Thomas Watson was admired and celebrated in his own day by such important writers as Thomas Lodge in Phyllis (1593), George Peele and John Lyly in the dedicatory verses to the Hekatompathia (1582), Christopher Marlowe in Amintæ Gaudia (1592), and Edmund Spenser in The Faerie Queene (1596). Some critics persist in identifying Watson as Amyntas in Spenser's Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (1595); but as Spenser revised his encomiums for those who had died after his visit to the court in 1592, it is unlikely that the reference is to him. Watson's love of music and his ability in composing madrigals meant that he enjoyed the friendship of William Byrd. It also seems his contemporaries appreciated his dramatic skills (no plays survive), for Francis Meres writes in Palladis Tamia (1598) that he was one of the "best for tragedy." It is not difficult to understand why Watson was honored by his contemporaries: his classical...