence of declared friendship,” Saintsbury, Minor Poets, 554-56.

15. Andreadis, “Sapphic-Platonics,” 40.

16. Elizabeth H. Hageman, “The Matchless Orinda: Katherine Philips,” in Katharina M. Wilson, ed., Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 572-73.

17. Lawes set “To Mrs. M. A. upon Absence,” and “A Dialogue of Absence twixt Lucasia and Orinda,” Saintsbury, Minor Poets, 548 and 522 respectively.

18. These categories are outlined by Ian Spink in English Song: Dowland to Purcell (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1974), 89-93. See also Hart, “Introduction to Henry Lawes,” 333-34.

19. “A long note at the end of a line in a tuneful song will naturally fail to be entirely satisfactory where there is an enjambment, since it will hold up what (from the literary point of view) ought to run on,” Ian Spink, English Song, 88-89. Willetts describes these tuneful songs: “[They are] often composed in triple time, with no pretension to depth of feeling and no particular attention to the word-setting. A light catchy tune repeated for each stanza is the aim. These strophic settings suffer from the inescapable defect of their structure: few poems are absolutely regular in metric construction, thus a melody which fits one verse will probably distort a word or so in another.” Pamela J. Willetts, The Henry Lawes Manuscript (London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1969), 4.

20. I would like to thank John O'Neill for his thoughts on enjambment and verse structure in “Friendship's Mystery.”

21. I would like to thank Susan McClary who shared her understanding of these harmonic procedures with me. DonnaMae Gustafson also shared her impressions with me to my benefit. I am grateful to Phil Rukavina and Lisa Carney for learning and performing for me the two pieces discussed here.

22. Philip Brett, “Word-Setting in the Songs of Byrd,” Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association 98 (1971/72): 47-64. See pages 52-55 in particular.

23. Spink, English Song, 79-83. Spink discusses Lawes setting of Carew's “To an inconstant Mistris” (“When thou, poore excommunicate / From all the joyes of love, shalt see”).

24. See Ian Spink, English Song, 79-83 for an analysis of a similarly complex poem set in a declamatory, through-composed fashion by Lawes.

25. Peter William Thomas, Sir John Berkenhead, 1617-1679: A Royalist Career in Politics and Polemics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 188-89.

26. This text recalls the Elizabethan choirboy plays that included laments focused on the repetition of words such as I die, alas, etc. Such texts were so pervasive that Shakespeare parodied them in the last act of A Midsummer Night's Dream with the death songs of Pyramus and Thisbe. For further information see G. E. P. Arkwright, “Elizabethan Choirboy Plays and Their Music,” Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association 40 (1913/14): 117-38. See also Philip Brett's remarks in his edition of choirboy laments in Consort Songs, Musica Britannica, vol. 22 (London: Stainer and Bell, 1967), xvi.

27. Willetts, The Henry Lawes Manuscript, 5.

28. These musical gestures are also not unlike those of the Elizabethan choirboy laments. See Philip Brett, Consort Songs, for modern editions of several laments.

29. Andreadis, “Sapphic-Platonics,” 42-43.

30. Janice Raymond, A Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female Affection (London: The Women's Press, 1986), 224.

31. “A Friend,” Saintsbury, Minor Poets, I: 561-63.

32. Jeremy Taylor, “A Discourse of the Nature, Offices, of Friendship and Measures, With Rules of Conducting It, In a Letter to the Most Ingenious and Excellent M. K. P.,” 1657, in Reginald Heber, ed., The Whole Works of Jeremy Taylor, vol. 11 (London: Ogle, Duncan and Co., 1822), 330. See also Hageman, “The Matchless Orinda,” 574.

33. Taylor, “Discourse,” 330-31.

34. Edmund Waller, The Poems of Edmund Waller, ed. George Thorn Drury (London: Routledge, 1893), 60-61.

35. Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1981), 72. It is interesting to note that Katherine Philips disliked Waller. See Letters from Orinda to Poliarchus, (2d ed., London: printed for B. Lintot, 1729), 189-90.

36. It seems that it was only after Katherine Philips that women began explicitly to write poetry about lesbian relationships. Most notable among the later poets was Aphra Behn. See her poem “To the Fair Clarinda, Who Made Love to Me, Imagined More than Woman,” in Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, eds., The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition in English (New York: Norton, 1985), 94. For an examination of women who took Philips's poetry as a model for their own poetry about female friendship see Marilyn L. Williamson, “Orinda and Her Daughters,” Raising Their Voices: British Women Writers, 1650-1750 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990), 64-133. An example of this poetry can be seen in the work of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea. Her dialogue “Friendship between Ephelia and Ardelia” is obviously indebted to Philips. It is available in Dale Spender and Janet Todd, eds., Anthology of British Women Writers (London: Pandora Press, 1989), 156-57. For other anthologies see Moira Ferguson, ed., First Feminists: British Women Writers 1578-1799 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985); Mary R. Mahl and Helene Koon, eds., The Female Spectator: English Women Writers Before 1800 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977); Angeline Goreau, ed., The Whole Duty of a Woman: Female Writers in Seventeenth-Century England (Garden City, New Jersey: Dial Press, 1985); Germaine Greer, et al., eds., Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women's Verse (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1989).

37. James Holstun, “‘Will You Rent Our Ancient Love Asunder?’: Lesbian Elegy in Donne, Marvell, and Milton,” E.L.H. 54, no. 4 (1987): 835-67.

38. Holstun, “Will You Rent Our Ancient Love,” 837.

39. Holstun, “Will You Rent Our Ancient Love,” 845-46.

40. Andreadis, “Sapphic-Platonics,” 51. For a consideration of the ways the figure of Sappho was defined, redefined, and used throughout French literary history see Joan DeJean, Fictions of Sappho, 1546-1937 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

41. Quoted in Andreadis, “Sapphic-Platonics,” 52.

42. Holstun, “Will You Rent Our Ancient Love,” 843.

43. John Donne, “Sapho and Philaenis,” lines 45-56, quoted in Elizabeth D. Harvey, “Ventriloquizing Sappho: Ovid, Donne, and the Erotics of the Feminine Voice,” Criticism 31, no. 2 (1989): 127.

44. Holstun, “Will You Rent Our Ancient Love,” 840.

45. Easton, “Excusing the Breach of Nature's Laws,” 5.

46. For further examples, see excerpts from her poetry in Appendix E.

47. “To Mrs. M. A. at parting,” Saintsbury, Minor Poets, I: 550-51.

48. “Friendship in Emblem, or the Seal. To my dearest Lucasia,” Saintsbury, Minor Poets, I: 529.

49. “Injuria Amicitiae,” Saintsbury, Minor Poets, I: 538-39.

50. “To my Lucasia,” Saintsbury, Minor Poets, I: 541.

51. Harvey, “Ventriloquizing Sappho,” 126.

52. For a compelling discussion of the “tension of repression” between Philips's voice and Orinda's, see Easton, “Excusing the Breach of Nature's Laws.”

53. Easton, “Excusing the Breach of Nature's Laws,” 129.

54. Brett, “Word-Setting in the Songs of Byrd,” 54.

55. Souers, The Matchless Orinda, 181.

56. Saintsbury, Minor Poets, 520.

57. John Berkenhead, quoted in Souers, The Matchless Orinda, 66.

58. Saintsbury, Minor Poets, 561-63.

59. Waller, The Poems of Edmund Waller, 60-61.

60. Saintsbury, Minor Poets, 520-22.