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The Second Coventry Carol and a Note on The Maydes Metamorphosis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

John P. Cutts*
Affiliation:
State University of Iowa
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Extract

The Coventry carol ‘Lully lulla yu littell tine child’, sung by the women in The Taylors & Shearmens Pageant to their babes before Herod's murderous soldiers burst in on them, is now well known and deservedly popular. It was first copied out by Thomas Sharp in 1825 from a manuscript copy of the pageant ‘newly correcte by Robert Croo’, who is said at the end to have finished his work on March 14, 1534. The manuscript was unfortunately destroyed in the disastrous fire at Birmingham City Reference Library in 1879, and thus Sharp's edition of the play has assumed considerable importance. Sharp's copying down of the musical score for ‘Lully lulla yu littell tine child’ presents no editorial difficulties; he was probably impressed by its immediate appeal and copied carefully from the manuscript. ‘Lully lulla’ has duly found a place in The Oxford Book of Carols.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1957

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References

1 Craig, Hardin, Two Coventry Corpus Christi Plays (London: Early English Text Society [extra series], 1902), p. 87.Google Scholar Craig does not print the music.

2 Sharp, Thomas, A Dissertation on the Pageants or Dramatic Mysteries Anciently performed at Coventry (Coventry, 1825), pp. 113118.Google Scholar

3 The Oxford Book of Carols, ed Percy Dearmer, R. Vaughan Williams, and Martin Shaw (London, 1933 [first ed. 1928]), pp. 44-47.

4 Craig, Hardin, English Religious Drama (Oxford, 1955), p. 362 Google Scholar, and Reese, G., Music in the Renaissance (London, 1954).Google Scholar

5 A collation of the songs' texts, with notes, is given at the end of this article.

6 The Complete Works of John Lyly, ed. R. W. Bond, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1902), III, 570 and the note on p. 358: ‘Mopso's and Frisco's songs are, says Bullen, evidendy fragments of old ballads.’ The source of this remark is in A Collection of Old English Plays, ed. A. H. Bullen, 4 vols. (London, 1882-85), III, 96: ‘These verses and Frisco's “Can you blow the little home?” are evidently fragments of Old Ballads—to be recovered let us hope, hereafter.’