As we now go back to study the state of music in Shakspere's time, we find that the English people of the sixteenth century were enthusiastic lovers of the art. There were professorships of music in the universities, and multitudes of teachers of it among the people. The monarch, the lord, the gentleman, the merchant, the artisan, the rustic clown, the blind beggar, all ranks and conditions of society, from highest to lowest, cultivated the practice of singing, or of playing upon some of the numerous instruments of the time. Early in the century Henry VIII evinced his own personal love for music, and thus established it as the fashion with his royal countenance. Hollingshead in his chronicles records that Henry VIII "exercised himself daylie in shooting, singing, dancing, wrestling, casting of the barre, plaieing at the recorders, flute, virginals, in setting of songes and making of ballades." You can find in the Peabody Library some part-songs of King Henry VIII's composition which are not bad for a king. After Henry VIII, Queen Elizabeth preserved a genuine delight in music, and with her queenly favour added such incentives to the popular inclination that the art flourished in her reign with the greatest vigour. The Queen herself was a good performer on the lute and the virginals. It is thought that a compliment to her playing is intended in a passage in Act III, Scene I of the first part of Shakspere's King Henry IV. Mortimer, you remember, has married a beautiful Welsh lady who can speak no English, while he can speak no Welsh; yet he is complimenting the dainty words which fall from her lips, and declares: I will never be a truant, love, Till I have learned thy language: for thy tongue Makes Welsh as sweet as ditties highly penned, Sung by a fair queen in a summer's bower, With ravishing division, to her lute. The ditties highly penned is a graceful allusion, likely, to Queen Elizabeth's poems, some of which are, like Henry VIII's music, not bad for a queen. The word division here is a technical term of the musical science of that time. We shall presently see that their music was largely made up of old immemorial tunes, redacted and made new by all sorts of ingenious variations. These variations were called, in general, " division"; instead of saying "an air with variations," as we do, they said "an air with division." Coming down from these royal music-lovers, the assertion just now made that not only the monarch, but all lower ranks of society, the nobleman, the private gentleman, the merchant, the artisan, the clown, and the beggar, assiduously cultivated music in Queen Elizabeth's time is not mere rhetoric, but is literally true. If I had time, it would be easy to cite you quotation after quotation from contemporary writers implying the common pursuit and practice of music, at this time, by all classes of people. I have just remarked that Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth were good musicians. To leap at once to the other extreme of society, I find in Shakspere's Winter's Tale that he could speak, without danger of hissing from the audience, of the rustic sheep-shearers as being able to sing part-songs. In Scene II of Act IV, as the cunning Autolycus strolls down the road singing, When daffodils begin to peer, With heigh! the doxy over the dale, presently comes on a clown, who begins to say over to himself the numerous sweets and spices which his sister has sent him to buy against a pudding for the sheepshearing feast. "Three pound of sugar; five pound of what will this sister of mine do with rice? currants; rice rice |