Jul 22, 2008

Shakespeare's Work | Music in Shakespeares Work

It is hardly surprising that Shakespeare employed music in the majority of his plays, when we consider the precedents to be found in earlier and contemporary drama. The interludes of Thomas Heywood and William Cornish and of later Elizabethan comedy, beginning with Nicholas Udall's Ralph Roister Doister (ca. 1553), where song and dance are prominent; the court dramas of John Lyly, where songs are indicated or cued; the satires of Ben Jonson; Elizabethan entertainments and Jacobean court masques—these and many more use music as part of their theater. From the earliest days of...