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Thomas Campion made a varied contribution to the arts of his period. Perhaps best known today as the composer of music and lyrics for more than one hundred songs for voice and lute, he was equally celebrated in his own time for his Latin poetry. He wrote a theoretical treatise on versification urging the adoption of classical quantitative meters in English, and a music textbook which was sufficiently forward-looking to be republished throughout the seventeenth century. His contribution to the dramatic literature of the age consists of four masques, works which have been unjustly condemned by most modern critics. While there can be no doubt that Ben Jonson is the dominant figure in the history of the Jacobean masque, Campion's works are fine examples of the genre.
Campion was born on 12 February 1567 in the parish of St. Andrew's Holborn. By 1580 his father, John Campion, a cursitor of the Court of Chancery, and his mother, Lucy, were both dead, leaving him in the care of his mother's third husband, Augustine Steward, and his new wife, Anne Sisley.
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