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This chapter focuses initially on John Hall of Durham, who had been under Stanley's patronage since 1642 and was a key member of his London literary group. Hall was also an avid reader of Milton's prose and an associate of the educational reformer and intelligencer Samuel Hartlib, who regarded the dissolution of the court as an opportunity to reform learning in England. The first section of the chapter examines Hall's correspondence with Hartlib and his (failed) effort to bring the Stanley circle and Hartlib network together. The second section looks at Milton's sonnets in the mid-1640s and examines in particular how Milton's anti-Presbyterianism in these sonnets is accompanied by a softening attitude towards the Cavalier culture that he previously attacked. There is an extended reading of Milton's sonnet to his old Cavalier friend, the musician Henry Lawes. The third section traces the development of both Hall's Parliamentarianism and his anti-Presbyterianism.

Though it is clear that Herrick and Henry Lawes knew and respected each other’s work, little attention has been given to their collaborative efforts. Here, in contrast to the melancholy or declamatory airs for which Lawes is mostly known, we find mirthful pieces set in a ‘tuneful’ manner. Solo voices jauntily bespeak of quarrelling cupids (‘About the sweet bag of a bee’) or would-be lovers (‘Am I dispis’d’), while rollicking triple-time choruses deliver the cheerful resolutions. In sympathy with Herrick, Lawes’ music for such poetry almost sounds like secular hymns and anthems for a doctrine of mirth. This study provides a list of Lawes' musical settings for Herrick’s poems from the mid-seventeenth century and suggests how better to understand their collaborative style and how they may have hoped to use their combined cultural influence in the service of the king.

This chapter investigates the ways in which the philosophy of friendship developed in Philips's verse draws on and contributes to the politicised friendship writings produced in the royalist literary milieu which fostered her. Where Cavendish takes encouragement from her contact with the circle around Henry Lawes, former master of the King's music, Philips is taken to the heart of his coterie and it is coterie manuscript circulation which lies at the root of her emergence as a political author in contrast to Cavendish's lavish printed folio volumes sponsored by her husband and presented to the universities. The chapter argues that Philips' rise as an author (culminating in the printing of her poems and plays after the Restoration) is assisted by the fact that her gender makes her especially well-placed to articulate the values or ideals which are seen to have specific pertinence to Interregnum royalists of both sexes. It further demonstrates that though the Restoration alters the meanings of friendship in her work, they remain highly politically significant in her renderings of Corneille's drama and shape perceptions of her worth as a translator.

In John Milton’s works, music is a powerful instigator of unsettling modes of poetry. From A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle to Samson Agonistes and Paradise Lost, Milton remains fascinated by the transformative potential of song, though he comes increasingly to eschew its uncontrollable qualities. In his later career, Milton found it increasingly pressing to subordinate music to his authorial voice. Yet his fantasies of bibliographic control did not prevent him from influencing the songbook movement of the 1650s or from becoming a source for Dryden’s unperformed opera The State of Innocence. Tracing Milton’s connections to his erstwhile collaborator Alice Egerton, to Cavalier songwriters including William Cartwright, and to music publishers including John Playford, Chapter 4 reveals that poetry retained its tendencies toward media adaptation notwithstanding the conflicted desires of poets.

This chapter discusses the role of performer additions in mid-seventeenth-century English song. It re-examines the relationship between delivery of a poetic text and musical performance. The ‘Hilton’ Songbook, BL Additional Manuscript 11608, demonstrates how a group of professional singers learned their ornamentation techniques from Italian sources such as Giulio Caccini, and how vocal expressivity could be achieved by breaking the customary rules of verbal rhetoric. Songs by Henry and William Lawes, Nicholas Lanier and Thomas Brewer, as well as theatrical music by Robert Johnson, are seen in varying stages of textual completion, allowing performers to insert themselves into the relationship between poets and composers. The results contradict the prevailing view of simplicity, artlessness and even musical decline that have often characterised descriptions of mid-seventeenth-century English song.