Known in his own time as a virtuoso performer on the lute, John Dowland is today remembered mainly as a composer of vocal and instrumental music. Except for a few pieces of minor verse--four commendatory rhymes for others' books, a Latin quatrain, and a translation--he is not known to have written poetry. It is possible that he could have written some of the lyrics to his songs, but there is no evidence that he did. Dowland owes his place in literary history to his role as a collector and preserver of poems and as a kind of musical interpreter of them.

John Dowland was born in 1563. His birthplace is not known, but it was probably in England, and not, as some earlier scholars thought, in Ireland. He did spend a fair amount of his life outside of England, however. He was in the service of Sir Henry Cobham...