Thomas Morley, Robert Johnson, and Songs for the Shakespearean Stage

Abstract

Thomas Morley’s possible association with, and contribution to, the Shakespeare theatre has been proposed and dismissed with equal weight by a host of scholars over many years. This chapter re-examines what we know, offers solutions to major problems, and concludes that it is probably time to put the controversy to bed once and for all. The songs of Robert Johnson have long been admired by those interested in early seventeenth-century English theatre. Songs by or attributed to him survive for plays by Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Webster, Thomas Middleton, Francis Beaumont, and John Fletcher, and many of them are exquisite. Is it possible, however, that our eagerness to have the original songs to the plays has led us to presume that any musical setting that survives in a seventeenth-century source was used in the relevant play’s first production? This chapter re-examines what we know of Johnson’s career and of the surviving sources for his play songs, explores the limits of what we can safely claim about his settings and, in some cases, proposes alternative original settings to the lyrics.