Music and Song in Plays Acted by Children's Companies during the English Renaissance Michael Shapiro In recent years, an impressive amount of scholarship has concerned itself with music and song and their uses in Shakespeare's plays. In addition to the earlier studies of Naylor, Noble, and Cowling, we are now fortunate to have John H. Long's and Frederick Sternfeld's more specialized studies of the uses of music and song in the comedies and tragedies respectively, Peter Seng's useful compendium of information on the songs, and John Cutts's edition of songs used in the later plays. Although we can only rejoice over this signifi- cant body of work, it has created the impression that Shakespeare's plays are typical of the period in their uses of music and song. While this hypothesis may turn out to be valid, it cannot be tested until scholars have thoroughly in- vestigated the uses of music and song in plays written by other dramatists and in plays performed by other acting companies during the same period. In fact, a cursory view of English Renaissance drama suggests, if anything, the atypicality of Shakespeare's uses of music and song. For example, the plays acted by the companies of child actors which flourished between 1599 and 1612 are richer in music and song than are the plays written by Shakespeare and others for adult companies during the same period, and often use music and song in radically different ways. Moreover, the musical conventions in the plays acted by children's troupes were developed in and for small, indoor "private" theaters, and were often adopted by adult troupes after 1609 when they began to move to those theaters from their large, open-roofed "public" theaters. A few scholars have recently continued the exploration of non-Shakes- pearean private theater music begun by Arkwright, Lawrence, and others. Cutts and Andrew J. Sabol have unearthed several settings for songs from plays acted by children's troupes, and W. R. Bowden in The English Dramatic Lyric: 1603-1641 has investigated the use of song in plays acted in both pub- lic and private theaters by both adult and boy companies. The forthcoming1 collection of essays, edited by John H. Long, on music in non-Shakespearean plays of the period promises to be of great interest. Much more remains to be done, but few literary scholars are equipped for the tasks involved. When the texts of plays supply lyrics for songs, as they frequently do not, musicologists who are familiar with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century collections of music-printed and manuscript-are likely to be more successful than literary scholars in discovering settings. Even when settings can be located, they need to be edited and translated into modern notation before directors can use them for modern productions or literary scholars can discuss their dramatic effects, although such discussions too might best be conducted by musicologists. One of the aims of this article, therefore, is to invite musicologists to collaborate with literary scholars in investigating music and song and their 4+ C•M • 97 uses in non-Shakespearean drama of the English Renaissance, particularly in the plays acted by troupes of child actors. It is hoped that the brief history of the children's companies and the discussion of music and song in their plays will stimulate further investigation and exploration in the area of non- Shakespearean theater music of the English Renaissance. Perhaps the list of references that follows the discussion will be of some use to musicologists wishing to undertake such inquiries. A brief outline of the history of the children's troupes in England will ex- plain why their plays are richer in music and song than contemporaneous plays acted by troupes of adult actors (Hillebrand 1926; Chambers 1923: II, 8-76). In England, most of the children's troupes were originally troupes of choirboys; the two most prominent companies of boy actors styled themselves as the Children of St. Paul's Cathedral and the Children of the Chapel Royal. As choirboys, they were taught to read music, sing prick song, and also to play instruments, such as organs, viols, cornets, virginals and recorders (Harrison 1958: 186, 191, 2i4; Woodfill 1953: 144). Most of the boy choristers became adult choristers when they reached maturity, and some, like the composer Thomas Ravenscroft, a boy chorister at Paul's, went on to make significant contributions to English musical life (Lawrence 1924: 418- 23). During Elizabeth's reign the choristers from St. Paul's, the Windsor Chapel, the Chapel Royal, and Westminster Abbey performed plays at court as part of the Christmas-Shrovetide revelry. Sometime around 1576, the Children of Paul's and the Children of the Chapel Royal acquired their own private theaters, which were probably little more than typical Tudor ban- queting halls. Although the children's troupes charged admission to per- formances in these halls, such performances were considered rehearsals for performances in the banqueting halls at court and probably accommodated courtiers and would-be courtiers who were unable to attend the court per- formances. After an eight- or nine-year period of dormancy, the Paul's boys and the Chapel Children were reactivated around 1599 and flourished for about a decade, performing plays, mostly satiric comedies, by such dramatists as Jonson, Webster, Chapman, Middleton, Marston, and Dekker.2 It is difficult to say whether the members of the acting companies were more than nominally choirboys after 1599. The members ofa children's troupe like the Children of the Kings Revels, which acted at Whitefriars, were not choristers. The children's troupe that acted at Blackfriars, once called the Children of the Chapel Royal, lost its connection with the Chapel Royal shortly after the Accession of James in 1603, but the Children of Paul's probably consisted of choristers and was directed by the Cathedral choirmaster until the troupe's dissolution in 1607, In view of the origin and history of the children's troupes, it should be no surprise that their plays use music and song more profusely than do con- temporaneous plays acted by adult companies, although it is an exaggeration to describe them as resembling- "the musical or musical operetta of today" 98 (Sternfeld 1964: 14). A statistical approach is illuminating. Of the thirty-two extant children's plays acted before 1591, twenty-nine (91 %) have a total of 128 songs, or an average of 4.4 each. Garter's Susanna, one of the three plays that have no songs, apologizes in the Epilogue for this lack. In the post-1599 period, sixteen of the twenty-one plays (76%) acted by the Children of Paul's contain a total of eighty songs, or an average of 5 each, while 72% of the plays acted by the Chapel Children contain an average of 2.4 songs per play. By comparison, only 49% of the plays acted by Shakespeare's troupe during a corresponding period contain songs, the average of 1.4 songs per play is considerably lower than that for the plays acted by children's troupes, and plays acted by other adult troupes contain even less music (Bowden 1951: 126-28; Shapiro 1967: 346). The plays acted by children's troupes can be conveniently divided into two distinct phases, falling on either side of a hiatus in the dramatic activities of these troupes that lasted from about 1591 to 1599 or 1600. In the plays acted before 1591, few of the songs have much dramatic relevance and the two plays with the most songs-Summer's Last Will and Testament and The Arraignment of Paris-are more like music-hall revues than plays. Moreover, there is little variety in the use of music and song in the pre-159l children's plays. Nearly all of the songs in these plays, as well as most of the songs in plays acted after 1599 by the Children of Paul's, fall into four categories, which describe the dramatic function of the songs: complaint, servant song, pastoral or supernatural song, religious song. Complaints One type of song which is virtually unique to the plays acted by children's troupes before 1591 is the complaint, usually a solo song by a female charac- ter. Bowden describes the singers of this type of song as temporarily frustrated lovers, forsaken lovers, or bereaved lovers (1951 : 24-26; Sabol 1960 : 224-25), but the complaint tradition originated earlier and is broader than Bowden suspects, and included laments of friends, children, and parents, as well as lovers. The complaint is almost always a personal expression of the character's emotions and, as such, usually has some relevance to the dramatic action. The complaint thus differs from sad but impersonal songs, like the one sung to viol accompaniment in Wit and Science or the "dolefull ditty" that laments Summer's approaching death in Summer's Last Will and Testament. One of the earliest of these dramatic complaints is "Awake ye wofull wights," the lament of Pythias for Damon in Edwardes' Damon and Pythias (1564), a play acted by the Children of the Chapel Royal. The stage direc- tion stipulates that Pythias was accompanied by regals, but the song also survives in settings for lute accompaniment. Long has printed the tune, recitative-like in character, which was probably used in the play (1967: 247- 99 50). Like most dramatic and non-dramatic complaints of the period, "Awake ye wofull wights" is highly alliterative, intoning Pythias' sorrow in such lines as: "Gripe me, you greedy grief,/And present pangs of death!" (1924: 11. 612-13). Similar complaints occur in Patient Grissel, Misogonus, The Arraign- ment of Paris, and Sapho and Phao. Furthermore, Arkwright found a number of extant complaints, which seem to belong to plays, in manuscript collections of music (1906: 341-3, and 401- 3; 1909: 30-40 and 112-17; and 1914: 117-38). The most famous of these is "Alas, ye salt sea Gods," the lament of Panthea for Abradad, ascribed to Richard Farrant and set for treble voice and four strings. Noting Farrant's connection with the Children of the Chapel Royal, W. J. Lawrence argued that the song belonged to a play acted by that troupe, The Wars of Cyrus (pub. 1594), which contains characters named Panthea and Abradates, although the printed text of the play makes no provision for such a song (1921: 514). "Alas, ye salt sea Gods," like most complaints of this type, is heavily alliter- ative, contains repeated exclamations and stock phrases like "grievous groans" and "weep and wail," and includes a plea for the singer's death. It is one of several complaints sung by noble women who are threatened with captivity, sexual violation, the death of or separation from a lover, or with some equally heart-rending fate, and it is therefore quite possible that the type of dramatic complaint under discussion was a standard feature of the "pathetic heroine" play, which was popular with the children's companies in the 1560's, 1570's, and early 1580's (Brawner 1943: 455-64). Complaints even occur in a few plays acted by children's troupes after 1599. In the anony- mous Maid's Metamorphosis, the pathetic heroine sings "Ye sacred Fyres, and powers above" and "Since hope of helpe my froward starres denie," while Marston seems to have had his heroine sing a complaint of this type in Sophonisba and may have used complaints in Antonio and Mellida and Antonio's Revenge. If the alliterative and repetitive style of the lyrics and the recitative-like character of the tunes make the complaints seem somewhat heavy-handed, one should remember that sophisticated musical settings probably made them into effective expressions of grief and sorrow. Gustave Reese, writing about Elizabethan songs with viol accompaniment in general, including the "tragic songs of Farrant and Parsons," described the settings as follows: The upper voice generally carries a syllabic setting of the poem, while the lower voices, faster moving and noticeably less melodic, weave an amorphous polyphonic texture below the tune, and fill in gaps between its phrases (1959: 817). But we are not even sure if the so-called tragic songs of Farrant and Parsons were interided to be sung in dramatic performance, and much work remains to be done not only in locating and analyzing settings of complaints but also in defining the relationship between dramatic and non-dramatic complaints. 100 Servant Songs A second type of song in children's plays is the servant song, usually sung by two to four pages or maidservants. Although Sabol and others have pointed out the use of servant songs by Edwardes and Lyly (Sabol 1958a: 147-48), the convention is more extensive and more dramatically relevant than has been realized. Songs of this type occur in Tom Tyler (c. 1540), Respublica (c. 1552), and Nice Wanton (c. 1560), as well as in the plays of Edwardes and Lyly. These servants, descended from the witty slaves of Roman comedy and the vices of morality plays, are the agents of mischief, mockery, and merriment, and their songs generally ridicule figures of authority and celebrate festive revelry, with emphasis on drinking and sex. The song in II.ii of Misogonus (c. 1577), for example, combines nearly all of these:motifs: Let snurgis lurke & druges worke, we doe defie their slaverye he is but a foole, that gois to schole all we delight in braverye. It is the best, to live at rest, and takt as god doth send it To haunt ech wake, & mirth to make and with good fellowes spend it. The merye, man with cupp & cann lives longer then doth twentye The misers wealth, doth hurt his health examples we have plentye. In cardes & dice, our comforte lies In sportinge and in dauncinge Our mindes to please and live at ease and sometime to use praunsinge. With bes & nel we love to dwell In kisinge and in hakinge. But whope hoe hollie, with trollye lollye to them weil now be walking. (second, fourth, sixth, and tenth stanzas) A quartet, consisting of the prodigal-son protagonist and three of his atten- dants, sings this song to the well-known tune of "Heart's Ease." Before the song is sung, one of the attendants assigns the parts: Well then bycause you take me for your deane Ile apoynt the partes my selfe by saint John 101 You shall singe the false kinde I meane you know what & thoust bere the bas because thou art rustye the counterfet tener is youres by youre lott my selfe will singe the truble & that very trusty. R. W. Bond, the editor of the play, informs us that "false kinde" has been written in the manuscript above the word "tenther," which has been de- leted (1911: 197, 309-19). Unfortunately, Bond's note on these directions is so brief and vague that one would welcome further commentary on the musi- cal terms and any attempt to describe the style of the setting used in the play. As the reference to a bass part suggests, the children's troupe acting Misogonus included at least one adult actor, a practice not uncommon among children's companies before 1591 (Hunter 1962: 237). In plays acted after 1599, small groups of servants sing very much as they did in the plays of Edwardes and Lyly, that is at the end of short scenes of pert, audacious dialogue. As in the pre-1591 plays, such scenes rarely further the dramatic action but supply contrasting attitudes, parody theme and action of the main plot, create an atmosphere oflevity, and usually culminate in song. Such scenes, with this type of song, occur in the plays of William Percy (intended for Paul's but probably never performed there), and in plays acted by the Chapel Children at Blackfriars, but most of all in plays acted by the Children of Paul's. In Act II of Marston's Antonio and Mellida, two pages and a maid sing "the descant on our names," the lyrics to which are lost but must have been extremely bawdy because the pages' names-Dildo and Catzo-are Italian terms for penis. Marston's What You Will requires three page songs, all of them unfortunately lost, although Sabol has found two songs in Ravens- croft's Melismata that might well have been used (1959: 8). While this approach Can rarely yield more than conjectural results, it opens up possi- bilities of matching lyrics from manuscript and printed collections of music with plays with blank songs. In Lii of Blurt, Master Constable, probably by Middleton, three pages sing "What meat eats the Spaniard ?", which pokes fun at one of their masters (SabolI958a: 146-49). In IIji of the same play, two maidservants sing a bawdy question-and-answer duet, "In a fair woman that thing is best?" This song is sung in response to a request for a "light song," of the kind that "go nimbly and quick, and are full of change, and carry sweet division" (ILii. 47-49). The lyrics are ostensibly a sonnet written by another character, which the maids read before singing, perhaps because a polyphonic setting rendered the words unintelligible (Evans 1929: 44-45, 59-60; Bowden 1951: 129; Long 1955-61: 1,4; and Sabol 1960: 229-30). Thus, the children's troupes seem to have carried over the servant song from their pre-1591 plays when they resumed dramatic activities in 1599. This type of song belongs exclusively to the plays acted by children's com- panies, for adult troupes rarely if ever had more than two or three boys 102 capable of taking more than a walk-on role and those boys usually played female roles. When adult companies did use groups of children, as in Mid- summer Night's Dream and Merry Wives qf Windsor, the children are given roles which require a good deal of singing and dancing but little or no speaking. Many of the plays of the children's troupes, however, count heavily on the pages to fulfill their traditional functions both in speech and song. One would like to know more about the musical aspects of the servant song. Pastoral and Supernatural Songs A third type of song in the children's plays is the song for pastpral or supernatural characters, usually a choral song, such as the Nymph's song in Peele's Arraignment qf Paris. When choral groups were assigned a collective role, they were usually cast as muses, nymphs, shepherds, or fairies, probably because of the traditional association of music with such groups. Muses sing in Edwardes' Damon and Phythias, while Cupid sings with a group of nymphs in II.ii of Lyly's Gallathea, and troupes of fairies dance in II.iii of Gallathea and sing and dance in IV.iii of Lyly's Endimion, possibly to one of the songs in Ravenscroft's BrieJe Discourse (Lawrence 1924: 418-23). Moreover, such songs occur in a few plays acted after 1599. There is a fairy chorus in Act III of The Wisdom qf Doctor Dodypoll and a chorus of nymphs in Wi{y Beguiled. The Maid's Metamorphosis calls for rival singing choruses of shepherds and woodsmen in Act I; the lyrics of the shepherds' song are not given, but a song found in Ravenscroft's Melismata, "The Crowning of Belphoebe," would fit the context (Sabol 1959: 7-8). In Act II of the same play there is a chorus of fairies who sing and dance first alone and then with pages, and settings of both songs appear in Ravenscroft's BrieJe Discourse (Lawrence 1924: 420; Sabol 1958: 153). Songs of this type were naturally used rarely by adnlt companies, although they do occur in Midsummer Night's Dream and Merry Wives qf Windsor. Even the children's troupes abandoned this type of song in the early 1600's as they began to perform realistic satiric comedies set in contemporary London instead of the Ovidian romantic comedies made popular by Lyly. Religious Songs A fourth type of song in plays acted by children's troupes was the religious song-a hymn or prayer, usually sung by a chorus. As most of the children's companies were groups of boy choristers, they were accustomed to singing hymns or prayers in choral ensembles for religious services, so that consider- able time and energy could have been spared by their using the same songs in dramatic productions. Thus, a number of plays contain hymns or prayers, usually at the end, which could have been used for devotional purposes. For example, the "Hymnus" at the end of Act III of Sapienta Solomonis is a Latin verse rendering of Psalm 72. In other plays, where the lyrics are not given, 103 almost any religious selection would fit the context, as in Godly Queen Hester, where Hester asks her chapel to "Syng some holy himpne [sic] to spede us this day" (1904: 1. 861). Many of these religious songs come at the ends of plays, invoking blessings for the Queen, the court, and sometimes the com- mons; this type of song has little relevance to the dramatic action but is highly relevant to the theatrical occasion of a court play, the function of which was to praise or flatter the sovereign and, by extension, the members of the court and even the country as a whole. None of the Paul's plays produced after 1599 concludes with this prayer for the health and well-being of the sovereign and nobility, with the possible exception of Marston's Antonio's Revenge, which concludes with a request for "a solemne hymne .. . /To close the last act of my vengeance." The request and the hymn which must have followed it underscore the revengers' desire for purification, and the dramatic relevance of the hymn probably precluded the conventional prayer for the sovereign. Other plays use final songs, not necessarily religious, for dramatic effects, and such songs are usually inte- grated with the theme and action. Thus, The Maid's Metamorphosis concludes with a "roundelay" of g