SOURCE: Greenfield, Thelma N. “Nonvocal Music: Added Dimension in Five Shakespeare Plays.” In Pacific Coast Studies in Shakespeare, edited by Waldo F. McNeir and Thelma N. Greenfield, pp. 106-21. Eugene: University of Oregon, 1966.

[In the following essay, Greenfield discusses the integral function of music in several Shakespearean plays. She focuses on musical imagery in Richard II; Lorenzo's discourse on music in Act V, scene v of The Merchant of Venice; the disparate effects of martial music in Coriolanus; and the patterns of sound that accompany crucial episodes in Hamlet and the murder of Duncan in Macbeth.]

Inadequacies of Elizabethan play productions, like the inadequacies of Elizabethan play audiences, doubtless have a firmer basis in persistent myth than in historical truth. The popular picture of the Elizabethan actor ranting his lines on a poor bare stage with only his words to provide scenery, sound, and atmosphere hardly agrees with the almost incredible riches recognized elsewhere in Elizabethan life. Actually, in the theater there was much to look at: gorgeously attired actors, the rush-and flower-strewn stage, the richly painted arras, the elegantly decorated “heavens,” and a variety of properties. We know that the actors further occupied the eye with processionals and intricate dances, fencing matches and battles, spectacular ascents and descents from the upper and nether worlds, and with such things as fire and brimstone and disappearing ghosts. And there was much to hear besides the spoken lines: we find directions for peals of ordnance, ringing of bells, thunder, wind, the barking of dogs. We find also extensive use of music and great versatility in its employment. The variety of songs comes first to mind: mad songs, drinking songs, rounds, art songs, street songs, vendors' cries, and so forth. The musical instruments ranged from the various strings of the “broken consort” to drums; from the most impressive wind instruments to the simple rustic pipe; while in the popular theater, the musicians stationed themselves variously in the special chamber constructed for them, on stage with the actors, or “within” or even beneath the stage.

Shakespeare exploited brilliantly the possibilities of enrichment that lay in the use of music. His knowledge of the subject is astonishing, his allusions to it “… more numerous than those in the works of other Elizabethan or Jacobean dramatists, and they are handled with a rare knowledge of the art.”¹

Nearly all considerations of Shakespeare's music have emphasized his careful adaptation of music to the moment in the play, although, understandably, more attention has been given to his use of songs than to his nonvocal music. My purpose is to call attention to Shakespeare's use of nonvocal music in several plays representing several periods in his career as playwright: first, the accompaniment with strings of lyrical and philosophical passages in two plays dating presumably from the mid-1590s; second, the signal and ceremonial effects which emphasize the structure and nature of the conflicts of a late tragedy; and, finally, in two plays of Shakespeare's great tragic period, his use of continuities of sounds, not all technically music, which function as a musical reinforcement of various elements in the plays.

Much more than “mood music,” the nonvocal music Shakespeare calls for in certain lyrical and meditative passages unites with both language and action and often relates to character as well. An example here is the famous meditative speech in Richard II, spoken by the King as he consoles himself in prison. What Shakespeare does with the music here is doubtless partly within the Elizabethan habit of mind of “moralizing,” comparable to Jaques “moralizing” the stricken deer, or Touchstone the time of day, or Feste a drunken man, with the phenomenon expanded, philosophized, applied this way and that to human behavior and conditions. As Richard manufactures parallels and figures of speech to express his fallen fortunes, part of the passage (about twenty lines) is accompanied by music and Richard's language turns to musical allusions.² Although the musician or musicians are not seen, the playing of the music and the sound of the music become part of the dramatic fabric of the play. In terms of the action, the music comes unexpectedly, played to bring solace to the king and followed by the entrance of the still-faithful groom, who perhaps has furnished it. In terms of character, the music provides Richard with more opportunity to be himself: to indulge his impulse to talk, to draw comparisons, to air his artistic sensibility. “Keep time,” he cries irritably when the rhythm falters, and he remarks on his own “daintiness of ear.”³ Picking up the concept of time in music, he continues his everlasting parallels, making the music a part of the play's impressive imagery and turning it to embody the theme of kingship:

And here have I the daintiness of ear
To check time broke in a disorder'd string;
But, for the concord of my state and time,
Had not an ear to hear my true time broke.
I wasted time, and now doth time waste me;

(V.v.45-49)⁴

The King's duty, the needs of his country, Richard's mistakes—the music becomes a point of departure for comment on all of these.⁵ Richard, impelled here as always to verbalize, goes on for sixteen more lines to speak of time and music, all the while with an actual audible referent for his figures of speech in the music that we hear. Mood, character, action, theme, and imagery all build from the music played in the scene.⁶ Structurally the scene precedes Richard's death.

Musical imagery has twice before in the play been associated with characters' disappearances from the scene, first with Mowbray's being banished for life; and then with the death of John of Gaunt. These occurrences share certain features. Both times the musical imagery is connected with death. (Although, of course, Mowbray's death does not occur until later, Holinshed mentions it at this point in his account and Shakespeare gives Mowbray, banished forever, the phrase “speechless death” to describe the sentence Richard has pronounced upon him.) Both passages speak of music stilled to express metaphorically the loss of speech. Mowbray in foreign lands will find his tongue thrice useless like “an unstringed viol or a harp, / Or like a cunning instrument cas'd up / Or, being open, put into his hands / That knows no touch to tune the harmony” (I.iii.162-165). Gaunt, dead, has said all, “His tongue is now a stringless instrument; / Words, life, and all, old Lancaster hath spent” (II.i.149-150). In both cases, the lines are addressed to Richard, who both times responds with deliberate cold indifference; the two speeches are wasted words. The statement of Gaunt's death, furthermore, is in the form of a reminder that his words to Richard were always to no avail. That audible music in Richard's prison precedes his death, the stilling of his fluent voice, is an ironic climax to the series of images. It is poetic justice that he thinks here in musical terms of his own wasted past, but these thoughts are now as much wasted as the earlier poignant musical images were lost upon his careless ears. Now, Richard's time, not only wasted, is completely run out; that the music is unannounced and the source of it unseen heightens our sense of its being an omen (like the supernatural music which announces Antony's coming disaster).

Music as a metaphor for speech is especially appropriate in light of Richard's way of insisting on finding eloquent words to capture an understanding of concepts and events. The “audible image” of music at this point in Richard II comes as a culmination of a surprisingly large number of tangible references that support several of the great metaphors of the play: the garden imagery is spoken by gardeners in a garden; Richard actually sifts the dust of England through his fingers as he greets his homeland soil. When he considers his exterior aspect to see what he is when he is no longer king, he literally looks into a mirror. When he capitulates to Henry at Fleet Castle, he reinforces the sun image which expresses his fall from power by descending from the wall as he speaks the line, “Down, down, like glistering Phaeton I come.” (I disagree with editors who mark an exit and re-entry here; it seems to me that Richard descends in full view of the audience.) And the actual playing of music in ill-kept time while Richard thinks of his own wasted time is the last of the series. These scenes are often called symbolic of themes, but I should like to emphasize, too, their relation to Richard's typical response. A valuable effect of this concretizing of the play's important images is to intensify our sense of Richard's peculiar relation to the concrete—his acute awareness of it plus his splendid and fatal impulse to verbalize it and to substitute verbalization for the more practical virtues.

Of something of the same kind is the use of music in the last act of The Merchant of Venice, in the melting love scene of moonlight and lovers' sighs. Here, too, Shakespeare's music becomes a part of the story, partly by expansion of it, partly by reference to what has been going on. Auden's definition of music as presenting “… a virtual image of our experience of living as temporal, with its double aspect of recurrence and becoming” squares well with Shakespeare's use of music to relate to already established elements in the play and to provide a new dimension.⁷ In Merchant, as is Shakespeare's frequent practice, his characters account for the playing of the music; they comment upon it while it plays; and they finally explicitly bring it to a halt. In Richard the musical theme is time and kingly responsibility; in Merchant it is harmony, universal and human, enforced by associations of music and light. Lorenzo, calling for music, gives us a lyrical philosophical discourse:

How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here will we sit and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears. Soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold.
There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-ey'd cherubins;
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.(8)
Come, ho, and wake Diana with a hymn!
With sweetest touches pierce your mistress' ear
And draw her home with music.
                                                                                                              Play music

(V.i.54-68)

Moonlight, sweet harmony, the starry heavens, the music of the spheres—we move from the perceived beauties to harmonies too perfect for human apprehension. As the music plays, Lorenzo goes on to speak of the “sweet power of music” and “the concord of sweet sounds” that soothes the wild beast and moves the human mind; he warns against “the man that hath no music in himself” and ends, “Hark the music.”

Like the passage from Richard II, these lines have been the subject of exhaustive commentary. A valuable article by James Hutton places the speeches of Lorenzo in the laudes musicae context of Shakespeare's time and relates the English type to its Continental sources. By tracing the development of the praise of music tradition from the ancients through the Renaissance Neoplatonists, Hutton shows that Lorenzo's discourse “… not only contains traditional topics, but that the arrangement is traditional and one part implies the presence of others—in short that we have here to do with a coherent literary theme that Shakespeare has taken bodily into his play.”⁹ When Lorenzo moves from the music of the spheres to the human condition, he is following a part of the tradition, for there is a correspondence between the realms. The healthy soul is “harmonious” or “symphonic.”¹⁰ In the soul of each man is a small scale equivalent to “… the mightier revolutions in the soul of the world, which are just the paths of the heavenly orbs.”¹¹ Since Shakespeare is writing a play, he can give his philosophical discourse added dimension by having music actually played while the lines are spoken.

Shakespeare's mingling of music and light in this scene is in keeping with the various correspondences worked out by Dante and the Neoplatonists between the nine spheres and the nine orders of angels.¹² Light, like music, an emanation of the Divine, is of course inherent in the conception of the music of the spheres and as we are aware of the actual playing of music in the last act of Merchant, we have also a strong illusion of actual moonlight and starlight to which is added the little candle shining from Portia's window. The visual effect comes first, before the music, when the scene is ushered in with “The moon shines bright,” an illusion which is impressed upon us by eight iterations of the phrase “on such a night,” as Jessica and Lorenzo match stories of lovers' nights, ending finally with themselves “on such a night.” Lorenzo also describes the stars, and Portia and Nerissa, entering at a distance, introduce candlelight. Like the music, the light of the candle is connected with human morality: “So shines a good deed in a naughty world.” There appear to be inconsistencies in the handling of the elements of light in this scene: although the moon is bright, the stars are out in full force, and the moon itself seems to set and rise again within the space of thirty-five lines.¹³ But the philosophical significances are consistent.

This scene of soft lyricism, of heavenly music and heavenly lights, perhaps sits oddly in a play that has heretofore dealt largely with merchant vessels, monetary transactions, the city and the law. What do these have to do with the music of the spheres? The particular emphases given in common to both the music and the light help formulate the contrast between Venice and Belmont. The correspondence between music and light and human virtue is one of the main points made by the speakers in this part of the scene. The condition most suitable to perception of music and light is the second important point. Both are better apprehended in the quiet dark: “soft stillness and the night / Become the touches of sweet harmony”; “When the moon shone we did not see the candle”; “Methinks it [music] sounds much sweeter than by day. / Silence bestows that virtue on it …” These and similar lines relate to Lorenzo's discussion of the music of the spheres, which can be heard by immortal souls but not, alas, by the immortal souls of men. The playwright makes this scene itself a distillation of the elements that provide for the best perception of harmonies. If these people caught in the spell of earthly music and moonlit darkness cannot actually hear the heavenly music they are at least profoundly in tune with it. Shakespeare's use of actual music (a string consort) for some forty-two lines is a literal dramatic element of the scene and an auditory symbol of the universal harmonies sensed by human beings in special moments when their perceptions are refined by the proper environment and mood. The commercial world of Venice allows for little perception of that sort.

Our sense of the harsh, busy outside world is kept alive in this episode by other musical sounds. Bassanio's arrival from Venice is announced by a trumpet fanfare which comes as rather startling ten lines after the consort ceases. And before the musicians play for Lorenzo and Jessica, Launcelot, with a message of Bassanio's coming, gallops in, hallooing for half a dozen lines in what is usually interpreted to be an imitation of a post horn.¹⁴ These contrasting sounds of music heighten our response to the difference, often noted, between the world of Belmont and the world of Venice.

Sir Israel Gollancz saw this musical scene not as a filler for a fifth act but as extremely important to the play in presenting a vision of human love and universal concord after the inhumanity of the Shylock story.¹⁵ That it is enacted in large part by the Jewess Jessica and the Gentile Lorenzo is, he felt, significant. Probably he was right.

In these two plays, then, the music comes late but is not, as I hope I have shown, wholly unrelated to what came earlier in the plays. I shall turn now to a later play in which musical effects, used throughout, point up the dramatic structure. Coriolanus offers an example of Shakespeare's use of that specialized kind of unsung music called upon for signal and ceremonial effects: the drum for the alarum, for the flourish the trumpet; these were indispensable to Elizabethan plays, dealing heavily, as they did, in battle and ceremonial scenes.¹⁶ Too often we read absently past the musical directions for flourish, tucket, retreat, sennet, alarum or dead march, without trying to realize what the audience actually heard at that point or without trying to comprehend the total effect of music, words, and movement.

In a sense, Coriolanus is a most unmusical play and the music it has is simple and loud. The play itself, one of the most classically structured of Shakespeare's works, is at the same time one of his noisiest, depicting loud quarrels at home and the rage of battle abroad. Rowdy conflicts dramatize the people's dilemma over the hero, Coriolanus, whom they find intolerable at home but so strong as to be indispensable in foreign affairs. The settings in the play divide into those inside Rome and those outside, as the play moves back and forth between Rome's internal and external troubles. The dramatization of both fighting and victorious jubilation is helped along in large measure by musical effects. The drawn out warfare of Act I (seven scenes of it, according to modern text division) owes much of its impetus and emotional pitch to the drum and trumpet. Their harsh sounds unite with the great warrior voice of Coriolanus himself in a paean to the glory of battle; they tell the story of the losses and gains. There are no less than fourteen directions here for alarum, flourish, parley, retreat, et cetera, no two of them exactly alike, several of them indicating continuous sounding, and all revealing discrimination in the particular effect: for example, distance in “alarum continues still afarre off”; or, as the great generals bare their heads before Coriolanus, a particularly long trumpet flourish; or a cornet (instead of the trumpet) as the Volscian Aufidius enters to reveal his sinister intention to destroy Coriolanus by foul means.

After the fighting, in Act II, numerous indications of sounds of trumpet and cornet mingle with shouts to accompany Coriolanus' triumphal entry into Rome, providing a loud, ironic prelude to his sudden terrible disgrace and banishment. Even louder is the music of celebration when Coriolanus saves Rome in the final act. Here the music reaches a crescendo, playing “full-power” as the Elizabethans would have expressed it. The stage direction is for “trumpets, Hoboyes, Drums beate, altogether,” and the lines describe a host of instruments suggestive of the Elizabethan municipal band:

                                                                                          Why, hark you!
The trumpets, sackbuts, psalteries, and fifes,
Tabors and cymbals and the shouting Romans
Make the sun dance.

(V.iv.51-54)

Here, at the end of the play, Coriolanus has another triumphal entry, now into Antium among the Volscians. “Drummes and trumpets sounds, with great showts of the people”—“Splitting the air with noise,” remarks a disgruntled observer. Doubly ironic is this celebration; for Coriolanus will again quickly become an object of the people's hatred. People of Antium are as fickle as people of Rome, confronted with unvarnished truths of the sort that Coriolanus is always impelled to utter. In a breath, the cries of welcome turn to shouts of “kill, kill,” and this time his enemies accomplish his death. Volumnia has spoken of her son more profoundly than she knew: “Before him he carries noise, and behind him he leaves tears.”

The play demonstrates particularly careful and discriminating use of musical effects that might seem at first glance purely mechanical. They give us the noise and progress and fervor of battle, the only place where Coriolanus is really at home; musical effects loudly bespeak the formality of the proceedings which are to make Coriolanus a consul and thereby emphasize the people's violent, confused upsetting of that formality; music embodies perfectly the wild hero-worship, so excessive and so brief; it points up the structural repetitions of the play. It suggests the empty, fickle nature of public opinion. That last loud Roman full-power celebration, for example, says much, for the Roman people have solved their dilemma at last. They finally have got it both ways. Their unmanageable savior has preserved Rome and destroyed himself simultaneously. The Romans really have something to celebrate.

In addition to lyrical and ceremonial and battle effects there is a third kind of Shakespearean music which I want to illustrate—perhaps not technically music at all. But to call these powerful continuities of sound simply sound effects is inadequate, for in the usual sense a sound effect is merely the duplication of a noise the audience expects to hear as a result of a particular action or under certain conditions. It is a naturalistic device. Shakespeare, however, though he uses naturalistic sound effects, also employs sound effects with design, a design that is akin to the design and pattern found in music, much the same as is the design of some poetry. When there is design and pattern in the use of nonvocal sound, the use of that sound is under an artistic control more stringent than that exercised over the ordinary naturalistic sound effect, the dramatic employment of which is governed less by the artist than by what is naturally expected by the audience. Shakespeare's use of patterned nonvocal sound, notably in King Lear and Hamlet, transcends the naturalistic and becomes an artistic device in support not only of action but of theme. It is, in its broadest sense, another kind of musical accompaniment.

The most obvious example of these patterned continuities of sound is the storm in King Lear, which continues through four scenes. Less obvious but important is the firing of artillery in Hamlet. Hamlet makes much use of conventional music, too, but I shall give attention to the firing off of cannon, near the beginning and end of the play, both times at Claudius' command.¹⁷ In each case, Claudius pretends to be celebrating his approval of Hamlet by drinking toasts and with the sound of cannon. The first time, in the first act, before Hamlet has anything more than an intuition of his uncle's wickedness, Claudius describes his joy and the coming celebration thus:

This gentle and unforc'd accord of Hamlet
Sits smiling to my heart; in grace whereof,
No jocund health that Denmark drinks today
But the great cannon to the clouds shall tell,
And the King's rouse the heaven shall bruit again,
Respeaking earthly thunder.

(I.ii.123-128)

Predominant in the passage is the image of sound rising to the heavens and resounding back again. Two scenes later the described celebration is enacted but off-stage. We hear it, through the stage direction, “A flourish of trumpets and 2. peeces goes of” (Q2), and through Hamlet's description:

The King doth wake tonight and takes his rouse,
Keeps wassail, and the swagg'ring up-spring reels;
And, as he drains his draughts of Rhenish down,
The kettledrum and trumpet thus bray out
The triumph of his pledge.

(I.iv.8-12)

Kettle drum, trumpet, and cannon reappear in the lines and actually sound again, in the final scene of the play, when the crafty Claudius for the last time pretends friendship toward his nephew-son. It is a noisy scene: “Trumpets the while.” Once more the sounds are associated with drink. The stage direction indicates stoups of wine as well as drum and trumpets. Claudius calls for wine; and for Hamlet's successes in the fencing match with Laertes, the King commands:

Let all the battlements their ordnance fire;
                                                  … Give me the cups;
And let the kettle to the trumpet speak,
The trumpet to the cannoneer without
The cannons to the heavens, the heaven to earth,
‘Now the King drinks to Hamlet.’

(V.ii.281, 285-289)

When Hamlet, in the fatal match, makes the first touch, the King drinks and offers a stoup of poisoned wine to him, while the stage direction reads: “Drum, trumpets and shot. Florish, a peece goes off” (Q2). The Prince refuses to drink; Gertrude does it for him to find that she has partaken once too often of the cup Claudius has to offer.

Drinking is important in the play. In the first act it demonstrates Claudius' crude indulgence, described in other terms in the bedroom scene when Hamlet berates his mother for her unbefitting physical passion. In view of the early carousing there is additional irony when, with drink, Claudius, thinking to poison his step-son, accidentally poisons his wife, reveals publicly his own villainy, and dies with Hamlet forcing that final toast of his own preparation down his throat. The importance and similarity of both drinking episodes are loudly signalized not only by the usual drum and trumpet but by the firing of cannon as well. That the sound of the cannon is described both times as rising to the heavens and then returning to earth suits the many things in the play that take flight only to fall back upon their source: “purposes mistook / Fall'n on th'inventors' heads,” as Horatio says of Claudius' last coup; or the prayers of Claudius which refuse to rise along with the empty words; or the machinations of Polonius, who is stabbed while at his pet practice of eavesdropping, or the deaths of Rosencranz and Guildenstern, who are executed by the letters they themselves carry, or Laertes, caught “as a woodcock to mine own springe.” In keeping with the cannon, the most famous of these images of plans backfiring is the military one of the “enginer hoist with his own petar,” the planter of an explosive mine becoming his own victim.

Although much of Hamlet is dramatized in terms of a secret family struggle, there are many references to national military activities throughout. In the background are the battles and warlike appearance of the elder Hamlet, the hasty military preparations of Denmark—casting of “brazen cannon,” building of ships, trafficking in “implements of war”—and always there are the restless goings-on of militant young Fortinbras. At Hamlet's death, Fortinbras comes to the front, heralded in the stage directions by sounds of shot and the approaching drum. The last words of the play, as Prince Hamlet's body is borne out, are, “Go, bid the soldiers shoot.” The play ends with a dead march and one last “peale of ordenance.”

Emphasis and structure, the delineation of character, the nature of the conflict, and the theme of destiny unexpectedly shaping ends regardless of the engineer's intentions, these things in the play are underscored by the literal firing of artillery in Hamlet. The unretarded upward movement of the flights of angels bringing Hamlet to his final rest sets him as a character apart from those others who have received unexpected returns from the heavens and brings release from the ironically circular motion of many of the actions and images of the play.

One last example, from Macbeth, of music not technically music. One of the most decisive and dramatically effective episodes in Macbeth is not enacted on stage. I speak of the murder of Duncan, which although not seen, towers in importance and horror above the murders of Banquo and Macduff's child, both done on stage. There are many reasons why this is so. But a major contribution to the power of this “scene”—which the audience imagines but does not see—is a hair-raising death symphony, some of it heard and some of it not, which is played as the murder proceeds in our imagination. The sequence begins and ends with the ringing of a bell, the first a soft but inexorable summons:

I go, and it is done. The bell invites me.
Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell
That summons thee to heaven, or to hell.

(II.i.62-64)¹⁸

Macbeth is the one summoned to hell. The little bell has decided his future in this life and in the next. As Macbeth performs his bloody act off stage, Lady Macbeth stands on stage straining to hear some sound. We listen with her, surely the tensest scene in Shakespeare. The concern is almost exclusively with sound. The tension tightens, relaxes, tightens again through a variety of heard and described sounds: night creatures, several speakers, real and unreal. Lady Macbeth, listening, exclaims:

                                        Hark! Peace!
It was the owl that shriek'd, the fatal bellman
Which gives the stern'st good-night.

(II.ii.2-4)

From off stage, Macbeth's voice interrupts the silence at the very time when he should be most quiet. We hear him call out, “Who's there? What, ho!” When he reappears, he barely mentions the accomplished murder before demanding, “Did'st thou not hear a noise?” His wife replies, “I heard the owl scream and the crickets cry. / Did you not speak?” Macbeth echoes her earlier “Hark!” He then begins to rehearse the performance of the murder, mostly, we notice, in terms of sounds of voices, first human: a laugh, a cry, a prayer, and his own terrifying inability to answer “amen” when the sleepers “did say ‘God bless us!’”—then of the hallucinatory speaker who cries,

                               … ‘Sleep no more!’ to all the house;
‘Glamis hath murther'd sleep …’

(II.ii.41-42)

As Macbeth's attention turns at last from the sounds he has heard to the color he sees on his hands, there finally comes a noise from the outside. The pounding at the gate begins—the stage direction repeated nine times—as if the heavens themselves, moved by Duncan's murder, were demanding retribution; and in a sense they are, for the knocker is Macduff, Macbeth's ultimate destroyer. When Macduff discovers the murdered body of Duncan he calls for the alarm to be rung and the sequence ends as it began, with a bell, but this bell is loud, “… a hideous trumpet [calling] to parley / The sleepers of the house,” and signalling the commencement of the reign of terror which will last until Macduff bears in Macbeth's severed head to announce “the time is free.”¹⁹

To enact the unseen murder Shakespeare has depended mainly on aural effects, sounds of omen and prophecy, of death, heaven and hell, of summons and alarm.²⁰ The most frightening of all, however, is the most ordinary of all, Macduff's persistent knocking at the gate to waken Duncan. Macduff comes from the normal, ordinary world that expects Duncan to be alive that morning. Macduff embodies the ordinary virtues of the world: decency, love of family, country, king and fellow men and he will be the world's agent for expelling the dark passions, obsessions, and aberrations of the play's hero. The sound of his knock is a clearer prophecy than all the witches' riddling but it comes at a time when we have so far accepted Macbeth's world of blood-stained hands and visionary daggers that the normality it represents seems terrible, nearly unbearable. We are almost at one here with Macbeth's “How is it with me when every noise appals me?” The intensity of our identification with Macbeth's horror is achieved by our hearing either actually or in imagination the sounds that he hears, sounds which in their arrangement follow the pattern of the crime, moving from soft summons to prophetic noises of the night, from sleepy voices to cries of protest, loud knocking and clamorous alarm. That Macbeth hears cries unheard by others, that every noise does appall him, is a kind of reversal of the music of the spheres, unheard because we are too sinful. Macbeth can hear this death music because he is so steeped in guilt.

Examination of these five plays shows that in four of them Shakespeare uses musical effects especially toward the end. In the earlier dramas he accompanies lines of dialogue with conventional music, which is introduced into the statement of the play in what we might call in general an illustrative function. In the later plays studied here, the music, made from less likely materials, becomes a language of its own, structured, and telling the story in its own way. Thus, when we hear music in a Shakespearean play we are very likely to hear it (in a manner of speaking) twice, because in addition to the actual sound of music, the language of the play reiterates and shapes it. We form an intellectual conception of the sound beyond our initial apprehension, and we see it further in dramatic operation—in a large structural embracement in at least one play—sometimes with greater emphasis upon theme, and sometimes with its significance apparently limited to a given scene, though even there one can suspect larger applications.

Notes

1. Frederick W. Sternfeld, “The Dramatic and Allegorical Function of Music in Shakespeare's Tragedies,” Annales Musicologiques, III (1955), 265.

2. For identification and explanation of the musical terms in this passage see Edward W. Naylor's excellent discussion in Shakespeare and Music (London, 1896), pp. 32-33.

3. Sternfeld suggests that perhaps the music played at this point should not actually falter, but falters only in Richard's imagination. Music in Shakespearean Tragedy (London, 1963), p. 202.

4. Quotations from Shakespeare's plays are from the Kittredge edition (Boston, 1936), except where references to F and Q stage directions seems advisable.

5. W. H. Auden explains the upshot of the passage thus: “Since music, the virtual image of time, takes actual time to perform, listening to music can be a waste of time, especially for those, like kings, whose primary concern should be for the unheard music of justice.” “Music in Shakespeare: Its Dramatic Use in His Plays,” Encounter, IX (Dec. 1957), 36.

6. This passage is often discussed in conjunction with the reconciliation scene in King Lear: Richard exclaims, “This music mads me … / For though it hath holp madmen to their wits, / In me, it seems it will make wise men mad.” See G. Wilson Knight, The Imperial Theme, 3rd ed. (London, 1951), pp. 360-361, and Foster Provost, “On Justice and Music in Richard II and King Lear,” Annuale Mediaevale, Duquesne Studies II (1961), 55-71.

7. Op. cit., p. 33.

8. After line 65, Kittredge inserts the stage direction, “Enter Musicians.”

9. “Some English Poems in Praise of Music,” English Miscellany, X (1951), 3. He adds that Puritan attacks on music, especially instrumental, lent a special impulse to the English poems de laudibus musicae.

10. Leo Spitzer, “Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony: Prolegomena to an Interpretation of the Word Stimmung,” Traditio, II (1944), 421. Spitzer sees a musical connection between Shylock and Chaucer's “Prioress' Tale.”

11. John Burnet, “Shakespeare and Greek Philosophy,” in Essays and Addresses (London, 1930), p. 164.

12. See Hutton, pp. 23-25. E. M. W. Tillyard believes that Shakespeare here refers not to the spheres in general but specifically to the Starry Firmament, the particular sphere of the Cherubim. The Elizabethan World Picture (London, 1948), pp. 38-39.

13. The new Arden editor attempts to solve the problem by interpreting the sleeping moon to mean Jessica or as an extension of “How sweet the moonlight sleeps …,” p. 131, note to lines 109-110. He does not, however, explain Nerissa's earlier “When the moon shone …”

14. The new Arden editor (p. 127, note to line 39) identifies his noise as hunting cries. I think Launcelot's “… there's a post come from my master, with his horn full of good news …” (lines 46-47), very likely supports the post horn interpretation.

15. Allegory and Mysticism in Shakespeare: A Medievalist on “The Merchant of Venice” (London, 1931).

16. Military music on the Elizabethan stage is treated in Paul A. Jorgensen, Shakespeare's Military World (Berkeley, 1956).

17. Sternfeld discusses this aspect of the play in Music in Shakespearean Tragedy, pp. 210-212.

18. Roy Walker comments on the bell sequence, taking it back to Duncan's first appearance (I.ii), which is preceded by “Alarum within.” The Time Is Free: A Study of Macbeth (London, 1949), p. 76. There, however, the word alarum refers to a drum roll and I think is no more related to the bell sequence than the trumpet flourish which begins I.v, or the “hautboys” that announce Duncan's arrival at Inverness.

19. G. R. Elliott in his Dramatic Providence in Macbeth (Princeton, N.J., 1960), p. 85, connects the “hideous trumpet” with the Doomsday trumpet.

20. Webster's mention of bell and “Scritch-Owl, and the whistler shrill” in connection with the death of the Duchess of Malfi is worth comparing here. F. P. Wilson connects the bell to a certain public practice instituted in 1605 for condemned prisoners of Newgate: “Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama” in R. J. Kaufmann, ed., Elizabethan Drama: Modern Essays in Criticism (New York, 1961), p. 19; reprinted from Wilson, Elizabethan and Jacobean (Oxford, 1945).