The works of Thomas Campion (1567–1620) were published during his lifetime in five books of ayres, three masque “Discriptions,” a treatise on prosody, a treatise on “counterpoint” (recte four-part harmony), two large collections of Latin poetry,1 and a group of elegies set to music by John Coprario.2 In all of these genres, Campion was and is recognized as a major exponent. Defensive tropes on being reluctant to commit his work to publication are found in the prefaces and dedicatory epistles to several of his English works. There is nothing exceptional in this. Similar disclaimers occur variously and frequently in both English and continental prefaces to published books. What makes Campion particularly unusual is that he asserts it was his Latin poems that he regarded confidently as his major work suited for public dissemination and that his English ayres—his “superfluous Blossomes”—were subsidiary, apt for private consumption. This essay interrogates that assertion.
Between 1596 and 1622, William Barley’s A New Booke of Tabliture and John Attey’s The First Booke of Ayres, thirty-two collections of English ayres were published. This print phenomenon has never been satisfactorily explained,3 given that the lute song together with instrumental lute music,4 had been a manuscript genre since the 1560s.5 It is noticeable that its start coincided with Byrd’s relinquishment of his printing patent to Thomas Morley.6 What is certain is that it released into the public domain a music-poetry genre hitherto confined to esoteric circles of readers and authors. Among the most prolific contributors to this culture were John Dowland, Thomas Campion, and Robert Jones.7 Prestigious folio books of lute ayres usually comprised eighteen to twenty-eight leaves or pages accommodating a corresponding number of ayres either for solo voice with lute and/or viol (sometimes orpharion), or arranged in parts for three or four voices.8 The majority contains twenty-four leaves following the precedent set in Dowland’s first book of 1597.9 The vogue for the lute ayre was at its most intense between 1597 and 1610, comparable with the madrigal, whose popularity, according to publication statistics, can be identified to have been at its height between 1588 and 1600, falling off slightly to 1610 and more markedly to 1620 and finishing in 1632.10
The comparatively narrow time span, the generic similarities of the music/poetic form, and the fact that several composers issued three or four collections of ayres has led modern commentators following the empiricist advocacy of Edmund Fellowes and his pioneering editions of his so-called school of English lute-song composers and Peter Warlock’s influential The English Ayre (1926) to identify the English ayre as a generic whole.11 Performative issues could reinforce this approach; the ayres are intended to be performed as solo voice pieces with instrumental accompaniment. About two hundred of the six hundred ayres in the printed collections contain alternative part-song versions, presumably made by the composer of the original solo ayre.12 But a reexamination of the intended audience for the ayre and its artistic purpose as defined by its author would reveal divergent tendencies within the genre.
The differing artistic personae of the three most prolific composers of lute ayres, namely Dowland, Campion, and Jones, provide insights into publication motivation beyond William Barley’s commercial cynicism.13 In his dedicatory epistle in A New Booke of Tabliture (1596) to the Ladie Bridgett, Countesse of Sussex, Barley asserts that
bookes . . . that are compiled by men of divers gifts, are published by them to divers endes: by some in desire of a gainefull reward: some for vaine ostentation, some for good will & affection, and some for common profit which by their works may be gotten.14
John Dowland was in today’s terminology a professional musician15—composer, instrumentalist, and teacher—keen to parade his professional music qualifications in his publications. On the title page of his The First Booke of Songes or Ayres (1597), and subsequent books, he is styled “Batcheler of musicke in both the Universities.”16 His prefaces advertise his musical expertise and prowess. Why he published his books of ayres accords with his career development, or rather his professional aspirations. Diana Poulton suggests the reason “he chose the year 1597 in which to publish his first collection probably resulted from the realization that, after the second failure to secure an appointment at Court, his career had reached a critical point, and that some special effort was needed to maintain himself in public favour after his absence abroad.”17 That he chose lute ayres and not solo lute music, Poulton contends, was because he could reach a wider audience, although the inclusion of a galliard for lute duet in the first book may undermine the legitimacy of this assertion.18 Or it may unashamedly advertise his potential as a teacher.19 The audience Dowland, or rather his publisher, targeted, was diverse. Some years later, his son, Robert, justified the contents of A Musicall Banquet. Furnished with Varietie of Delicious Ayres (1610) according to the potential recipients of the collection:
Some [ayres] I have purposely sorted to the capacitie of young practitioners, the rest by degrees are of greater depth and skill, so that like a carefull Confectionary, as neere as might be I have fitted my Banquet for all tastes.20
Those tastes varied among aristocratic households and the fast-emerging mercantile gentry, for their own amusement, for their family’s entertainment and erudition, or for their music servants to perform. In his dedicatory epistle to “the Honourable the Ladie Arbella,”21 Michael Cavendish offers his 14. Ayres in Tabletorie to the Lute (1598) “whereby I can best expresse my service to you, and you may (if it please you) make use of them at your idlest houres.”22 Thomas Ford wishes to express his gratitude to “The Worthie and vertuous Knight, Sir Richard Weston” in his Musicke of Sundrie Kindes (1607) for his continuing patronage:23
I shall not neede to make an Apologie in defence of these musickes, since none are so much in request nor more generally received then of these kindes, which with all hartie affection I offer to your favorable judgement not as a worke whose merit or worth deserves so judicious a patron, but a manifestation of my worthlesse affection bound unto you by many particular favours.24
William Corkine similarly acknowledges his debt to Sir Edward Herbert25 and Sir William Hardy in his Ayres, To Sing and Play to the Lute (1610) for their support for his musical education: “that I might shew my humble duetie, and gratefull minde to you my two Honourable Masters, whose bountie bestowed on me that knowledge (whatsoever it is) that I have attain’d in Musicke.”26 In his discussion of patronage and the “private encouragement of musicians,” David Price cites the case of a certain John Ramsey, a gentleman of Mount in Surrey, whose diary records his library list, compiled over more than twenty years, which included music books by Dowland, Byrd, Robert Jones, Philip Rosseter, Michael Cavendish, Thomas Morley, and a number of Elizabethan madrigalists.27 Price contends that this list reveals a certain conservatism in taste, an “appreciation for the more restrained moral and musical atmosphere of Elizabeth’s court.”28 By all accounts, it also reflects a norm of interest typical of an educated gentleman of the period.
Robert Jones was a composer and performer who “professed Musicke” to earn his living. His professional qualification was the BMus he received from Oxford University in 1597. He published five books of ayres between 1600 and 1610. It seems his ayres attracted a mixed reception if his defensive preface “To all Musicall Murmurers” in his fourth collection, A Musicall Dreame (1609) has meaning:
Thou, whose eare itches with the varietie of opinion, hearing thine owne sound, as the Ecchoe reverberating others substance, and unprofitable in it selfe, shewes to the World comfortable noyse, though to thy owne use little pleasure, by reason of uncharitable censure.29
Jones’s popularity and esteem do appear to have suffered a decline during the first decade of the seventeenth century (and thereafter). An ayre in his first collection, The First Booke of Songes or Ayres (1600), by all accounts was “one of the most successful of all the English lutenist songs” together with some of Dowland’s ayres, and perhaps Campion’s.30 In addition to instrumental arrangements for lute, cittern, mandora, and virginals, “Farewel Deare Love” was rearranged as vocal-lute parody in several sources and published as far distant as Scotland and the Netherlands.31 It was used by Shakespeare in Twelfth Night (act 2, scene 3) shortly after its publication in Jones’s book, and later by Beaumont in his Knight of the Burning Pestle (ca. 1609) (2.470–471). Its appearance in a theatrical context attests both to its further appeal and to Jones’s connection with the theater. On January 4, 1610, Jones was granted a patent to “practice and ex’cise [boys] in the quality of playing by the name of Children of the Revells of the Queene within the white ffryers,” together with Philip Kingham, Philip Rosseter, and Ralph Reeve.32
Unlike Dowland and Jones, Thomas Campion did not “profess” music and boasted no professional qualification until he made public his medical “Doctor of Phisicke” on the title page of the Description of the Lord Hayes masque in 1607.33 There is no evidence he received any specialist music education and yet his musical output is at least comparable with most English lute-song writers and more inventive and assured than Robert Jones. However, in his first publication, A Booke of Ayres (1601), his joint author and associate, Philip Rosseter, makes plain he regarded his English ayres as second best to his Latin poetry, “superfluous blossomes of his deeper Studies.”34
Like Jones, Campion published five books of ayres. They were issued between 1601 and 1618. Unique among the lutenist songwriters, Campion composed both music and poetry for all these collections. That seems to have afforded Campion a special control over the contents. All his books were printed as paired volumes (i.e., two volumes in one publication) and, with the exception of the first A Booke of Ayres, undated. The first book contains twenty-one ayres by Campion in the first part and an equal number by Rosseter in the second, possibly suggesting an acknowledged qualitative presentational preference. The second and third books are arranged according to poetic and musical content, the “first are grave and pious; the second amorous and light.” The fourth and fifth books are characterized not so much by subject matter as by the supposed relationship of the ayres to the respective dedicatees, Sir Thomas Mounson and his son, Mr. John Mounson, following the example set in his Two Bookes of Ayres, the first dedicated to Francis, Earl of Cumberland, the second to his son and heir, Henry Lord Clifford.35
That Campion was seemingly reluctant to commit his ayres to print can possibly be explained both by his special circumstances and the print culture surrounding the ethos of the English ayre in the early seventeenth century.36 Several composers make the point that their ayres were “made” for private consumption and have been released for public display grudgingly at the behest of others. Thomas Morley expresses his gratitude to a worthy backer, Ralph Bosville, Esq, by publishing a book of lute ayres, his The First Booke of Ayres (1600), “In recompence therefore of my private favours, I thought it the part of an honest minde, to make some one publique testimonie and acknowledgement thereof.”37 Aware, like Morley, of adverse criticism, Robert Jones attempts to defend his stance on making public his private ayres. In his address “To The Reader” in his The Second Booke of Songs and Ayres (1601) he states:
The trueth is, although I was not so idle when I composed these Ayres, that I dare not stand to the hazard of their examination: Yet I would be glad (if it might be) that thy friendly approbation might give me incouragement, to sound my thankefulnes more sweetely in thine eares hereafter. If the Ditties dislike thee, ’tis my fault that was so bold to publish the private contentments of divers Gentlemen without their consents, though (I hope) not against their wils: wherein if thou find anie thing to meete with thy desire, thank me; for they were never meant thee.38
The passage from private to public ayre and its consequences are expressed by John Danyel in his dedicatory verse to “Mrs Anne Grene the worthy Daughter to Sir William Grene”39 in his Songs for the Lute Viol and Voice (1606):
That which was onely privately compos’d,
For your delight, Faire Ornament of Worth,
Is here, come, to bee publikely disclos’d:
And to an universall view put forth.
Which having beene but yours and mine before,
(Or but of few besides) is made hereby
To bee the worlds: and yours and mine no more.40
John Maynard finds himself in a similar position with regard his The XII. Wonders of the World (1611) in his apology to his hoped-for patron, “the Lady Joane Thynne, of Cause-Castle in Shropshire”:41 “What at first privately was entended for you, is at last publickely commended to you.”42 Secure in the patronal favors of Sir Richard Weston, Thomas Ford intimates in his Musicke of Sundrie Kindes (1607) his ayres were thrust in the public domain by “the perswasion of some private friends, together with the general good of such as take delight therein.”43 Aware of peer approbation or criticism, William Corkine acknowledges in his dedicatory epistle in his Ayres, To Sing and Play to the Lute (1610) the increasing number of composers who have released their ayres to the wider public: “Among so many [musitians], I have now made one, yeelding my private inventions subject to publicke censure.”44
In keeping with other lute-song composers, Campion claims his ayres were originally intended for private consumption and only subsequently did he permit them to be made public.45 In the preface “To the Reader” to Two Bookes of Ayres (ca. 1613) he opens with a disclaimer that only at the behest of others were his ayres, many composed a number of years earlier, released to a wider audience: “Out of many Songs which partly at the request of friends, partly for my owne recreation were by mee long since composed, I have now enfranchised a few, sending them forth divided according to their different subject into severall Bookes.”46 Uniquely among the lute-song composers, Campion offers two exceptional reasons why his English ayres were his private property. In the dedicatory epistle to Sir Thomas Mounson in A Booke of Ayres (1601), Philip Rosseter observes that Campion’s ayres were “made at his vacant houres, and privately emparted to his friends, whereby they grew both publicke, and (as coine crackt in exchange) corrupted: some of them both words and notes unrespectively challenged by others.”47 The special circumstances of Campion’s authorship, that he wrote both words and music, give this statement added potency. The same point is made by Campion himself, with less vehemence, in his preface “To the Reader” to The Fourth Booke of Ayres (ca. 1617) where he says, “Some words are in these Bookes, which have beene cloathed in Musicke by others, and I am content they then served their turne: yet give mee now leave to make use of mine owne.” He also recycles “three or foure Songs [of his own] that have beene published before.”48 The second explanation why Campion’s ayres were not primarily made public was due to his status as a (neo-)Latin poet, as Rosseter intimates in A Booke of Ayres: “In regard of which wronges, though his selfe neglects these light fruits as superfluous blossomes of his deeper Studies, yet hath it pleased him upon my entreaty, to grant me the impression of part of them.”49 Campion’s “light” offerings are his (rhyming) English ayres; his “more serious studies” are his Latin poems and Classical learning, as the dedicatory epistle to the Lord Buckhurst in his Observations in the Art of English Poesie (1602) attests.
Campion’s Latin poems outweigh his English in quantity produced. His first substantial work was his collection of Latin poems, Poemata, published in 1595. It contains the epic fragment, Ad Thamesin, celebrating the defeat of the Armada (1588)—the first of its kind; what turned out to be the first part of a neo-Ovidian epic, the Fragmentum Umbrae; a book of 16 elegies, and a book of 129 epigrams. Although many were fanciful and often erotic “youth-borne” poems of indeterminate quality, according to Percival Vivian, Poemata “won him a considerable reputation almost immediately.”50 Among a number of approbatory references in contemporary sources, Francis Meres, for example, in his Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury (1598), praises Campion as a Latin poet in the company of Walter Haddon, Nicholas Carr, Gabriel Harvey, Christopher Ocland, Thomas Newton, Thomas Watson, and others, many of whom were also distinguished writers of English poetry, in august comparison with Sir Philip Sidney, Spenser, Samuel Daniel, Drayton, Warner, Shakespeare, Marlow and Chapman, who Meres cites.51 Notable Latin poet and a prominent member of the circle around Campion, which included the Mychelburnes, Laurence, Edward, and Thomas, was Charles Fitz-Geffry who accords Campion second place as a writer of Latin epigrams behind Sir Thomas More, whose Epigrammata was published in 1520. Fitz-Geffry supports Campion’s claim in his Elegeia I (1595) to be the best English writer of Latin elegies in an epigram addressed to Campion, “O cujus genio Romana Elegia debet,” in Affaniae (1601).52
Toward the end of his life, the second substantial collection of Campion’s Latin poems was published, the Tho. Campiani Epigrammatum Libri II Umbra Elegiarum liber unus (London, 1619). It comprised 453 epigrams, the large majority of which were new though many only a couple of lines long; 88 were reworkings of epigrams originally published in 1595, the completed Fragmentum umbrae from 1595; and 13 elegies, most of which were derived from earlier poems. The majority of Campion’s Latin poems, therefore, as Davis points out,53 effectively represent his early work, before he started publishing English ayres and before he published his treatise advocating quantitative meters in English poetry, his Observations in the Arte of English Poesie (1602).54
Despite his exhortations to Edward Mychelburne and reminder to Fitz-Geffry to publish, it is probable not all Campion’s Latin poetry was in fact published. In Epigrammatum liber primus (1619), Campion writes to Mychelburne:
Haec quorsum premis? ut pereant quis talia condit?
Edere si non vis omnibus, ede tibi.55
In Epigrammatum liber secundus (1619), to Fitz-Geffry he writes:
Carole, si quid habes longo quod tempore coctum
Dulce fit, ut radijs fructus Apollineis,
Ede, nec egregios.56
Campion’s long epic panegyric, De puluerea conjuratione (On the Gunpowder Plot) survives in a manuscript copy in the library of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.57 Clearly a “public” poem dedicated to King James, its two books intend a historical narrative rather than a laudator temporis acti, yet it is not certain why it remained unpublished. Its most likely date of composition in its completed state, possibly after revision, Lindley argues, is 1615–1618.58 If that is the case, then its lack of publication is curious given the number of Latin poems by Campion published in 1619.
The relationship between Campion’s Latin poems and his English is characterized not so much by his long poems as by the short, pithy epigrams. In both A Booke of Ayres (1601) and Two Bookes of Ayres (ca.1613), he compares his ayres to epigrams:
Short Ayres if they be skilfully framed, and naturally exprest, are like quicke and good Epigrammes in Poesie, many of them shewing as much artifice, and breeding as great difficultie as a larger Poeme.59
This confirms his earlier apology in 1601:
What Epigrams are in Poetrie, the same are Ayres in musicke, then in their chiefe perfection when they are short and well seasoned . . . as Martiall speakes in defence of his short Epigrams, so may I say in th’apologie of Ayres, that where there is a full volume, there can be no imputation of shortnes.60
Short lyrical poems possess a quality longer ones are incapable of sustaining—that is, personal reflection and intimacy. This quality presents a dilemma to the early modern author who wishes to present his private thoughts and sentiments in public. Unlike overt forms of “public” display such as masques and plays, in which certain kinds of ayres were included, the ayres of the song books often reveal an individuality and introspection not found for example in madrigals and theater songs. As Daniel Fischlin observes,
the ayre presented an alternative form of theatricality or performativity, one in which overt codes of social and political hierarchy were displaced by the humanist concern with monody, the affective yoking of words to music in a manner that does not undermine the focus on the words. Implicit in such an aesthetic is a turning away from the use of art to idealize power or the powerful (as in the masque) or of art to create a public spectacle that represents the dialogical interplay of a particular extended narrative (as in the theatre).61
Campion wrote music and words for four courtly masques, decidedly a public statement of his art in contrast to many of his lute ayres. Fischlin goes on to assert that the performative and receptive relationship between author and audience emphasize its “private” status:
the ayre, by virtue of its internalized theatricality, rejects many of the conventions of public spectacle to stage something quite different: the highly accomplished “individual” singing carefully wrought words and music as an expression of the very power of words and music to stage that individual’s voice. . . . The ayre as a performance genre implicitly repudiates mass spectacle, whether musical or theatrical, cultivating instead the staging of introspection, solitude, and dialogical intimacy as part of its aesthetic appeal, even if it does so in public.62
A number of Campion’s ayres (as poems), however, are expressly public. His Songs of Mourning: Bewailing the Untimely Death of Prince Henry (1613), “worded” by Campion and set to music by John Coprario,63 are collectively public, albeit moving from formal statement in the poems addressed to the king and queen to more personal recollection in the poem “spoken” to Princess Elizabeth, as Lindley notes, “further dismantling the distance between poet and addressee, [which] allows for the first time a sense of the poet speaking as grieving individual, rather than public spokesman.”64 The balance between distance and intimacy is most sensitively achieved by Campion in his Two Bookes of Ayres, published around the same time as the Songs of Mourning. The division of the collection into two books, the first “contayning divine and morall songs,” the second “light conceits of lovers” sets up an apparent opposition between public and private statement. The first book represents a public face of the poet, notably in no. 1, “Author of Light”;65 no. 3, “Where Are All Thy Beauties Now?” on the death of Queen Elizabeth; no. 6, “Bravely Deckt Come Forth Bright Day” on the Gunpowder Plot; no. 7, “To Musicke Bent Is My Retyred Minde”; no. 8, “Tune Thy Musicke to Thy Hart” on the affective power of music; and no. 21, “All Looks Be Pale,” an elegy on Prince Henry’s death. Whereas the second book of “amorous and light” ayres constitutes an “idealized private space as its performative context, one in which whispering, dreaming, pleasure, and intimacy [are] part of the aesthetic values reflected in both the lyrics and their musical settings,” especially in the ayres where “lovers cares” are expressed.66
Campion was not unusual among the lute-song composers in claiming that his ayres were originally intended for private consumption. In the first book of the lute-song series, The First Booke of Songes or Ayres (1597),67 Dowland makes the point in his preface “To the courteous Reader”: “How hard an enterprise it is in this skilfull and curious age to commit our private labours to the publike view.”68 Composers make similar observations in subsequent publications, as has been noted. No other authors, however, claim their English ayres were overshadowed by Latin poetry and their publication inhibited as a consequence. Moreover, as author of both words and music, uniquely among the lute-song composers, Campion presents a special aesthetic in that his ayres retain their artistic integrity with or without their musical setting. Hoping to deflect adverse criticism he acknowledges the variable qualitative worth of the ayres in the preface to Two Bookes of Ayres. In contrast to all other lute-song writers, he also advises that his ayres may be either sung or read.
Omnia nec nostris bona sunt, sed nec mala libris;
Si placet hac cantes, hac quoque lege legas.69
In his dedicatory verse to Francis, Earl of Cumberland, in the same book, he similarly proclaims:
These Leaves I offer you, Devotion might
Her selfe lay open, reade them, or else heare
How gravely with their tunes they yeeld delight
To any vertuous, and not curious eare.70
Evidence that at least some of Campion’s ayres were read without their music can be deduced from their inclusion in printed verse miscellanies and manuscript commonplace books. Three poems were included in Francis Davison’s Poetical Rapsody (London, 1602), namely “A Hymne in Praise of Neptune,” “When to Her Lute Corinna Sings,” and “Blame Not My Cheeks.” Campion’s “What If a Day” enjoyed especial popularity. It is first found in the commonplace book of John Sanderson (GB-Lbl Lansdowne MS 241 fol. 49) and subsequently in a number of sources.71 “The Man of Life Upright” appears in a manuscript mistakenly attributed “Sir John Harrington’s Poems, Written in the reign of Queen Elizabeth” (Oxford Bodleian Rawlinson MS. 31). The verse miscellany, GB-Lbl Harley MS 6910 (ca.1596), contains transcripts in sonnet form of “Thou Art Not Faire, for All Thy Red and White” and “Thrice Tosse These Oaken Ashes in the Ayre.” Without their music, as Campion intimates, reading may lead to increased intimacy and privacy, beyond the innate privacy of ayres “enfranchised” in public.
1. The long and ambitious Latin poem, De Puluerea Coniuratione exceptionally survives in manuscript: GB-Cssc MS 59. See below.
2. There are two collected editions: Vivian, Campion’s Works; Davis, The Works of Thomas Campion. For a brief review of secondary literature see Wilson, “Words and Notes Coupled Lovingly Together,” 1–10 and “Campion,” GMO (accessed August 15, 2015).
3. Doughtie (Lyrics from English Ayres, 10) argues that the songbooks could be considered a continuation of the poetical miscellanies of the sixteenth century. This does not account for the music.
4. See above, Freeman, “The Transmission of Lute Music.” As Freeman discusses, lute music continued to be a manuscript genre.
5. See Greer, Songs from Manuscript Sources.
6. According to Stanley Boorman, Byrd’s royal patent expired in 1596 at which date the London booksellers and printers Peter Short and William Barley began printing music. In September 1598, Thomas Morley secured a patent; Barley became his associate (Boorman et al., “Printing and Publishing of Music,” GMO (accessed June 20, 2013). The patent is reproduced in Steele, Earliest English Music Printing, 27–29. Graham Freeman notes in his essay (fn7) Krummel’s assertion that 1597 marked a high point in English music printing while the patent was in abeyance. Following Morley’s death, probably in 1602/3, Short and Thomas East developed the business. Subsequent reasonably successful printers of music books include John Wyndet (1607), Humfrey Lownes (1604–1613), and Thomas Snodham (1609–1624). For a reference work on music publishing, see Krummel, Literature of Music Bibliography. For a more specific discussion of later sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English music publishing, see Price, Patrons and Musicians, 180–189 and Smith, Thomas East and Music Publishing.
7. No critical overview of the so-called English lute song exists but the subject entries in GMO under individual composers provide references to seminal secondary literature. Campion has attracted a possibly disproportionate amount of critical attention.
8. This diverse accompaniment possibility distinguishes and differentiates the so-called lute song from instrumental lute music so that the two genres cannot be regarded as interchangeable.
9. On the role of John Dowland in the Elizabethan musical world and print culture, see Gibson, “‘How Hard an Enterprise It Is.’” See also Gibson, “‘The Order of the Book.’” Freeman refers to these sources in “The Transmission of Lute Music.”
10. Although it is included in Sternfeld and Greer’s revised edition of English Madrigal Verse (1967) under “Lute Songs,” Walter Porter’s Madrigales and Ayres (1632) contains no lute ayres and therefore can only be categorized as a madrigal book, albeit of a late kind. For a still-pertinent comparative study of the two genres and their contextual significance, see Ruff and Wilson, “The Madrigal, the Lute Song and Elizabethan Politics,” 3–51.
11. Fellowes, English School of Lutenist Song Writers; Warlock, The English Ayre.
12. These are available in Greer, Collected English Lutenist Partsongs, Musica Britannica, vols. 34 and 35. For a discussion on the compositional status of the part-song version see Wilson, “Thomas Campion’s ‘Ayres Filled with Parts’ Reconsidered,” 3–12.
13. In fact, as Price (Patrons and Musicians, 184–187) points out, publication “gave very little financial encouragement to prospective composers.” Printers/publishers like William Barley made the profit.
14. Barley, A New Booke of Tabliture (1596), Part I, sig. A2.
15. For a discussion of this possibly misleading terminology, see Bailey, “The Challenge of Domesticity,” this volume.
16. According to Poulton (John Dowland, 49), by 1597, Dowland had been awarded BMus degrees from both Cambridge and Oxford because he describes himself as “Lutenist and Bachelor of musicke in both the Universities.” See also, Ward, “A Dowland Miscellany,” 9–10.
17. Poulton, John Dowland, 48–49.
18. In fact, Dowland’s publication catalyst may have been the printing in 1596 of Barley’s two “plagiarising primers,” A New Booke of Tablature and The Pathway to Musicke. See Price, Patrons and Musicians, 183.
19. On Dowland as instructor, see Gale, “John Dowland, Celebrity Lute Teacher,” 205–218.
20. R. Dowland, A Musicall Banquet, unpaginated.
21. Lady Arabella Stuart (1575–1615). Warlock (The English Ayre, 111) notes that several music books were dedicated to her.
22. Cavendish, 14. Ayres in Tabletorie to the Lute, unpaginated dedication. The madrigal was also intended as a leisure activity for the nobility. In his dedicatory epistle to Arthur, Lord Chichester, in his The Second Set of Madrigals (1618), Thomas Bateson, for example, made it clear that his madrigals were “solely entended for your Honours private recreation.”
23. Sir Richard Weston (1577–1635) received his knighthood in 1603 and became first Earl of Portland in 1633. Brian Quintrell, “Weston, Richard, First Earl of Portland (bap. 1577, d. 1635),” DNB (accessed November 21, 2013).
24. Ford, Musicke of Sundrie Kindes, sig. A2.
25. The gentleman of letters, Sir Edward Herbert (1583–1648) was the first Baron Herbert of Cherbury and brother of George Herbert.
26. Corkine, Ayres, To Sing and Play to the Lute, sig. A1v.
27. GB-Ob Douce 280, fol.120 in Price, Patrons and Musicians, 187.
28. Ibid., 188.
29. Jones, A Musicall Dreame, sig. A2[v].
30. Greer, “Five Variations on ‘Farewel Dear Loue,’” 214. See also Greer’s insightful brief summary, 225–227.
31. See further, Greer, “Five Variations,” 215–222.
32. See Brown, “Jones, Robert (ii),” GMO (accessed November 21, 2013).
33. It is not certain when and where Campion qualified. Shapiro, “Thomas Campion’s Medical Degree,” 495, made a convincing case for Caen in 1605.
34. Rosseter, A Booke of Ayres, unpaginated dedication to Sir Thomas Mounson.
35. For further discussion of this point, see Davis, The Works of Thomas Campion, 128–129, where he argues that the “difference between the two [books] is . . . a distinction in tone, between rather bitter and hard-headed songs on the one hand and lighter frothy ones on the other. Youth and age here signify innocence and experience. Surely one reason for the peculiar form of the distinction is that these two books are occasional in a way that none of the other songbooks are: in his epistle, Campion is at great pains to specify the way he feels about Monson and his relation to him in this book.”
36. For a discussion of a wide range of aspects of print culture, and one that interrogates its meaning and significance in the early seventeenth century, see Raymond, The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, vol. 1. On music and printing, see Krummel, English Music Printing. On the decline in music printing after 1612, see Pattison, “Notes on Early Music Printing,” 416–418. For a general comparison with literary works, see Miller, Professional Writers and Saunders, Profession of English Letters.
37. Morley, The First Booke of Ayres, sig. A2. Ralph Bosville of Bradbourne, Kent, was a militia officer and was knighted by James I on July 23, 1603 (Doughtie, Lyrics from English Ayres, 493).
38. Jones, The Second Booke of Songs and Ayres, sig. A2[v].
39. Doughtie (Lyrics from English Ayres, 549) records that Sir William Green acquired the manor house at Great Milton in Oxfordshire by 1588 and was still living there in 1611. He was knighted by James I on July 9, 1603.
40. Danyel, Songs for the Lute Viol and Voice, unpaginated dedication.
41. Lady Joan Thynne was the wife of Sir John Thynne of Longleat and daughter of Sir Royland Hayward, sometime Lord Mayor of London (Doughtie, Lyrics from English Ayres, 596).
42. Maynard, The XII. Wonders of the World, unpaginated dedication.
43. Ford, Musicke of Sundrie Kindes, sig. A2.
44. Corkine, Ayres, To Sing and Play to the Lute, unpaginated dedication.
45. Campion’s social status, like his father’s, was “gentleman.” His career at Peterhouse, Cambridge and Gray’s Inn attests to a person of private means and family support. See Vivian, Campion’s Works, xvii, xxv–xxxi. For a gentleman to publish for an audience of unequal social rank was regarded indecorous in Elizabethan and Jacobean society. Price (Patrons and Musicians, 192), argues that “it was at least possible, if not strictly advisable, that some artistic gentlemen of proven pedigree could risk criticism by appearing in print. . . . This acceptance was made easier if a publishing composer could claim that his work, previously circulated in manuscript, had been abused in some way.”
46. Campion, Two Bookes of Ayres, unpaginated. Poems and/or music appearing earlier include First Book: no. 2, “The Man of Life Upright” in A Booke of Ayres, 18; no. 18, “Seeke the Lord” in A Booke of Ayres, 4; Second Book: no. 7, “Give Beauty All Her Right” compare the second stanza of “Now Hath Flora” in The Lord Hayes Masque (1607); no. 10, “What Harvest Halfe So Sweet Is?” part derived from A Booke of Ayres, 7. The ayre “Bravely Deckt Come Forth Bright Day” I.6 refers to the Gunpowder Plot (November 5, 1605) in the first stanza and the death of Prince Henry (November 6, 1612) in the last.
47. Rosseter, A Booke of Ayres, unpaginated dedication.
48. Campion, The Fourth Booke of Ayres, sig. G[1]. For the identity of “others” and Campion’s parodies see Sternfeld and Greer, eds., English Madrigal Verse, 732–733.
49. Rossiter, A Booke of Ayres, unpaginated dedication.
50. Vivian, Campion’s Works, xxxvi.
51. Meres, Palladis Tamia (1598), fol. 280r.
52. Fitz-Geffry (FitzGeofridi), Affaniae (1601), 56.
53. Davis, The Works of Thomas Campion, 359.
54. For one of the best discussions of Elizabethan verse in classical meters, see Attridge, Well-Weighed Syllables. On theory in Campion’s treatise, see Fenyo, “Grammar and Music in Campion’s Observations,” 46–72.
55. Campion, Thomas Campiani Epigrammatum libri II, Epigrammatum liber primus, no. 192, “Why do you censor these [Latin poems]? Who creates such things so that they may wither? If you wish not to publish for all, publish for yourself” (translation by the author with advice from Dr. David Bagchi).
56. Campion, Epigrammatum liber secondus, no. 70, “Charles, if you have anything that, by long ripening, has become sweet, as fruit are by the rays of Apollo [the sun], then publish . . .” (translation by the author with advice from Dr. David Bagchi).
57. GB-Cssc MS 59. Lindley, Thomas Campion: De Puluerea Coniuratione.
58. Lindley, Thomas Campion, 4.
59. Campion, Two Bookes, unpaginated.
60. “To The Reader,” A Booke of Ayres, sig. A2v.
61. Fischlin, In Small Proportions, 21.
62. Ibid., 21.
63. On the working relationship and artistic interactions between Campion and Coprario, see further Wilson, “A New Way of Making . . . Counterpoint,” 7–10 et passim.
64. Lindley, Thomas Campion, 5.
65. For a compelling analysis of this ayre, see Mellers, “Words and Music in Elizabethan England,” 404–408.
66. Fischlin, In Small Proportions, 253–254.
67. This book set the format for most successive publications. It went into five “newly corrected and amended” editions: 1597, 1600, 1603, 1606, and 1613.
68. Dowland, The First Booke of Songes or Ayres, sig. A1.
69. Campion, Two Bookes of Ayres. The First, “To the Reader,” sig. A1v. “Not all things in our book are good, but neither are they all bad. If it pleases [you], you may sing them, or, accordingly, read them” (author’s translation with advice from Dr. David Bagchi).
70. Campion, Two Bookes of Ayres. The First, sig. A1.
71. See further, Greer, ‘“What If a Day,’” 316–318.