If Music Be the Food of Love: Music in Shakespeare’s Plays

Music was central to the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. Shakespeare’s final play, “The Tempest,” has so much music in it that English composer and lutenist Robert Johnson may well be considered Shakespeare’s co-author.

Blackfriars and the Globe Theatre had unique pit orchestras involving six instruments: flute, treble viol or violin, bass viol, lute, bandora, and cittern. Along with singing and other instruments, this English consort helped to tell Shakespeare’s stories, moving the audience to laugh, cry, love, and hate.

In this talk by music historian and performer Sarah Huebsch Schilling, we’ll explore how music was used in Shakespeare’s plays when they were first performed at the turn of the seventeenth century.