Music in Shakespeare’s Plays

Music Onstage

Para1Music was widely used in early modern plays, including those by William Shakespeare, with most plays featuring at least moments of instrumental and vocal music. Physically, theatres of the age also gave important space to music: most had a special musicians’ gallery above the stage, which mimicked the galleries of most great halls in noble houses.
Para2Sometimes music was played on the stage by actors or by professional musicians employed by the playing company, such as when musicians appear before the Capulet’s home on the night before Juliet’s ill-fated wedding to Paris in Romeo and Juliet. Music or song could be used to indicate unspoken messages to the audience, as when Ophelia’s singing in Hamlet indicates a psychological breakdown, or as Cassio uses music in Othello in an attempt to ingratiate himself with Othello.
Para3Theatre impresario Philip Henslowe, who operated the Rose theatre, records a number of instruments owned by the company in his Diary:
Item, iii1 trumpets and a drum, and a treble viol, a bass viol, a bandore2, a cithern3
Para4Characters in Shakespeare’s plays frequently quote from songs, sing songs as part of a performance, or play musical instruments. Major characters—apart from fools—seldom sing, however, except as an indicator of madness or feigned madness. An important exception is Desdemona, who sings to Emilia a Song of Willow that she learned from Barbary, her mother’s maid.

Music and the Mood

Para5Music sets a mood in early modern plays across many genres. Music on the lute, recorder, or viol was seen as courtly and refined. References to the lute are common in Shakespeare’s plays, likely indicating its widespread use by actors and musicians. Richard III mentions it in his chilling opening soliloquy as a part of his scorn for romantic love. In The Taming of the Shrew, part of Bianca’s education as a young gentlewoman includes lessons on the lute, which go comically awry as an indication of her headstrong temper. Her disguised suitor Hortensio attempts to teach her the lute and enters with it broken over his head in Act 2.
Para6Oboes (called hautboys) yielded a more eerie or mysterious sound. In Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, an unusually specific stage direction in Act 4 notes Music of the hautboys is heard under the stage as soldiers hold a watch outside Antony’s camp the night before a battle. Hautboys were descended from an older instrument, the shawm, which resembles a bagpipe in its sound. In Francis Beaumont’s play The Knight of the Burning Pestle, the boorish Citizen scorns the recorders that provide refined music. The Citizen calls for the band of shawms (and the musicians that play them) from the neighbouring Southwark district.
Para7The trumpet, drum, and fife conveyed warlike sentiments or introduced royalty. Trumpet blasts called sennets, a kind of fanfare played on a brass instrument, frequently sounded in the plays to announce the arrival of kings or other noblemen. Demetrius asks in Titus Andronicus, Why do the emperor’s trumpets flourish thus? (4.2.49), showing the importance of music as a signal of rank.

Musicals?

Para8Of the many songs Shakespeare embedded in his plays, only a few have surviving tunes (or settings; those tunes that have survived illustrate the variety and melodic inventiveness of the music of the period. While all early modern plays featured some music, none were set continuously or largely with a score in the background. However, both Shakespeare’s 1601 comedy Twelfth Night and the 1611 The Winter’s Tale, which was written more for an indoor theatre like the Blackfriars than for the outdoor environment at the Globe, feature an unusual number of songs.
Para9In Twelfth Night, the fool Feste delights in music and is employed as an entertainer both in the household of the Countess Olivia as well as in the court of Duke Orsino. His flexible talents allow him to ask Olivia’s kinsman Sir Toby what sort of music he would prefer, either something about love or a song of good life. He sings five songs in the play, including O Mistress Mine, Come Away Death, and The Wind and the Rain. The music that accompanies the lyrics for O Mistress Mine appeared in Thomas Morley’s First Book of Consort Lessons (1599), just two years before the first known performance of Twelfth Night.
Para10In The Winter’s Tale, the rogue Autolycus is a ballad-seller. These roving musicians/street vendors were common in cities but also roamed in market squares of towns across England. They sold inexpensive versions of popular ballads and sang them aloud as advertising. Autolycus sings several songs, with the titles As Daffodils Begin to Peer, Jog On, Jog On, and Lawn as White as Driven Snow.
Para11Shakespeare’s plays feature a few moments where characters discuss music. The most noteworthy example comes at the end of The Merchant of Venice when Jessica remarks that she is never merry when she hears sweet music (5.1.77). Her new husband Lorenzo responds with a long speech on music, explaining that while her response to music may be due to a special virtue of attentiveness in her, for the most part people who cannot be moved by music are not to be trusted:
Since naught so stockish, hard, and full of rage
But music for the time doth change his nature.
The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night
And his affections dark as Erebus.
Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.

Ending with a Dance

Para12It’s common for many comedies that include scenes of weddings, such as Much Ado About Nothing and As You Like It, to end with the characters engaging in a dance. These dances must have featured music, although the tunes are now largely lost.
Para13In a tradition that surprises many viewers in the 21st century, early modern tragedies and histories also ended with a jig or jigg. This blending of music, dance, and comedy was led by the skilled clowns who performed with most early modern playing companies. Actors such as Richard Tarlton and Will Kempe filled this role in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men when Shakespeare was a member of that company. They used popular melodies of the day and instruments such as the fiddle or cittern to accompany the piece. Today at Shakespeare’s Globe in London, the company regularly employs this rousing way of ending a performance.

Key Print Sources

Barclay, Bill, and David Lindley. Shakespeare, Music, and Performance. Cambridge University Press, 2017.
Clegg, Roger. When the Play Ends, You Shall Have a Dance of All Treads: Danced Endings in Shakespeare’s Plays. The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance. Ed. Lynsey McCulloch and Brandon Shaw. Oxford University Press, 2019, pp. 83–106.
Duffin, Ross. Shakespeare’s Songbook. Norton, 2004.
Larson, Katherine R. The Matter of Song in Early Modern Song: Texts in and of the Air. Oxford University Press, 2019.
Lindley, David. Shakespeare And Music. The Arden Shakespeare, 2006.
Smith, Simon. Musical Response in the Early Modern Playhouse, 1603–1625. Cambridge University Press, 2017.
Wilson, Christopher R. and Mervyn Cooke. The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Music. Oxford University Press, 2022.

Key Online Sources

English Broadside Ballad Archive. Dir. Patricia Fumerton. https://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/. Accessed 10 Feb. 2026.
Owens, Jessie Ann, ed. Noyses, Sounds, and Sweet Aires: Music in Early Modern England. Folgerpedia. The Folger Shakespeare Library, 2006. https://folgerpedia.folger.edu/Noyses,_Sounds,_and_Sweet_Aires:_Music_in_Early_Modern_England. Accessed 10 Feb. 2026.
Springfels, Mary. Music in Shakespeare’s Plays. Encyclopædia Britannica. 10 Nov. 2005. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Music-in-Shakespeares-Plays-1369568. Accessed 10 Feb. 2026.

Notes

1.Early modern writers usually used lower-case letters i and j to make Roman numerals. Here, iii means three.↑
2.A bandore was an instrument rather like a bass guitar↑
3.A cittern was an early form of the guitar↑

Prosopography

Janelle Jenstad

Janelle Jenstad is a Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Director of The Map of Early Modern London, and Director of Linked Early Modern Drama Online. With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Beatrice Kaethler, she co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old Words, New Tools (Routledge). She has edited John Stow’s A Survey of London (1598 text) for MoEML and is currently editing The Merchant of Venice (with Stephen Wittek) and Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody for DRE. Her articles have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Elizabethan Theatre, Early Modern Literary Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin, Renaissance and Reformation, and The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. She contributed chapters to Approaches to Teaching Othello (MLA); Teaching Early Modern Literature from the Archives (MLA); Institutional Culture in Early Modern England (Brill); Shakespeare, Language, and the Stage (Arden); Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate); New Directions in the Geohumanities (Routledge); Early Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter); Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana); Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (Minnesota); Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies (Routledge); and Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London (Routledge). For more details, see janellejenstad.com.

Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

Leah Hamby

Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.

Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

Trevor Knorr

Trevor Knorr was a student at Utah Valley University.

Orgography

LEMDO Team (LEMD1)

The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors.

University of Victoria (UVIC1)

https://www.uvic.ca/

Metadata

Authority title Music in Shakespeare’s Plays
Type of text Critical
Publisher University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform
Series Early Modern England Encyclopedia
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By Trevor Knorr and Kate McPherson, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions
Editorial declaration This document uses Canadian English spelling
Edition Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a
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Early Modern England Encyclopedia

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.
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Utah Valley University
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