George Gascoigne, born about 1539 and dead on 7 October 1577, was one of the most adventurous and consequential writers of early Elizabethan England. Poet, translator, dramatist, critic, court entertainer, soldier, traveler, and sometime political aspirant, he lived with the instability and appetite that his writing so often dramatizes. His career was brief, troubled by debt, family conflict, legal suspicion, militar…
“the more monosyllables that you use, the truer Englishman you shall seem, and the less you shall smell of the inkhorn”
Neighbourhood:
Elizabethan Poets, Love Poets, Renaissance Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Peace, Joy
Few composers in Western music history have lived through as much upheaval, as many transformations of faith and state, as Thomas Tallis—born around 1505 in Kent, England, and buried in 1585 in the quiet churchyard of St. Mary-at-Horn, London. To speak of Tallis is to speak of survival: not merely the survival of a man through plague, political intrigue, and religious civil war, but the survival of sacred music itsel…
Neighbourhood:
Elizabethan Poets, Renaissance Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Spirituality, Sorrow
