Greensleeves

The story

"Greensleeves" is a traditional English song. In September 1580 the printer Richard Jones registered a broadside ballad called "A Newe Northen Dittye of ye Ladye Greene Sleves" at the Stationers' Company in London. Six more ballads related to it were registered within a year: an answer by Edward White on the same day, 3 September 1580, then others by Henry Carr, White again, Jones and William Elderton, and a third by White in August 1581. The song survives in A Handful of Pleasant Delights (1584) as "A New Courtly Sonnet of the Lady Green Sleeves", and the tune appears in several late 16th- and early 17th-century sources, among them Ballet's MS Lute Book, Het Luitboek van Thysius and manuscripts in the Seeley Historical Library at the University of Cambridge.

A common myth credits the song to King Henry VIII. He could not have written it: it rests on an Italian style of composition that reached England only after his death. Musically the melody fits the ground-bass chord patterns well known at the time, the romanesca, which came from Spain, the passamezzo antico and the Andalusian progression.

The tune was famous within a few years. In Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor (written c. 1597, published 1602), Mistress Ford twice mentions "the tune of 'Greensleeves'", and Falstaff calls on the sky to thunder to it. As "My Lady Greensleeves" it served as the slow march of the London Trained Bands in the 16th and 17th centuries, and during the First World War the 7th (City of London) Battalion of the London Regiment took it as its quick march in place of "Austria". New words were also set to it: the 17th-century ballad Old England Grown New, and from as early as 1686 Christmas and New Year texts. By the 19th century nearly every printed collection of carols included a version, among them "What Child Is This?", written by William Chatterton Dix in 1865.

In the 20th century Ralph Vaughan Williams used the tune in his opera Sir John in Love (1928), and Ralph Greaves's 1934 arrangement for strings and harp, made with his blessing, became the Fantasia on Greensleeves. Gustav Holst wove it into his Second Suite in F for Military Band and his St Paul's Suite. It has been reused in film and television, by Jacques Brel and Leonard Cohen, and is played by ice cream vans in the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.

What it says

A love song in which the singer reproaches Lady Green Sleeves for rejecting him. Who she was has long been argued over: a popular reading makes her a woman of loose morals, since "green" could carry sexual meaning, but scholars note that this association is attested only from 1675 and that Renaissance saints and noblewomen were painted in green. Another reading holds that she was wrongly judged by her dress, and that her refusal of the singer shows it.

The words