By Master Sedley, Chairman of the Library Committee 2003-2011. This article originally appeared in The Inner Temple Yearbook 2008-09.
Although it has had in recent years to sell some of its most valuable non-legal books, the Inner Temple Library still has some eclectic delights on its shelves. Among them is a fourth edition, published in 1670, of John Playford’s The Dancing Master. It came (though probably not directly) from Playford’s bookshop by the porch of the Temple Church.
Playford was apprenticed in 1639, at the relatively advanced age of 16, to a stationer. But music was his first love, and within three years he had rented, at £2 a year, the shop or booth by the church porch from which for the rest of his life he sold not only music books but instruments and medicaments (among them “Doctor Turner’s dentifrices and Sir Kenelme Digby’s Sympathetical Powder”). Here musicians and music-lovers came, among them Samuel Pepys, who bought a copy of The Dancing Master in 1662, Henry Purcell and Dr Blow. Another of his customers, the poet laureate Nahum Tate, wrote an elegy for Playford’s funeral in December 1686, when he died in his house in Arundel Street and was buried – or so it is thought – in the Temple Church.
The booksellers of 17th-century London were its publishers. The books Playford published during the Commonwealth show how little there is in the notion that Cromwell’s England was a psalm-singing cultural desert. Late in 1650 the Stationers’ Company gave Playford its licence to publish The English Dancing Master, which he did the following year. The adjective “English” in the title, which had been dropped by the time of publication of the second edition in 1653, was not fortuitous. Every acknowledged dancing master in the country was French, and formal dancing was an elite pastime. The point Playford was setting out to make, and which his book memorably proved, was that England had its own popular dances which, with simple-to-follow notation, every fiddler could play and everyone could join in. The book is prefaced by a key setting out the dance symbols, and each score carries instructions.
To judge by the quality of his books, Playford must have been a demanding publisher. His first printer was Thomas Harper, but by the time of the Inn’s edition The Dancing Master was being printed by William Godbid, with whose widow or daughter Playford’s son went into partnership, finally taking over the printshop. Playford himself, who had a printshop of his own in Little Britain, later in the 1650s introduced the use of horizontal strokes to join quavers and semiquavers, a device which was picked up by Dutch printers and has become a universal feature of music printing.
Although Playford published the works of many of the leading composers of his time, it is on The Dancing Master that his reputation rests, alongside his Catch that Catch Can, a collection of popular rounds and catches which he published in the following year. It was The Dancing Master, however, which went through numerous editions, first in the hands of his son, then (from 1709) of his successor John Young, and then in the hands of a variety of publishers. By 1728 it was in its seventeenth edition. By 1850 it had expanded to three volumes, and over a thousand dances had at one time or another been included in it.
Playford’s Dancing Master is the source of a number of tunes which would otherwise have been lost. Among them is that of The bonny broom, a song which Beaumont and Fletcher early in the century had heard milkmaids singing and which twentieth-century singers have been able with Playford’s help to restore as a complete song. It is also a ready source of a number of popular melodies, including the Elizabethan tune Sellenger‘s Round, a version of which is in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book but which by the 18th century was being specified on penny broadsides as the melody for such texts as the ribald Fair Maid of Islington.
By obtaining appointment in about 1653 as clerk to the Temple Church Playford became able, in addition to collecting burial fees and rents, to function as bookbinder to the Inner and Middle Temple and to be secure in the tenure of his shop. A serious musicologist, he wrote and published a history of music which ran through ten editions before his death. After the Restoration, grumbling that “all solemn musick is much laid aside, being esteemed too heavy and dull for the light heels and brains of this nimble and wanton age”, he republished some of his own liturgical books.
In 2008 the Inner Temple is celebrating the 400th anniversary of the grant of its Royal Charter. Playford and his Dancing Master are to feature in the celebrations, for both his tunes and his dances (one of them is Pegasus, or the Flying Horse) bring to life a period of the Inn’s and the country’s history not far removed from that moment.