The beta version of Early Modern Songscapes is a digital exploration of Henry Lawes’s 1653 songbook Ayres and Dialogues. The Ayres and Dialogues menu is intended to help you browse the collection. To browse the Table of Contents page as transcribed from the 1653 Ayres and Dialogues click on "Table of Contents" in the drop-down menu. "View Editions" will bring you to an alphabetical listing, by "first line title", of all of the TEI/MEI editions of Lawes' songs that can be examined with our viewer. "Full Songbook Text" provides a searchable version of the entire 1653 songbook, including dedicatory epistles and poems, with embedded links to individual lyrics and song editions. For an image-based digital facsimile of Lawes’ songbook click on "View Primary Source".
The songs "Come heavy Souls," "Theseus, O Theseus," and "Venus, redress a wrong" are variant editions, with textual and musical variants indicated in blue. Users can toggle between copy texts by clicking on the interactive shelf numbers on the left. Click the blue highlighted musical notation or text to see a pop-up box with an image of the relevant variant(s). This is often easier to do if you zoom in using your browser, in most cases with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+ (Windows) or ⌘+ (Mac). Also, bear in mind that the cursor will change from an arrow to a pointer when you hover over something clickable. Simply click anywhere outside of the pop-up box to close it.
For bibliographic information about the variants displayed, click the "Details" at the bottom of any edition to display publishing information and other relevant metadata.
For our practices concerning variants and accidentals, see our editorial statement.
To download our TEI and MEI files, see our Github data repository.