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Christopher Page, Paul Sparks, Three centuries of the guitar in England, Early Music, Volume 49, Issue 2, May 2021, Pages 293–296, https://doi.org/10.1093/em/caab032
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Extract
This conversation marks the completion of the trilogy The guitar in Tudor England (Cambridge, 2015), The guitar in Stuart England (Cambridge, 2017) and The guitar in Georgian England (New Haven and London, 2020), by Christopher Page.
PS Why the guitar after so many years mired in the Middle Ages?
CP A medievalist was once defined as someone who knows a lot about a little. I bought a French guitar of about 1825 more than decade ago and once I began to look into the social history of the guitar I was amazed (as a medievalist would be) by the sheer Niagara of information released by newspapers, periodicals and literary works of that period. The possibilities for a wide-ranging narrative, illustrated by advertisements, images, anecdotes, letters and more besides seemed impossible to resist. I still have buckets of this material beyond what I used for the books. I’m fond of the story of a swindler in 1833, for example, who pretended to teach Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, the guitar and embroidery. He travelled under a range of assumed names and claimed to be a Spanish officer. He was frequently to be found in gambling dens, and whenever he feared that his imposture was on the verge of discovery, he fled. With his large Spanish cloak, mustachios and tawny complexion, he was a storybook Spaniard, which is perhaps why so many people were drawn to him only to be deceived. Even by the standards of the early 19th century, when impostors and swindlers of many kinds were daily being exposed in the newspapers, such guitar-playing rogues were familiar figures in the press. The guitar was always regarded as a foreign instrument in England and was particularly associated with itinerant or even rootless musicians who chose to travel light. Those musicians might have an alluring moral taint, an element of the picaresque, but they were hardly ever stained with the sheer dullness of the rank-and-file professional.
