Poetry and Song: Shakespeare and his Contemporaries Part II John Dowland 1563-1626

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The first of these three articles was concerned with the context of Shakespeare's songs, in the plays and the mythological framework within which he was writing. The second is concerned with performance, and how the songs compare with those written for the court and aristocratic patrons by his contemporary, John Dowland, considered to be among the finest English song-writers, alongside Henry Purcell.

The article presents an analysis of seven of Dowland's lute songs, the poetic structure but also their musical brilliance and techniques; how an understanding of these is vital to their performance, along with the context in which they were to be sung. Shakespeare became rich by knowing exactly what would sell, and changed according to the climate change after 1601. We have to see all art as conditioned by the climate and context for which it was produced. It is one of the greatest absurdities that all art is treated as serious, even lugubrious, when much of it was produced to lighten the soul in a spirit of fun and frequently sexual delight.

Dowland was among the first composers in England to write music which exploited the system of harmonic progressions within major and minor diatonic scales recently devised in Italy, where he spent several years in the early 1590s. His First Book of Ayres composed in this new idiom was published in 1596, the date Romeo and Juliet was staged in London. The sexual freedom of the play is clearly one with the atmosphere relating to sexual dalliance and behaviour among the aristocracy of the 1590s, within which John Donne wrote his Songs and Sonnets and Elegies and Dowland his lute songs.

The article describes the nature of the change from modal polyphonic writing, mainly for religious use, and the new harmonic and melodic forms called diatonic music that released the enormously inventive compositions of the next three centuries in Western Europe. Which was for use in secular contexts, principally in the theatre and courtly entertainments. Dowland was early in writing music for the last. In 1598 he became lutenist in the court of Christian IV of Denmark, a possible link to the setting for Hamlet. He returned to London and published in 1605 his Lachrimae, Greek for Tears, which contains the most moving instrumental music for a consort of viols, the string quartet of the time. This music exploited the sorrowful quality of the minor scales for the first time so that it earned the epithet Doleful Dowland. Performance of all his music has tended to relate to this epithet.

The change in tastes on the accession of James I, a dour Scot from Calvinist Scotland with an obsession for the evils of witchcraft, had a very obvious effect on plays Shakespeare wrote, the poetry of such as John Donne and music such as that of Dowland. Donne wrote his hatred of Calvin and Luther. The 17th century saw the triumph, then humiliation of Puritans.

Performance of Elizabethan music is typically sombre and serious; the escapism and great jollity which it provided for the circles in which it was played is lost. While the article demonstrates the poetical and musical jokes written into Dowland's songs. Shakespeare plays are attended by those who go expecting high language and literature, when plays of the 1590s to the death of Elizabeth I in 1601 were written to entertain an illiterate London populace and a decadent court, who wanted to laugh or be startled by excitements and horror like audiences everywhere. The last Twelfth Night written to lighten the atmosphere of religious conflict and doom as the old queen was dying, mocks posturings of love and is a heavy jibe at the Puritans in the gulling of Malvolio; which reflects the conflict between the Puritan City of London and the aristocratic court of Elizabeth. Romeo and Juliet of the mid-1590s is full of sexual jokes.

Dowland's songs cover a very wide emotional range, many of them are courtly dances and others are just plain fun. There are, of course, those which express sorrow and the pain of love in various stages of the lover's progress. The article provides a brief look at this range.

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