40); and while there are of course no lutes or viols with fixed metal frets, these instruments would have been performed with, and thus tuned to, the cittern, bandora, or
orpharion in the Elizabethan broken consort.
Poets big and small, classicists and critics, joined in a continuous stream of praise and emulation." (21) Early English emulations range from those in Philip Sidney's first Arcadia (1577-1580), Robert Greene's
Orpharion (1589), and Spenser's Amoretti (1595), to those of Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick, and Abraham Cowley (among many lesser lights).
Another exquisite piece is Elizabeth's personal
orpharion, a hand-carved stringed instrument thought to have been given by Elizabeth to a distant ancestor of the present owner.
The works attributed posthumously to Shakespeare's hostile rival Robert Greene offer some celebrated Elizabethan instances, such as Greenes Groats-worth of Witte, 1592; compare also Greenes neuer too late, Greenes
orpharion, Greenes mourning garment, all published in 1590; Greenes newes both from heauen and hell, 1593; the apocryphal Greenes arcadia, 1610, and so on.
In this collection of previously published articles, now well-matured and carefully revised, Wells's readings of the Henry IV plays, The Tempest, Twelfth Night, the songs of Dowland and Rosseter, and his interpretations of cultural artefacts (the lute and the
Orpharion) are not intentionally radically new but are often dynamically perceptive.