T allis, T homas (1505–1585)

Four compositions in the first layer of the Old Hall Manuscript (GB-Lbl, Add. MS 57950) are attributed to R. Chirbury (or R. Chyrbury). This article argues that the Robert Chirbury who ended his days as Dean at the Collegiate Church of St Mary, Warwick was this composer. His career included stints at the Chapel Royal and probably also earlier employment in the London diocese, as well as service in the household of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick. Moreover, this individual can be differentiated from similarly named men in the Register of the London St Nicholas Fraternity of Parish Clerks, and the assertion that the composer was employed at St George's, Windsor can be discounted.

When Handel arrived in London in the last weeks of 1710, Henry Purcell had been dead for just fifteen years. His younger brother Daniel, though still active as a professional organist, was no longer a productive composer, and much the same is true of the long-lived William Turner (1651–1740), who, with John Blow (d. 1708), had been the most distinguished of Purcell's colleagues and contemporaries in the Chapel Royal. Likewise John Eccles, the leading English theatrical composer at the turn of the century, and official court composer from 1700 until his death in 1735, had by this time retired from the hurly-burly of life in the city and gone to live in Hampton Wick where, according to Hawkins, he spent most of his time fishing. As for Jeremiah Clarke, one of the more impressive creative talents of the next generation, he had, seemingly for love, put a pistol to his head in late November 1707. Of those native composers still left and active on the London musical scene, much the most gifted were John Weldon (1676–1736) and William Croft (1678–1727), both of whom Handel must surely have encountered quite early on in his first visit.

Foremost English composer of the Baroque period. A chorister in the Chapel Royal, he succeeded John Blow as organist of Westminster Abbey and served in the Chapel Royal from 1682.

This volume makes a welcome addition to the surprisingly sparse collection of early 18th-century English music available in modern critical editions, though it seems Croft’s previous neglect is giving way to a somewhat skewed picture of the composer’s output. Together with the Italianate sonatas written in the early part of his career, edited by H. Diack Johnstone for Musica Britannica 88 (see my review in Early Music, xxxviii/2 (2010), pp.298–300), the showy orchestral sacred music presented here reassuringly aligns Croft with the European lingua franca. A more rounded view of Croft’s career will require editions of the dozens of verse anthems that were his bread and butter in the Chapel Royal, which show a coherent attempt to interpret the tradition of Purcell and Blow in the context of the Italian style which Croft was arguably the first English composer to master from the inside, ‘without earlier gropings’, as Watkins Shaw memorably put it (Shaw, rev. Graydon Beeks, ‘Croft, William’, Grove Music Online).

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewTimothy Rosendale, Liturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England Liturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England. Timothy Rosendale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. x+237.Hannibal HamlinHannibal HamlinOhio State University Search for more articles by this author Ohio State UniversityPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreAmong subjects overlooked in early modern literary studies, surely one of the most egregious oversights is the Book of Common Prayer (BCP). As well as shaping English religious belief and practice from 1549, this was perhaps the best-known anthology of English literature in the period, if we include as “literature” prayers, responses, collects, Psalms and biblical readings, and liturgies. Thomas Cranmer, the author of much of this literature (authorship here involving also translation, adaptation, and compilation), was one of the greatest prose stylists in English. He also had a brilliant sense of drama: the liturgies of morning and evening prayer, the Communion service, burial, and Ash Wednesday constitute powerful participatory performances, and they are second only to the Bible in shaping the English language and its literature. Timothy Rosendale is right to underscore the importance of the BCP as well as to decry its critical neglect.1Rosendale's Liturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England is in part a response to the central argument of the only other recent literary study addressing the BCP, Ramie Targoff 's Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England (University of Chicago Press, 2001). While Targoff aims to correct earlier overstated claims for Protestant individuality and inwardness, Rosendale aims to correct what he perceives as Targoff 's overstated claims about the centrality to English Protestantism of outward performance in public worship and its shaping of individual belief. So the critical pendulum swings. Targoff is right that Protestants were not just isolated individuals and that the common experience of worship through the BCP services shaped belief as well as practice. But Rosendale is right to swing the pendulum back toward the middle, an appropriately Anglican position, pointing to the “ways in which [English Protestant] reform both subjected people to new structures of authority and recognized them as autonomous subjects” and demonstrating that the “textual matrix” for this complex centrifugal and centripetal movement was the BCP, which “held in productive tension both the imperatives of the hierarchical nation and the prerogatives of the evangelical soul” (4–5).The first half of Rosendale's book focuses on the BCP itself, and the second examines its influence on English secular writers. Rosendale summarizes the history of the BCP in several “interludes.” Chapter 1 explores the role of the BCP in creating an English national identity. Rosendale describes the role of the BCP in furthering Henry VIII's Erastian program to establish an English church, equating church and state, and subordinating private belief to public conformity. The use of the English language in the BCP was also crucial in establishing a national identity, as John Foxe recognized in his Actes and Monuments. (Here Rosendale challenges Richard Helgerson's Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England [University of Chicago Press, 1992].) Chapter 2, by contrast, focuses on individual identity, beginning with the “explosion of self-authorizing discourse” generated by English Bibles (Rosendale paraphrasing Robert Weimann, 76). Rosendale shows how the use of English in the BCP (which he argues everyone could understand) allowed everyone to participate in worship but also encouraged individual interpretation. The BCP's Communion service, which rejected both Catholic transubstantiation and Zwinglian literalism, relocated the sacrifice of the Mass inward to the heart of the individual believer. And although the wording of the service, especially the consecration of the elements, preserved a “conservative ambiguity,” it effectively turned transubstantiation into trope (93–95). For Rosendale, this is perhaps the most important feature of the BCP, its “figural, interpretive, readerly conception of the sacrament,” which turned sacraments into signs that demanded interpretation (107).Chapters 3 and 4 explore the literary ramifications of the BCP's radical focus on representation or signification. Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Poetry (1595), in Rosendale's view, argued for the redeeming power of the figurative and derived this understanding of fiction and interpretation as “vehicles of truth” from the BCP (140). Rosendale believes Shakespeare's English histories were indebted to the BCP's “reconfiguration of representation, authority, and national identity,” moving away from notions of divine right toward a celebration of the successful kings (like Henry IV and V) who could play roles and “manipulate signs” (176). In Paradise Lost (1667), as elsewhere, Milton absolutely rejects liturgy as popish and evil, but Rosendale proposes that he nevertheless owes to the BCP his reconception of the Fall as a failure of reading. What must be read is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, a “pure sign” (borrowing from Gilles Deleuze) “of the hierarchical difference between God and humanity” (185). Satan, Eve, and Adam all misread the tree as having to do with actual knowledge, a notion that derives from the Catholic misreading (as understood by Protestants) of the Bread and Wine as actual flesh and blood. Rosendale's final literary example is Hobbes, whose “rigorous separation of belief and action” required outward conformity to preserve the order of the state but nevertheless allowed for freedom of inward belief (196). This, Rosendale argues, is exactly the dynamic of the BCP.This is a provocative book that makes a useful contribution to our understanding about the interdependence of outward conformity and individual freedom in English Protestantism. Rosendale's focus is neither exactly literary nor historical, however, and the resulting argument is therefore somewhat superficial from both perspectives. From the literary perspective, relatively little of the BCP is actually analyzed in detail (a summary of the 1549 contents is confined to an appendix). As for its literary influence, the sections on Milton and Shakespeare in particular are not likely to satisfy specialists on these authors. Shakespeare's Henry V, for example, is hardly an unambivalent celebration of secular realpolitik, and to argue that the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Gen. 2:9; Paradise Lost 4.221 has “Tree of knowledge”) has nothing to do with knowledge seems itself a failure of reading. Rosendale's arguments for the dependence of these various authors on the BCP are also not fully convincing, depending purely on analogy. On Henry V, for example, he suggests, “The hero-king's authority, like the Prayerbook Eucharist, is thus constructed fundamentally on an inclusive and unifying sense of signification, and on the communal participation of subjects in these representations” (173). A better case could be made on the basis of shared language or other more concrete links. Rosendale's interpretation of the BCP also seems to shift according to the needs of particular claims. In chapter 2, for instance, Rosendale recognizes that the English theology of the Eucharist, as expressed in the BCP, was essentially ambiguous, denying Catholic transubstantiation but allowing for a range of views between Lutheran “real presence” and Zwinglian memorialism. But Rosendale's arguments about Sidney, Shakespeare, and Milton depend on an entirely Zwinglian reading, reducing sacraments to tropes. For most English worshippers, the eucharistic elements were never merely tropes or signs, at least not in the sense understood by modern semiotics. Finally, Rosendale's analysis of the BCP focuses largely on the 1549 edition and its cultural context, but the religious, ecclesiastical, and political situations in the 1570s, 1590s, 1640s, and 1660s, when Sidney, Shakespeare, Hobbes, and Milton were writing, were quite different and demand a more historicized examination of changing ideas of sacramental theology and liturgical practices.As history, Rosendale's study is also problematic. For one thing, treating the BCP exclusively as a written text fails to recognize that only in performance was it actually experienced in church. Much of the BCP was sung, for instance, so one ought to consider the experience of singing and its various forms found in practice (choral, congregational, responsorial). Rosendale is hardly alone among interdisciplinarily inclined literary scholars in ignoring music, but music is especially important to his argument. As Nicholas Temperley has shown, worship practice varied from church to church, especially between cathedrals and collegiate chapels and parish churches, but also from city to country. Congregants at St. Paul's, London, with its professional cathedral choir, participated to a much lesser degree than did those at St. Mary Magdalene, Stoke Lyne.2 Furthermore, in some churches, services were not performed in English; this challenges somewhat Rosendale's arguments for a single national identity created by worship in the vernacular. Judith Maltby points out that the definitive study of the “availability of the Prayer Book for the laity” has not yet been done, and this is true of both non-English and English editions.3 In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries the BCP was translated into Welsh (1551), Irish (1551), and French (1553, for use in Calais and the Channel Islands). A Manx translation was made but not printed, since apparently Manx clergymen preferred to translate the BCP extempore.4 In the sixteenth century and even more so in the seventeenth, the English monarch ruled many non-English speakers (for instance, those in Cornwall who still spoke Cornish and refused to use the BCP partly for that reason). The 1549 Prayer Book Revolt was not just about religious differences but about the imposition of the English language.5The BCP was printed in Latin and Greek editions as well. The 1560 Latin edition is particularly interesting, since it generally follows not the 1559 but the 1549 English text and seems to reflect Elizabeth's desire for a more traditionally “Catholic” service.6 Indeed, contrary to Rosendale's claim that the BCP remained uniform and unchanged from 1559, it varied in significant ways. Sometimes the services of ordination and consecration were included, sometimes not. Sometimes a collection of private, nonliturgical “Godly Prayers” was included at the end. The Coverdale Psalter (from the Great Bible, slightly altered) was regularly, though not always, included, and the BCP was frequently bound with a variety of other books: Bibles, psalters (especially “Sternhold and Hopkins”), the Catechism, and the Thirty-Nine Articles. Closer examination of the history of the BCP as a book would illuminate many aspects of its use (intended and actual).Liturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England has a worthy goal in paying overdue attention to the BCP and its influence on English politics and literature, but the liturgy, its literature, and its influence await further, more intensive and extensive, study. Future scholars will be helped considerably by the 2006 Oxford Guide to the Book of Common Prayer, which includes valuable articles on music, politics, church architecture, translation, printing, and more, and the Web site of Charles Wohlers, which provides online texts of the major editions from 1549 to the present, as well as some of the earlier Latin and English sources.7 Notes 1.Judith Maltby's Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Stuart England (Cambridge University Press, 1998) is alone in the field. Essential earlier works include G. J. Cuming, A History of the Anglican Liturgy (London: Macmillan, 1969); F. E. Brightman, The English Rite : Being a Synopsis of the Sources and Revisions of the Book of Common Prayer, 2 vols. (London: Rivingtons, 1915); and Francis Procter, A New History of the Book of Common Prayer, with a Rationale of Its Offices, ed. and rev. Walter Howard Frere (1855; London: Macmillan, 1902).2.Nicholas Temperley, Music of the English Parish Church, 2 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 1979).3.Maltby, Prayer Book, 25.4.David N. Griffiths's The Bibliography of the Book of Common Prayer, 1549–1999 (London: British Library, 2002), not in Rosendale's bibliography, is the best means of tracking translations and editions.5.Mark Stoyle, “The Dissidence of Despair: Rebellion and Identity in Early Modern Cornwall,” Journal of British Studies 38 (1999): 423–44.6.Norman L. Jones, “Elizabeth, Edification, and the Latin Prayer Book of 1560,” Church History 53 (1984): 174–86. See also Roger Bowers, “The Chapel Royal, the First Edwardian Prayer Book, and Elizabeth's Settlement of Religion, 1559,” Historical Journal 43 (2000): 317–44.7.Charles Heffling and Cynthia Shattuck, eds., The Oxford Guide to the Book of Common Prayer: A Worldwide Survey (Oxford University Press, 2006); Charles Wohlers, “The Book of Common Prayer: Church of England,” http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp/england.htm. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 109, Number 2November 2011 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/661526 Views: 15Total views on this site © 2011 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Orlando Gibbons was undoubtedly one of the greatest of English composers. Indeed, his music ranks among the finest written by any European composer of the day. His musical gifts received early recognition, and in 1605, at the age of twenty-one, he was appointed an organist of the Chapel Royal. John Bull and Edmund Hooper were among his colleagues. Doubtless, much of the organ music was written at this time, but since it is all stylistically mature it is impossible to date it accurately. However, some of the best keyboard music was included in Parthenia, and this dates from 1612–13. It is likely that much of the dance music—both for keyboard and for strings—was written after his appointment in 1619 as a musician of the Privy Chamber, for dancing was much in vogue at court and dance-music was enjoyed also in its own right. In 1623 Gibbons was appointed organist of Westminster Abbey, and two years later he died, at Canterbury.

The received biography available for the English composer John Sheppard (c.1514 – late 1558 or early 1559) is amenable to clarification at a number of points. He was employed as Master of the Choristers at Magdalen College, Oxford, for just a single spell, September 1543 to early 1548. The available evidence suggests that he proceeded thence directly to admission to the Chapel Royal. He had no further contact with Magdalen College; an instance of kidnap and confinement perpetrated in 1555 that is commonly attributed to him was instead committed by one Richard Sheparde/Sheper/Sheprey, a fellow of the college. Despite being only an imperfect draft, his ‘will’ of 1 December 1558 reveals much about his family circumstances at Westminster. He died between 1 December 1558 and 31 January 1559; the actual date must be reconcilable with expectation of his attendance at Queen Elizabeth’s coronation on 15 January 1559, as recorded on a list compiled not earlier than 15 December 1558.

ABSTRACTThe history of the Spanish musical press in the eighteenth century has usually been interpreted as an ongoing struggle against a narrow and underdeveloped market. Print itself has been seen as a superior technology that helps to secure stability and clarity of the musical text. In this light, José de Torres, prestigious organist and composer, music director of the Spanish Chapel Royal from 1720 and owner of an important musical press, has appeared to be a heroic modernizing figure. This article challenges this received image, underlining the effectiveness of censorship and the control of individual initiatives in the field of music publishing in early eighteenth-century Spain. This is demonstrated by newly discovered documents concerning a lawsuit brought against Torres, who owned a royal printing privilege from 1700 until his death in 1738, by Francisco Díaz de Guitián, who wanted to establish a music press of his own. Several musicians acted as witnesses, giving a detailed view of how the music press worked at the time, notably how the approbations customarily given by established musicians on behalf of music treatises intended for publication were used to promote or block a career. Based on these new insights, a general study of all the known prints by the Imprenta de Música is presented in a broader editorial, political and cultural context.