TY - JOUR

T1 - Songs lost and found: Katherine Philips's Pompey's Ghost

AU - Cunningham, John

PY - 2022/11/7

Y1 - 2022/11/7

N2 - First staged at the Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin in 1663, Katherine Philips’s Pompey was the first play by a woman to be performed on the British stage. It was also pathbreaking in its use of entr’acte songs, which Philips newly added. This essay explores the complex afterlife of one song from the play, popularly known as Pompey’s Ghost. It was her most widely disseminated text, though it largely circulated anonymously or attributed to other authors. Between 1663 and 1806 the song was set to music at least five times. One late seventeenth-century setting became popular in New England and was known there into the nineteenth century. By the late eighteenth century, through another setting, the song became known as Scottish. The tune to which Pompey’s Ghost was sung in Scotland had been thought lost but can now be identified, restoring more of the song’s complex reception history and significance.

AB - First staged at the Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin in 1663, Katherine Philips’s Pompey was the first play by a woman to be performed on the British stage. It was also pathbreaking in its use of entr’acte songs, which Philips newly added. This essay explores the complex afterlife of one song from the play, popularly known as Pompey’s Ghost. It was her most widely disseminated text, though it largely circulated anonymously or attributed to other authors. Between 1663 and 1806 the song was set to music at least five times. One late seventeenth-century setting became popular in New England and was known there into the nineteenth century. By the late eighteenth century, through another setting, the song became known as Scottish. The tune to which Pompey’s Ghost was sung in Scotland had been thought lost but can now be identified, restoring more of the song’s complex reception history and significance.

KW - Katherine Philips

KW - Robert Burns

KW - Geminiani

KW - Henry Purcell

KW - Commonplace books

KW - Manuscript dissemination

KW - Book culture

KW - Cultural history

KW - music

U2 - 10.1093/ml/gcac015

DO - 10.1093/ml/gcac015

M3 - Article

VL - 103

SP - 591

EP - 629

JO - Music and Letters

JF - Music and Letters

SN - 0027-4224

IS - 4

M1 - gcac015

ER -