SOURCE: Styan, J. L. “Shakespeare's Fusion of the Arts.” Upstart Crow 8 (1988): 10-27.

[In the following essay, Styan reviews many occasions of music and dance in Shakespeare's plays, arguing that their principal function is to manipulate audience response.]

My first premise is that Shakespeare was a Renaissance man, with all the magic connotations of that term, and that he was therefore familiar with all the arts. My second and perhaps more important premise is that his territory, the Elizabethan stage, was a Renaissance vehicle and equally magical, the pantechnicon of its time. The poet, his play, and his stage are inseparable, and the Renaissance concept of the poet as maker embraces speech as well as words, song and dance as well as music, taking all the performing arts to a point where their edges are thoroughly blurred.

In practice, it is for us to recognize the form and shape of these arts of voice and body, ears and eyes, and to unblur their edges. More than this, the study of a play demands that we understand how they come together for the promotion of drama and performance. If a Shakespeare play works like no other ever written and performed, it should lead us directly to that other mystery, the nature of the Elizabethan theatre and stage itself. Its sheer emptiness—its “empty space”, to use the term with which Peter Brook enshrined it—places the emphasis on the embodiment of the arts in action, and on the processes of drama as a performing art.

The open stage has been said, with justice, to throw all the weight upon the actor and his power of speech and movement. If it is a bare stage, it also invites the participation of the audience, urging the laws of “Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts,” to quote the ironic plea for help spoken by the Chorus in Henry V. Above all, the empty space makes of drama a direct and sensory experience: when Lear curses his daughter Goneril on the line, “Infect her beauty, / You fen-suck'd fogs,” our thoughts are less likely to be on Tudor notions of infectious disease than on the actor's spittle flying through the air from all those f's and s's; when Macduff hears of the death of his wife and children, the lines teach the actor how to speak them, since one word, “all,” is repeated and repeated until we hear it as both a cry of anguish and a call for revenge:

                                                            All my pretty ones?
Did you say all?—O Hell-kite!—All?
What all my pretty chickens … ?

(Macbeth, IV. iii. 216-18)

Say this more softly and we hear groans, more loudly and we hear yells; but the noise itself is doing the work.

The emptiness of the Elizabethan stage, however, carries another, more elusive, quality, one which has to do with the nature of Elizabethan dramatic illusion. The thrust of the platform precipitates the actor into the arms of his audience, and the intimacy of the tight-knit auditorium compels him to sense it physically all around, below, and above him. In turn, although the stage does not necessarily represent anything in particular, it refuses to allow us to slip away into the simple ease of make-believe, but constantly insists that we remember we are in a theater, as Dr. Johnson believed we do, and Bertolt Brecht desired we should, and that we have a constructive contribution to make in the creation of the play. In summary, the non-illusory quality which enabled an Elizabethan poetic play to work at maximum force was that of a ritualistic spirit shared by all parties to the play.

This alert and conscious quality of imagination characteristic of a Shakespeare play allows the arts to come together in performance in the way they do. The same freedom that encouraged the language of the stage to leap from prose to verse and back again, that enabled the action to slip from the realistic to the unreal and symbolic with the speed of a dream (or a nightmare), prompted the playwright to exploit in many hybrid ways the arts of music and song, and dance and pantomime, within the magic web of the theater. This paper will stay with music, song, and dance in the plays, and the way they are used within the play may reveal a little of how poetic drama does its remarkable work.

“Music plays” is the recurring stage direction throughout quarto and folio, and for years the more literary reader took this as a cue to let his eye run on to the next line of print. But we know too well what power music can bring to a scene: how many gunfights in the western movies of old would simply lack excitement, if not actual firepower, without the constant help of a full orchestra out there on the range; and how many bad actors and actresses have not had their performances vastly enhanced at moments of great emotion by a friendly violin or two (some years ago there was a pretty English starlet named Patricia Roc who received great praise for an emotional performance of watching her lover's airplane flying off to war; closer inspection of the shot reveals that the camera showed only the back of her head; music had done it all).

So the rule for an Elizabethan play should be that whenever we read the stage direction, “Music plays,” we should pay special attention, and at least determine what kind of music: a lute and strings proposing a love song will have a different effect from the drums and trumpets, hautboys and sackbuts, of a royal procession. Yet in Shakespeare there are some 300 musical stage directions, and at least 32 of the plays refer to music, with over 500 passages in the text making direct reference to it. The implication is that the musicians belonging to a company or hired for the occasion were always on hand, and that every play may be assumed to employ music. Every boy actor was trained, we know, in singing, and every company clown was expected to sing also; perhaps all Elizabethan actors had vocal gifts. Is this alarming? We always knew that Shakespeare wrote musical comedies; it now seems he wrote musical tragedies and histories too. It is for us to check the places where singing merges with speech, and song and dance with drama.

The gulling of Benedick in Much Ado about Nothing, II. iii. offers a familiar instance of a Shakespearean song in action. As Benedick eavesdrops upon the Prince, Leonato, and Claudio (who, of course, know that he is listening), the trickery is begun appropriately with a love song, Balthasar's sweet and melancholy little ditty,

Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,
                              Men were deceivers ever.

(62-63)

This exactly captures the sentimental mood by which Benedick's transformation from misogynist to lover is to be managed, not impossible in the case of such a self-deceiver. It could well be that Shakespeare is really touching on the theme of deception in the play as a whole, especially preparing us for Claudio's rejection of Hero. He is thereby wasting no opportunity to work upon the audience's sensibilities as well as Benedick's, and casting over his comedy a little of the darker shadow of what is to come.

Yet that is not all there is to arranging a song for a play. In performance (as we know from modern musicals), a song lends a new dimension to the art and craft of the performer, and in this instance Benedick is enabled to use the time and style of the singing to convey the ridiculous change in his outlook. His attitude in his earlier lines was one of complete cynicism:

I do much wonder that one man, seeing how much another man is a fool when he dedicates his behaviours to love, will, after he hath laughed at such shallow follies in others, become the argument of his own scorn by falling in love: and such a man is Claudio. I have known when there was no music with him but the drum and the fife …

(7-14)

From this he passes to a certain grudging approval of the music he believes is being played to gratify Claudio's amorous desire:

Now, divine air! Now is his soul ravished! Is it not strange that sheep's guts should hale souls out of men's bodies?

(58-60)

Benedick is by now showing two faces. What's more, a melancholy song has become a funny one. A student once asked me what was funny about the beautiful love song heard in Twelfth Night, “O mistress mine.” Of course, it is not the song that is funny, but its context, sung as it is to Andrew Aguecheek, who is lost in the throes of love and liquor. There is a Yorkshire dialect word that suitably describes the stupid expression on his face, the word “gormless,” and all Shakespeare has done is set a delightful song in brilliant counterpoint with a delicious performance of “gormlessness.”

However, no two songs in the plays have quite the same effect. We are not dealing with songs per se, songs-sung, but with songs-functional, songs-in-action, songs-in-the-service-of-the-play. It is possible to list the many and varied jobs that music and song may do in drama, like creating the mood and atmosphere of a scene, enhancing our perception of a character, marking an entrance perhaps, or, as in opera, developing a moment of feeling and emotion, and so on, but the constantly varying context of drama in performance will always defy any simple conclusions about its use of song.

Bassanio's song sung during his casket scene in The Merchant of Venice, III. ii, has another job to do, “the whilst Bassanio comments on the caskets to himself,” as the Quarto stage direction has it. The action seems uncomplicated. Portia called for a song earlier:

Let music sound while he doth make his choice,
Then if he lose he makes a swan-like end,
Fading in music.

(43-45)

Then she makes it clear that she would dearly like Bassanio to choose the right casket (that is, the lead casket, as by now we know), although she says she will not cheat, but hopes that love will find a way. Now we hear the song itself, with its tell-tale rhymes:

Tell me where is Fancy bred,
Or in the heart, or in the head?
How begot, how nourished?

(63-65)

Has Portia cheated? Granville-Barker does not think so, believing such a trick to be unworthy of her.¹ John Russell Brown doesn't think so either, since it would not only belittle the lovers, but also cheapen the theme of the play.² Yet “Fancy bred” … “in the head” … “nourished”, and more, all inescapably rhyme with “lead,” just as the verses in Morocco's casket showered him with “gold” and those in Arragon's were laced with silvery sibilants. One thing is clear, and that is that no audience can avoid the question, which has the effect of inviting us to join in a happy word-game, a kind of charade. More than this, the song also invites us to take Portia's position and share her problem. Even more than this, we are given another hint of her lighter, feminine side, since we are to be prepared for the play's ultimate game, chiefly characterized by the frivolous exchange of rings immediately following a deadly trial nearly involving murder, no less. The Shakespeare capable of the ironic twists of The Taming of the Shrew and Love's Labor's Lost was certainly capable of a twinkle in the eye in The Merchant of Venice. Thus a song, by its placing in the action, can help manipulate our feelings and expectations about a whole play.

There are about 90 songs in the plays, and one or two other examples may suggest their range of dramatic possibilities. Perhaps the most moving of all is Desdemona's so-called “willow” song in Othello, IV. iii. The first point to make is that this song appears to have been a popular song of the time. We know that Shakespeare did not hesitate to “borrow” a lyric or a tune when it served his play, and “It was a lover and his lass” from As You Like It and “O mistress mine” from Twelfth Night were probably pop-songs of the day set to music by Thomas Morley. The willow song was another of these:

The poor soul sat sighing, by a sycamore tree,
                              Sing all a green willow:
Her hand on her bosom, her head on her knee,
                              Sing willow, willow, willow. …

(40-43)

The sentiment and the mood of poor Barbary's song of unrequited love are exactly right for Desdemona's scene:

                                                            that song tonight
Will not go from my mind … I have much to do,
But to go hang my head all on one side
And sing it like poor Barbary. …

(30-33)

Moreover, the fact that it was a well-known song suddenly changes our image of Desdemona back from Iago's portrait of a whore and Othello's monster of his imagination to the girl we admired in the beginning, the one who gave the Moor “a world of sighs” when she heard his story. We are indeed to perceive two images of Desdemona just before she dies, one through Othello's fevered brain and one through the sweet agency of song. The simple, lyrical image of her is supported by the fact that, where the original ballad was sung to a lute, Desdemona must sing it unaccompanied, and in the most natural fashion. She interrupts herself to give orders to Emilia (“Lay by these” at line 47 and “Prithee hie thee” at line 49) and she even forgets her lines (“Nay, that's not next” at line 51)—Shakespeare's charming touch of human nature. This song is to be so informal as to be an extension of the living character, and to the Elizabethan playgoer, Desdemona was to seem as familiar as a song heard in the streets.

At another extreme, how can criticism account for Pandarus' song in Troilus and Cressida, III. ii: “Love, love, nothing but love, still love, still more!”? This song to the ineffable Helen of Troy is also a love song, but a really smutty one. It appears to echo the sex act to the point of orgasm; I will not review the text. In its last line, “O ho, groans out for Ha, ha, ha!,” it even introduces the ironic suggestion of venereal disease, so foreshadowing the epilogue to the play with which Pandarus completes the picture. There cannot have been many more sexually obscene songs than “Love, love, nothing but love” before the rock songs of our own day sung to the phallic guitar. Pandarus' song sits at the epicenter of its play, and at the very least debases the cause for which the Trojan War is being fought. It also neatly sums up musically the interacting elements of sex and war that the play surveys: “Wars and lechery. Nothing else holds fashion” (V. ii. 193-4), and Thersites executes a perfect pun when he reports that the legendary heroes of Greece and Troy “war / whore for a placket” (II. iii. 21).

A Midsummer Night's Dream is one of the more musical plays in the canon. It enjoys several woodland songs like “Over hill, over dale” and “You spotted snakes with double tongue,” which, as seems appropriate, are given to fairies. However, there is one song that is not, perversely not. When Bottom the weaver, wearing his ass's-head, decides to sing so that his friends “shall hear I am not afraid” (III. i. 118), what song was Shakespeare to choose? In keeping with everything else in the wood near Athens, he decided to give him one about woodland birds. But Bottom is no fairy.

The ousel cock, so black of hue,
                    With orange-tawny bill,
The throstle, with his note so true,
                    The wren with little quill.

(120-3)

A pretty piece it is—until we hear it sung in Bottom's coarse voice, which may be presumed to be quite wrong to render delicate lines about bird-songs. Of course, there is another principle at work, one of ironic comedy, for Bottom's voice must also awaken Titania, who responds with all the enthusiasm that a drop of purple juice in the eye can bring:

What angel wakes me from my flowery bed?

(124)

As befits the Queen of the Fairies, Titania manages a perfect iambic pentameter. So Shakespeare marks the incongruity between his gross and earthy mechanical and his fragile Fairy Queen by the ridiculous contrast between their two voices.

The Tempest has more songs than any other play of Shakespeare's, and the spirit of the comic action seems to be marked at key points by the style of the singing. Some of the most lovely songs in the language belong to Ariel and express his special qualities of compassion: “Come unto these yellow sands” (I. ii. 377) seems to allay the storm, and “Full fathom five thy father lies” (I. ii. 399) comforts Ferdinand who thinks his father has drowned. Moreover, The Tempest may be identified by two kinds and styles of song, not only Ariel's, but also Stephano's, the clown who sings sea-shanties and catches like “I shall no more to sea, to sea” (II. ii. 43) and

The master, the swabber, the boatswain, and I,
                    The gunner and his mate,
Lov'd Mall, Meg, and Marian, and Margery,
                    But none of us car'd for Kate. …

(II. ii. 47-50)

In a similar way an audience is guided gymnastically through Twelfth Night by the three sorts of song associated with Orsino, Sir Toby, and Feste.

The numerous occasions when Shakespeare uses instrumental music in his plays indicate further ways by which he enhances his scenes and reveals his sense of theatre. In an Elizabethan performance it would have been impossible for his audience not in some degree to have been aware of the musical side of his dramatic talent. At every level of society in sixteenth-century England there was a common experience of musical entertainment, and whether in court or tavern, music was a rich part of daily life. It might therefore be a fair guess that any striking musical reference or instance in the playhouse, whether touching the music of the spheres or merely cueing a trumpet-blast, would guide the audience towards a contributing perception.

The controlling power of music is used at many a moment of heightened emotion. In Much Ado about Nothing, V. iii., when Claudio comes to grieve for his dead Hero at “the monument of Leonato,” we should not be surprised to find “Balthasar and musicians” trailing behind him, ready to answer the clear injunction with some form of religious music,

Now, music, sound, and sing your solemn hymn.

(11)

Balthasar then sings “Pardon, goddess of the night” in the manner the song calls for, “heavily, heavily,” all in careful preparation for the moving disclosure of “another Hero” (V. iv. 62). That, too, by a kind of counterpoint, is a preparatory cue for the big change to come, and the last line in the play is Benedick's “Strike up, pipers!” as he calls for the dance which ends it on a joyful note of universal reconciliation.

This use of music is not there, of course, to support a character in the story, although the actor may react to it; like everything else in the play, in the last analysis it is there to manipulate the audience. During the beautiful scene in which Cordelia awakens her father from his madness in King Lear, IV.vii., Shakespeare ensures Lear's transfiguration, and our belief in it, by paying great attention to external detail. He gives the King a change of costume (“in the heaviness of sleep / We put fresh garments on him,” 21-22). He seems to change the (imaginary) lighting also, for after the darkness of the storm scenes, Lear is conscious of “fair daylight,” in line 52. And the poetry Lear is given to speak is reduced to simple monosyllables. Then, to crown the whole effect and complete the treatment, the Doctor calls for music with “louder the music there” (line 25). Even if we are not sure what kind of music is wanted to cure a king's madness and provide “the best comforter / To an unsettled fancy,” as Prospero calls it in The Tempest, V.i. 58-9, for the moment Lear's music makes us into doctors, just as Cordelia's kiss makes us daughters. Finally, when the old man wakes to new sanity, the same music magically makes King Lears of us all.

The supreme example of musically therapeutic witchcraft is heard at the end of The Winter's Tale, V. iii., when Paulina brings to life the statue of Hermione with the help of music:

                                                  Music, awake her, strike!
'Tis time; descend; be stone no more; approach;
Strike all that look upon with marvel. Come!

(98-100)

This is a little like the awakening of Pericles's queen Thaisa when she lies in her coffin in Pericles, III. ii.:

The still and woeful music that we have,
Cause it to sound, beseech you.
The viol once more; now thou stirr'st, thou block!
The music there!

(89-92)

As Paulina says, everyone's faith is wanted at moments when the dead are to come to life. Frequent playgoers, like frequent flyers, will know that when the music strikes up, all will be well.

Not all of Shakespeare's music is designed to cast a spell and put us into a trance; some of it wakes us up. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, IV. i., Theseus' “winding of horns” certainly wakes up the lovers after their long night's contest in the wood:

Go, bid the huntsmen wake them with their horns.
Good-morrow, friends. Saint Valentine is past.

(137-8)

Accordingly, the Folio has “Wind horns. Shout within: they all start up.” Nevertheless, these same horns also have the important effect of waking the audience itself from its dream in the imaginary moonlight, for we have to be alert and ready for the comic ironies of the last act. So Theseus' horns are slightly sarcastic horns, akin to the alarums heard at the beginning of Troilus and Cressida when they blow raspberries at the lovesick Troilus:

Peace, you ungracious clamours! Peace, rude sounds!
Fools on both sides, Helen must needs be fair
When with your blood you daily paint her thus.
I cannot fight upon this argument;
It is too starv'd a subject for my sword.

(I. i. 89-93)

This protest by Troilus is answered by another blast on the trumpets.

Shakespeare's musical imagination is working to manipulate our attention when a deliberately discordant note is struck, the elements of the drama seeming to be in a state of fission rather than fusion. On the night before the battle in Antony and Cleopatra, the fearful stage direction in the Folio at IV. iii. 11 reads, “music of the hautboys is under the stage,” and the hautboys in Macbeth that accompany the ominous “show of eight kings” at IV.i.106 are hardly intended to put us to sleep.

In some of the comedies, another sort of counterpoint is practiced. In The Merchant of Venice, the mercenary world of Venice is set at odds with the sweet music of Belmont. In As You Like It, the contentious world of the court is balanced against the singing heard in the Forest of Arden. In Twelfth Night, the sensuous palaces of Illyria are undercut by the drinking songs associated with Sir Toby in the so-called “kitchen scene,” with Feste the clown subversively passing freely between all parties.

Twelfth Night opens with “Orsino” music, but “the food of love” is evidently rather sickly, to be surfeited, if not actually thrown up. The same music is heard again in II. iv.:

                                        That piece of song,
That old and antic song we heard last night;
Methought it did relieve my passion much,
More than light airs and recollected terms
Of these most brisk and giddy-paced times.
Come, but one verse.

(2-6)

So the tune is played again, and before we are allowed to know its melancholy words, we are told more about it:

Mark it, Cesario, it is old and plain;
The spinsters and the knitters in the sun,
And the free maids that weave their thread with bones
Do use to chant it. …

(43-6)

Our wonder at such strange properties prepares us finally to receive its alarming ideas:

Come away, come away death,
And in sad cypress let me be laid.
Fie away, fie away breath,
I am slain by a fair cruel maid.

(51-4)

This was the very song I was required to read as a schoolboy of fourteen from Palgrave's famous anthology of 1861, The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language, always known as Palgrave's Treasury. But, Palgrave mistook the comic intention of “Come away death” for that of a pathetic love song.

Comments from the characters strongly suggest that it is comedy. When the music is heard again in this scene, the Duke again feels “the sweet pangs” of love, and the same tune teases Viola almost into revealing her secret feelings. Shakespeare concludes it with a somewhat sarcastic joke:

There's for thy pains.
No pains, sir, I take pleasure in singing, sir.

(67-8)

Feste adds a mocking little prayer on leaving:

Now the melancholy good protect thee, and the tailor make thy doublet of changeable taffeta, for thy mind is a very opal.

(73-5)

The song itself is as sickly-sentimental a love song as Shakespeare could invent, “Come away death” being roughly translated to mean, “Hurry up and bury me.” In Shakespeare's Use of Song (1923), Richmond Noble sensed its “humourously playful pity for the Duke's sad love-grief” (p. 83), but we also hear ironic laughter of the kind heard in Hamlet and Troilus and Cressida and other plays seen at the Globe in about 1600. Shakespeare's musical intention is to have us firmly reject the Duke's kind of loving.

Ironic counterpoint is a constant element present in Shakespeare's dialogue and action, and it should not surprise us to find it in the music too. One of the best examples occurs during Capulet's ball in Romeo and Juliet, I. v. The music he calls for to start the dancing at his party echoes his good-humored welcome to his guests:

Welcome, gentlemen, ladies that have their toes
Unplagued with corns will walk a bout with you.

(16-17)

Not a very good joke, but it suits old Capulet, and its intention is clear enough. His call goes out for what must be a lively tune:

A hall, a hall, give room! And foot it, girls!

(26)

It is possible, therefore, to make a good guess at the sort of dancing wanted—hardly a stately pavan. I'd suggest a courante or a galliard.’‘The nimble galliard,” as the Ambassador of France calls it in Henry V, I. ii. 252, would meet the occasion, “a gallant dance,” according to Sir John Davies in his poem “Orchestra,”

With lofty turns and caprioles in the air,
Which with the lusty tunes accordeth fair.

(stanza 68)

The galliard was a joyful affair in which the lady dances away and the man leaps after her, and it was one of the most popular dances of the sixteenth century. Yet in the midst of all this gaiety we hear Tybalt's threat to kill Romeo, foreshadowing the tragedy to come. Unlike Franco Zeffirelli's film version of 1968, in which the syrupy music seems to accompany the action of the ballroom scene, Shakespeare's music works against the force of the dialogue, and has the extraordinary power of making the ominous threat to the lovers seem more painful.

We are but a step away from the dance as yet another art form making its contribution to Elizabethan drama. A performance customarily ended with a dance, although this was not always mentioned in the text (as it is in A Midsummer Night's Dream and Much Ado about Nothing). In Shakespeare, dances turn up in different places in all kinds of plays, and with increasing frequency towards the end of his career. He was by then one of the King's Men, and King James was especially fond of dancing.

The Elizabethan stage also had a wide range of dances to choose from: coarser, country dances like the roundel, the hay, and the jig were balanced by more courtly dances like the pavan, the measure, the canary, and the cinquepace, or “sink-a-pace” as Sir Toby Belch calls it. Some court dances could also be very vigorous, like the lavolta in which the man lifts the lady with his knee. Moreover, audiences were familiar with the differences, as is implied by Beatrice in Much Ado when she offers advice about marriage to her cousin Hero:

Hear me, Hero: wooing, wedding, and repenting is as a Scotch jig, a measure, and a cinque-pace: the first suit is hot and hasty like a Scotch jig, and full as fantastical; the wedding mannerly-modest as a measure, full of state and ancientry; and then comes repentance and, with his bad legs, falls into the cinque-pace faster and faster, till he sink into his grave.

(II. i. 66-73)

In that folk dancing and courtly dancing were performed on the same stage, the playhouse was one of the rare places in sixteenth-century London that must have seemed classless. For the play, however, mixed dancing served to distinguish one group of characters from another, as in A Midsummer Night's Dream: if Theseus and Hippolyta dance a stately pavan, Titania and Oberon and their fairies may enjoy a round or a ring-dance; if the lovers dance a coranto, the running courtship dance, we know that the mechanicals settled for a rustic bergomask, possibly to the sound of Bottom's favorite music, the tongs and the bones. Thus the audience's sense of the dance could help it to leap the imaginative levels in the play.

One would expect Shakespeare to integrate his dances, like his songs, into the action of his play, and here are a few of their uses in performance. Love's Labor's Lost will be remembered for its masked ball at V. ii. 157, where we read, “Enter Blackmores with music; … and the rest of the Lords disguised.” The four noble lovers approach their ladies with a mask of Muscovites, and all the signs are that their dance is to be solemn and pompous. Thus speaks the King of Navarre, referring to the Princess of France:

Say to her, we have measur'd many miles
To tread a measure with her on this grass.

(184-5)

“Measure” was synonymous with “pavan,” which was the most formal of processional dances, its name deriving from “pavo,” peacock. Edward Naylor, that tireless student of Shakespeare's music, reported that the dance had reference to the peacock's majestic strut and gay feathers, and went on to say,

It was de rigueur for gentlemen to dance the pavan in cap and sword; for lawyers to wear their gowns, princes their mantles; and ladies to take part in the fullest of full dress, the long trains of their gowns being supposed to correspond in appearance and movement to the peacock's tail.³

The Muscovites are soon recognized as our four inept lovers in disguise, and each must strut back and forth before his disdainful lady, as she “refuses” to dance with him. Conveniently, each couple remains downstage on the Elizabethan platform until the progression requires that it makes room for the next pair (a trick of stagecraft that Shakespeare was to use again in the elegant pavan danced by the four couples seen in the masked ball of Much Ado about Nothing, II. i. 79.) Finally Navarre's men salute the ladies with a bow:

KING.
Farewell, mad wenches: you have simple wits.
PRINCESS.
Twenty adieus, my frozen Muscovites.

(264-5)

I like that “frozen Muscovites:” even if they didn't have snow on their boots, the dance would certainly have come across as a little frigid.

In All's Well That Ends Well, the mysterious fistula from which the King of France is dying is finally cured with a coranto (II. iii). Indeed, after Tyrone Guthrie's renowned productions of 1953 and 1959 in Canada and England, the scene actually came to be known as “the ballroom scene.” It begins with a key speech from Lafew: “They say miracles are past!” The news is out that Helena, the girl from out-of-town, has cured the King, and he has been tranformed. “Lustique” is Lafew's word for him. But how will Shakespeare muster the forces of the stage to project the change in him? The world is told, “Why, he's able to lead her a coranto” (43). A coranto, no less! And to prove his miraculous recovery, the old king dances in with his youthful preserver on his arm, executing one of the most vigorous dances in the repertoire. The coranto was a lively country dance that was later adapted for the court, and to dance it a couple sprang from left to right, running and jumping in [frac34] time. If you saw the BBC-TV production of All's Well, you had a glimpse of Donald Sinden prancing along with Angela Down at his side; for the Edwardian period chosen by Guthrie for his production, Alec Guiness and Irene Worth in Canada whirled on stage to a fast, old-fashioned Viennese waltz.

The Witches in Macbeth surely open their play with a dance:

When shall we three meet again?
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?

(I. i. 1-2)

The idea that they sit cozily round their cauldron is belied by the insistent rhymes and rhythms of their tetrameters and quatrains. But there is also a good theatrical reason why the Witches do a dance. With the trap in the platform at centerstage, their dance would be performed in the round, so that the pattern of their movement would itself cast a spell, not only by marking out a circle into which the haunted characters of the play would step later on, but also by involving the whole audience in a widening circle: those who are to share the witchcraft of the play will become its haunted spectators.

Every dance seems to have its proper function in the plays. In Timon of Athens, the vanity of Timon's degenerate house is signalled by “a masque of ladies” performing as “Amazons, with lutes in their hands, dancing and playing” (I. ii. 126). Timon was entertaining his guests, and Shakespeare was no doubt entertaining his audience, even if we cannot today imagine what a masque of Amazons looked like. Nevertheless, the play's choric commentator, the “churlish philosopher” Apemantus, also hints at what is to come:

I should fear those that dance before me now
Would one day stamp upon me.

(139-40)

Unlike Ben Jonson, Shakespeare wrote no masques, although his most musical play, The Tempest, seems to be made up of visionary, masque-like units. These episodes both sing and dance to us, as do the goddesses, nymphs, and reapers of the fourth act. (Here they probably danced the French “branle,” anglicized as “brawl,” a term describing different kinds of ring dances in which everyone linked arms and moved sideways in circles.) The idea that this play is a kind of masque in itself is not new, and goes back to scholars like A. H. Thorndike in Shakespeare's Theater in 1916 and Enid Welsford in The Court Masque in 1927; it supports our sense of the extraordinary capability of the Elizabethan stage to exploit the sister arts. The dance of shepherds and shepherdesses during the sheep-shearing feast, which helps to change the mood of The Winter's Tale at IV.iv.167, would have been an immediately recognizable country dance, perhaps a “hay” with its winding pattern of steps, for we remember Florizel's refreshing description of Perdita's dancing:

                              When you do dance, I wish you
A wave o' th' sea, that you might ever do
Nothing but that. …

(140-2)

Nevertheless, why would Shakespeare have introduced into his great Whitsun pastoral scene “a dance of twelve satyrs” (343)? What exactly were twelve hopping, jumping, hairy men doing in this play—unless merely gratifying the wenches with “a gallimaufry of gambols” (329)?

This review of the arts of music and dance in Shakespeare could be pursued a stage further into something more speculative. Just as there are countless places where his verse speech merged smoothly with song and incantation, both for tragic heroes like Romeo (“O my love, my wife. / Death that hath suck'd the honey of thy breath …,” Romeo and Juliet, V.iii.91-2) and for comic heroines like Viola (“Make me a willow cabin at your gate, / And call upon my soul within the house …” Twelfth Night, I.v.272-3), so there are many where the nature of the gesture and movement implicit in Shakespeare's verse comes close to dance. We are talking now about what may be called Shakespeare's unique “choreography.” In a theatre of non-illusion, where the controlling limitations of realism in speech and behavior did not obtain, we cannot be sure that dance was not also a characteristic of the artificial style of movement that belonged to the Elizabethan stage.

One or two well-known examples may encourage speculation. Everyone admires the first words shared by Romeo and Juliet at Capulet's ball, because they form a delightful sonnet:

If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss. / …

(Romeo and Juliet, I.v.92-5)

As poetry this sonnet not only manages to sanctify their meeting, but it also contrives to carry implicit stage directions for kissing hands and lips: images of holy and profane love merge in one deft exchange. Yet all the while music is being played for a courtship dance like the galliard, so that the pretty sonnet may also be a cue for a flirtatious dance by the lovers, their bodies swaying forwards and backwards with the music and the verse, a gallant advance by Romeo succeeded by a coy retreat by Juliet.

If dancing to a sonnet is unacceptable, what about the intricate mixing of poetry and movement in the scene of “choosing a husband” danced in All's Well, II. iii? Helena has cured the King of France, who now invites her to choose the man she wants to marry from among the eligible officers and courtiers present. There is no specific direction for her to dance with all the men, but it is evident from the pattern and rhythm of the verse that she dances with four of them, so that some form of choreography is called for.

HELENA.
Now, Diane, from thy altar do I fly,
And to imperial Love, that god most high
Do my sighs stream. [To First Lord] Sir, will you hear my suit?
FIRST Lord.
And grant it.
HELENA.
Thanks, sir, all the rest is mute.

(74-77)

Helena dances a foot or two with each man and passes to the next, rejecting each one. A delighted audience sees Bertram's turn getting nearer and nearer, until there is only him left, and it is he whom she leads in astonishment to the King:

HELENA.
This is the man.
KING.
Why, then, young Bertram, take her; she's thy wife.

(104-5)

In the Guthrie productions the orchestra stopped and a deathly silence fell upon the assembled company. Reality returned with a rush, and Helena's fantasizing came to an abrupt end. Bertram turned away in disgust: what did he want with this person whose only virtue was that she knew how to cure a fistula? Performance completely justified the use of dance, and for the first time Guthrie was able to show that in this play Shakespeare fully intended a dramatic use for his rhyming couplets; he used rhyme, not because he didn't know any better, but in order to control his audience's perception of the action and its mood.

One more puzzle. What did the Lord Chamberlain's Men at the Globe do with the gathering of unhappy lovers in As You Like It, V.ii.? Here is a sample of their lines:

PHEBE.
Good shepherd, tell this youth what 'tis to love.
SILVIUS.
It is to be all made of sighs and tears,
And so am I for Phebe.
PHEBE.
And I for Ganymede.
ORLANDO.
And I for Rosalind.
ROSALIND.
And I for no woman.

(82-89)

This pattern is repeated four times. I have heard these lines spoken with the actors sitting forlornly around an oak tree, but they cry out for some kind of round dance. This is a play in which different kinds of amorous behavior are wildly juxtaposed in order to illuminate one another. It seems eminently appropriate that its spirit of fantasy and burlesque should be capped at the end by a song and a dance that draws on all the performing arts. When the climax of the comedy arrives and everyone is at sixes and sevens, an amusing little square-dance serves to mock the confusion of the four unhappy lovers.

Music and dance traditionally suggest the possibilities of harmony and reconcilation implicit in comedy, just as Ariel's music pacifies the storm in The Tempest; but harmony need not always be the intention. In Twelfth Night, Sir Toby's drunken singing serves to touch off mayhem in an orderly household. And in A Midsummer Night's Dream, the fairies hardly conduct their moonlight revels peacefully. In Shakespeare and the Dance (1981), Alan Brissenden points out that although dancing was one of the chief occupations of Elizabethan fairies, they were creatures who rarely walked if they could get from one place to another by hopping and skipping, tripping and gambolling, in “paroxisms of antic corybantic jollity”.⁴

In his famous theory of music-drama and the “total art-work,” Wagner argued in The Art-Work of the Future (1849) that Beethoven had taken music to the point where speech should follow, and that Shakespeare had taken poetry to the point where music should follow. It would not be unfair to say that Shakespeare may have had his own ideas all along about a total art-work for the stage, one which mixed the arts in a very digestible dramatic pie.

Notes

1. Prefaces to Shakespeare, Second Series (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1930), p. 74 note.

2. The text used in the paper is the Arden Edition (London: Methuen, 1955), p. 80.

3. Shakespeare and Music (New York: Da Capo Press, 1931), pp. 129-30.

4. Shakespeare and the Dance (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities, 1981), p. 142.