Concord of Sweet Sounds: Musical Instruments in Shakespeare by Gerard Brender à Brandis and F. David Hoeniger (review)

In early modern and modern times certain instruments are iconic. In Elizabethan England and throughout Renaissance Europe the viol and lute held sway. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the violin and harpsichord were omnipresent. In the nineteenth century it was the turn of the pianoforte. Modernity is often characterized by the use of electronic instruments. The significance of musical instruments for Shakespeare varied according to their role. Brender à Brandis and Hoe-niger identify twenty-seven different instruments in the plays and poems. The only significant Renaissance instrument not included is the cornett, probably because Shakespeare does not actually name it in his dramatic dialogue; it occurs a number of times in stage directions either as a complement to or substitute for the louder trumpet. The generic term ‘pipe’ is omitted. Consequently, pastoral references such as ‘When shepherds pipe on oaten straws’ (Love’s Labour’s Lost) and Corin’ s ‘pipes of corn’ (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) are excluded, as are allusions to mariners’ whistles in Pericles and The Tempest. Pipe is recorded in the context of the one-man band ‘pipe and tabor.’

This exquisite little book opens with the quintessential Renaissance courtly and later domestic instrument, the viol. It presents the various instruments of Shakespeare’s time following modern classifications, namely strings, winds, keyboard, and percussion, arranged according to contemporaneous function and context, mainly to do with court and country.

Musical instruments feature in Shakespeare’s plays either as acoustic cues or verbal imagery. Some cues, it has been argued, also serve as symbolic signifiers. Royal personages, high nobility, military leaders enter and exit to trumpet flourishes. The irony of Quince’s entry for the Prologue to a ‘flourish of trumpets’ toward the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream would not be missed by an Elizabethan audience. Brender à Brandis and Hoeniger include ‘hoboys,’‘sackbuts,’ ‘psalteries,’ and ‘cymbals’ as noisy processional instruments together with trumpets, fifes, and drums (tabors). Trumpets are the most frequently cited by Shakespeare, not as art instruments which they were yet to become, but as military or civil signalling instruments. Similarly the bugle and horn were used to sound hunting calls, as Hoeniger points out. It is curious, however, that the rustic hornpipe is included as an instrument. The unique reference in The Winter’s Tale of the lone Puritan singing psalms to hornpipes surely intends the dance. Fiddles replaced the medieval hornpipe after the fifteenth century as the preferred tune-line instruments to accompany dances. The lute, with both its perfect symmetry of design and its sensory, pear-shaped belly and rounded back, is Shakespeare’s favoured emblematic or associative instrument. Hoeniger mentions Apollo’s lute (lyre) and Orpheus’s efficacious lute-song music, legends deriving from classical mythology and used effectively by Shakespeare in several plays and poems. While he alludes to the lute as symbol of romantic love, he does not discuss the lute as emblematic antidote to war and strife, as in 1 Henry VI when Talbot reassures the dying Salisbury, ‘Plantagenet, I will, and like thee, Nero, / Play on the lute, beholding the towns burn,’ or depicted most vividly when the non-compliant Katherina refuses to learn the lute and instead breaks it over the head of the ineffectual Hortensio in the famous lute lesson in The Taming of the Shrew.

Concord of Sweet Sounds presents the musical instruments mentioned by Shakespeare in the dramatic dialogue of several plays and one sonnet. It does not set out to be comprehensive nor are there any references to further reading. The distinguished Shakespearean scholar Professor Hoeniger provides short descriptions of the instruments, their functions, and their contexts in selected plays (and sonnet 128). The renowned wood engraver Brender à Brandis accompanies each entry with an illustration which aims to ‘capture the essence’ of the instrument rather than offer a literal depiction, albeit with ‘careful attention to historical accuracy.’ The wood engravings...