The Merry Month of May in 1923
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VnAAYMAf4s
The Merry Month of May
by Thomas Dekker (1599) [a good year numerically]
O, the month of May, the merry month of May,
So frolic, so gay, and so green, so green, so green!
O, and then did I unto my true love say,
Sweet Peg, thou shalt be my Summer's Queen.
Now the nightingale, the pretty nightingale,
The sweetest singer in all the forest quire,
Entreats thee, sweet Peggy, to hear thy true love's tale:
Lo, yonder she sitteth, her breast against a brier.
But O, I spy the cuckoo, the cuckoo, the cuckoo;
See where she sitteth; come away, my joy:
Come away, I prithee, I do not like the cuckoo
Should sing where my Peggy and I kiss and toy.
O, the month of May, the merry month of May,
So frolic, so gay, and so green, so green, so green;
And then did I unto my true love say,
Sweet Peg, thou shalt be my Summer's Queen.
Thomas Dekker was an English Elizabethan dramatist and pamphleteer, a versatile and prolific writer, whose career spanned several decades and brought him into contact with many of the period's most famous dramatists.
His books, plays and pamphlets include:
Old Fortunatus (1599), The Gull's Hornbook, The Plague Pamphlets, Lantern and Candlelight, The Shoemakers Holiday, The Roaring Girl, Or Moll Cutpurse, The seven deadly sinnes of London, A Woman Killed with Kindness and Other Domestic Plays, Four Birds of Noah's Ark: A Prayer Book from the Time of Shakespeare and The Noble Spanish Soldier
