Richard Allison, born about 1570 and believed to have died about 1615, occupies a modest but revealing place in the cultural history of late Elizabethan and early Jacobean England. He was principally a composer, singer, and player of stringed instruments, yet his surviving publications also make him important to the history of English devotional verse, religious controversy, and domestic music-making. Allison did not…
Compare Poets
Pick two poets who seem to have nothing to do with each other — a Gothic American and a pastoral Englishman, say — and see where the catalogue actually joins them: overlapping years, shared ground, distinctive themes, and the poems that secretly rhyme.
Poet A
Richard Allison
Poet B
George Gascoigne
Compare two related contemporaries
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Strongly related
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 65%
Blended 65%
Swap sides
Another related pair
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 first and most necessary point that ever I found meet to be considered in making of a delectable poem is this, to ground it upon some fine invention. For it is not enough to roll in pleasant words, nor yet to thunder in rim, ram, ruff by letter, unless the invention have in it also aliquid salis.”
In time
Richard Allison
George Gascoigne
1539
1615
They overlapped for 8 years (1570–1577).
When Richard Allison was born, George Gascoigne was about 31.
Richard Allison was about 7 when George Gascoigne died.
On the map
About 82 km separate England from Cardington, Bedfordshire, England. Both have ground in England.
Richard Allison
Themes they return to
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Shared
From the biographies
culture
Richard Allison: late elizabethan, early jacobean, countess of warwick, sir john scudamore, the psalmes of david in meter, a plaine confutation of a treatise of brownisme, protestant devotional culture, musical training. George Gascoigne: cardington, bedfordshire, elizabeth breton, trinity college cambridge, gray's inn, supposes, the adventures of master f. j., a hundreth sundrie flowres.
Poems that secretly rhyme
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
The world around them
While their lives overlapped
Notable events from the years they were both alive.
1570
All Saints' Flood
Richard Allison
George Gascoigne
1558
Study at Gray's Inn
Emotional landscapes
Richard Allison: Sensuality, Longing, Wonder. George Gascoigne: Tenderness, Peace, Joy.