Secular song flourished in late Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Spurred by a vogue for Italian madrigals "Englished" (translated), native composers then spawned a widely popular movement of madrigal composition in English. Alongside this trend ran a courtly fad for lute-songs—strophic airs in English set for a tenor and lutenist; some 600 such pieces were written and published over a 25-year period. Domestic and courtly music-making, however, also allowed for varied performing ensembles. John Dowland's First Booke of Songs or Ayres (1597) exploited this flexibility by presenting the lute-songs in a "tabletop" format such that any mixed group of singers, lutenists, or even viola da gamba players could play the same song. Dowland continued the profitable marketing technique of making his music available to different ensmbles in his second and third books of songs, giving four-part vocal arrangements of many individual pieces. The strophic song Me, me and none but me, from the Third Book, offers a good example.

In the (presumably prior) solo version of Me, me and none but me, the song takes a simple ABB refrain form, with a second verse. The two halves of each verse contrast the despair felt by the poet who is near death, and his blissful hope that he may meet his "faithful turtledove" when he has flown to heaven. Dowland achieves musical contrast appropriate to these two emotions by making the first phrase more plodding in its rhythm, and more unstable in harmony than the more tuneful second half; he even reflects the sense of the poet's text "fly to heaven above" by means of a brightly ascending melody.

The vocal writing in Me, me and none but me demonstrates both the strengths and weaknesses of Dowland's practice of arrangement. In the vocal version, the same melody from the solo version still dominates the texture, by its position in the highest voice and by its greater melodic interest than the other voices. The other voices, however, strongly emphasize the sense of Dowland's text by giving even more musical contrast to the two halves. The first half proceeds mostly in chunky, chordal textures. In the hopeful vision of the second, however, Dowland adapts a feature of the original counterpoint—a rising melodic bass that strives to rejoin the descending upper melody—to a choral texture; all three lower voices surge upwards to meet the song's melody as the lovers may be reunited in paradise.

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