Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-s2hrs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T12:32:18.905Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Ferrabosco and Jonson's ‘The Houre-glasse’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Edward Doughtie
Edward Doughtie*
Affiliation:
Rice University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In one of the recent volumes in the English Lute-Songs series, Ian Spink has assembled from manuscript sources fifteen songs by Alfonso Ferrabosco. The first is a setting of an anonymous poem, ‘All you forsaken lovers come,’ for a solo voice with bass, to which Spink has added inner parts. Spink's source is the ‘John Bull’ manuscript, MS. 52 D, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (c. 1620); another version—from which Spink takes two readings—is in British Museum MS. Additional 10337, the ‘Elizabeth Rogers Virginal Book,’ dated c. 1657. A third version of this song, but with a different and much more interesting set of words, Benjonson's “The Houre-glasse,’ is in a pair of manuscript part-books now in the Cathedral Library at Carlisle. These partbooks were compiled around 1637 by Thomas Smith, later bishop of Carlisle, and contain several songs not known elsewhere, such as the cycle of eleven songs about ‘John and Joan’ by Richard Nicholson. They also contain two Latin anthems by Ferrabosco (pp. 74, 75).

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 22 , Issue 2 , Summer 1969 , pp. 148 - 150
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1969

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Ferrabosco, Alfonso, Manuscript Songs, ed. Ian, Spink, in The English Lute-Songs, Second Series, XIX (London: Stainer and Bell, 1966), 2–3, 41.Google Scholar

2 'An Elizabethan Song-Cycle’ and ‘Some Elizabethan Lyrics,’ The Cornhill Magazine, XLVIII (1920), 572-579, and LI (1921), 285-296.

3 'Joan qd John and Other Fragments at Western Reserve University,’ Aspects of Medieval and Renaissance Music, ed. Jan LaRue, presented to Gustave Reese (New York: W.W.Norton, 1966), pp. 832-855.

4 Abbreviations in the MS are here expanded and modern typographical conventions followed. I am grateful to the Carlisle Dean and Chapter for permission to publish.

5 Jonson, Ben, ed. Herford, C.H., Percy, and Evelyn, Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press), VIII (1947), 148–149.Google Scholar

6 'An Elizabethan Song-Cycle,’ pp. 578-579.