An Unpublished Contemporary Setting of a Shakespeare Song

Summary

In The Winter’s Tale Autolycus, Mopsa and Dorcas sing a three-part song, beginning “Get you hence, for I must go”. The original setting for this has hitherto remained unknown, but now it is possible not only to give the music to which it was sung but also to suggest the composer and to present the words of a second verse, not reproduced in the Folio text of the play.

The setting (see Plate V) occurs in a manuscript volume, 'Songs unto the violl and lute', which was once in the possession of Stafford Smith, author of Musica Antiqua (1812). The manuscript passed into the hands of Edward Francis Rimbault, a zealous musical historian, and subsequently to the Music Division of the New York Public Library, where it is now designated manuscript Dx. 4175.1 How Stafford Smith came to miss the setting is a puzzle, for in his Musica Antiqua he printed no less than eight of the manuscript's songs, and it is strange that he did not identify the words as those in The Winter's Tale. Probably the music was composed by Robert Johnson: the manuscript, although it presents no attribution to him, gives it in close proximity to several compositions certainly or almost certainly by him—"Come away Hecket" from Middleton's The Witch, c. 1610, "Deare doe not your faire bewty wronge" from May's The Old Couple, c. 1615, "O let us howle" (xlii) from Webster's The Dutchesse of Malfy, 1613, "Tell me dearest what is love" from Beaumont and Fletcher's The Captaine, c. 1611, and "Have you seene the bright lilly growe" (xlix) from Jonson's The Divell is an Asse 1616. The fact that all these plays were produced by the King's Men, for whom Robert Johnson was busily writing in the theatre and at court between 1608 and 1617—makes it not inconceivable that the setting is Robert Johnson's