ProV Logo
0

Free

The Song of Sixpence / Picture Book by Walter Crane ( Author )
Lemonjar
-
01-01-2006
The rhyme's origins are uncertain. References have been inferred in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night (c. 1602), (Twelfth Night 2.3/32–33), where Sir Toby Belch tells a clown: "Come on; there is sixpence for you: let's have a song" and in Beaumont and Fletcher's 1614 play Bonduca, which contains the line "Whoa, here's a stir now! Sing a song o' sixpence!" In the past it has often been attributed to George Steevens (1736–1800), who used it in a pun at the expense of Poet Laureate Henry James Pye (1745–1813) in 1790, but the first verse had already appeared in print in Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book, published in London around 1744, in the form: Sing a Song of Sixpence, A bag full of Rye, Four and twenty Naughty Boys, Baked in a Pye. The next printed version that survives, from around 1780, has two verses and the boys have been replaced by birds.[1] A version of the modern four verses is first extant in Gammer Gurton's Garland or The Nursery Parnassus published in 1784, which ends with a magpie attacking the unfortunate maid. Fifth verses with the happier endings began to be added from the middle of the 19th century.
230801341
Book
epub
7,074.19 KB
English
Language and Literature Childrens literature
MYR 0.01
-
Share this eBook