Discover our easy and free score of this mythical work. Discover our free and easy score of this popular piano piece. Download the free piano sheet music of Greensleeves in PDF format. Discover more. Learn Greensleeves on the piano. Download the sheet music in PDF. Receive 40 scores of famous songs directly in your mailbox. You will receive an email containing your resource in a few seconds. Email First Name Download the 40 piano scores. Greensleeves — Sheet music.
Composer : Unknown Category : traditional Level : beginner-intermediate Status : free sheet music Volume : 1 page sheet music. Learn to play the best classical music on the piano. Discover the piano learning app. Greensleeves — Presentation. Learn to play Greensleeves on the piano.
Frequently Asked Questions. Is this sheet music free? You can download this piano sheet music for free. What skill level do you need to be to play it? How to download it? Where can I find other similar scores? How to learn Greensleeves on the piano? Share the sheet music on:. You might also like…. II , London: Hakluyt Society, Are we constantly spying these rats that are apparently only six feet away?
No, they must be somewhere else , like the dog-heads. Who exactly put their dog in the microwave? Not anyone you or I know: they are always somewhere else , like the dog-heads. So as in law, as in logic, as in science, as in life, it is always up to proponents of a claim to prove its validity, proven with evidence, verification and substantiation.
A central heating engineer in the s actually told me the last one and, like all people with fanciful fixed ideas not based on any evidence, nothing could dissuade him — not logic about the impossible logistics, nor facts about the radio transmission capabilities of tubular copper piping not connected to transmission equipment.
People can be very inventive with their claims and very loyal to them, evidence or not, and so, as in law, as in logic, as in science, as in music, as in history, as in life, anything claimed without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. People have claimed that Henry VIII — wrote it for Anne Boleyn, with no evidence that he wrote it or even that the song existed in his lifetime; that it is a song about a prostitute, based on no evidence in the song and easily-debunked mythology about Tudor prostitutes; and that it was originally an Irish song, based on fabricated claims and wishful thinking.
For all of these claims there is not a jot of evidence and yet still the stories are circulating widely. So in part one my aim is to do what, on the principle just given, no one should have to do. Yet in the face of their persistence, I will take these claims seriously in order to show why, with evidence and critical thinking, they fall apart.
Then, in part two , I hope to show that the true story of the song is far more fascinating than these fanciful imaginings. Part three is a collection of videos of different versions of Greensleeves in many musical genres, to illustrate its remarkable hardiness and longevity. The original lyric is 18 verses long. To the new tune of Greensleeues.
I have modernised the spelling. Henry VIII died in Greensleeves first appeared in So how did the story arise?
Guilpin does not even mention Greensleeves. Therefore Guilpin makes no claim about Greensleeves at all: not that Henry wrote it, nor therefore that Henry wrote it for Anne Boleyn, nor that the song has any particular antiquity. There is no record of either The Lord of Lorne or Greensleeves before MS is dated to c.
The stream of regular inaccuracies and historical gaffes are hilariously detailed at thetudorswiki. One such is the scene where Henry sits with a lute, composing Greensleeves , which we then hear being sung in the background. There is absolutely no evidence for this, that words and music were written separately, nor that Henry wrote the words. Dog-heads, microwaves and rats: anything claimed without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
The idea is that the very name Greensleeves shows her to be an amorous romper in the grass at the very least and, at worst, a prostitute. An oft-cited song in the general context of the symbolism of women in green clothes is The Gown of Green , by which people often mean The answer to The gown of green , which is a slightly later and different song. No matter here, as both broadside ballads serve to make the same point in relation to Greensleeves. Taphouse and Son, , the verses about the war are clearly shoe-horned in, signifying an original older song.
The song begins:. The broadside, The answer to The gown of green , first printed in the late 18 th century, ends with the lines:. The expression is not confined to Scotland, but prevails in the north of England. This is the late 18 th century and mid 19 th century, and the cultural currency of words and phrases changes over time.
How far back does this idea go? The final verse leaves us in no doubt:. Before we examine whether this idea stretches back to Greensleeves and is the intended meaning there, I have sometimes read the claim that Tudor or renaissance prostitutes or courtesans wore green to advertise their services, or perhaps just wore green sleeves on renaissance gowns, sleeves were detachable and thus the Lady Greensleeves was such a woman — so not really a Lady , then, in the Tudor sense of a titled noblewoman, at all.
This claim has no supporting evidence and is easily dismissed by the portraits of the women below, none of whom were prostitutes. Indeed, renaissance prostitutes are not known for having the wealth to have their portrait painted, nor are they known to be the sort of women sought after as a love match by such as the moneyed man in Greensleeves.
Besides which, where is the internal evidence in the song that the woman in question is a prostitute? These questions only arise if there were the slightest evidence that renaissance prostitutes made themselves visible by wearing green or that the song contained any sign that the woman being unsuccessfully wooed is a prostitute.
Where did the very idea of the Lady Greensleeves being a prostitute come from? A moderately inventive story, to be sure, but without considering the serious logistical difficulties of having illegal coitus in a public place.
It has the same reliance on evidence as the dog-heads. If the colour is meant to be significant — the love interest is, after all, given the name of her sleeves and their colour — then we also have the following symbolism of green clothes in the renaissance to choose from:.
This was not just a matter of taste, but of law. The Sumptuary Laws had been in force since the 14 th century, and were several times strengthened during the Tudor reign. The purpose of these laws was twofold: to maintain strict distinctions between social classes; and to protect the domestic wool trade by restricting the importation of foreign fabrics. They dictated, on pain of heavy financial fines and, in some cases, even imprisonment, the type of fabric, how much fabric, and the colours people could wear, all according to their social status and annual income.
Half of the fine would go to the monarch and the other half to the informant; and the offending uppity clothes-wearer was legally obliged to forfeit the garment. These laws of social status also applied to food, drink, furniture, and jewellery, and having been given such items as gifts was no defence for breaking the law. The picture is complex but it seems that, in general, it was perceived that the potential power of men could threaten to undo the social order by wearing clothes above their rank; women much less so or, in , not at all.
This is the outcome of a milieu where men held practically all the political and financial power and women were expected, in their subservience, to be no trouble except those in the households of labourers, who were hardly likely to be able to afford the proscribed clothes, anyway.
This is why she strung them along with her bogus marital intentions for as long as she could, to keep them quiet and maintain her position as sole monarch Alison Weir, Elizabeth the Queen , London: Vintage Books, I suggest we can detect something of this gender power dynamic in the words to Greensleeves. After 14 verses describing all the gifts he has lavished upon the unresponsive object of his affections, we have:. He never seems to take the hint, despite her lack of interest.
On the other hand, she did keep all the gifts. Strict and punitive as the Sumptuary Laws were in statute, they were widely ignored in practice. So many people were tempted by luxurious clothes that fines were rarely imposed. Those that were caught would happily pay the fine and carry on as before. He does try to give evidence of a sort, but it is usually vague, general and irrelevant to the point he is trying to prove, making astounding leaps of assumption.
Sometimes he just makes it up. Instead, he claims its Irishness elsewhere in the book. A brief look at one of these Shakespeare songs will give you a flavour of the paucity of his reasoning. The very name has a reference to the saffron truis of the mediaeval Irish. However, this does not mean that any general reference in Shakespeare or in any other contemporaneous English work to yellow stockings is necessarily a specific reference to Irish clothes.
The cross-gartered yellow stockings in the context of the play are a ruse to make Malvolio look ridiculous in front of Olivia to comic effect, as she detests both cross-gartering and yellow stockings, so there is nothing specifically Irish about that.
Malvolio: Remember who commended thy yellow stockings. Olivia: Thy yellow stockings! Malvolio: And wished to see thee cross-gartered. Olivia: Cross-gartered! It is true that one of the very earliest surviving written versions of the Greensleeves tune, perhaps the very first, is in a lute manuscript in Trinity College, Dublin, but we cannot claim that, because the manuscript is in Ireland, it is an Irish manuscript or has Irish musical content, any more than standing in a garage makes me a car.
Trinity College houses three late 16 th and early 17 th century handwritten lute books, which are:. This manuscript is particularly valuable for those interested in both early music and folk music, as it is the earliest source for many broadside ballad tunes, written in lute tablature in a straightforward fashion, without the complex divisions and variations so typical of the late Elizabethan period — and it is all the more valuable for this melodic clarity.
John M. Even the case of Callino Custurame is not at all straightforward, as this article explains. A few years previously, an Anglo-Irish Song was written to the tune of Greensleeves. The answer to all these questions is the same, and the same as most other questions in relation to Flood: he made it up. Anything claimed without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. A distantly-related idea I have come across is that slieve in Irish is mountain in English, that slieve sounds like sleeve , and that therefore Greensleeves is an Irish song.
It is by no means unknown for songs to mix languages. In modern pronunciation, slieve can be sleeve or slay-eve , and the equivalent word sliabh is pronounced schlee-u. I cannot comment on 16 th century pronunciation of the word, or even if the word existed in 16 th century Irish. Where is the macaronic text of Greensleeves indicating the Irish spelling of the word for the English mountain? Where is there just one single example of a macaronic song entirely in one language except for a single word in another?
Where is the indication that the song, first published as a broadside ballad in England, has Irish origins? To finish off, and purely for completion, here are four more brief baseless circulating myths about Greensleeves. The song name is a corruption of a surname such as Greenleaf or Gildersleeve, indicating she was a real person.
Why must a name in a song with no biographical details link to an actual person? Where is the evidence for a previous form of the name Greensleeves? A wandering minstrel fell in love with a woman who rejected him.
The idea of the wandering minstrel is a modern romantic invention. Minstrels were employees. And have you ever noticed your sleeves going green through labouring outside? Mucky and sweaty is more likely. Baseless fantasy. Anne Boleyn had scars on her arms and wore green blouses with long sleeves to hide them, hence the title. Tudor women never revealed their bare arms or legs in public though oddly an amply visible bosom was perfectly acceptable for unmarried women , so who would know?
And why would Anne need to take any special measures, since women covered their arms, anyway? And from whence did she get the alleged scars, never documented? The one exception to women baring arms or legs in public was the legs of the washerwoman, trampling clothes in a tub of lye, who was in any case on the bottom rung of the social ladder.
This fabrication is an extension of the fabrication that Henry wrote it for Anne. Greensleeves was originally a waits carol. The waits were musicians, municipal employees who played at official occasions, and a carol was originally a round dance that was partially danced and partially sung. There is no evidence that Greensleeves was ever a carol.
The mythology around Greensleeves will continue unabated. People like their cherished beliefs, even about something as seemingly innocuous as a four centuries old song. William Henry Grattan Flood based a whole career on it. This article, then, is the equivalent of King Cnut on the shore, commanding the waves not to advance, knowing his words are futile.
I suppose no harm is done from believing unsubstantiated and false ideas about a 16 th century song — no one will become ill or suffer an injustice as a result.
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