Dowland's lute solo Go from my window sits within a nexus of Elizabethan culture and cultural construction. The most famous playwright of the time, William Shakespeare, borrowed the melody and the concept of a melancholy nocturnal scene for one of Ophelia's "mad' ditties. In its story, a young woman laments going into the room of her lover who promised to marry her; he instead took her viginity and then left. In Shakespeare's hands, the song becomes laden with questions of madness and assumed madness. With somewhat sanitized lyrics, Shakespeare's song also became attached to a popular ballad tune, which has been constantly in the English folk song traditions to this day. In the hands of Dowland, the song took on even greater prominence as a set of variations upon the ballad melody with his name attached. Like Shakespeare, Dowland was known for careful characterisations in his works; like Hamlet, Dowland constructed for himself a public persona of eccentric melancholy; like Ophelia, Dowland had to suffer lifelong rejection from someone important to him (in his case, Queen Elizabeth I).

Set against that rich backdrop are Dowland's eight variations on the ballad tune. In one sense, the very choice of a variation set was invested with meaning, perhaps representing some of the eccentricity and relentless character of Ophelia's madness, or Dowland's futile but relentless suit for royal employment. The composer certainly invested his variations with a kaleidoscopic color palette. The first time through the ballad, his setting remains restrained and elegant, a simple setting for singing. The second time, he slightly tweaks both melody (with syncopated suspensions) and harmony (with a different modal color). The third features daring little countermelodies, and the fourth a bit more contrapuntal interest. The fifth explodes with rhythmic energy, bursting into a compound gigue meter, which contrasts well to the following pastoral lilt. After a comparatively dense opening passage, the seventh variation becomes more sparse in its closing strain, alternating single notes with a running bass countermelody. The final time through the melody, Dowland provides the clearest musical textures yet: a lucid alternation between just two voices; is he suggesting that the story's two lovers have made up and are singing in harmony, or that they have finally gone their own ways?

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