Modern productions of plays include all manner of music, accompaniment, and we almost consider an orchestra pit to be synonymous with theater today. For William Shakespeare, however, his plays were performed in a variety of locations, all of which were void of any orchestra pit but we do know that Shakespeare’s plays included music with works like Hamlet calling for Ophelia to sing a song, but also flourishes to signal entrances as well as exits, along with popular ballads and even a few songs we believe Shakespeare wrote himself. 

 

Our guest this week, Catherine Loomis, is here to help us explore the role of music in early modern theater, and the songs that survive from Shakespeare’s lifetime.

Catherine Loomis has taught at the University of New Orleans and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and currently teaches at the Rochester Institute of Technology. She is the author of The Death of Elizabeth I: Remembering and Reconstructing the Virgin Queen (2010) and the editor of William Shakespeare: A Documentary Volume (2005) and Shaping Shakespeare for Performance: The Bear Stage (2015) as well as essays on Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth, and theater history. She has lectured on Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth at the Folger Institute in Washington, DC, and at several universities. She is currently working on a collection of early modern poems and prose works in which male authors adopt a female narrative voice.