Shakespeare: The Sweet Power of Musicke - The New York Consort of Viols

"The Sweet Power of Musicke" is appraised in some thirty lines of verse, spoken by Lorenzo to Jessica while musicians play, just before Portia arrives home at Belmont in the last scene of The Merchant of Venice. The speech is Shakespeare’s most extensive single discourse on music, which he calls for and refers to frequently in his plays. The varieties of music on this recording would have been familiar to his contemporaries, particularly to the aristocrats and courtiers, since indoor, courtly music was generally written for the viols, the lute, or the virginals—a smaller version of, as well as a synonym for, the harpsichord. When Shakespeare wrote Sonnet 128, he seems to have thought that the “jacks’ were the wooden keys of a virginals rather than the mechanisms that plucked the strings when keys were depressed.

The tunes are popular as well as courtly, the most popular being those old ballad favorites Walsingham, Bonny Sweet Robin and Greensleeves. Although originally thoroughly secular love ballads, the three tunes were used for other texts adapted to religious purposes as early as the sixteenth century—as settings for versified psalms, carols, or hymns. Shakespeare makes use of this practice as a metaphor for the contrast between Falstaff’s words and his “disposition’” in The Merry Wives of Windsor when he has Mistress Ford remark that ”they do no more adhere and keep place together than the Hundredth Psalm to the tune of Greensleeves.“ His only other reference to the tune is also in The Merry Wives, where, in the last scene of the play, Falstaff, wearing the buck’s head prefaces his embracing of Mistress Ford with the invocations: “Let the sky rain potatoes; let it thunder to the tune of Greensleeves." It is pertinent in both episodes to recall that ‘Lady Greensleeves’ was a euphemism for a woman of easy virtue.