Greensleeves - Early Literary References

Early Literary References

In Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor, written around 1602, the character Mistress Ford refers twice without any explanation to the tune of "Greensleeves" and Falstaff later exclaims:

Let the sky rain potatoes! Let it thunder to the tune of 'Greensleeves'!

These allusions indicate that the song was already well known at that time.

Read more about this topic:  Greensleeves

Famous quotes containing the words early and/or literary:

    At the earliest ending of winter,
    In March, a scrawny cry from outside
    Seemed like a sound in his mind.
    He knew that he heard it,
    A bird’s cry, at daylight or before,
    In the early March wind.
    Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)

    There is no calm philosophy of life here, such as you might put at the end of the Almanac, to hang over the farmer’s hearth,—how men shall live in these winter, in these summer days. No philosophy, properly speaking, of love, or friendship, or religion, or politics, or education, or nature, or spirit; perhaps a nearer approach to a philosophy of kingship, and of the place of the literary man, than of anything else.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)