I have selected a few lines from a political song called The Trimmer, to print with this copy, because it has the burden, “Which nobody can deny.” It is one of the many songs to the tune in Pills to purge Melancholy.
This is contained in Anthony Holborne’s Cittharn Schoole, 1597; in Queen Elizabeth’s Virginal Book; in William Ballet’s Lute Book; and in many other manuscripts and printed books.
There are two copies in William Ballet’s Lute Book, and the second is entitled “Robin Hood is to the greenwood gone;” it is, therefore, probably the tune of a ballad of Robin Hood, now lost.
Ophelia sings a line of it in Hamlet—
and in Fletcher’s Two Noble Kinsmen, the jailer’s daughter, being mad, says, “I can sing twenty more … I can sing The Broom and Bonny Robin.’ In Robinson’s Schoole of Musicke (1603), and in one of Dowland’s Lute Manuscripts,
