SOURCE: Eriksen, Roy T. “Two Into One: The Unity of George Gascoigne's Companion Poems.” Studies in Philology 81, no. 3 (summer 1984): 275-98.

In the following essay, Eriksen suggests that Gascoigne arranged the poems in his works in certain combinations to reflect various themes.

George Gascoigne often combined and arranged his shorter poems into sequences or larger units of poetry, a compositional technique variously reflected in The Adventures of Master F. J., his poems written on given “theames,” his translation from Orlando furioso, and in the first Elizabethan sonnet sequences.¹ His companion poems, “Gascoignes good morrow” and “Gascoignes good nyghte” and the versification of Psalm 130, printed as such a sequence in The Posies of George Gascoigne (1575), had obviously been intended to function as such earlier in A Hundreth sundrie Flowres (1573).² These three religious lyrics, which originally had “verie sweete notes adapted unto them,” are unique among Gascoigne's sequential “inventions” in being...