Elizabethan Folk Songs

Folk songs are part of the oral tradition of a country. They were not written nor formally composed. Instead, they were passed on from generation to generation, within families, villages, towns, and cities. When people traveled from place to place, they would carry their songs with them, and they would hear different songs in different places. Sometimes new words were set to old tunes, sometimes new tunes were created for old words, and sometimes they would be written down and collected for posterity.

In the Middle Ages and later, troubadours and balladeers in England, France, Italy, and other parts of Europe made a living by performing from town to town. They sang songs and often accompanied themselves on simple, portable musical instruments, in very much the same way that folk singers do these days.

Like the folk singers of our own time, these traveling musicians and poets sang songs that could be comic or tragic. The songs told stories, celebrated the joys of love, described the pain of separation and loss, and illuminated the duties, pleasures, and hardships of the everyday lives of people. Sometimes their songs related events that had just happened-troubadours and balladeers were early news broadcasters, and often the first that people would hear of an important national event, a murder, or a family feud, would be from the mouth of a traveling singer.

Traveling singers were also the tabloid newspapers and talk radio hosts of their time. They spread gossip, scandal, and wild exaggerations. From time to time, they probably told outright lies. In Elizabethan times, balladeers would often accompany groups of "strolling players," who put on plays and entertainments, creating a makeshift stage on the backboard of a cart. The balladeers often took part in the plays, and their songs would punctuate the dramatic action as well as being a source of entertainment themselves.

These traveling musicians were looked upon as powerful people. They influenced public opinion, and their goodwill or ill will could make or break reputations. As William Shakespeare's (1564-1616) Hamlet says of the players who come to perform at Elsinore Castle: "Let them be well used, for they are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time; after your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live . . . "

Published Collections of Folk Songs

The most famous collection of early English folk songs is Percy's Reliques, by Thomas Percy (published in 1765), which contains verse tales, songs, and traditional ballads from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries, all arranged in chronological order. Francis Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1857-1868) is another valuable source, as is the Roxburghe Collection (1710). It is important to remember when looking through such collections that a song which appears as "sixteenth century" or "seventeenth century" may have its roots in something much more ancient.

Folk Songs in the Theater

We find folk songs too embedded in the works of the Elizabethan dramatists-William Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Feste's songs, "O Mistress Mine" and "When That I was and a Little Tiny Boy" from Twelfth Night may have been heavily adapted by Shakespeare, but clearly their roots were much older. The same is true of "It Was a Lover and His Lass" from As You Like It, "Take O Take Those Lips Away" from Measure for Measure, and the "Willow Song" from Othello. When Ophelia goes insane in Hamlet, Gertrude describes her "singing snatches of old songs," and when she wanders on to the stage, she starts to sing a ballad, "Bonny Sweet Robin," which would definitely have been known to Shakespeare's own audience. When Lear goes mad, he too breaks into fragments of old songs: "Child Roland to the Dark Tower Came" exists in many forms outside Shakespeare, and "Then They for Sudden Joy Did Weep," with its mention of Little Bo Peep, is a children's song that must have been familiar to Elizabethan theatergoers.

The plays and entertainments of Shakespeare's friend and fellow-dramatist Ben Jonson (1573-1637) were mostly satirical comedies, and they contained many songs and ballads of the time. Some were written by Jonson himself, and some were well known to his audience. "A Caveat for Cutpurses," which appears in his Bartholomew Fair, is a ribald warning to careless people who dangle their purses in the way of thieves, and an even more dire warning to the thieves themselves of the consequences of crime: the gallows. This song is also found in the Roxburghe Collection.

Folk Songs in the Royal Court

The folk songs of Elizabethan England were not confined to the streets, the theatres, and the alehouses. They found their way into the houses of the wealthy and noble, and into the court of Queen Elizabeth herself. Among the Queen's courtiers were a large number of musicians and composers who took the folk songs of the period and set them in the form of airs (accompanied by lutes, citterns, orpharions, and recorders) and as madrigals-songs for unaccompanied groups of voices.

Composers' Settings of Folk Songs

William Byrd (1543-1623), the Queen's Organist in the Chapel Royal, created many such settings in his Songs of Sundrie Natures, published in 1589. "Though Amaryllis Dance in Green" and "Go No More A-Rushing" are both typical of his pastoral style, and demonstrate how the Elizabethan folk song could be transformed into something fit for the Queen herself. The First Booke of Songes or Ayres of Foure Parts (1597) by John Dowland (1562-1626), was immensely popular and became the model for all other lute song collections. Most of Dowland's early lute songs are based on dance forms and rhythms, and pieces such as "If My Complaints" and "Flow My Tears" added words to existing tunes borrowed from popular ballads. The composer known simply as "Mr. Ascue" set one of the many existing ballads of Robin Hood to a lute accompaniment. "Up Tails All" by Giles Farnaby (1563-1640) is an example of a form taken intact from the folk repertoire. Thomas Campion (1567-1620) used ballad forms and other simple folk melodies in his songs, "Never Weather-Beaten Saile," "Turn Back You Wanton Flyer," "When Thou Must Home," and many others.

Byrd, Dowland, Farnaby, Campion, and other great Elizabethans like Thomas Tallis (1505-1585) and Orlando Gibbons (1583-1625) adapted and reinvented the folk song and made it into something rich and gracious. But some Elizabethan folk songs and ballads have come down to us intact. When we hear songs such as "I Cannot Keep My Wife at Home," "John Come Kiss Me Now," "Put on Thy Sark on Monday," "The Market Is Done," and "Mall Symes," we catch the flavor of another Elizabethan England, with its alehouses, bustling streets, country fairs, and marketplaces with their hurdy-gurdies and screeching shawms, domestic squabbles, love, and lust for life. It speaks to us across the centuries, and its world feels somehow very like our own.