Robin Headlam Wells re-examines the myth, central to the Orpheus story, of the civilising power of music and poetry.

List of illustrations; Preface; List of Abbreviations; Introduction; Part I: Music, Myth and Politics: 1. Spenser and the politics of music; 2. Falstaff, Prince Hal and the New Song; 3. Prospero, King James and the myth of the musician-king; Part II: Defining the Essential: A Humanist Iconography: 4. The ladder of love: verbal and musical rhetoric in the Elizabethan lute song; 5. Microcosmos: symbolic geometry in the Renaissance lute rose; 6. The orpharion: 'a British shell'; Part III. The Game of Love: 7. Ars amatoria: Philip Rosseter and the Tudor court lyric; 8. Dowland, Ficino and Elizabethan melancholy; 9. 'Ydle shallowe things': love and song in Twelfth Night; Coda: floreat Orpheus; Notes; Index.