I think that anyone who reads the literary and music theorists
of the late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries will be struck
by the persistence with which these theorists clung to an ideal
concept of the proper union of poetry and music. They readily
admitted the history, the nobility, and the future possibilities of
each art separately. But they seemed to regard the combination
of the two as an independent art, and--in the opinion of some
theorists, at least--as an art superior to either of the component
two. The concept was often expressed in the formula, "poetry
plus melody equals music"; and in this inclusive and--as the
Renaissance liked to think--classical sense of the term, music
came to have an aesthetic and a system of rules of its own. By
these standards, melody was considered to be governed by the
words, or was--in the parlance of the theorists--the handmaiden
of poetry. But the theorists were firm in their belief that poetry
without music and music without poetry were equally inferior
to a proper combination of the two.

This is the concept of the union of poetry and music which
I should like to discuss now in more detail, first by describing
the origin and the persistence of the ideal itself in the writings
of Renaissance theorists, and then by commenting briefly on
some of the devices and techniques prescribed by these writers
for attaining the ideal in practice.

The origins of the concept in the musical humanism and the
poetical experiments of mid-sixteenth century Continental
academies have been so thoroughly described by D. P. Walker in
a series of articles in the Musical Review, and by Frances Yates,
in The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century, that I per-
haps need do little more than summarize their findings here.

Two academies in particular were important for their activi-
ties in focusing the interest of sixteenth-century humanism on
the problems of music and poetry: Jean de Baïf Académie de
Poésie et de Musique, instituted by royal decree in France, and
the Florentine Camerata, in which Giovanni De'Bardi was the

-2-