At what point does a man's public and assumed personality become the inner truth? Elizabethan and Jacobean England viewed John Dowland as "semper Dowland, semper dolens" (always himself, always miserable). He did endure years and years of waiting in vain for a job worthy of his talents to materialize at the English court, and needed to spend huge amounts of that time separated from his family, while he worked for King Christian of Denmark. He may also have burned court bridges by his personality. Was his emotional life as downtrodden as these circumstances warranted? Both Dowland's contemporaries and our own have sometimes looked for evidence in the music he wrote, often beginning with his famous publication of the collected "Teares" music (Lachrimae). From his songs and ayres, as well, a distinctly poignant and even tragic emotional character can emerge, even in the midst of a society that sought catharsis from its art (think King Lear). Dowland's song "Wilt thou, unkind, thus reave me of my heart?" gives evidence both of conventional musical "mourning" gestures, and more extraordinary use of the musical language.

The poetic speaker of the "Wilt thou unkind" text is caught between the cruelty of his departing mistress and his tender devotion, between his hope and her disdain, between the heat and fire of his desire and his inability to enjoy her favor. The music Dowland composed for the five verses of this poem remain fairly conventional. It proceeds in mostly chordal fashion, using predictable harmonic progressions within its minor key (always tinged by hope in a major final chord). Dowland does interrupt the usual flow of the melody by a poignant rest between "reave [rip from] me" and "of my heart." Yet he saves his most powerful writing for the refrain: "Farewell, but yet ere I part (O Cruel!) kisse me, my Jewell." The words of parting being in a conventional vein, pitting a single soprano against the lower three voices, but on the painful word to "part," the melody suddenly leaps downwards an impossible interval, above an abrupt shift in the supporting harmony. The speaker's anguish becomes a chord progression barbed with sharps and suspensions as he names the mistress cruel! Not even the repeated fond gestures that set the kisses or the final major chord dissipate the pain of that musical moment, and it keeps repeating on each refrain.

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