Vaughan Williams Memorial Library Lectures: Drink, Song and Politics in Early Modern England, Angela McShane

Between about 1580 and 1690, early modern England experienced three interrelated developments. First: the growth of a successful commercial popular music industry, centred on London, that served a socially broad national market. Second: the development of political parties, emerging from the political and religious turmoil of the period, which impinged significantly upon the newly burgeoning popular music industry and its markets. Third: a substantial increase in the per capita consumption of alcoholic drinks across all social classes, for reasons of sociability rather than health or nutrition. This paper briefly explores the unexpected effects of these changes on cultures of politics, drink and song across the whole period. In particular, it explores the way in which the Cavaliers of the 1650s and the new ‘Tory’ party of the 1680s used the medium of song to encourage excessive drinking in order to promote loyal obedience and the political and social denigration of sobriety.

Angela McShane is the Head of Early Modern Studies for the V&A/RCA postgraduate programmes in History of Design, and is currently a Visiting Fellow at the University of Sheffield. She has published widely on the subject of 17th century political broadside ballads and on the material culture of drinking, including chapters in collected editions, and journal articles in Past and Present and Journal of British Studies. A monograph, The Political World of the Broadside Ballad in 17th Century England, is forthcoming.