The First Booke of Ayres, 1600

Morley, Thomas; Fellowes, Edmund Horace; Dart, Thurston; Greer, David

doi:10.4159/harvard.9780674330306.c9

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“…On the one hand, 'private' in this context could imply leisure time, thus avoiding the assertion that Dowland's songs had been written or printed with the express intention of commercial gain or social advancement, but rather it implies that they were initially written 'privately' for his own recreation in much the same way as a gentlemanly amateur might figure his writing. In his The First Booke of Ayres (1600), Thomas Morley likewise draws on a similar idea, writing to his patron, Ralph Bosvile, that since his ayres 'were made this vacation time, you may vse likewise at your vacant howers', 122 while Robert Jones describes the poems he sets in his The First Booke of Songes or Ayres (1600) as the 'priuate recreation' of the anonymous gentlemanly amateurs who penned them. 123 On the other hand, the notion of 'priuate labours' implicitly alludes, perhaps, to the increasingly common convention in early modern printed books of male writers figuring their creative offerings in terms of labour and childbirth.…”

Section: The Sociocultural Autonomy Of the Composer As Authormentioning

confidence: 99%

‘How Hard an Enterprise It Is’: Authorial Self-Fashioning in John Dowland’s Printed Books

Gibson

2007

Early Music History

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The naming of John Dowland as ‘Author’ on the title page of his publication The First Booke of Songes or Ayres (1597) suggests a proprietary relationship between the composer and his work. This proprietary relationship is, perhaps, reinforced with the alignment of Dowland’s intellectual activities as ‘author’ with the notions of ‘composition’ and ‘invention’ in the same passage. All three terms could be used by the late sixteenth century to refer to notions of creativity, individual intellectual labour or origination. While many early examples of the use of ‘author’ refer specifically to God or Christ as creator, such as Chaucer’s declaration that ‘The auctour of matrimonye is Christ’, by the sixteenth century it was increasingly used to refer to an individual originator of intellectual or artistic creation closer to the modern sense of the word. Its sixteenth-century usage is, for instance, reflected in the title ‘A tretys, excerpte of diverse labores of auctores’, or as in a reference in 1509 to ‘The noble actor plinius’. Likewise, ‘invent’ or ‘inventor’ could be used to refer to the process of individual intellectual creation, exemplified by its use in 1576 ‘Your brain or your wit, and your pen, the one to invent and devise, the other to write’, while ‘compose’ could mean to make, to compose in words, ‘to write as author’ or, more specifically, to write music.

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Section: The Sociocultural Autonomy Of the Composer As Authormentioning

confidence: 99%

‘How Hard an Enterprise It Is’: Authorial Self-Fashioning in John Dowland’s Printed Books

Gibson

2007

Early Music History

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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The First Booke of Ayres, 1600

Cited by 1 publication

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‘How Hard an Enterprise It Is’: Authorial Self-Fashioning in John Dowland’s Printed Books

‘How Hard an Enterprise It Is’: Authorial Self-Fashioning in John Dowland’s Printed Books

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