Lyrics from the Song-Books of the Elizabethan Age

These are the songs England sang before Shakespeare became Shakespeare. Drawn from the popular song-books of the Elizabethan era, this anthology captures the raw, uncensored voice of the period: love songs that ache, drinking songs that roar, laments that still cut after four centuries. The compiler, A.H. Bullen, sought out the treasures that other collectors overlooked, the lyrics that real people hummed in taverns and country lanes, not the polished court verses. Here you'll find William Byrd and John Dowland alongside anonymous works whose authors vanished into time but whose words endured. The language is early modern English: slightly strange, immediately familiar in its emotions. A lover still pines. The seasons still turn. Death still waits. This is folk poetry at its most direct, unadorned by literary ambition but rich with the truths that made people sing. For anyone curious about the music that lived beneath the great dramas of the Elizabethan stage, these pages hold something rarer: the ordinary, eternal voice of the past.