English comedy from the fifteenth to the early seventeenth century abounds in song lyrics, but most of the original tunes were thought to have been lost--until now. By deducing that playwrights borrowed melodies from songs they already knew, Ross W. Duffin has used the existing English repertory of songs, both popular and composed, to reconstruct hundreds of songs from more than a hundred plays and other stage entertainments. Thanks to Duffin's incredible breakthrough, these plays have been rendered performable with period music for the first time in five hundred years. Some Other Note not only brings these songs back from the dead, but tells a thrilling tale of the investigations that unraveled these centuries-old mysteries [Publisher description]

A Handbook of Editing Early Modern Texts provides a series of answers written by more than forty editors of diverse texts addressing the 'how-to's' of completing an excellent scholarly edition. The Handbook is primarily a practical guide rather than a theoretical forum; it airs common problems and offers a number of solutions to help a range of interested readers, from the lone editor of an unedited document, through to the established academic planning a team-enterprise, multi-volume re-editing of a canonical author. Explicitly, this Handbook does not aim to produce a linear treatise telling its readers how they 'should' edit. Instead, it provides them with a thematically ordered collection of insights drawn from the practical experiences of a symposium of editors. Many implicit areas of consensus on good practice in editing are recorded here, but there are also areas of legitimate disagreement to be charted. The Handbook draws together a diverse range of first person narratives detailing the approaches taken by different editors, with their accompanying rationales, and evaluations of the benefits and problems of their chosen methods. The collection's aim is to help readers to read modern editions more sensitively, and to make better-informed decisions in their own editorial projects.

Henry Lawes (1596-1662) has long been acknowledged as the leading English songwriter of the period of Charles I. He collaborated with Milton in Comus (1634) and among his hundreds of songs are settings of many famous lyrics by Cavalier poets such as Carew, Herrick, and Suckling. New recordings and musical editions of his work reflect his continued and increasing importance. This study, the first published since 1940, combines an account of his life with an analysis of his development as a songwriter.

Originally published in 1992, Music in English Children’s Drama of the Later Renaissance is the first book-length study to examine the Elizabethan and Jacobean children’s drama, not only from a musicological perspective, but also drawing on the histories of literature, culture, and the theater. It gives the children’s companies new historical significance, showing that they were an integral and ultimately influential part of the London theatrical world. These companies originated important features of later drama, such as music before and between acts, and the exploitation of different timbres for specific effects. Those interested in music history, English literature, theater history, and cultural history will find this a comprehensive and fascinating study. Of special note are the appendices, which offer a unique and important reference source by providing the only definitive list of the plays and songs used by the children.

One of the monuments of mid-sixteenth-century Scottish letters is Ane Compendeous Buke of Godlye Psalmes and Spirituall sangis, also known simply as the Gude and Godlie Ballatis, first published in Edinburgh in 1565 and reprinted for decades afterwards. Although a few secular tunes, like “Go from my window” and “John come kiss me now,” are inferred in the volume through the use of poetic parodies, well over a hundred of the collection’s self-described “sangis” give no musical direction whatsoever. A half-century ago, Helena Mennie Shire questioned whether the GGB’s music could be properly recovered, thereby reclaiming it “as a book of versions intended for singing.” Using contrafacta from the early Lutheran repertoire, from Coverdale’s Goostly Psalmes of 1535, and particularly the Forme of Prayers (the Scottish psalter) of 1564, this edition presents tunes and lyrics for all of the songs in the corrected GGB edition of 1578, uniquely preserved at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.

Presents a study of the literary output of Sir John Suckling. This work reconstructs the various contexts in which the poems, plays, letters, and prose tracts were produced and, reveals the nature of one writer's engagement - both creative and subversive - with the social, religious, political, and cultural dimensions of Caroline England.

This vintage book contains a comprehensive treatise of Baroque music. It was written for the music student and music lover, with the aim of acquainting them with this great period of music history and helping them to gain a historical understanding of music without which baroque music cannot be fully appreciated and enjoyed. Written in simple, plain language and full of fascinating information about baroque music, this text will appeal to those interested in music but who have little previous knowledge of baroque, and it would make for a most worthy addition to collections of music-related literature. The chapters of this book include: 'Early Baroque in Italy'; 'The Beginnings of the Concertato Style: Gabrieli'; 'The Phases of Baroque Music'; 'Tradition and progress in Sacred Music'; 'The Netherlands School and Its English Background', et cetera. We are republishing this antiquarian volume now in an affordable, modern edition complete with a new prefatory biography of the author.

Robert Herrick has long been one of the best loved of English lyric poets. Known through the centuries as the author of 'Gather ye rosebuds', he also wrote, as this new edition shows, hundreds of songs, epigrams and longer poems equally worthy of attention. Volume I of this new edition of Herrick's work contains Hesperides, Herrick's only published collection. As well as the commentary on Hesperides, volume II contains the fifty-nine surviving manuscript poems which can be firmly attributed to Herrick, and on which his reputation was based before 1648. It is an ambitious and original attempt to recover for the first time the history of Herrick's corpus of manuscript poetry, and to identify how his poems circulated, and who his copyists and readers were. By establishing the type of sources to which they had access and the nature and quality of the poems these sources contained, and through the histories of transmission that accompany every poem, this volume offers a significant body of evidence that deepens our critical understanding not only of Herrick's poetry, but of the mechanics of scribal publication and the culture of reading, writing and performing poetry and music in early modern England. Where, as is often the case, a musical setting survives this is also printed, along with a commentary on the setting, in a form which is designed to encourage the performance of the lyrics.