Some Other Note: The Lost Songs of English Renaissance Comedy by Ross W. Duffin (review)

Every student of early modern theatre understands, on some level, that music featured prominently in the performance of plays; Alan C. Dessen and Leslie Thomson, in their Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama (Cambridge, 1999), identify 630 explicit stage directions for music to sound in over 220 plays. But because even those play-texts which print lyrics typically do not include printed music to accompany them, I would suggest that very few scholars appreciate quite how extensive a role music played. Like prologues, epilogues, and letters, songs circulated independently of play-texts, leading (we might assume) to an increased propensity for loss. On rare occasions, though, a musical fragment is all that survives of an otherwise lost play-text: Tourneur's 'The Nobleman' (1611) and Fletcher, Field, and Massinger's 'The Jeweller of Amsterdam' (1616) fall into this category.¹ The Early Broadside Ballad Archive (UC Santa Barbara) and Broadside Ballads Online (Oxford) have done much to catalogue extant ballads from the period, and the Arden Early Modern Drama series now offers a treble clef as a musical marker to indicate the punctuation of a scene or act by music. With Ross Duffin's comprehensive research, it should now be possible and desirable to include in critical editions the actual melodies used in plays, and for editors to include commentary analyzing intertextual uses of those melodies in other drama of the period.

At the heart of Duffin's book is the simple yet eminently sensible observation that because playwrights were not usually also composers, they 'wrote lyrics to tunes that they were humming to themselves, appropriated from music they were hearing, and that therefore shaped the lyrics as they were written' (xxiv). Duffin further claims that 'there is almost a compulsion to use some of the same key words, or rhyming words, that are in the original song' (xxv). These are powerful insights: they enable Duffin to scour the archives for period tunes that fit the lyrics in plays, and thereby identify plausible settings for the otherwise silent songs in playbooks. His inspired detective work encompasses the identification of probable cues for music within plays, including covert allusions in stage dialogue to the names or popular refrains of well-known songs; the recognition of unusual versification and rhyme schemes that enable a quasi-forensic 'match' with extant musical settings; and the explication of the subtleties of musical form and terminology in ways that elucidate the import of a particular tune at specific moments in a dramatic spectacle. Most helpfully, he sets the lyrics to the music he identifies as the most plausible original setting, and accompanies these with a discussion of how the song may have been sung.

Some Other Note commences with the polyphonic sophistication of non-liturgical music in fifteenth-century shepherds plays and the scatological parody of Christmas songs in Mankind as a kind of background to Renaissance musical comedy. Noting that 'Recovering plausible music to songs in comic interludes is more possible than people may think', Duffin fleshes out this background via attention to sixteenth-century 'chorus-masters, composers, and instrumentalists' involved in the production of court interludes (20): William Cornysh, John Skelton, John Heywood, and Nicholas Udall (whose Ralph Roister Doister Duffin dubs 'one of the most musical of English Renaissance comedies' [45]). As well as deciphering obscure musical terminology and combing through their plays for oblique cues for the performance of songs, Duffin offers concise biographies of each of these men, outlining with admirable succinctness their respective contributions to the formation of musical entertainment in England.

Church musicians including John Redford, Sebastian Westcott, Richard Farrant, and others form the basis of the following chapters' exploration of interludes associated with the Children of Paul's and the Chapels Royal. Duffin uses the identification of meter and form, comparison with lyrical analogues, sensitivity to intertextual allusion and parody, and other close reading methods to great effect: in...