Instruments in Elizabethan Drama

This is not the same article as Hannah Cruze's - it actually has nothing in particular to do with The Knight of The Burning Pestle. Rather, it provides some useful terminology and background to understanding instrumentation and music in drama.

It does, of course, include references to specific plays which themselves reference particular instruments, and suggests historical meanings for why specific instruments or songs may have been chosen.

The article discusses what we so commonly see in Shakespeare and other plays in the stage directions - i.e. hautboy plays or loud music. It gives the general understanding of what this meant at the time. The most interesting thing to me, I think, is that some of these stage directions actually indicate a much greater use of music than what we might perceive them to mean today. I read somewhere else that it is quite possible that The Tempest was much more like a musical, in terms of how much music was played and sung during production, than a regular stage play at the time. It's not something that I could include in my paper, but I just found it super interesting.

Fitzgibbon, H. Macaulay. "Instruments and Their Music in the Elizabethan Drama." The Musical Quarterly 17.3 (Jul. 1931): 319-329. JSTOR. 4 May 2015.