The work of a music historian sometimes resembles that of a detective. What clues can lead us from the evidence, such as a piece of music, back to the human emotions that inspired the music? The famous lutenist John Dowland himself signed a copy of the dance tune Lady Laiton's Almain in one of its surviving copies, but who was Lady Laiton? History offers a tempting—but completely unsubstantiated—candidate, Lady Winifred Leighton, daughter of Simon Harcourt of Ellenhall and wife of Sir William Leighton. William, a noble and an amateur poet, was the author of the lamenting collection of verse Teares or Lamentations of a Sorrowfull Soule, which may have been connected to Dowland's most famous set of compositions, the instrumental variations on the Pavan Lachrimae.

The music Dowland apparently dedicated to Lady Laiton follows the courtly pattern of the almain, or German dance. His courtly audience, whether physically dancing or not at the time, would expect a fairly stolid dance in duple meter. Dowland does not disappoint, giving the listener—or the dancer—a completely balanced pair of repeated phrases, replete with subtle ornamentation on the repeats. The stereotypically clumsy Germans could prance through their national dance. Yet the ever witty composer of courtly music Dowland also apparently represented even more lightness within the dance in this case. A second copy of the same piece, this one signed in Dowland's hand, gives a more spirited, and far more virtuosic, reading of the same dance melody. In the second, more virtuosic version, however, he escapes from the actual dance and passes by means of his ornamentations into phrases of what a later esthetic will call "absolute music."

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