SHAKESPEARE'S SONGS
William Linley, born 1771, edited two volumes octavo of settings to Shakespeare's lyrics, called Dramatic Songs. Some of them are by Purcell, Arne, etc.; but unfortunately the majority are by the editor, who seems to have had no exaggerated respect for Shakespeare's text, but a very high opinion of his own powers.
Mr Linley has some very naïve remarks to make in the observations printed after the preface. Writing of the lyrics sung by Feste in Twelfth Night, he says: "Though there is a whimsical point about them, they are not inelegantly written." (This of "Come away, Death"!) Linley proceeds: "Shakespeare evidently meant that it should be sung with pathetic expression, but one is not prepared to relish it from the Clown; and there is nothing ludicrous in the words, and the plaintive wildness which they seem to demand from the music could not, by any aid of preparation, be given by the Clown so as to produce a feeling of melancholy—it would be more likely to excite laughter."
After these preliminary remarks, one may expect anything from our editor; and when one remembers the exquisite pathos of Mr Courtice Pounds' singing of Augustus Barratt's setting at His Majesty's one can smile at the pretentious want of knowledge displayed in Linley's short introduction.
His own setting, which is before me, is sorry stuff. Words and phrases are repeated over and over again. He does not even set the first sentence correctly; he says, "Come away, Death, come away," and continues his "improvement" throughout the song.
The same kind of thing occurs throughout his two volumes; but it is interesting to note that for a long time it was considered a standard work, and Roffe, so late as 1867, speaks of it in his Handbook of Shakespeare Music as "a happily conceived work."
It is a curious thing that the lyrics in the plays most popular with composers are either frankly not by Shakespeare or are very doubtful. The one most frequently chosen, "Take, oh take those lips away," from Measure for Measure, has been set, according to Roffe (1867), seventeen times; and, according to a work not quite truthfully describing itself as A List of All the Songs and Passages in Shakespeare which have been Set to Music, thirty times. Now, the second verse, "Hide, oh hide," is undoubtedly by Fletcher, from The Bloody Brother, and it is likely that Shakespeare merely quoted the first verse without acknowledgment, as he often did.