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This chapter illuminates the affective significance of music and song within household drama, a genre that early modern scholarship has found difficult to detach from the page and that continues to be undervalued in performance terms. Drawing on the notion of the closet, understood both as an architectural and acoustic space within the early modern household and as a generic marker for women’s dramatic productions, it explores the range of musical practices encompassed under the broad category of “household plays.” Focusing on Jane Lumley’s Iphigenia at Aulis, Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure, and Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory, it then considers how recent staging experiments help to illuminate textual markers of music and song that have too often been silenced.

This article analyzes Benjamin Britten's late works through the lenses of late style discourse and theories of aging, showing how these final compositions can be read as a reflection of the ways in which Britten's illness and physical disability in the last years of his life prematurely ushered the composer into 'old age' and its attendant physical and psychological difficulties. From Death in Venice on, Britten's compositions display an unmistakable preoccupation with mortality, both in terms of subject matter and in terms of an even further finessed concision of musical style. While the stylistic decisions in these last works cannot be divorced from Britten's very real sense and eventual acceptance of the nearness of his own death, neither can they be wholly accounted for by it, marking as they do an undiminished capacity for creative achievement in the midst of significantly diminished physical capabilities.

The authorizing potential of ludic spaces offers a valuable and overlooked context for considering the critique of conventional courtship roles that grounds Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost and Mary Wroth's Love's Victory. Love's Labour's Lost stands as an important precursor to Love's Victory in featuring conversational play as a formal and thematic device and in emphasizing the ladies' skilled and authoritative leadership of the courtship games that pervade the drama. Both plays rely on three elements derived from ludic conventions: an emphasis on isolated or semi‐isolated playing spaces, the establishment of rules and hierarchies particular to those contexts, and an elaborate system of punishments and rewards that governs not only the smaller playing spaces that permeate both dramas but their courtly and pastoral play worlds as well. In giving Love's Labour's Lost and Love's Victory an overarching ludic framework, Shakespeare and Wroth challenge the conventional ephemerality of ludic spaces, blurring the boundaries between individual games and the broader realms their characters inhabit. In so doing, they extend the agency of their female protagonists beyond the parameters of their seemingly isolated playing spaces. (K.R.L.)

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