Music and Shakespearean Revision

As Tiffany Stern has demonstrated, music cues and songs were highly vulnerable to alteration and modification during the life of an Early Modern play-text. Tracing the revisions of the cues for instrumental music between Quarto and Folio versions of Shakespeare’s texts usefully indicates something of the nature of the change wrought in musical provision as The King’s Men took over the Blackfriars theatre in 1608. The necessity of providing entr’acte music to cover the lighting of candles must have made the provision of an ensemble of musicians distinct from the actors (who in all probability had provided the music at the Globe themselves), essential. So, for example, the emergence of the cornett, a professional’s instrument, is indicated in the Folio Merchant of Venice.

These are instances of practical accommodation to the new circumstances of the Blackfriars theatre; it may also be that the editing out of Desdemona’s ‘Willow Song’ from the Quarto of Othello was, similarly, necessitated by the practicalities of acting personnel and their singing ability. Rather more ambivalent is the question whether there are signs of significant revision in the summoning of Fest to sing ‘Come away death’ in Twelfth Night. It may be that this represents more significant revision – in the way that the witches’ songs in Macbeth, or the (probably) Middletonian addition of ‘Take, O take those lips away’ certainly do. While The Tempest’s masque is defended from the charge of its later addition to a play revised for court performance, a case is made that both the satyrs’ dance and the song of ‘Two maids wooing a man’, set by Robert Johnson, in The Winter’s Tale belong to a revised text. The style of the surviving setting, as well as its uneasy placement, strongly suggest that it was added at some time after the play’s first composition.