An interesting correction from Laura

Valentine Singers are performing Shearer's Songs and Sonnets on 6th March, but did you know....

Great composer though Shearer might be, his knowledge of Shakespeare leaves something to be desired!

The first song in ‘songs and sonnets’ isn’t by the Bard at all; it’s a hybrid of two poems. The first part (up to bar 60) is most of ‘The passionate shepherd to his love’ by Christopher Marlowe. Marlowe was a poet and playwright who was a contemporary of Shakespeare and might have rivalled him had he not got himself killed in a tavern brawl following a disagreement over who was to pay for the drinks.

Walter Raleigh (the chap who put his coat over a puddle for Queen Elizabeth) wrote a reply to Marlowe’s idealised picture of rural life. In Raleigh’s poem the maid basically tells the shepherd to push off; she doesn’t think much of his presents as most of them will fade and decay and she’s not sure you can trust shepherds anyway! The first verse of this poem gave Shearer the end of our song. So in order to be true to the spirit of the original the choir (or the ladies at least) should sing from bar 61 with eyebrows raised and a kind of ‘am I bovvered’ expression to show what the maid really thought of the shepherd’s offer….


I also looked up a couple of the odd words in the songs which really are by Shakespeare:

Pugging tooth – doesn’t seem to mean anything at all, at least all the sources I checked said it was unclear but probably rude!
Tosspot, on the other hand, wasn’t obscene in Shakespeare’s day – it just meant ‘drunkard’, i.e. man who tosses back his tankard to get some more in
Aunts could be a general term for women of a certain age – so the chap need not have been rolling in the hay with his Mum’s sister but making free with a selection of the village women