UWB Crest

School of Music

News

New tunes for the Elizabethan stage

Dr Sally Harper’s work for a new book on the sources of music in Wales before 1650 (to be published by Ashgate in 2007) has turned up a fascinating cluster of English stage melodies within a rare list of eighty tune titles (c.1590) from Lleweni Hall near Denbigh in north Wales.

Tarlton

Four tunes are named after two famous Elizabethan stage stars – Richard Tarlton (d.1588), master of comic improvisation, and Edward Alleyn (d.1626), renowned for taking the lead role in several of Marlowe’s plays. About a dozen more titles also give a flavour of the lost musical repertory associated with the stage jigg, a song-and-dance form performed as a comic after-piece to the main play that was made universally popular with Elizabethan audiences by Tarlton himself.

The transmission of such fashionable tunes to provincial north Wales seems a puzzle, but the key figure is the Elizabethan poet and courtier John Salusbury, head of the household at Lleweni from 1586 until his death in 1612. Salusbury was both a close associate of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, as well as the brother-in-law of Ferdinando, Lord Strange – both of whom had their own companies of players.

An extended study of the Lleweni tune list and its stage tunes will appear in the next edition of the Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle, while Dr Harper will also be speaking about her findings at the Leeds International Medieval Congress in July.