In the twilight years of the Elizabethan era, as the golden age of English poetry shimmered into the Jacobean dawn, a quiet but gifted composer emerged whose voice—though faint in the historical record—resonates with a rare and haunting beauty. John Bartlet, active roughly between 1585 and 1620, remains one of the most enigmatic figures of early English secular music. His life is shrouded in mystery, his dates approx…
“Their want of worth could not divert my purpose from publishing to the world the zeal I bear to thankfulness.”
Neighbourhood:
Lute-Song Composers, Renaissance Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Tenderness, Sorrow
Sir Richard Fanshawe, born on 12 June 1608 and dead in Madrid in June 1666, lived one of the most various and hazardous lives available to a seventeenth-century English man of letters. He was at once a poet, translator, civil servant, soldier-administrator, parliamentarian, courtier, prisoner, exile, and ambassador. His name has never become as immediately familiar as those of John Milton, Andrew Marvell, or John Dry…
Neighbourhood:
Cavalier Poets, Devotional Poets, Love Poets, Metaphysical Poets, Renaissance Poets
Emotional landscape: Sensuality, Wonder, Fear
