Thomas Morley participated in many ways in the late Elizabethan vogue for Italian music, in addition to his formative role in the new (though derivative) genre of the English madrigal. For instance, in his well-known theoretical treatise the "Plaine and Easy Introduction," he offered concise and user-friendly definitions of many genres of Italian music already making inroads into English culture. He noted the popularity of the Balletti of Giovanni Gastoldi, defining the genre as a "song which being sung to a ditty may likewise be danced...also another kind of ballet, commonly called Fa Las." But he went further. Morley himself took Gastoldi's 1591 Italian collection of Balletti a cinque voci con li suoi versi per cantare, sonare, e ballare and printed it in London under the 1595 title Ballete (copyright did not yet exist). At the same time, he issued a copy of English-language "Balletts," closely modeled upon Gastoldi's collection. In it, he adapted wholesale the music of Gastoldi, Marenzio, Giovanni Croce, and Orazio Vecchi. Though as one historian put it, Morley may have had "an eye on international sale," he also changed the Italian models just enough to help launch a new English genre.

My bonny lass she smileth arrives early in Morley's 1595 Balletts, and in it he borrows heavily from Gastoldi's Questa dolce sirena (from the 1591 collection). Gastoldi's original Italian lyrics had been fairly uninspired, and Morley's metrical English translation of the strophes can be downright insipid: "My bonny lass she smileth, When she my heart beguileth"; "When she her sweet eye turneth, O how my heart it burneth." Yet Morley manages to improve upon Gastoldi's simple dancelike music. He takes Gastoldi's music for the little rhyming couplets almost as is, but significantly expands and develops the "fa la la" sections that follow each couplet. He invests them with greater rhythmic sophistication as well as with a higher level of contrapuntal artifice. Both features would serve a later generation of English madrigalists well. Thus this English composer, even when baldly pirating the cultural goods of the Mediterranean, manages to do so with aplomb, and makes something a bit more sumptuous.

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