Henry Lawes was the preeminent songwriter among the musicians associated with the court of Charles I. He was especially valued and praised by contemporary poets because the style of early baroque monody, or continuo, song, which he developed as a vehicle for lyric verse, gave the greatest possible exposure to the poetic text in terms of meaning, imagery, and verbal play--qualities that were often summed up as "wit." Lawes set to music poems by many of the poets of his time, and his prestige was such that contemporary printer-publishers such as Humphrey Moseley and Thomas Walkley included a reference to Lawes's settings on the title pages of volumes by John Milton, Thomas Carew, Edmund Waller, Sir John Suckling, and William Cartwright (as well as the more common attributions accompanying individual poems, used in the Robert Herrick and the Richard Lovelace editions). In turn, many of these and lesser...