Journal Article

John Rastell’s Dramatic Ballad and the Early Tudor Court

Lillo, Matthew

2020

Overview

Where scholars frequently claim that ballads emerge primarily from orally transmitted folk and festival songs, evidence shows equally important aristocratic influences on the form during the early sixteenth century. In what has become a well-known innovation among music historians, early English printer John Rastell becomes the first to use a new, influential system for printing music when he publishes the musical notation for a dramatic ballad within his own 1520 play, The Four Elements. Crucially, Rastell takes the musical setting for his ballad from a composition attributed to no less a figure than Henry VIII. But, while Rastell’s dramatic ballad has been well-discussed in relation to Henry VIII’s oeuvre as a composer and lyricist, its broader relationship to early Tudor balladry has not been thoroughly investigated. In fact, despite a surge of new interest in discussing early English ballads both within and without dramatic literature, there exists no serious, sustained study of balladry that focuses on the first half of the sixteenth century. Putting Rastell’s dramatic ballad into conversation with an array of secondary evidence, this article thus works toward addressing an ongoing scholarly gap in the early history of the English ballad, revealing, in its course, the early Tudor court’s extensive, often deliberate, and too-frequently elided influence over the genre’s development.

• Publisher: University of North Carolina Press,The University of North Carolina Press
• Subject: 16th century / Aristocracy / Ballads / Book publishing / British & Irish literature / Conversation / Courts / English literature / Folk music / Genre / Historians / Innovations / International economic relations / Music / Music festivals / Music history / Musical notation / Nobility / Rastell, John / Rastell, John (1475-1536) / Shakespeare, William (1564-1616) / Songs / Theater / Traditions / Trends / Tudor period