Thomas Ravenscroft: Musical Chronicler of an Elizabethan Theater Company

Abstract

HOMAS RAVENSCROFT (ca. 1590-1635) is best known today as the collector and editor of the earliest printed English folk songs and rounds. But during his relatively short lifetime, this enigmatic man was also a chorister, composer, music theorist, and, possibly, actor. His sense of commerce was remarkably shrewd, for he carefully marketed his four secular publications-Pammelia (i 609), Deuteromelia (1 609), Melismata (i 6i ), and A Briefe Discourse of the True (but Neglected) Use of Charact'ring the Degrees ( 16 4}--on the strength of their diversity and promised significance, clearly aiming at the widest possible audience.1 From these varied collections modem musical source studies have identified eleven songs whose lyrics appeared in contemporaneous stage plays, gaining for Ravenscroft a secondary reputation as a man of the theater.2 Since wordbooks of the era did not include music, and collections of exclusively theatrical music were never printed, most songs from Elizabethan and Jacobean plays have been

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