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Sidney, Tessier, Batchelar and A Musicall Banquet: Two Notes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Edward Doughtie*
Affiliation:
Rice University
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Extract

Two small nuggets of information have come to light which would not seem important in themselves did not their implications touch on matters of more general interest concerning music and literature in the Renaissance. At any rate, it seemed to me that they deserve more than a footnote. Both are connected one way or another with Sidney and with Robert Dowland's anthology of English and continental lute-songs, A Musicall Banquet (1610).

One of the composers represented in A Musicall Banquet, along with John Dowland and Giulio Caccini, is Daniell Batchelar. Batchelar's contribution is a setting of a poem by the Earl of Essex, ‘To plead my faith’ (No. VI).

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1965

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References

1 John Aubrey also says Danvers was Sidney's page. See Brief Lives, ed. Oliver L. Dick (Penguin reprint, 1962), pp. 171, 336.

2 See the Dedication to Monson in Varietie of Lute-lessons; for other examples, see Walter L. Woodfill, Musicians in English Society (1953), pp. 68-70.

3 The song Sidney called for, La cuisse rompue, was not necessarily of Sidney's own composition, as W. A. Ringler rightly points out in his edition of Sidney's Poems (1962), P.351.

4 The attribution to Charles Tessier seems to have originated with Peter Warlock in The English Ayre (1926), p. 123. It has been repeated by several other writers since then, including Ringler (Poems, p. 567).

5 Bruce Pattison, Music and Poetry of the English Renaissance (1948), p. 63; John Buxton, Sir Philip Sidney and the English Renaissance (1954), P. 114.

6 The melody is in the cantus partbook; the tenor partbook of this scattered and incomplete set has a French title (Premier Livre D'Airs) and a dedication in Italian to Queen Elizabeth. The first piece in the cantus partbook is also dedicated to the ‘Regina d'lnghilterra.’

7 Cecil Papers 172.91, Hatfield House. Reprinted by Peter Warlock in The English Ayre (1926), pp. 24-27.

8 See Pattison, pp. 85-86, 113-114; Gustave Reese, Music in the Renaissance (2nd ed. !959). PP. 815-819, 835-841; and my unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, ‘Poems from the Songbooks of John Dowland’ (Harvard, 1963), pp. 88-120.

9 F. W. Sternfeld, ‘Vautrollier's Printing of Lasso's Recueil du Mellange,’ Annales Musicologiques, v (1957), 207. For more details of possible French influence on the air, see Kenneth Jay Levy, ‘Vaudeville, Vers Mesurés et Airs de Cour’ and Thurston Dart, ‘Rôle de la Danse dans L’ “Ayre” Anglais,’ both in Musique et Pohie au XVIe Siècle, Colloques Internationaux du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (Paris, 1954), pp. 185-201 and 203-209.

10 Dowland, Nos. XI-XIII; Bataille, sigs. A4v, H3v, M2v.