The sources of musical settings of Thomas Carew's poetry

Abstract

This article draws upon and attempts to synthesize some of the recent work on manuscript sources of seventeenth-century song and verse, with particular focus on the musical settings of the poetry of Thomas Carew (?1595–1639/40). The first and largest part is devoted to describing the sources for those settings, listing the poems which were set to music, and outlining the number and type of settings. The aim is to provide reference material for future research into the relationship between poetry and music in this period, and at the same time to generate, through this focus on Carew, some sense of the extent and nature of that relationship. An image emerges of the court of Charles I as a site where musicians and poets worked in parallel to, and in partnership with, each other, developing English counterparts to Italian models. The article further attempts to assess the nature and importance of the role that song-books played in the publication of Carew's poetry, and to consider the interchange of lyrics between song-books and verse miscellanies. This leads into an examination of the importance of Henry Lawes's autograph song-book for both textual and literary criticism of Carew's poetry.