Jenkins and the Cosmography of Harmony

Abstract

Abstract If a flat Map be but pasted upon a Globe, the farthest East, and the farthest West meet, and are all one. John Donne, letter to Sir Robert Ker (1623)Like other years 1592 had its ups and downs. On Bankside a new play, Rarey the vi, in which the up-and-corning Shakespeare is thought .to have had a major hand, was enjoying a good run till bubonic plague closed the London theatres in June. Before the year was out the epidemic had spread into Kent, and in Jenkins’s birthplace, Maidstone, the authorities had to try to combat ‘diverse infectious and dangerous savours and noisome airs’ around the town. English troops, sent to aid the Huguenot king Henri IV against the forces of the Catholic league, were constantly corning and going through Kentish ports during the year, while for the music-loving Sir Henry Unton (whose famous memorial picture of four years later (Plate 1) shows him playing the bass in a domestic consort of five viols) recall from his embassy to France meant relief from a particularly trying diplomatic posting. In September Queen Elizabeth was received at Ditchley in Oxfordshire by her retired champion Sir Henry Lee with a gallant. entertainment in which music contributed to the atmosphere of flattering enchantment, before going on to the University of Oxford to be regaled with Latin disputations and Christ Church choir singing the Te Deum. Thomas Morley was sworn in as a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal, and in October the orphaned Alfonso Ferrabosco the younger was taken on to the books of the English court at a yearly pension of £26. 13s. 4d.