Greensleeves: A Song History

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"Greensleeves" first surfaces in the records of London's book trade. On 3 September 1580 the printer Richard Jones registered a northern ballad of the Lady Greensleeves with the Stationers' Company, and other entries tied to the song followed the same day and within the next few weeks, which suggests it was already popular; none of those 1580 printings is known to survive.[1][2][3] William Ballet's lute book, a manuscript of about 1590 now at Trinity College Dublin, is usually named as the earliest and best source of the melody, though Early Music Muse cautions that it is hard to say which written copy came first; the tune also appears in a number of other lute sources from roughly 1585 to 1605.[1][3] Musically it draws on the Italian ground basses known as the passamezzo antico and the romanesca.[1][3]

Painting of a young man in a plumed hat playing the lute, about 1625

Valentin de Boulogne, Lute Player, oil on canvas, ca. 1625–26. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Painted a generation after the earliest lute copies of the tune; shown for the instrument only.

That Italian pedigree is one reason to doubt the popular legend that Henry VIII wrote the song. The Hymnology Archive notes that this style is not known to have reached England before 1550, after the end of Henry's reign, and suggests that a 1598 verse allusion linking a ballad sung to the tune with Henry's day may be "entirely fanciful"; the Traditional Ballad Index sees little evidence that Henry could have composed such a melody and calls its true origin unknown.[1][2] By Shakespeare's day it was familiar enough to joke about: in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Mistress Ford compares Falstaff's mismatched words and character to the Hundredth Psalm sung to "Greensleeves," and Falstaff himself later calls on the sky to thunder to the tune.[4][5]

The melody outlived its ballad, turning up as a country dance, a morris tune and the setting for carols, among them "What Child Is This?"[2] The words of that carol, by William Chatterton Dix, were first published in Christmas Carols New and Old, First Series (London: Novello, 1868); the Hymnology Archive dates the carol's pairing with the tune to 1868 and observes that the melody has been known chiefly through Dix's text ever since.[1]

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Sources

  1. Hymnology Archive: "What Child Is This".
  2. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Greensleeves".
  3. Early Music Muse (Ian Pittaway): "Greensleeves: Mythology, History and Music. Part 2 of 3: History".
  4. Folger Shakespeare Library: The Merry Wives of Windsor, Act 2, Scene 1.
  5. Folger Shakespeare Library: The Merry Wives of Windsor, Act 5, Scene 5.