John Dowland is one of the very best composers of music for viol, voice & lute.

Sadly, Dowland scholarship is in serious decline; and the article in the Grove dictionary not up-to-date.

Years ago, as a graduate student in musicology at UC Berkeley, I wrote my doctoral dissertation on Dowland's works for solo lute. The gist of it is, most of the pieces attributed to Dowland are not by Dowland at all, which explains why musically some of these pieces are works of genius and others are the scribblings of hacks.

In all modesty, my dissertation is a scribbling, written on a DEC Compusaurus that used 5 inch floppies and had a ten inch orange screen.

For those of you who would like to read it, I've scanned it into a pdf.

And here it is :)

I'll be providing more links later.