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Leah S Veronese, A New Copy of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116: A Cavalier Cover Version, The Review of English Studies, 2025;, hgaf002, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgaf002
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Abstract
This article records a new witness of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 in Bodleian MS Ashmole 36, 37. The poem is a copy of Henry Lawes’ song-setting which adds six new lines to the poem. The song-setting can also be found in NYPL Drexel MS 4257, although there are significant variations between the two copies. The sonnet takes on new political relevance when read in the context of the Royalist Elias Ashmole’s miscellany, Bodleian MS Ashmole 36, 37, amongst material from the early 1640s: Shakespeare’s text is transformed from praise of romantic constancy to political constancy. This article provides a transcription of the new witness, reads the text in the local context of Bodleian MS Ashmole 36, 37, and then considers the setting in the wider context of the circulation of Shakespearean songs in manuscript and domestic musical performance during the Interregnum. The text is politicized at a local level in the context of Bodleian MS Ashmole 36, 37 and in the wider context of domestic performance during the Interregnum when the public performance of music was banned. This new copy contributes to our understanding of the circulation of Shakespeare’s poetry in manuscript, Shakespearean reception during the mid-seventeenth century, and Royalist counterculture.
In the nineteenth century, when William Henry Black was embroiled in cataloguing the mammoth Bodleian MS 36, 37, it appears he may not have read past the opening lines of a poem beginning ‘Self blyndeing Error seize all those minds’. After the first two lines it becomes quickly apparent that the poem is in fact an adaptation of Shakespeare’s famous Sonnet 116, ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds’. Black recorded the poem, in his catalogue of Ashmole manuscripts bequeathed to the Bodleian, not inaccurately as ‘On constancy in love’.1 Black had found Ashmole’s manuscript collections ‘far more voluminous in their contents’ than expected, and to add insult to injury Professor Thomas Gaisford, curator of the Bodleian, had recommended that Black try to cut down what was becoming a proportionally lengthy catalogue.2 Under the circumstances, it is perhaps unsurprising that Black’s summaries tend to be brief.3 In Black’s catalogue, the poem is unattributed to, or even recognizable as, Shakespeare. Combined with the poem’s unfamiliar first line, the catalogue description is probably the reason why this copy of Sonnet 116 in the Bodleian has never been recorded as a witness until now.4
And yet, the adaptation of Sonnet 116 itself has been known about since at least 1936, when Willa McClung Evans first formally attributed a song-setting of Sonnet 116 in NYPL Drexel MS 4257 to Henry Lawes.5 Although, as I will address below, there are significant variations between the two copies. Lawes’ setting has been paid very little sustained critical attention. It is sometimes added for a dash of colour to surveys of Shakespeare’s circulation in manuscript, as the novelty of a song-setting of a sonnet.6 The lack of more detailed analysis may be because the additional lines are not the most aesthetically pleasing. But, more pertinently, perhaps it is because the political charge of the additional lines is less apparent in the book of songs NYPL Drexel MS 4257 than it is in the context of Bodleian MS Ashmole 36, 37. The main exception to this critical narrative is Faith Acker’s reading of Lawes’ adaptation as a Royalist ‘revision’, which ‘[imposes] political and social values upon the text’.7 This political context becomes much clearer when read in the collection of the Royalist Elias Ashmole, surrounded by poems from the English Civil War: the additions conscript Shakespeare’s text from the praise of romantic constancy to political constancy. This article records for the first time the existence of another manuscript copy of Sonnet 116, and provides another literary reading of Lawes’ setting in the context of Bodleian MS Ashmole 36, 37.
Shakespeare is not an author famously associated with manuscript circulation. The most recent attention to Shakespearean manuscript evidence has been focused on dramatic fragments, the DEx Database of Dramatic Extracts.8 This new copy of Sonnet 116 in Bodleian MS Ashmole 36, 37 is a rare example of the circulation of Shakespeare’s poetry in manuscript. In contrast to the modern popularity of Sonnet 116, the poem does not appear to have circulated widely in the early modern period. Before now it was believed only to be found in NYPL Drexel MS 4257.9 This copy in Bodleian MS Ashmole 36, 37 provides a second witness to its circulation.10 This copy does not appear to be an example of the ‘sugared sonnets’ circulated amongst Shakespeare’s friends, to which Francis Meres tantalizingly gestured in 1598.11 It does, however, offer us crucial insight into the next generation of Shakespearean reception in the mid-seventeenth century. This new witness contributes both to the broader picture of Shakespeare’s reception during the Interregnum and to Royalist counterculture. Both in terms of the reception of Shakespeare’s poetry in the 1640s, and the impulse to expand, adapt, and recontextualize the sonnets, Lawes’ setting is comparable to John Benson’s infamous 1640 Poems which retitles, reorders, and even merges individual sonnets into longer poems.12 Whereas Benson’s edition, however, focuses the reader’s attention on the romantic sense of Sonnet 116, renaming it ‘The Picture of True Love’, the additions of the Lawes setting redirect the poem from the personal to the political.13 As evidence of the continued engagement with Shakespearean texts during the mid-seventeenth century, this new copy of Sonnet 116 also laterally connects with the recent identification of John Milton’s copy of the First Folio, which Claire L. Bourne and Jason Scott-Warren argue was annotated between the 1620s to the early 1650s.14 Whilst having an appreciation for Henry Lawes in common, Milton and Ashmole sit on opposite ends of the political spectrum in the Civil War. The new copy of Sonnet 116 speaks to the political repurposing of Shakespeare by Royalists during (at least) the early 1640s. This is pleasingly appropriate for the very sonnet from which Arthur Marotti took the title of his landmark article on the political potential of early modern sonnets.15
The article is divided into three main sections. In the first section I will provide a transcription of the copy in Bodleian MS Ashmole 36, 37, briefly introduce both manuscripts, and set out the variations between the two copies we now have. In the second section I will read Lawes’ setting in the specific context of Bodleian MS Ashmole 36, 37, before zooming out in the third section to consider Lawes’ setting in the wider context of the circulation of Shakespearean songs and domestic musical performance during the Interregnum.
THE TEXT IN BODLEIAN MS ASHMOLE 36, 37 AND THE MANUSCRIPTS
Bodleian MS Ashmole 36, 37 (hereafter the Bodleian Manuscript) is a behemoth folio ‘consisting of a great variety of papers, to the number of 348 leaves; which were bound together in Ashmole’s time’.16 The poem can be found in a single-volume miscellany which was bound into an aggregate with miscellaneous separates. The copy of Lawes’ song-setting which appears in the Bodleian Manuscript varies from NYPL Drexel MS 4257 (hereafter the Drexel Manuscript). The Drexel Manuscript is a manuscript collection of songs belonging to the musician John Gamble (d.1687). The compositions in the manuscript are predominantly by Henry Lawes, but also include songs by mid-seventeenth-century musicians William Lawes (1602–1645), John Wilson (1595–1674), Nicholas Lanier (d.1666), William Webb (d.1657), Robert Johnson (c.1583–1633), and John Gamble himself.17 It appears Lawes did not print the song in any edition of his Ayres and Dialogues.18
The text in the Bodleian Manuscript is as follows:
The most significant variations between the Drexel Manuscript and the Bodleian Manuscript are at l.6: ‘prevents’; ‘perverts’; l.7: ‘Oh noe Loue’; ‘Noe, Loue’; l.14: ‘Within his bynding Circle compas rownd’; ‘Within his bendeinge sickles compase come’; l.15: ‘holds it out’; ‘beares it out; l.18: “nere”; “euer”. In the Drexel Manuscript the text appears below Lawes’ score; the Bodleian Manuscript is a copy of just the text.
There is some overlap in content between the Bodleian Manuscript and the Drexel Manuscript, however, much like their respective copies of Sonnet 116, there are variations between the texts. There are three other texts found in both manuscripts: Sir John Suckling’s ‘A Ballad Upon A Wedding’, ‘Old Poets Hippocrene admire’, and ‘Let other beauties have the power’. The slight differences between the copies suggests that the two manuscripts are not directly connected—for example, whereas the copy of Suckling’s ‘A Ballad Upon A Wedding’ in the Drexel Manuscript begins ‘I tell thee Dick that I haue beene’ [emphasis mine], the Bodleian Manuscript has ‘I tell thee Dick where I have byne’ [emphasis mine].20 While there is not an obvious connection between the manuscripts themselves, however, it is possible that Ashmole may have come across both the work of Henry Lawes and John Gamble in Oxford. Ian Spink describes John Gamble as an imitator of Henry Lawes, with ‘less ability, sometimes to the point of downright incompetence’.21 Despite this fact, it appears he ‘won great renown among Oxford musicians’ in the 1650s.22 Ashmole does not mention either John Gamble or Henry Lawes in his diaries, but this Oxford-based community of Gamble fans seems a likely point of connection between Ashmole and Gamble. Ian Spink also suggests that as a member of the Chapel Royal it is likely that Henry Lawes accompanied the court to Oxford in the 1640s.23 Spink argues that ‘the copying and circulation of some of his anthems and psalm settings points to a period in Oxford at this time’.24 Ashmole’s copy of Lawes’ vernacular song may further contribute to this body of evidence for Lawes’ presence in Oxford.
Ashmole received musical training at an early age. Thomas Pagit organized musical tuition for him in singing, virginals, and the organ.25 Ashmole records his own singing in his diary (often as a seduction strategy in his dramatically on-again off-again affair with ‘Mrs March’ who once bestowed a love-token of a Newark shilling on him ‘for singing’).26 His manuscript collections reflect his interest in music and songs, a standout example being the wonderful little poem ‘On Lutte Strings Bitten By A Cat’.27 Ashmole’s ballad collection also forms one of the main sources for the Broadside Ballads Online.28 I will return to the musical context of the sonnet-setting in the final section of the article.
I will refer to the text throughout the article as ‘Lawes’ setting’. This is not intended to suggest that Henry Lawes himself adapted the text—although Acker describes Lawes as ‘a borrower and an adapter’ of Shakespeare’s sonnet.29 The Bodleian Manuscript does not provide evidence about who adapted the sonnet. Willa McClung Evans suggests there are ‘some sixty poets’ Lawes collaborated with, ‘any of whom he might have called upon for changes in the text had he so desired’.30 The likely practical purpose of the additions of Sonnet 116 was to expand the text to allow for three verses of song. I use ‘Lawes’ setting’ to describe the probable collaboration between Lawes and an unknown poet.
READING LAWES’ SETTING IN THE CONTEXT OF ASHMOLE 36, 37
Reading Lawes’ setting in the local context of the Bodleian Manuscripts opens up its political potential. Ashmole’s verse-collection in the Bodleian Manuscript ranges from Jacobean material up to the Restoration, including a printed copy of his own panegyric upon Charles II (‘Sol in Ascendente’). Towards the end of the manuscript there is a gathering of his own verses written in his own hand, reinscribing his personal connection with the manuscript.31 The manuscript opens with verses on several Civil War battles; the Civil War remains a persistent presence throughout the manuscript.32
The text of Lawes’ setting is found in a single miscellany, a gathering of 18 leaves which was bound in the aggregate (Fols 21 v to Fol. 39 v). The poem appears to have been quite professionally produced: it is written in a beautifully consistent secretary hand (notwithstanding a few occasional strike-throughs) and the paper has been folded as a writing guide. The poem begins with a flamboyant capital S, with plumes of elaborate ascenders and descenders. The gathering includes Jacobean material (such as two elegies on the death of Lieutenant Colonel Sir Thomas Thornehurst who died in 1627); Caroline material such as a poem on Felton’s Arraignment (dating it after 1628); and poems responding to events from the early 1640s such as Sir John Denham’s elegy on the Earl of Strafford (1593–1641) and the Royalist satirist John Cleveland’s response to the controversial 1640 Et Cetera Oath ‘A dialogue of two zealotts’.33 Although the manuscript does not provide evidence for the composition date of Lawes’ setting, it provides us with two contexts of reading: first, around at least the early 1640s in the original gathering, and secondly after the Restoration when the whole manuscript was bound. My reading of Lawes’ setting in the context of the Bodleian Manuscript follows Joshua Eckhardt’s approach to miscellany analysis. Eckhardt recognizes that ‘verse collectors put texts in new contexts, changing their frames of reference and, so, their referential capabilities’ and pays particular attention to how ‘manuscript collectors politicized and recontextualized’ texts.34 Angus Vine similarly emphasizes that ‘early modern compilers understood transcription … as a process of regrouping and reordering’.35 Lawes may not have written his setting of Sonnet 116 in the 1640s, however, I will be arguing that the ‘frame of reference’ for the text is reshaped by the context of Ashmole’s verse collection.
Ashmole’s own political allegiances shape the manuscript as a whole, but also this particular gathering. The gathering immediately follows from the printed copy of Ashmole’s own Restoration panegyric ‘Sol in Ascendente’. The Royalist Sir John Denham’s elegy on the Royalist military hero the Earl of Strafford keeps company with poems by the Royalists William Davenant and Frances Quarles.36 Just four leaves before Lawes’ setting of Sonnet 116 is a ‘Christmas Caroll’, complete with a few bars of music. Ashmole also had his own stab at a rebellious Christmas poem ‘Upon the neglect of celebrating Christmas’, which is in the later gathering of his own verses.37 The subject matter of Christmas celebration is politically controversial enough—as Stacey Jocoy Houck emphasizes, ‘regardless of stated political allegiances in the texts, the singing or printing of any song about Christmas in this period was considered to be in defiance of Parliamentary decree’.38 The fact that the verses proudly declare that ‘Christmas … still maintains / The tytle of a king’ further underlines the political defiance of the ‘Christmas Caroll’.39 The carol calls the audience to arms in a drinking battle, ‘Arme, arme, arme’ and ‘Dreadlesse of harme / drawe hoggesheade drye / let flaggons flye’, providing the singers another opportunity to sing, scoff, and drink in the face of Parliamentarian rule:
The description of the generous ‘skinker’, a tapster or drinking vessel, who ‘Rules without controule’ creates a surreal composite: an image of decidedly un-Puritan liberality, and a jibe at Republican leadership.41 Lois Potter’s observation that Royalist ‘drinking rituals … had become both a secular liturgy and way of parodying the authority of a government they refused to recognise’ is very applicable to this ‘Christmas Caroll’.42 The inclusion of a few bars of score suggests that this copy was intended to be sung. The defiant drinking song still echoes, as you turn the leaves of the manuscript and come across Lawes’ setting.
Found in this vehemently Royalist context, the opening four lines of Lawes’ setting begin to bristle with a new relevance:
Lawes’ setting clearly shifts the opening of the sonnet from a reflection on love to a reflection on the ability to discern truth from error—a theme which the setting will return to at the end, ‘If this be Error and not truth approved’. Shakespeare’s ‘marriage of true minds’ is completely excised from the setting. In the context of this particular manuscript, ‘all those minds’ seems to have more of a specific target in mind. The primary sense of ‘all those’ is the category of those ‘whoe … call that loue / Which alters when it alteration finds’. Before we even reach the second line, however, in this manuscript we may already assume that it is Republican minds who are seized by ‘self blyndeing Error’. The opening is comparable to Lovelace’s political complaint in ‘To Lucasta from Prison’ that ‘now an universall mist / Of Error is spread or’e each breast’.43 The setting amplifies the pre-existing legal metaphor of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116: the legal connotations of ‘appellation’, (‘ground of appeal, title, or claim’; ‘A designation, name, or title given’), introduces the fraught subject of legal legitimacy.44 In the Bodleian Manuscript this metaphor might invite the reader to question anyone else with a legally questionable claim to authority. The error itself, of love altering ‘when it alteration finds’, also reads differently when surrounded by Royalist poetry, as if reprimanding those who have betrayed the cause, whose political allegiance ‘alters when it alteration finds’.45 This in turn inflects ‘Loue alters not with his breafe hours & weekes / But beares it out, euen to the Edge of doome’, as if imagining a political forbearance which will make it through the indefinite trials of the Interregnum.
What was implicit in the first three lines becomes more clumsily explicit in the setting’s next addition:
Rather than disguising the unexpected segue, ‘Not much unlike’ counterintuitively foregrounds the setting’s translation of Shakespeare’s sonnet from love to truth and interpretation. Willa McClung Evans came close to thinking about the political implications of the setting when she speculated that the ‘imaginative force’ of whoever was responsible for the text of Lawes’ setting ‘was provoked by intense religious or moral feeling … and could no doubt have wielded an able pen in religious controversy’.46 These two lines by themselves are so general that they could happily slot into any Reformation polemic without too much difficulty. Evans tellingly describes the ‘anonymity’ of the setting: ‘He changed a very personal sonnet into a song of anonymity, the marriage of true minds concerning him but little, the sin of self-blinding error a great deal’.47 Acker also reads the addition as ‘[transforming] the poem into a cautionary tale equating false love, or disloyalty to God’s ordained king, with heresy’.48 In the context of the Bodleian Manuscript, however, following from poems explicitly reflecting on the religious controversies of the early 1640s, these malleable lines may take on more immediate local relevance.49 In Cleveland’s poem ‘A dialogue of two zealotts’, which is written in the same hand as Lawes’ setting, the two Puritan speakers set about analysing the infamous ‘et cetera’ clause: ‘(Et cetera) god blesse vs which they conster’.50 The Et Cetera Oath was to be taken by all members of the clergy, which Charles I himself personally requested from Convocation in 1640. Besides the King’s intervention in Convocation, the controversy of the oath hinged on the phrase:
I will not endeavour by myself or any other, directly or indirectly, to bring in any popish doctrine contrary to that which is so established; nor will I ever give my consent to alter the government of this church, by archbishops, bishops, deans and archdeacons, et cetera as it stands now established.51
The ‘et cetera’ was added after the Oath was agreed upon by Convocation. Another crucial amendment made after the agreement was the removal of the word ‘popish’. This omission led Puritans to fear that ‘I will not … bring in any doctrine contrary to that which is so established’ might refer to Puritan doctrine.52 The controversy therefore revolved around textual ambiguity and close attention to textual detail.
Cleveland’s satire foregrounds the textual interpretation of the ‘two zealotts’. They ‘conster’ the Oath, ‘to analyse or trace the grammatical construction of a sentence … specifically to do this in the study of a foreign and especially a classical language’.53 ‘Rogers thus divides the text’ like the divisio of a sermon—a very appropriate activity for a sermon-loving Puritan and an even more appropriate task topically given that the Puritans were extrapolating the wider potential application of the Et Cetera Oath.54 Cleveland gleefully parodies their micro-analysis, before pulling out the second punchline—the second ‘zealott’ does not overanalyse or misinterpret the Et Cetera Oath, but simply has not read it at all:
This is hypocritical, hyperbolic piety which favours fasting over exegesis. The themes of over-analysis and hypocrisy in Cleveland’s poem might add shade and colour to the vague outline of religious controversy in Lawes’ setting. Lawes’ setting also might feed back into Cleveland’s poem—is the first zealot ‘[perverting] the sense’ of the Et Cetera Oath?
The variant of Lawes’ setting in the Bodleian Manuscript ‘pervert’ makes the act of misinterpretation more of a wilful contortion of scripture, than ‘prevent’ found in the Drexel Manuscript. The most immediately obvious senses of ‘pervert’ in this context are textual misinterpretation—‘To turn aside (a text, argument, concept, etc.) from the correct meaning, use, or purpose’—and detrimental religious conversion—‘to turn (a person) away from a religious belief regarded as true, to one held to be false. Opposed to convert’. 56 But ‘pervert’ has more general moral connotations, all of which suggest wilful corruption: ‘to interfere with or distort … to impede, thwart (justice, etc.)’; ‘to change for the worse; to subvert, ruin, or destroy’; ‘To turn aside (a person, the mind, etc.) from right opinion or action; to lead astray; to exercise a harmful influence on; to misguide; to corrupt’.57 The setting’s rewriting of the couplet from ‘if this be error and upon me proved’ to ‘if this be error and not truth approved’ further contributes to a sense of orthodoxy, rather than the flexible humanist ‘proving’ of a subjective first-person speaker. The missing subject for ‘Truth approved’, presumably sacrificed by necessity of scansion, prompts the question approved by whom? For Acker, this may be Christ.58 ‘Truth approved’, however, also creates the sense of an implied and shared understanding between the reader and the speaker of what is truth and what is error. This shared ability to discern becomes politicized in Ashmole’s manuscript.
Arthur Marotti, writing on the circulation of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 2 in manuscript, describes how:
[BL MS Add. 30982] inserts the Shakespearean sonnet into a run of poems that generalize the moral meaning of experience and present love and courtship through both an academic and a Cavalier sensibility.59
The generalizing of love ‘through … a Cavalier sensibility’ is also very applicable to reading Lawes’ setting of Sonnet 116 in the Bodleian Manuscript, although it should be acknowledged that Nicholas McDowell has recently called for a reinvention of the term ‘cavalier’ as a literary category.60 When Sonnet 116 is read alongside poetry written by Royalists, and poems which respond to the events of the early 1640s, the content of Lawes’ song-setting seems to respond to this local context. The generalized gestures to religious conflict through flawed exegesis and martyrdom become infused with the more specific complaints of the Bodleian Manuscript—like the defiant ‘Christmas Caroll’ and Cleveland’s satire of Puritan responses to the 1640 Et Cetera Oath. At the very least, the proximity of this material to Lawes’ setting demonstrates the specific political context in which it was read. Similarly, the poem’s praise of romantic constancy becomes politically charged, reminiscent of Lovelace’s use of romantic love as a figure for political allegiance. A copy of ‘To Althea from Prison’ is in fact one of the opening poems in the Bodelian Manuscript.61 Read in the context of the 1640s, the assertions that ‘Loue alters not with his breafe hours & weekes / But beares it out, euen to the Edge of doome’ strikes a defiant tone. Read in a Restoration context, following Ashmole’s ‘Sol in Ascendente’, this perseverance glows with hindsight, tracing a line of political constancy through the ‘alteration’ of the Interregnum to the Restoration. The political context of the setting further develops beyond the Bodleian Manuscript, however, when considering one of its defining characteristics: it is a song.
READING LAWES’ SETTING IN AN INTERREGNUM CONTEXT
As a song-setting circulating in manuscript during the 1640s, Lawes’ setting should also be read in the context of the manuscript circulation of Shakespearean songs during the mid-seventeenth century. Sarah Lewridge has traced the circulation of songs from Shakespeare’s plays in manuscript during the closure of theatres from 1642 to 1660.62 Lewridge highlights that the Republican legislation on public music is a crucial context for this circulation: the Rogues Ban of 1649 and the Vagrants Ban of 1657 both prevented public musical performance. In this context ‘musical performance – particularly performance of song repertoire – could thrive only in clandestine or private circumstances’.63 Lewridge even cites none other than Henry Lawes as an example of former court musicians who survived during the Interregnum by working as music tutors and organizing private performances in domestic settings.64 John Gamble similarly kept himself afloat during the Interregnum by tuition and domestic performance.65 Lois Potter notes how ‘cultural rebellion was probably widespread’ during the Interregnum ‘whether it took the form of celebrating Christmas in private houses, singing ballads, or engaging in amateur theatricals’.66 Domestic musical performances by professional musicians could be added to this list of safely illicit activity during the Interregnum. Ashmole records in his diary the ‘first shew’ of one of William Davenant’s rarely permitted operatic entertainments in 1656, suggesting his continued interest in available musical performance during the period.67
Given the manuscript circulation of other Shakespearean songs for domestic performance during the Interregnum, and given the activities of Henry Lawes and John Gamble themselves, Lawes’ setting of Sonnet 116 takes on an inherently political dimension. These private concerts by former court musicians seem to be a highly likely performance context for the song-setting. The copy in the Drexel Manuscript, as Gamble’s own collection of song scores, speaks to this Interregnum counter-culture of domestic performance which both Henry Lawes and John Gamble were engaged in. Although the setting of Sonnet 116 did not make it into any print incarnation of Lawes’ Book of Ayres, the marketing of the Ayres and Dialogues during the Interregnum further demonstrates the political inflection of Lawes’ vernacular songs. The edition of Ayres and Dialogues printed c.1653–1658 contains an advert for other titles from the bookseller including King Charles his Tryall with his speech on the Scaffold to which is added several other speeches.68 The subtitle of each Book of Ayres also highlights Lawes’ role as court musician: ‘By Henry Lawes servant to his late Ma:tie in his publick and private musick.’69 JocoyHouck also observes that ‘Lawes also took special care to note the names of the textual author in the tables of contents’, creating ‘impressive lists of literary royalists’ which ‘reinforced Lawes’s defiant stance and asserted a monarchical presence in their frequent mention of “his majesty”’.70 Both Lawes and Gamble regained court employment in the Restoration: Lawes as Composer in the Private Musick for Lutes & Voices and Clerk of the Cheque to the Chapel Royal, and Gamble as a cornet player in the King’s wind band.71 Not only was the context of performance a soft form of counter-culture, but both Gamble who copied the song-setting and Lawes who composed it were Royalists, and the print circulation of Lawes’ music was politicized.
The broader manuscript collection of Elias Ashmole reflects the political context of the manuscript circulation of Shakespeare’s songs during the Interregnum. In Bodleian MS Ashmole 47, ‘Take those lips away’ from Measure for Measure is copied in Ashmole’s own hand.72 Only four leaves afterwards, on a page labelled ‘Songs’, Ashmole copied Alexander Brome’s 1647 Royalist drinking song—creatively entitled ‘The Royalist’. The song connects the acts of drinking and singing with the implied politics of the singers even more explicitly than the ‘Christmas Carrol’ of the Bodleian Manuscript:
From its opening the song is a toast to King Charles, inviting the reader into a companionable relationship with the Royalist speaker ‘Come pass about the Bowle to me’. Dosia Reichardt notes that toasts to the King were illegal by 1648, establishing a tone of political insurgency immediately.74 The image of the song of the caged bird connects the act of singing itself with the dire political situation of the singers: the ‘cage’ evokes both King Charles under house arrest, and his Royalist supporters in a ‘hole’. Singing becomes an act of political defiance: ‘Birde in a Cage may freely sing’. Ashmole copying a Shakespearean song a few pages before this Royalist drinking song demonstrates the wider political context in which he was collecting songs, and the political charge of singing.75 The image of the caged singing bird could just as well describe the clandestine musical performances of the Interregnum as it does the defiant toasts of secluded Royalists. Henry Lawes was also involved in producing both forms of song. He set a political drinking song by Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery which appears in his 1653 Ayres and Dialogues.76 The evidence from Bodleian MS Ashmole 47 provides more evidence for the wider political context of Ashmole’s song-collecting; this context further reinforces the political charge of Lawes’ setting of Sonnet 116 when read in the Bodleian Manuscript.
CONCLUSION
This new copy of Henry Lawes’ setting of Sonnet 116 in the Bodleian Manuscript places us in a particular moment of the manuscript circulation of Shakespeare’s sonnets: during, at least, the 1640s. Although the manuscript does not provide evidence for exact date of Lawes’ composition of the setting, it does provide us with a political moment in which Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 was being re-read and repurposed. In the context of Ashmole’s collection, Lawes’ setting of Sonnet 116 reads as a political love-song in praise of Royalist political constancy during political turmoil. This new witness is distinctly political—from the local context of the Bodleian Manuscript, to the wider context of the manuscript circulation of Shakespeare’s dramatic songs during the Interregnum and the likely original performance conditions of Lawes’ setting. Ashmole’s own manuscript collection beyond the Bodleian Manuscript reflects the political context of the private circulation and performance of songs, as ‘Take Those Lips Away’ keeps company with Royalist drinking songs. From a Shakespearean angle, this copy provides new evidence for the continued engagement with Shakespearean texts during the Interregnum, further challenging Gary Taylor’s claim that the Interregnum was the greatest lull in the history of Shakespearean reception.77 It is also striking that both surviving manuscript copies of Sonnet 116 are a song-setting. Colin Burrow observes the pattern of ‘scribal adaptations of the poems to suit musical settings’; similarly, Sasha Roberts notes that ‘alterations to Shakespeare’s sonnets reflects the strong song tradition in manuscript miscellanies of the period’.78 The addition of another point in this pattern suggests that we should recognize music even more significantly as a key mode for the continued reception of the sonnets in the seventeenth century. In terms of seventeenth-century literary culture, my reading of Lawes’ setting contributes to the wider picture of the Royalist circulation and performance of song during the Interregnum. Like all good cover versions, Lawes’ setting of Sonnet 116 is transformative, leaving its own signature on the sonnet and the history of Shakespearean reception.
The identification of this new copy of Sonnet 116 also demonstrates one of the limitations of first line indexes. First line indexes are indisputably invaluable tools for research. They do, however, rely on the first line of a text being the first line you are expecting to find. This copy is not an archival ‘discovery’ in that the Bodleian Manuscript has been catalogued since the nineteenth century and therefore made locatable to scholars for over 100 years. Nevertheless, when listed in the catalogue with the additional first line of the setting ‘Selfe blyndeinge Error seize all those minds’, and described without reference to Shakespeare, the copy has hidden in plain sight. The copy in the Bodleian Manuscript also appears in the Union First Line Index: the entry lists the first line as ‘Self-blinding error seize, all those minds’ and the last line as ‘Cupid’s no god, nor no man ever loved’; it lists the library, the manuscript, and the page on which it can be found. The columns for ‘author’ and ‘title’, however, are left blank—presumably as this information is not included in Black’s summary in the Quarto Catalogue, nor in Margaret Crum’s First Line Index of English Poetry 1500–1800 in the Manuscripts of the Bodleian Library Oxford.79 If someone actively searching for Sonnet 116 were to search for ‘Let me not to marriage of true minds’, this copy would not appear. Ben Higgins, emphasizing the need to work on new methodologies for reception history, has recently, rightly, questioned ‘How many Milton First Folios are left?’80 From the perspective of manuscript studies, however, this copy of Sonnet 116 in the Bodleian Manuscript, tantalizingly raises the possibility of other famous texts which might be lying unseen in unexpected forms in the midst of other miscellanies and manuscripts.
Footnotes
William Henry Black, A Descriptive, Analytical, and Critical Catalogue of the Manuscripts Bequeathed unto the University of Oxford by Elias Ashmole Esq., M.D., F.R.S., Windsor Herald, also of some Additional MSS. contributed by Kingsley, Lhuyd, Borlase, and Others (Oxford, 1845), 18.
R. W. Hunt, ‘The Cataloguing of Ashmolean Collections of Books and Manuscripts’, Bodleian Library Record, IV (1952–1953), 161–70, 167. The fourteen years of cataloguing the manuscripts between 1831–1845 appears to have been a long and acrimonious process, with an exasperated Black ultimately feeling he had not been sufficiently paid for his work by the Bodleian. Hunt, ‘Cataloguing’, (1952–1953), 166–9.
Another of the Bodleian’s nineteenth-century ‘Quarto Catalogues’, W. D. Macray’s catalogue of the Digby Manuscripts bequeathed to the Bodleian, received a new expanded edition in 1999: W. D. Macray, rev R. W. Hunt and A. G. Watson, Bodleian Library Quarto Catalogues IX: Digby Manuscripts (Oxford, 1999). In his review of the revised edition Ralph Hanna praises how the editors have necessarily expanded on ‘a Victorian document conceived to meet the needs of that era’. Ralph Hanna, Review of Macray, Hunt, and Watson, Quarto Catalogues in Medium Aevum, 69 (2000), 343–4, 343. He notes that ‘like other Victorian cataloguers, Macray gave nearly all his attention to listing contents’, primarily concerned with summary rather than identification. It appears that the cataloguing priorities of William Henry Black, Macray’s contemporary, were similar.
The manuscript is not listed in either Peter Beal, Index of Literary Manuscripts, vol. 1 (London, 1980) or on the online Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450–1700, <https://celm.folger.edu/authors/shakespearewilliam.html> accessed 18 June 2024.
Willa McClung Evans, ‘Lawes’ Version of Shakespeare’s Sonnet CXVI’, PMLA, 51 (1936), 120–22.
Gary Taylor, Some Manuscripts of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Manchester, 1985), 224; Arthur Marotti, ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the Manuscript Circulation of Texts in Early Modern England’, in Michael Schoenfeldt (ed.), A Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Oxford, 2007), 193; Sasha Roberts, Reading Shakespeare’s Poems in Early Modern England (London, 2003), 173; Colin Burrow (ed.), The Complete Songs and Sonnets (Oxford, 2008), 106. See also Mary Hobbs, ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnet II: A Sugared Sonnet?’, Notes and Queries, 26 (1979), 112–13.
Faith Acker, ‘Restoration Revisions: Musical, Dramatic, and Miscellany Readings’, in First Readers of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1590–1780) (New York, NY, 2020), 125.
DEx, <https://dex.digitalearlymodern.com/> accessed 26 June 2024.
CELM, <https://celm.folger.edu/authors/shakespearewilliam.html> accessed 18 June 2024.
Sonnet 2, existing in thirteen manuscripts, appears to be the most widely circulated in manuscript. Taylor, Some Manuscripts, 210. Marotti, ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, 187.
Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia Wits treasury being the second part of Wits common wealth (London, 1598) [ESTC 17,834].
On Benson see Burrows, Complete Songs, 93–4; Acker, First Readers, Chapter 4; Roberts, Reading Shakespeare’s Poems, 153–72.
John Benson, Poems: written by Wil. Shakespeare. Gent (London, 1640), Sig.D3v.
Claire L. Bourne and Jason Scott-Warren, ‘“thy unvalued Booke”: John Milton’s Copy of the Shakespeare First Folio’, Milton Quarterly, 56 (2002), 1–85, 61.
Arthur Marotti, ‘Love is Not Love: Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order’, English Literary History, 49 (1982), 396–428.
William Henry Black, Descriptive, Analytical, and Critical Catalogue, 16.
Ian Spink, ‘John Gamble (d.1687)’ (pubd online 2004) <https://www.oxforddnb.com/display/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-10322?rskey=mq0gTh&result=1> accessed 12 March 2024.
The song does not appear in: Ayres and dialogues, for one, two, and three voyces by Henry Lawes (London, c.1653–1658), Wing (2nd edn) / L639 (v. 3); The second book of ayres, and dialogues, for one, two, and three voyces. By Henry Lawes servant to his late Ma:tie in his publick and private musick (London, 1655) Wing (2nd edn) / L641; Select ayres and dialogues to sing to the theorbo-lute or basse-viol composed by Mr Henry Lawes … and other excellent masters (London, 1669) Wing (CD-ROM, 1996) / L643.
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 36, 37, Fol. 29 v. This transcription has been conservatively modernized: all original spelling and punctuation is retained; conventional scribal contractions, and superscriptions have been expanded/lowered; u/v is retained; ‘ff’ is given as F; interlinear additions and corrections have been silently accepted.
New York, New York Public Library, MS Drexel 4257, 103; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 36, 37, Fol. 51 v. The Bodleian Manuscript has a second copy of the ballad on Fol. 292. There are similar variants in the other two texts. ‘Old Poets Hippocrene Admire’, Drexel Manuscript: ‘Had they this heavenly fountain seen’ (137), Bodleian Manuscript: ‘Had they but this same Fountain seen’ (Fol. 246 r). ‘Let other beauties’, Drexel Manuscript ‘att ont to bid one looke and dye’ (2009), Bodleian Manuscript ‘At once to looke & byd one dye’ (Fol. 194 r).
Spink, ‘John Gamble’.
Spink, ‘John Gamble’.
Ian Spink, Henry Lawes: Cavalier Songwriter (Oxford, 2000), 81–2.
Spink, Henry Lawes, 82.
‘because he [Thomas Pagit] & his Sons were greatly affected to Musick, & very well Skil’d therein, He was desirous I should spend part of my tyme at the Musick Schoole … Mr: Michael East Batchellor of Musick, was my Tutor for Song, & Mr Henry Hinde Organist of the Cathedrall, tought me on the Virginalls & Organ.’ C. H. Josten (ed.), Elias Ashmole (1617–1692): His Autobiographical and Historical Notes, His Correspondence, and Other Contemporary Sources Relating to His Life and Work, vol. 2 (Oxford, 1967), 312–13.
Josten, Elias Ashmole, 413, 428.
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 47, Fol. 24 r.
Broadside Ballads Online <http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/collection/ashmole> accessed 27 June 2024.
Acker, First Readers, 128.
Willa McClung Evans, Henry Lawes: Musician and Friend of Poets (London, 1941), 44, fn20. R. J. McGrady also argues that Lawes worked closely in collaboration with the poets whose poetry he set. R. J. McGrady, ‘Henry Lawes and the Concept of ‘Just Note and Accent’’, Music & Letters, 50 (1969), 86–102, 87–8. Contrastingly, Linda Phyllis Austern in her treatment of Lawes’ setting of four poems by Katherine Philips emphasizes that there is no evidence of collaboration between Philips and Lawes on his song-settings. Linda Phyllis Austern, ‘The Conjuncture of Word, Music, and Performance Practice in Philip’s Era’, in David L. Orvis and Ryan Singh Paul (eds), The Noble Flame of Katherine Philips: A Poetics of Culture, Politics, and Friendship (Pittsburgh, PA, 2015), 213.
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 36, 37, Fols 219 r–243 v. See also Black, Descriptive, Analytical, and Critical Catalogue, 30.
Some of the opening poems in the manuscript are: ‘Vpon the meeting of the King & Queene vpon Edge Hill’, Fol. 1 r; a ballad on the battles of Bradock Down and Stratton in 1643, Fol. 2 r; and ‘Vpon the besieging of Banbury by the King’s Forces’, Fol. 3 v. On the politics of the manuscript as a whole see Leah Veronese, Suing for Grace: The Early Modern Rhetoric of Petition, D.Phil, thesis (Oxford University, 2022), Chapter 4.
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 36, 37, Fol. 31 v, Fol. 31 r, Fol. 33 v, Fol. 21 v.
Joshua Eckhardt, Manuscript Verse-Collectors and the Politics of Anti-Courtly Love Poetry (Oxford, 2009), 6, 11.
Angus Vine, Miscellaneous Order: Manuscript Culture and the Early Modern Organization of Knowledge (Oxford, 2019), 23.
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 36, 37: for Sir John Denham see Fol. 32 r; for William Davenant Fol. 22 v; for Francis Quarles see Fols 22 v and 23 v. Although Niall Allsopp has recently argued for Davenant’s increased ‘political ambivalence’ and ‘his rapprochement with new allies on the republican side’ by 1650. Niall Allsopp, Poetry and Sovereignty in the English Revolution (Oxford, 2020), 33.
For Ashmole’s own Christmas poem see Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 36, 37, Fols 225 v–226 r. Henry Lawes also set his own Christmas carol ‘Tis Christmas now’. See Stacey Jocoy Houck, ‘Decoding Musical Resistance: English Vocal Music in Service of the King, 1625–1660’, D.Phil thesis, University of Illinois, 2005, 199.
Jocoy Houck, ‘Decoding Musical Resistance’, 201.
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 36, 37, Fol. 25 r.
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 36, 37, Fol. 25 v. On.
Skinker, noun, Sense 1a and Sense 2 <www.oed.com> accessed 20 Feb 2024.
Lois Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature, 1641–1660 (Cambridge, 1989), 138. Jocoy Houck also connects the invitation to drink in this carol with ‘several laws in the late 1640s concerning the regulation and taxation of alcohol … making Parliament appear to be against alcoholic consumption’. Jocoy Houck, ‘Decoding Musical Resistance’, 212.
Richard Lovelace, ‘To Lucasta From Prison, An Epode’, The Poems of Richard Lovelace, ed. Cyrill Hackett Wilkinson (Oxford, 1930), 51.
Appellation, noun, Sense I.1b and II.4 <www.oed.com> accessed 19 March 2024. Biographically, this is also pleasing found in the context of Ashmole’s collection given that in his later work as a herald he would spend much time pursuing pedigrees and investigating dubious claims of lineage. See particularly the year 1665 in Josten, Elias Ashmole.
Acker similarly reads the opening as a ‘criticism of political or religious infidelity’. Acker, First Readers, 127.
McClung Evans, Henry Lawes, 42.
McClung Evans, Henry Lawes, 42.
Acker, First Readers, 127.
Eckhardt similarly observes that ‘texts on religious difference … directed against unspecified Catholics or puritans’ are ‘particularly open to recontextualisation’. Eckhardt, Manuscript Verse-Collectors, 13.
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 36, 37, Fol. 21 v.
Quoted Julian Davies, The Caroline Captivity of the Church: Charles I and the Remoulding of Anglicanism 1625–41 (Oxford, 1992), 275.
For a full account of the controversy see Davies, The Caroline Captivity, Chapter 7.
Conster, verb, Sense 3a <www.oed.com> accessed 26 March 2024.
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 36, 37, Fol. 21 v.
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 36, 37, Fol. 21 v.
Pervert, verb, Sense 1b and Sense 3a <www.oed.com> accessed 22 Feb 24.
Pervert, verb, Sense 1a; Sense 2; Sense 3b <www.oed.com> accessed 22 Feb 24 .
Acker, First Readers, 127.
Marotti, ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, 192.
McDowell notes that early ‘cavalier’ poets like Suckling and Carew ‘were both dead by 1642, before the civil wars had got under way in earnest’, inviting us to consider the influence of French and Italian poetry as a more sustained aesthetic point of connection between early and late cavalier poetry, rather than comparing them based on political allegiance alone. Nicholas McDowell, ‘Towards Redefinition of Cavalier Poetics’, The Seventeenth Century, 32 (2017), 413–31, 413.
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 36, 37, Fol. 3 r.
Sarah Lewridge, ‘From Boards to Books: The Circulation of Shakespearean Songs in Manuscript and Print during the Interregnum’, in Amanda Eubanks Winkler, Claude Fretz, and Richard Schoch (eds), Performing Restoration Shakespeare (Oxford, 2023), 15–37.
Lewridge, ‘From Boards’, 26. See also Jocoy Houck, ‘Decoding Musical Resistance’, 34–5.
Lewridge, ‘From Boards’, 25. See also Austern, ‘The Conjuncture of Word’, 233.
Spink, ‘John Gamble’.
Potter, Secret Rites, 34.
‘The First shew at Sir Will: Davenants Opera’, Josten, Elias Ashmole, 692.
Lawes, Ayres and dialogues.
See Lawes Ayres and dialogues; Lawes, The Second Book; Lawes, Select Ayres and Dialogues. On the politics of the Ayres, see Jocoy Houck (1996), 446–51. On the similarly ‘unabashedly royalist’ character of John Playford’s edition of Henry Lawes’ Choice Psalmes see Jocoy Houck, ‘Decoding Musical Resistance’, 403–6. Pleasingly, for this essay, Playford apprenticed with none other than John Benson. Jocoy Houck, ‘Decoding Musical Resistance’, 402.
Jocoy Houck, ‘Decoding Musical Resistance’, 446.
Ian Spink, ‘Henry Lawes’ (pubd online 2004) <www.oxfordodnb.com> accessed 12 March 2024; Spink, ‘John Gamble’.
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 47, Fol. 130 v. See also Black, Descriptive, Analytical, and Critical Catalogue, 73.
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 47, Fol. 134 r.
Dosia Reichardt, ‘“At My Grates No Althea”: Prison Poetry and the Consolations of Sack in the Interregnum’, Parergon: Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 20 (2003), 139–61, 156.
Steven May has recently suggested the tavern has been overlooked as an environment for manuscript circulation, producing ‘an atmosphere also conducive to singing, reciting, even composing verses’. Steven May, English Renaissance Manuscript Culture: The Paper Revolution (Oxford, 2023), 111.
The song claims wine ‘Teaches fools to rule a state’ and that anyone who abstains from drinking wine is ‘a Foe to the Common-weale’. Lawes, Ayres and dialogues, 33. See also Dosia Reichardt, ‘“At My Grates”’, 143–4.
Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present (New York, NY, 1987), 11.
Both cite the New York Manuscript of Sonnet 116, and a copy of Sonnet 8 in London, British Library, Additional MS 15,226. Burrow suggests that the adaptation of Sonnet 8 may have been another song-setting, and Roberts notes that with the addition of the title ‘In laudem Musice et opprobrium Contemptorii eisudem’ (‘In praise of music, and in contempt of its despiser’), the sonnet is ‘recast as a eulogy to music’. Burrow, Complete Songs, 106. Roberts, Reading Shakespeare’s Poems, 173.
Margaret Crum (ed.), First Line Index of English Poetry 1500–1800 in the Manuscripts of the Bodleian Library Oxford, vol. 2 (Oxford, 1969), 757.
Ben Higgins, ‘Judith and Lucrece: Reading Shakespeare Between Copy and Work’, English Literary Renaissance, 52 (2022), 34–71, 71.
