Gods! I can never this endure: madness made manifest in the songs of Henry Purcell (16591695) and Henry Carey (16891743)

The seventeenth-century English mad song reached a pinnacle with the work of Henry Purcell (16591695), whose compositional innovations within that genre continued to be employed long after his death. The intention of this essay is to explore the development of the Baroque mad song, as well as the musical expression of madness contained within, by deconstructing three songs composed within 50 years of one another: Henry Purcell's Bess of Bedlam (1682), and two mad songs by Henry Carey I go to the Elisian Shade (1724) and Gods! I can never this endure (1732). Though much is known of Henry Purcell, little-known composer, poet and satirist Henry Carey (16891743) was one of the few composers of mad songs during the 1720s and 1730s. Carey's exciting and engaging mad songs stand as superlative representatives of period solo vocal literature. Yet, progressive though they are, direct antecedents to Carey's work can be found in the earlier work of Purcell. By studying excerpts from Purcell's Bess of Bedlam and each of Carey's mad songs, this essay explores the genre of the English mad song, focusing primarily on its development in the hands of Carey during the early part of the eighteenth century. Consideration is also given to non-musical elements, including period and contemporary reflections on madness, facilitating an understanding of how madness in literature and drama was reflected in the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century mad songs of Purcell and Carey.