May was born in Mayfield, Sussex, the son of Sir Thomas May, a minor courtier. He matriculated at Sidney Sussex, Cambridge, graduating B.A. in 1613. He wrote his first published poem while at Cambridge, an untitled three-stanza contribution to the University's memorial collection of poems on the death of Henry Prince of Wales in 1612.Epicedium Cantabrigiense in obitum immaturum & semper deflendum, Henrici ... (Cambridge: 1612), p.
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Próthesis is the deposition of the body of the deceased on the funereal bed and the threnody of his relatives. Today the body is placed in the casket, that is always open in Greek funerals. This part takes place in the house where the deceased had lived. An important part of the Greek tradition is the epicedium, the mournful songs that are sung by the family of the deceased along with professional mourners (who are extinct in the modern era).
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In 1945, there was a commemoration of the 250th anniversary of Purcell's death, raising interest in the composer. Britten began that year to arrange songs, duets and a trio by Purcell, writing out—or "realizing"—Purcell's figured bass as an accompaniment for piano, sometimes taking great liberty with the original composition. He chose songs, arias and duets by Purcell, or attributed to him, from Harmonia Sacra, Orpheus Britannicus, The Queen's Epicedium, Dido and Aeneas and The Fairy Queen. The Britten-Pears Foundation acquired a manuscript of one of the realizations in 2019, a version of The Blessed Virgin's Expostulation which Britten wrote for a concert at Wigmore Hall in 1945.
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In 1635 there appeared a folio volume entitled titled "Devotionis Augustinianæ Flamma, or Certayne Devout, Godly, and Learned Meditations: written by the Excelently Acomplisht Gentleman, William Austin of Lincolnes Inne, Esquier." The title-page, which contains an admirably engraved portrait of the author, states that the work had been "set forth after his decease by his deare wife and executrix, Mrs. Anne Austin." The book opens with a meditation for Lady Day, written in 1621, and closes with a funeral sermon in prose, and an epicedium or funeral dirge in verse, composed by Austin for himself, in which he deplores the loss of his first wife and many of his children.
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On the accession of Mary he was restored to his fellowship, but a perusal of Calvin's ‘Institutes’ began to unsettle his religious opinions, and his orthodoxy was further shaken by reading Peter Martyr's ‘Commentary on the First Epistle to the Corinthians’ and by witnessing the execution of Ridley and Latimer, which he strongly denounced. He now became as vehement a Protestant as he had before been Roman Catholic, absented himself from mass, and made a point of walking out whenever obnoxious ceremonies occurred in the church service. He avoided a second expulsion from his fellowship by voluntarily leaving Oxford, and obtained the grant of a mastership in Reading School. He was not long left in peace, for his study was searched by some of his enemies, and various anti-Roman catholic manuscripts discovered, including a poem called ‘Epicedium,’ written in answer to an epitaph on Gardiner by Peter Morwen.
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Blow wrote fourteen services and 30 odes for royal celebrations, 50 secular song-like pieces and more than a hundred anthems. In addition to purely ecclesiastical music and his relatively well-known masque Venus and Adonis, Blow's works include Great sir, the joy of all our hearts, an ode for New Year's Day 1682, similar compositions for 1683, 1686, 1687, 1688, 1689, 1693 (?), 1694 and 1700; odes, and the like, for the celebration of St Cecilia's Day for 1684, 1691, 1695 and 1700; for the coronation of James II, two anthems, Behold, O God, our Defender and God spake sometime in visions; some harpsichord pieces for the second part of Henry Playford's Musick's handmaid (1689); Epicedium for Queen Mary (1695) and Ode on the Death of Purcell (1696). In 1700 he published his Amphion Anglicus, a collection of pieces of music for one, two, three and four voices, with a figured bass accompaniment. This includes a setting for voice and continuo of the poem The Self Banished by Edmund Waller.
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