Musical Notation from 'Upon a Summer's Day'

This musical staff shows a melody from a period song or composition, reproduced in J. Ashton's 1883 collection of seventeenth-century humor and satire. The three-line excerpt in treble clef represents the kind of popular music that accompanied satirical ballads and humorous verse of the early modern period. Such songs, often printed as broadsides with illustrated letterpress or woodcut images, were vehicles for social and political commentary aimed at literate and semi-literate audiences. The marriage of music and text made satire accessible and memorable, establishing a tradition of visual and verbal wit that would evolve through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries into the caricature and comic art forms that preceded modern comics.