Unlike most of his colleagues Dowland did not acknowledge the authors of his texts. It is tempting to assume he wrote at least some of them himself. Dowland opens his
Firste Booke with
Unquiet thoughts, which is a summary of many of his classic preoccupations: internal struggles which have disquieting echoes of the political upheavals that were never far from the collective memory in late Elizabethan England, whether to be silent or to speak the heart’s passion, and a taste for startling visual imagery that inspires dramatic musical gestures: ‘Be still, for if you ever do the like/ I’ll cut the string that makes the hammer strike.’
from notes by Elizabeth Kenny © 2008
