SOURCE: Ingram, R. W. “Music as Structural Element in Shakespeare.” In Shakespeare 1971: Proceedings of the World Shakespeare Congress, Vancouver, August 1971, edited by Clifford Leech and J. M. R. Margeson, pp. 174-89. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972.

In the following essay, originally delivered as a lecture in 1971, Ingram explores Shakespeare's unconventional use of military music in the English history plays, especially Henry VI, Part 1. He also examines the way that parodic or ironic music underscores the dissonance between pretense and reality in Troilus and Cressida.

My texts are taken from Thomas Heywood and Hereward T. Price. In his An Apology for Actors (1612), Heywood wrote that ‘a description is only a shadow received by the ear but not perceived by the eye; so lively portraiture is merely a form seen by the eye, but can neither show action, passion, motion, or any other gesture, to move the spirits of the...