William Browne was born on the banks of the Tavy, in or near Tavistock, in about 1590 (when Shakespeare was 26 and John Ford 4). He is believed to have been educated at the grammar school in Tavistock, then at Exeter College, Oxford, and finally went to the Inner Temple in London to study law. In this respect his career closely mirrors what we suppose about John Ford’s early years. Browne must have known Ford although Browne was principally a poet, a disciple of Edmund Spenser with Puritan leanings, who never wrote plays as such. His best-known work isBritannia’s Pastorals, which is largely set around Tavistock and, in spite of its title, champions Devon almost as if it were a separate country. He shows a particular passion for describing the Dartmoor rivers, especially the river Tavy.  It is thought that he gave up writing when comparatively young, by the time he was in his mid thirties. He certainly never finished Britannia’s Pastorals, although the well-known ballad Lydford Journey,  containing the famous lines

Oft have I heard of Lydford Law/ How in the morn they hang and draw/ And sit in judgement after

probably dates from around 1640, when he was fifty. He seems to have spent much of the latter part of his life tutoring for various aristocratic families, often living outside Devon. He died around 1643.

John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, knew and annotated Browne’s work for his own purposes: Browne’s influence can be felt in much of Milton’s early poetry, and not least in Milton’s own masque Comus, where Comus is the son of the same Circe who dominates the action of Browne’s untitled Inner Temple Masque.