June 27, 2023
You speak Eclogue!
—Musidorus in Head over Heels
Prologue
In The Defence of Poesy, Sir Philip rails at length against the “defectuous,
“faulty,” and frequently “absurd” English drama of his day, confessing that in his
exasperation he has “lavished out too many words of this play matter.”1 Something that
sends him into a particular apoplexy, one from which he cannot restrain himself from
critiquing, is “mongrel tragicomedy”: it does not obey the classical unities of time,
setting, and theme, but instead “with neither decency nor discretion” presents nothing but
“scurrility unworthy of any chaste ears.” Overall, in his determination, the elements
potentially making up stage plays are “pitifully abused.” With that in mind, one might
rightly be relieved that poor Sir Philip did not live to say the present state of affairs, in
which seemingly no genre or text, including one by him, is immune from hybridization.
And yet, his Arcadia is itself something of a generic mixture, and many have found postSidney blendings, from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part One, to tentpole blockbuster films
like Wonder Woman that combine action, adventure, comedy, and romance more
recently, to be artistic successes.
This essay will focus on one particular recent mash-up: the musical Head over
Heels. Created between 2015 and 2018 by Jeff Whitty and James Magruder, it has since
been widely produced, regionally and on Broadway, with a hiatus when the Master of the
Revels shuttered the playhouses due to the plague in 2020.2 Its plot derives from Sidney’s
Arcadia, and for its music it uses the songs of The Go-Go’s. It is devoutly to be wished
that my commentary will persuade readers to see it live when they get a chance.
1 Gavin Alexander, ed., Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 45-48. 2 N.b. quotations of song lyrics are from the liner notes to the compact disc, cited parenthetically by page
number in the booklet: Head over Heels: Original Broadway Cast Recording (2018). Quotations of
dialogue are from the published script: Jeff Whitty and James Magruder, Head over Heels (New York:
Broadway Licensing, 2018).
I. Background
First, some background on the diverse ingredients of this effervescent concoction:
the Arcadia is a long, interlaced romance. It is pastoral-heroic, euphuistic, and tragicomic. As Oxford don C.S. Lewis, who also found time to write the pastoral saga The
Chronicles of Narnia, described it: “Its woods are greener, its rivers purer, its sky
brighter than ours.”3 Its original coterie audience centered around Mary Sidney Herbert,
the Countess of Pembroke, and her affinity of “courtly nymphs” at Wilton House, where
her brother frequently stayed. The main plot points retained in Head over Heels concern
Arcadia’s ruling family: King Basilius and Queen Gynecia, and their two daughters, the
princesses Pamela and Philoclea. Also prominent are Pamela’s servant Mopsa and
Philoclea’s childhood friend Musidorus. (In the musical, his character will be conflated
with his cousin Pyrocles, and also morphed into a local shepherd swain, following his
original’s disguise as plain Dorus, a humble rustic.) A Delphic oracle makes a
pronouncement concerning potential threats to the kingdom’s stability, sparking the
King’s evasive measures that ironically help fulfill their fate. One key to the action is that
Pyrocles ends up cross-dressing as an Amazon so as to ingratiate himself with Philoclea,
thereby attracting erotic interest from the King and the Queen as well. From this, classic
comic contretemps and wackiness, tinged with threats, ensue.
The original Arcadia also contains a number of “Eclogues” (pastoral poems)
along with myriad digressions, road trips, backstories, complicated subplots, and
numerous episodes of chivalric gallantry, courtly love, and knightly skirmishes. After
completing a lengthy preliminary version, Sidney starting substantially revising his
“toyful book” but unfortunately he was killed in 1586, aged thirty-one, leaving a dog’s
breakfast.4 Those close to him published different tidied-up forms of his opus starting in
the 1590s, and modern scholars have diligently edited and analyzed the early printed
volumes and manuscript witnesses, which they call the Old Arcadia and the New
Arcadia, but such textual issues are not our concern here. Bypassing various critical
3 C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Excluding Drama) (Oxford: Clarendon, 1954),
341.
4 Sir Philip Sidney, letter to his brother Robert, 1580, quoted in Katherine Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney:
Courtier Poet (New Haven and London; Yale University Press, 1991), 170-71. For his original work, see
Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, ed. Maurice Evans (Harmondsworth, Middlesex,
England: Penguin Books, 1977).
3
matters about this copious, fluid work, we might rather remember its significant impact
on later authors; as Virginia Woolf observed: “in the Arcadia, as in some luminous globe,
all the seeds of English fiction lie latent.”5 Head over Heels may then be considered a
long-dormant sprouting of those seeds planted by our dear Sir Philip.
He was at the center of an influential if amorphous group of artists now known as
the Sidney Circle.6 Many of his relatives composed verse, much of it frankly negligible.
However, his sister the Countess of Pembroke translated several early modern
Continental books and also completed his Englishing of the Psalms, and his niece Lady
Mary Wroth née Sidney excelled in courtly Sidneyan genres in the early seventeenth
century.
7 The two major non-related authors connected most closely to the Sidneys by
patronage or artistic sharing were Edmund Spenser and Ben Jonson; several minor
English and European satellites also moved in their orbit.8 The Sidney Circle was less an
exclusive private club behind a velvet rope, and more like an inviting pub where thirsty
poets stopped by to imbibe now and then.
II. God Bless The Go-Go’s
Jumping ahead four centuries, I contend that The Go-Go’s have now entered this
exalted Circle. The Go-Go’s exploded out of the L.A. punk scene and burned brightly in
the pop stratosphere of the early 1980s.9 Their debut album Beauty and the Beat (1981)
was followed by Vacation (1982) and Talk Show (1984). They topped the charts,
becoming the first all-female group who wrote their own songs and played their own
instruments to do so. Members were Charlotte Caffey, Belinda Carlisle, Gina Schock,
Kathy Valentine, and Jane Wiedlin. They broke up in 1985 due the usual rockstar recipe
of drug abuse, personality conflicts, and fights over money. Later they reunited for
occasional gigs and a new release, God Bless The Go-Go’s (2001), while lead singer
5 Virginia Woolf, “The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia,” in The Second Common Reader, ed. Andrew
McNeillie (1932; San Diego: Harvest Books, 1986). 6 See Mary Ellen Lamb, Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle (Madison: The University of
Wisconsin Press, 1990); and Matthew Woodcock, Sir Philip Sidney and the Sidney Circle (Tavistock,
Devon: Northcote House, 2010). 7 An moving elegy on Sidney, “The Doleful Lay of Clorinda,” may have been composed by the Countess
of Pembroke; it is attributed to Spenser by some scholars. 8 N.b. Sidney’s nephews William and Philip Herbert, the 3rd and 4th Earls of Pembroke, respectively, were
also the dedicatees of Shakespeare’s First Folio (1623), kind-of a big deal. 9 See The Go-Go’s, dir. Allison Ellwood (documentary film, 2020).
4
Belinda Carlisle enjoyed a successful solo career, including covers of French standards
on Voilà.
10 The band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (the American
version of Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey) in 2021.
III. The Mash-Up
At this juncture I would like to offer a theoretical appraisal. From a taxonomical
perspective, Head over Heels fits into several classifications: jukebox musical,
Renaissance rom-com, and rock opera.11 The one I wish to highlight is that it is also a
“mash-up.” In this millennium, popular music has been the most significant field where
mash-ups have thrived. Both established artists and amateur collaborators have created
wild juxtapositions of distinct songs. In current usage, mash-up can be defined as “a
mixture or fusion of disparate elements or genres.” The concept, however, stretches way
back. For instance, Stuart court masques, such as the two that Jonson devised and that
Queen Anne and Lady Mary Wroth performed in, blended mythology, allegory, drama,
music, opulent scenery, and dance—a precursor to modern opera. In “Remixing Culture
and Why the Art of the Mash-Up Matters,” pundit Ben Murray suggests that:
Meaningful appropriation remains a key tenet of creativity and innovation. … The best
examples of this kind of creative work are often marked by a reframing of the original
narrative, and so produce a fresh perspective on both the source material and the context
in which it first existed.12
While they do not always work, I believe that impulse to refashion and refurbish extant
art in novel ways can be highly successful. As T.S. Eliot, librettist for the Taylor Swift
musical Cats, argued in his influential essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” true
new art “involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence”;
original texts exist in conversation with the masterpieces that inspired them.13
Performance reviews and critical reactions to Head over Heels, though, have been
10 Belinda Carlisle’s solo career included releasing the hits “Mad about You” and “Heaven Is a Place on
Earth,” both featured in Head over Heels. 11 Several other popular recent musicals have blended history or literature, especially Shakespeare, with
songs, including Six, & Juliet, Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour, and adaptations of Twelfth Night and
Love’s Labour’s Lost. On musicals, see Nathaniel Hurwitz, A History of the American Musical Theatre: No
Business Like It (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2014). 12 Ben Murray, “Remixing Culture and Why the Art of the Mash-Up Matters,” Tech Crunch (2015). A
related nexus of questions concerning aesthetics and originality, plagiarism, copyright law and fair use, etc.,
while very interesting, are properly beyond the scope of this present essay. 13 “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) in Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New
York: FSG/HBJ, 1975), 37-44.
5
rather polarized. While many have enjoyed and praised it, others, such as New York
Times theater critic Ben Brantley, have offered harsh takes. He called it a “shotgun
wedding,” observing of the insertion of songs by The Go-Go’s into an Elizabethan
romance that “though many of their hits ponder the vagaries of love, they otherwise have
little in common with an arcane literary universe that is usually the province of graduate
students.”14 In contrast, I believe Head over Heels provides a splendid example of valueadded synthesis. It is much richer and more fulfilling than, say, a revival of that hoary
Jacobethan classic Musedorus (that other play with a bear) or a concert by a Go-Go’s
cover band.
IV. We Got the Beat!
So into the woods we go! Head over Heels presents a concentrated version of the
Arcadia’s romantic intrigues, structured around seventeen tunes by The Go-Go’s
(including two from Belinda Carlisle’s solo career). Brief non-musical exchanges and bits
of action help move the plot along; the dialogue mixes rhyme, blank verse, and prose.
(One fun running joke is about “speaking Eclogue, not English.”) The conceit setting
everything up is that Arcadia flourishes because it has “the beat”: it is in tune with the
natural cadences of life and prospers due to this celestial, transcendental harmony. The
opening number is “We Got the Beat,” during which Arcadians chant:
For ages the beat has ordered our lives
Gift from the gods, of their truth it’s a sign.
The beat heats our grapes and turns them to wine.
It threshes our wheat and gives us to dine.
We heed its rhythm and follow its form.
It keeps us in line and dictates the norm.
Our nation made strong by brilliant design.
Arcadians swear: Our beat is divine! (10)
Threats to this order immediately appear, however. Princess Pamela, heir to the throne,
refuses to marry any of her fine eligible suitors and in fact turns out to be as self-centered
as a gyroscope. Her theme song is “Beautiful”:
Beautiful! Is all I see when I look at me!
Beautiful! Ev’ry mother’s dream!
Day by day
Things just keep getting prettier
Beautiful! What a wonderful life! (10-11)
14 Ben Brantley, New York Times, July 2018 (review).
6
Meanwhile, Princess Philoclea’s feelings for the shepherd Musidorus and their budding
mutual relationship are thwarted by their class differences, which will lead to the
hilarious yet destabilizing confusions, jealousies, and tensions that arise when he
reappears as a hot Amazon calling herself Cleophila (Cleophila is his awkward
appellation in the Old Arcadia; some may be more familiar with him as Zelmane, the
nom de guerre he adopts in the New Arcadia). His steamy signature spotlight moment, in
a risqué, veiled dance to the song “This Old Feeling,” enthralls his admirers, as do his
dance moves during “Cool Jerk.” After we meet the characters and ascertain the setting,
an androgynous oracle, Pythio, appears to the King and his advisor Dametas (father of
Mopsa), pronouncing four unlikely events that will destroy Arcadia should they take
place; the various responses and reactions carry the story forward to its mostly upbeat
comic climax.
I have seen the show five times: once at a progressive high school, twice by
strong college theater departments, and twice by professional regional companies. In all
productions, a talented live band, visible in the wings, played the music while the cast
sang and danced. The oracle had a vampy drag-queen vibe, and the costuming overall had
a flashy neo-Elizabethan-meets-80s neon aesthetic. Interested readers may wish to screen
the one-minute trailer at this juncture; it is available online at Broadwaylicensing.com
sub Head over Heels.
a. Harmonious Androgyny
I would suggest there are two thematic elements baked into the secret sauce that
makes Head over Heels such smart entertainment. The first is how it amplifies the gender
fluidity present in the original. As Mary Ellen Lamb (whose cratylic name connotes
pastoral charm) perceives, the Arcadia is “harmoniously androgynous.”15 It is not only
the non-binary Pythio serving as a kind of presiding spirit over Arcadian hijinks and the
attractive spectacle of Musidorus cross-dressing (in the dénouement he hints that he’ll
keep the dress out of the closet, so to speak, for occasional cosplay with Philoclea). There
is another change to the plot as well: while in Sidney’s tale it is the princely Musidorus,
disguised as the lowly shepherd Dorus, who wins Pamela, in Head over Heels, Pamela
15 Lamb, Sidney Circle, 80.
7
becomes smitten with her lady-in-waiting Mopsa, though this anagnorisis causes major
drama. For example, in act I, scene 8, Pamela shares the poetry she has been composing,
entitled “The Ideal Suitor for Sweet Pamela.” She gets stuck, though, in trying to
complete the rhymes because she is unable to see that the partner she truly desires is not a
cisgender straight noble male. So (in the cleaner high school version), she ends a line
with “curl” but cannot conceive of pairing it with “girl,” and likewise does not imagine
matching “shady” and “lady” (I.8.42-44). In the original script, the implied Sapphic
couplets are rather more scandalous. One operatic highlight of the show, in fact, comes
from Pamela and Mopsa’s dueling duet on “Automatic Rainy Day,” when each vents
about how blue the other one is making her feel:
You walk into the room and the temperature falls.
The mood disappears,
Chased away by the gathering storm that is here.
I look up, painted sky full of memories.
And this house has no roof to shelter me.
It’s an automatic rainy day,
When I see you. (13)
As an English teacher, I am contractually obligated to mention here that this illustrates
one aspect of the “pathetic fallacy,” where the landscape reflects or takes on characters’
moods, a trope ubiquitous in pastoral.16 Moving on, they complete the song with a battle
of the divas in which they try to out-warble each other over the last high high notes like
songbirds competing for dominance. The script calls for “riffage between them”; this sort
of flourish is also termed cadenza or melisma (46). This scene ends with Mopsa resigning
her position, which takes us to the next number, “Vacation,” where she laments that
Pamela is still constantly in her mind despite being geographically distant. “Oh absent
presence, Stella is not here,” as Sidney put it in an Astrophil and Stella sonnet.
17
b. Petrarch Rülz!
These two songs illustrate the other great alchemical link that makes Head over
Heels extra: the happy confluence between the Arcadia’s Petrarchism and the angsty
romanticizing given catchy, melodious voice throughout The Go-Go’s catalogue.
16 For background, see William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral, rev. ed. (New York: New Directions,
1974).
17 Sir Philip Sidney, The Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2002), Astrophil and Stella, 106, line 1.
8
In his notes, the adaptor James Magruder stresses that the work should be played
as its own Green World, where the characters truly care about the “genuine stakes” of
their worries and express them in the Arcadian idiom of Eclogue and song, and not as a
campy meta-drama. He states that:
Head Over Heels is not mean. It is not self-aware. It is not snarky. It does not refer to
other musicals. It is not anachronistic. It does not know that it is funny. Sex permeates its
content, but it is not a dirty show. It is a show with an open, generous, inclusive heart for
heartless times.
While obviously the plot hath been streamlined and tweaked, the situations taken
from Sidney’s narrative seamlessly find emotive expression via The Go-Go’s songbook.
We hear the unrequited longing in which the passions of young lovers are stymied by
larger societal forces or parental pressure in tunes such as “Mad about You.” In that song,
the shepherd Musidorus is accompanied, in fine bucolic fashion, by his flock of sheep,
who pun on “you”/“ewe” in the chorus, a nice Elizabethan touch.18 The conflicted
feelings, so fundamental to pastoral complaint, are heard in songs like “Cool Jerk” or
“Lust to Love,” while the standard Renaissance comparison of Amour to the celestial
realm is central to “Heaven Is a Place on Earth”:
Ooh, baby, do you know what that’s worth?
Ooh heaven is a place on Earth!
They say in heaven love comes first
We’ll make heaven a place on Earth! (17)
All of the confused, “love-shaked” characters do the opening number of Act II, the titular
“Head over Heels,” which aptly conveys the tumultuous, topsy-turvy, mad state
experienced by any real early modern lover:19
Head over heels
Where should I go?
Can’t stop myself
Out of control! (15)
In short, the Whitty use of great, playful songs by The Go-Go’s lets the inhabitants of
Arcadia pour forth their deepest feelings and maketh for an utterly delightful musicaltheater experience.
18 Nowadays many of the plot twists and themes of Arcadia and Head over Heels are considered
“Shakespearean,” e.g. cross-dressing, pastoral romance, the lyrical expressions, etc. As scholars have long
known, though, these elements can be traced back to works by his predecessors, including Sidney, Lyly,
Lodge, and other “minor” Elizabethans.
19 See the discussion in Shakespeare, As You Like It, at 3.2.346ff.
9
Coda
Despite my own fanboy enthusiasm, I recognize that Head over Heels probably is
not for everybody. Some have objected to the dumbing down or transmogrification of an
Elizabethan classic; others simply might not like The Go-Go’s and their bouncy, New
Wave California sound. Still, this commentator, who is a born aficionado of smart pop
music rooted in punk; of Renaissance literature in all its copious, splendiferous plenitude;
and of brave, smashing interdisciplinary juxtapositions, clearly fits its target demographic
to a T. I feel it captured the spirit of Sidney’s complex romance as well as breathing new
life into a book that to be honest has become outmoded, solely the province of a handful
of diligent scholars toiling away in obscurity, and their obedient students interminably
turning pages. I do hope some of my audience today will be intrigued enough to check it
out and discover that the beat of Arcadia is still alive and well.
10
Works Cited
Alexander, Gavin, ed. Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance
Literary Criticism. London: Penguin Books, 2004.
Brantley, Ben. New York Times, July 2018 (theater review).
Duncan-Jones, Katherine. Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet. New Haven and London;
Yale University Press, 1991.
Eliot, T.S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot. Ed. Frank
Kermode. New York: FSG/HBJ, 1975.
Ellwood, Allison, director. The Go-Go’s. 2020. Film.
Empson, William. Some Versions of Pastoral. Rev. ed. New York: New Directions,
1974.
Head over Heels: Original Broadway Cast Recording. 2018. Compact disc.
Hurwitz, Nathaniel. A History of the American Musical Theatre: No Business Like It.
Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2014.
Lamb, Mary Ellen. Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle. Madison: The
University of Wisconsin Press, 1990.
Lewis, C.S. English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Excluding Drama). Oxford:
Clarendon, 1954.
Murray, Ben. “Remixing Culture and Why the Art of the Mash-Up Matters.” Tech
Crunch. 2015.
Sidney, Sir Philip. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia. Ed. Maurice Evans.
Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1977.
—. The Major Works. Ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2002.
Whitty, Jeff, and James Magruder. Head over Heels. New York: Broadway Licensing,
- Script.
Woodcock, Matthew. Sir Philip Sidney and the Sidney Circle. Tavistock, Devon:
Northcote House, 2010.
Woolf, Virginia. “The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia.” The Second Common Reader. - Ed. Andrew McNeillie. San Diego: Harvest Books, 1986.
‘HOH Sidneyana 23,’ SCRC QEI 23
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