Choyce Drollery: Songs and Sonnets

These are the songs that Restoration England sang to itself: bawdy, beautiful, and aching with the knowledge that the monarchy had just returned, the plague had burned through London, and the world had nearly ended in fire. Compiled from the rare 1656 edition and enriched with verses from the 1661 "Merry Drollery" and "Antidote Against Melancholy," this collection gathers the work of the so-called Time-Poets: anonymous and named versifiers whose work captures the full spectrum of human feeling in an age of upheaval. Here you'll find love songs so tender they break your heart, tavern ballads that slur their syllables with drink, political verses whispered in fear, and pastoral fantasies of a countryside that probably never existed. The poets sang of desire and betrayal, war and weariness, the pleasure of a kiss and the weight of a dead friend. This is not the polished literature of court poets. It's raw, immediate, and gloriously imperfect: the verse that ordinary English people read, sang, and remembered. For anyone who wants to hear the actual voice of the 1650s and 1660s, stripped of myth and memorial, here it is.