Much of the poetry of the Sidneys, and of other writers of the period, was written to pre-existing tunes. When Philip Sidney in the Defence of Poesy talks of 'words set if delightful proportion, either accompanied with, or prepared for, the well-enchanting skill of music' he is distinguishing lyric poems which may later be set to music (as many of his were) from poems written to music (contrafacta). Elizabethan poets learned a great deal about poetic imagery, about lyric rhetoric, and about versification, by writing poems which would displace previous song texts, often French and Italian. When we discuss the meaning or the form of such poems we do well to remember the nexus of priorities and traditions which produced the song whose rhetoric the contrafactum adopts. The two examples presented here are a well-known poem by Philip Sidney and a less well-known one by his brother Robert Sidney. Each exists in a lyric collection which mixes musical and non-musical texts. Philip Sidney's Certain Sonnets was first printed in the 1598 edition of the composite Arcadia, following on directly from the Arcadia and proceeding The Defence of Poesie and Astrophel and Stella. Various earlier manuscript copies (with names like "Dyvers and sondry Sonettes" and "Certein lowse Sonnettes and songes") combine various of its 32 poems, many of which are written to named tunes or for named occasions. The Certain Sonnets represents far more clearly than the involved fictions of performance of Arcadia or Astrophel and Stella the social context of Sidney's verse. Robert Sidney's autograph book of poems also distinguished between 'sonnets', used in the narrow sense, and 'songs', strophic poems either written to or prepared for music; indeed Robert Sidney numbers the songs, which are interspersed among the numbered sonnets, in a separate sequence.

The songs presented here have not perhaps been heard since the seventeenth century, yet they were written to be sung. Neither of the sources has been identified before. By retrieving the model to which they were written we also discover a lyric text to which the new English words are some sort of response, and can observe an exercise of imitatio on several levels. Students of Philip Sidney will recognise that the Italian text has influenced others of his poems.

The songs were recorded in June 1998 in the Lord Colyton Hall, Gonville and Caius College. The singers were Lisa Wilson (soprano), Geraldine Rossetti (alto), Chris Goater (tenor 1), Charles Aitken (tenor 2), and James Kazi (bass). David Buckley engineered the recording and Tom Seligman directed.

Gavin Alexander

Philip Sidney, Certain Sonnets 6
(5 parts)

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Robert Sidney, Song 12
(4 parts)

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Bibliographical Details

Philip Sidney: text (modernised) from The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (1598); music and Italian lyric (original spelling) from Giovanni Ferretti, Il Primo Libro delle Canzoni alla napolitana a cinque voci (Venice, 1567); my translation.

Robert Sidney: text (modernised) from British Library Add. MS 58435, fol. 32^r-v; music and French lyric (original spelling) from Jehan Planson, Airs mis en musique à quatre parties (Paris, 1587); my translation; later concordances witness a popular tune on which Planson's 4-part arrangement is based, with the refrain in the form Robert Sidney refers to.

Sidneiana is edited by Gavin Alexander. Contributions, comments, and suggestions welcome.

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This page last updated Thursday, 12 August 1999