The following Essay is the outcome of curiosity—curiosity to know with what sort of stage-music and musical effect the Elizabethan dramatists produced their plays. It is an endeavour to do with the musical stage-directions what has already been done with those relating to other matters, namely, to collect them, and to force them to show their own conclusions. It endeavours to show what kinds of music were used during a play, and when and how the music was performed. Shakespeare's plays in First Folio and Quartos are the chief source of illustration, and other plays have been used as mines only that the ore extracted might illustrate the setting of a Shakespearian play. It concludes by attempting to estimate critically the artistic worth of music to the stage.

It may be objected that all this is purely antiquarian in its aim; but even if it were, it must not be assumed that all antiquarian research is of the dry-as-dust sort. It is highly important to obtain a clear idea of the conditions under which Elizabethan plays were produced, both for the light it throws upon the action of certain scenes, and also in order to clear away the old and false notions about the simplicity of the Elizabethan stage.

Before we attempt to describe the part music took in an Elizabethan play, it is necessary to say something about the musical instruments. They may be classified as follows:

Percussion. Drums, Timbrels, and Bells.

Brass instruments. Sackbuts, Trumpets, and Horns.

Wood instruments. Cornets, Hautboys, Recorders, and Fifes.

Viols. Treble-viols, Viols da gamba, Bass-viols.

Lutes. Treble-lutes, Citterns, Pandores, Bass-lutes.

Drums were of two kinds. The big drum or tabourine was used for playing military marches and national marches (such as that indicated by the direction “Danish march” in Hamlet, where the court enters to see the play), or funeral marches (like that at the close of King Lear, “Exeunt with a dead march”). Small drums called timbrels were hoops of wood covered with parchment only on one side. They were probably used in masquers' processions and in plays dealing with the East. They were employed at The Rose theatre, but there are no stagedirections indicating their use.

It was on the drum or tabourine that the drummers played their “alarums,” that is to say drum-rolls to indicate that a battle was being fought, and also “retreats.” They were employed on the stage, and also behind the scenes if it was desired to imitate a distant battle. Directions for alarums are so numerous in historical plays that it is not necessary to give instances. They can be found by dozens in Shakespeare's Histories, even in the First Folio; and later editors have inserted them in great profusion.

WHEN my friend Professor Vaughan asked me if I had thought over any subject for a dissertation, I felt depressed. For I remembered the melancholy compilation that is expected from a student who sets out to take a degree in English Literature.

Whilst pondering over possible subjects, a music-teacher of my youth, the late Wallis Vincent, A.R.C.O. (one whom I admired greatly not only for his musicianship, which was considerable, but also for his delight in humorous poetry, his ready wit, and his genial kindness), lent me his manuscript of a popular lecture on “Shakespeare and Music.” I was struck by the amount of fun he had got out of it, and foresaw that to make a deeper study of the subject would be to tread an interesting path. I made up my mind not to work the ground already appropriated by Mr E. W. Naylor and re-worked by Mr L. C. Elson, but to go further afield and describe the share taken by musicians in an Elizabethan play.

I drew up a scheme, was lucky enough to have it accepted, and proceeded to collect materials to make it into a dissertation. The result is the following little book. It does not assume to be more than a sketch, which at some future time I hope to enlarge. I should have liked to read and ransack every play of the period for material, but alas, I had not time enough for this.

There are many allusions to instruments of music in our elder poets, and an interesting list might be compiled showing the uses of the various sorts. But not until the Elizabethan age did music provide materials for poetic imagery. The medieval poets in mentioning music piled instrument on instrument. Thus in The Squyr of Lowe Degre—

And so in Piers Plowman, the poet is not content with saying he cannot play music, he must emphasise the fact by cataloguing the accomplishments of a wandering minstrel

We can easily imagine how one of our early poets would have interpreted the following thought from Marlowe's Tamburlaine (Act II. Sc. 4):

The men who provided this music in the theatres were a despised and outlawed caste, recruited from the ranks of strolling musicians. They were despised by the church, hated by Puritans, and mocked at even by a writer of plays like Dekker. Without visible means of support, wandering from tavern to tavern and town to town, with many ready to listen and few willing to pay, forced to tout for a hearing and beg for a pittance, is it a marvel that they were called thriftless and impudent? “As familiar as a fiddler” seems to have been a proverbial saying, and Dekker confirms it in his Guls Horn-Booke (1609) in the chapter describing “How a Gallant should behave himself in a Taverne” (Chap. VII). “If you desire not to be haunted with Fidlers, who by the statute have as much libertie as Roagues to travell into any place, having the pasport of the house about them, bring then no women along with you.” It was this impudence and brazenness that drew on their heads the wrath of beneficed clergymen. “London is so full of unprofitable pipers and fidlers that a man can no sooner enter a tavern than two or three cast of them hang at his heels,” says Stephen Gosson in his Short Apologie (1587). John Earle tells the same story about a stage-trumpeter.

English dramatic music took its beginnings from the antiphons and canticles of the medieval catholic church. The Mystery Plays—short dramas in popular verse dealing with scriptural incidents and legends of the saints—played by craft-gilds on certain festival days during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, drew quite naturally from the music of the church. Musicians played at times during their performance, and the plays contain antiphons, canticles, and a few lyrics—the earliest specimens of the English dramatic song.

It is impossible to give here a full list of references to music in the Mystery Plays; but we can get some notion of the share which music took by comparing the first play, The Creation, in existing series of gild-plays.

In the York play, a chorus of angels sings the canticles Te Deum laudamus, and Sanctus.

In the Chester play, The Creation and Fall, minstrels play whilst God puts Adam and Eve in Paradise. After they have eaten the fruit, this direction is found, “Then Adam and Eve shall cover ther members with leaves, hyddinge themselves under they treeyes; then God shall speake, and mynstrelles playinge.” This attempt to add mystery to God's words by the use of music shows that the producers were well aware of the value of music for enhancing emotional effect.

Although music was introduced with the utmost freedom into the action of Elizabethan plays, there were certain conventional uses observed corresponding to the part a modern theatre orchestra fulfils in playing an overture, entr'actes, and accompanying songs, or in playing music to increase the emotional tension of a scene. Indeed our use of the orchestra in pure drama is a debt we owe to the men who made English drama. Our English custom of associating music with drama must have been handed down from the time of Shakespeare. It cannot be a loan from opera; for since the days of Davenant and Purcell, opera in England has always been a forced and outlandish kind of drama, never fixed in popular support, but flourishing when the fashionable world lent its approval, and dying when it turned its fickle face another way.

In the age of Shakespeare, no overture was played before the curtain rose. There was no curtain to rise. The custom was to play three blasts on the trumpet or sackbut from the topmost story before the speaker of the prologue entered to speak his lines. It was no new thing to blow trumpets at the beginning of a meeting. It was common at tournaments and at fairs. The church had done the like on certain feast-days. In some places musicians were sent up the church-tower to play before the celebration of festival masses. The custom still lingers in a few old-world towns.

If the Elizabethan age was like “a nest of singing birds,” and “the golden age of English music” as the critics tell us, how is it that the best songs are not heard at our concerts? The answer is that the songs as music, however beautiful they may be as poems, have been left far behind by later developments in harmony. The poems are still read with lively enthusiasm, and the madrigals are a living joy to some glee-societies; but the songs, the airs and the dances are forgotten; save by a few cultured musical antiquaries, who, after valuing Elizabethan music for its historical importance, have learned to appreciate its beauties.

Owing to their diatonic nature, Elizabethan airs sound like snatches of old psalm-tunes. They are all quaint, many of them are pleasing and even powerful in their emotional appeal, but, to ears accustomed only to modern music, they are uttered in a dead language which sounds often harsh and crude. The seventh note of the scale is frequently left unsharpened, which conveys to modern ears the effect of a change of key. This is owing to the fact that their scales were hexachords. Another peculiarity was that Elizabethan ears could tolerate a “false relation.” Leaps in the melody from a given note to its imperfect octave (e.g. ♯F to ♮F) are sometimes made, even in vocal music.

1. Frontispiece. A photograph, by Mr Emery Walker, of part of a picture in the National Portrait Gallery representing scenes from the life of Sir Henry Unton. The plate shows an Elizabethan consort playing music at his wedding-feast. A procession of masquers is filing past the musicians, who are seated around a table with their music before them. The instruments played by the consort, beginning at the left, are viol, flute, lute, cithern, viol da gamba, and probably pandore. The violist rests his instrument against the chest, and not, as do modern fiddlers, under the chin. The gambist is depicted in an impossible attitude, holding his bow by the point. Here, evidently, the painter was at fault. At the top of the stair, on the right, stands a drummer; and on the left, a quartet of singers are shown. The period is the last decade of the sixteenth century.

2. Plate I, p. 22 (from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition), is borrowed from an article in Shakespeare Jahrbuch, Vol. XLIV, entitled “The Fortune Theatre,” by Mr William Archer. The plate represents a reconstruction of the first Fortune Theatre, in Golding Lane, by Mr W. H. Godfrey, from the original specification furnished to one Peter Streete, a builder, on January 8th, 1600, by Philip Henslowe and Edward Alleyne. The indenture is quoted by J. P. Collier in his Annals of the Stage (3rd edn. 1831), Vol. III. p. 304. The theatre was eighty feet square outside, and fiftyfive feet square within.