The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

Give me my sword and cloak. Falstaff, good-night!

Falstaff only feels disappointed:

Now comes in the sweetest morsel of the night, and we

must hence, and leave it unpick'd.

In Prince Hal's life this moment is the turning point; from now on he will become the responsible ruler. Falstaff will not change because he is incapable of change but, at this moment, though he is unaware of it, the most important thing in his life, his friendship with Hal, ceases with the words "Good­night." When they meet again, the first words Falstaff will hear are—"I know thee not, old man."

Since music, the virtual image of time, takes actual time to perform, listening to music can be a waste of time, espe­cially for those, like kings, whose primary concern should be with the unheard music of justice.

Ha! Ha! keep time! How sour sweet music is When time is broke and no proportion kept! So is it in the music of men's lives. And here have I the daintiness of ear To check time broke in a disordered string; But, for the concord of my time and state, Had not an ear to hear my true time broke.

CRichard II, Act V, Scene 5.)

iv

We find two kinds of songs in Shakespeare's plays, the called-for and the impromptu, and they serve different dra­matic purposes.

A called-for song is a song which is sung by one character at the request of another who wishes to hear music, so that action and speech are halted until the song is over. Nobody is asked to sing unless it is believed that he can sing well and, litde as we may know about the music which was actually used in performances of Shakespeare, we may safely assume from the contemporary songs which we do possess that they must have made demands which only a good voice and a good musician could satisfy.

On the stage, this means that the character called upon to sing ceases to be himself and becomes a performer; the audi­ence is not interested in him but in the quality of his singing. The songs, it must be remembered, are interludes embedded in a play written in verse or prose which is spoken; they are not arias in an opera where the dramatic medium is itself song, so that we forget that the singers are performers just as we forget that the actor speaking blank verse is an actor.

An Elizabethan theatrical company, giving plays in which such songs occur, would have to engage at least one person for his musical rather than his histrionic talents. If they had not been needed to sing, the dramatic action in Much Ado, As You Like It and Twelfth Night could have got along quite well without Balthazar, Amiens and the Clown.

Yet, minor character though the singer may be, he has a character as a professional musician and, when he gets the chance, Shakespeare draws our attention to it. He notices the mock or polite modesty of the singer who is certain of his talents.

don pedro: Come, Balthazar, we'll hear that song again.

Balthazar: O good my lord, tax not so bad a voice To slander music any more than once.

don pedro: It is the witness still of excellency

To put a strange face on his own perfection.

He marks the annoyance of the professional who must sing for another's pleasure whether he feels like it or not.

jaques: More, I prithee, more.

amiens: My voice is ragged: I know I cannot please you.

jaques: I do not desire you to please me: I desire you to sing. Will you sing?

amiens: More at your request than to please myself.

In the dialogue between Peter and the musicians in Romeo and Juliet, Act IV, Scene IV, he contrasts the lives and motives of ill-paid musicians with that of their rich patrons. The musicians have been hired by the Capulets to play at Juliet's marriage to Paris. Their lives mean nothing to the Capulets; they are things which make music: the lives of the Capulets mean nothing to the musicians; they are things which pay money. The musicians arrive only to learn that Juliet is believed to be dead and the wedding is off. Juliet's life means nothing to them, but her death means a lot; they will not get paid. Whether either the Capulets or the musicians actually like music is left in doubt. Music is something you have to have at a wedding; music is something you have to play if that is your job. With a felicitous irony Shakespeare introduces a quotation from Richard Edwardes' poem, "In Commendation of Musick"

peter: When gripping grief the heart doth wound And doleful dumps the mind oppress Then music with her silver sound— Why "silver sound"¹? Why "music with her

silver sound"? What say you, Simon Catling?

ist mus: Marry, sir, because silver hath a sweet sound.

peter: Pretty! What say you, Hugh Rebeck?

2nd mus: I say, "silver sound," because musicians sound for silver.

CRomeo and Juliet, Act IV, Scene 5.)

The powers the poet attributes to music are exaggerated. It cannot remove the grief of losing a daughter or the pangs of an empty belly.