This chapter considers the impact of musical practices during the Interregnum on the Restoration performances of Shakespeare that followed. Understanding the circulation and performance of Shakespearean song during the years when England’s theatres were closed (1642–1660) is key to explaining how and why Shakespeare’s works came to be adapted and ‘musicked’ by Restoration dramatists and composers. The manuscript and printed sources which have survived from this period indicate that certain theatrical and musical practices survived the suppression of public performances and that dramatic song remained popular, though it may have found alternative contexts for performance. Musical sources that were created and used during the Interregnum bridge the gap between pre- and post-Restoration musical style and help map the development of dramatic song in England.

Recent valuable studies have focused on the circulation of Shakespeare’s plays, music-making in general, and the circulation of dramatic music during the Interregnum.Footnote ¹ While the cultural restrictions of the Civil War and Commonwealth inevitably impeded new theatrical works, those surveys of the period’s literature confirm a continued interest in drama and dramatic song. Emma Depledge has exposed as myth, furthermore, the notion that Shakespeare experienced a lull in popularity during the period, tracing the continued publication of his plays in such modified forms as drolls, play ballads and dramatic extracts.Footnote ² The present study proposes that the continued circulation of Shakespearean song – here defined as any song performed in part or in full in a Shakespeare play – together with the reading and perhaps performance of those redacted and modified play texts, enabled Shakespeare’s plays to remain fresh in public memory throughout the years of theatrical curtailment.

Setting the Musical Scene: A Blurring of Boundaries

When considering the various ways in which Shakespearean song circulated during the Interregnum, it is important to recognise that boundaries of time, professionalism, place, media and genre were less distinct than is sometimes supposed. Dale Randall has warned against the dangers of omitting the period 1642–1660 from studies of seventeenth-century drama, arguing that the stylistic differences between pre-war and Restoration works cannot possibly be understood without taking into consideration material produced in the intervening years.Footnote ³ By the same token, new musical practices did not spring up suddenly in 1642 nor end abruptly in 1660. It is therefore important to acknowledge material produced and performed in the years leading up to and directly following the closure of the theatres in order to establish a clear picture of England’s musical scene at that time. Accordingly, Table 1.1 lists manuscripts and prints dating from the 1630s to the 1660s.

A particularly blurry boundary existed at this time between the activities of occupational and recreational musicians.Footnote ⁴ Some musical sources for Shakespearean song which have survived were certainly used within private musical circles where occupational and recreational musicians performed side by side. The experiences of composers during this unique period of music-making undoubtedly shaped the music of Restoration Shakespeare. While Charles I was still alive, there appear to have been sporadic employment opportunities for royal musicians: in 1642, for instance, the Cavaliers at Oxford sent for ‘Musick, Players and Ladies to entertain the time with’, and in October 1643 Prince Rupert and his men ‘danced through the streetes openly with musick before them, to one of the Colleges, where after they had stayed about halfe a houre, they returned back againe dancing with the same musick before them’.Footnote ⁵ Leslie Hotson has found evidence that Prince Rupert’s men heard a play during that half hour, in which the same group of musicians might conceivably have participated.Footnote ⁶ Once the King fled into exile, however, some of England’s leading musical figures – Matthew Locke (b. 1621–1623, d. 1677) and Nicholas Lanier (1588–1666), for instance – also left the country. Lanier seemingly spent his time in the Low Countries feeling ‘old, unhappye in a manner in exile, plundered not only of his fortune, but of all his musicall papers, nay, almost of his witts and vertue’.Footnote ⁷ Both composers returned to England prior to the Restoration, during which time Locke composed a substantial body of domestic consort music (transmitted in GB-Lbl Add. MS 17108),Footnote ⁸ and Lanier his Italianate Hero and Leander recitative ‘Nor com’st thou yet’, arguably ‘the first use of true recitative in English music’.Footnote ⁹ Yet both also made music with recreational musicians such as Samuel Pepys before and after the Restoration:

So music written during the Interregnum for private or domestic performance by mixed groups of occupational and recreational musicians undoubtedly paved the way for the Restoration Shakespeare scores that followed. Matthew Locke, for instance, went on to contribute music to Restoration adaptations of The Tempest, Henry VIII, and possibly Macbeth.

While the closure of the theatres ruled out large-scale dramatic performances in those venues, organised musical gatherings and performances in private houses blurred the boundary between public and domestic performance space. This is illustrated by the activities of former court musicians Henry Lawes (1596–1662) and John Wilson (1595–1674), who remained in England and found employment as music tutors. Lawes held musical evenings at his house where his friends and students would perform alongside him.Footnote ¹¹ Not only did such gatherings dissolve boundaries of musical professionalism, but they also illustrate the point that the terms ‘public’ and ‘domestic’ are not mutually exclusive where mid-seventeenth-century performance spaces are concerned. Other similar musical circles around the country, including those attended by Wilson, are well documented, and as we shall see, it was amongst those musical circles that many of our primary sources were used.Footnote ¹² Since dramatic performances during the period were necessarily clandestine, and since the convention of the public concert grew out of less formal seventeenth-century musical meetings, performances could be both public and domestic, and feature music written and performed by both occupational and recreational musicians.Footnote ¹³

Owing to further bans on public musical performance, song and ballad repertoire became essentially confined to domestic spaces, a fact which is reflected in the types of Commonwealth sources for Shakespearean songs which have survived. Source types which are present in large numbers in Table 1.1 include song anthologies, broadsides and vocal partbooks, all of which lend themselves superbly to at-home performance, and some of which bear sure sign of it (for instance GB-Lbl Add. MS 11608, discussed later in this section). While previously respected court composers such as Lawes and Wilson may have found ways to survive the Interregnum, life was made more difficult for performing musicians, who were ostracised in the same way as actors. Ballad singers, for instance, were equated with rogues in a ban of 1649:

That act could be viewed as an attack on the politically explosive material contained in some mid-century ballads rather than on singing as a profession. An act against vagrants which came into effect in 1657, though, leaves no doubt about the lowly status of musical performers and the impossibility of earning a living that way:

The picture that emerges, then, is of a society where musical performance – particularly performance of song repertoire – could thrive only in clandestine or private circumstances.

Another blurry boundary prevailed between the two systems of literary transmission that Arthur F. Marotti claims competed and co-existed in England from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century – manuscript and print.Footnote ¹⁶ While print became increasingly popular for transmission of the song lyric it did not quickly overtake manuscript culture, and manuscript certainly remained the preferred medium for musical notation until after the Restoration.Footnote ¹⁷ Indeed, the close relationships between certain manuscript and printed collections hint at scribal copying; Table 1.1’s GB-Eu Dc.1.69, for instance, bears close enough resemblance to John Wilson’s printed Cheerfull ayres to suggest filiation.Footnote ¹⁸ Twenty-three of the fifty-six sources listed in Table 1.1 transmit music: of those twenty-three, fourteen are manuscripts and nine are prints. In the case of purely textual sources, however, only seven are manuscripts while fifteen are prints.Footnote ¹⁹ Where the transmission of Shakespearean song during the Interregnum is concerned, those figures certainly reflect a preference of manuscript for music and print for the song lyric.

If publication is defined as the communication of a work to others, then manuscripts and prints may both be classed as publications.Footnote ²⁰ Harold Love emphasises the importance of differentiating between ‘an initiatory act and a replicatory act’, and it is the initiatory act of publication which this study measures; in other words, a manuscript and a print transmission of a song both have a value of one.Footnote ²¹ It is true that early modern manuscripts were not usually reproduced (though sometimes they were bought and sold), and yet multiple copies of one book were produced during a print run. The actual dissemination and readership of prints and manuscripts, however, is impossible to measure and must therefore remain unquantifiable. The concept of manuscripts as scribal publications has been developed by Love and A. I. Doyle.Footnote ²² Scribal publication can be described as the production of a manuscript for the purpose of dissemination, a description to which many of the sources collated in Table 1.1 answer. GB-Lbl Add. 11608, for example, was probably copied for immediate use by John Hilton’s (1599–1657) circle, and US-Ws v.a.411 was amongst loose papers assembled by John Playford (1623–1687) for use by the Old Jewry Music Society (see the section ‘The Transmission of Shakespearean Song during the Interregnum’).Footnote ²³

New kinds of drama emerged during the Interregnum, and the fluidity of the boundaries between those various genres enabled the continued circulation and performance (albeit surreptitious or domestic) of Shakespeare’s plays and songs. This increase in the variety of dramatic forms was perhaps partly due to efforts to circumvent the 1642 ban on stage plays. Drolls and drolleries, for instance, were distinct from plays, and some Commonwealth Shakespeare abridgements, which are discussed in more detail later, fall within this category and transmit Shakespearean song.Footnote ²⁴ If they were performed during the Interregnum, such adaptations not only prolonged previous theatrical and musical practice, but also paved the way for Shakespearean adaptation after the Restoration.

In music too, indistinct boundaries between genres facilitated performance possibilities, while the intersection of drama and music during the period crucially prefigured the structure of Restoration Shakespeare. The pre-Restoration musical productions of William Davenant were ambiguously titled The First Days Entertainment at Rutland-House, By Declamations and Musick, and The Siege of Rhodes Made a Representation by the Art of Prospective in Scenes, And the Story sung in Recitative Musick; the latter was in fact registered with the Stationers’ Company as a ‘maske’.Footnote ²⁵ Masques survived the 1650s by setting aside their traditional courtly rhetoric, and became instead musical dramas which were no doubt influential on the types of Restoration productions that emerged.Footnote ²⁶ The earlier court masques, though, were not forgotten: the subject matter of Thomas Jordan’s Cupid His Coronation (1654), for instance, clearly displays nostalgia for lost courtly traditions.Footnote ²⁷ John Playford’s English dancing master (1651), furthermore, ostensibly preserves old English ‘country’ dances, and yet that material was sourced from theatrical works, particularly the antimasque and revels sections of Ben Jonson’s court masques. Under the pretence, then, of publishing an anthology which harked back to simpler pre-war times and folk customs, Playford (a known royalist) used those popular, rustic tunes to remind England of her lost courtly traditions and ensure the survival of those musical forms.Footnote ²⁸

Though the activities of occupational ballad singers were curtailed during the Interregnum, the music and words of pre-Civil War ballads, including those appropriated by Shakespeare, continued in circulation and performance. There appears to have arisen, though, a boundary of performance practice between those ballads and modern vocal music, as Margaret Cavendish, a writer and music enthusiast, was at pains to point out to the ‘Harmonious Voice[d]’ Eleonora Duarti:

It is unclear whether those so-called ‘old ballads’ were considered musically distinct from the modern, oftentimes royalist ballads which were banned in 1649 (see earlier in this section). Table 1.1 demonstrates that early ballads such as ‘Walsingham’, ‘Bonny Sweet Robin’ and ‘O Sweet Oliver’ – which certainly pre-dated their use by Shakespeare – continued to circulate during the Interregnum, and that ballads printed during the period continued to be sung to older tunes. It is perhaps to this repertoire that Cavendish referred.

The Transmission of Shakespearean Song during the Interregnum

Table 1.1 lists sources of Shakespearean song created around the time of the closure of the theatres. Of course, many manuscripts and broadsides are at best only vaguely dateable. It must be assumed, furthermore, that sources created prior to the period in question continued to be used and shared. The table confirms, nonetheless, that Shakespearean songs remained in vogue and were still copied out, printed, sung and read though performance of their respective plays was banned. My basis for the inclusion of songs in Table 1.1 was to confine the enquiry to those which were likely sung – either in full or in part – in Shakespeare’s plays, thereby excluding spoken references to pre-existing songs. Ross Duffin has thoroughly covered all musical references in the Shakespearean canon;Footnote ³⁰ the present study is rather an examination of the circulation of songs performed during the plays. It is true that a certain amount of conjecture is necessary to determine whether short snippets of song text were spoken or sung, stage directions for singing being sparse and inconsistent in the First Folio. We cannot know, moreover, whether popular songs which pre-dated their use by Shakespeare were certainly sung to the tunes which have survived. Nonetheless, for the purposes of developing the argument it is necessary to postulate on a case-by-case basis which songs were sung and to what tunes. Only first editions of printed anthologies are listed, except where later editions transmit new material, John Hilton’s Catch that Catch can (1667) being a case in point.

Table 1.1’s dramatic sources (Dr) point to a desire to continue theatrical practices, at least in print, while the theatres were closed. Those sources may have been privately read or used in the types of at-home performances described in ‘Setting the Musical Scene’ and thus they played a vital role in keeping Shakespeare’s plays and songs current despite the ban on playing. Three of Shakespeare’s plays were printed in quarto during the 1650s, complete with their songs: The Merchant of Venice (1652), King Lear (1655) and Othello (1655). Two Shakespearean drolls also maintained a degree of original musical content: The merry conceited humors of Bottom the weaver (1661), and ‘The Grave-makers, out of Hamlet Prince of Denmark’ in The Wits, or, Sport upon sport (1662). Francis Kirkman’s preface to The Wits suggests that the drolls contained in that volume were privately acted when the theatres were closed.Footnote ³¹ Meanwhile, Shakespearean songs continued to circulate independently of their dramatic associations in song and ballad anthologies, vocal partbooks, solo keyboard anthologies, verse and prose anthologies, and broadsides. All told, I have traced thirty-two Shakespearean songs in sources created during the period. Since those transmissions are too numerous to consider in detail, the present chapter will proceed by examining the contribution of three important musicians – John Wilson, John Playford and John Hilton – through the lens of those songs which circulated most widely.

Six of the thirty-two songs occur more frequently than others: ‘Take, o take those lips away’ (Measure for Measure), ‘Come live with me and be my love’ (The Merry Wives of Windsor), ‘Bonny sweet Robin’ and ‘Walsingham’ (Hamlet), and ‘Full fathom five’ and ‘Where the bee sucks’ (The Tempest). The Tempest songs were retained in Restoration adaptations of the play, though set to new music at various points, proving that their continued circulation during the Interregnum ensured their viability for Restoration audiences. ‘Come live with me’ and the two Hamlet songs certainly predated their use by Shakespeare, and it is probable that those snippets were still sung to their original tunes in Restoration performances.Footnote ³² In the case of pre-existing songs, it is impossible to determine whether they continued to circulate because of their general popularity or because of their association with Shakespeare. Indeed, the fact that only fragments of those songs were sung in the plays perhaps weakens the Shakespearean argument. The songs which likely originated with their plays, however, surely retained their Shakespearean associations when copied into anthologies. It is significant that those highly popular songs ‘Take, o take those lips away’, ‘Full fathom five’ and ‘Where the bee sucks’ all circulated during the Interregnum in musical settings by the composer John Wilson. Wilson was connected with the King’s Men from 1614 to 1629 and became a prominent musical figure in Oxford during the Interregnum. The evidence suggests that Wilson’s music, ideal as it was for private performance, served as a bridge between pre- and post-Restoration Shakespeare, keeping dramatic songs alive and relevant while England’s theatres remained dark.

Of the songs that make up this study, the most widely transmitted during the Interregnum was ‘Take, o take those lips away’, used by Shakespeare in Measure for Measure and later set to music by Wilson.Footnote ³³ The song’s evident popularity may attest to a protracted enthusiasm for the play, given that William Davenant’s Law against Lovers – an amalgamation of Measure for Measure and Much Ado About Nothing – was the first Shakespearean adaptation to be staged after theatres reopened.Footnote ³⁴ Intriguingly though, Davenant chose to replace ‘Take, o take those lips away’ with new songs. Charles Gildon reinstated ‘Take, o take’ in his own, later adaptation of the play, Measure for Measure, Or Beauty the Best Advocate (1700), though it was likely set to new music, possibly by John Weldon.Footnote ³⁵ Following Davenant’s revival, Wilson’s music was reprinted in one new anthology compiled by John Playford (The treasury of musick, 1669), and that print was identical to Playford’s previous prints of the song.Footnote ³⁶ It seems, then, that Wilson’s song’s evident popularity rests mainly in the Caroline era and Interregnum, while Davenant’s omission and Gildon/Weldon’s presumed modernisation serve as examples of the wider desire to update Shakespeare for Restoration audiences.

The song’s intertheatricality may have been another reason behind its protracted popularity, given its secondary use in the collaboratively written Bloody Brother or Rollo Duke of Normandy, performed by Shakespeare’s company around 1616 and published in 1639 and 1640. In Rollo – allegedly co-written by John Fletcher, Ben Jonson, George Chapman and Philip Massinger – the song acquired a supplementary, somewhat lewd second verse which is stylistically incongruous with the first.Footnote ³⁷ Scholars have long disagreed on the song’s provenance: while some argue that verse one is the work of Shakespeare and verse two the creation of the authors of Rollo, others conclude that the song originated in Rollo and was a late interpolation for a Jacobean revival, possibly an adaptation by Thomas Middleton (1580–1627), of Measure for Measure.Footnote ³⁸ All sources with the exception of Measure for Measure transmit the second verse. Wherever and however the song originated, the existence of a second verse would certainly have rendered it apt for abstract performance at pre-Restoration musical gatherings.

Wilson’s music for ‘Take, o take’ circulated in manuscript and in anthologies printed by John Playford. One manuscript in particular, GB-Lbl Add. MS 11608, shows distinct signs of domestic consumption and aural transmission, and was likely used within its author John Hilton’s own musical circle.Footnote ³⁹ Such gatherings enabled Shakespearean song to survive the Interregnum’s theatrical and musical drought, thus reinforcing Shakespeare’s suitability for performance and adaptation when theatres reopened. Hilton’s and two other unidentified hands are present in the manuscript, and while it is true that ‘Take, o take’ was copied by another scribe than Hilton, Mary Chan has shown that all three scribes were involved in the compilation of the volume from its inception.Footnote ⁴⁰ The volume as a whole was clearly used for performance and shows signs of aural transmission: on folio 63v, for instance, ‘The treble I tooke & prickt / downe as mr Thorpe sung it’. The version of ‘Take o take’ transmitted in GB-Lbl Add. MS 11608 differs notably from the song’s other sources by way of its highly ornamented melody line.Footnote ⁴¹ The ornamentation itself bears further testament to aural transmission, since the in-score ornaments appear to have been added by the scribe around his initial transcription,Footnote ⁴² while the elaborate figures at the foot of the page seem typical of the Italianate performance style in vogue during the latter half of the century.Footnote ⁴³

Wilson’s three-voice arrangements of Robert Johnson’s Jacobean settings of ‘Full fathom five’ and ‘Where the bee sucks’ also belong to an era when staged performances of The Tempest were a distant memory and dramatic song was performed in non-theatrical settings.Footnote ⁴⁴ Wilson’s rearrangement of Johnson’s solo songs as part songs perhaps represents an early effort to update Shakespeare for a new cultural landscape, namely for private musical meetings. Wilson’s Cheerfull ayres (1659) preserved Johnson’s solo songs with their basso continuo parts alongside Wilson’s own settings, thus providing a variety of performance possibilities for recreational music makers. The Tempest was revived and rewritten as The Enchanted Island for the Restoration stage in 1667, and it is likely that new music was composed by John Banister (1624/5–1679) for that production.Footnote ⁴⁵ That being so, as with his adaptation of Measure for Measure, Davenant chose to update The Tempest’s music despite the survival and circulation of Wilson’s songs past the Restoration. If Wilson’s settings were as popular during the Interregnum as the quantity of surviving sources suggests, it is not surprising that Davenant would want to replace music associated with the period of theatrical curtailment with music that more closely reflected the excitingly new musical and dramatic styles of Restoration theatre.

Of the sources for the Tempest songs collated in Table 1.1, GB-Ob Don.c.57 alone transmits Johnson’s solo version rather than Wilson’s later arrangements; that version of ‘Where the bee sucks’ is nonetheless attributed to Wilson, implying that Wilson’s Commonwealth-era settings replaced Johnson’s original to the degree that Wilson was often mistakenly credited as the composer. All other sources for the two songs – with the exception of US-NYp Drexel 4041 which transmits only the text – are vocal partbooks, ideal volumes for use at informal musical gatherings. One set of partbooks in particular was unquestionably used in this context: GB-Bc Acc. No. 57316 constitutes leaves removed from GB-Eu Dc.1.69, a manuscript which transmits the cantus primus of many items from Cheerfull ayres; the corresponding cantus secundus partbook is held at the Bodleian Library (GB-Ob Mus, d. 238), and the whereabouts of the bassus book is unknown.Footnote ⁴⁶ Copied by Edward Lowe (c. 1610–1682) – an Oxford-based organist and music tutor – those partbooks were certainly connected with the mid-century musical circle in Oxford of which Wilson was himself a member, and would therefore have been used by local musicians and students.Footnote ⁴⁷ The version of ‘Where the bee sucks’ transmitted in the Edinburgh/Birmingham manuscript provides three additional and unique verses, allegedly ‘made by Mr Smith secretary to the Archbishop of Canterbury’ and circulated to Lowe by ‘Madame Trumbull’. The fact that Smith, Trumbull and Lowe were near neighbours is further testament to the manuscript’s use by local performers.Footnote ⁴⁸ The additional verses recast the protagonist – Shakespeare’s Ariel – as Cupid, thus substituting the song’s theatrical context for a more commonplace mythological theme appropriate to Interregnum performance settings.

Two further sets of partbooks transmitting Wilson’s Tempest songs confirm the songs’ popularity in locations outside of Wilson’s immediate sphere, and one set in particular displays signs of use into the Restoration. US-NH Misc. MS 170 Filmer 4 belonged within a Kent-based musical circle, possibly associated with the recreational musician Edward Filmer (d. 1650), and transmits early Restoration works such as John Banister’s music for The Indian Queen (first performed 1664) alongside pre-publication versions of Wilson’s songs and music from earlier periods.Footnote ⁴⁹ The presence of those later pieces, copied onto blank pages left between earlier transcriptions of Jacobean and Caroline music, gestures to the co-existence of old and new musical styles and repertoire during the early Restoration.

US-Ws v.a.411 comprises leaves removed from a set of partbooks (GB-Ge MSS Euing R.d.58-61) for the purpose of performance. The leaves in question, copied by Playford, were originally among loose papers compiled for use by the Old Jewry Music Society. They transmit Wilson’s versions of the two Tempest songs, along with three other Wilson songs.Footnote ⁵⁰ Playford published ‘Where the bee sucks’ and other songs from those papers in his 1667 print of John Hilton’s collection Catch that Catch can. In Playford’s preface to that edition, his acknowledgement of his friends’ ‘Excellent Musical performances, when it was thrown before you in loose Papers’ perhaps identifies the Folger leaves and their use by that particular musical circle.Footnote ⁵¹ If so, Playford’s 1667 print serves as a link between Commonwealth musical performances and the Restoration.

A probable fourth Wilson setting of a Shakespearean song came into print during the Interregnum, though apparently it neither circulated as widely as his other offerings nor survived into the Restoration. ‘Lawn as white as driven snow’ from The Winter’s Tale was printed in Cheerfull ayres and copied into GB-Ob Mus.d.238 (cantus secundus to the treble volume GB-Eu Dc.1.69, from whence the leaves containing ‘Lawn as white’ have been removed and lost).Footnote ⁵² Even pre-Civil War, the circulation of songs from The Winter’s Tale was somewhat limited, indicating a less strong written and/or performance tradition than the Tempest songs. The Winter’s Tale, unlike The Tempest, was certainly not revived for the Restoration stage, an indication that its popularity had waned.

The preponderance of publications by Playford listed in Table 1.1 is unsurprising since he dominated the music publishing scene from 1651 to 1684.Footnote ⁵³ Crucially, while Playford emerged as something of a champion of John Wilson’s music, printing more than fifty of Wilson’s songs all told during his publishing career, he was also largely responsible for the continued print circulation of those pre-Shakespearean popular tunes which may well have been retained in performances of Restoration Shakespeare.Footnote ⁵⁴ His English Dancing Master (1651) and Music’s Recreation on the Viol (1661) transmit the popular pre-Civil War tunes ‘The friar and the nun’ (‘It was the friar of orders grey’, The Taming of the Shrew), ‘Jog on’ (The Winter’s Tale) and ‘Hunts up’ (‘O sweet Oliver’, As You Like It).Footnote ⁵⁵ It was not unusual for pedagogical volumes to contain popular old tunes, which all three of those were by the mid-seventeenth century. The backward-looking, nostalgic undercurrent of The English dancing master has already been noted, and the fact that it ran to eighteen editions, the last dated 1721, is testament to the enduring appeal of that repertoire during the Interregnum and Restoration. Petruchio’s snippet of ‘It was the friar’ was retained in John Lacey’s Restoration adaptation Sauny the Scot or The Taming of the Shrew (performed in 1667 and printed in 1698), and was presumably still sung to its original tune, printed by Playford during the Interregnum.

Playford’s print of Hilton’s Catch that Catch can (1652) demonstrates the desire to update and refresh original Shakespearean song settings for Commonwealth consumers, a trend which would continue into the Restoration. Catch that Catch can transmits a musically up-to-date version of the Shakespeare song ‘What shall he have that killed the deer?’ (As You Like It). The song is also present in the pre-Civil War catch anthology US-Ws v.a.409, and that version seems to belong to an earlier musical era than the printed form. Music Example 1.1, for instance, shows the manuscript’s simple, modal version of the fourth phrase of the song compared with Hilton’s more elaborate and harmonically up-to-date cadential figure.

Music Example 1.1 Fourth phrase of ‘What shall he have that killed the deer’: (a) Us-Ws v.a.409, f. 17r and (b) Catch that Catch can (London, 1652), 30.

Though v.a. 409 is excluded from Table 1.1 on the grounds that it may have been compiled as early as 1625,Footnote ⁵⁶ its importance must be acknowledged since the modernised version of its music transmitted in Catch that Catch can illustrates an effort – as do Wilson’s Tempest trios – to update Shakespearean song for a unique musical era, a practice which continued in earnest when public playing resumed.

That Shakespeare’s plays and their songs survived the closure and even demolition of England’s theatres is borne out not only by the zeal of their Restoration adaptors, but also by their uninterrupted presence in manuscript and print through the Interregnum. Early modern anthologists played no small part in prolonging Shakespeare’s popularity; dramatic songs were routinely treated as paratexts to be read and sung independently of their plays, and yet surely retained their dramatic associations for consumers. Musicians meanwhile circumnavigated the various restrictions placed upon musical performance, and their irrepressible enthusiasm for dramatic songs fuelled the phenomenon that would come to be known as Restoration Shakespeare.