Song one in Macbeth and song five in The Winter's Tale included in a manuscript songbook

This music book, written around 1620-1630, includes a song from Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (4.4.336), “Get yee hence, for I must goe” (images 2 and 3) and a song from Shakespeare's Macbeth (3.3.35), “Come away, come away” (image 1). The manuscript belonged to Ann Twice and was probably copied out for her by her music teacher. Ian Spink suggests that Twice was “probably quite an accomplished singer, able to accompany herself on the lute.” The volume has the inscription “Ann Twice, Her Booke” on the front cover and “Songs vnto the violl: and lute” on the first page.

Although none of the settings in the manuscript are explicitly attributed to the composer Robert Johnson (1588-1633), the tune for “Get yee hence” in Twice’s manuscript was likely composed by him. This attribution rests primarily on the fact that Twice’s songbook includes a number of other songs Johnson is known to have written for early plays and masques (Long 81). Johnson is now best-known for writing the original music to “Where the bee sucks”(5.1.98) and “Full fathom five” (1.2.474) from Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

Scholars such as John Cutts and John H. Long have argued that the tune of “Get yee hence” presented in this manuscript (the tune also appears in NYPL Drexel MS 4041 with a previously unknown second verse not printed in The Winter's Tale) represents the original music for performance, while Tiffany Stern suggests that the song pre-dates the play.

Twice’s songbook also includes a number of other songs from plays and masques, including Ben Jonson’s The Devil is an Ass and John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. Although her music teacher was likely the one who copied the songs, Twice, a Gloucester native, was this manuscript’s intended user and audience: she was expected to read not only the lyrics, but also the vocal line, and the accompaniment so that she could sing while accompanying herself on the lute.

The manuscript’s provenance in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries is unknown. Although Twice’s manuscript lists fifty-eight items in the table of contents on the final leaf, only twenty-eight musical settings are now present, including the aforementioned “Get yee hence, for I must goe” (images 2 and 3) from Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (4.4.336) and “Come away, Come away, Hecket [Hecate]” (image 1) from Middleton’s The Witch (which may also have been used in William Davenant’s 1674 Restoration adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth). The earliest text of Macbeth, the 1623 First Folio, simply lists “Come away, come away, &c” as a song by the witches at the end of act three, scene five.

Twice’s songbook later belonged to John Stafford Smith (1750-1836), who published selected songs from the manuscript in Musica Antiqua (1812), before it passed to music collector and historian Edward Francis Rimbault (1816-1876). At Rimbault’s death, the New York Public Library bought it for their Drexel collection, where it still resides. A full facsimile of this manuscript appears in Elise Bickford Jorgens, English Song: 1600-1675, volume 10.