The plays of William Shakespeare feature the word “music” at least 170 times, and further references to songs, tunes, voices and a wide variety of instruments outstrip this number. It seems that only King John has no reference to music at all, though even this play alludes to the ballad “Sir Guy of Warwick” in passing. Of course Shakespeare was not alone amongst the Elizabethan and Stuart playwrights in including music in his plays, but no other dramatist exploited music as a poetic image to the same extent.

In Shakespeare’s world characters who appreciate music are estimable: those who don’t are fit merely for “treasons stratagems and spoyls”. Nor is it enough just to appreciate music. How Hamlet berates the otherwise courtly Guildenstern for not being able to play the recorder: “’Tis as easie as lying,” he says and proceeds to give  the wretched man a lesson. Not even to be able to play a recorder, makes Guildenstern a gentleman lacking in the necessary accomplishments at best, and morally suspect at worst.

So attitudes to music colour motive and character, and villains often shy away from it. For example, after Othello has rhapsodised about the harmony implicit in his love for Desdemona, Iago, like the stock villain, maintains outward decency but indicates his real intent with:

Oh you are well tun’d now: But Ile set down

the pegs that make this Musicke, as honest as I am. (II.i)

(Incidentally, a trick which mischievous colleagues used to play on the musically illiterate George Formby before performances, showing that times don’t change). But you tweak random pegs at your peril. As Ulysses says in Troilus & Cressida:

Take but degree away, un-tune that string

            And hearke what discord followes. (I.iii)

Here we are in affairs of state, and Henry VI says much the same:

How irksome is this musick to my heart?

When such strings jarred, what hope of Harmony?         ```````````````````````````````````````````````````````````(IV.ii)

Things are even worse for poor Richard II, for here is an additional warning to us all: we must not only play in tune, but in time:

Musicke do I heare?

            Ha, ha? keep time: How sowre sweet Musicke is,

            When Time is broke, and no Proportion kept?

            So is it in the Musicke of mens lives:

            And here have I the daintinesse of eare,

            To heare time broke in a disorder’d string. (V.v)

But help is at hand. We may have disordered strings and slipping pegs, but we have frets too, and Shakespeare is not slow to use this opportunity for word-play. Here’s Hamlet again:

You would seem to know my stops: you would pluck out the heart of my Mysterie; you would sound mee from my lowest Note to the top of my Compasse…Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me,

you cannot play upon me. (III.ii)

In less sinister circumstances in The Rape of Lucrece, frets intercede for Love::

These means, as frets upon an instrument,

            Shall tune our heart-strings to true languishment.

For in love we find one of the most subtle aspects of the power of music. Berowne says in Love’s Labour’s Lost:

And when Love speaks, the voice of all the gods

            Makes heaven drowsy with the harmony. (IV.iii)

Nor is the music of love always that pure. When Cleopatra asks:

Give me some Musicke: Musicke, moody foode of us that trade in love. (II.v)

we know she’s up to something and Anthony is lined up for serious seduction.

So with our instrument in tune, the pegs fitting and the frets adjusted we are all set to

play this most subtle music. Another king, Henry IV, makes the distinction between

music and “noise”:

Let there be no noyse made (my gentle friends)

             Unlesse some dull and favourable hand

            Will whisper Musicke to my wearie spirit. (IV.v)

Perhaps a lute is suggested here, but realistically a consort of viols or even a solo lyra- viol would carry better from “the other room” where the musicians are required to play for the requisite soothing effect. In any case definitely not “noyse”. String players can note smugly that this was the word used for wind music in particular. Indeed, elsewhere in the play Falstaff calls for music in the tavern and the local band “Sneaks Noyse” duly oblige. In Othello the wind players (of bagpipes it seems) are asked to make “no more noise”. The clown then asks, “If you have any Musicke that may not be hearde?” There is a double-meaning in this question, and it brings us specifically to viols. By asking if they have any music that “cannot be hearde” he is asking for the sound of strings, firmly associated with the music of the spheres, which, as we shall see, was of such perfect harmony that mortals could not hear it.

The most famous Shakespearian exposition of the music of the spheres occurs in The Merchant of Venice as Lorenzo talks to Jessica. Critics have commented that Shakespeare combines several versions of the theories of harmony and cosmology, but he is writing poetry, not a treatise, and the result is one of the most memorable and resonant passages about music anywhere in literature:

            How sweet the moone-light sleepes vpon this banke,
            Heere will we sit, and let the sounds of musicke
            Creepe in our eares soft stilnes, and the night
             Become the tutches of sweet harmonie:
            Sit Jessica, looke how the floore of heaven
            Is thicke inlayed with pattens of bright gold,
            There's not the smallest orbe which thou beholdst
            But in his motion like an Angell sings,
            Still quiring to the young eyed Cherubins;
            Such harmonie is in immortall soules,
            But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
            Doth grosly close in it, we cannot heare it: (V.i)

It was the Neoplatonists at the Medici court who codified the ancient occult philosophy, and the physician Marcilio Ficino who, in translating Plato, identified two strands of the magic of music: the concept of the music of the spheres, and the power of music to influence the human mind and soul. It was Agrippa in De Occulta Philosophia (1533) who drew these two together into a form reminiscent of the Shakespeare passage:

Thus no songs, sounds and instrumental music are stronger in moving the emotions of man and in inducing magical impressions that those composed in number, measure, and proportion as likenesses of the heavens.

So how do viols come to be associated with mystical music and healing? The title for this article I can now confess comes not from Shakespeare, but from Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Prophetess.

Delphia.

Strike music from the spheres!                                   [Music]

Diocles.

Ha! in the air?

All.      

Miraculous!

Maximinian.

Still the gods
Express that they are pleased with this election.

Geta.  

My master is an emperor, and I feel
A senator's itch upon me: 'Would I could hire
These fine invisible fiddlers to play to me
At my instalment.”

Here then we have strings playing the music of the spheres (doubtless in the gallery above the stage) and as such bestowing on these politicans the blessing of the Gods. The same invocation is made at the beginning of Pericles, where Pericles realises that the princess he desires has been in an incestuous relationship with her father Antiochus:

The stage directions make her enter in a halo of music, giving Pericles a cue for the imagery of his speech, praising before he damns. (A musical accompaniment is also indicated for the entry of the similarly beautiful Helen of Troy in Marlow’s Dr Faustus.)

You are a faire Violl, and your sense, the stringes;
Who finger'd to make man his lawfull musicke,
Would draw Heauen downe, and all the Gods to harken:
But being playd upon before your time,
Hell onely daunceth at so harsh a chime: (I.i)

Under the circumstances the frequently-employed musical pun on “finger’d” here leaves a particularly nasty taste. Later in the play a music cue means that the music of the spheres must be provided. Assuaged of his guilt and in a state of spiritual calm Pericles alone is able to hear the music, though dramatically the audience must too.

Per.

But harke what Musicke tell,

Hel.

My Lord I heare none.
Per.

None, the Musicke of the Spheres,
Rarest sounds, do ye not heare?
Most heavenly Musicke.
It nips me unto listning, and thicke slumber
Hangs upon mine eyes, let me rest. (V.i)

The magical physician Cerimon also invokes the power of music in this play to

bring Queen Thaisa back to life.

The rough and
Wofull Musicke that we have, cause it to sound beseech you:
The Violl once more; how thou stirr'st thou blocke?
The Musicke there: I pray you give her ayre:
Gentlemen, this Queene will live,
Nature awakes a warmth breath out of her;
She hath not been entranc'st above five howers:
See how she ginnes to blow into lifes flower againe. (III.ii)

Moving enough, but what of the viol-player addressed as “thou blocke”, apparently shiftless and inattentive? More of him later. Divine healing seems to be a common theme in these later plays, for we find a similar scene in The Winter’s Tale where

Paulina summons music to bring the statue of Hermione back to life.

Musicke; awake her: Strike:
'Tis time: descend: be Stone no more. (V.iii)

And what music do they strike? As Dryden reminds us: the viol. There may be a practical reason why these tranformation scenes occur in the late pays, for they were designed for the indoor theatres and perhaps the relatively soft sound of viols made a greater impact there. We certainly know of a viol in use  at Blackfriars Theatre where according to Frederic Gershowin in 1602:

A boy sang so beautifully in a warbling voice to the bass viol, that unless the nuns in Milan have outdone him, we did not hear the like on our travels.

Incidentally it is a testament to the accomplishments and individual vocal quality (cum voce tremula, in the Latin) of the chorister/actors of the time. Further, several of John Marston’s plays for these choirboy companies make specific reference to the use of consorts of viols

But what of the shiftless viol-player in Pericles? Alas we may be sublime off-stage  but as actors: “every bass-viol soloist on the stage, and this implies lyra-viol every time, is an affected ass”. So says J.S.Manifold in his comprehensive survey  Music in  English Drama. Such a character is Fastidious Brisk in Ben Jonson’s Every Man out of his Humour, though he needs his mistress to tune the instrument, and has to admit that she also plays it rather well:

You see the subject of her sweet fingers there? Oh, she tickles it
so, that she makes it laugh most divinely, I'll tell you a good jest
now, and yourself shall say it's a good one: I have wished myself to be
that instrument, I think, a thousand times, and not so few, by heaven!

His servant adds cynically:

            Not unlike, sir; but how? to be cased up and hung by on the wall?

It seems playing the lyra-viol was considered just too clever by half. Andrew

Aguecheek in Twelfth Night is a similar character::

Fie, that you'l say so: he playes o'th Viol-de-gam-boys,
and speaks three or four languages word for word
without booke, & hath all the good gifts of nature.  (I.iii)

Moreover, when the musical spell doesn’t work opprobrium follows:

So, get you gone: if this penetrate, I will consider your
Musicke the better: if it do not, it is a voyce in her eares
which Horse-haires, and Calves-guts, nor the voyce of
unpaved Eunuch to boot, can never amend.

Benedick in Much Ado, also makes clear the strings’ humble origins:

Now divine aire, now is his soule rauisht, is it
not strange that sheepes guts should hale soules out of
mens bodies? well, a horne for my money when all's
done. (II.iii)

Let us end with a consort, though, for the last word must go

to Queen Katherine in Henry VIII:

 I have not long to trouble thee. Good Griffith,
Cause the Musitians play me that sad note
I nam'd my Knell; whil'st I sit meditating
On that Coelestiall Harmony I go too.
[ Sad and solemne Musicke.]

The “knell” she calls for is the song “O death rock me asleep” with its refrain

“Toll on the passing bell…sound
                                    my death knell” Appropriately, 

the
                                    scoring of the earliest surviving setting suggests voice and viols.

Note: Shakespeare quotations are from the First Folio, the original
                                    spelling

 retained with the
                                    exception of the interchangeable “u” and “v” which 

have been given their modern English values for clarity’s sake.

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