Heart’s ease, or The Honesuckle, was a lively Elizabethan almain that Holborne also arranged for a consort. You can hear a lively concert performance here. I have just found that the cantus part of the song is practically identical to the upper voice of this arrangement (phew!). You can tell the melody in the score because all the stems point up.
The only significant divergence is in bar 20, where the lute version shows a C in the top voice whilst there is a C# in the cantus; I have gone with the C# here, though I know that Holborne did like to sneak unexpected notes in.
Arranged from the digital facsimile of Matthew Holmes Lute Book Dd.2.11 f. 44/2 at Cambridge University Library.
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| A heartsease or wild pansy (Viola tricolor). They appear spontaneously in my veg garden, and are probably a hybrid swarm of the native plant with cultivated pansies, of which they are an ancestor. Culpepper reckoned it was a powerful anti-venereal , but in A Midsummer Night's Dream it's used as a love potion. |
Peter: Musicians! O! musicians, ‘Heart’s ease, Heart’s ease:’ O! an ye will have me live, play ‘Heart’s ease.’
First Musician: Why ‘Heart’s ease?’
Peter: O! musicians, because my heart itself plays ‘My heart is full of woe;’ O! play me some merry dump, to comfort me.
[A dump was a dirge, so what is a merry dirge? The humour escapes me.]
According to abcnotation there are two tunes under this name. They give these words, but I can’t make them fit to the present piece, though they can be stretched to fit the first section if it’s repeated:
1. Singe care away with sport & playe,
Pasttime is all our pleasure.
Yf well we fare, for nought we care,
In mearth our constant treasure.
2. A cooper I am, and have been long,
And hooping is my trade.
And married man am I to as pretty a wench
As ever God hath made.
Fit or not, they do summarize the feeling of the piece.
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