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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 June 2025
One of the five Elizabethan anthologies of ‘Englished’ Italian songs, Thomas Watson’s 1590 Italian Madrigalls Englished (IME) presents itself as a selection of madrigals – almost all by Marenzio – with texts that do not strictly translate the original lyrics yet remain equally suitable to the music they underlay. Contrary to earlier studies of the IME, this article argues that Watson’s contrafacta, while indeed far from faithful translations, in fact remain deeply invested in the appropriation and subversion of the madrigals’ original verse. Most crucially, the IME carefully naturalises Marenzio’s pastoral landscapes – originally meant to evoke the Roman milieu of the composer’s patron – by repopulating this Arcadia with prominent Elizabethans and recognisable characters drawn from Watson’s own poetry. His contrafacta equally engage with the madrigals’ representation of characteristic formal elements of Italian verse, to prove not only the English language’s capacity to assimilate foreign prosody but also the Italian madrigal’s capacity to accommodate native English rhythms. Ultimately, the IME seeks to prove that English verse is equally suitable to being sung to the period’s most prestigious secular compositions, that the madrigal is equally capable of evoking a musical Arcadia in Elizabethan England.
1 ‘The Epistle dedicatorie’ in N. Yonge (ed.), Musica Transalpina: Madrigales Translated of Foure, Five and Sixe Partes, Chosen out of Divers Excellent Authors (London, 1588; henceforth MT in the notes).
2 T. Watson, The First Sett, of Italian Madrigalls Englished, not to the Sense of the Originall Dittie, but after the Affection of the Noate (London, 1590; henceforth IME).
3 In the later part of the sixteenth century, madrigals arrived in England both from Italy (as attested by Yonge’s preface in MT) and, more importantly, from the Antwerp press of Pierre Phalèse, beginning with his anthologies of the 1580s and later also including his reprints of single-author volumes first issued in Venice. However, many in England preferred to perform these songs without their Italian lyrics: manuscript copies of Italian madrigals – compiled between the late 16th and mid 17th cc. – are predominantly ‘Englished’ or left untexted (to be performed instrumentally or to solfège, or even simply intended for private study). Only a few manuscript collections retain the original texts. See e.g. L. Hamessley, ‘The Reception of the Italian Madrigal in England: A Repertorial Study of Manuscript Anthologies, ca. 1580–1620’ (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 1989); L. Hamessley, ‘The Tenbury and Ellesmere Partbooks: New Findings on Manuscript Compilation and Exchange, and the Reception of the Italian Madrigal in Elizabethan England’, Music & Letters, 73 (1992), pp. 177–221; P. Cecchi, ‘“Delicious air and sweet invention”: The Circulation and Consumption of Marenzio’s Secular Music in England (c. 1588–1640)’, in Perspectives on Luca Marenzio’s Secular Music, ed. M. P. Calcagno (Turnhout, 2014), pp. 283–369, at pp. 286–9; J. Kerman, The Elizabethan Madrigal: A Comparative Study (New York, 1962), ch. 2.
4 The most recent and complete biography of Watson can be found in the General Introduction to T. Watson, The Complete Works, ed. D. F. Sutton (2010–24), https://philological.cal.bham.ac.uk/watson/,at/intro.html.
For recent scholarship on the Hekatompathia, see A. E. B. Coldiron, ‘Watson’s Hekatompathia and Renaissance Lyric Translation’, Translation and Literature, 5 (1996), pp. 3–25; J. T. Knight, Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature (Philadelphia, 2013), ch. 3; P. Lamb, ‘Traducing Ronsard: Larceny and the Poet in English Love-Lyrics, 1582–1591’, in Language Commonality and Literary Communities in Early Modern England: Translation, Transmission, Transfer, ed. L. Sansonetti and R. Vuillemin (Turnhout, 2022), pp. 195–219, at pp. 201–5.
5 The presentation on the title page of IME. Indeed, both Joseph Kerman and Ellen E. Knight see Watson’s subtitle as a direct response to Yonge’s literal approach to translating lyrics in MT: Kerman, Elizabethan Madrigal, p. 58; E. E. Knight, ‘Thomas Watson and the Italian Madrigalls Englished’ (PhD diss., Brigham Young University, 1978), p. 182.
6 Watson also translated this text into English in the same year: T. Watson, An Eglogue Upon the death of the Right Honorable Sir Francis Walsingham (London, 1590).
7 See e.g. K. D. Grapes, ‘Italian Artistry, English Innovation: Thomas Watson’s Italian Madrigalls Englished (1590)’, Mediaevalia, 39 (2018), pp. 345–85, at pp. 349–50.
8 A. Chatterley, Introduction to T. Watson, Italian Madrigals Englished: 1590, ed. Chatterley, Musica Britannica, 74 (London, 1999), p. xxvi.
9 Cecchi, ‘“Delicious air and sweet invention”’, p. 295.
10 Grapes, ‘Italian Artistry, English Innovation’, p. 350.
11 Besides the 23 madrigals by Marenzio, there is one song each by the composers Girolamo Conversi (Sola soletta), Giovanni Maria Nanino (Morir non può ’l mio core) and Alessandro Striggio (Non rumor di tamburi). Watson probably drew all three from Musica divina (1583), one of the madrigal anthologies printed in Antwerp by Pierre Phalèse, which was also an important source for Yonge’s MT. See Kerman, Elizabethan Madrigal, pp. 48–51; Chatterley, ‘List of Sources’, in Watson, Italian Madrigals Englished, pp. 120–1.
12 L. Macy, ‘The Due Decorum Kept: Elizabethan Translation and the Madrigals Englished of Nicholas Yonge and Thomas Watson’, Journal of Musicological Research, 17 (1997/8), pp. 1–21, at p. 18. Macy’s comparison is between Watson’s rendition of Petrarch’s Zefiro torna as Zephyrus breathing (song 4, with music by Luca Marenzio), and the MT’s earlier translation of the same text (set to music by Girolamo Conversi) as Zephyrus brings the time.
13 W. P. Mahrt, ‘Yonge Versus Watson and the Translation of Italian Madrigals’, John Donne Journal, 25 (2006), pp. 245–66, at p. 264. Mahrt compares Yonge and Watson’s divergent ‘Englished’ versions of another poem by Petrarch, the ballata Amor, quando fioria. Yonge employs Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina’s setting, while Watson again uses Marenzio’s setting of this poem – Marenzio does not, however, include the first three lines of the poem in his madrigal; the song is thus identified by its incipit Ahi, dispietata morte!
14 K. Duncan-Jones, ‘“Melancholie Times”: Musical Recollections of Sidney by William Byrd and Thomas Watson’, in The Well Enchanting Skill: Music, Poetry, and Drama in the Culture of the Renaissance: Essays in Honour of F. W. Sternfeld, ed. J. Caldwell, E. Olleson and S. Wollenberg (Oxford, 1990), pp. 171–80, at p. 180.
15 Cecchi, ‘“Delicious air and sweet invention”’, p. 297.
16 Grapes, ‘Italian Artistry, English Innovation’, p. 364.
17 Ibid., p. 360. Despite sharing certain conclusions with Cecchi, Grapes seems unaware of his earlier discussion of the Sidney–Essex elements in the IME.
18 Macy, ‘Due Decorum Kept’, p. 13.
19 Songs 1, 19, 23, 24 and 27.
20 The Italian lyrics that are rewritten by both the IME and MT I are Petrarch’s Zefiro torna (set by Conversi in MT) and Amor quando fioria (set by Palestrina in MT). In MT II, the octave of Zefiro torna reappears with the same translation as in MT I, this time in a setting by Ferrabosco, and there is a further text shared with the IME, Battista Guarini’s Crudel perché mi fuggi, set here by Benedetto Pallavicino. In the IME, however, all of these texts are set by Marenzio. Comparisons between Yonge and Watson’s approaches to ‘Englishing’ the same lyrics are thus also limited by the fact that, even when they both work with the same original text, they are never actually dealing with the same musical settings of these poems.
21 For example, Cecchi promises ‘an examination of the entire collection’, before proceeding to an analysis referring solely to the ‘four pieces in honor of Sidney and Walsingham’, along with Watson’s original poem in praise of Queen Elizabeth, set to music by William Byrd. See Cecchi, ‘“Delicious air and sweet invention”’, pp. 295–9.
22 The only analysis of the IME that attempts to engage with all of Watson’s contrafacta is Knight’s 1978 dissertation. Her conclusions about the collection are illuminating; however, she largely focusses on the relationship between Watson’s lyrics and the music, with very little discussion of the relationship between the contrafacta and the Italian texts they replace.
23 This can be contrasted not only to MT’s attempts at literal translation, but also to Morley’s approach to contrafaction in his 1598 Madrigals to Five Voices, where he freely retexts the music without regard to the sense of the original lyrics. See Kerman, Elizabethan Madrigal, p. 67.
24 For a complete list of the songs in the IME, along with a brief description of how the contrafactum lyrics respond to the Italian lyrics they replace, see the Appendix to this article.
25 Besides featuring various madrigals originally published as far back as the 1560s, Yonge’s anthology also contains contrafacta of French chansons by Lassus and Ferrabosco (Susanne un jour and Le rossignol, both texts in settings by both composers). For the sources of MT, see Kerman, Elizabethan Madrigal, pp. 53–5.
26 Along with, as mentioned earlier (n. 11), the three selections drawn from Phalèse’s 1583 anthology Musica divina.
27 IME, sig. [A]v (all parts): ‘Lucae Marenzio Musicae artis peritissimo Tho. Watsonus.’
28 During the 1580s, at least some of Marenzio’s music was available in England both through Phalèse’s madrigal anthologies (1583’s Harmonia celeste and Musica divina and 1585’s Symphonia angelica, featuring 9 Marenzio madrigals in total) and Yonge’s MT (7 Marenzio madrigals). Of these publications, only a single Marenzio madrigal from Symphonia angelica overlaps with the selections in the IME: Madonna mia gentil, ‘Englished’ as song 14, When from myself sweet Cupid. That most of Watson and Yonge’s Marenzio selections do not overlap with Phalèse thus also attests to at least a limited circulation of the original Venetian prints in England in the 1580s. However, the presence of Marenzio in English manuscript collections – a sign of his increasing popularity – largely begins during the 1590s and extends into the mid 17th c. See Cecchi, ‘“Delicious air and sweet invention”’, pp. 285–7, 305–6, 367–9; Kerman, Elizabethan Madrigal, ch. 2; Hamessley, ‘Reception of the Italian Madrigal’, ch. 2.
29 G. Gerbino, Music and the Myth of Arcadia in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge and New York, 2009), pp. 324–5. On Marenzio’s revival of Sannazaro, see A. Einstein, The Italian Madrigal, 3 vols. (Princeton, NJ, 1949; repr. 2019), ii, p. 613; G. Gerbino, ‘The Madrigal and its Outcasts: Marenzio, Giovannelli, and the Revival of Sannazaro’s Arcadia’, The Journal of Musicology, 21 (2004), pp. 3–45. However, as J. Chater, Luca Marenzio and the Italian Madrigal, 1577-1593, 2 vols. (Ann Arbor, MI, 1981), i, p. 21, notes, Marenzio did continue to set Petrarch quite frequently during this pastoral period.
30 See e.g. G. Tomlinson, Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance (Berkeley, 1987), p. 33; L. Marenzio, The Complete Five Voice Madrigals for Mixed Voices, ed. J. Steele, 6 vols. (New York, 1996), i, p. viii.
31 Gerbino, Myth of Arcadia, p. 324.
32 Ibid., pp. 329, 336.
33 Chater, Luca Marenzio, i, p. 10.
34 Gerbino, Myth of Arcadia, p. 300; see also Chater, Luca Marenzio, i, p. 1. All of the Marenzio songs included in the IME were written during the composer’s time under Luigi’s patronage.
35 Gerbino, Myth of Arcadia, pp. 300–12.
36 Kerman, Elizabethan Madrigal, p. 58. Specifically, he points to the omissions of Dolorosi martir from the I a 5, of the sestet of Zefiro torna as well as Tutto ’l di piango from the I a 4, and of Caro Aminta from the IV a 6.
37 See Querela prima, line 9, Querela secunda, line 1, and Querela nona, line 38, in T. Watson, Amyntas (London, 1585), sigs. Ar, A3r, Cv.
38 Watson takes care to note that his translation is ‘not … exactly to the latin original’. For a discussion of some differences between the two versions, see D. F. Sutton, Introduction to Meliboeus, in Watson, The Complete Works, https://philological.cal.bham.ac.uk/watson/melib/intro.html.
39 Dedication to Lady Francis Sydney in Watson, Eglogue, sig. [A2]r.
40 Preface ‘To the Courteous Reader’, Watson, Eglogue, sig. [A2]v.
41 The Lamentations of Amyntas for the Death of Phillis, Paraphrastically Translated out of Latine into English Hexameters, with reprints in 1588, 1589 and 1596. Fraunce finally acknowledged Watson’s authorship of Amyntas in The Countess of Pembrokes Yvychurch (1591). See A. Chatterley, ‘Thomas Watson: Works, Contemporary References and Reprints’, Notes & Queries, 48 (2001), pp. 239–49, at p. 244.
42 Watson, Eglogue, sig. Bv, line 27.
43 Preface ‘To the Courteous Reader’, ibid., sig. [A2]v.
44 As Duncan-Jones, ‘“Melancholie Times”’, pp. 177–8, and others have noted, Watson’s use of the name ‘Astrophil’ before the publication of Sidney’s sonnets in 1591 seems to indicate that he had access to these poems in manuscript version – possibly as far back as the early 1580s, when they were first composed.
45 As Sutton notes in his Introduction to Meliboeus, in Watson, The Complete Works, https://philological.cal.bham.ac.uk/watson/melib/intro.html, in Amyntas, ‘Amyntas is genuinely concerned for the welfare of his flocks and crops. But Corydon is really posing the question now who will administer England? Meliboeus is presented, Agamemnon-wise, as a shepherd of men, and the entire pastoral enterprise is coopted as a metaphor for statecraft.’
46 Watson, Eglogue, sig. B2v, line 87.
47 Ibid., sig. C4r, lines 370–2.
48 Ibid., lines 381–4.
49 Ibid., sig. C4r–v, lines 385–408.
50 Watson, Amyntas, trans. Sutton, in Watson, The Complete Works, https://philological.cal.bham.ac.uk/watson/amyntas/trans.html, Fifth Epistle, ‘The Joys of Amyntas’, lines 28–34.
51 Ibid., lines 55–7.
52 Watson’s identification of Marenzio is always with a more nebulous ‘Italy’, however. In the IME’s dedication to Essex, Watson refers to Marenzio’s ‘Italis … notis’ (‘Italian notes’) and to the ‘Hesperiae Philomelae … voces’ (‘the tunes of Italy’s nightingale’): ed. and trans. Sutton, in Watson, The Complete Works, https://philological.cal.bham.ac.uk/watson/madrigals/text.html.
53 J. A. Owens, ‘Marenzio and Wert Read Tasso: A Study in Contrasting Aesthetics’, Early Music, 27 (1999), pp. 555–74, at pp. 555–6.
54 Ibid., p. 558. Gerusalemme liberata was well known in England by this time: for Spenser’s own use of the passage describing Armida’s Garden as a model for his Bower of Bliss, see book II, canto xii, especially stanzas 70–1, in E. Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton, H. Yamashita and T. Suzuki (New York, 2013), p. 282.
55 A note on the musical examples. I have created these based on several sources: primarily, the original partbooks of the IME, with reference to Chatterley’s critical edition of the IME and Steele’s Marenzio edition. I follow the bar numbering employed by Chatterley, as well as his practice of using smaller note sizes (as in bar 5 of the Contratenor in Example 1) in passages where there is a discrepancy between the music of the IME (regular note size) and the original Italian publications (smaller notes). The spelling follows the original IME partbooks (with modernised ‘i/j’ and ‘u/v’) – this sometimes leads to disparate spellings of the same word (especially proper names) in different voice parts. I have also modernised all clefs.
56 ‘The charming birds among the green branches tune their playful notes. The breeze murmurs, and makes the leaves and waves chatter, as variously it catches them. When the birds are silent, it answers clearly; when the birds sing, it blows more softly. Whether by chance or design, the music [of the breeze] now accompanies and now alternates with their verses.’ Translation from Owens, ‘Marenzio and Wert Read Tasso’, p. 558.
57 Song 6 is not the only contrafactum to populate the natural, uninhabited landscape described in the original Italian text with human characters. Similar tactics are employed in song 4, Zephyrus breathing (originally the octave of Petrarch’s sonnet Zephiro torna, poem 310 in the Canzoniere), and song 14, Sweet hart arise (originally the octave of the anonymous sonnet Spuntavan gia).
58 Here and elsewhere, I employ lowercase letters to depict feminine rhymes and uppercase letters for masculine rhymes.
59 For example, in Palinode’s description of a May Day celebration with ‘Horne pype’ (May Eclogue, line 23) and Perigot and Willye’s duetted ‘roundelay’ in the August Eclogue (lines 53–124). See E. Spenser, ‘The Shepheardes Calender: Conteyning Tvvelue Æglogues Proportionable to the Twelue Monethes’, in The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. E. D. Selincourt, 3 vols. (Oxford, 2013), i, pp. 1–121, at pp. 47, 80. In MT’s The Nightingale, a translation of the chanson Le rossignol plaisant et gratieux, Yonge’s bird also sings a ‘roundelay’.
60 The Amyntas characters appear in songs 3, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 22 and 26. Within these, Phyllis features most often (in 3, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 16, 17 and 21), followed by Amaryllis (3, 5, 17, 18, 22, 26), along with a single mention of Amyntas in song 5. None of the three appear in the lyrics shared by the two original madrigals by Byrd (songs 8 and 28).
61 Songs 1 (where Astrophil uniquely appears alongside Stella), 23 and 27 (Meliboeus and Astrophil), 24 (Meliboeus and Tityrus) and 26 (Diana). There is also a ‘Faire shepherds Queene’ in song 5, who could equally be understood as Queen Elizabeth.
62 ‘The loveliest shepherdess / who ever trod flowers underfoot was singing, / while a nymph yet more beautiful than she / showed the divine coloring of her face. / Why did my soul, servant of both, / not have two hearts, / while at that moment I gazed on them both, / to leave one heart to the song and the other to the face!’ Translation by K. Bosi in Marenzio, Complete Five Voice Madrigals, i, p. 69.
63 ‘My Lady came to me in my sleep while I languished, / with a sweet, humane expression, / merry and lovely, to console me. / And I, daring to tell her / of my vain afflictions, / saw her call to me pityingly, / saying: “Why do you sigh, / why burn with desire from afar? / Do you not know that those very weapons / which wounded you can put an end to your pain?”’ Translation by Bosi in Marenzio, Complete Five Voice Madrigals, i, p. 57. Marenzio sets the entire poem in two parts, but Watson does not include Marenzio’s ‘seconda parte’ in his collection.
64 Poem 38 in Sannazaro’s Sonnetti e canzoni. For an interpretation of the relationship between the contrafactum and the original lyrics, see Cecchi, ‘“Delicious air and sweet invention”’, p. 295, n. 45. It has also been demonstrated that Watson’s contrafactum imitates a sonnet by Philippe Desportes (sonnet 34 from Diane, book I): see W. F. Staton jr, ‘A Lodge Borrowing from Watson’, Renaissance News, 14 (1961), pp. 3–6.
65 ‘a cold flame lights up my heart, / my lady’: translation by Bosi in Marenzio, Complete Five Voice Madrigals, i, p. 25.
66 ‘… and a hot shiver / [passes through] my spine’: translation by Bosi, ibid.
67 At this moment, the Superius does not sing. All five voices do not come together in homophony until bars 40–2.
68 The fifth stanza of the sestina Come notturno uccel nemico al sole (L’Arcadia, VIII, lines 25–30).
69 ‘… then will I singe his laye / Of fayre Eliza, Queene of shepheardes all:’ April Eclogue, lines 33–4, in Spenser, ‘Shepheardes Calender’, p. 37.
70 Watson, Eglogue, sig. C3v, line 350. While ‘Diana’ was also at times employed by artists in the Sidney/Essex circle – including William Byrd – as a pseudonym for Lady Penelope Rich, the sister of the earl of Essex, Watson’s use of the name in the IME seems almost certainly to align with his earlier Meliboeus and Eglogue. Song 27, The fates, alas too cruell, makes this connection explicit when identifying Meliboeus as ‘Dianaes cheefest jewell’ – in other words, as the Queen’s Secretary of State. On the association of ‘Diana’ with both Elizabeth and Penelope Rich, see J. L. Smith, ‘Music and Late Elizabethan Politics: The Identities of Oriana and Diana’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 58 (2005), pp. 507–58.
71 This also occurs in songs 15, 16, 18 and 26. Intriguingly, Watson also seems to avoid including any madrigals from the three Marenzio publications he drew on whose original lyrics already feature named pastoral characters. For example, several passages with identifiable characters from Sannazaro’s Arcadia appear in Marenzio’s I a 4 (such as the final madrigal, Vienne, Montan), yet none of these songs are employed in the IME.
72 Watson, Eglogue, sig. [A2]v, ‘To the Courteous Reader’.
73 The only other overlap occurs in song 26, which features both Diana and Amaryllis.
74 ‘This lovely and delicate garland, / freshly woven from green herbs / and tender flowers, / O youthful shepherd, is sent / by your beloved, pretty Flora, / who dwells with her little goats / on the banks of the Tiber; she says that / she is waiting for you and wishes to make you happy.’ Translation by Bosi in Marenzio, Complete Five Voice Madrigals, i, p. 75.
75 Gerbino, Myth of Arcadia, p. 311.
76 Within Italy, it was equally important, when reusing or imitating a madrigal lyric, for topical references to align with the particular patrons and dedicatees associated with a composition. For example, J. Chater, ‘“Such sweet sorrow”: The “Dialogo di partenza” in the Italian Madrigal’, Early Music, 27 (1999), pp. 576–99, at pp. 581–2, notes the replacement of the Florentine ‘Arno’ with the generic ‘rio’ when the lyrics of a Marenzio madrigal (Filli mia bella, a dio) are imitated by a madrigal in the 1586 Ferrarese anthology I lieti amanti (Alberto L’Occa’s A dio, mio dolce Aminta).
77 Macy, ‘Due Decorum Kept’, p. 19.
78 ‘Then my bright sun with a sweet smile said to me, / so that I would not perish: “Enjoy now, / my faithful love, the rewards of your ardor.” / With many kisses she gave forth / all the grace and sweetness of paradise / and the flowery perfumes of Spring.’ Translation by Bosi in Marenzio, Complete Five Voice Madrigals, i, p. 13.
79 Macy, ‘Due Decorum Kept’, p. 19.
80 Conversi’s style in this composition, as in much of his work, tends towards the same light, ‘canzonetta-madrigal’ style as Marenzio’s pastoral madrigals; see Einstein, The Italian Madrigal, ii, pp. 598–9. The song is thus perfectly suited to the musical sensibilities of the IME.
81 ‘All on my own, a carefree single girl, I go on my way singing, and I keep my heart free and colder than ice, and I continue to disdain all the entanglements of love.’ Translation by Chatterley in Watson, Italian Madrigals Englished, p. 38.
82 Grapes, ‘Italian Artistry, English Innovation’, pp. 352–3.
83 It is a feature of many contrafacta to recall the opening words of the original lyrics. In monophonic contrafacta printed without music, this could function simply as a memory aid or clue to the correct tune to sing. However, the recollection of the original incipit could also – as in Watson’s case – serve to emphasise the notion that the contrafactum was directly responding to the original song.
84 Another notable instance of this practice can be found in song 13, Alas where is my love, wher is my sweeting, originally Ohimè dov’è il mio ben, dov’è il mio core?, the fifth stanza of the Bernardo Tasso poem Se ben di nove stelle ardenti e belle.
85 Poem 324 of the Canzoniere. Marenzio’s setting does not include the opening three lines of Petrarch’s ballata, which begins ‘Amor, quando fioria …’.
86 ‘Ah, death inexorable! ah, cruel life! / The one leaves me in grief / and all my hopes are bitterly consumed: / the other holds me here against my will, / whence she departed has. / I may not join her, she does not consent. / Yet every present hour / my lady is enthronèd in my heart, / and what my life is she knows all too well.’ Translation by B. Reynolds in L. Marenzio, The Complete Four Voice Madrigals for Mixed Voices, ed. J. Steele (New York, 1995), p. 65.
87 Mahrt, ‘Yonge Versus Watson’, pp. 262–3.
88 L. Schleiner, The Living Lyre in English Verse: From Elizabeth through the Restoration (Columbia, MO, 1984), p. 26.
89 Mahrt, ‘Yonge Versus Watson’, pp. 261, 263, discusses this inversion, noting that – as in Marenzio’s original formulation – a madrigalism can also depict the opposite of what the text says (in this case, having voices ‘follow’ each other with imitative entries for the words ‘seguir non posso’).
90 Ibid., p. 263.
91 For example, Watson explains before his fifth Passion (a term he uses interchangeably with ‘sonnet’) that ‘All this Passion (two verses only excepted) is wholly translated out of Petrarch’. He later refers to Passion LXVI and the ‘Epilogue’ (both in Latin) as ‘faithfully’ translating Petrarch. See T. Watson, The Hekatompathia or Passionate Centurie of Love (London, 1582), sigs. A3r, Iv, [N3]v.
92 See e.g. ‘My Laura here I may an Harpye name’, Passion XCVII, line 8, ibid., sig. Nr.
93 The original text is from poem 127, stanza 5, of the Canzoniere, ‘Non vidi mai dopo notturna pioggia’. See also Grapes, ‘Italian Artistry, English Innovation’, p. 363, where she discusses the theme of sight in this contrafactum.
94 G. Alexander, ‘The Elizabethan Lyric as Contrafactum: Robert Sidney’s “French Tune” Identified’, Music & Letters, 84 (2003), pp. 378–402, at pp. 380–1 (my emphases).
95 F. J. Fabry, ‘Sidney’s Poetry and Italian Song-Form’, English Literary Renaissance, 3 (1973), pp. 232–48, at pp. 233–4; see also Schleiner, Living Lyre, p. 13.
96 Fabry, ‘Sidney’s Poetry’, pp. 234–5. See also F. J. Fabry, ‘Sidney’s Verse Adaptations to Two Sixteenth-Century Italian Art Songs’, Renaissance Quarterly, 23 (1970), pp. 237–55, at p. 244; J. Stevens, ‘Sir Philip Sidney and “Versified Music”: Melodies for Courtly Songs’, in The Well Enchanting Skill, ed. Caldwell, Olleson and Wollenberg, pp. 153–70.
97 P. Sidney, ‘A Defence of Poetry’, in Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. K. Duncan-Jones and J. Dorsten (Oxford, 2012), pp. 59–121, at pp. 119–20. See also Fabry, ‘Sidney’s Poetry’, p. 238. A few years later, George Puttenham makes a similar claim for the English language’s greater variety of formal possibilities than Greek or Latin: see G. Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy: A Critical Edition, ed. F. Whigham and W. A. Rebhorn (Ithaca, NY, 2007), pp. 95–6.
98 Alexander, ‘The Elizabethan Lyric as Contrafactum’, p. 392.
99 Ibid., p. 378.
100 Schleiner, Living Lyre, p. 21.
101 Alexander, ‘The Elizabethan Lyric as Contrafactum’, p. 380.
102 Schleiner, Living Lyre, p. 22.
103 Ibid., p. 23.
104 Ibid.
105 In both the Superius and Bassus, this latter alteration is also achieved by dividing a single note into two shorter notes of the same pitch (see bar 8).
106 It should be noted that Watson’s rhythmic changes are not always felicitous, and Mahrt, ‘Yonge Versus Watson’, p. 263, points out in the following line of verse (bars 14–21) ‘a serious misdeclamation of the English “commandeth”’. Here, Watson forces the original feminine rhyme ‘doglia’ into the three syllables of ‘commandeth’, with the musical emphasis now awkwardly on the first syllable. This same misdeclamation was previously noted by Knight, ‘Thomas Watson’, p. 214.
107 Schleiner, Living Lyre, p. 21.
108 Originally Veggo, dolce mio bene, song 3 in Marenzio’s I a 4.
109 ‘in the glance of your eyes a lovely light’: translation by Reynolds in Marenzio, Four Voice Madrigals, p. 11.
110 The only modifications that Watson makes to Marenzio’s notes are to split a single longer note into two shorter notes of the same pitch (e.g., a minim G becomes two crotchet Gs), or less commonly, to combine two consecutive notes of the same pitch into a single note with a longer note value (e.g., two crotchet Gs become one minim G). However, Watson never alters the pitch of a note. For a careful discussion of rhythmic issues in Watson’s contrafacta, see Knight, ‘Thomas Watson’, pp. 213–16.
111 “The happy lovers and the tender maids / wandered amid the leas, remembering / the ardor and the bow of Venus’ son. / They felt no jealousy, but with delight / they danced their measures to the lyre’s sound. / From time to time they billed and cooed like doves. / O purity, O sweet the ways of yore! / Now I know well that the inconstant world / forever worsens as it older grows.’ Translation by Reynolds in Marenzio, Four Voice Madrigals, p. 83.
112 The other three songs she refers to are nos. 7, 13 and 25: Schleiner, Living Lyre, p. 21.
113 Gerbino, ‘Madrigal and its Outcasts’, p. 8.
114 For a list of these madrigals, see ibid., p. 5.
115 Ibid., p. 4.
116 The second part of the final line is also repeated in bars 69–73 (the final bars of the madrigal), where the voices do not sing homophonically.
117 Sidney, ‘A Defence of Poetry’, p. 120. In a particularly virtuosic demonstration of this claim, the eclogue ‘Come Dorus, come’ in Sidney’s Arcadia begins with several stanzas in a terza-rima scheme with sdrucciolo rhymes, before proceeding through feminine, then masculine rhymes and subsequently even more complex metrical and rhythmic patterns. See Arcadia, in The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. W. A. Ringler (Oxford, 2012), pp. 7–132, at pp. 14–16. For an analysis of this passage, see J. Thompson, The Founding of English Metre (New York, 1961), pp. 142–4.
118 Perhaps the worst rhythmic modification appears in song 15, where each voice sings a long melisma on the word ‘the’ in the line ‘if they but catch thee the sight will wound me’, which replaces the much more natural (and more obviously imagistic) ‘con molti baci sparse fuore’. Knight, ‘Thomas Watson’, p. 220, calls this a ‘unique horror’ in the collection.
119 Kerman, Elizabethan Madrigal, pp. 110–11; Knight, ‘Thomas Watson’, pp. 250–1.
120 Gerbino, Myth of Arcadia, p. 326. Kerman, Elizabethan Madrigal, pp. 110–11, comments that Byrd at times ‘almost approaches the canzonet style’, and ‘In general Byrd’s style is closer to Andrea Gabrieli’ than to Marenzio. Given the fact that Marenzio’s pastoral madrigals closely resemble Gabrieli’s canzonetta-madrigal (see e.g. Einstein, The Italian Madrigal, ii, pp. 534, 617), this does not disrupt the notion that Byrd aimed specifically to imitate Marenzio in these songs.
121 For his analysis of Marenzio’s pastoral style, see Gerbino, Myth of Arcadia, pp. 324–31. On pp. 329–30 he notes that canonic imitation is ‘an iconic gesture associated with [the words] “scherzo” and “scherzare,” used for example in “Spuntavan già”’.
122 May Eclogue, line 1, in Spenser, ‘Shepheardes Calender’, p. 46.
123 ‘tutti e nessun poeta italiano particolare’. For a list of several Italian analogues to this text, see A. Obertello, Madrigali italiani in Inghilterra: Storia, critica, testi (Milan, 1949), pp. 460–2.
124 It is used as a rhyme, often in the pair ‘… pleasure /… treasure’, in eight of the contrafacta.
125 For further discussion of this reference to ‘second Troy’, see Chatterley, ‘Textual Commentary’, in Watson, Italian Madrigals Englished, p. 124; Obertello, Madrigali italiani in Inghilterra, p. 460. Spenser, The Faerie Queene, book III, canto ix, line 44, p. 377, similarly evokes this Trojan source of the British monarchy; however, his ‘Troynovant’/London is described as the ‘third kingdom’, not the second.
126 My thanks to Tim Carter for bringing this to my attention.
127 The Honorable Entertainement gieven to the Queenes Maiestie in Progresse, at Elvetham (1591) in Watson, The Complete Works, https://philological.cal.bham.ac.uk/watson/elvetham/text.html. The textual similarity between these two songs has been noted before, e.g. in Knight, ‘Thomas Watson’, pp. 173–5. However, Chatterley does not believe that the Elvetham song was written by Watson because it is ‘workaday’ ‘poetry for music’. See A. Chatterley, ‘Thomas Watson and the “Elvetham Entertainment”’, Notes & Queries, 47 (2000), pp. 37–40, at p. 38.
128 Watson, Hekatompathia, sig. *3v, lines 5–8, 13–16.
129 Sidney, ‘A Defence of Poetry’, p. 111.
130 Originally a six-voice song; several of the parts are now lost, but it is reconstructed in W. Byrd, Madrigals, Songs and Canons, ed. P. Brett, The Byrd Edition, 16 (London, 1976), pp. 16–32; facs. of Cantus secundus in M. C. Boyd, Elizabethan Music and Musical Criticism, 2nd edn (Philadelphia, 1962), facing p. 32. See Sutton’s discussion (with the complete text) at A Gratification unto Mr. John Case, in Watson, The Complete Works, https://philological.cal.bham.ac.uk/watson/opuscula/text.html, ‘Minor, Lost, and Doubtful or Spurious Works’, no. III.
131 Knight, ‘Thomas Watson’, p. 275, states that only songs 1, 11 and 21 of the IME feature regular metres. However, even songs 1 and 21 feature some irregularities to what are ostensibly iambic pentameters.
132 See e.g. P. Fumerton, The Broadside Ballad in Early Modern England (Philadelphia, 2021), p. 369.
133 Parker’s book provides metrical translations of the psalms, each written to be sung to one of the eight four-part tunes provided, all composed by Thomas Tallis. For the tune in question, the fourth, see M. Parker, The Whole Psalter Translated into English Metre, which Contayneth an Hundreth and Fifty Psalmes (London, 1567), sigs. XX.iiiv–iiiir; ed. in Boyd, Elizabethan Music, p. 48.
134 For example, Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, p. 169, prefers the use of masculine rhymes, arguing that ‘alwayes the cadence [i.e. rhyme] which falleth vpon the last sillable of a verse is sweetest and most commendable’. However, through the 1590s, under the influence of Philip Sidney’s contrafacta on Italian songs and Morley’s Italianate imitations, feminine rhyme (and to a lesser extent trochaics) came to be regarded as formal characteristics ‘ideally suited for song verse’ (Fabry, ‘Sidney’s Poetry’, p. 239), so that by 1603 Samuel Daniel would explicitly consider ‘feminine Rymes to be fittest for Ditties’: see S. Daniel, Poems and a Defence of Ryme (Cambridge, MA, 1930), p. 157.
135 Fabry, ‘Sidney’s Poetry’, pp. 239–40, has argued that Byrd was not comfortable imitating Italian music, and preferred to set Sidney’s songs with masculine rhymes, as opposed to his feminine-rhymed verse. However, Byrd did also set an excerpt of Ariosto (La verginella), making it clear that he was indeed capable of setting – and willing to set – a poem with feminine rhyme endings. Thus, it seems likelier that the use of masculine rhymes in This sweet and merry month of May was a choice made by Watson (or Watson and Byrd together) rather than solely by Byrd himself.
136 Chatterley, Introduction to Watson, Italian Madrigals Englished, p. xxv; Macy, ‘Due Decorum Kept’, p. 19.
137 Kerman, Elizabethan Madrigal, p. 57.
138 For a discussion of the impact of this mixture of admiration and distrust towards Italian culture on English collections of madrigals in manuscript, see Hamessley, ‘Reception of the Italian Madrigal’, ch. 4.