Shakespeare’s plays: Holborne’s Hearts-Ease (the Honie-Suckle), Voices of Music

We continue our celebration of Shakespeare’s 400th anniversary with music from the play Romeo and Juliet: Anthony Holborne’s setting of Hearts-Ease, also known as “the Honie-Suckle.“ Holborne was well known in London, and published a wide variety of arrangements of popular songs in his printed collection of “Pavans, Galliards, Almains and other short Aeirs“ of 1599. Although the diarist Samuel Pepys wrote in 1662 “it is a play of itself the worst that I ever heard in my life,“ the work became one of Shakesp