The (lost) tune of ‘Raging Love’ and its reverberations in Isabella Whitney’s Copy of a Letter

Abstract

This article argues that Isabella Whitney’s verse epistles ‘To Her Unconstant Lover’ and ‘The Admonition’ in The Copy of a Letter (c. 1566–67) are enmeshed more thoroughly in the early modern English soundscape than previous criticism has tended to acknowledge. Seeking to enrich current understandings of Whitney’s confluences, this article first examines the vibrant musical sphere in which The Copy of a Letter’s printer-publisher Richard Jones was demonstrably immersed before moving on to explore the more specific implications of an acoustically evocative allusion to ‘Raging Love’ (a now-lost Elizabethan ballad melody) in the opening lines of ‘The Admonition’.