ABSTRACT
The English Renaissance held a parallel discourse on the doctrine of Platonic love and on the theory of speculative music. The merging of the identities of Neoplatonic love and speculative music in Early Modern England formulates the search for unity that is so characteristic of the age. Ficino was also a major source for the theory of speculative music, which was handed down to the Early Moderns from a tradition going back to Pythagoras, Plato, Macrobius and Boethius. The music of the spheres, or speculative music, is inaudible to human ears as Anton underlines, being entirely compounded of arithmetical proportions. Harmony as the union, unity, or to use Barnes' image, "unison" of parts, is indeed a recurring trope in Early Modern poetic language. Divine harmony is in turn associated with the dedicatee of the poem, Queen Elizabeth, as the microcosmic depository of world unity, the ruler of the "three realms".
