The King’s Revels list of charges of the house includes “music,” while (as we shall see) in the 1624 list of “necessary attendants” to the King’s Men musicians are the only category specifically named (p. 301ff). The Blackfriars theatre had its famous consort of musicians and they are presumably what Sir Henry Herbert had primarily in mind when he drew up that list, making musicians so prominent. But music was an essential element of all professional drama in the period; and every leading troupe employed professional musicians (doubtless in smaller numbers than the Blackfriars) to provide it. They fell into at least two categories. On the one hand there were those who played the drums and trumpets; on the other there were those who would play chamber music or accompany songs, playing woodwind or stringed instruments. Such sets of instruments would not have been expected to perform together at this date.
Drums and trumpets had a very specific role outside the playhouse: in announcing the arrival of traveling players at a new venue and in making people aware that a show was about to begin at one of the London theatres. Hence they figure prominently in the anti‐theatrical literature. For example John Stockwood, in a 1578 sermon preached at Paul’s Cross, bewailed “Will not a filthy play, with the blast of a trumpet, sooner call thither a thousand, than an hour’s tolling of a bell bring to the sermon a hundred?” (ES, 4: 199). It was a point often made. And when the Lord Mayor in 1580 wrote to the Earl of Warwick about his players appearing in venues near the city, he is careful to spell out that if their leader “obtain lawfully to play at the Theatre or any other open place out of the City, he hath and shall have my permission with his company, drums, and show to pass openly through the City, being not upon the Sunday” (291). The Lord Mayor remains respectful, but he stands his ground: they must get proper permission, they mustn’t perform on Sundays. In such a context allowing the use of drums at all is a gracious concession. When James Burbage was building the second Blackfriars theatre, however, it was part of the (successful) objection of the local residents “that the same playhouse is so near the church that the noise of the drums and trumpets will greatly disturb and hinder both the ministers and parishioners in time of divine service and sermons” (320). And when Lord Hunsdon negotiated with the Lord Mayor to allow his new company to use the Cross Keys inn during the winter of 1594/5, he made the very specific concession that they “will not use any drums or trumpets at all for the calling of people together” (316).
Nevertheless, there would always be work for drummers and trumpeters within performances themselves, since between them they provided the musical soundtracks of warfare and royal ceremony. In Act 4 of Richard III a stage direction reads “Enter King Richard and his train, marching with drums and trumpets” (Q1 1597, 4.4.135.1) and shortly thereafter Richard commands: “A flourish, trumpets! Strike alarum, drums” (149). The OED describes such a flourish as “A fanfare (of horns, trumpets, etc.), esp. to announce the approach of a person of distinction” (n, 7a) and it preceded warlike royalty everywhere in Elizabethan plays, while the alarum or call to arms goes up on almost every battlefield, accompanied by drums and/or trumpets. In 3 Henry VI, for example, 4.6, 4.7, 4.8, 5.3, 5.4, 5.5. and 5.7 all begin with flourishes, while 5.2 begins and 5.4 ends with an alarum: as 2 Henry VI puts it, “When the angry trumpets sound alarum” (5.2.3). These probably corresponded to actual signals on the contemporary battlefield, but for less warlike settings it seems that the Elizabethan theatre devised its own convention for announcing royalty, the sennet, which the OED describes as “A set of notes on the trumpet or cornet, ordered in the stage‐directions of Elizabethan plays, apparently as a signal for the ceremonial entrance or exit of a body of players.” So in Thomas Dekker’s Satiromastix, a stage direction reads “Trumpets sound a flourish, and then a sennet” (3.2.0 SD); in Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII, 2.4 opens with “Trumpets, sennet, and cornetts.” Fletcher’s own Valentinian 5. 8 calls for “A sennet with trumpets.”
The only other instrument so specifically and regularly called for in play texts for the public theatres is the hautboy, a precursor of the modern oboe, though Lucy Munro points out that they “are extremely rare in adult company plays performed before 1608” (2009, 548, n. 22). We find it required, for example, at the beginnings of both 1.6 and 1.7 in Macbeth, ominously contrasting scenes in which King Duncan approaches Macbeth’s castle (“The castle hath a pleasant seat”) and Macbeth plots murder (“If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well / It were done quickly”). In the second quarto (1604) of Hamlet the dumb‐show commences with “The trumpets sound,” but in the folio version (1623) the direction is “Hautboys play.” Early in Timon of Athens a feast begins with “Hautboys playing loud music” (1.2.0 SD). These are all texts first printed in 1623, we note, and may well not reflect their earliest staging.
But the theatres certainly had a much wider range of instruments at their disposal than this. In Alleyn’s inventories of the Admiral’s Men’s property at the Rose, beside three trumpets and a drum, he listed “a treble viol, a bass viol, a bandore, a cittern.”13 These are all instruments that might be used to accompany singing. It cannot be accidental that Augustine Phillips bequeathed to his “late apprentice,” Samuel Gilburne, his “bass viol” and to his current apprentice, James Sands, “a cittern, and a bandore, and a lute” (EPF, 198–9). There was a consistent relationship between music and the boy players, and not just those in the all‐boy companies, which had their roots in the choir schools.
I discuss this further under Apprentices (p. 182). For now I wish simply to point out that, so long as the adult companies retained apprentices – and, moreover, recruited a growing number of their sharers both from among those apprentices and from the boy companies – they were never short of musicians trained in singing and in the use of stringed instruments. In the Chamberlain’s / King’s Men, for example, Alexander Cooke made the transition from apprentice to sharer, while William Ostler, John Underwood, and Nathan Field all derived, directly or indirectly, from the Blackfriars boys.14 This ensured, for example, that when the famous opening of Twelfth Night appears to call for onstage musicians – “If music be the food of love, play on” – it would not have been difficult to provide them from within the sharer players, without recourse to hired men. When Viola asks Feste “Dost thou live by thy tabor” (3.1.1–2) it probably indicates that Robert Armin was playing the tabor [small drum] and pipe as Tarlton had done in earlier years (see Figure 2.1 and p. 44). When Amiens sings “Blow, blow, thou winter wind” in As You Like It (2.7.180–93), and other songs, probably to the accompaniment of one or more stringed instruments, it would hardly have taxed resources at all.
Musical costs in the theatre would also have included some commissioning of new songs. To some extent they would have got by on their own resources, with authors setting their own words to existing popular tunes. For example, when Edgar as Poor Tom bursts into “Come o’er the burn, Bessy, to me” (3.6.25) he is singing a ballad by William Birche, first published in 1558; when Desdemona sang “The Willow Song” (Othello, 4.3.43–59), which she calls “An old thing” (31), she was probably doing so to a lute tune first published in 1583. But the King’s Men certainly employed people to write original songs and settings for them, perhaps more regularly after they took over use of the Blackfriars. All those so employed that we know of held positions as musicians at court. The most notable of these was Robert Johnson, a lutenist who was for a time in the employment of the younger Lord Hunsdon, patron of the company while it was the Chamberlain’s Men. Johnson wrote surviving settings for songs in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline (circa 1609), The Winter’s Tale (circa 1611), and The Tempest (1611), Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (circa 1613), Middleton’s The Witch (circa 1616), Jonson’s masque, The Gypsies Metamorphosed (1621), and five plays in the Beaumont and Fletcher canon, The Captain (circa 1612), Valentinian (circa 1614), The Mad Lover (circa 1616), The Chances (circa 1617), and The Lover’s Progress (1623).
Alphono Ferrabosco, a viol player, was another composer who we know worked for them on at least one play, Jonson’s Volpone, performed at the Globe in 1606; his settings included one for its famous seduction song, “Come, my Celia, let us prove.” Jonson had worked with Ferrabosco on The Masque of Blackness (1605) and Hymenaei (1606), elaborate and extravagant court masques, to which music was central. Since the King’s Men supplied the speaking and singing roles for these events (while royalty and aristocrats posed and danced) a natural connection grew up between the actors and such musicians. Jonson praised Ferrabosco in the printed text of Hymenaei: “I do for honour’s sake, and the pledge of our friendship, name Master Alphonso Ferrabosco, a man planted by himself in that divine sphere, and mastering all the spirits of music; to whose judicial care, and as absolute performance, were committed all those difficulties both of song and otherwise; wherein, what his merit made to the soul of our invention would ask to be expressed in tunes no less ravishing than his” (Jonson 2012j, lines 584–8).
Such men were never regular employees of the company, and would be paid strictly on a commission basis. Songs always enjoyed a somewhat semidetached relationship to the plays in which they appeared and are often not printed with them (Stern, 2009a, 120–73). Most of John Lyly’s plays for boy companies in the 1580s, for example, first appeared without their songs; it was only in the collection of Six Court Comedies (1632) that their lyrics found their way into print. The stage directions in the quarto text of Merry Wives tell us that the “fairies” who torment Falstaff at the end of the play “sing a song about him” (G2, G3), but the words do not appear; they only survive in the folio version (5.5.93–102).