aspects of Byrd's approach to word-setting (without, however, referring to Brett,

'Word-Setting in the Songs of Byrd', PRMA, xcviii (1971-2)); and proceeds to Campion
and 'measured music'. Here she rather surprisingly omits Campion's definitions in
Observations in the Art of English Poesie (1602) of certain kinds of musical poetry, especially 'of
Ditties and Odes', 'which we may call Lyricall, because they are apt to be soong to an
instrument' (Chapter 8), and 'of Anacreontick Verse', which is 'passing gracefull in our

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English toong, and will excellently fit the subject of a MadrigalC (Chapter 9), references
which, coming from such a positivist theorist, I should have thought important to
furthering the argument of Miss Maynard's book.
One of the major differences between types of song as a result of context is to be found in
the solo song of roughly 1597 to 1630. On the one hand, there are the subjective,
non-functional lute songs forming the large majority of Dowland's and other composers'
publications; on the other, the dramatic, functional songs of Ferrabosco, Lanier, Johnson
and their successors, which were intended primarily for masques and plays but sometimes
also found their way into undesignated songbooks. Commentary on the interrelationship
and development of the music and poetry for each is to be found elsewhere, for example in
Elise Bickford Jorgens, The Well-Tun'd Word (Minneapolis, 1982; see Music & Letters, lxiv
(1983), 113-15). Miss Maynard's approach, in contrast to that of Dr. Jorgens, whom she
does not mention, is to concentrate in the first instance on types of song composed by
Dowland and Ferrabosco and then, as a kind of climactic finale, to draw all the lyric
threads together by scrutinizing the ways in which Shakespeare employed song. She
concludes that 'Shakespeare's use of song was at all times proportioned to his dramatic
means and purpose; in the last plays [viz. The Tempest], ncher in theatrical resources,
unparalleled in their imaginative span, it reached its consummation' (p. 223). I would not
disagree.
CHRISTOPHER WILSON

English Renaissance Song. Edward Doughtie. pp. 185. (Twayne, Boston, Mass., 1986,
£19.95.) [Macmillan]
To what extent is the experience of art-songs a musical one? Is the poetic text merely or
mainly a catalyst for musical composition or contrafactum, absorbed by rather than
existing with the music? If music is by nature necessarily predominant, then, for example,
the emergence, or historical need, of monody and declamatory song might serve conversely
to reinforce the premise that song abstracts, rather than expresses, a text, since they began
at a time when, it is consistently maintained today, the union of music and poetry achieved
consummate heights never before reached. I am, of course, referring to the sixteenth and
not to the nineteenth century. Renaissance monody, it might be argued, was invented to
replace the musico-verbal inadequacies of art song. Why, then, did Shakespeare not
employ it in his dramatically integrated songs in, say, Hamlet or The Tempest? Or why did a
composer like Campion, who was obsessed by verbal rhythm and overall textual meaning,
eschew declamation for the most part? Apart from the historical fact that the art of
Shakespeare and Campion lay retrospectively in the Renaissance, to answer such questions
it would be necessary to examine the properties and disparate (changing) aspects of
English Renaissance song.
In his new book on English Renaissance song, Edward Doughtie starts with the text, or
rather with the potentiality of the text for music. He delivers a historical as well as an
exploratory, descriptive account, proceeding from the prefatory chapters on the nature of
the music-poetry get-together to an overview of their existence during the period
(c.1516-1630), followed by largely derived coalescent commentary on Whythome,
word-setting in some consort songs by Byrd and others, Italian parodical verse and the
English madrigal, and finally the lute songs of Dowland and Campion in particular.
Professor Doughtie says in his preface that his book is intended to inform literary readers
about the mutual influences music and poetry had on each other during the Renaissance.
Nowhere is the metamorphosis of poem into song more continuous and predictable than
in the English madrigal. Here, not only is the life of the text changed but its very existence
modified as the music, with its figurative word-painting, harmonic switches and other

266
devices, assumes an illustrative conventionality separate from the emotional immediacy,
rhythms and shape of the poem, to such an extent that the poem as poem is no longer
functional—a point, one might suggest, affirmed by the instrumental tendency of most
madrigals 'apt for violls and voyces'. This easily explains why English madrigalists
preferred not to set poems with an obvious and continuing life of their own. As Professor
Doughtie asserts: 'Much of the verse in the madrigal books is . . . mere poesia per musica, and

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is not of much interest apart from its music' (p.-4lO3); and this is why, for example, the
editor of The New Oxford Book of English Light Verse (1978), Kingsley Amis, is mistaken in his
serious textual criticism of the nonsense poem 'Ha ha! ha ha! This world doth pass' from
Weelkes's Ayeres or Phantaslicke Spirites (1608), since it is unhelpful to consider poem and
madrigal as separate entities. By examining the music of a madrigal in relation to the text it
sets, and not vice versa, Professor Doughtie maintains, 'we may revise our own
expectations about verse found in the madrigals' (p. 107). With the frequently cited help of
Joseph Kerman and Philip Brett, he is largely persuasive.
The importance of poem to music in the English lute song is variable, producing an
inevitably stratified aesthetic response from both the hearer and, presumably, the
composer. If the music expresses the imagery and mood of the whole poem in each and
every stanza, then, it seems to me, the music subsumes the poem, denying it a separate
existence, as if the poem had been made for song. Professor Doughtie puts it another way. A
composer who, in a strophic setting, does not pervert the expression of his text in
succeeding stanzas by incongruous word-painting etc. in the first, produces a formal
setting:

Most of the strophic airs of Dowland and the other composers of airs are formal in this manner. The music
may be expressive of the general mood, but it is usually content to provide a melodic medium by which the
poem may be clearly heard and understood, (p. 127)

Conversely, in my view a song which fails to meet the expectations of the complete text
releases its obligations upon the poem, so that coexistence and separate identity persist
conjointly. The poem may be either sung or read, as Campion stated. Professor Doughtie
finds examples among Dowland's ayres. One of these is 'From silent night' (1612, No. 10),
which, following Professor Doughtie's commentary, clearly illustrates the point. Dowland
selected three stanzas from a longer poem but

only the first can be comfortably sung to the music. The poem was clearly not made for singing . . . [the] song
is in effect a through-composed setting of the first stanza only. Freed from the constraints of strophic setting,
Dowland creates an expressive blend of lute song, consort song, and madrigal. The accompaniment consists
of lute with bass and treble viols; the melody . . . has the breadth and solemnity of a consort song without its
formal restraints. And several of the expressive devices associated with the madrigal appear with more
frequency than they do in most strophic airs. (p. 134)

This is clearly generic transformation in which the poem, because of the music, loses its
original integrity.
Thomas Whythorne's understanding of the interfusion of music and poetry, according
to Professor Doughtie, is formal. 'Music can give a generalizing distance to the substance of
the poem, sometimes tone, sometimes rhetorical point, but rarely emotional expressiveness'
(p. 61). This is meant to be a comparative rather than analytical point. The reason why
Professor Doughtie chooses to draw conclusions about the idiosyncratic Whythorne is so
that he can compare him with Campion and so 'realize the great changes that occurred in
poetic style and in the relationship between words and music' (p. 46). It would be a
mistake, however, to come to general conclusions about the changing attitudes to
word-setting betwen 1571 and 1601, as Doughtie hopes, in preference to making particular
observations about the individual differences between Whythorne and Campion. Both were
poet-composers; both were chronologically unrepresentative; but they are otherwise
dissimilar.
Like so many others before him, Professor Doughtie sees Campion as the culminating
Renaissance maker of words for music. Moreover, he views him as primarily a poet,
dismissing both his musical and poetic theory as trivia, and his music as comparatively

267
insignificant. Consequently, he chooses to look at a selection of the sixteen or so lyrics from
Campion's songbooks 'cloathed in Musicke by others', adopting a comparative stance.
Dowland's setting of'I must complain' (1603, No. 17) is a good example of music
subsuming the text, detracting from a poem as visual/aural art and compensating by
making something (perhaps) better and certainly new. This is common in Dowland. His
melodic rests, integrated accompaniment and rhetorical line are musically persuasive.

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Campion, on the other hand, is seemingly disappointing. Accordingto Professor Doughtie,
he has got his setting wrong. There is some truth in this, but Doughtie's peremptory
dismissal of Campion's setting betrays a superficial approach. At first sight 'simplicity
prevails'. Doughtie's interpretation of the rhythm, however, is simplistic. He asserts that
the 'duple time music follows the poetic meter, with accented syllables falling on
downbeats', so that the 'four square symmetry in this instance becomes rigidity' (p. 155),
causing word meaning and musical continuity to disagree. But the musical-poetic rhythm
of Campion's ayre, which Dowland of course completely and so characteristically
submerges in his music, is not rigidly four-square but springingly alternates 3/2 and 3/1, a
procedure that to most Elizabethans was commonly associated with galliards. The
musico-poetic rhythm (of the first two lines) may be represented as in Ex. 1. The opening

Ex. 1

^ J J |J- J J J_J J J |o
I must com - plain, yet doe en - ioy my Love

J J J |J- J J J J J |o
She B too fane, too rich in love - ly parts

chord affirms this reading, since it gives definition to the opening silence needed as
compensation for the beat 'missing' at the repeat. (The music after the repeat does not need
the extra chord since the silence occurs between two notes.) The dotted minim-plus-
crotchet rhythm, which Professor Doughtie totally ignores, is, it seems to me, the obvious
quantitative clue to the interpretation of the musico-poetic rhythm. Only in the last,
epigrammatic line does Campion subtly and purposefully 'smooth out' the dotted rhythm.
Doughtie is similarly inadequate in his over-hasty analysis of'Blame not my cheeks', whose
quasi-galliard rhythm he does not understand: 'Campion's music is plain and straightfor-
ward, in slow triple time, in a minor tonality, with chordal lute accompaniment' (p. 150).
So what? Doughtie is wrong to expect too much emotional expressiveness in Campion's
music. In any case, word-painting and Renaissance music-emotion conventions were of
little consequence to Campion (see, for example, the preface to A Booke of Ayres, 1601),
although he did not abandon them altogether. As I have already indicated, he was more
concerned widi musico-poetic rhythmic interplay and reciprocity. To what extent does he
succeed in giving these two ayres, among others, an extra temporal dimension through the
galliard rhythm? To emphasize the pictorial or even emotional differences at the expense of
the rhythmic, between Campion and, say, Dowland, is to do Campion a disservice and miss
the point. Professor Doughtie should not perhaps have been so summarily dismissive, in
keeping with most commentators, of Campion's Observations (1602): a treatise on metrical
experimentation at least tells us something about a writer's attitude, if not his mind.
Professor Doughtie's book is something of a disappointment. It does not tell the
informed literary student much about music that he would not know already; the musical
reader will find useful summaries but will need to return to the cited references and
authorities.
CHRISTOPHER WILSON

268