Read The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England for Free Online Page B

and biting, and the monkey grip the saddle tightly and scream, many times being bitten, in which baiting the horse is often left dead and removed by the attendants …’ 45
    Music and Dancing
    Although no one has yet conclusively proved that music is the food of love, there is little doubt that Shakespeare himself thinks it is. More than 170 passages in his plays allude to music or musicians, airs or madrigals, and nearly all do so in a positive way. The words for many songs are reproduced verbatim in the plays. 46 Nor is Shakespeare alone in his passion for music: most Elizabethans are expected to play an instrument or at least to be able to sing. Barbers sometimes have a cittern or lute in their shops, which the customer is welcome to strum as he waits for his shave. The vast majority of taverns will have music played within, although the most commonly played instrument among working drinkers is still the bagpipes. In 1587 Stephen Gosson notes that ‘London is so full of unprofitable pipers and fiddlers that a man can no sooner enter atavern than two or three cast of them hang at his heels to give him a dance ere he depart.’ 47
    There is just as great an aptitude for music at the top end of the social spectrum. Ever since the Middle Ages noblemen have maintained their own musicians to entertain them during meals and to perform at feasts. The royal family leads the way: Henry VIII maintained as many as fifty-eight musicians, and Elizabeth has about thirty on the payroll of the royal household. The nobility themselves play music: all the members of the Willoughby family of Wollaton, for example, are trained to play the virginals. 48 The well-to-do ladies in Claudius Hollyband’s dialogue book declare, ‘our dancing master cometh at 9, our singing master and he that teacheth us to play on the virginals at 10, lute and viol de gamba at 4’. The queen too plays the virginals, the lute and the orpharion (a large cittern). The only difference between the aristocratic love of music and that of the common people is that noblemen and ladies are expected never to play in public, only in private. Elizabeth explains that she is fond of playing the virginals because it calms her down.
    If you are keen to play along with the musicians of Elizabethan England, you will have plenty of opportunities to do so. However, it may not be as easy as you think. Music is not written or printed in the modern way. Although the notes are depicted in more or less the same form, there are no bar marks. This makes it very difficult to play in time together – especially because music books are not printed with all the parts of a five-part piece on the same page. They are designed to be dismantled and handed out to the various players, who only have their own part. Take a music book like Anthony Holborne’s Pavans, Galliards, Almains and Other Short Aeirs Both Grave and Light in Five Parts (1599) and you will see that all the canto parts to all sixty-five pieces of music are printed in one section, all the alto parts in another, and all the ‘quinto’, tenor and bass parts in separate sections after that. Therefore you cannot see what the other parts are doing. Music stands are very rare; normally music is laid on a table.
    The instruments also vary from their modern equivalents. A lute is not like a guitar. Its head is at a right angle to the neck, its gut strings are all in pairs or ‘courses’, and it may have anything from six to ten courses, with the strings of lower courses tuned an octave apart from one another. The standard tuning is in fourths, with amajor third between the central pair of courses; but there are many variations on this. Easier to play is the cittern, which generally only has four courses, a flat back and an angled neck. Large bass versions are known as ‘bandoras’, and intermediate ones as ‘orpharions’. Instruments of the viol family, whether small ones the size and shape of a violin or large ones the size of a