In 1588 William Byrd had a collection of diverse English-text vocal works printed (his first publication since a joint venture with Thomas Tallis in 1575) that he called Psalmes, Sonets, and songs of sadness and pietie. From this collection devoted comes one of Byrd's best-known pieces, the five-voice "sonnet" (Byrd uses the term in a very general way) Constant Penelope, a setting of text extracted from Ovid's Heroïdes and remade as English verse by a translator who remains unknown but very possibly might have been Byrd's acquaintance Thomas Watson.

In the preface to the 1588 collection Byrd explains that many of the multi-voice pieces contained within are actually consort songs (songs for solo voice with viol accompaniment) that he revised for use as vocal ensemble pieces. And so it comes as no surprise that of the five voices of Constant Penelope, one is clearly musically dominant (the superius, or top, voice, marked as the "first singing voice" by Byrd). The text is as follows:

Constant Penelope sends to thee, careless Ulysses, Write not again, but come sweet mate thyself to revive me. Troy we do much envy, we desolate lost ladies of Greece. Not Priamus, nor yet all Troy, can us recompense make. Oh, that he had when he first took shipping to Lacedaemon, That adulter I mean, had been o'erwhelmed with waters; Then had I not lain now all alone, thus quivering for cold, Nor used this complaint, nor have thought the day to be so long.

There is some thought that the text is not just a reflection of Byrd's esteem for Ovid but also a somewhat veiled reference to Penelope Rich, famous as the Stella of Sir Philip Sydney's sonnets. However, no hard evidence for this theory exists. Byrd had apparently been reading up on some of the more current trends in text-setting before composing Constant Penelope, for we find him matching the short and long syllables of the hexameter verse to short and long note-values (exclusively quarter-notes and half-notes, save in the originally instrumental lower parts, which contain a few passing eighth-notes) in a precise way that is quite extraordinary for him.

The work is cast in the key of G minor (using the archaic one flat key signature). Although the four lower voices originally carried no text (and thus aren't bound by the conventions of text/melody association), a variety of motivic reflections of the upper voice are found in them throughout the piece, from the way the soprano's entrance in the third measure (as transcribed into modern 4-2 meter) is presaged by the higher of the two bass parts in the very first measure, to the robust, five-voice imitation of "Then had I not lain" in the second half of the piece. Although Byrd's choice to set the text as measured verse (the technique described above) causes the work to sound a little stiff at times, the flexibility of phrase and general brevity of length (only about thirty-five measures in all) help to compensate for this shortcoming, as does the increased melodic range that results from the lower voices all being originally conceived for instruments. The final nine bars, complete with the requisite cadence and Picardy third, are to be repeated, thus placing greater emphasis on the final two very dramatic lines of text.



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