The Ballad Literature and Popular Music of the Olden Time/Volume 1/Reign of Elizabeth/Sick, Sick, and Very Sick
This tune is contained in Anthony Holborne’s Cittharn Schoole, 4to., 1597, and in one of the Lute MSS. in the Public Library, Cambridge. (D. d. iv. 23.) In Much Ado about Nothing, Hero says, “Why, how now! do you speak in the sick tune?” and Beatrice answers, “I am out of all other tune, methinks.” In Nashe’s Summer’s last Will and Testament, Harvest says, “My mates and fellows, sing no more Merry, merry, but weep out a lamentable Hooky, hooky, and let your sickles cry—
And sick and for the time;
For Harvest, your master, is
Abus’d without reason or rhyme.”
On 24th March, 1578, Richard Jones had licensed to him “a ballad intituled Sick, sick, &c., and on the following 19th June, “A new songe, intituled—
For grief to see this wicked world, that will not mend, I fear.”
This was probably a moralization of the former.
In the Harleian Miscellany, 4to, 10. 272, is “A new ballad, declaring the dangerous shooting of the gun at the court (1578), to the tune of Sicke and sicke; commencing—
At evening toward night,
Our noble Queen Elizabeth
Took barge for her delight;
And had the watermen to row,
Her pleasure she might take,
About the river to and fro,
As much as they could make.
Weep, weep, still I weep,
And shall do till I die,
To think upon the gun was shot
At court so dangerously.”
The ballad from which the tune derives its name is probably that printed in Ritson’s Ancient Songs, (1793, p. 139) from a manuscript in the Cotton Library (Vespasian, A 25), and entitled Captain Car. The event which gave rise to it occurred in the year 1571. The first stanza is here printed to the tune:—
