Lot 123•
MUSIC - MADRIGALS MORLEY (THOMAS) Madrigalls to Foure Voyces... The First Booke... Cantus, 1594
Ending from 19 November 2025, 12:00 GMT
Online, London, Knightsbridge£600 - £800
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MUSIC - MADRIGALS
MORLEY (THOMAS) Madrigalls to Foure Voyces Newly Published... The First Booke... Cantus [one of 4 parts only], title within wide elaborate woodcut border, text and musical notation within narrower page border throughout, numerous woodcut initials, some soiling and lower outer corners repaired throughout (occasionally affecting woodcut border), title with further rather crude repairs, modern cloth by Edmund Worrall, Birmingham, gilt-lettered red morocco title label on upper cover, with an early manuscript leaf on vellum bound in as fly-leaves (also crudely repaired), and 2 fragmentary strips of an early antiphonary loosely inserted [ESTC S112991], 4to (234 x 170mm.), Thomas Est in Aldersgate street at the signe of the black horse, 1594
Footnotes
A RARE PARTBOOK FROM THOMAS MORLEY'S FIRST SET OF MADRIGALS - WITH MEDIEVAL MANUSCRIPT FRAGMENTS. No copies of any part have been traced in auction records, and only an incomplete copy of the 1600 second edition. There is no sign in this copy of the excised dedication to Sir Henry Puckering which the scholar Thurston Dart discovered had been dropped by Morley during printing.
The fifteenth century manuscript leaf inserted into the binding is written in gothic textualis in brown ink (with the heading 'OM' and rubric at end in red), and comprises extracts from St Augustine's Homilies on the Gospels of St John, more precisely the final portion of Homily 5 on baptism. The two loose strips of vellum, perhaps once used as bookmarks, are fragments from a fifteenth century antiphonary, written in brown, blue and red ink.
Thomas Morley (1557 or 1558-1602), composer, author and organist, was born in Norwich, the son of a brewer. Having studied under William Byrd and been employed as organist at St. Paul's, he went on to become the foremost member of the English Madrigal School following publication of his first set in 1594. Probably the most famous composer of secular music in Elizabethan England, along with Robert Johnson he provided the only surviving contemporary settings of verse by Shakespeare. In 1596, upon the expiration of William Byrd's patent, Morley was granted the monopoly of music printing by Queen Elizabeth.