No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 1983
While masque texts tell us a great deal about some aspects of musical performance, on other issues they are reticent and equivocal. Textual information is at its most frustratingly perplexed on the question of the extent to which the new Italian monody influenced the music for the Jacobean masque. There is some difficulty in deciding when recitative was first introduced to England, and it depends on the reliability of two references in the 1640 Folio edition of Ben Jonson's Works. In the text of Lovers Made Men performed on the 22 February 1617, Jonson begins by describing the opening scene and then adds,
And the whole Maske was sung (after the Italian manner) Stylo recitative, by Master Nicholas Lanier; who ordered and made both the Scene, and the Musicke. (lines 26–28)1
1 All line references to Jonson masques are from the complete edition, Ben Jonson, ed. C.H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford, 1925–52), vii.Google Scholar
2 Jonson's use of the term stylo recitative is interesting since - even by 1640 - it was not a standard term in Italy. See Or Sternfeld's note on terminology, this issue of Proceedings, 41.Google Scholar
3 ‘Nicholas Lanier's Innovations in English Song’, Music and Letters, xli (1960), 13–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
4 Ibid., 15–16.Google Scholar
5 Ibid., 23.Google Scholar
6 ‘English Song and the Challenge of Italian Monody’, Vincent Duckies and Franklin B. Zimmerman, Words to Music (Los Angeles, 1967), 3–42.Google Scholar
7 I say ‘up to’ twenty years because the copy for the second Folio was obviously complete at the time of Jonson's death in 1637. A bill to the Court of Chancery makes it dear that a few months before he died Jonson handed over his writings to Sir Kenelme Digby ‘to whose care & trust the said Beniamin left the publishing and printing of them and delivered him true & perfect Copies…’. Ben Jonson, ix, 98.Google Scholar
8 ‘English Cavalier Songs 1620–1660’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, lxxxvi (1960), 71.Google Scholar
9 See my ‘Insubstantial Pageants Preserved: the Literary and Musical Sources for the Jonsonian Masque’ in Jonson and Shakespeare, ed. Ian Donaldson (London, 1983), 202–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
10 The Memorable Masque of the Middle Temple and Lincoln's Iun in The Plays and Poems of George Chapman: the Comedies, ed. T.M. Parrott (London, 1914), 444.Google Scholar
11 In the manuscript of The Masque of Blackness, the songs are copied in Roman script while the rest of the text is in an English hand, but until 1616 this was not paralleled in printed masques by the convention of alternating italic and roman type for sung and spoken verse. After that date, such typographical distinctions were made - but only inconsistently. Masque texts had to accommodate so many different sets of words (spoken dialogue, songs, stage directions, and descriptions of scenes or costumes) that it would have been almost impossible to reflect these different verbal functions typographically. The Folio text of Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue adopts the convention of printing songs in italic for the second half only. Despite this inconsistency, there is no real problem in knowing what was sung and what was spoken in masques up until 1616.Google Scholar
12 Sir William Davenant, The Siege of Rhodes, ed. Ann-Mari Hedback, Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis 14 (Uppsala, 1973), 4.Google Scholar
13 A General History of Music (1776), ed. F. Mercer (London, 1935), ii, 278.Google Scholar
14 This setting can be found in Ian Spink, English Song: Dowland to Purcell (London, 1974), 47–8, or A.J. Sabol, Four Hundred Songs and Dances from the Stuart Masque (Providence, 1978), 87–8.Google Scholar
15 Setting by Lanier in English Songs 1625–1660, ed. Ian Spink, Musica Britannica, xxxiii (London, 1971), 22–4.Google Scholar
16 Thomas Carew, Poems, ed. Rhodes Dunlap (Oxford, 1949), 43; and see English Songs 1625–1660, op. cit., 93–8.Google Scholar
17 A General History of the Science and Practice of Music (1776), ed. Charles Cudworth (New York, 1963), ii, 579.Google Scholar
18 These bar numbers are from the edition found in English Songs 1625–1660, op. cit., 12f.Google Scholar
19 After the edition in English Songs 1625–1660, op. cit., 12–21.Google Scholar
20 After Alfonso Ferrabosco II: Manuscript Songs, ed. Ian Spink, The English Lute Songs, Second Series, xix (London, 1966), 26–7.Google Scholar
21 From Ayres (1609), Song xx.Google Scholar
22 An Apology for Poetry in G. Smith (ed.), Elizabethan Critical Essays (London, 1904), i, 205.Google Scholar
23 In J.E. Spingam (ed.), Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century (London, 1908), i, 79.Google Scholar
24 The Works of Thomas Campion, ed. W.R. Davis (London, 1969), 55–6.Google Scholar
25 Sig. b.Google Scholar
26 Preface to Album and Albanius (1685), in The Works of John Dryden, xv, eds. E. Miner, G.R. Guffey, and F.B. Zimmerman (Berkeley, 1976) 6–7. In their notes, the editors have a useful discussion of the comparison of vernaculars in English Renaissance criticism in which they mention the Sidney and Chapman passages cited above; see p. 326.Google Scholar
27 Especially no. 29, dated 3 April 1711.Google Scholar
28 The known facts in this area have been written about elsewhere. See, for example, Nigel Fortune's essay on ‘Solo Song and Cantata’ in G. Abraham (ed.), The Age of Humanism, 1540–1630, (New Oxford History of Music, v, London, 1968), 211–15.Google Scholar
29 Parthenia, c.1613, ed. Thurston Dart (London, 1962), 3.Google Scholar
30 Op. cit., 55.Google Scholar
31 John Dowland (2nd edn., London, 1982), 36.Google Scholar
32 See Charteris, Richard, ‘Jacobean Musicians at Hatfield House 1605–1613’, Royal Musical Association Research Chroricle, xii (1974), 115–136.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
33 See Joiner, Mary, ‘British Museum Add. MS 15117: An Index, Commentary and Bibliography’, Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle, vii (1969) 51–109.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
34 See Poulton, John Dowland, op. cit., 74.Google Scholar
35 By the 1630s, numerous collections of Italian monody were apparently on sale in London. Robert Martin lists a considerable number amongst the ‘Libri Musici’ in his various editions of Catalogue Librorum … ex Italie selegit Robertus Mertinae, Bibliopola Landinensis (1633, 1635, 1639, 1640). See Krummel, D.W., ‘Venetian Baroque Music in a London Bookshop: the Robert Martin Catalogues 1633–50’, Music and Bibliography, ed. Oliver Neighbour (London, 1980), 1–27.Google Scholar
36 British Library MS Sloane 2329, f.75v. I am most grateful to Dr Penny Gouk for drawing my attention to the Galilei references here.Google Scholar
37 Professor Stoddart Lincoln has drawn my attention to an example from a Davenant play which illustrates the caution with which such references must be treated. In The Man's the Master (1668), one of the characters calls for a song, and the stage direction reads, ‘The SONG in recitative and in parts’. British Library Add. MS 33234 contains a setting of this song by John Bannister, and it seems quite likely that this was the setting used in the play, yet it gives no hint of either recitative or parts. If the play text is not simply wrong, then it seems that Davenant must have been prepared to call any non-strophic and monodic setting ‘recitative’ (although that still would not explain what happened to the ‘parts’).Google Scholar
38 O. Strunk (ed.), Source Readings in Music History (New York, 1950), 378.Google Scholar
39 Ben Jenson, v, 17 (from Preface to Volpone).Google Scholar
40 Hymenaei, line 16.Google Scholar
41 Le Nuove Musiche (Florence, 1602).Google Scholar
42 The Poems and Masques of Aurelian Townshend, ed. C.C. Brown (Reading, 1983), 77.Google Scholar
43 Quoted by J.A. Westrup, ‘The Nature of Recitative’, Proceedings of the British Academy (1956), 28.Google Scholar
44 Ben Jonson, viii, 625, lines 2031–36. Any attempts made to write recitative in English in the seventeenth century remained sufficiently isolated for each new endeavour to be described as if it were the first. Most obviously, Davenant in the preface to The Siege of Rkodes wrote of recitative as being ‘unpractis'd here’ and ‘though of great reputation amongst other Nations, the very attempt of it is an obligation to our own’. Henry Lawes in the preface to the 1653 Ayres and Dialogues (the volume containing his ‘Ariadne’ lament), Dryden in his preface to Albion and Albanius, and even Congreve and Addison in the early eighteenth century all imply that there was no tradition of recitative in England.Google Scholar