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occasions Shakespeare’s atmospheric musicians paraded openly onstage. At other times they played behind curtains or under the stage, which had a trapdoor and cavity for the use of gravediggers, prisoners, and similar underground characters. 17 Shakespeare several times made use of “sleep music” to induce slumber in his characters for dramatic purposes. In The Tempest Ferdinand is sung to sleep by the enchanting “Come unto these Yellow Sands.” For Henry IV, Part 1 (as we shall see), Shakespeare had use of a Welsh-speaking teenage boy who played the monoglot daughter of Glendower and sang her husband Mortimer to sleep with a Welsh lullaby. Shakespeare also used music and singing to broaden his character studies. Thus in Measure for Measure , Marianna’s self-indulgence is emphasized by the song “Take, Oh Take, Those Lips Away!” In Twelfth Night Feste’s beautiful song “O Mistress Mine” tells us about the relationship between Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek and their sovereign lady. In A Winter’s Tale , at the end of the fifth act, Paulina brings Queen Hermione’s statue to life with the words “Music! Awake her! Strike! Tis time. Descend. Be stone no more. Approach!” It is not difficult to imagine the music accompanying these dramatic words, which are immediately followed by the reconciliation between Hermione and her husband, King Leontes, and the rebirth of love with which the play ends.
    Though some textual indications (alarums, excursions, etc.) indicate particular instruments—trumpets signify the anger of battle; “ho’boys” signify fear creeping in—the texts rarely indicate the musical comments that were frequent throughout a play. As Shakespeare grew more experienced, it is possible to trace a steady and impressive increase in artistry, both in the use of music and in the many art songs themselves, in presentation. So modern productions that are not “scored” or “orchestrated” leave out a dimension of the plays. That of course is one reason why Shakespeare’s texts lend themselves so easily (and often) to opera. The 200-plus operatic versions mentioned earlier do not include the fashion for “music plays” of the seventeenth century, which may have begun during Shakespeare’s lifetime but which certainly dominated the reopened stage after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, when a music-starved public flocked to listen to musical adaptations of plays, especially Shakespeare’s. Purcell and Dryden played important roles in this development, which saw Macbeth , The Tempest, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream established as favorites. The Dream also inspired Purcell’s Fairy Queen (1692), though the latter is more a series of masques than a play and does not include settings of Shakespeare’s words. 18 The rage for musical versions of Shakespeare was a nineteenth-century phenomenon that continued into the twentieth century and on into the twenty-first. In musical inspiration Shakespeare is easily ahead of all rivals, Goethe coming next with about sixty musical settings; then Byron and Scott, with fifty-five each; and Victor Hugo with fifty-two. Very occasionally the composer excels the playwright—thus Verdi’s Falstaff is a better opera than The Merry Wives of Windsor is a play. But in almost every other case the subtle verbal music of Shakespeare’s texts defiesimprovement by the composer. Verdi’s early opera Macbeth is a travesty of that monument to poetic horror, Shakespeare’s play; and the musical Kiss Me, Kate , though highly successful and often revived, mainly serves to set off the theatrical fun and brilliance of The Taming of the Shrew .
    Shakespeare, then, was a virtuoso in words and sounds; and in his plays, though anxious always to follow a story line which is plausible and (when appropriate) historically accurate, he is equally, perhaps more, keen to create opportunities for his virtuosity. He quickly learned that, in the theater, an