Ayres and arias: A hitherto unknown seventeenth-century English songbook

Abstract

Most mid-seventeenth-century English songbooks are, as one might perhaps expect, concerned almost entirely with native repertoire. Though there was, it seems, a certain amount of Italian (and some French) solo vocal music available, it appears to have circulated mainly in imported prints and in manuscripts copied by a variety of foreign scribes. Among the very few sources in which both ayres and arias are combined by an English copyist (as yet unidentified) is an interesting little anthology of 63 pages dating from the early 1660s which, to the best of my knowledge, has never yet been described in print. Formerly in the Prussian State Library in Berlin, it is now in the Jagiellonian Library in Kraków, where it is bound up with a copy of Henry Lawes's third book of Ayres and Dialogues published by Playford in 1658 (Day & Murrie 11). Also included under cover of the same press-mark (Mus.ant.pract. P 970) are copies of Playford's Select Ayres and Dialogues For One, Two, and Three Voyces; to the Theorbo-Lute or Basse-Viol (1659; Day & Murrie 14) and the second (1655) book of Lawes's Ayres and Dialogues (Day & Murrie 8). Pasted on the verso of the title-page of the first of these is the beautifully engraved bookplate of ‘Charles Barlow Esq; of Emanuel Colledge, Cambridge’ (whose signature, together with the name of his college, also appears on the title-page itself).