“It sets the text so well, meaning it doesn’t really matter when it’s from,” Davies said. “It is one of the greatest songs in the English language.”
NOTHING IS KNOWN about Dowland’s early life. “There are no extant records — at least, none that anybody has found yet — that tells where he was born, who his parents were, or how he got his training,” Grapes said. Scholars agree that he was born around 1563, probably in Westminster, England. But it’s a mystery how he got his start in musical life, or how he looked.
Dowland’s relationships with institutions, however, show an ambitious man keen to improve his standing in life. He received a bachelor of music degree from the University of Oxford in 1588, in the same year as the madrigal king Thomas Morley. At a time when social class was extremely stratified, Dowland proudly repeated his learned title across his published works as a sign of status.
He secured numerous important jobs in royal courts and became an unusually well-traveled musician for his time. In the 1590s alone, he moved to France, toured the courts of present-day Italy, was employed by the landgrave of Hesse in Germany, and then by Christian IV of Denmark. He was among the most highly paid court musicians of his day.
What made Dowland’s cosmopolitanism more remarkable, Grapes said, “was that Dowland always had to ask permission to seek other employment.” He “must have been a great observer,” she added, “and had some canny insight into the workings of the political situation of the day.”
The most important document in understanding Dowland’s life is a letter written to Queen Elizabeth I’s privy counselor Sir Robert Cecil in 1595. Alongside its description of Dowland’s life, it also shows him at his most anxious. He believed that he had missed out on the vacant, coveted lutenist position in the queen’s Protestant court because she thought him “an obstinate papist.” His fears were exaggerated — Elizabeth engaged Catholic musicians, such as William Byrd — but his dream position eluded him.
