Sidney's Verse Adaptations to Two Sixteenth-Century Italian Art Songs

Abstract

It is well known that Sir Philip Sidney modeled eight of his thirty-two 'Certaine Sonnets’ upon existing ‘tunes,’ as he called them. To date, only one, relatively unimportant, musical model is known—the current Dutch National Anthem, to which Sidney wrote CS 23, ‘Who hath his fancy pleased.’ The result of this association of the sister arts is a simple, metrically precise, stylistically dull lyric whose numbers are directly proportioned to the regularity of its musical model. Of his other models, one, ‘The Smokes of Melancholy,’ appears to have been an English consort song; the others (five Italian, one Spanish) are probably variant forms of the villanella, a type of sixteenth-century art-song written for three or four voices and distinguished by its rhythmic lightness, its homophonic (chordal) structure, and its mildly satirical or openly vulgar text.