Elizabethan Song

Elizabethan Song is the English solo song of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, above all the lute ayre: strophic or through-composed settings of courtly lyric poetry for voice with lute, viol or printed tablature accompaniment. Published in books from *John Dowland*'s "First Booke of Songes" (1597) onward, the ayre balanced Italian and French influence with native melancholy, its poets and composers often the same person. Alongside the consort song for voice and viols, it forms the central art-song repertoire of the English Renaissance.