4 - ‘An instruction to the Gitterne’

Summary

Sir Thomas Elyot's The boke named the Gouernour is a work that Surrey, the most exalted poet of Elyot's generation, might have called a ‘guide to bring/Our English youth, by travail, unto fame’. First published in 1531, and dedicated to Henry VIII, the book counsels all tutors of the young – the future servants of the common weal – to be temperate. The more severe parts of the curriculum should alternate with some pleasant learning, including music, so that pupils do not become exhausted or disgusted with their studies. To this end, Elyot offers a chapter to explain ‘in what wise musike may be to a noble man necessarie’, but without neglecting ‘what modestie ought to be therin’. Such allusions to ‘noble’ men reflect the decorum customarily observed by Tudor authors, obliged to write as if only the patron class need be addressed; they do not define the only audience Elyot wished to reach, and the ‘modestie’ that he commends in musical study, implying restraint and temperance, was not traditionally regarded as a noble virtue. (Although the virtue of keeping to ‘themeane’ in all things was a favourite topic of contemporary poets, one did not commission a portrait from Nicholas Hilliard, or pay a fortune for tournament armour, in order to appear temperate.) Moderation, however, could mean a great deal to those who aspired to become respected persons in their livery company, or in their parish, without the benefit of an inherited title or estate. Furthermore, Elyot recommends that a young man should learn to play instruments ‘for the refresshynge of his witte’, a counsel well suited to lawyers, merchants compiling their ledgers and all self-made men in Tudor England with a career to pursue.

Such men and their wives were increasingly becoming members of what might be called the portrait class: those whose ambitions ran to commissioning a panel portrait in oils. The sitters in such pictures almost invariably appear with bare hands – holding their gloves, not wearing them – for hands that were well groomed, not roughened or soiled by work, were a source of pride. To play a musical instrument like the gittern or lute was therefore to display an indisputably elite form of hygiene.