Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century

based on poems in iambic pentameter, the Shakespearean meter, with hemiolas—the breaking of a normal
triple bar (say, 3/4) bar into two smaller ones (2 × 3/8) or grouping two of them into one larger bar (2 ×
3/4 = 3/2)—allowing for interesting inversions and cross-accents that adapt the regular meter to the
normal enunciation pattern of English speech. The witty lover’s complaint, Can shé excúse my wróngs
with vírtue’s clóak? (i.e., can she claim virtue as her excuse for thwarting me) is a particularly complex
—and therefore a particularly delightful—example (Ex. 17-23a). The title as just given is marked to show
the normal iambic-pentameter scansion. Example 17-23b shows how Dowland’s hemiolas actually stress
the words in performance. This is English musical prosody at its most original and authentic.

EX. 17-21   John    Dowland,    “Flow   My  Tears,” first   strain

The situation changed, very abruptly, in 1588, the year of the great sea battle with the Spanish
Armada, hence a year usually associated in English history with victory and conquest. In music it went the
other way. It was the English who were conquered by the Italians, to the point where a decade later
Thomas Morley could complain, in his Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke, that “such
be the newfangled opinions of our countrymen, who will highly esteem whatsoever cometh from beyond