Many practitioners of the magical arts in English Renaissance drama rely on music to achieve their occult goals. Indeed, music often comes to represent the audible sound of arcane forces at work, for to the Renaissance music itself was a dual art with both obvious and hidden properties. On one hand, music was a delightful, practical science concerned with the production of ordered sound by the human voice or artificial instruments. On the other hand, music, like magic, was a powerful numerical art capable of unlocking the obvious and hidden aspects of all creation. As Thomas Morley carefully reminds his readers in the most famous contemporary English treatise on music theory,Musicke is either speculative or practicall. Speculative is that kinde of musicke which by Mathematicall helpes, seeketh out causes, properties, and natures of soundes by themselves, and compared with others, proceeding no further, but content with onlie contemplation of that Art. Practicall is that which teacheth al that may be knowne in songs, eyther for the understanding of other mens or the making of ones owne.

To Elizabethan observers in many disciplines, feminine beauty and music offered parallel benefits and dangers that influenced prescriptions for the actual musical behavior of contemporary Englishwomen and also the development of stock literary situations in which female musicians either caused spiritual fulfillment or physical destruction. Conflicting ideologies, based on the most respected ancient authorities and contemporary observers, attributed similarly opposite aspects to women and music, which had both come to be regarded as earthly embodiments of the divine and the damning by the final part of the sixteenth century. Women, who possessed the natures of both Mary and Eve, were regarded as agents alternately of salvation and destruction even as music was perceived as an inspiration to both heavenly rapture and carnal lust.

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