This project combines many of my avocations: the Renaissance lute, research into historical music performance techniques, writing Web pages, and spending lots of money printing out old books in their entirety from microfilm.

      When comparing this work to Robert Dowland's A Varietie of Lute Lessons, there are a number of obvious differences. The first of which, obviously, is Robinson's use of the dialogue format. Although "Timotheus" has been hired to teach the knight's children, he ends up teaching the knight through discourse. (I do wonder if Robinson was influenced by the Italians, for although I have rarely seen English treatises in dialogue style, it seems to have been fairly common in Italian works.)

      Another obvious difference is that, in Dowland's work, the authors of the treatises (actually John Baptisto Besardo and John Dowland) limited their instruction to technical matters, whereas Robinson frequently exhorts his readers to pay attention to the spiritual aspects of music.

      Robinson advises that the thumb of the left hand should always be kept as close to the forefinger as possible, whereas Besardo, in Dowland's book, states that it should be kept in the middle of the neck. It is possible that Robinson meant merely that the thumb should remain in the same fret as the forefinger, but if so, he fails to make this point clear.

      Due to the current limitations of Web protocols, I am unable to reproduce the long s of the original manuscript, but I have retained the period use of the letters u and v: the letters are used fairly interchangeably, but the form v appears only at the beginnings of words, or if the entire word is capitalised. The u form appears anywhere else within a word. The letter w is sometimes a single character, but occasionally it is printed as vv, especially at the beginnings of words, and I have also retained this convention.

      Another period typographical convention that I was not able to reproduce conveniently is the use of a line above a word to indicate an omitted m or n. In transcribing such words for the Web, I have placed the ommitted letter in italics (for example, committed or them).

      All other spelling has been left as in the original; although the period orthography takes some getting used to, it also sheds some light on period pronunciation (a subject in which, as a singer of Renaissance music, I have a great deal of interest). For example, the word passionate is also given the spelling pashionate, indicating that it would not be pronounced as "pass-ee-o-nate", as I have heard advocated.

      In addition to retaining the original spelling, I have chosen to replicate typographical errors (such as Ioyall rather than loyal in Robinson's entreaty to King James).

      The term -vt, used in several places in this work, is an abbreviation for the word gamut, the contemporary term for a scale. It derives from the lowest note on the bass staff, referred to as Gamma, and ut from the original name for the tonic of a scale (now referred to as do), from the Latin hymn to St. John:

Ut queant laxis resonare fibris,
Mira gestorum famuli tuorum,
Solve polluti labii reatum,
Sancte Iohannes.

      At the bottom of most pages, the first one or two words of the following page appear, a convention intended to help the printer put the pages in the proper order. I have reproduced these here, as well as the folio numbers at the bottom of each recto (which serve the same purpose). Although there's no point to doing so on the Web, I have left these intact.

      Following the treatise, Robinson has arranged quite a bit of tablature. Although I hope to eventually produce ASCII versions of every piece, I have not yet included them here.

      These Web pages were written using OS/2 System Editor and Windows Notepad. Graphics were scanned using a Hewlett-Packard ScanJet 4c. These pages are certified to be 100% free of frames and <BLINK> tags.