“Come Away, Death”

I think we need to get out of our heads a bit, so I’m dropping music onto this platform.

I bet you didn’t know that William Shakespeare and I share a birthday, his on April 23rd and mine on May 3rd. “But that’s not the same day,” you might be saying. And that’s where you would be wrong. The English government, stubborn bastards that they have always been, did not adjust the calendar to be in conformity with the Gregorian calendar until 1752—almost 200 years after Shakespeare was born. The Gregorian calendar went into effect in 1582, when the Bard was 18. Still, what was April 23rd when he was born we now call May 3rd.

There are no accidents.

When I was a Waldorf teacher, I would write songs upon occasion for my classes to sing. And at no time was this more fun than when I was directing my kids in productions of Shakespeare’s plays. As a result, I wrote tunes and arrangement for the lyrics in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest, and the play from which this song comes, Twelfth Night. What a pleasure these tasks I set myself were!

As I’ve mentioned before, another one of the songs I wrote for Twelfth Night is “The Wind and the Rain,” which I recorded some years ago with my comrades The Corktown Popes (Corktown is the historical Irish neighborhood in Detroit). You can give it a listen it here:

“Come Away, Death” is a melancholic little number that occurs in Act II, Scene 4, of Twelfth Night when the Count Orsino, lovesick puppy that he is, waxes philosophically to his page Cesario (who is in reality Viola—and madly in love with him) about love. When the fool of the Countess Olivia (a lady Orsino imagines himself to be in love with) shows up (at someone else’s house?), Orsino requests a song.

ORSINO 
O, fellow, come, the song we had last night.—
Mark it, Cesario. It is old and plain;
The spinsters and the knitters in the sun
And the free maids that weave their thread with bones
Do use to chant it. It is silly sooth,
And dallies with the innocence of love
Like the old age.

FOOL  Are you ready, sir?

ORSINO  Ay, prithee, sing. [Music.]

It’s a very sad song, one which the lovesick doth move to swoon.

I hope you like it.