Roundtable: Early Modern Music on the Elizabethan Stage

Phew. Okay, I made it. Running three blocks on crutches is not my favorite thing to do ever, but I made it. I'm no musician, but I am a sound designer by trade, and I know what I like, and music is always an indispensable element to my conceptions of a theatrical production, so I'm glad to be able to make it to this roundtable. Facilitating this discussion is Dennis Siler from the U of Arkansas at Fort Smith.

Dennis Siler

Fretted musical instruments on the early modern stage is the topic for Siler's discussion. He begins by tracking some of the evolutions between the medieval lute and the Renaissance lute. The medieval lute has a primary and secondary sound hole, and five pairs of strings. For almost five centuries, it did not change. The Renaissance lute is less circular in nature, and loses it's second sound hole, and has more courses of strings (typically 7, but sometimes more). The availability of Yew wood that followed the adoption of the musket (which replaced the longbow) led to an increase in quantity of lutes and thus an increase of their popularity.

The lute has enough punch to rise above the ambient noise of a crowd, which would have been necessary for the intervals on the Elizabethan stage. The Renaissance lute, in particular, is louder and has a greater range than the medieval lute. A golden age of lutes that runs from 1580 to 1620 parallels the golden age of the early modern stage. The strings were made of sheep gut, and so they're not as loud as modern brass or steel strings.

Tuning on the Elizabethan lute seems like it would have been pretty expensive. The rule was to tune the A string until it was just before the point of breaking, and then to tune to the other strings to that. Ouch. The medieval lute is played parallel to the strings, whereas the Renaissance lute is played more like a classical guitar.

Here Siler "beared" himself away to yield the floor.

Laura Feitzinger Brown

Brown focuses on hearing and listening, most particularly in the Tempest, which relies heavily on music and sound to create the world of the play (the isle is full of noises). Brown examines the play in its traditional context of the play as an expression of universal harmony, the new historicist/post colonial approach that examines Prospero as an oppressive ruler, and how through a musical approach you can bring the threads together.

The initial place we see Prospero being "heavy handed and not listening well" is when he overbears Miranda's objections to his summoning of the storm. Her actors show an "early version" of Prospero that is not especially attentive to Miranda, and then Brown offers that we can see other examples of listening being relegated to the role of the inferior. The place of the superior is to speak. Brown also points out that there is a greater spiritual significance at the time placed on hearing rather than seeing, a evidenced by extant sermons: thus the fact that Alonso hears his sins and listens takes on a contemporary spiritual significance.

Brown points out, in her conclusion, that Prospero, in surrendering authority in her epilogue, becomes the listener.

Virginia R. Francisco

Francisco examines performance accompanied by music, opening with a portrait of Henry Unton, who "was an extremely important person," "who was probably a secret agent," and "connected to everybody important," although he did not seem to occupy a high position himself. Francisco is most interested in the right hand side of the portrait, which depicts a masque that was probably for his wedding. You can see Unton and his guests seated at a banquet table, and before them are masquers dancing around the musicians, who are seated in a circle around a table and facing one another. Interestingly, this portrait includes a very early image of a violin in use. Child masquers bear five-minute candle staffs for the masquers and musicians to see by. The use of the lute implies that singing was going to be an important part of the performance because the lute will scarcely be heard in the context of the metal stringed instruments (the violin, the guitar, etc).

For masques away from the court, musicians were often borrowed by the presenter from other houeholds. We have no reason to believe that Unton had any household musicians, although his household inventory demonstrates that he owned a set of viols and lutes. Family connections were important because they would have provided him with a venue for providing musicians as needed. From Leicester, Walsingham, the Dudleys, or even from the local weights. Social dancing, where ladies would have danced with masked members of the audience. The unmasking that followed would have resulted in surprise, whether feigned or not, on behalf of those who had danced with high ranking nobility or royalty.

Lizz Ketterer

Ketterer examines women as a pursued object in musical performance, as opposed to the receiver. This ties music to contemporary courtship ritual, and Ketterer asserts that most scholars who have examined the courtship rituals of the time ignore the impact of music. Courtship gifts are intimate, and take place in intimate places, and one of the ways that a company can use music is "to enact a shift in space" from a public to a private.

Primarily female characters are not musical agents: they neither perform no call for music, but there are some instances when they do. Female characters who do perform musically tend to challenge the bounds of female behavior, and explore the potentially "subversive nature of the female voice." "The connection between speaking and wantonness" in behavioral manuals reinforce the idea of the silent woman, which the role of women as musical agents directly opposes.

Michelle Kristelis

Kristelis' paper deals with music on a more metaphoric level than the other presenters have. Shaw's approach to the music of the work led him to explore Shakespeare's work in the same context of an opera, and approached the texts as if the musical flow was paramount to the proper presentation of the text. Shaw attended an 1895 reading of Pole's reading society, and was impressed by what he had seen. Frustrated with his contemporary actors for their lack of skill in musical analysis, he instructed his actors in musical elevation and terminology to help them hear the music in the line. He was known to lock his actors in rooms and refused to let them out until they had learned the proper inflections of the lines.

While it might seem strange to drill an actor in proper intonation of a line, this is a common practice in the musical world, and Pole saw no difference between the two. He felt that Elizabethan performance could not achieve the true fluidity of Elizabethan dramatic speech until the actors had achieved the musicality of the line, by wrote if necessary. Unlike the "stagey and overdone conventions of the 18th and 19th centuries," Pole's productions were comparatively sparse and text driven, and resulted in an original performance style that captured the minds of Shaw and other audiences of the time.

Well that'll do it for this roundtable, and for the this day of the conference. Things are winding down, but we still have another paper session and discussion about ASC's Globe tomorrow, and of course, the premiere of Shakespeare on Ice later tonight. I'll be back in the wee hours with some impressions from that, but as I have to take some folks to the air port in the morning, I'm going to go home and take a nap, so I'll see ya'll after the show!