Elizabeth Bacon Neville/Peryam, the Morley Household, and a Shakespeare Song in Print

Topic: Elizabeth Bacon Neville/Peryam, the Morley Household, and a Shakespeare Song in Print

Sourced Facts and Finding

Elizabeth Bacon, formerly Lady Nevell and by 1595 Lady Peryam, was not associated with only one major Elizabethan composer. William Byrd's My Ladye Nevells Booke was completed in 1591. Four years later Thomas Morley dedicated his First Booke of Canzonets to Two Voyces to the same woman. The dedication adds a fact that is more revealing than a conventional compliment: Morley's wife had previously served Lady Peryam and had selected her as the intended patron before the canzonets were completed.

This creates a documented household route:

Elizabeth Bacon Neville/Peryam → a woman formerly in her service → Thomas Morley → printed vocal music.

Morley subsequently printed the earliest surviving musical setting of the song “It was a lover and his lass” from As You Like It in his First Booke of Ayres (1600). The sequence does not prove that Henry Neville knew Morley, that Morley wrote for an original performance of the play, or that the connection has any bearing by itself on authorship. It does establish a concrete, female-mediated musical network within Henry Neville's immediate family environment and gives that network a later, direct intersection with a Shakespeare text.

Quoted Source Passages: The 1595 Primary Printed Witness

The Library of Congress supplies a complete scan of the 1595 partbooks. The title page reads:

CANTVS. OF THOMAS MORLEY THE FIRST BOOKE OF CANZONETS TO TWO VOYCES. IN LONDON BY THOMAS ESTE. ... 1595.

The dedication is headed “TO THE MOST VERTVOVS AND GENTILE LADIE THE LADIE PERIAM”. Morley personifies the two-part canzonets as two waiting women and explains why they are being offered to Peryam:

these Canzonets of mine like two wayting maydes desiring to attend vpon you; destinated by my Wife (euen before they were borne) vnto your Ladiships seruice. ... not being able as heeretofore still to serue you; shee would that these therefore with their presence should make good & supply that hir absence.

He dates the dedication from London on 17 November 1595 and signs himself Lady Peryam's servant. The complete object can be examined in the Library of Congress catalogue and page viewer, or as the full public PDF.

What the wording establishes

• Morley's wife had served Lady Peryam “heeretofore.” This is household service, not a resemblance inferred from surnames.
• The wife, rather than Morley alone, “destinated” the pieces to Peryam. She appears as an agent in patronage and book transmission.
• Morley represents the printed pieces as substitutes for his wife's absent personal service. The conceit only works because the prior service relationship was intelligible to the dedicatee.
• The book was offered to Elizabeth after her Neville marriage, but the service could have begun before or after her remarriage. The dedication does not date it.

John Harley's identification of the dedicatee brings the two musical witnesses together. The published abstract identifies the 1591 Lady Nevell as Elizabeth, wife of Sir Henry Nevell of Billingbear, and notes both her later receipt of Morley's dedication and Morley's marriage to one of her servants.

2. A Second and Independent Musical Association

The Byrd and Morley evidence should not be collapsed into one claim.

The first is an exceptional keyboard anthology; the second is a printed book of Italianate two-voice secular songs. Together they show that Elizabeth's musical patronage was neither confined to a single composer nor dependent upon a single retrospective identification.

For Henry Neville research, this matters because Elizabeth was his stepmother. The appropriate historical question is therefore not “did Henry own these books?”—the evidence does not say that—but how musical repertory, musicians, and servants moved through a household shared across the Neville, Bacon, and Peryam phases of Elizabeth's life.

3. Morley's Later Printing of a Shakespeare Song

In 1600 Morley included “It was a lover and his lass” in The First Booke of Ayres. The Folger record identifies the surviving copy and reproduces the title page and the music across B4v–C1r: Folger Shakespeare Documented, STC 18115.5.

The corresponding Folger text of As You Like It 5.3 reads:

PAGES [sing]

    It was a lover and his lass,

       With a hey, and a ho, and a hey-nonny-no,

    That o'er the green cornfield did pass

       In springtime, the only pretty ring time,

    When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding.

    Sweet lovers love the spring.

Source: Folger, *As You Like It* 5.3.36–48.

The safe conclusion is exact but limited: the composer whose household was linked by marriage to Elizabeth Bacon's former servant later became a printer-composer of a Shakespeare lyric. Whether the 1600 music preserves a stage setting, a replacement setting, or a print adaptation remains a separate musicological problem.

4. Why This Is a Fruitful Research Avenue

The dedication suggests searches that ordinary male patronage studies can miss:

1. Identify Morley's wife. Search London marriage, baptism, burial, and probate records; musicians' guild and parish material; Peryam and Bacon wills; and household-payment records. Her name would convert an anonymous link into a traceable career.
2. Map women moving between households. Elizabeth's servants could have carried music, books, handwriting habits, repertory, and acquaintances across Billingbear, Peryam households, and London.
3. Compare repertories rather than titles alone. Test whether melodies, texts, or composers represented in My Ladye Nevells Booke recur in books associated with Morley, the Peryams, the Bacons, or Neville's diplomatic circle.
4. Investigate Windsor. Baldwin dated the Byrd manuscript at Windsor. Morley's household-service statement supplies a reason to ask whether Elizabeth maintained musical personnel or a London–Windsor circulation route, without presuming an answer.
5. Separate composition from circulation. A household can explain access to a song or setting even if it cannot establish who wrote the dramatic text. That is precisely why this lane is useful: it offers testable transmission mechanisms rather than resemblance alone.

5. Claim Boundaries

• The 1595 dedication is a directly inspected printed witness, not an OCR reconstruction.
• It proves service by Morley's wife to Lady Peryam; it does not name the wife or state where she served.
• Harley's identification makes Lady Peryam the former Lady Nevell, Elizabeth Bacon. The dedication itself uses only the later title.
• No relationship is proposed between Thomas Morley and Herbert Morley, the man named in Neville's 1599 travel party.
• The 1600 Shakespeare setting proves publication by Morley, not contact between Morley and Henry Neville and not the date or circumstances of the play's composition.

Citations and Notes on Access

• Thomas Morley, *The First Booke of Canzonets to Two Voyces* (1595), Library of Congress.
• John Harley, “‘My Ladye Nevell’ Revealed,” *Music & Letters* 86 (2005).
• Folger Shakespeare Library, Morley's *First Booke of Ayres* and “It was a lover and his lass”.
• Folger Shakespeare Library, *As You Like It* 5.3.