Early Encounters with Shakespeare Music

Abstract

For many early modern playgoers, music was not a peripheral feature of commercial drama, but a chief attraction of the theatres—sometimes even the primary motivation for playgoing. This chapter explores early evidence of musically interested playgoers and their engagements with practical musical performance at venues like the Globe and Blackfriars. It works with a range of examples before taking The Merchant of Venice as an extended test case in the early modern relationship between drama and music. Through these materials, the chapter offers three core propositions about playhouse engagements with music during Shakespeare’s working life. The first is that musical experience was in itself a significant and widely acknowledged incentive for playgoing that can be traced across the textual record. The second is that playgoers regularly encountered music as an integral element of a play’s dramaturgy, and so their musical experiences need to be understood in the context of their wider engagements with drama. The final suggestion is that playwrights like Shakespeare anticipated the overlap of musical and dramatic experience in playhouse performance by embedding music into their dramaturgical designs, using playhouse responses to music to shape dramatic meaning.