Ferrabosco and Jonson's ‘The Houre-glasse’

Abstract

In one of the recent volumes in the English Lute-Songs series, Ian Spink has assembled from manuscript sources fifteen songs by Alfonso Ferrabosco. The first is a setting of an anonymous poem, ‘All you forsaken lovers come,’ for a solo voice with bass, to which Spink has added inner parts. Spink's source is the ‘John Bull’ manuscript, MS. 52 D, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (c. 1620); another version—from which Spink takes two readings—is in British Museum MS. Additional 10337, the ‘Elizabeth Rogers Virginal Book,’ dated c. 1657. A third version of this song, but with a different and much more interesting set of words, Benjonson's “The Houre-glasse,’ is in a pair of manuscript part-books now in the Cathedral Library at Carlisle. These partbooks were compiled around 1637 by Thomas Smith, later bishop of Carlisle, and contain several songs not known elsewhere, such as the cycle of eleven songs about ‘John and Joan’ by Richard Nicholson. They also contain two Latin anthems by Ferrabosco (pp. 74, 75).