ABSTRACT
We may never know why, after already waiting over four years from the time that Bathe had left for the Continent, East apparently decided to go ahead and print A Briefe Introduction to the Skill of Song before securing the rights to Bathe’s earlier book. Perhaps East was aware that two of his competitors, William Barley and Peter Short, were planning to issue their own music textbooks around this same time, and he may have wanted to beat them to publication.50 In any case, given the trouble that Bathe’s text seems to have caused him, we may assume that East thought highly of its contents, and of the book’s potential to earn him a fair amount of money. It is to the nature of these contents that we may now turn.
