[2] Sometime after his uncle's death in April 1572, Watson went to Europe, spending seven and a half years in Italy and France, according to the preface of his version of Antigone.
"[5] Watson's De remedio amoris, perhaps his earliest important composition, is lost, as is his "piece of work written in the commendation of women-kind", which was also in Latin verse.
The following year Watson appears for the first time as an English poet in verses prefixed to George Whetstone's Heptameron, and in a far more important work, as the author of the Hekatompathia or Passionate Centurie of Love, dedicated to Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, who had read the poems in manuscript and encouraged Watson to publish them.
Also entitled Watson's Passion the work, published in 1584, contains over 100 poems in French and Italian sonnet styles, including a number of translations.
The technical peculiarity of these interesting poems is that, although they appear and profess to be sonnets, they are written in triple sets of common six-line stanza, and therefore have eighteen lines each.
He was held in high regard by his contemporaries, even though his style was very similar to those of his late 15th and early 16th-century Italian predecessors Sannazaro and Strozzi.
[8] As his reputation grew, Watson's name became associated with such literary powers as Christopher Marlowe, George Peele, Matthew Roydon and Thomas Achelley.
His employer, William Cornwallis, comments that devising "twenty fictions and knaveryes in a play" was Watson's "daily practyse and his living" (Hall, p. 256).
He was less literal in his approach to the Italian originals than Yonge, writing (as he put it), "not to the sense of the originall dittie, but after the affection of the Noate".
[16] Of the remainder of Watson's career, nothing is known save that on 26 September 1592 he was buried in the church of St Bartholomew the Less[3] and that a month later his second Latin epic "Amintae Gaudia" was seen through the press by his friend, "CM," possibly Marlowe.
In the following year, his last book, The Tears of Fancie, or Love Disdained (1593), was posthumously published under the initials T. W. This is a collection of 60 sonnets, regular in form, so far at least as to have 14 lines each.
[citation needed] Spenser is supposed to have alluded to Watson's untimely death in Colin Clouts Come Home Again, when he says: "Amyntas quite is gone and lies full low, Having his Amaryllis left to moan".