A Score for the Lord's Masque by Thomas Campion.

Andrew J. Sabol, ed. Hanover and London: Brown University Press (University Press of New England), 1993.19 ill + xx + 348 pp. $75. ISBN: 10-87541-569-6.

Among the wide and varied corpus of Renaissance celebratory entertainments, the English court masque provides one of the most elaborate and spectacular examples. The masque was the epitome of the multimedia entertainment, combining high and low drama, music, dance, ornate costumes, elaborate scenes and machines, high-flown philosophical rhetoric, structural and generic intricacy, and complex allegorical and political meaning. Long relegated to obscurity in little-studied printed and manuscript sources, the masque has exercised an increasing influence in English Renaissance scholarship since the 1970s. Yet during this time, little attention has been paid to the important place of music in the masque. This is chiefly because the sources for masque music are widely scattered and frustratingly incomplete. But as Andrew Sabol showed in his impressive Four Hundred Songs and Dances from the Smart Masque (1978, 1982), the music is there and can be put to use, if only one is willing to approach it with scholarly care and a little imagination. Now Sabol has demonstrated how that promise might be fulfilled, producing in one volume a "complete" rendition of the text and music for Thomas Campion's The Lords' Masque, presented on 14 February 1613. The work formed a part of the extensive celebrations for the ill-fated marriage of James I's daughter Elizabeth to Frederick V, Elector Palatine, and featured scenes and costumes by Inigo Jones and music by some of the great musical figures of the age, including Coprario, Johnson, Taylor, Campion himself, and, perhaps, a number of others.

Like the Stuart masque, Sabol's book is its own multimedia entertainment, including not only some 250 pages of musical score, but four (or five, depending upon how one counts) chapters combining a scholarly discussion of the masque - and masques in general - with ideas and hints for performance, and extensive critical notes on everything from the text to the music to the illustrations. There are many things to praise in this volume: Sabol not only provides a facsimile of the 1613 printed libretto, but also inserts an edited and line-numbered text in its proper locations throughout the score; the various illustrations are apposite to the discussion; and important related material is presented in four appendices. The score itself introduces what may be some newly-discovered music written expressly for this masque, and the other music is for the most part well-chosen (although occasionally an eyebrow might be raised, e.g. in the case of Sabol's use of Orlando Gibbons's famous madrigal "The Silver Swan" [no. 24]). Overall, however, the arrangements are very good, and Sabol has helpfully provided editorial "divisions" for use in repeated passages, alternative versions of some of the pieces, and keyboard reductions of the consort accompaniments to the songs for use in rehearsal. Performers on the lute, cittern, bandora, and lyra viol used to playing from tablature might prefer versions of their parts in that format, although regular scoring is of course more accessible to scholars and non-specialists. For its part, the University Press of New England has miraculously invented a binding that enables this paperback volume to stay open, even on the most unforgiving of music stands.

Despite the sumptuous nature of this volume, greater care might have been taken with some of the more minor aspects of preparation. While the plates are clearly reproduced, parts of the score look like second-generation photocopies, and there is an annoying (and annoyingly inconsistent) tendency to use the letter "1" in place of the numeral "1," especially in the footnotes. Perhaps more significantly, one wonders what principle might have guided the organization of the various sections of the book. Both the preface and chapter 1 contain important information about the origins of masque, which should probably have been brought together in one place. Moreover, intellectual curiosity at times gives way to frustration as the reader is left flipping backward and forward through the volume in search of notes to the text, notes to the music, or the facsimile of the original libretto. A better scheme might have been to keep the four scholarly chapters (3-34) and their notes (317-323) together as part 1, while assigning to part 2 not only the score (45-315), but also the "List of Items in [the] Score" (xi-xiii), the "Notes to the Music Items" (335-45), the facsimile, collation, and the "Notes on Instruments" (35-44), and the "Notes to the Illustrations" (324-25), to be followed by the appendices and bibliography.

These minor complaints aside, Andrew Sabol should be congratulated, not merely for his wide-ranging familiarity with the music of the period, but for making that music, along with his considerable scholarly erudition, available in such a neat package. Performers and scholars alike should welcome this important contribution to our knowledge and understanding of the Stuart masque. We eagerly await a performance and/or recording that will bring this work to its full fruition.

ANDREW R. WALKLING Dartmouth College