Music and its Function in the Romances of Shakespeare

Summary

Most of the Elizabethan beliefs about music remain with us as familiar myths whose full implications are ignored. We know of the Platonic notion of the music of the spheres and of the Orpheus legend. We are aware, too, that for a Christian age there was literal truth in Job, xxxviii. 7: “When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy”, and in the singing and playing of the angels before the throne of God in Revelation. The faculty which has tended to desert us with the passing of time is that of being permanently conscious of and responsive to the place of music in the Elizabethan scheme of things, of seeing it not simply as a diversion but as an act of faith, and as something no less essential to the overall pattern than the concepts of degree, the body politic, the elements and humours, and the like. Since, moreover, the dance was associated with music as a heavenly dispensation, Elizabethan attitudes are not easily borne in mind in an age like ours, when music in general is secular in intention, and that which accompanies the dance has little perceptible connexion with belief, religious or otherwise.