Shortly after Elizabeth Tudor became England's queen in November 1558, the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity were passed, effectively outlawing the practice of Roman Catholicism in England and making Elizabeth I head of the Church of England. By establishing Protestantism as the official state religion, Elizabeth hoped to put an end to the religious conflicts that had divided the English people and disrupted the realm ever since her father, Henry VIII, defied the Pope by divorcing Catherine of Aragon in 1534. In what is known as the Elizabethan settlement, she reversed the policies of her Catholic half-sister Mary I, who reigned from 1553 to 1558. Mary's marriage to Philip of Spain had forged an alliance between England and the most powerful Roman Catholic country on the continent. As queen she had attempted to return England to the Roman Catholic faith after a period of intense reform activity that occurred during the six-year reign of Mary and Elizabeth's younger half-brother, Edward VI (1547-53). With the Elizabethan settlement England became a predominantly Protestant country after many turbulent years of religious strife.

Five and a half years after Elizabeth’s ascension to the throne, WilliamShakespeare was born in Stratford. England’s most illustrious playwrightthus belonged to the first generation of English people who lived their entirelives in an officially Protestant country, required by law to practise the establishedstate religion.

Definitions of jazz as musical practice are contingent upon a host of factors, not least of which are the intellectual histories and life experiences that condition writers' approaches to definition. Some are likely to see as most distinctive jazz musicians' usage of rhythm, harmony, melody and/or timbre in jazz performance and composition, others the relative balance of oral/aural and textual materials, and still others the music's connections to African-American expressive culture. Early writers on jazz, for example, tended to have European concert music as their primary frame of reference. The ‘work-’ and ‘score-centric’ concepts and terminology of concert music almost dictated that these writers would focus on parameters of music making amenable to staff notation and textual analysis – e.g., melody, harmony, form (and, to a lesser degree, rhythm) – and describe jazz chiefly through the ways in which it differed from concert music. Whether or not one agrees with that approach, it is a manifestation of the desire to identify and describe jazz's distinctive character. In a world of diverse musical expressions displaced geographically and temporally, the practical necessity of making distinctions (Lakoff 1987, 5–6) has required those writing about jazz to find ways to distinguish it not only from concert music but also from Tin Pan Alley popular song, from other forms of African-American music and from other musics that prominently feature improvisation. This chapter will examine the ways in which other writers have defined jazz, taking account of the characteristics they have invoked and the usefulness of those items for definition.

When the United States Congress declared that jazz deserved to be ‘preserved, understood, and promulgated’, 1987 became a watershed year in the history of valuing jazz: a music that had first entered the written historical record as ‘discordant jass’ now possessed the status of ‘a rare and valuable national American treasure’. Yet it could be said that such a statement attempts to erase the history that made it necessary. Even the Congressional discussion that preceded the resolution shows that the conflicted history of jazz is not so easily swept away.

Although John Conyers, the resolution's chief sponsor, at one point mentioned the ‘Afro-American roots’ of jazz, he, like the other speakers, emphasised the music's global success. He spoke of having encountered jazz in Japan, Moscow, Africa and the Caribbean, and he hailed the spread of jazz, along with its generative force to produce musical fusions, as bases for international respect and understanding. However, he raised important issues of ownership and identity when he commented: ‘I have been in countries throughout Europe in which many people thought that the art form [jazz] was their art form.’

'Tragedy of love' is to some extent a contradiction in terms. For love is the great force that unites and binds. It is what prompts a man to leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife. Celebrated traditionally in romantic comedy, love is the divine bond which leads to marriage and the creation of a new family. In forming the basic building block of the social group, love is not only a beneficial but a fundamentally creative force and as such it is opposed to all the forces of destruction. Love not only creates society, moreover, but seeks to preserve what it has made. It is therefore the great civilizing force, the energy that counters anarchy and chaos with order and degree (in primitive societies, marriage is always the first law). Love makes for civil conversation, courtesy, and good manners. It oils the wheels of social functioning and mitigates aggression and selfishness. When, in literature, love does encounter the forces of destruction it is generally in order to meet them head on and reverse them in a glorious moment of redemption. When Hero appears to die in Much Ado About Nothing, for example, or Hermione in The Winter’s Tale, their later appearance alive, well, and still loving is made all the more poignant for our fear that they have been lost. Tragedy is averted as love’s redemptive force wins out. Strictly speaking, the sleeping potion that Juliet takes in order to feign death should fall into this category too.

In the middle of The Second Part of King Henry the Fourth, during the long nocturnal tavern scene, Shakespeare abruptly alters the elegiac mood by introducing a new character – Pistol. Significantly, his entrance is announced in advance: as soon as his name is mentioned Doll Tearsheet denounces him as 'a swaggering rascal' and 'the foul-mouthed'st rogue in England'. Her complaint instantly identifies his essential attribute, for like so many secondary characters in the second tetralogy, Pistol speaks a distinctive language.

‘Stuff’ indeed. Attempting to pass himself off as a valiant warrior, the cowardhas filched the rhetoric of a hero, and we need look no further for the sourceof his grandiloquent speech than the Elizabethan playhouse.

Not everyone has subscribed to the idea that all people can learn to play jazz. Since the time of the earliest accounts of the music, many writers and audiences have perceived jazz as a ‘natural expression’ of the performers rather than as a learned and practised behaviour. This perception has taken two predominant modes: that the ability to play jazz passes mysteriously from some invisible source through select ‘great’ individuals (i.e., geniuses), or that jazz springs forth from a subconscious and unmediated ‘voice of the people’, more specifically, an apparently unified African-American population. Prevalent as these notions have been, however, neither of them explains certain fundamental aspects of musical performance, and this chapter will focus on some of the ways in which jazz musicians have acquired and handed down to others the practical knowledge of their craft. It will investigate both the informal venues in which individuals learn how to play jazz and, in somewhat greater depth, some of the methods, values and influences of the relatively recent institutionalisation of jazz pedagogy, commonly referred to now as ‘jazz education’. But before turning to these issues, it may be helpful to review briefly the attitudes and beliefs behind the aforementioned ‘natural expression’ perceptions.

‘Some folks got it and some folks ain't’

Public notions of jazz as the product of either biology or genius are rooted in a number of historical and cultural domains. First, white audiences and critics around the turn of the twentieth century had come to understand music largely as a notated phenomenon, the craft of improvisation in European-based styles having gradually died out over the course of the previous decades. Consequently, these listeners marvelled at the ability of jazz musicians to vary, embellish and invent melodic lines, seemingly effortlessly and ‘out of thin air’ (see, for example, Ansermet 1919).

As twenty-first-century readers, when we approach the five tragedies that Shakespeare set in the Greco-Roman world – Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and Timon of Athens – we must negotiate among several kinds of cultural and historical differences. A striking moment in Antony and Cleopatra exemplifies the challenge these plays pose for us. In the wake of Antony's death and the victory of his arch-rival Octavius, Cleopatra imagines herself a captive in Rome, chief trophy amongst the victor's spoils:

The Egyptian queen pictures this public display in the terms of Elizabethan theatre, her feminine role performed by a boy; strictly speaking, Shakespeare has created an anachronism. Her theatrical imagery also peers into the future, as it were, reminding us that this play has in fact been staged countless times since Shakespeare penned these lines. His play lives on in our own cultural present, in film and popular culture as well as onstage.

As early as 1922, in an article published in the New York Times Book Review and Magazine, journalist Burnet Hershey chronicled his recent journey around the world taking in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Orient, and reported that jazz was everywhere:

The dominant readings of jazz history have concentrated on chronology: the historical succession from New Orleans jazz to classic jazz, swing, bop and beyond (see, for example, Kernfeld 1988, I, 580–606). While such accounts are not modelled in terms of the diaspora, they are locked into it, since these stages happen also to correspond to diasporic factors. From New Orleans to the classic jazz of Chicago, from Kansas City to the bop hothouse of New York – each stylistic shift is also marked by a geographical shift. In formalist approaches (that is, those centred on musical characteristics), emphasis is on what is seen as ‘progress’ to higher levels of musical aesthetics, a teleology that continues to underpin powerful institutionalised discourses. Parallel to, but often in tension with, formalist accounts are cultural narratives interested less in what the music sounds like than in its social meanings. In these readings, various themes have remained durable, as, for example, a music of cutting-edge modernist or bohemian individualism, yet of authentic folk collectivity. Both reflect a suspicion of mass culture.

In the grand sweep of more than three thousand years of Chinese history, the period from roughly 1680 to 1780 has been celebrated as a prosperous age. From other perspectives, the period has been disparaged as a time when China's people were held down and held back by autocratic foreign rulers. Such dichotomies reveal that the possibilities remain open for both positive and negative assessments of the period of Chinese history from the founding of the Ch'ing dynasty to the end of the Ch'ien-lung emperor's life in 1799. Without promising to resolve the conflicting historical interpretations, this introduction explores some of the issues and problems that are raised in the chapters of this volume and by interpretations of Ch'ing history to 1800 in general.

Simple historical chronology locates the subject matter of this volume after 1644, the conventional date for indicating the fall of the Ming dynasty, and before the end of rule by the Ch'ing imperial house in 1911. In terms of the historiography of the Cambridge History of China series, this volume is located between Volumes 7 and 8, with the shared title of The Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644, and Volume 10, entitled Late Ch'ing, 1800–1911.

Volume 10 was the first volume of the entire series to be published (in 1978). In Volume 10's Introduction, titled “The Old Order,” the late John K. Fairbank, who was editor of the volume and a main organizer of the entire series, characterized the late Ch'ing period as the end of the “old China” in conflict with the “outside world,” especially as represented by Western and Westernizing nations pursuing imperialist interests.