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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
At the turn of the century, a few years before the First Quarto of Hamlet (1603) was printed, the reappearance of the choirboy troupes—the Children of the Chapel and the Children of Paul's—at their own private theaters in London provided serious competition to the adult companies acting on the public stages, and among them the Chamberlain's Men, Shakespeare's company. In a topicality in this corrupt, ‘reported’ version of the play, Guildenstern alludes to the popularity of the child actors as he accounts for the visit of the traveling players:
1 Hamlet,Q I (1603),sig.E3r.
2 Act n, sc. ii, 11.362-363. The Complete Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare (The New Cambridge Shakespeare), ed. W. A. Neilson and C.J. Hill (London, 1942), p. 1063.
3 Benjonson, ed. C.H.Herford and P. Simpson (Oxford, 1925-52), IV, 255-256.
4 Chambers, E.K., The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford, 1923), 11, 46–47.Google Scholar
5 Ben Jonson, TV, 39.
6 Ballad tunes are specified, for example, in John Pikering's Horestes (Q 1567), ed. J. S. Farmer, TFT (1910), sigs. Biiv, ciir-v, and civr; also in John Phillip's Patient Crissell, ed. R. B. McKerrow and W. W. Greg, Malone Society Reprints (1909), sigs. civr, Diiiiv. For still others, see the anonymous Misogonus in R . W. Bond, Early Plays from the Italian (Oxford, 1911), pp. 197, 219. For the music of some of these, see John Ward, ‘Music for A Handefull of Pleasant Delites', JAMS, x, 3 (1957), 151-180.
7 Several laments are transcribed in Elizabethan Songs, 3 vols., ed. Peter Warlock (Oxford, 1926). In B . M . Add. MS 15117, f. 3r, there appears an anonymous lament with lute accompaniment, whose lyric beginning ‘Awake ye woeful wights’ parallels the first and part of the second stanzas of the lyric in Edwards’ play, Damon andPithias. Transcribed and edited by Warlock, it is published separately as a solo song in Curwen Edition, No. 2448 and in an arrangement for chorus of equal voices in No. 71690. The setting, presumably by Edwards, evidently served as a ballad tune, for the same tune, with a few variants, appears in a broadside dated 1563 and entitled ‘A Newe Ballade of a Louer Extollinge his Ladye. To the tune of Damon and Pithias.’ The broadside is facsimiled in Ward, facing p. 168. If the tune was first composed by Ed-wards for his play, the date of the broadside suggests that the play's first performance may be dated earlier than the Christmas of 1564, the date generally accepted.
8 See H. N. Hillebrand, The Child Actors, Univ. of III. St. in Lang. and Lit.,xi (1926), 215,237,243; M. C. Boyd, Elizabethan Music and Musical Criticism (Phil., 1940), chap. vii; and Mark Eccles, ‘Martin Peerson and the Blackfriars', Shakespeare Survey, xi (i9S8), 100-106.
9 For bibliography of studies containing music for choirboy plays, see A.J. Sabol, 'Two Songs with Accompaniment for an Elizabethan Choirboy Play', Studies in the Renaissance, v (1958), 145-159.
10 A. J . Sabol,'A Newly Discovered Contemporary Song Setting for Jonson's Cynthia's Revels', Notes and Queries, New Ser., v, No. 9 (Sept, 1958), pp. 384-385. Willa M. Evans discusses the songs for this play in Benjonson and Elizabethan Music (Lancaster, Pa., 1929), pp. 48-5 5; this setting, however, was unknown to her.
11 For revivals at court in 1613 by the Lady Elizabeth's Men, see Chambers, Eliz. Stage, III, 430-431.
12 See G. E. P. Arkw right, Catalogue of Music in the Library of Christ Church, Oxford, Pt. 11 (London, 1923), pp. 70-75, for listing of unidentified songs in MS 439, with incipits of lyrics and music. The transcript below from pp. 38-39 of MS 439 presents the setting with the barring and scoring of the original. The cantus here appears in the G clef rather than in the c clef (c on the first line) of the original. The setting is reproduced with the kind permission of the authorities of the Library of Christ Church. A later and different setting of the same lyric by Henry Lawes appears in British Museum Loan MS 35.
13 Several items in MS 439 appear with a lyra viol accompaniment. R[obert] D[onington], in Grove's Dictionary (5th ed.,London, 1954), under Lyra, notes: ‘Strictly, the English lyra is not a distinct instrument at all, but the bass member of the viol family — tuned and handled in a special manner, to suit a special variety of music.’ Examples illustrating ‘the free use of chords and the mingling of bowed and plucked techniques characteristic of the music for this instrument’ appear in Jacobean Consort Music, ed. T. Dart and W. Coates, Musica Britannica, IX (London, 1955), 200-213. The final chord of the accompaniment to the setting reproduced below makes it clear that it was intended for the lyra.
14 For contents see A. Hughes-Hughes, A Catalogue of Manuscript Music in the British Museum, 3 vols. (London, 1906-09), H, 468-469; see also Giles Earle, his booke, ed. P. Warlock (London, 1932) for the text of the lyrics (no music). Warlock describes the manuscript as ‘a good specimen collection of the favourite songs of a Jacobean musical amateur’ compiled between 1615 and 1626. In Add. MS 24665 ‘The darke is my delight' appears on pp. 61, 59, and significantly, is followed by ‘Yf I freely may discover' on pp. 62, 60. The latter song, anonymous, long identified as for Jonson's Poetaster, is facsimiled in Evans, Ben Jonson and Eliz. Music, frontis. In the MS the bass of'The darke is my delight’ is very corrupt, and in the transcript below appears in two versions: (1) in score with the cantus, in a version reconstructed by the present editor, and (2) separately, exactly as it appears in the MS . The cantus is presented in the G clef rather than the c clef (c on the first line) of the original, and the scanty barring is regularized. In the cantus, in measures 10 (beat 4) and 11 (beat 2) the eighth rests appear as quarter rests in the original. In measure 14 (beat 2) of the cantus, the G appears as a quarter note in the original, not tied to the following note. In measure 14, in the underlay, the repeat sign in the original follows ‘againste’ rather than ‘prickle'. The setting is reproduced with the kind permission of the authorities of the British Museum.
15 Ben Jonson, IV, 88,37.
16 Ibid., 115-116, 11. 230-258.
17 The fact that Henry Youll in his Canzonets to Three Voices (1608) has set another lyric from this play, ‘Slow, slow, fresh fount’ (1.2) may suggest that he was associated with the Children of the Chapel and contributed music for all the lyrics in this play; but it is questionable whether his setting, a concerted piece a 3, is a stage song. The play-text clearly indicates that the lyric is sung by Echo as a solo. Youll probably found the lyric (first printed in 1601) attractive for his own nondramatic purposes. For a modern transcript of this setting, see The English Madrigal School, ed. E. H. Fellowes, XXVIII (London, 1923), 35-41.
18 See H. H. Wood, The Plays of John Marston, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1938), III, xvi-xviii, and also R. W. Ingram, ‘Music in the Plays of Marston', Music & Letters, XXXVII (1956), 154-164.
19 The Plays of John Marston, II, 78-79.
20 Ibid.,3l4.
21 Ibid.,69.
