I Saw My Lady Weepe - Composition

Composition

While composing "I Saw My Lady Weepe" and the other songs in the Second Booke, Dowland was heavily influenced by what has been referred to as the "Elizabethan Melancholy" or "Cult of Darkness." Most songs in his First and Third Booke also show this influence.

At a time when poets and composers were becoming increasingly interested in the problems of affective writing, grief, melancholy and despair were welcomed because they provided an opportunity for the exploitation of new techniques. If Elizabethan composers tended to choose lyrics which express simple, stylized emotions this is because they were interested in the transmission, not of ideas, but of feelings…this was only possible within the framework of a familiar poetic convention in which emotions were not complex, but followed well-worn paths. Dowland's songs are no exception to this rule. —Robin Headlam Wells, Early Music, Vol. 13, No. 4. November 1985 pp. 514–528

Robin Headlam Wells stated that Dowland's songs follow this convention about transmitting feelings. According to Wells, the subject of the song is the power of the lady's beauty—or in other words the overriding power of female beauty, whether spiritual or physical. This idea of power coming from a woman's beauty is one that is quite common in the poetry of the Elizabethan era.

The poetry of "I Saw My Lady Weepe" breaks with some of the conventions of its day in its treatment of the lady's beauty and charms. Rather than grouping them together, Dowland presents a paradox in which the lady herself becomes more beautiful than her sorrow; at this time, it was the emotion itself that was generally considered to be the beauty or charm, rather than the human subject itself. Like most examples of this type, it ends with an ironic admission of the power of love has to conquer over reason. The composer can then take liberties regarding the theoretical nature of the music to which he sets the text. The joining of the text with the music enhances the sense of the melancholy that pervades the verse of the time and through this merger, the music of the epoch takes on this same sense.