(b London, c1475; d London, June 1536). English playwright, and printer. Active also as a lawyer, chronicler and adventurer, he was best known in the field of printing for his histories, law books, interludes, poetry and statutes, and in the 1520s became the first English printer of polyphonic music. In this field he was a pioneer of new technology; Rastell's music was the earliest to be printed by single impression using movable type, an advance over double-impression printing that revolutionized the economics of music publishing.
To judge from the few examples of Rastell's printed music that survive, his preferred format was the single sheet (or ‘broadside’) rather than the book. Two songsheets issued by him are extant, both fragmentary. Although they are undated, typographical evidence places one of them at about 1523. A third songsheet printed from Rastell's single-impression music type was in fact issued by his son, William Rastell, about 1533. The chance survival of these three ephemeral publications, separated in date by about ten years, hints at a much more extensive production, the full extent of which is unknown. Like other works printed by the Rastells, the songsheets were created for a local market rather than for export, since they feature English-texted songs at a time when English was barely spoken outside the British Isles.
John Rastell's involvement with music, and especially song, was considerable. As a playwright, deviser of pageants and owner of a public stage (in Finsbury Fields, north of the city walls of London), he had regular contact with singers and other musicians. His play A New Interlude and a Mery of the Nature of the IIII Elements, published about 1520, includes a three-part song that parodies works by Henry VIII; it was printed in the play text using Rastell's music fount (see illustration). Rastell's daughter married John Heywood, whose career spanned music and drama. Ultimately Rastell's interest in Protestant propaganda also found musical expression: his music type passed into the hands of the printer John Gough, who used it to publish Myles Coverdale's Lutheran hymnbook, Goostly Psalmes and Spirituall Songes, copies of which were included among Rastell's ‘goods and cattales’ at the time of his death.
A.W. Reed: Early Tudor Drama: Medwall, the Rastells, Heywood, and the More Circle (London, 1926/R)
S. Anglo: Spectacle, Pageantry, and Early Tudor Policy (Oxford, 1969, 2/1997)
A.H. King: ‘The Significance of John Rastell in Early Music Printing’, The Library, 5th ser., xxvi (1971), 197–214
A.H. King: ‘An English Broadside of the 1520s’, Essays on Opera and English Music in Honour of Sir Jack Westrup, ed. F.W. Sternfeld, N. Fortune and E. Olleson (Oxford, 1975), 19–24
Three Rastell Plays, ed. R. Axton (Cambridge and Totowa, NJ, 1979)
R.A. Leaver: ‘Goostly psalmes and spirituall songes’: English and Dutch Metrical Psalms from Coverdale to Utenhove, 1535–1566 (Oxford, 1991)
J. Milsom: ‘Songs and Society in Early Tudor London’, EMH, xvi (1997), 235–93
JOHN MILSOM