Seaven passionate pauans
Lachrimæ, or Seaven Teares was published while Dowland was on a visit to London from the Danish court. He had arrived in England in the summer of 1603, just a few months after Elizabeth’s death. It is likely he made the journey to try his luck with the new king, James I. He dedicated the collection to James’s wife, Anne of Denmark, but, again, he must have been naîve if he thought it would secure him a post at the new court, for Anne would presumably have thought it not politic to be seen poaching an employee from her brother. Dowland tried to return to Denmark in the autumn of 1603, but was forced to spend the winter in England “by contrary windes and frost”, as he put it in the Lachrimæ dedication. He also told Anne that the collection was “begun where you were borne, and ended where you raigne,” which seems to mean that some of it was written in Denmark, perhaps for an ensemble that included his fellow expatriates William Brade and Daniel Norcombe, and the rest was written specially for the publication in London in the winter of 1603-4.
Dowland broke new ground with Lachrimæ. It was only the third collection of dance music to be published in England, after Anthony Holborne’s Pavans, Galliards, Almains and Thomas Morley’s First Booke of Consort Lessons, both published in 1599. It was the first collection of string consort music to include a lute tablature part. Late sixteenth-century pictures sometimes show lutes or keyboard instruments playing with string groups, but it was not until the 1620s that parts for continuo instruments were routinely included in collections of dance music. It was also the first and only published collection of consort music to use the table layout. Consort music was normally published at the time in sets of part-books, with each book containing all the parts for a particular instrument. In Lachrimæ they are grouped around the page, with the parts for the largest instruments, the bass and the lute, on the long sides. Even so, practical experience shows that it is difficult if not impossible to get five viol players and a lutenist seated around a single copy: if they get close enough to read the music comfortably there is no room for bowing; if they withdraw to a safe distance the music is too small to read.
The title-page of Lachrimæ tells us that the collection is intended for “the Lute, Viols, or Violons, in fiue parts.” This has sometimes been taken to mean that the two families of stringed instruments should be mixed together, with violins taking the upper parts and viols the lower parts. In fact, everything we know about English music of the period suggests that Dowland intended them as alternatives: a complete viol consort or a complete violin consort. As late as 1636 the writer Charles Butler wrote that the various types of instruments are “commonly used severally by them selves: as a Set of Viols, a Set of Waits [shawms], or the like”. Mixed ensembles, such as the sextet of violin or treble viol, flute or recorder, bass viol, lute, cittern and bandora used by Thomas Morley and Philip Rosseter, were exotic novelties at the time, and only became common later in the seventeenth century.
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