Shakespeare’s Use of Music
Elizabethan’s believed in the cosmic and symbolic value of music and its connection to the divine. In the ‘Traité de l’Harmonie Universelle’ of 1627, M. Mersenne illustrates the concept of order and degree in the universe as symbolised by the musical scale. He divides music into four significant categories:
I. La Musique Divine
II. La musique crée (qui) est dépendante de la Divine
III. La musique mondaine
IV. La musique humaine
Shakespeare and his contemporaries found inspiration and symbolism from the third and fourth categories: the third representing the music of the spheres and the power of music to control the elements, and the fourth, the association of musical harmony with the ‘humors’ of the body, as understood in the medical and psychological lore of the time. In Burton’s ‘The Anatomy of Melancholy’ of 1621, we are told that Music ‘is a soveraigne remedy against Despaire and Melancholy’. This is perhaps best represented in the opening of Shakespeare’s ‘Twelfth Night’, when the love-sick Duke Orsino proclaims:
‘If music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it; that surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.’
Although he would have been more than familiar with the ‘cosmology’ of music, it is difficult determine exactly how much Shakespeare used or believed in these principals. The symbolism is definitely evident in his plays and most of the ideas are represented in Act V of ‘The Merchant of Venice’. In Lorenzo’s apostrophe to music ‘How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank’ we find Shakespeare’s ‘philosophy’ of music; its emotional and atmospheric power and its effect upon the actor and the audience.
In all of Shakespeare’s plays, with the exception of ‘The Comedy of Errors’, some form of vocal or instrumental music is required. The music is always relevant and vital to the action or the plot. Shakespeare was not the first to use music in drama; he was in fact continuing a long theatrical tradition, yet he was particularly inventive and imaginative and used a wider variety of musical forms than any of his predecessors. Because the use of scenery and lighting effects was limited, the language and music in the drama had to convey as much as possible.
The music in Shakespeare’s plays always reinforces or enhances the dramatic aims by:
- advancing the plot or making a comment on it
- intensifying the emotional appeal of a scene
- giving listeners a respite from the spoken word
- creating or changing the mood, tone or atmosphere
- expressing a character’s personality, emotions or state of mind
- facilitating or heightening the effect of a character’s entrance or exit
- rounding off the story with a song and /or dance
He uses more music in his comedies and romances than in his tragedies and histories, however in 32 of his 37 plays, there are direct references to music in the text and there are over 300 stage directions relating to music in his plays as a whole. In addition to royal fanfares, alarums, drums and flourishes there is music for dances, festive occasions, courtly masques and funerals. Clowns, peddlers and spirits sing and there are songs for love serenades, spells, lullabies, drinking and entertainment. He also uses songs for healing and to express madness.
The sound-scape of Stratford and London is less obvious in performances of his plays today than it would have been to Shakespeare’s audiences. The wooden ‘O’ of The Globe theatre had a particular acoustic, which Shakespeare would have exploited and the plays were performed in the afternoon, the commencement announced by brass flourishes. There would also have been the sound of bells and bell-ringing from the churches and the noise of the dogs in the bear pits at Southwark. Shakespeare may well have used these as offstage noise: e.g. the bells and barking described in Ariel’s songs in The Tempest. In Stratford he would have heard birdsong and the noise from shops and small industry, mixed with the talking and singing of the workers and people in the street. We find this reflected in the plays with rural settings and the songs of rustic characters.
In his historical plays, most of the music is limited to flourishes, alarums, drums, fifes, tuckets and sennets. These are particularly associated with the military and the monarchy. There is also music for dances and pageantry and to underline rhetoric in speeches and narration. Shakespeare understood the importance of music and pageantry in both his histories and tragedies. The Elizabethan audiences loved drama and expected the stage to imitate and heighten the drama of their everyday life. The spectacular processions, coronations and ceremonies were a part of individual and collective life in London and playwrights reproduced these experiences on the stage by using music and musical effects. The trumpet flourishes and music used to open and to end scenes, were a particular hallmark of Shakespeare’s historical plays, yet editors have removed many of them, finding them excessive for modern audiences.
The histories occasionally used songs but they are more numerous in his tragedies and comedies. The comedies have many ‘ayres’, whilst the tragedies and histories mostly used the ballad form or traditional popular songs. The ballad combines both song and story, can be comic or tragic, and has characters and actions. The melodies are simple and usually pre-date the texts. This facilitates oral learning and proliferation, which essential to the ballad tradition. In Shakespeare’s day, ballads were sung by everyone from monarch to peasant and there was little distinction between art song and folk song. They were influenced by music from Italy and France, and the spread of Protestant cults, which rejected the Roman Catholic sacred and liturgical music, in favour of hymns and psalms, to ballad or lute tunes.
Both art song and folk song were used in Elizabethan drama but using ballads in tragic plays was a particular device to help prolong the ‘shelf-life’ of a play. Tales of injustice, traitors, criminals and bad women and good women wronged have immediate popular appeal and are sung even today (e.g. Barbara Allen). When Shakespeare was writing, suffering, sorrow, pain and death were everyday presences, especially in the lives of the poor and illiterate classes. Using ballad stories for inspiration and including ballad tunes was a brilliant strategy for popularising a play. Shakespeare also used them to insert moral lessons into his tragedies and histories. Audiences would have appreciated this ‘pleasing device’ as it was very much a part of the Renaissance philosophies of neo-Platonism: ‘the reclamation of Reason and Paradise Lost’.
Shakespeare introduces ballads and popular tunes into worlds turned upside down; e.g. in ‘Hamlet’, where ballads are sung by hero, heroine, villain, clown, princes, ladies, drunks and gravediggers. We are not given complete ballads, but fragments used dramatically to underline the wise or unwise action of a character or to make a moral point in the style of Bardic traditions.
He also uses the’ ballad medley’ – a mixture of nonsense, half sense and foolery, sometimes satirical, sometimes containing a sombre message or irony, but always truthful. The medley, also called ‘motley’, ‘patch’ or carol’ is usually given to the fool or jester and is set to common ballad tunes. Idiots and half-wits are not able to dissemble; they speak truthfully. This is a powerful dramatic tool, related to the use of conceit or wordplay, which combines ideas and images that would normally seem illogical, but in the right context bring fresh revelations. In Hamlet, the fool’s comic songs become tragic in the settings that Shakespeare gives them. In ‘King Lear’ the fool is more logical than the hero. Shakespeare’s fools are sometimes comics and sometimes clairvoyants.
The manners, tastes, status and emotions of the people were reflected in Elizabethan song; from madrigals, motets, and the lutenist ayre to ballads and catches, drinking songs and street cries. Dramatists used folk songs, street songs, ayres, madrigals and canzonets on the stage, although madrigals and church music do not really feature in Shakespeare’s plays.
Folk tunes were rhythmic and simple melodies in the style of popular dances and were usually sung to simple instrumental accompaniments e.g. pipe, tabor or fiddle. The tunes were traditional, of unknown authorship and interchangeable with a variety of lyrics. Some were in the form of ballads or three part songs or catches. A ‘catch’ is a round song; e.g. Three blind mice. A street song however, had lyrics by a known writer and was set to a folk tune, usually for solo voice. They were generally used to advertise the wares of itinerant vendors but they could also include ballads, describing an unusual event or bawdy love story; e.g. Autolycus’ song in ‘The Winter’s Tale’.
An ‘ayre’ was an art song with a melody composed for lyrics by the composer and accompanied by a specific instrument. It had more elaborate and complex rhythms, syncopations and counterpoint and was usually set for solo voice or up to five voices. Ayres for the stage were composed by Robert Johnson, John Wilson, John Hilton, Alphonso Ferrabosco, Thomas Ravenscroft and Thomas Morley, a friend and neighbour of Shakespeare. Most plays of this time used a selection of songs by various composers. Ben Johnson is known to have used songs by Robert Johnson and Alphonso Ferrabosco.
The customs and attitudes of Elizabethan society were also reflected on the stage. Songs were usually given to a secondary character, or sometimes sung offstage by a singer. The type of song related to the type of person; e.g. the rustics sang country folk ballads. Clowns and tradesmen also sang, but songs were rarely given to characters of exalted station; and nobility only sang in situations of intimacy with family and friends; e.g. in ‘As You Like It’. Folk and street songs were particularly useful for the stage as they did not require highly trained singers and instrumentalists and had immediate appeal to all audiences. Masques and more elaborate music began to be more widely used in about 1610, but the extra costs involved in hiring the musicians, meant that most shareholders and actors were not keen to use them.
The performance of an ayre however, needed trained singers and musicians, who rarely joined theatrical troupes and had to be paid fees. Adult actors who had been apprentice musicians occasionally performed ayres but this elevated art form was rarely within the skills of the average player and the extra expense was often beyond the finances of most companies. When an ayre was required, boys representing pages were often ‘written in’. In public playhouses the boys usually sang off stage, usually on balconies, in ‘music rooms’ or even under the stage, depending on the dramatic intent.
Elizabethan and Jacobean plays used songs and music for a variety of dramatic functions:
- to portray character
- to establish and augment settings
- to foreshadow an event
- to forward the action
- to solve various mechanical problems such as the need to indicate a lapse of time
- to suggest offstage action
- to cover exits and entrances
- to reinforce the emotional impact of the language
- to contribute to the action of the play
- to create a supernatural atmosphere
- to cover the sound of stage machinery
Songs were also included for the purpose of entertaining and amusing the audience at the beginning or the end of acts or scenes; e.g. in ‘Much Ado About Nothing’. This was more common in plays for the Court. In such private performances, the ‘children of the chapels’ were used. These included the Children of St Paul’s, the Children of the Chapel (Blackfriars), the Children of the Queen’s Revels and the Children of Windsor. They were boys aged 9 to 13, highly trained as vocalists and instrumentalists to provide music for the Church and the Court. They often formed acting companies for indoor theatres and plays were written to include them, but they were not usually ‘written in’ to the action.
When Shakespeare appears as a playwright in London in about 1592, the choirboy companies were less well known. His fellow dramatists were already using music in their plays to perform dramatic functions. A variety of music was at their disposal, including choral works, lutenist’s ayres, street ballads, folk songs, and many kinds of instrumental music. When Shakespeare began working on his plays he was fully aware of this effective dramatic tool, yet his particular skill in its employment allowed him to weave the music into the texture of his plays, in a natural and brilliantly effective way: from the elaborate song-dance-choral ayres of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ to the popular street song at the end of ‘Twelfth Night.’
Elizabethan drama was unique in its integration of poetry, drama, dance and music. Today there is no counterpart. However, for over 400 years Shakespeare’s plays and poems have inspired theatrical and concert music, operas, ballets, overtures, symphonic poems, fantasies, musicals, suites and songs. ’As You Like It’ inspired more music than any other play, followed by ‘Twelfth Night’ and ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’. Sonnets 18 and 125 have been the most popular for song settings. His works have been translated into most of the World’s languages and his legacy is one of our greatest national assets. The richness of his vocabulary and the poetic genius of his writing have inspired and continue to inspire generations of artists, writers and composers.
© H Kean
Bibliography
‘Shakespeare in Music’ ed. by P Hartnoll Macmillan & Co Ltd 1964
‘Shakespeare’s Use of Music’ John H Long University of Florida Press
Volume 1 1955 - Volume 2 1961 - Volume 3 1971
Letters and Conversations with: OUP, Boosey & Hawkes, Valerie Langfield, The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust & Library, The Folger Shakespeare Library, Ariel Music and Opera North.
All text book resources were obtained by Burnley Music Library and the British Library Service.
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