In the lute songs of the Elizabethan and Jacobean composers, music is at the service of poetry. This age of Shakespeare, Jonson, Spenser, and Donne saw English verse rise to heights of expressivity still unsurpassed. To sing to the lute is an art barely separate from the art of declaiming verse. It requires clarity and beauty of tone, a natural flow of language, and a delicate sense of dialogue with the lute, the instrument of courtly love. In this course, students will discuss the repertoire and approaches to performance practice, including topics such as rhetoric, Elizabethan pronunciation, historical gesture, ornamentation, and varying the instrumentation or voices to better suit individual verses and dialogues..