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‘So to the wood went I’: Politicizing the Greenwood in Two Songs by John Dowland

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Kirsten Gibson
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Abstract

Figurations of woods as sites of solitude, political exile and authenticity are drawn upon in a number of John Dowland's songs. ‘Can she excuse’ quotes from the ballad tune Woods so wild, while ‘O sweet woods’ makes reference to Wanstead woods, associated with both Philip Sidney and Robert Devereux during their lifetimes. This article examines how courtly experiences of political withdrawal and exile are articulated through musical and literary references to woods in these songs.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 132 , Issue 2 , 2007 , pp. 221 - 251
Copyright
Copyright © The Author 2007

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References

The research for this article was funded by anAHRCaward. I thank Ian Biddle, Elizabeth Eva Leach, Magnus Williamson and Richard Wistreich for their helpful comments and advice on earlier drafts. My thanks also to the anonymous JRMA readers for their constructive suggestions and to Martin Eastwell for preparing the music examples.Google Scholar

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25 To plead my faith' was set as a lute song by Essex's secretary, the well-known lutenist Daniel Batcheler. It was published in Robert Dowland's A Musicali Banquet (London, 1610), with the added inscription The Right Honourable Robert, Earle of Essex: Earle Marshall of England'.Google Scholar

26 Poulton, John Dowland, 226.Google Scholar

27 Reprinted by permission of the publisher from LYRICS FROM ENGLISH AIRS, 1596–1622, edited by Edward Doughtie, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1970 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College (p. 348). Batcheler, ‘To plead my faith’, in R. Dowland, A Musicali Banquet (London, 1610).Google Scholar

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32 Robert Dowland, A Varietie of Lute Lessons (London, 1610), sig. M2r.Google Scholar

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40 For some earlier formulations of the greenwood as a site of retreat see Duby, George, ‘Solitude: Eleventh to Thirteenth Century’, A History of Private Life, ii: Revelations of the Medieval World, ed. Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1999), 509–34 (p. 515–17); Fran Doel and Geoff Doel, Robin Hood: Outlaw or Greenwood Myth (Stroud, Glos., 2000); Carol Ballard, The Green Man: The Shakespeare Connection (Leamington Spa, 1999).Google Scholar

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44 London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 649, fol. 376v This source is cited in Hammer, The Polarisation, 318.Google Scholar

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46 Astrophil and Stella, sonnet 72, Sir Philip Sidney: The Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (2nd edn, Oxford, 2002), 182. Poem reproduced here by permission of Oxford University Press.Google Scholar

47 Marotti, ‘“Love is not love‘”, 404.Google Scholar

48 See Ruff and Wilson, ‘The Madrigal, the Lute Song’; Ruff and Wilson, ‘Allusion to the Essex Downfall in Lute Song Lyrics’, Lute Society Journal, 12 (1970), 31–6; Poulton, John Dowland, 262; Daniel Fischlin, In Small Proportions: A Poetics of the English Ayre 1596–1622 (Detroit, 1998), 126–32.Google Scholar

49 ‘O sweet woods’ was published as song 10 in Dowland's Second Booke of Songs or Ayres (London, 1600).Google Scholar

50 The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia written by Sir Philip Sidney Knight, Now since the First Edition augmented and ended (London, 1593). The first edition, which became known as the New Arcadia, was printed posthumously in 1590, edited by Fulke Greville, Dr Matthew Gwinne and possibly John Florio. The 1593 folio edition was published by Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, and her husband's secretary, Hugh Sanford. Herbert and Sanford added missing eclogues and appended the last two books of Old Arcadia to conclude their edition. The discrepancies between the differing editions is discussed in Joel Davis, ‘Multiple Arcadias and the Literary Quarrel between Fulke Greville and the Countess of Pembroke’, Studies in Philology, 101 (2004), 401–30.Google Scholar

51 The setting is in Lbl, Add. MS 53723, fol. 11.Google Scholar

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55 David Greer, in the new Musica Britannica edition of Dowland's Ayres for Four Voices (2000), suggests that the last crotchet of bar 9 (bar numbers as in Greer's edition) and the first two of bar 10 in the Tenor part might be reversed to read c'aa (matching the lute accompaniment) so as to alleviate both the g‘/a clash between the Tenor and Alms parts and the false relation c‘/c♯ between the Tenor and Bassus parts, but it is also possible that Dowland intended to provide this dissonant version in the four-part setting. See John Dowland: Ayres for Four Voices, ed. David Greer, Musica Britannica, 6 (London, 2000).Google Scholar

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57 Dowland, Second Booke, song 18. Reprinted by permission of the publisher from LYRICS FROM ENGLISH AIRS, 1596–1622, edited by Edward Doughtie, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1970 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College (p. 109). The text of Greville's poem is also published in Fulke Greville, Certame Learned and Elegant Works of the Right Hon. Fvlke, Lord Brook, Written in his Youth, and Familiar Exercise with Sir Philip Sidney (London, 1633), 179. The themes of Greville's text are echoed in the text of ‘Amour ne pouvant vivre avec la feintise’, which was published in Jehan Planson's book of Airs mis en musique in 1587. Here, as Jeanice Brooks points out, ‘the singer claims that the cruelty and deception of the “divinités” of the court have forced Love to flee for the countryside’. The text is as follows: ‘Amour ne pouvant vivre avecques la feintise, / Quitient aux grandes cours de la divinité / S'est fait hoste des bois pour revivre en franchise / Avecques la constance et la fidélité. / Là nous allons cerchant parmy les patourelles / Dont les coeurs sont aprins d'aymer naïsvement, / Et qui ne vendent point comme font les cruelles / Un petit de plaisir pour beaucoup de tourment.’ English translation as given by Jeanice Brooks: ‘Love, no longer able to live with the deception / that reigns in the great courts of divinities, / has made himself a guest in the woods, to live again in honesty / with constancy and fidelity. / There we will go looking among the shepherdesses, / whose hearts are taught to love simply, / and who do not sell, as do those cruel ladies, / a little bit of pleasure for a lot of torment.’ Brooks, Courtly Song, 365. The similarities between the texts, and their respective settings in English and French ayres, points, perhaps, to their courtly associations, which might be understood as an integral feature of both the English ayre and the French air de cour as Brooks portrays it.Google Scholar

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59 Ibid., 400.Google Scholar

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65 Cited ibid., 185, 187.Google Scholar

66 Cited ibid., 183.Google Scholar

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82 Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (London, 1577; facsimile repr., Menston, NJ, 1971), fol. k4r.Google Scholar

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84 Brooks, Courtly Song, 341. The term ‘popularesque’ was coined by the Brazilian polymath Mario de Andrade (1893–1945) to describe imitation of folk-music features by learned musicians.Google Scholar

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86 Ibid.Google Scholar