© 2003 by Oxford University Press
The Elizabethan Lyric as Contrafactum: Robert Sidney's ‘French Tune’ Identified
The writing of English contrafacta in the later sixteenth century was an important route for the importing of Continental music, and for the influence of Continental poetic styles and musico-poetic relations. The contrafactum can tell us a great deal about how its writer understands English poetry and versification in relation both to music and to literary and musical practices in other countries. It also offers a model for thinking about how the use of a pre-existent poetic or musical form cannot avoid encountering and responding to the residues of previous occupants. The song that lies behind Robert Sidney's Song 12, ‘To a french Tune’, is identified and its implications both for our knowledge of the poetry of Sidney and his contemporaries, and for the history of Elizabethan and Jacobean song, are discussed. The French song ‘Puis que le ciel’ is witnessed by a number of versions and Sidney's contrafactum in fact adds much to what we can say about them.