On Feb 27, 2007, at 8:04 PM, Nancy Carlin wrote: > I have always wondered if it were something about Dowland's > personality versus Byrd. Was Byrd more user friendly? Did he have > better people skills than Dowland? Or perhaps he was just better at > buttering up the right people at the right time.
I've wondered about that myself. I suppose it's worth something to say that neither one of them ended up on the rack. That is definitely where Dowland would have found himself had he been even remotely suspected of being a Catholic spy. (As for his being paranoid, it seems to me that when it came to matters of religion in those days everybody in England was paranoid.) Byrd's career does go to show that not all Catholics in Elizabethan England were necessarily "held back," as Dowland apparently thought he was. If you were a Catholic in the England of 1600, probably you would be left alone as long as you didn't get political. David Rastall [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.rastallmusic.com -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
