Music in Shakespeare’s Plays

It was customary in Tudor and Stuart drama to include at least one song in every play. Only the most profound tragedies, in accordance with Senecan models, occasionally eschewed all music except for the sounds of trumpets and drums. In his later tragedies, William Shakespeare defied this orthodoxy and used songs startlingly and movingly, particularly in Othello, King Lear, and Hamlet.

Dramas produced at court were invariably much more lavish than those put on by the professional companies. Casts were larger, as were the instrumental ensembles used to accompany songs and provide incidental music. Gorboduc (1561) by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, the first English five-act drama in blank verse, used a five-part instrumental ensemble to accompany the dumb shows that introduced each act. Wit and Science (c. 1539) by John Redford provided as an interlude a composition played and sung by four allegorical characters. The sententious choirboy dramas presented at court throughout the second half of the 16th century were acted and sung by two companies, the Children of Paul’s and the Gentlemen and Children of the Chapel Royal. Most of these plays included a lament to be sung by a treble voice and accompanied by a consort of viols. About eight of these pieces survive; several are sufficiently lovely to justify their dreary alliterative verse. Shakespeare parodies the genre mercilessly in the Pyramus and Thisbe interlude performed by the rustics in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; the blissfully absurd lament “What dreadful dole is here?” is a send-up of “Gulchardo,” a consort song that has survived into the 21st century.

The vocal music

The professional companies that put on plays in the public theatres worked with much-reduced musical resources. Normally, one boy actor could sing and perhaps play an instrument. Adult actors, especially those specializing in clown roles, sang as well. A special musical-comic genre, the jigg, was the particular domain of the great Shakespearean comedians Richard Tarlton and William Kempe. Jiggs (bawdy, half-improvised low-comedy burlesques) were put on at the conclusion of a history play or tragedy. They involved from two to five characters, were sung to popular melodies (such as “Walsingham” and “Rowland”), and were accompanied by the fiddle or cittern (a small wire-strung instrument strummed with a pick). Touring troupes created a vogue for jiggs on the Continent beginning in the 1590s. As a result, we have marvelous settings of jigg tunes by Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, Samuel Scheidt, and other important northern European composers. The most accomplished of the comedians was Robert Armin, who joined the Chamberlain’s Men about 1598.

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To what sorts of characters did Shakespeare assign most of the singing? Servants (both children and adults), clowns, fools, rogues, and minor personalities. Major figures never sing, except when in disguise or in distracted mental states. Most songs, in fact, are addressed to the protagonists themselves.

It is thought that the boys’ songs in commercial plays were often set pieces, drawn from a repertoire of music suitable to a variety of dramatic situations. Thus, in Antony and Cleopatra the boy musician of the company sings a generic drinking song, “Come, thou monarch of the vine” (for which there is no surviving melody). Another boy, who was sufficiently famous for his name to have been included in the stage directions of the First Folio of 1623—he was Jacke Wilson—sang “Sigh no more, ladies” in Much Ado About Nothing. There is some debate about whether “Take, O, take those lips away” from Measure for Measure and “O mistress mine” from Twelfth Night predate these plays. The lyrics seem to most experts to be authentically Shakespearean, but there is the hint of an unperformed second verse to “Take, O, take,” and instrumental settings of “O mistress” by William Byrd and Thomas Morley do indeed antedate the first production of Twelfth Night. It is reasonable to conclude that Shakespeare both made use of songs that were established in the popular repertoire of the period and composed his own lyrics as well. In both cases, the songs in his plays never seem to be extraneous, though their reasons for being there can be complex.

Shakespeare used vocal music to evoke mood, as in “Come, thou monarch,” and, while doing so, to provide ironic commentary on plot or character. “O mistress,” sung by Robert Armin in the role of Feste, is directed toward the aging Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek; the lyrics touch on all the themes of the play and even hint at Viola’s transgendered disguise in the phrase “that can sing both high and low.” The incantatory, magical, and ritual uses of song are also central to such plays as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest, and Macbeth. In the first, the fairies use “You spotted snakes” as a sleep-inducing charm, while in The Tempest, Ariel’s song “Come unto these yellow sands” reassures the shipwrecked arrivals in Prospero’s magical realm. The heavily magical-musical Weird Sisters’ (Three Witches’) scenes in Macbeth were so popular that they were greatly expanded in Restoration revivals of the play. Songs of the ritual type usually occur near the conclusion of a play; at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for example, Titania calls upon the fairies to “First, rehearse your song by rote, / To each word a warbling note. / Hand in hand, with fairy grace, / Will we sing, and bless this place.” Juno’s song “Honour, riches” in Act IV, scene 1, of The Tempest is clearly the ritual blessing of a marriage and a charm incanted to produce fruitfulness.

Shakespeare also used songs to establish the character or mental state of the singer. Ariel simply describes himself in “Where the bee sucks.” Iago uses songs to give himself the appearance of a rough soldier. Most significantly, Ophelia’s snatches of folk song demonstrate the regressive breakdown of her personality. (The only other Shakespeare heroine who sings is Desdemona. To overwhelming effect, she sings a popular tune, “The Willow Song”—for which 16th-century words and music exist—just before she is murdered by Othello.) In King Lear Edgar feigns madness by singing snatches of folk song.

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Other types of vocal music that appeared in the plays include serenades, part-songs, rounds, and catches, all used very much in imitation of real life in Renaissance England.