EX. 17-23B John Dowland, Can shee excuse my wrongs, voice part rebarred to show hemiola scansions(One of the madrigals Yonge Englished was Palestrina’s ubiquitous Vestiva i colli.) Yonge’s
bestseller was followed two years later by Italian Madrigals Englished, mainly containing Marenzio,
freely paraphrased by a well-known poet, Thomas Watson. And then it was Morley’s turn to make a
killing. Aiming for the widest possible appeal, he concentrated at first on the lighter submadrigalian
Italian genres that had descended from dance songs, becoming ever more frivolous as the madrigal
became ever more serious: canzonetti (little homorhythmic songs), balletti (little dances), and the like.
These are the genres that have the falala nonsense refrains (parodying solmization) that are so firmly
associated with English “madrigals” as commonly defined (and as sung by glee clubs). Their continued
currency goes all the way back to Morley’s popularizing efforts.
Morley’s first book of Italian translations, Canzonets, or Little Short Songs to Four Voices: Selected
out of the best and approved Italian authors, came out in 1597. His Madrigals to Five Voices: Selected
out of the best approved Italian authors appeared the next year, and also consisted, for the most part, of
canzonets. But his Italianate composing activity actually preceded his editorial work. In 1593, Morley had
published a book of two-voiced canzonets of his own; in 1594 he put out a book of four-part madrigals
under his own imprint as publisher; and in 1595 he issued a shady little book that bestrode the borderline
between composing and arranging: The first book of ballets to five voyces, issued in both English and
Italian versions, in which no name is given as author except Morley’s, but in which almost every item is
so closely based on an Italian model as to amount to plagiarism, except that Morley very skillfully
amplified the “falas” far beyond anything in his models.
Morley’s dance-song “Now is the month of Maying,” for example, now a glee club evergreen, was
really a balletto, So ben mi c’ha bon tempo, that Morley found in a goldmine of a book published five
years earlier in Venice, called Selva di varia ricreatione (“Forest [i.e., a big bunch] of various
recreations”) by Orazio Vecchi, the great Italian master of submadrigalian frivolity (including “madrigal
comedies”—farces with texts made up entirely of madrigal spoofs). Ex. 17-24 shows the first strophe,