SOURCE: Greenfield, Thelma N. “Nonvocal Music: Added Dimension in Five Shakespeare Plays.” In Pacific Coast Studies in Shakespeare, edited by Waldo F. McNeir and Thelma N. Greenfield, pp. 106-21. Eugene: University of Oregon, 1966.

In the following essay, Greenfield discusses the integral function of music in several Shakespearean plays. She focuses on musical imagery in Richard II; Lorenzo's discourse on music in Act V, scene v of The Merchant of Venice; the disparate effects of martial music in Coriolanus; and the patterns of sound that accompany crucial episodes in Hamlet and the murder of Duncan in Macbeth.

Inadequacies of Elizabethan play productions, like the inadequacies of Elizabethan play audiences, doubtless have a firmer basis in persistent myth than in historical truth. The popular picture of the Elizabethan actor ranting his lines on a poor bare stage with only his words to provide scenery, sound, and atmosphere hardly agrees with...