P

Pabylon see Babylon.

parley (A) The military term derives from the French ‘parler’ (to speak). To beat or sound a parley is to give a signal, generally in a battle situation, that one side wants to hold a meeting with the other. A drum would be beaten or trumpet sounded to indicate that one side wished to hold talks, for example in a siege when the besieged sought to discuss terms of surrender. There is also evidence that a parley might be sounded by the besiegers in order to ask leave to bury their dead.

(B) There are several explicit indications that trumpets must be used for parleys in the Shakespeare canon, for instance when at Shrewsbury ‘the trumpet sounds a parley’ (1H4 4.3.29.SD) is followed by the entry of Sir Walter Blunt who listens to Hotspur’s grievances against the King. A similar stage direction is found in 1 Henry VI: ‘Trumpets sound a parley’ (3.3.35.SD).

During the siege of Corioles, Martius orders one of his followers: ‘Come, blow thy blast’ (Cor 1.4.12), another unmistakable reference to the use of trumpets. This cue is followed by the explicit stage direction: ‘They sound a parley. Enter two Senators with others on the walls of Corioles’ (1.4.12.SD).

The use of trumpets can also be inferred from the lines spoken by Bolingbroke before Flint Castle:

Go to the rude ribs of that ancient castle;

Through brazen trumpet send the breath of parley

Into his ruin’d ears . . .

(R2 3.3.32–4)

A sound effect follows: ‘The trumpets sound. Richard appeareth on the wall’ (3.3.61.SD). This type of staging was standard in plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries for scenes which display two enemy factions holding a parley. Usually, after the sounding of trumpets or the beating of drums, one or more representatives of one party are instructed to appear on an elevated area (the stage gallery in a public playhouse) standing for a besieged castle or town, while the other party occupies the main stage. The symbolism evoked by the sound effect and the use of the acting space on two levels were effective devices in a theatre which did not rely on scenery and other realistic devices (see also Introduction). A similar staging was implied in Henry V during the besieging of Harfleur, when Gower’s line ‘the town sounds a parley’ (3.2.136) is preceded by the sound cue ‘A parley’ (3.2.135.SD).

In Macbeth, a horrified Macduff reacts with decisiveness after discovering the murder of Duncan:

Awake, awake!

Ring the alarum-bell! Murther and treason!

. . .

Ring the bell. Bell rings.

(2.3.73–4; 80)

As Lady Macbeth enters, she exclaims: What’s the business, / That such a hideous trumpet calls to parley / The sleepers of the house? (81–3). At first, it seems strange that she calls the bell a ‘hideous trumpet’: however, it is possible here that she is subconsciously expressing her sense of guilt, which makes her feel that she is being summoned by enemies. Furthermore, her words assume a quasi-biblical tone conjuring up as they do the image of the Last Judgement. The sleepers of the house ‘rising in their night-shirts and flocking on to the stage by every entrance . . . present a visual resemblance to the spirits rising from their graves on the Last Day’ (Jones, p. 17).

Sometimes, parleys are mentioned in metaphors, for instance when Iago cunningly uses a military image to appeal to the soldier Cassio while trying to awaken in him lustful feelings for Desdemona: ‘What an eye she has! Methinks it sounds a / parley to provocation’ (Oth 2.3.22–3). He elaborates on this a few lines later: ‘When she speaks, is it not an alarum to love?’ (26).

Tarquin’s cowardly assault on Lucrece while she is asleep in her bed is described in terms of a siege and subsequent attack on a town. For instance, when Tarquin puts his hand on her breast, Shakespeare likens his hand to a battering ram hitting an ivory wall. When the woman is awoken, he does not show much pity towards her: ‘First like a trumpet doth his tongue begin / To sound a parley to his heartless foe’ (Luc 470–1). A frightened Lucrece asks him ‘under what color he commits this ill’ (476). The word ‘color’, besides meaning ‘pretext’, also has a military connotation (a flag or standard of a regiment) and builds on the martial imagery preceding the act of rape.

(C) Dessen and Thomson, A Dictionary of Stage Directions (1999), pp. 157–8.

Jones, The Plays of T. S. Eliot (1960).

Muir, Macbeth (1984).

parrot see bird.

part see bear a part.

passamezzo see pavan.

passy measures see pavan.

pavan (A) The Renaissance ‘pavan’ was a slow stately dance of Italian origin ( pavana means ‘of Padua’). Arbeau was the first to record its measures:

The pavan is easy to dance as it is merely two simples [single steps] and one double [double step] forward and two simples and one double backward. It is played in duple time [mesure binaire], you will take note that in dancing it the two simples and the double forward are begun with the left foot, and the two simples and one double backward are begun with the right foot.

(Orchesography, 1589, p. 57)

Whilst declining in popularity by the time Arbeau described it (as he notes), the pavan maintained its attractiveness in English courtly circles in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Music for pavans survives in a variety of sources for lute, keyboard and consort. Morley regarded the pavan in high esteem, next only behind the fantasy in ‘gravity and goodness’: ‘A kind of staide musicke, ordained for grave dauncing, and most commonlie made of three straines, wherof everie straine is plaid or sung twice’ (Introduction, 1597, p. 181).

There are a large number of examples of pavans in English manuscript and printed sources. In these, the pavan is often the first of several dances. Quicker dances, such as the galliard in triple metre, followed the slower pavan. Sometimes the quicker dances were melodically or harmonically related to the pavan. Keyboard arrangements of consort pavans from the early Tudor court survive, such as King Harry the VIIIth Pavyn (BL. Royal App. 58, ed. in MB 67, no. 41). The simple homophonic style found in contemporary continental and Elizabethan settings of the 1580s was displaced by the more complicated, technically sophisticated pieces of later Elizabethan composers such as William Byrd, whose ten pavans in MLNB demonstrate a high degree of originality and skill. The gravity of the form is sometimes emphasized as in the titles ‘pavana dolorosa’ (e.g. Peter Philips FWVB i. p. 321), ‘pavana lachrymae’ (e.g. Dowland Lachrymae, 1604) and John Bull’s ‘Melancholy Pavan’ (MB 19, p. 13).

In addition to pavans bearing titles designating mood, pavans also included titular prefixes denoting musical characteristics. The passamezzo or passing measures pavan was very popular in Europe from the 1540s and was developed in England during the last two decades of the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth. It was characterized by a specific repeating bass, the passamezzo antico, equivalent to modern-day minor tonality. The ‘quadran’ pavan used the passamezzo moderno, a bass in major tonality, and slightly different from the antico bass. Passamezzo pavans were often followed by a galliard or saltarello using the same bass or harmonic pattern.

(B) Twelfth Night is the only Shakespeare play where reference to this dance by name occurs, when Sir Toby makes an ironic comment about Dick Surgeon’s drunkenness: ‘Then he’s a rogue, and a passy measures pavin’ (5.1.200). (‘Panin’ found in Folio is a misprint for ‘pavin’. Commentators as early as Malone – in his Shakespeare edition of 1790 – have noted that the middle letter has been inverted.) Sir Toby is associated with the lively caper (1.3.141) and is frustrated by the slowness of the Surgeon who is likened to the staid dance. The passamezzo music is bass heavy: this is appropriate for the heavy exaggerated steps that accompany drunkenness.

(C) Caldwell, English Keyboard Music before the Nineteenth Century (1973), includes discussion of a wide variety of English pavans.

Neighbour, The Consort and Keyboard Music of William Byrd (1978), provides a discussion of Byrd’s pavans.

Sternfeld, Music in Shakespearean Tragedy (1967), pp. 250–2, offers a definition of pavan and scrutinizes its occurrences as ‘measure’.

pavin see pavan.

peal (A) A peal indicates the loud sound of instruments, for instance bells, and can also mean ‘a discharge of guns or cannon so as to produce a loud sound’ (OED 5).

(B) In the theatre of Shakespeare’s day, references to ‘peal’ often included musical instruments with military significance, and were associated with ordnance. It was a peal of chambers (short cannon), indicated by the stage direction ‘Chambers discharg’d’ (H8 1.4.48.SD) which is thought to have caused the Globe theatre to burn down during a production of Henry VIII in 1613.

When Titus invites his followers to join the hunt, he wants them to ‘ring a hunter’s peal, / That all the court may echo with the noise’ (Tit 2.2.5–6). A stage direction some lines later tells us exactly which instruments were intended to be used: ‘Wind horns in a peal’ (2.2.10.SD). (Other stage directions in the Shakespeare canon prescribing a peal are discussed under ‘ordnance’).

Moth uses the expression ‘Peace, the peal begins’ (LLL 5.1.44) with an ironic intention when he likens the pedantic exchanges between Holofernes, Armado and himself to a peal of bells. The phrase ‘ring a peal’ was used to describe a torrent of words (David, p. 123).

(C) David, Love’s Labour’s Lost (1951).

Dessen and Thomson, A Dictionary of Stage Directions (1999), p. 160.

peg (A) The peg is the small wooden tuning key at the top end of the fingerboard of a stringed instrument (e.g. viol, lute, cittern, etc.) which when turned raises or lowers the pitch of an individual string. The viol, for example, has six pegs, one for each string. They are arranged on each side of the ‘head’ or pegbox, which is often ornately carved.

(B) According to the stage direction in Q1 Othello (1622) (this stage direction is omitted in Folio), when Othello arrives in Cyprus and embraces Desdemona, ‘they kiss’ (2.1.198.SD), effectively articulating: ‘And this, and this, the greatest discord be / That e’er our hearts shall make’ (2.1.197–8). In this harmonious meeting, Shakespeare’s musical imagery is omnipresent. Iago observes that the lovers are well tuned, but determines to destroy that harmony or music by altering (flattening is implied) the pitch of the strings, thus putting them out of tune and causing discord: ‘O you are well-tun’d now! / But I’ll set down the pegs that make this music’ (199–200). The implications are that marital bliss will be undone or untuned by the workings of human evil. As Lawrence Ross points out:

the official ‘Homilie of the State of Matrimonie’ . . . warned Elizabethan married folk to be careful of falling into just such false security as Othello: . . . ‘For the divell will assay to attempt all things to interrupt and hinder your hearts and godly purpose, if yee will giue him entry . . . [with] divers griefes and displeasures’.

(p. 113)

This use of pegs as musical imagery invoking ‘discord’ is found in Othello and nowhere else in early modern drama. It is surprising that this neat and effective metaphor was not employed more frequently.

(C) Dodd, ‘ “But I’ll set down the pegs that make this music” ’ (1967).

King, ‘ “Then Murder’s Out of Tune”: The Music and Structure of Othello’ (1986), analyses the musical imagery pervading Othello and its relationship with the theme of loss of harmony.

Ross, ‘Shakespeare’s “Dull Clown” and Symbolic Music’ (1966).

Sternfeld, Music in Shakespearean Tragedy (1967).

percussion see thunder.

perform (A) Although common in musical parlance today, the term was rare in Elizabethan times meaning the playing or singing of music either in private or in public. More often used was ‘sound’ [a note, instrument, etc.] or words specifying the manner of performance, such as ‘sing’, ‘dance’, ‘chant’, ‘warble’, ‘play’, etc. Occasionally the word is found with its executorial musical meaning, as when Gibbons writes in the dedicatory epistle to Sir Christopher Hatton: ‘Songs of this Nature are usually esteemed as they are well or ill performed’ (First Set of Madrigals, 1612).

(B) The term appears only once in a musical context in the Shakespeare canon, and then in connection with dance, in a passage in Macbeth usually ascribed to Thomas Middleton. The scene shows the apparitions conjured up by the Witches and Hecate in reply to Macbeth’s queries. Just before the Witches disappear, the First Witch exhorts her sisters as follows:

I’ll charm the air to give a sound,

While you perform your antic round;

That this great king may kindly say

Our duties did his welcome pay.

Music. The Witches dance and vanish.

(4.1.129–32)

The ‘antic round’ in this case is a dance rather than a song, and discloses the sinister power of the world of the occult through the use of practical music on the stage.

See also rehearse.

(C) Austern, ‘ “Art to Enchant” ’ (1990), considers the relationship between the occult and practical music in Renaissance theatre.

Wulstan, Tudor Music (1985), focuses on performing different types of English Renaissance music.

Philomela (Philomel, Philomele) see bird.

Phoebus see Apollo.

pie see bird.

piece (A) Although not used in its eighteenth and nineteenth-century way to mean an entire small-scale composition or movement of a musical opus, ‘piece’ is found in Elizabethan times used to describe a song or part of a musical work. It was also conventionally used in ‘a piece of ordnance’ to signify a cannon or other artillery weapon.

(B) A marginal stage direction in Q2 Hamlet (1604/5) prescribes: ‘Drum, trumpets, and shot. Florish, a peece goes off ’ (N4v). This indicates that a cannon was expected to be shot off-stage to signal the beginning of the fencing contest between Hamlet and Laertes. There are also some instances of ‘piece’ in the dialogue which refer to the aural sphere. For instance, the Master Gunner of Orléans informs his boy that he has placed ‘a piece of ord’nance’ (1H6 1.4.15) which will kill Salisbury.

In Twelfth Night, Orsino wants to hear ‘that piece of song / That old and antique song’ (2.4.2–3) which he and Viola (disguised as Cesario) heard the previous night and which momentarily soothed Orsino’s passion for Olivia. This request confirms the Duke’s proneness to self-indulging melancholia, and his tendency to make ‘a spectacle of his passion’ (Wells, p. 215), while also hinting at Viola’s feelings for him. This is the first use of ‘piece’ in a musical sense in the English language.

In Troilus and Cressida, Paris tells Pandarus that he wants to hear a ‘piece of your performance’ (3.1.52). This cue occurs in a context permeated with musical allusions, and hints at Pandarus’ performance of the song ‘Love, love, nothing but love’ (115–24) later in the scene.

See also music.

(C) Dessen and Thomson, A Dictionary of Stage Directions (1999), p. 163.

Wells, Elizabethan Mythologies (1994).

pipe (A) Either on its own or connected with a descriptive term, ‘pipe’ is a simple generic term to denote a wide range of differing kinds of wind instrument, including recorder, flute, fife, flageolot, shawm, tabor and pipe, bagpipe, hornpipe, panpipe, organ pipe and whistle. Sometimes ‘pipe’ is used in connection with the singing voice.

Pipes were made from many kinds of materials and were generally a single tube in which several finger holes were cut in order for the player to produce different notes or pitches. From earliest times they were fashioned out of natural materials such as wood, reed-cane and straw, and were employed in rustic contexts, often to ‘serve primitive magic and ritual’ (Baines, p. 171). In classical antiquity, the divergent double pipe with its reedy nasal sound replaced the old single fluty whistle, becoming the aulos of the Greeks and the tibia of the Romans. Both the sound and shape of these classical pipes were known to the Elizabethans. The sixteenth century saw the culmination of the diverse Medieval types of pipes. After Shakespeare’s time, they were either to be known by specific names or become largely obsolete, banished to the confines of rustic obscurity.

(B) One interesting use of ‘pipe’ occurs when the Greek commander Ajax orders that a trumpet be sounded before Troy: ‘Thou, trumpet, there’s my purse. / Now crack thy lungs, and split thy brazen pipe’ (Tro 4.5.7–8). Ajax is addressing a trumpeter: hence ‘brazen pipe’ is a metonymic transposition for the trumpeter’s throat (Riverside Shakespeare, p. 513).

In Othello, the Clown dismisses a group of musicians as follows: ‘Then put up your pipes in your bag, for I’ll / away. Go, vanish into air, away!’ (3.1.19–20). The dialogue preceding these lines draws on an allusion to the classical myth of Marsyas’ disastrous contest with Apollo, in which the pipe – the classical aulos – is compared unfavourably with the refined lute – the kythara or lyre of Plato and others. There is also a possible sexual innuendo in these lines, since they seem to expand on a word-play on ‘tail’ (7–8), a reference to the penis.

The rustic, often peasant origins of the simple traditional pipe are commonly adduced in literature. This pipe, the ‘shepherd’s pipe’, is made from materials such as corn stalks, river reeds or grass and is the ‘pipe of green corn’ of Chaucer, the ‘oaten pype’ in Spenser’s ‘January’ (Shepherds Calendar, 1597), and Watson’s ‘My Muse shall pipe but on an oaten quill’ in Eclogue upon the Death of Walsingham (1590). A similar usage is found, for instance, in a line of the concluding song of Love’s Labour’s Lost : ‘When shepherds pipe on oaten straws’ (5.2.903). Titania reminds Oberon of when he ‘in the shape of Corin sat all day / Playing on pipes of corn’ (MND 2.1.66–7). In The Passionate Pilgrim we have: ‘My shepherd’s pipe can sound no deal’ (17.17) when the poet laments the sense of loss caused by his mistress’s inconstancy. References to rustic straw pipes are a pastoral commonplace with precedents in classical antiquity going back to Theocritus.

Elsewhere, this imagery is used with an ironic twist as in the villainous Richard’s ‘weak piping time of peace’ (R3 1.1.24) which is characterized not by martial music but by the rustic pipe, also invoking on a more sophisticated level the pipe’s polarity to the stringed instrument, the ‘lascivious pleasing of a lute’ (13).

On the eve of the Battle of Agincourt, an impatient Dauphin comments in the following terms about his horse:

. . . the earth sings when he touches it; the

basest horn of his hoof is more musical than the pipe of

Hermes.

(H5 3.7.16–18)

The ‘pipe of Hermes’ recalls classical mythology (Ovid, Metamorphoses I, 677) where Hermes lures the monster Argus to sleep by playing his pipe (Walter, p. 84). The harmonizing or civilizing power of Hermes exercised through poetry and music was often employed in Elizabethan mythological imagery. The subduing of the monster by music is emblematic of social order and universal law embodied in the monarch, an idea particularly current in Elizabethan philosophy (Brooks-Davies, 1983).

On the other hand, the notion of the lowly pipe is exploited when Guildenstern has his recorder lesson. Hamlet exhorts him to: ‘Govern these ventages / with your fingers and thumbs, / Give it breath . . . and it will discourse most eloquent music’ (Ham 3.2.357–60). Later, Hamlet suggests that Guildenstern should not try to ‘play upon’ him (i.e. to control him) given that he is incapable of mastering a simple instrument like the pipe. The ability to ‘govern’ or play a pipe as analogous to controlling the mind and emotions is found in Hamlet’s observation:

. . .and blest are those

Whose blood and judgement are so well co-meddled,

That they are not a pipe for Fortune’s finger

To sound what stop she please.

(3.2.68–71)

In the Induction to 2 Henry IV the prologue-like figure of Rumour warns us that the mind can be distracted by dishonourable thoughts and deeds:

. . . Rumor is a pipe,

Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures,

And of so easy and so plain a stop

That the blunt monster with uncounted heads,

The still-discordant wav’ring multitude,

Can play upon it . . .

(15–20)

The high-pitched voice of a woman is compared to the sound of a pipe when Orsino remarks of Viola’s voice: ‘Thy small pipe / Is as the maiden’s organ, shrill and sound’ (TN 1.4.32–3). The implications of these lines cannot be overstated: the ‘small pipe’ is ‘at once the treble voice and undeveloped member of the boy actor, which is simultaneously . . . female vocality and genitality together’ (Elam, p. 35). Similar implications are found in Coriolanus:

Away, my disposition, and possess me

Some harlot’s spirit! My throat of war be turn’d,

Which quier’d with my drum, into a pipe

Small as an eunuch, or the virgin voice

That babies lull asleep! . . .

(3.2.111–15)

Coriolanus delivers this speech after being persuaded by Volumnia to appease the plebeians’ anger. To his combative and soldierly nature, the fact that he will not be allowed to express his contempt for the plebeians amounts to prostitution and loss of virility.

The imagery of a high- versus low-pitched voice is enlarged upon in Jaques’ famous speech on the seven ages of man. When a man reaches his sixth age:

. . . his big manly voice,

Turning again toward childish treble, pipes

And whistles in his sound . . .

(AYLI 2.7.161–3)

Mention of Philomela’s pipe (8) in Sonnet 102 aptly recalls the shrill high-pitched voice of a treble or soprano, confirming that Shakespeare’s songbird was female.

See also organ.

(C) Baines, Woodwind Instruments and their History (1977).

Brooks-Davies, The Mercurian Monarch (1983).

Elam, ‘The Fertile Eunuch: Twelfth Night, early modern Intercourse, and the Fruits of Castration’ (1996).

Partridge, Shakespeare’s Bawdy (1968), p. 434.

Schlesinger, The Greek Aulos (1939).

Smith, ‘The Contest of Apollo and Marsyas: Ideas about Music in the Middle Ages’ (1979).

Walter, Henry V (1954).

plainsong (A) Morley’s approach to teaching counterpoint is based on the Renaissance principle of composing one or more parts against a ‘plainsong tenor’. Although some of the tunes used may bear resemblance to Medieval ecclesiastical chants, Morley uses the term to mean a basic or simple tune, as in: ‘now here be diverse other examples of plainsong, which you may sing by your selfe’ (Introduction, 1597, p. 8). The term when used in a religious context is derived from the late Medieval cantus planus, an alternative name for monophonic (Gregorian) chant, and is more appositely called ‘plainchant’. When employed in a polyphonic composition, be it religious or secular, the plainsong invariably acts as a tenor or ground on which other parts build more florid music (descant).

(B) The song ‘The woosel cock so black of hue’ (MND 3.1.125–33) intoned by the ass-headed Bottom lists different birds and the qualities which make them unique. Among them is ‘the plain-song cuckoo grey’ (131): this use of the term hints at the basic repetitive nature of this bird’s song. The same meaning of simple tune is implied in Henry VIII when Lovell contrasts his ‘plain-song’ (1.3.45) with the ‘French song’ (41): whereas the former embodies English honesty and integrity, the latter is artificially elaborate and reflects the deviousness and potential for seduction implicit in French music.

Nym’s comment parodying Henry V’s famous speech ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends’ (H5 3.1.1–34) during the attack on Harfleur uses ‘plain song’ in an interesting way:

. . . The knocks are

too hot; and for mine own part, I have not a case of

lives. The humo[u]r of it is too hot, that is the very

plain-song of it.

(3.2.3–6)

His fear of being killed in battle is articulated through sensorial conceits including aural metaphors. In his frightened state, ‘plain song’ equals ‘simple truth’ but also hints at the role he is undertaking during the battle, which is associated with the part in a song.

(C) Apel, Gregorian Chant (1958), is the standard work on chant.

Hiley, Western Plainchant: A Handbook (1993), is a detailed survey and contains a bibliography.

Iselin, ‘ “My Music for Nothing” ’ (1995), explores the potentially subversive power of music in Shakespeare.

play (A) To play refers specifically to performing on an instrument as opposed to singing a song as in:

Then I forthwith took my pipe . . .

And upon a heavenly ground . . .

Played this roundelay.

(Dowland, 1603, no. 12)

Another example is: ‘Like as the lute delights, or else dislikes, / As is his art that plays upon the same’ (Daniel, 1606, no. 4. Poem by Samuel Daniel, sonnet 57 in Delia).

Consequently, when music is referred to as playing, that reference is almost invariably to instrumental music. Playing upon an instrument caused music to sound although not always audibly to mere humans (as when the concept of musica mundana or music of the spheres is evoked):

Hark! hear you not a heavenly harmony?

Is’t Jove, think you, that plays upon the spheres?

Heavens! Is not this a heavenly melody,

Where Jove himself a part in music bears?

(Bateson, 1604, no. 22)

(B) Stage directions in the Shakespeare canon instructing that music be played sometimes specify which instrument is required, as in The Tempest: ‘Ariel plays the tune on a tabor and pipe’ (3.2.124.SD). In Q1 Hamlet (1603), we have: ‘Enter Ophelia playing on a lute, and her haire down singing’ (G4v). The lute accompanies her irreverent bawdy songs and the dishevelled hair is an indicator of her state of insanity. The solemnity of the banquet hosted by Timon is signalled by: ‘Hoboys playing loud music. A great banquet serv’d in . . .’ (Tim 1.2.OSD). The central entertainment of the banquet consists of a masque ‘of Ladies, as Amazons, with lutes in their hands, dancing and playing’ (1.2.130.SD).

More often however there are generic indications for music (sometimes referring to the musicians themselves), without any specification about the nature of the instruments to be played. This happens for instance in another banquet scene: ‘Music plays. Enter two or three servants with a banket’ (Ant 2.7.OSD). Or in The Merchant of Venice where we have: ‘Play Music’ (5.1.68.SD). The imperative tone of this stage direction may indicate that this was an addition by a theatrical annotator addressing the musicians during rehearsals. Vague as these stage directions for music may appear to a modern reader, they were nonetheless very useful in a theatre where the number of musicians available at any given performance was, like many other resources, variable.

Sometimes lines in the dramatic dialogue work as cues for music, called for to underline the moods of different occasions ranging from happiness in love at wedding celebrations to sadness in death at funerals. For instance, Duke Senior commands: ‘Play, music’ (5.4.178) towards the end of As You Like It, when order and harmony are finally restored and celebrated. Similarly, at the end of Much Ado About Nothing, Benedick uses the same cue (5.4.121) to celebrate the triumph of positive feelings. Quite a different effect is achieved in Henry VIII when Katherine of Aragon orders: ‘Cause the musicians play me that sad note / I nam’d my knell’ (4.2.78–9). The disgraced Queen knows that she is dying and wants to find some comfort in the soothing power of music during her transition between the mortal world and the ‘celestial harmony’ (80) she is hoping to achieve.

Another interesting example occurs at the opening of Twelfth Night, which immediately establishes Orsino’s proneness to melancholy. His first words are:

If music be the food of love, play on,

Give me excess of it; that surfeiting,

The appetite may sicken, and so die.

(1.1.1–3)

It is not clear in which area of the stage the music was intended to be played during this scene. It is possible that a consort of musicians would have started playing on the main stage before the entrance of Orsino, or perhaps that they would have occupied the stage gallery if a public playhouse was used. Alternatively, playing could have taken place in the tiring-house rather than in full view of the audience (see Introduction for a discussion of the areas where aural effects were normally achieved in Elizabethan playhouses). Music – both instrumental and vocal – is heard on several occasions in this play, and underlines the theme of love as it is perceived by different characters. Orsino has a tendency to make ‘a spectacle of his passion’ (Wells, p. 215), a trait confirmed in 2.4, when he wants Feste to sing for him an ‘old and antique song’ (3) which has the power to ‘relieve my passion much’ (4). When Curio leaves to look for Feste, Orsino orders the musicians ‘to play the tune the while’ (14), once again indulging in his feelings for Olivia in a public way.

An unusual use of the verb ‘play’ is observed when, at the eve of the Battle of Shrewsbury, the Prince of Wales interprets ominously the signals given out by the weather:

The southern wind

Doth play the trumpet to his purposes,

And by his hollow whistling in the leaves

Foretells a tempest and a blust’ring day.

(1H4 5.1.3–6)

In this prosopopoeia the whistling wind is described as playing a trumpet, an instrument with strong martial associations (trumpets were commonly used, for instance, to sound alarums).

The act of playing an instrument acquires metaphorical nuances when Hamlet tries to persuade Guildenstern to learn how to play the recorder. The latter protests that he cannot play the instrument, and Hamlet confronts him:

. . . You would play upon me, you would

seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the

heart of my mystery, you would sound me from my

lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is

much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet

cannot you make it speak. ’Sblood, do you think I am

easier to be play’d on than a pipe? Call me what

instrument you will, though you fret me, yet you

cannot play upon me.

(3.2.364–72)

Thanks to the use of polysemic terms such as ‘stops’, ‘note’, ‘compass’, ‘voice’, ‘organ’ and ‘instrument’, the speech works on two different levels: on a superficial level, it is about the practical art of mastering an instrument, but at the same time it is about the political art of manipulating, or ‘playing on’, people’s minds. Hamlet’s ultimate message to his ‘friend’ (who in fact wants to establish on behalf of Claudius whether the Prince is faking his madness) is that he will not tolerate anyone exerting control over him.

See also false, ply, strain.

(C) Dessen and Thomson, A Dictionary of Stage Directions (1999), pp. 165–6.

Wells, Elizabethan Mythologies (1994), studies the correlation between love and music in Twelfth Night.

pleasant (A) In rare musical contexts, ‘pleasant’ is used in connection with singing, as in: ‘Sounding on high in Daphne’s praise / Pleasant songs and roundelays’ (Youll, 1608, no. 16).

(B) In Sonnet 102, we are told that the summer is ‘less pleasant now’ (9) that the nightingale does not sing. This image is based on the belief that this bird only sang at the beginning of the summer and stopped this activity by the end of July (Duncan-Jones, p. 102). It evokes the pleasantness of the bird’s melodious singing as reflected in the summer climate.

In The Winter’s Tale the Clown declares his passion for ballads, which he describes by means of paradox: ‘I love a ballad but even too well, if it be doleful matter / merrily set down, or a very pleasant thing indeed and sung lamentably’ (4.4.188–9). Here, the topic of the ballad (‘mournful’ as opposed to ‘light-hearted’) is contrasted with the mode of delivery of this popular form of song (quick and lively as opposed to slow and sad).

(C) Duncan-Jones, Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1997).

ply (A) Not often found in a musical sense, ‘ply’ is used generally in literary and artistic contexts to mean the enthusiastic application of an act, as in Spenser’s ‘During which time her gentle wit she plyes / To teach them truth’ (The Faerie Queene, 1.6.19).

(B) When Polonius instructs Reynaldo to spy on Laertes (who has just left for Paris), he concludes his recommendations by saying: ‘And let him ply his music’ (Ham 2.1.69). This sentence could be interpreted in two ways: Polonius is either asking Reynaldo to let Laertes carry on with whatever he wants to do, or he wishes that Laertes would become skilful in music since ‘music was one of the essential accomplishments of the gentleman’ (Jenkins, p. 233).

(C) Jenkins, Hamlet (1982).

point (A) A point is a small group of notes with a separately identifiable melodic and rhythmic contour (a motivic cell) which can be used as the theme or motive in imitative counterpoint. As Butler puts it, ‘A Point is a certain number and order of observable Notes in any one Parte, iterated in the same or in divers Partes’ (Principles of Musik, 1636, p. 71). ‘Point’, ‘fuge’ and ‘imitation’ are synonymous for Morley: ‘We call that a Fuge, when one part beginneth, and the other singeth the same, for some number of notes (which the first did sing)’ (Introduction, 1597, p. 76). Today the term is obsolete but in Elizabethan music theory and practice it was common. Points were used as much in instrumental music as they were in vocal. The madrigal was particularly fond of exploiting points whereas the fantasia, according to Morley, was the principal kind of instrumental music in which ‘a musician taketh a point at his pleasure, and wresteth and turneth it as he list, making either much or little of it according as shall seeme best in his own conceit’ (ibid., p. 181).

(B) Though ‘point’ is used many times by Shakespeare, principally in non-musical contexts, it occasionally has a musical connotation, as for example when Westmorland asks the Archbishop of York why the latter has decided to turn his ‘tongue divine / To a loud trumpet and a point of war’ (2H4 4.1.51–2). The phrase ‘point of war’, now obsolete, means ‘a short phrase sounded on an instrument as a signal’ (OED, 9a), a martial signal.

When Pericles is finally reunited with his daughter Marina, he exclaims:

O heavens bless my girl! But hark, what music?

Tell Helicanus, my Marina, tell him

O’er, point by point, for yet he seems to dote,

How sure you are my daughter. But what music?

(Per 5.1.223–6)

To the amazement of other onstage characters, he claims that what he is hearing is the music of the spheres (musica mundana), but since this was not supposed to be audible to mortals, it is difficult to establish if music was intended to be played during a performance (see ‘music’ for a review of different positions on this matter). What is important to note here is that the reference to ‘point’ happens in a scene where music carries out a fundamental role in plot development. Earlier in the same scene Marina sings for Pericles, and soon after this passage the goddess Diana appears to him, although any musical signification of Diana is not exploited here.

(C) Kerman, ‘Byrd, Tallis, and the Art of Imitation’ (1967).

practical music (musica instrumentalis) see music.

praise (A) ‘Singing someone’s praise’, either literally or metaphorically, was common in Elizabethan literature. Heroic ladies, or the objects of amorous desire, were often the subjects of vocal praising as in:

Come, shepherd swains . . .

Sing not a note of mirth, but sigh with me . . .

For she is dead, who while she lived was such

As in her praises none could sing too much.

(East, 1618, no. 16)

Elsewhere, Campion’s amorous suitor regales his unresponsive ‘rosy cheeked’ lady: ‘Yet will I never cease her praise to sing, / Though she gives no regard’ (Second Booke, c.1613, no. 20).

In many cases the object of praise is holy or divine as versified by John Hopkins in his metrical version of Psalm 47:

Sing praises to our God, sing praise,

Sing praises to our King,

For God is king of all the earth,

All thankful praises sing.

(Mundy, 1594, no. 7)

(B) A religious connotation of praise is intended when Charles exalts Joan’s vital role in the recapture of Orléans:

’Tis Joan, not we, by whom the day is won;

For which I will divide my crown with her,

And all the priests and friars in my realm

Shall in procession sing her endless praise.

(1H6 1.6.17–20)

The fact that religious men rather than laymen will be singing her praise indicates the saint-like status that she enjoys. This is even clearer when Charles concludes his speech by claiming that Joan will become the new patron saint of France after she dies: ‘No longer on Saint Denis will we cry, / But Joan de Pucelle shall be France’s saint’ (28–9).

Sonnet 5 of The Passionate Pilgrim, whose text is also found in Love’s Labour’s Lost (4.2.105–18), follows the more conventional line of praise to a lady whose love is craved by the poet. The poem concludes with the couplet: ‘Celestial as thou art, O, pardon love this wrong, / That sings heaven’s praise with such an earthly tongue’ (13–14). In the poet’s eyes, the object of his love has divine qualities, hence praising her acquires a quasi-religious overtone.

See also Te Deum, psalm, hymn.

pricksong (A) A fairly common term in Elizabethan times, ‘prick-song’ indicates notated as opposed to unwritten, improvised music. Specifically it means music written on staff notation as opposed to tablature, as the title of Tobias Hume’s The First Part of Ayres (1605) makes clear: ‘some in Tabliture, and some in Pricke-Song’. In an age of widespread illiteracy, written songs would be, almost exclusively, composed art music in contrast to the many kinds of improvised folk ballads and popular songs. In the preface ‘To the Reader’ of his Second Booke of Ayres (1601), Robert Jones reminds his readers that the ‘prickesong Notes’ he is using are ‘Semibreefe, Minnum, Chrochet, Quaver’, in other words the note-values of modern notated music.

Some confusion has arisen over the use of the word ‘pricke’ in Elizabethan sources. A prick note is a dotted note, that is one that is lengthened by a half. Morley calls this the ‘pricke of augmentation’ and says that ‘the pricke [signifieth] the halfe of the note going before to be holden out’ (Introduction, 1597, p. 12). This is the meaning of ‘you maie hold the first note with a pricke’ in Coprario’s Rules How to Compose (Wilson (ed.), p. 91/c.1610, fol. 11v). It is easy to see how the confusion has arisen. A little later, Coprario talks about ‘if they rise in quavers you maie nott use them with a pricke in a song’ (Wilson (ed.), p. 92/c. 1610, fol. 13v).

(B) The only use of this term in Shakespeare is found in a speech by Mercutio, who says of Tybalt that

. . . He fights

as you sing a prick-song, keeps time, distance, and

proportion; he rests his minim rests, one, two, and the

third in your bosom . . .

(Rom 2.4.20–3)

Musical metaphors are employed to describe opponents engaged in a fencing context (see ‘minim’ for a detailed analysis). The use of ‘prick-song’ with its implications of accuracy, predictability and control of notation stresses the idea of precision characterizing the art of duelling.

(C) Gibbons, Romeo and Juliet (1980), p. 142.

Krummel, English Music Printing (1975), focuses on English printed music.

Rastall, The Notation of Western Music (1998), is a good introduction to music notation.

Wilson (ed.), A New Way (2003).

priest (A) Shakespeare confines singing priests to the Histories. Those priests would be Roman Catholic and monastic. Their singing, therefore, would be monodic chanting.

(B) The Dauphin praises Joan of Arc’s recapture of Orléans and promises that ‘all the priests and friars in my realm / Shall in procession sing her endless praise’ (1H6 1.6.19–20). The Catholic context of this play makes this allusion all the more appropriate. The same conclusion can be drawn in relation to Henry V’s famous soliloquy before the Battle of Agincourt. Praying for a victory against all odds, he reminds God that he has had two chantries built for Richard II, where ‘the sad and solemn priests / Sing still for Richard’s soul’ (H5 4.1.300–1).

The swan, often associated with death, is compared to a singing priest in The Phoenix and Turtle:

Let the priest in surplice white,

That defunctive music can,

Be the death-divining swan,

Lest the requiem lack his right.

(13–16)

The mournful associations of this bird make it apt to officiate at the funeral of the phoenix and the turtle dove.

See also chantry, plainsong.

(C) Apel, Gregorian Chant (1958), discusses the traditional music of the Roman Catholic Church and its plainchant.

proportion (A) A difficult term from music theory, ‘proportion’ is the relationship between sections of a piece of music in differing rhythms and tempi. The most common proportional change in Renaissance music concerned moving from duple metre into a faster triple metre. ‘Proportion’, therefore, was the speed of the new tempo in relation to the former either in diminution or in augmentation. Morley defines it as:

either of equalitie or unequalitie. Proportion of equalitie, is the comparing of two aequall quantities together . . . Proportion of inequalitie, is when two things of unequall quantitie are compared together, and is either of the more or lesse inaequalitie. Proportion of the more inequalitie is, when a greater number is set over and compared to a lesser, and in Musicke doeth alwaies signifie diminution. Proportion of the lesse inequalitie is, where a lesser number is set over, and compared to a greater, as 2/3, and in Musicke doeth alwaies signifye augmentation. . . . in all proportions the upper number signifieth the semibriefe, and the lower number the stroke, so that as the upper number is to the lower, so is the semibriefe to the stroke.

(Introduction, 1597, pp. 27–8)

Rhythm and tempo became clearer with the introduction of the metrical bar-line and the time signature. The upper note signified the number of beats or strokes in a bar, whose quantity or unit pulse was indicated by the lower number, thus a bar in minims would have a lower number 2, in crotchets it would have a lower number 4, in quavers a lower number 8, etc. A piece in 2/4 would be in duple time whereas a piece in 3/4 or 3/8 would be in triple time.

The theory of proportion originated in Medieval mensural notation and was a complex issue due to the three main metrical categories, namely Mode, Prolation and Time. The mathematical basis for the system of proportions goes back to the early sixth century and Boethius. The mathematical ratios were used to diminish or increase the value of notes within a section. The whole system depended on the principle of a fixed unit of time, namely the tactus or rhythmical beat. Consequently, if the beat is lost proportion cannot be kept.

The idea that proportion contained quantity or ‘numbers’ and depended on a regular beat or accent did not escape Campion’s attention in his treatise on quantitative verse in neo-classical English poetry, his Observations in the Art of English Poesie (1602), in which musical parallels and interrelationships are cited to reinforce his argument: ‘The world is made by Simmetry and proportion, and is in that respect compared to Musick, and Musick to Poetry . . . What musick can there be where there is no proportion observed? (Vivian (ed.), p. 35).

Campion knew that musical rhythm was governed by the relationship of the shorter notes to the longer and that in classical verse a similar relationship was thought to exist between long and short syllables. That durational principle governed the scansion or metre of a line of poetry. Such a system, Campion asserts, could be applied beneficially to English poetry in place of accentual rhymed doggerel. This theory was effectively dismissed by Daniel Samuel in his A Defence of Ryme, published the following year.

(B) A wording similar to the concluding line of Campion’s passage quoted above is found in Richard II, which was published in 1597, five years before Campion’s Observations. Richard soliloquizes about the futility of human life before being murdered:

(The music plays). Music do I hear?

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.

(5.5.41–4)

As in music, loss of harmony in life has extremely negative consequences. In Richard’s case, it ultimately causes his death.

The concept of proportion is also found in a metaphor which likens fencing to music. Mercutio says of Tybalt:

. . . O, he’s the

courageous captain of compliments. He fights

as you sing a prick-song, keeps time, distance, and

proportion; he rests his minim rests, one, two, and the

third in your bosom . . .

(Rom 2.4.19–23)

Rhythm and tempo have to be scrupulously observed for duelling to be successful. Proportion has to be kept by following the time-value represented by the minim. (See ‘minim’ for a detailed discussion of this passage).

See also degree, mood.

(C) Apel, The Notation of Polyphonic Music (1953), pp. 145–95, considers the use and notation of proportions in music.

Attridge, Well-weighed Syllables (1974), is an excellent account of the so-called quantitative movement in English poetry.

Campion, Observations in the Art of English Poesy, ed. Vivian (1966).

de Ford, ‘Tempo Relationships between Duple and Triple Time in the Sixteenth Century’ (1995).

psalm (A) The texts of the psalms come from the Hebrew Scriptures of the Bible known as the Old Testament. Often referred to as the Psalms of David, the Book of Psalms or Psalter was translated into Greek (the Septuagint) in the early Middle Ages and thence into Latin (the Vulgate). It contained 150 items or sacred poems. Early English translations, such as Coverdale’s (1535), were based on the Vulgate.

Musical settings of psalms had been used in religious worship from earliest times and plainchant psalms were common in Roman Catholic worship in the Middle Ages. During the last years of Henry VIII’s reign and those of Edward VI (1547–53) the effects of the Protestant Reformation were felt increasingly in England. This meant that much of the musical practice of Roman Catholicism was swept away. Instead of chanting psalms, vernacular translations in metrical rhyme were introduced. One of the first publications was Myles Coverdale’s Goostly psalmes and spirituall songes drawen out of the holy Scripture (c.1539). It contained thirteen metrical psalms as well as metrical versions of canticles, the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed and German and Latin hymns. Another early collection of metrical psalms was Robert Crowley’s Psalter of David newely translated into Englysh metre (1549). It was the first complete English metrical psalter and contained tunes harmonized in parts similar to the Lutheran collections of geistliche Lieder. It was not, however, successful. Thomas Sternhold’s small selection of metrical psalms, issued in 1549, did gain favour, especially at court. During Mary’s reign (1553–8) the Latin rite was restored and metrical psalms were cultivated on the continent. Sternhold and Hopkins’ famous psalter was published in Geneva in 1556. Elizabeth’s accession to the throne in 1558 saw the return of the English rite and the Queen’s Injunctions of 1559 allowed the resumption of metrical psalm singing. The first English edition of the Sternhold and Hopkins psalter was published by John Day in 1560. The first complete edition was published in 1562.

The singing of metrical psalms became increasingly widespread in cathedrals and churches throughout England coinciding with the publication each year of a new edition of ‘Sternhold and Hopkins’. The impact on religious worship of the return of Puritan refugees, notably Dutch, was significant, especially in the 1560s. In 1559, Jan Utenhove, the great Dutch psalmist, came back to London from exile in Emden, where he had been forced to flee during the Marian years. His early psalm paraphrases had been published in London by Steven Mijerdman during the Edwardian era and were intended for the exiled Dutch Protestant Church in London. On his return, subsequent psalters by Utenhove were published by John Day in London. The complete edition, De psalmen Davidis, in Nederlandsicher sangsryme was published in 1566, the year after Utenhove’s death.

The tunes of the metrical psalms were basically simple, syllabic, easily sung lines. They were published either as single-line (monophonic) tunes or harmonized in four parts in homorhythmic chordal fashion. In contrast to the more florid settings of polyphonic cathedral music, they reflected the simplicity and austerity of the Puritan creed. During Elizabeth’s reign a large number of books of metrical psalms were published. Their aim was accessibility to a large cross section of the population. Thomas Este published his The Whole Booke of Psalmes in 1592 so that ‘the unskilfull with small practice may attaine to sing that part, which is fittest for their voice’. William Barley’s The Whole Booke of Psalmes (1599) repeated the accessibility blurb and was printed in a cheap pocket-sized version. Richard Alison’s The Psalmes of David in Metre (1599) are musically very straightforward.

(B) Interestingly, Shakespeare mentions ‘psalm’ in light-hearted contexts, for instance when Mistress Ford remarks that Falstaff’s words ‘do no more adhere and keep place together than the / hundred Psalms to the tune of “Green-sleeves” ’ (Wiv 2.1.62–3). This comment appears in Folio (there is no such reference in the two quarto versions antedating Folio) and has evoked a debate in the scholarly community, since editors have interpreted, and sometimes emended, ‘hundred’ in different ways. It is common knowledge that there are 150 psalms – no Elizabethan psalters printed a selection of 100 psalms. This has led Wells and Taylor to emend the phrase to ‘the hundred and fifty psalms’ (p. 490). This makes no sense because each psalm had its own tune and it would be meaningless to compare the psalms as a totality with one tune. Other scholars simply emend ‘hundred’ to ‘hundredth’. In the eighteenth century, Rowe adopted this reading as did Quiller Couch and Dover Wilson in their 1921 Cambridge edition of The Merry Wives of Windsor. Oliver, on the other hand, keeps ‘hundred’ on the grounds that Rowe’s interpretation in part spoils Mistress Ford’s joke since there is ‘even less likelihood of all hundred (or so) psalms being sung or fitted to the lively tune of “Greensleeves” ’ (p. 40). But Oliver’s emendation ignores the fact that there are 150 psalms.

From a musical point of view the obvious solution is to emend ‘hundred’ to ‘hundredth’. Mistress Ford’s remark has an ironic intention: having just realized that Falstaff is trying to seduce both her and Mistress Page, Mistress Ford implies that his promises of constancy to each of the two women sound as inappropriate as the singing of the ‘Old Hundredth’ psalm tune to the tune of the popular love song, ‘Green-sleeves’. The ‘Old Hundredth’ is a dour slowish tune in four-square rhythm with a solemn descending four-note pattern at its beginning whereas ‘Greensleeves’ is a sprightly compound duple-metre tune with an ascending melody at its opening. In other words, the tunes could hardly be more dissimilar. The moralistic opposition between psalms and ballads is neatly expressed on the title page of William Daman’s The Psalmes of David in English meter (1579), where psalms are ‘to the use of the godly Christians for recreating themselves, in stede of fond and unseemely Ballades’.

In 1 Henry IV, 2.4.133 ‘psalm’ is used by Falstaff (see ‘weaver’ for a detailed comment) and alludes to the reputation of weavers as psalm singers. In The Winter’s Tale, the rustic atmosphere of the sheep-shearing feast is created by the three-part song intoned by the shearers. According to the Clown, most of their voices belong to the middle and low range (‘means and bases’, 4.3.43), except for that of a Puritan who has a high-pitched voice but refuses to sing and dance for the sake of entertainment. Instead, he ‘sings psalms to horn-pipes’ (44).

(C) Frost, English & Scottish Psalm & Hymn Tunes (1953), contains bibliographical details of Elizabethan publications and the music of the psalm tunes.

Kümin, ‘Masses, Morris and Metrical Psalms: Music in the English Parish, c.1400–1600’ (2001).

Le Huray, Music and the Reformation in England (1978), ch. 11, concentrates on the metrical psalm in England.

Leaver, ‘Goostly Psalmes and Spirituell Songes’ (1991).

Oliver, The Merry Wives of Windsor (1971).

Wells and Taylor, William Shakespeare: The Complete Works (1986).

psaltery (A) The psaltery was a simple plucked stringed instrument of the zither family in which the wire strings were laid out horizontally in a flat wooden box. The box could take many different shapes. The most common was the triangular form, but there were wing shapes, irregular triangular shapes and also quadrangular forms. A distinctive kind, known as the istrumento di porco, was essentially triangular with concave cheeks, the so-called ‘pig’s head’ shape. The psaltery was popular throughout Europe in the Middle Ages but was supplanted by the harpsichord during the sixteenth century.

(B) In Coriolanus, a messenger notes that Rome is pervaded by a festive mood when its citizens are informed that Coriolanus has decided to spare the city, thanks to his mother’s intercession:

. . . Why, hark you!

The trumpets, sackbuts, psalteries, and fifes,

Tabors and cymbals, and the shouting Romans,

Make the sun dance. Hark you!

(5.4.48–51)

This is the only instance in the Shakespeare canon where psalteries are mentioned. The messenger’s remark was intended to bring the audience’s attention to the music and sounds which were expected to be achieved from behind the tiring-house walls, as the stage direction ‘A shout within’ (5.4.51.SD) suggests. The liveliness characterising this scene is short-lived, as the play ends with the indication that a dead march (with its sombre connotations) be sounded while Coriolanus’ dead body is brought off stage.

It is interesting to note that, even if it appears in a pagan context, this passage echoes Psalm 150:

Praise ye the Lord . . .

Praise him with the sound of the trumpet: praise him with the psaltery and harp.

Praise him with the timbrel and dance: praise him with stringed instruments and organs.

Praise him upon the loud cymbals: praise him upon the high sounding cymbals.

(verses 1; 3–5)