Marie’s Musings

Suite Sorrow

by Marie Delgado Travis

After too long a hiatus, this continues our discussion of William Byrd’s suite, The Battell, an ambitious musical program for its time, as it sought to depict a battle from start to finish.

The highlight of the suite (— at least for me) is “The Earle of Oxford’s Marche,” composed before 1588, and known generically (— by those who perhaps didn’t like Oxford) as the “The Marche Before the Battell.”

Through this spirited piece, Maestro Byrd apparently sought to honor— and indeed memorialize—his contemporary and friend, Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, whom many believe to be the true author of the Shakespeare canon.

In my previous post, I detail how Oxford leased a property called (of all things!) “Battell” to Byrd.

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In the same post, you can also hear examples of two earlier battle scores: “La Guerre” by Clement Jannequin [1528], and “A la Battaglia” by Heinrich Issac [1487], which as others have pointed out, tend to glorify war. See Yorgason, Brent Thomas, “Music and War Throughout the Ages” (1997).
https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/honors/275

By contrast, Byrd interrupts the fanfare (Marches), national rivalries and camaraderie (Irish Jig and Morris Dance), and of course, the brash sounds of warfare, with a somber piece entitled “The Burning of the Dead,” also known as “The Burying of the Dead.”

This brief but solemn interlude recalls the true cost of war, not just in terms of death and life-altering injuries, but the harsh impracticability, particularly in that era, of transporting the bodies of the fallen back to their respective homelands and loved ones.

Below is the score for The Battell Suite (in Three Movements) by William Byrd, as pieced together by scholars from contemporary and near-contemporary collections:

1. The Marche Before the Battell (AKA “The Earle of Oxford’s Marche”).

2. The Battell

a. The Souldier’s Sommons

b. The Marche of the Footemen

c. The Marche of the Horsemen

d. The Trumpetts

e. The Irish Marche

f. The Bagpipe and the Drone

g. The Flute and the Droome

h. The Marche to the Fight – Tantara Tantara – The Battells be Joyned

i. The Retreat

j. The Burning of the Dead

k. The Morris

l. Ye Souldiers Dance

3. The Galliard for the Victorie

Source: https://imslp.org/wiki/The_Battell_(Byrd,_William)#Scores

Burying or burning bodies is quite a remarkable and grotesque topic for an artist to depict in any medium. But as we shall see below, the man who wrote Shakespeare creates similar juxtapositions in his history plays. We’ll use two plays from Shakespeare’s Henriad to illustrate this point.

The French, for example, in Henry V, ask the eponymous king for leave to bury their dead, following the stunning English victory at Agincourt:

Montjoy: No, great king:
I come to thee for charitable licence,
That we may wander o’er this bloody field
To look our dead, and then to bury them;
To sort our nobles from our common men.
For many of our princes—woe the while!—
Lie drown’d and soak’d in mercenary blood;
So do our vulgar drench their peasant limbs
In blood of princes….

Henry V (IV, 7).

One cannot help but note that, among the French nobles, even in death, there is an insurmountable class distinction (— prefiguring the very distant French Revolution). That Shakespeare guy was quite precocious.

Contrast the above with Henry V’s egalitarian— and eminently Christian— promise to his men before the Battle of Agincourt:

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.

For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition….

Henry V (IV, 3).

An Aside: In the passage above, Henry calls his men “vile.” Is that a left-handed compliment?

According to Etymonline.com, an acceptation of the word is “of low estate, without worldly honor or esteem.”

The man who wrote Shakespeare contrasts this word with “gentle,” which according to the same source means, among others, “high born, worthy, noble, of good family” and “of the same family or clan”— and I might add, “refined,” as in gentleman.

Another somber yet realistic note in the same largely patriotic play occurs the night before the battle, when a soldier, Williams, turns Henry’s above speech on its head, and admonishes a disguised King Henry:

Williams: But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all ‘We died at such a place;’ some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind
them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle….

Henry V (IV,1)

A similarly harsh social commentary comes in Henry IV Part One (V, 3). Falstaff, who had been entrusted by the future Henry V (then Prince Harry / Hal) to recruit and lead men against Hotspur and his rebels, makes this devastating admission:

Falstaff: I have led my ragamuffins where they are peppered: there’s not three of my hundred and fifty left alive; and they are for the town’s end, to beg during life.

So at least two questions come trippingly to the tongue. Is it realistic to think that a commoner like Will from Stratford upon Avon would be permitted to doubt the decision of a monarch— even a past monarch— to declare war? Under Elizabeth, England engaged in a number of conflicts (against Spain, the Scottish and Irish, and in the Netherlands).

To put it in context, a printer had his hand cut off for publishing a pamphlet criticizing Elizabeth’s courtship with the Duke of Alençon (later Duke of Anjou).

Or is it more likely that she gave a certain amount of artistic freedom to someone whose deep knowledge of English history could be used to validate her position on the throne?

No doubt she found his work entertaining and instructive (dulce et utile, how to act and not act). And she could always lop his head off later, anyway, if she felt like it.

The second question that comes to mind is did the presumptive “Shake-Speare,” Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, ever serve in the military?

Clearly the real writer seemed to know a lot about war, yet the man from Stratford upon Avon seems not only to have lacked much formal schooling, but also military training.

I recall an acting director once commenting in an interview that he couldn’t imagine how anyone without war experience could have written those stirring words in Henry V:

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.…

To his mind, it was a writer who knew that protecting one’s buddy is often more important to a true soldier than his own survival.

So we’ll explore the question of Oxford’s military experience in my next post! — And Bye Bye Birdie!