Arthur Brooke's The Tragicall Historye of Romeus…
1562 CE
Arthur Brooke's The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, published in 1562, though professedly a translation from the Italian of Bandello through a French version, is a free paraphrase.
Gorboduc, also titled Ferrex and Porrex, a tragedy written by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville and performed (as the title page says) before Queen Elizabeth I in January of 1562, is the first first verse drama in English to employ blank verse.
A forerunner of the whole trend that will later produce Shakespeare’s King Lear, the play is notable also for its political subject matter (the realm of the Welsh king Gorboduc is disputed by his sons Ferrex and Porrex), which is still a touchy area in the early years of Elizabeth's reign; and for its manner, progressing from the models of the morality play and Senecan tragedy in the direction which later playwrights will follow.
In 1562, the same year that Jean Calvin’s Psalter, with music by Louis Bourgeois, is published in Geneva, the complete Sternhold and Hopkins metrical psalter, with tunes for unison singing, is published in England.
Calvinists hold the stern belief that only psalms, in simple form, should be sung by the congregation.
The psalm settings are forced into metrical form, one note per syllable, often at the expense of any clear connection with the original psalm meaning.
While these settings retain the spirit of the psalms, they greatly alter substance.