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
Martin Peerson
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.
Kindred spirits
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 75%
Blended 75%
Swap sides
Another related pair
In the twilight years of Elizabeth I's reign and throughout the tumultuous early decades of the seventeenth century, when England stood at the crossroads between medieval traditions and modern innovations, one composer quietly crafted some of the most exquisite musical settings of poetry ever written. Martin Peerson, born around 1571 and dying in 1651, lived through one of the most extraordinary periods in English cu…
In time
Richard Allison
Martin Peerson
1570
1651
They overlapped for 45 years (1571–1615).
When Martin Peerson was born, Richard Allison was about 1.
Martin Peerson was about 44 when Richard Allison died.
On the map
About 92 km separate England from March, Cambridgeshire, England. Both have ground in England and London.
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.
No overlapping top terms in the poem critiques — any kinship may sit in mood rather than vocabulary.
From the biographies
music
church
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. Martin Peerson: march, cambridgeshire, st. paul's cathedral, william byrd, thomas tallis, christopher marlowe, william shakespeare, mottects or grave chamber musique.
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.
1595
Execution at Tyburn
Richard Allison
Martin Peerson
Emotional landscapes
Richard Allison: Sensuality, Longing, Wonder. Martin Peerson: Sorrow, Longing, Despair.