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The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson

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Music Edition: Introduction

Ben Jonson and Music

1. Introduction

In a recent essay on music and Ben Jonson, David Lindley noted that ‘the most significant involvement in terms of musical history was [Jonson’s] work as the principal provider of masque libretti for some twenty-five years from 1605’ (Lindley 2010, 162). While this assessment is perfectly accurate it does not quite tell the full story. Two-thirds of the principal texts in the Jonson canon have some musical dimension, from conventional analogies and metaphors, and character names, to actual music in the form of songs, dances, and sometimes just plain noise. Our picture of how the actual music worked in practice is regrettably fragmentary. A central concern is that for the plays, masques, and entertainments it is not always easy to decide whether surviving song settings were used in early performances. Despite the efforts of some scholars to assign later settings of play songs to revivals (documented or not), it is clear that many of Jonson’s song texts were simply chosen by (or indeed, for) composers independently of any staged production. We can also see this trend in the handful of settings of Jonson’s non-dramatic verses published in The Forest and The Underwood. Though that is not to say that these settings only came about as a result of the texts being published; in several instances, the musical setting is among the earliest (if not the earliest) source of Jonson’s text. In terms of form, these poems are generally indistinguishable from song texts in plays or masques. Indeed, one of Jonson’s most famous songs, ‘Have you seen but a white lily grow’, appeared as a song in The Devil Is an Ass and as a poem in The Underwood.

Whatever the performance contexts, the majority of the surviving settings of Jonson’s words date to the first half of the seventeenth century. However, elements of Jonson’s works enjoyed a musical afterlife well beyond his death in 1637. The most conspicuous example is ‘Drink to me only with thine eyes’, a late eighteenth-century setting of which has become absorbed into popular culture, and so it remains. This simple setting was so admired at one time that it was even (though wrongly) attributed to no less a composer than Mozart.

2. Music in the Plays

Music in the early modern theatre was used mainly for decoration, and thus generally played a relatively unimportant role in the dramatic works themselves. This situation partly stemmed from the two main types of theatres that developed in Elizabethan England (see Austern, 1992, xv–xvi; D. Bevington, ‘Actors, Companies, and Playhouses’, in the present edition, 1.cxvi–cxxx; Lindley, 2005 also provides an excellent introduction to the subject). The public theatres were relatively large, open-roofed structures usually in a circular or polygonal shape. Seats in the galleries were relatively expensive; however, standing in the yard was affordable to most. Thus, the public theatres had quite a diverse audience. The plays were acted by men (with boys taking any female roles), and tended to be quite broad in their appeal. The private theatres, by contrast, were small, enclosed, rectangular, and fully seated. The cost of admission was higher and thus they were more exclusive than the public theatres. The actors were children, largely drawn from the choristers of St Paul’s Cathedral and from the Chapel Royal. As David Bevington has noted, Jonson ‘seems to have preferred the Chapel/Blackfriars Children to Paul’s Boys, perhaps because he considered the Chapel/Blackfriars repertory more adventuresome, perhaps too because [John] Marston was so strongly identified with Paul’s Boys in 1599–1600’ (CWBJ, 1.cxvii). The plays presented by the children’s companies tend to have more songs and music than those of the adult companies. In addition to using music in the plays, the children’s companies also performed instrumental music beforehand and between the acts. Plays performed by the adult companies generally offered only incidental music, although their audiences also expected to hear stage jigs (bawdy entertainments that included music, song, and dance). The main reasons for the different usage of music are twofold. The children were largely drawn from the cathedral choirs and thus had a high degree of training in both vocal and instrumental music, but music was also more audible in the private indoor theatres than in the public open-air ones.
Instrumental theatre music survives only sporadically for much of the seventeenth century: none can be assigned to any of Jonson’s plays. As David Lindley makes clear, it is important to understand that any incidental music heard on the early modern stage was ‘always part of the world of the play itself, heard and responded to by the characters on-stage’ (Lindley 2005, 112). There are many such examples in Jonson’s plays, perhaps the most obvious of which is the wind band (‘loud music’) in A Tale of a Tub (5.9 and 5.10). We have no way of knowing what they played, though such music would not have been specifically composed for the occasion (nor need it have been the same in each performance). For obvious reasons, songs are more readily attributable to particular works. We have complete texts for seventeen of Jonson’s plays, as well as two incomplete texts published in the second folio. Several other early plays are known to be lost. Throughout the plays a total of twenty-eight songs are called for, which are generally indicated in the printed texts either by stage directions or italics. (‘Song’ is here defined as a portion of the text written by Jonson that was evidently sung, but where no popular or ballad tune is indicated or implied. Though potentially problematic, the term is used here as a convenient short-hand). However, of these songs only five settings survive from around the time the plays were first performed; not all can be firmly associated with early performances. There are also seven later settings of songs from the plays, most of which appear to be isolated settings not associated with any theatrical revivals. The result is an inevitably sketchy picture of the effectiveness of Jonson’s use of song in practice. It would, of course, be possible to construct a thesis based on the theoretical use of music. And it is important to stress that, as in the masques, we have no means of knowing what – if any – input Jonson had in how the songs would have sounded. Indeed, he may not have even cared.
Jonson’s earliest plays were performed in different theatres by both adult and children’s companies, which clearly influenced the degree to which music was used. So too did the genre: there was traditionally less music in English tragedies than in the comedies. Where songs are found in tragedies they are generally given to an attendant boy or to a clown or fool, the most obvious example being the clown in Hamlet. Jonson is more rigorous than Shakespeare in this regard: his tragedies – Sejanus (1603), Catiline: His Conspiracy (1611), and the fragmentary Fall of Mortimer – are firmly in the classical mould and avoid song completely. With the exception of The Case Is Altered, Jonson’s early plays containing songs were all acted by children’s companies. Cynthia’s Revels and Poetaster – both performed by the Children of the Chapel – contain eleven songs between them, more than any of Jonson’s other plays, and the songs are a feature of the plot. Although the quarto was not published until 1609, The Case Is Altered is Jonson’s earliest surviving play and was probably first performed by the Earl of Pembroke’s Men. There are two songs in the quarto (1.1 and 4.5), and both are purely decorative. They are sung by the cobbler Juniper (no music survives), reinforcing the conventional stereotype of cobblers as being merry. No text is given for the song in Act 4 (i.e. a blank song), and nothing would be lost dramatically by the omission of the song which opens the first act. Indeed, Mary Chan (1980, 46) has suggests that the songs were a later addition incorporated for a possible revival by the Children of the Chapel some time before 1609. The Case Is Altered was followed by the two Humour plays (1598 and 1599), both of which were also acted by an adult company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. It was not until Jonson was commissioned to write for the newly-formed company, the Children of the Chapel, that he began to incorporate song into his dramatic conception, whether by necessity or design.
The first of Jonson’s children’s plays was Cynthia’s Revels (1600), a work in which music plays an important role. In particular Jonson uses song as a reinforcement of the satire on court culture. For example, some music is called for as part of the entertainments in Act 4 devised by the Nymphs and courtiers: Hedon obliges with a song titled ‘The Kiss’, ‘Oh, that joy so soon should waste!’ (Q, 4.3.161–72). Jonson’s text gives two important details about the song. First, it was accompanied on the newly-fashionable ‘Lyra’ or lyra-viol, described as ‘an instrument that alone is able to infuse soul in the most melancholic and dull disposed creature upon earth’ (Q, 4.3.156–7); a conventional though satirical reference to music’s power to dispel melancholy. Second, when asked for his verdict on the song another courtier, Amorphus replies, ‘A pretty air! In general, I like it well. But, in particular, your long “die” note did arride me most, but it was somewhat too long’ (Q, 4.3.175–6). The ‘die note’ refers to the note to which the word ‘die’ is set in the last line. In keeping with Amorphus’s comments, one of the surviving settings includes a four-bar held note on the word ‘die’ (P.1.2/1 (Full score   , MIDI   )). The composer’s intention seems to have been a deliberate satire of Hedon’s pretentions, achieved through excessive word-repetitions and a convoluted vocal line: it is one of the earliest examples of such techniques on the English stage. The song could, of course, have been composed independently of the early staged performances, but this is beside the point. It is clear from Amorphus’s comments that some similar effect was specifically required by Jonson. And we can certainly imagine how effects such as the long ‘die note’ could be exaggerated in performance for added comedy. In response to Hedon’s song, Amorphus sings an equally trite verse about a glove bequeathed him by his mistress (no music survives). The ensuing conversation concerning the composition of Amorphus’s song is revealing of Jonson’s knowledge of music, or at least of his awareness of late Renaissance theory (Q, 4.3.233ff.). David Lindley (2010, 166) has rightly noted that the passage suggests Jonson had read Thomas Morley’s Plain and Easy Introduction to Practical Music (1597); without directly quoting, Jonson borrows Morley’s specialized musical language to reinforce the satire of the courtiers’ pretensions. Song is used in a similar manner in Poetaster. Each of the five songs except for the last is sung by Crispinus, the poetaster of the title. ‘If I freely may discover’ (2.2.136–45, 151–60) is the only one for which music has survived, a contemporary setting perhaps associated with an early performance of the play (P.2.1/1 (Full score   , MIDI   )).

Although the amount of actual music heard in the theatres varied, musical imagery was a common trope in early modern literature. Jonson frequently used musical imagery and analogies in the plays, although not to the same extent as Shakespeare. The musical references in The Case Is Altered are typical of the conventional analogies between musical and worldly or human harmony. For example, at the start of Act 4 the soldier Maximilian says to his disguised prisoner Camillo, ‘I cannot say, “welcome” to Milan. Your thoughts and that word are not musical’ (4.1.2–3). The welcome is not ‘musical’ or in harmony with the thoughts of the men, who are brought to Milan against their will. Jonson alludes to the feminizing effects of music in the quarto version of Every Man In His Humour, where Lorenzo Junior quips, ‘Then will I be made an eunuch and learn to sing ballads’ (1.2.46–7). But this is also indicative of the fact that Jonson and his contemporaries sometimes enjoyed ridiculing the ballad genre. There are also frequent references to music in the popular, though controversial, sequel Every Man Out of His Humour. Music is used by Fastidious Brisk to describe Savolina, with whom he is besotted: ‘she has the most harmonious and musical strain of wit that ever tempted a true ear’ (2.2.255ff.). Brisk counts music among his talents and is not afraid to use it in the wooing process. We learn that the bass viol is his instrument, and in Act 3 he is put to the test as he attempts to show off to Savolina. However, he finds the instrument out of tune, and so sets about trying to rectify it, but his incompetence soon becomes obvious. Jonson is here ridiculing Brisk’s pretensions, but he is also setting up the expectation that his viol playing will be equally inept and lacking in harmony, thus reinforcing the characterisation. In point of fact it is Savolina who seems to possess the musical talent as she tunes the viol quickly, leading to yet more admiration from Brisk, who in the end does not play. By revealing her musical talent on an instrument played between the legs, Jonson here seems to be subtly commenting on Savolina’s morals, reinforced by Brisk’s confession ‘I have wished myself to be that instrument, I think, a thousand times, and not so few, by heavens’ (3.3.94–5).

In 1608 Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men, took over the Blackfriars and the formerly resident Children of the Chapel moved to the Whitefriars Theatre. It was here that Epicene was performed in 1609. Within four years the two main children’s companies had disbanded. The Children of St Paul’s had suddenly stopped producing plays in 1607, and in 1613 what remained of the Children of the Chapel were incorporated into the Lady Elizabeth’s Men. The decline of the children’s companies provided adult troupes with new talent and resulted in an increased use of music and song in the adult plays. However, this change had been gradually occurring in the first decade of the century, especially after the King’s Men took over the Blackfriars, as may be illustrated by the inclusion of four songs in Volpone acted by the King’s Men in 1606. The songs in Volpone are used to perform specific functions and show a much more developed approach than previously demonstrated by Jonson. The first of the four songs (five, if Volpone’s second song was sung to different music) is heard near the start of the play, as part of an entertainment staged for the duplicitous title-character. This is followed by two songs in the next act, both of which are intended to draw customers to Volpone disguised as a mountebank. These songs are all performed by Nano, a dwarf companion of Volpone. No music survives. Although it seems that Nano was originally played by Robert Armin (see Volpone, Stage History), the role could have been taken by a child actor. The final song, ‘Come, my Celia, let us prove’ – for which a setting by Alfonso Ferrabosco II survives (P.4.1 (Full score   , MIDI   )) – occupies a central place in Volpone’s attempted seduction of Celia (3.7.165ff.) (see Lindley, 2010).

In the later comedies Jonson makes less use of songs. There are none in The Alchemist (1610). The Devil Is an Ass (1616) includes only one, ‘Have you seen but a white lily grow’ which became Jonson’s most widely disseminated song in his own day largely thanks to the fine setting (P.8.1 (Full score   , MIDI   )) probably by Robert Johnson (d. 1633), arguably the best English songwriter of the period (the play also includes a blank song, though this may also have been to the same tune). The last comedies – The Staple of News (1626), The New Inn (1629), The Magnetic Lady (1632), A Tale of a Tub (1633) – also make less use of song than many of the earlier plays, though that is not to say that music does not play an important role on occasion. There are no songs in A Tale of a Tub, though the play calls for music and musicians at several points. The stage direction for ‘loud music’ (5.9 and 5.10) indicates that it was provided by a wind band, which may have been provided by members of the City Waits. (Jonson of course refers to ‘Dick Tooter! . . . one o’the waits o’the city’ (3.6.22–3); by the late seventeenth century ‘tooter’ had become a derisive term for a wind musician). Of the remaining plays, music also features strongly in The New Inn. In addition to the frequent musical references, in Act 2 (2.6.85–7) Tiptoe seems to be referencing the satyrs’ catch (‘“Buzz”, quoth the blue fly’) from Oberon. There are several references to ballad songs (e.g. 4.2.65–6 and 4.2.74), and the whole play closes with music as ‘They go out, with a song’. One wonders whether with this final (untexted) gesture Jonson is again referencing the court masque (which often ended with a song) by underscoring the restoration of order in the play with the introduction of musical harmony. Music is also used thematically and structurally in The Staple of News. Here Jonson seems to have used both popular tunes (for example, 1.6) and composed settings (Madrigal’s song in 4.2, and perhaps the blank song later in the same scene). No music survives, and Jonson gives no clue as to what popular tunes were used. Jonson and his contemporaries made regular use of popular tunes, typically associated with ballads, to represent characters musically: this is most clearly seen in Eastward Ho! (1605) and in Bartholomew Fair (1614).

Eastward Ho! is a difficult play to analyse: we cannot know for sure whether the various music references were inserted by Jonson, Marston, or Chapman. According to the 1605 quarto, the play was acted ‘in the Blackfriars by the Children of Her Majesty’s Revels’ (this was the Children of the Chapel, which had recently been adopted by Queen Anne). The play makes extensive use of popular and ballad songs, often in the form of sung snatches – originals and parodies. Here we can also see the rather conventional use of music to depict madness, with the clear references to Ophelia in Hamlet. There is a similar use of popular song in Bartholomew Fair (1614). This is Jonson’s most extensive treatment of music, embodied in the character of Nightingale; the pervasiveness of music in the play suggests the rambunctious world of the fair. The play was first given by the Lady Elizabeth’s Men on 31 October, followed by a court performance the next day. Bartholomew Fair also serves to highlight another gap in our knowledge, as only a single ballad tune can be confidently identified – the ubiquitous ‘Packington’s Pound’ (P.7.1 (Full score   , MIDI   )). The problem of identification can be due to references to what are now obscure ballad tunes, but also lies in the fact that ballad tunes were often known by multiple names. No doubt there is a good deal of ballad tune references in Jonson’s plays and in those of his contemporaries which, much like arcane masque symbology, remains hidden from the modern reader.

Finally, it is necessary to return to the earlier rather narrow definition of ‘song’, as it implies that settings were newly composed for each individual item in the plays. It perhaps also implies a rather artificial demarcation between ‘popular’ and ‘art’ songs, which was much less clear in the early modern period than it is today. Indeed, it is worth noting that a number of ballad tunes were evidently derived from ‘composed’ music. For example, as Andrew Sabol (1960, 224 n. 7) notes, the vocal part of the song ‘Awake ye woeful wights’ (London, British Library, Add. MS 15117, fol. 3), the text of which is from Richard Edwards’s 1564 play Damon and Pythias, is almost identical to the music printed on a broadside of 1568. The ballad, ‘A new ballad of a lover extolling his lady’, is one of several which is instructed to be sung ‘to the tune of Damon and Pythias’ (see also King, 2009, 233–5). The evidence strongly suggests that the author of the broadside derived much of his invention (including the tune) from Edwards’s song. Such cross-fertilization also worked in the other direction also (e.g. ballad and popular tunes being used as the basis for composed variations, typically for solo lute or keyboard), and continued into the seventeenth century. A modern distinction between ‘popular’ and ‘art’ music in this context is thus somewhat misleading in terms of how the music would have sounded, and how it worked in practice. Indeed, David Lindley (Lindley 2005; Lindley 2010) and Ross Duffin (2004) have even argued that ballad tunes, or at least existing well-known tunes, were used for many, if not all, of the ‘songs’ (as the term was defined above) in plays performed by the adult companies throughout much of the Jacobean period (both authors were concerned with Shakespeare’s theatre, suggesting a cut-off point of c. 1616).

The theory has the advantage of explaining why such a high proportion of song settings from the repertoire has been lost, even allowing for historical accident, though it is perhaps worth noting that even in the eighteenth century theatre music tends to have a comparatively poor survival rate. Moreover, the theory is reinforced on a practical level by the fact that in addition to their musical training the children’s companies had more time between performances, thus they had more opportunity than had the adult companies to commission composers and to rehearse material. Indeed, one could also add that both Jonson and Shakespeare tend to generally divide their song lyrics into lines of four stresses, which could greatly facilitate reusing tunes. But the theory also raises several unanswered questions. For example, the survival rate for songs associated with children’s companies is not very much better than for the adult companies in the same period. It also ignores the impact of the integration of child actors into the adult companies in the first decade of the century. And, to judge from surviving settings of songs from several plays – Cymbeline (c. 1609?), The Witch (1609), A Winter’s Tale (c. 1611), The Tempest (1611), The Captain (c. 1612), The Duchess of Malfi (c. 1613), Valentinian (c.1614), The Mad Lover (c. 1616), The Chances (c. 1617), The Lover’s Progress (1623) – it seems that the Robert Johnson was writing songs, at least on occasion, for the King’s Men from around 1609 or so until his death in 1633. Not all can be special occasions. Johnson held an official post in the Royal Music as a lutenist from 1604, after serving a seven-year apprenticeship in the household of Sir George Carey (c. 1541–1616). Carey was a powerful ally, and it seems likely that he used his position as Lord Chamberlain (which he held 1596‒1603) to grease the wheels for Johnson’s appointment. More tellingly, perhaps, Carey was also patron of what was to become the King’s Men.

It is difficult to dismiss the arguments of Lindley and Duffin out of hand, though some moderation is warranted. It does seem likely that a mixture of pre-existing tunes and newly composed settings was used for play songs. And it may well be that pre-existing tunes were used more frequently than has been traditionally thought, but there is no reason to think that newly composed settings were significantly in the minority – or even a complete rarity – on the early modern English stage. For instance, we must bear in mind that many popular tunes would carry their own connotations for a seventeenth-century audience, which may not be appropriate for a given dramatic situation. Clearly there would be some dramatic contexts in which a relatively formal (and new) setting, and delivery, would be more appropriate than a popular tune. For example, Lindley notes that it is dramatically ‘important’ that the song ‘Have you seen but a white lily grow’ from The Devil Is an Ass ‘is sung well so that the audience might respond to the attractiveness of the music of the song but not thereby identify with the aspirations of the singer’ (Lindley 2010, 167). The singer is Wittipol and the song is an ‘erotic fantasy’ musing on the virginal state of Frances the wife of Fitzdottrel, who interrupts and threatens Wittipol with death. The famous setting of the song attributed to Robert Johnson, which was probably heard in the first performances, has been briefly referenced above. This was Jonson’s most widely disseminated song lyric. It survives in eight contemporary music sources, though most preserve a different version (five in all, P.8.1(a‒e) (Full score   , MIDI   )). Each version contains enough melodic similarities to demonstrate that they are related. Rather than being evidence of corruptions in transmission, this suggests that the song was partly disseminated as a ‘gist’ which consisted of the essential or striking segments of the tune and (harmonic) bass. This method of dissemination is frequently encountered in the instrumental repertoire and allowed transmission of the salient components of a composition. It was also useful for improvisation, similar to a modern-day jazz musician memorizing a chord sequence and some melodic motives from which an entire piece may be extemporized within a recognizable framework.

Two of the versions of ‘Have you seen . . .’ also contain elaborate ornamentation and are highly suggestive of an aural transcription, perhaps from memory, without immediate recourse to a notated exemplar: this would also explain the variants in the text. The same is true of the setting of ‘I was not wearier where I lay’ (M.9.1 (Full score   , MIDI   )) from The Vision of Delight. It could be argued that so long as most of the distinct melodic essentials were included and the delivery reasonably effected on-stage, then the formal and dramatic requirements of the scene would be satisfied. In other words, a performance need only be a recognizable approximation of what may be preserved in notated exemplar. The argument cannot be fully rehearsed here, though we must be guarded against interpreting written sources – and indeed their non-survival – too literally because they tend to preserve songs as they disseminated for consumption by amateurs, and may at best reflect a blurred snapshot of a single performance. In addition, it is difficult to imagine how the memorization of a new song’s gist would require much additional rehearsal time for the actor; indeed, contrariwise, it could function as a mnemonic device. And excellent though the setting of ‘Have you seen . . .’ is, there is nothing in it to suggest that Johnson could not have composed it quickly. A similar case could be made for virtually every play song from the period that has been preserved in written form.

3. Music in the Masques

Music and song played an integral role in most of Jonson’s masques and entertainments; dancing was, of course, the raison d’être. Jonson’s masques typically include three or four songs. The antimasque sometimes included a song but its focus was on choreographed dancing. In contrast to the main masque, antimasque characters were more likely to sing a popular ballad tune befitting their lowly status. The main masque typically comprised two or three newly choreographed dances. They were often introduced by a song, in which elements of the symbolism could be explained but which also offered the masquers respite. To close the masque, the revels were often followed by a song. The main masque songs were all newly composed by some of the finest songwriters of the period. In contrast to the plays, arguments could be made for associating over half of the thirty surviving song settings from Jonson’s masques and entertainments with the performances, but even so the picture is far from complete because comparatively few detailed records exist pertaining to the musical elements of such works.

   Masque songs tend to fall into two categories (see also Walls, 1995, and Holman, 1992). On one hand there are lighter songs, essentially derived from the styles of popular dances of the day (such as the alman or galliard: for example, ‘Nay, nay, you must not stay’ from Oberon, M.7.5 (Full score   , MIDI   )). On the other, there are the more serious songs, in what has become known as the declamatory style. Such songs (for example, ‘Gentle knights’ from Oberon, M.7.7 (Full score   , MIDI   ), or ‘If all the ages of the earth’ from The Masque of Queens, M.6.5 (Full score   , MIDI   )) are based on simple harmonies which allow full declamation of the text, which is often interspersed with rests and mimics the rhythmic patterns of speech. The advantages of the declamatory style are clearly linked to audibility and clear enunciation of the text in the performance spaces in which the masques took place: large, resonant halls. The declamatory style was perhaps the main musical innovation in the masque, and it quickly became more widely popular (for a detailed account, see Spink, 1974).

In any discussion of masque music it is important to stress the collaborative nature of such entertainments as a whole. We might consider the three main elements to be libretto, stage design, and music. However, masque music encompassed both dances and songs, and was not usually the responsibility of a single person. Composers were often unacknowledged in masque texts; where they are, their exact roles or duties were rarely stated unambiguously. That said, Jonson was the only writer of masques to name his composers, though he did so only on occasion and seemingly only where it fitted his overall conceit. One thing is clear, however: where Jonson does acknowledge a composer, songs and dances are understood as distinct entities and responsibility for them was demarcated. This is borne out by court payment records.

In Jonson’s early masques musical duties seem to have been consistently shared among Alfonso Ferrabosco II (songs), Thomas Giles (dances), and Jeremy Herne (dances), though some of the dances were likely supplied by other musicians, depending on the occasion. Alfonso Ferrabosco II ( c. 1575–1628) is generally regarded as one of the finest English composers of the Jacobean period. As a young child, he was left in England by his father, also a composer named Alfonso (1543–88). Ferrabosco senior was a courtier at Elizabeth’s court until he became embroiled in several scandals resulting in his departure for his native Italy in 1578, with his wife, Susanna Symons, leaving their children evidently deposited as collateral against his return. He never returned, and the children remained in the care of the court musician, Gomer van Awsterwyke, until his death in 1592. Over the next decade Ferrabosco II began working as court musician, and by the time of his death he held four posts in the royal music. Jeremy Herne (d. 1640) is first encountered in court records in May 1608, as a member of the violin band (but appointed as a bass viol player), though he became better known as a dancing master. He is often referred to as ‘Jerome Heron’, which may suggest that he was French (see Holman, 1993, 179). Thomas Giles was dancing master to Prince Henry from 1605; he died in 1617, shortly before the installation of Charles as Prince of Wales. Giles is mentioned in relation to several masques, and we also know that he composed dances at least on occasion: the fourth dance in Thomas Campion’s Lord Hay’s Masque (1607) is attributed to him. The dancing masters were all known as violinists. It seems that they were often responsible for composing the dance tunes as well as providing the choreography, though this need not apply in each instance. It is also worth noting that masque dances also tend to be constructed from various stock melodic patterns, highlighting a shared musical knowledge or repertoire.
To the composition of music (vocal and instrumental) we can add a further demarcation of duties: arrangement. The surviving records for court masques indicate that vocal and instrumental items were normally arranged by another person responsible for ‘setting’ the tunes for different ensembles. Taking the example of Love Freed from Ignorance and Folly (1611), we can get a picture of the complex nature of masque collaborations. Ferrabosco II received £20 for ‘making’ the songs, while Robert Johnson received £5 for ‘setting [them] to the lutes’. Thomas Lupo received £5 for ‘setting the dances to the violins’ (Masque Archive, Love Freed, 4). Oberon (1611) offers similarly detailed accounts of payments. Here Robert Johnson received £20 ‘for making the dances’ and Thomas Lupo £5 ‘for setting them to the violins’. Thomas Giles also received £40 ‘for 3 dances’, while Nicolas Confesse (another dancing master, fl. 1610–35) and Jeremy Herne both received £20 each along with Ferrabosco II (Masque Archive, Oberon, 7). The Oberon records also note that rehearsals (presumably for the dances) lasted for almost six weeks. The sum paid to Robert Johnson presumably also covered his arrangements for the twenty lutes that he supplied. Such references to instrumentation are found only sporadically in Jonson’s masques. In Queens the masquers performed their first dance ‘to the cornetts, the second to the violins’ (609–10). Even though they are not generally specified in the masque texts, payments show that violins were often present. From court records, Peter Holman has deduced that the size of violin bands in masques varied from eight in Gypsies, twelve (or sixteen if the dancing masters are counted) in Love Freed, to twenty-one in Oberon. Holman also notes that the Venetian diplomat Orazio Busino recalled that there were twenty-five or thirty violins in Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue (1618). Certainly the size of the violin band must have been considerable on occasion, presumably fleshed out by players not yet part of the court establishment (see Holman, 1993, 183–4). In terms of the deployment of the different musical ensembles, the masques appear to have been a microcosm of the Royal Music. Thus, some comment on the structure of the Royal Music itself will be useful.
Secular music at court was provided by the three main sections of the Royal Music: the wind consorts (see Lasocki, 1983), the violin band (see Holman, 1993), and the private music (also known as the ‘Lutes, Viols, and Voices’; see Cunningham, 2010). These groups were distinguished not only by instrumentation but also by function and place, providing either public or private music within the palace at Whitehall. The distinction between public and private music groups was basic common sense, stemming from the medieval distinction between haut (loud) and bas (soft) instruments. The acoustically loud violin and wind bands were suited to large, ceremonial entertainments, and were loud enough to be heard above the din at meal times. The softer lutes and viols were better suited to intimate chamber music, typically played in the more private areas of the court. This demarcation of music groups can also be observed in masques where the lutes and voices were used in the songs and so forth, the violin band played the louder dance music, and the wind band provided aural cover for scene moves and processions. The wind instruments also occasionally played dance music: they were sometimes added to the violin band for colour usually in grotesque music or antimasques. Until the Restoration, the royal violin band played as a five-part band with a single treble, and the implication is that masque dances were arranged in the same scoring (the wind band played six-part music with two trebles).

The first stage for masque dances was evidently composition in a two-part format, tune and bass. Then – as we have seen above – a second person was employed to complete the inner parts. The outer parts would be sufficient for dance rehearsals, and had the advantage of being flexible in terms of instrumentation. This process explains why the majority of masque dances survive in two-part format: it was complete as it stood but could also be expanded upon. This made the two-part format suited to the needs of amateurs and professionals alike. Unless special effects were required (for example in The Irish Masque, where two harps were used), most main masque dances were presumably performed by the violin band. Antimasque dances seem to have also been scored for a five-part ensemble; however, the orchestration would presumably be often augmented by (or primarily consisted of) unusual instruments, particularly percussion, thus further reinforcing the sense of demarcation and disorder. The main problems in assessing masque dances are that they tend to survive only in two-part format, but also we can only ever make tentative associations with particular masques usually based on titles in sources, such as ‘The Birds’ Dance’ (M.11.1 (Full score   , MIDI   )) and so on (see also section 7, below). Such dances would have been newly composed, though the processional (loud) music used to accompany the entrance of the King is likely to have been taken from the existing repertoire of the wind consorts.

As with the instrumental music, our understanding of masque songs is affected by the ways in which they were preserved and disseminated. We know from various court payment records and eyewitness accounts that main masque songs were typically accompanied by ensembles of lutes. Where song settings do survive, they are typically in a reduced scoring often consisting of the vocal line and an instrumental bass part. The best source for Jonson’s masque songs is the printed book of Ayres by Ferrabosco II. The Ayres includes eight songs from The Masque of Blackness (1605), The Masque of Beauty (1608), The Haddington Masque (1608), and The Masque of Queens (1609), as well as a setting of ‘Come, my Celia, let us prove’ (P.4.1 (Full score   , MIDI   )) from Volpone. Perhaps the biggest issue surrounding these songs, and masque songs in general, is the relationship of the surviving settings to the original performances. For example, the songs in Ayres have an accompaniment of lute and bass viol. The volume was clearly aimed at the domestic, amateur market, and we cannot assume that the accompanying lute part represents what may have been heard in the masques, even in reduced form. The bass viol part generally doubles the bass of the lute part, so they could be played together or as alternatives (other suitable instruments were of course possible). Some of the songs also lack the choruses that were part of the original performances. Moreover, in the masque the vocal lines are likely to have been embellished; it is worth emphasising that the singers in the masque were professionals, and improvised ornamentation would have been expected, as several manuscript sources testify.

   Ferrabosco II and Jonson first collaborated on The Masque of Blackness (1605). In the quarto version of Hymenai, printed in 1606, Ferrabosco received glowing praise from Jonson. In 1609 Ferrabosco published two collections of music (Lessons for 1. 2. and 3. Viols, and Ayres: see the List of Sources): Jonson contributed a dedicatory sonnet to each. The collaboration lasted until at least 1611. Christopher Wilson has argued that after 1612 the role of music in the Jonsonian masque changed somewhat, ‘from a literal to a philosophical one enhancing a (Renaissance) neo-Platonic ideal of separate arts, music, poetry and dance exerting a conjoint, and at the most sophisticated level complementary, existence’ (Wilson 1990, 93). The claim is not without merit, though we lack any music from Jonson’s masques between 1611 and 1617. In any case, by 1617 Nicholas Lanier (1588–1666) seems to have replaced Ferrabosco as Jonson’s main musical collaborator. Lanier had been active at court since 1613, and had received an official place as a lutenist in 1616. Multitalented and politically astute, he became the Master of the Music upon the accession of Charles I. Mary Chan (1980) has suggested that Jonson and Ferrabosco quarrelled, though there is no evidence that this is so. It is more likely that the older man simply stepped aside. Jonson next collaborated with Ferrabosco on The Masque of Augurs (1622), in which he and Lanier – whom Jonson described as ‘that excellent pair of kinsmen’ in the quarto text –contributed vocal music; Robert Johnson supplied the dances.
   Lanier, though a less gifted composer than Ferrabosco, seems to have shared Jonson’s changing vision of the masque in the second decade of the century. Lovers Made Men was described by Jonson as being ‘sung (after the Italian manner) Stilo recitativo by Master Nicholas Lanier, who ordered and made both the Scene and the Musicke’ (13, collation). No music survives, though Jonson’s claim that the entertainment was sung throughout is perfectly plausible. Much ink has been spilt in attempting to determine how exactly this would have sounded: one imagines that it would have been closer to a heightened form of declamatory song than true Italian monody (see Walls, 1996, especially 89–93). Lovers Made Men was one of Jonson’s least traditional masques. Written for a private performance away from the court he could abandon the received structures and conventions; the experimental opportunities offered by the performance context also explain why ‘Stilo recitativo’ did not make its presence felt in the court masque proper. The year 1617 also saw another collaboration between Jonson and Lanier, The Vision of Delight, in which the character of Delight ‘spake in song (stylo recitativo)’ (4) Survival rates for this masque are only marginally better: a setting of ‘I was not wearier where I lay’ (M.9.1 (Full score   , MIDI   )) is the sole musical remnant (though generally attributed to Lanier, its authorship is far from certain). The setting is clearly an effort to transcribe a highly embellished song either aurally or from memory. Either way, it suggests that ‘stylo recitativo’ had a different meaning for Jonson than it does for us, or than it would have had for a continental contemporary. Lanier’s setting of ‘Do not expect to hear of all’ (M.13.3 (Full score   , MIDI   )) from The Masque of Augurs further suggests this disparity.

4. Life after Death: the Later Seventeenth Century

After his death in 1637, Jonson’s works continued to exert a strong presence in literary circles. This was no doubt aided by the appearance in 1640–1 of the second folio edition of his complete works; a third folio appeared in 1692. Historical accident notwithstanding, despite the availability of Jonson’s works in print, not to mention manuscript dissemination, in the decades after his death, one finds only occasional musical settings of his words. Those we do find, in general, tend to be settings of lyrics that had already been in circulation for some time as individual songs. For example, settings of masque songs by William and Henry Lawes, Nicholas Lanier, and William Webbe (all roughly contemporaries of Jonson) were published in almost all of John Playford’s songbooks from 1653 to 1673; ironically, however, unlike many masque texts it was the composer’s name that was printed in these volumes while Jonson was now relegated to anonymity. Jonson’s name was also omitted from Lanier’s ‘A Pastoral Song to the King on New Year’s Day’ 1664 (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 36/37). No music survives, but the text incorporates ten lines from Jonson’s New Year Ode for 1636, printed as Underwood 79 (1641). Given Jonson’s renewed popularity in the early Restoration and the Royalist tenor of the 1636 ode, this was an ideal text for Lanier to adapt for Charles II’s court. We can only guess at how the piece would have sounded. The arrangement of the iambic stanzas into different numbers of syllables implies different music for each (see also McGuinness, 1960–1).

The restoration of Charles II also signalled the re-opening of the theatres. In the Interregnum, impresarios such as William Davenant (1606–68) sought to circumvent the interdiction on spoken drama by developing all-sung operatic entertainments, heavily influenced by the court masque. Davenant’s second entertainment, The Siege of Rhodes (1656), was apparently mostly set in recitative, with vocal music by Henry Lawes, Henry Cooke, and Matthew Locke, and instrumental music by Charles Coleman and George Hudson: none survives. Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) was among those who saw the entertainment; it appears to have partly influenced his decision to compose a recitative setting of a soliloquy from Catiline: His Conspiracy.

Catiline was first performed in the summer of 1611 by the King’s Men. Jonson had high hopes for this, his second, tragedy but Jacobean audiences were unimpressed. It seems that Cicero’s lengthy orations to the senate in the fourth act severely tested their patience, leading Jonson to publish quickly the quarto text criticizing the ignorance of what he called ‘these jig-given times’ (dedication, 4). Despite this inauspicious start, Catiline became more widely recognized later in the century. According to Gerald Bentley it was more commonly cited than any other play by Jonson or Shakespeare (Bentley, 1945); see also Potter, 2010). Pepys first read Catiline on 18 December 1664, but did not see the play performed until 19 December 1668. As so often happens, lengthy anticipation resulted in great disappointment. After the performance Pepys concluded in his diary that it was ‘a play of much good sense and words to read, but that doth appear the worst upon the stage’. The production that Pepys endured was merely a prelude to his decision to compose a setting of verses from the play. Catiline is not, however, an obvious choice for musical treatment. Pepys chose to set the opening soliloquy ‘It is decreed. Nor shall thy fate, O Rome’ (P.6.1/1 (Full score   , MIDI   )). Composition was evidently a long and laboured process. According to his diary, Pepys began in April 1666 and did not finish until 11 November, and he received help from the court musician John Hingeston (d. 1683). Pepys also had his household musician Caesar Morelli compose a setting of the same text, which dates from c. 1680 (P.6.1/2 (Full score   , MIDI   )). Both settings are similar in style. Pepys’s style of text-setting was undoubtedly influenced by the Interregnum experiments in recitative. As already mentioned, he was particularly enamoured of The Siege of Rhodes, and had a disdain of vocal music in which the words were not ‘plainly expressed’. Although Pepys called his setting ‘recitative’ it is perhaps better described as a declamatory air: every syllable gets a separate note, and the harmony is quite simple and slow-moving.

5. The Eighteenth Century

Catiline was one of several Jonson plays to be staged in the late seventeenth century; Bartholomew Fair, for example, was first revived in 1661. However by the early eighteenth century only three of Jonson’s plays appeared frequently on the London stage: Volpone, Epicene, and The Alchemist (for which incidental music survives by Handel for a 1710 revival: HWV 43). The first two of these plays contain songs, though we have no way of knowing whether they were sung in these revivals, and if so how. Certainly no musical settings are known to have survived. Rather, we must next turn to Jonson’s non-dramatic verse.

Jonson’s exquisite two-stanza ode to the intoxicating nature of love, ‘Drink to me only with thine eyes’, was first published in The Forest (1616). It is not clear when or how the collection came about. Some of the poems had been composed a decade or more before publication, and it seems that none can be firmly dated to after 1612 (The Forest, ed. Burrow, CWBJ, 5.201). The first musical settings of ‘Drink to me only with thine eyes’ did not, however, appear until well over a century after publication of The Forest. But in large part due to the popularity of its musical afterlife, by the end of the eighteenth century the poem was well known in popular culture. Two examples: the opening line appeared in a popular 1797 hand-coloured etching by Richard Newton (1777–98); it was also the subject of a late-nineteenth century painting by Charles Trevor Garland (1855–1906). The most famous musical setting (N.1.1/1 (Full score   , MIDI   )) appears to date from around 1770. It was published in various arrangements aimed at the amateur market. The majority of early prints are three-voice glees, and are difficult to date although most appear to have been printed in the 1770s or 1780s. None was entered in the Stationers’ Register. It seems to have been this setting that Frances Burney recalled in her diary as being sung by the two daughters of the Dean of Winchester in 1782; she describes it as ‘a very pretty little old song’ (1889, 2.298–9). The nineteenth-century musical antiquarian, William Chappell (1809–88), included it in his Popular Music of the Olden Time (1855–9), noting that Charles Burney was among those who tried unsuccessfully to identify the composer. Burney had also included Alfonso Ferrabosco II’s setting of ‘Come, my Celia, let us prove’ (P.4.1 (Full score   , MIDI   )) in his A General History of Music (1776–89). Burney did, however, call into question Ferrabosco’s ‘genius’, concluding that his Ayres (1609) ‘contain as little merit of any kind as I have ever seen in productions to which the name of a master of established reputation is prefixed’ (C. Burney, 1776–89, 2.118, 282). It is worth noting that Burney was generally disparaging about the majority of seventeenth-century English composers. Of the composers to whom ‘Drink to me only with thine eyes’ has been attributed, the most likely candidate is Dr Henry Harington (1727–1816): a founder member of the Bath Harmonic Society and minor, but well known, composer of glees.

This is, to be sure, only the most famous setting of ‘Drink to me only with thine eyes’: a further five settings eighteenth-century settings are known (N.1.1/2 (Full score   , MIDI   )–6). It is tempting to suggest that these other settings were inspired by the popularity of the famous setting, but in fact all of the others appear to pre-date it. All but one are for solo voice and continuo; some have instrumental symphonies and interludes. They do, however, share the characteristic of being difficult to place chronologically. In terms of style, two appear to date to around 1730, while another two appear to date to around the middle of the century. Only two settings carry an attribution. The pick of bunch is by the otherwise unknown Mr Andrews (N.1.1/3 (Full score   , MIDI   )): perhaps Henry Andrews, the minor court employee with whom Handel stayed during his 1712 visit to London. The remaining setting is another three-voice glee (N.1.1/3 (Full score   , MIDI   )), and was composed by Thomas Linley senior (1733–95). Though not published around the turn of the nineteenth century, in the posthumous Works of Linley senior and junior (1758–78), the setting seems likely to date to c. 1760–70.

Jonson’s musical afterlife was not confined to small-scale chamber forms such as the glee. The 1770s also saw a return of Jonson’s masques as complete entertainments, with two Jonsonian ‘masques’ presented at London’s Covent Garden theatre: The Fairy Prince in 1771–2 and The Druids in 1774–5 (see also Butler and Savage’s Stage History of the masques in the CWBJ Performance Archive). Neither was a masque as Jonson would have understood the term. Rather, both were quite free adaptations from various sources presented as quasi-operatic spectacles. The result was two works that resembled Jonson’s originals in neither form nor intention. One was, to be sure, almost as deeply intertwined with the current political context as any of Jonson’s entertainments.

In the summer of 1771 ten nobles were invested with the order of the Garter. Among them were King George III’s eldest sons, George, the Prince of Wales (later George IV), and Frederic, the Duke of York and Bishop of Osnabruck. The spectacular ceremony at Windsor Castle captured the public’s imagination and inspired two theatrical entertainments. The first to be staged was The Institution of the Garter, or Arthur’s Roundtable Restored, devised by David Garrick (1717–79). He based the text on Gilbert West’s dramatic poem The Institution of the Garter (1742), and commissioned Charles Dibdin (1745–1818) to compose the music. It premiered at Drury Lane on 28 October and ran for 33 nights (no music survives). Garrick’s Institution of the Garter was closely followed by the staging of a similarly patriotic and elaborate entertainment in the rival Covent Garden Theatre. The entertainment was devised by George Colman the elder (1732–94), who enlisted Thomas Augustine Arne (1710–78) to compose the music. The result was a spectacular English opera, The Fairy Prince.

   Colman was well versed in drama of the seventeenth century. During his Covent Garden tenure he staged several of his Shakespearean adaptations. He was also evidently familiar with Whalley’s 1756 edition of The Works of Ben Jonson, and published his own adaptations of Epicene and Volpone. When it came to compiling his Garter-inspired libretto, Colman returned once more to Jonson. The potential analogy of the much admired Stuart prince with his Hanoverian counterpart offered by Oberon was simply too good to pass up. To Jonson’s masque, Colman added passages by Shakespeare, John Dryden, and Gilbert West. A patriotic farrago The Fairy Prince may have been, but the dramatic deficiencies were balanced by the high quality of the music and scenery; Arne’s setting was generally seen by critics as a return to form. Fortunately, much of the music was published in vocal score (a complete edition, with separate introduction, is included here as an appendix to the Music Edition). Despite enjoying a successful season, The Fairy Prince was performed in full for the last time in May 1772. Several of the songs circulated in manuscript. Most widely disseminated of these was the bawdy catch for the Satyrs, ‘“Buzz”, quoth the blue fly’. In addition to manuscript copies, it was included in the third volume of Apollonian Harmony (c. 1795–8), a large collection of catches and glees associated with the Noblemen’s and Gentlemen’s Catch and Glee Club (generally known as the Catch Club), which ranked Arne among its members.

The Druids opened on 19 November 1774 (see Butler and Savage, CWBJ ‘Masques: Stage History’). It too was also well received by London audiences, and ran for almost 60 nights over the season. The author of the adaptation opted for anonymity: it was advertised as ‘a new pastoral Masque and Pantomime interspersed’ (Stone, 1962, 3.1850). The music was composed by John Abraham Fisher (1744–1806), who led the Covent Garden orchestra from c. 1769 to 1778; indeed several members of The Fairy Prince cast also appeared in The Druids. Heavy on spectacle and dancing, The Druids was based on the central premise of an intrigue involving lovers at cross-purposes, an enchanted druid, and a dance of Cupids and Hymen. It began with several pastoral songs but this quickly descended into a variety show involving collapsing ladders, flying teapots, and acrobatics. The central episode of the entertainment involved Venus, Cupid, and Hymen, and was culled from Jonson’s Haddington Masque. The work was also interspersed with a wide variety of material from Jonson and elsewhere. With the exception of a semi-public performance of the first part of The Fairy Prince in 1775, The Druids was to be the last Jonsonian masque staged publically until the modern revivals of the twentieth century.

1774 also produced another setting from a Jonsonian masque, although on a very much smaller scale than The Druids. A setting by Samuel Webbe (1740–1816) of a single song, ‘To the old, long life and treasure’ (M.12.6A (Full score   , MIDI   ) ), is found in a late eighteenth-century manuscript associated with the Catch Club (London, British Library, Add. MS 31806). The song was originally one of the antimasque songs from The Gypsies Metamorphosed (1621). Webbe is generally considered to be the most important composer of the glee; his lifetime almost perfectly covers the rise, development and decline of the genre. He began his association with the Catch Club no later than 1766, the year in which he won his first annual Prize Medal. The club awarded these annual medals to encourage new compositions. This Jonson song is just one of several hundred catches, canons, rounds, and glees composed by Webbe. Typical of many of his lighter three-voice catches, it was also one of his prize-winning ones, taking the Prize Medal in 1774.

It seems that at the Catch Club Jonson was not only remembered through his words. Add. MS 31806 also includes a short catch for three voices (in score), titled ‘Epitaph on Ben Johnson’ and attributed to ‘J. Hawkins sen.’ (fol. 94v):v

The attribution seems to refer to James Hawkins senior (1662/3– 1729), a minor composer mostly of sacred music, who spent much of his career at Ely Cathedral. It is not clear what prompted him to compose a Jonsonian elegy, though he was quite backwards looking in many respects. The short text is by Robert Herrick (1591-1674), and was included in his Hesperides of 1648 (p. 342, 'Upon Ben Johnson'). It may be worth noting the similarity of the opening line, based on 'Hic jacet', to lines 9–10 of Jonson’s ‘On My First Son (Epigrams, 45: ‘Rest in soft peace, and, asked, say here doth lie Ben. Jonson his best piece of poetry’). Given the general accuracy of attributions in Add. MS 31806 and the style of the piece, there seems little reason to question the attribution to Hawkins. However, beyond a terminus ante quem the setting is difficult to date, but even if it were an early work it would by no means be the oldest song in the manuscript nor in the Catch Club’s repertoire.

Apart from Webbe, the Catch Club also heard settings of Jonson’s words by another distinguished member, the composer and organist, Richard John Samuel Stevens (1757–1837). As a fourteen-year-old boy Stevens had in fact performed in The Fairy Prince as one of the boys of the St Paul’s choir; his ‘Recollections’ (written between 1808 and 1827), also include a fascinating entry recounting the rehearsals (see Appendix: ). Stevens is mainly remembered as a composer of glees. He gave careful consideration to the texts he chose to set (Shakespeare was his favourite) and did most of his composing between 1780 and 1800. Despite being comparatively few in number, his glees are among the finest of the period; his best ones easily rank alongside those of Webbe. In terms of style, Stevens often moves away from the more traditional glee by placing the melody in the top part, and supporting this by clear harmonies with little counterpoint; this can be seen in his two settings of Jonson’s words. In 1782 he composed a five-part glee using several lines (some quite loosely) from Jonson’s ‘Epitaph on Elizabeth, L. H’ (N.1.1 (Full score   , MIDI   )). The poem first appeared in Jonson’s Epigrams, included in the 1616 folio. The identity of the dedicatee is unclear but the poem also circulated widely in manuscript. Stevens submitted the setting for one of the Catch Club prizes in the same year, but was unsuccessful. He returned to Jonson in the late 1790s, setting another five-part glee this time taking the text from The Masque of Queens (M.6.7(a) (Full score   , MIDI   )). One of his best works, the glee is dated 1 February 1799 in one of Steven’s autograph scorebooks; he published a slightly revised setting in 1808. We know from Stevens’s ‘Recollections’ that ‘The Witches’ Song’ was quite popular and was performed at various public and semi-public occasions until at least 1810. The text of Stevens’s four-part glee ‘From Oberon, in Fairy Land’ (composed, 1792; published, 1794) is sometimes attributed to Jonson. The text appears in numerous collections from the late eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth, sometimes titled ‘Robin Goodfellow’. It is in fact a ballad text published c. 1625, ‘The Mad Merry Pranks of Robin Goodfellow’ (to be sung to the tune of ‘Dulcina’, itself a Jacobean masque dance: for a transcription, see Ritson, 1813, 3.296; it is a lengthy text, Stevens’s setting runs to just over 100 bars). There is nothing to suggest that Jonson was the author; the attribution presumably came about largely because of the opening line.

6. The Nineteenth Century and Beyond

Stevens takes us into the early nineteenth century, which marks an end point for the music edition. This is not to say, however, that here the trail goes cold: quite the opposite. Well over a dozen settings of various Jonson texts were published in the nineteenth century; no doubt a systematic search would produce yet more results. It is no surprise that the nineteenth century saw a proliferation of Jonson settings. William Gifford’s nine-volume edition of the Works was published in 1816. Gifford modernized Jonson and brought his work to a new generation; his edition remained the standard critical text for over a century. The nineteenth-century settings are primarily three- or four-voice glees, catches, or rounds, and are essentially an extension of the eighteenth-century glee tradition. Many of the composers are obscure figures, but there are settings by comparatively well-known glee composers such as Thomas Attwood Walmisley (1814–56) and William Horsley (1774–1858), and even a setting of poem 7 from The Forest – ‘Song: That Women Are but Men’s Shadows’ (‘Follow a shadow, it still flies you’) – by Charles Hubert Hastings Parry (1848–1918). Indeed, the range of texts set is quite varied, though the most commonly encountered are the ‘Hymn to Diana’ and ‘Slow, slow, fresh fount, keep time with my salt tears’, both from Cynthia’s Revels. Horsley’s four-voice glee setting of ‘See, the chariot at hand here of Love’ also achieved a high degree of popularity. The poem had been included in Jonson’s The Underwood, one stanza of which had a previous and enduring life as the song ‘Have you seen but a white lily grow’ from The Devil Is an Ass. The lyric enjoyed renewed interest from composers in the early twentieth century and beyond: of note is the 1929 setting by Elizabeth Maconchy (1907–1994) for voice and piano (published by OUP, 1930).

   Into the twentieth century we continue to find settings of Jonson, though inevitably there is a wider range of texts and composers began to move away from glee settings. Scattered among the plethora of minor composers, there are of course luminaries such as Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958) and Benjamin Britten (1913–76). Britten included a setting of the ‘Hymn to Diana’ in his famous Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings (1949), while Vaughan Williams included a setting of ‘See, the chariot at hand here of Love’ in his 1929 opera Sir John in Love. Vaughan Williams had also contributed music, as did Gustav Holst (1874–1934), to a rare twentieth-century production of Pan’s Anniversary, staged in April 1905 as part of a Shakespeare festival in Stratford-Upon-Avon (see Butler & Savage, ‘Masques: Stage History’, CWBJ Electronic Edition).

The most notable twentieth-century projects involving Jonson’s words were operas. Shortly before his death, Edward Elgar (1857–1934) was working on a project titled The Spanish Lady (ed. Young, 1991). The libretto by Elgar and Barry Jackson was based on The Devil Is an Ass, though it also included lyrics or lines from various Jonson masques including Hymenaei, The Masque of Beauty, The Haddington Masque, The Masque of Queens, Oberon, Love Restored, and Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue. The musicologist Percy M. Young (1912–2004) arranged the fragments for performance in Cambridge in 1994, which was broadcast on BBC radio. The Jonsonian opera by Richard Strauss (1864-1949) was, however, completed. Die schweigsame Frau (The Silent Woman) premiered in Dresden on 24 June 1935. The libretto, by Stefan Zweig (1881–1942), was based on Epicene, which had also been the inspiration for another opera over hundred years earlier, L’Angiolina ossia il Matrimonio per sussurro (1800) by Antonio Salieri (1750–1825). Though a fine work, Die schweigsame Frau was one of Strauss’s least successful operas. In addition, Strauss had previously contemplated an operatic version of Volpone after Zweig’s free adaption of 1925. Volpone was also the source for operas by Norman Demuth (1949), George Antheil (1953), and Francis Burt (1960).

7. Musicology and Ben Jonson

The twentieth century saw the publication of the monumental Oxford edition of Jonson’s works. Upon completion, in 1952, the edition was a repository for all then-known information the musical settings and their locations, greatly facilitating research into the music. The earliest Oxford volumes coincided with the earliest modern editions of the seventeenth-century settings of Jonson, such as Peter Warlock’s 1928 edition (for voice and piano) of ‘Have you seen but a white lily grow’. Warlock, born Philip Heseltine (1894–1930), was a talented composer though he is perhaps equally remembered as a writer on music, as well for his activities as an avid editor and transcriber of early music (over 500 published items). By the late 1920s there was also recognition by literary historians that little research had been done on music in Jonson’s works. In a 1929 article Edwin S. Lindsey (1897–1989) – a composer, and professor of English at the University of Chattanooga, Tennessee – made the case that while much work had been done on Shakespeare and music ‘Jonson is neglected’ (Lindsey 1929, 86). Lindsey went on to give a brief account of the settings that were known at the time, twenty-six songs in nine plays. Lindsey’s article was soon followed by the publication of a Columbia University doctoral dissertation on the very topic, Willa McClung Evans’s Ben Jonson and Elizabethan Music (1929); Baskervill’s seminal study of the Elizabethan jig appeared in the same year. McClung’s short monograph was a valiant attempt to understand the influence of music on Jonson. Her central thesis is that ‘Jonson’s rise and decline as lyricist and playwright were paralleled by the degree of his intimacy and collaboration with musicians’ (p. xi). McClung’s study was very much of its time; despite the many inaccuracies and misconceptions it remained the main text on the subject well after its (unrevised) reprinting in 1965.
By the 1960s the court masque was a frequently debated scholarly topic, which in turn entailed an examination of the surviving music; Jonson’s works were central to many studies. To be sure, much more was done by literary scholars interested in the music than by musicologists. As noted previously, the bulk of instrumental masque music survives in two-part format, which for many years was largely ignored. On one hand, it was seen as trivial amateur music (akin to the volumes Court Ayres and Courtly Masquing Ayres issued by Playford in 1655 and 1662, respectively). On the other, it was seen as being incomplete, as masque dances were clearly not performed in two parts. When musicologists began to look at the substantial two-part masque repertoire (largely on the back of renewed interest from literary scholars), much initial effort was spent on trying to match abstractly titled dances with particular masques and entertainments, an often wrong-headed and pointless endeavour. The process was fundamentally flawed, as there is no way of knowing whether a particular dance was performed in a specific entertainment, because it could have been wrongly or newly titled; it even could belong to an entertainment for which no libretto has survived. But also there is little musical difference between masque music and non-masque music of the period, which makes firm associations with particular works even more difficult, if not impossible (hence the tentative associations of the instrumental items included in this edition, explained in the individual headnotes). This type of endeavour reached a climax in Andrew J. Sabol’s editions of masque music. First published as Songs and Dances for the Stuart Masque, it was soon expanded to include over 400 items (1959; enlarged edition 1978, further expanded in 1982). To Sabol’s credit, he amassed the majority of the music associated with the court masque and made to readily available in a single volume. Unfortunately Sabol’s editing skills did not match the project’s ambition, and he lacked a full understanding of how masque music was created and how it worked in practice. He also produced a musical reconstruction of Lovers Made Men (1963). The edition was symptomatic of an increased desire to see such works performed; there were many staged reconstructions throughout the twentieth century (see Butler and Savage, ‘Masques: Stage History’).
Another aspect of musicological neglect (or disinterest) was that well into the 1960s seventeenth-century English music before Purcell was still somewhat of an unknown quantity for musicology as a discipline. It was far from a mainstream concern when in 1960 Murray Lefkowitz published his seminal monograph on William Lawes (1602–45), which included a substantial chapter on Lawes’s masque music. Although the primary focus was naturally on the Caroline masque, the study was an important step in terms of musicological engagement with masque music in general. In 1970 Lefkowitz published Trois Masques à la cour de Charles 1 er , which made most of Lawes’s masque music available (though the insertion of contrapuntal pieces to replace missing music is out of step with what we understand now of masque music).
Notable among specifically Jonsonian studies are David Fuller’s two important articles in the 1970s: the first dealing with music in the masques (Fuller 1973), the second dealing with music in the plays (Fuller 1977). Fuller combined a literary sensitivity with at times penetrating analyses of the music and its context and sources. In 1974 the late Ian Spink’s path-breaking study of seventeenth-century English song was also published, which greatly improved our understanding of the wider context in which masque and theatre songs existed and helped to create: it remains a central reference text.
The 1970s also saw a number of important articles by Mary Chan (née Joiner) dealing with the domestic song and theatre/masque repertoire and its sources. Chan’s work culminated in her 1980 monograph Music in the Theatre of Ben Jonson, the only full-length study since McClung to deal specifically with Jonson and music. Chan’s title is, however, misleading. There is a good introduction to music in the Elizabethan theatre, and though there are copious music examples – transcriptions (generally uncritical, sometimes inaccurate) of all contemporary music then known to be associated with Jonson – she discusses very little of the music in any detail (some is not commented upon at all). Indeed, much of the music was largely irrelevant to Chan’s central thesis. Chan’s main concern seems to be an attempt to argue that Jonson’s late plays deserve better critical reception. Moreover, she argues that Jonson is better when referring to music than when actually using real music or musicians. A central flaw in Chan’s argument is that she relies solely on songs for which musical settings survive, and assumes them to be exactly representative of what Jonson intended. It is nevertheless a valuable and important study. Jonson scholarship has also greatly benefited from Peter Walls’s excellent 1996 monograph Music in English Courtly Masque, 1604–1640. The work was a revision of Walls’s doctoral thesis (1976), and will remain the main reference text for the topic. Walls discusses most of the Jonson masques, with thoughtful, perceptive, and often detailed analyses of the music. The current editor’s debt to Walls’s study will be clear from the copious references throughout the headnotes and elsewhere. One of the things that Walls makes clear is that antimasque dances in particular derived their force primarily from the choreography. Barbara Ravelhofer’s 2006 monograph, The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music, has brilliantly brought together the available information from an impressive array of documents and sources, and has filled many of the gaps in our knowledge in this vital area.
   The preceding account is but the briefest of overviews, and a meagre representation of the scholarly work relating to music and Ben Jonson. A much fuller picture can be gleaned by glancing through the bibliography, though the best place to start is perhaps David Lindley’s most recent contribution (Lindley 2010) and his essay on the politics of music in the court masque (Lindley 1998). Much has clearly been done: the definitive account remains to be written.