William Browne of Tavistock, born about 1588 and traditionally thought to have died about 1650, is one of the most attractive and elusive figures in early seventeenth-century English poetry. He was not a major public presence on the scale of Ben Jonson, John Donne, or George Wither, nor did he leave behind the unusually full documentary record that allows historians to reconstruct the lives of some contemporaries. Ye…
“They believe the spirit which inspired the Reformation and the genius which dictated the Magna Charta possessed you.”
Neighbourhood:
Elizabethan Poets, Love Poets, Nature Poets, Renaissance Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Joy, Longing
In the golden twilight of the English Renaissance, when the echoes of Shakespeare's verse still rang through London's theaters and the madrigal reached its most exquisite flowering, Thomas Weelkes emerged as one of the most distinctive and emotionally powerful composers of his generation. Born around 1576 and dying in 1623, Weelkes lived through one of the most extraordinary periods in English cultural history, creat…
“I see not, if souls do not partly consist of music, how it should come to pass that so noble a spirit as yours, so perfectly tuned to so perpetual a tenor of excellencies as it is, should descend to the notice of a quality lying single in so low a personage as myself.”
Neighbourhood:
Elizabethan Poets, Lute-Song Composers
Emotional landscape: Longing, Irony, Sensuality
