The function of music and song in Elizabethan drama through Shakespeare

Abstract

The Elizabethan age has been called "The Golden Age of English Music" and the England of that day "a nest of singing birds". We read that everybody sang - the tavern chanters their "catches" and the cultured their "ayres" and madrigals; that every barber-shop had its lute for customers to strum while waiting their turnj that every household had its virginal, and that every bourgeois was capable of extemporizing discant to a melody, or at least of fiddling a base.