The Choise of Valentines; Or the Merie Ballad of Nash His Dildo

A lively, rib‑tickling ballad emerges from the margins of Elizabethan manuscript culture, offering a cheeky glimpse into the world of a poet who survived on the “keenest pangs of poverty.” Written for a youthful patron, the Earl of Southampton, the piece blends bawdy humor with the restless yearning of a writer scrambling for favor. Its verses tumble with vivid, unvarnished language that captures the restless energy of a courtly lover‑slinging marketplace.

Beyond its entertaining surface, the work holds real value for anyone curious about the social fabric of late‑16th‑century England. It preserves the vernacular slang, courtly customs, and the precarious relationship between patron and poet that shaped literary production. Listeners will hear a rare, unfiltered voice from a time when even the most modest scribes could, for a moment, brush shoulders with the era’s most influential figures.