As Christopher Wilson begins by saying, there are over 2,000 references to music and upwards of 400 musical terms in Shakespeare’s work. His book surveys what he calls “aspects of certain principal thematics” of this material by organizing it into nine chapters covering some of the different kinds of music, musical instruments, and musical theory to which Shakespeare refers. The focus of the book is on “the impact made on the sensory imagination when we know what a musical phrase or expression means and intends,” and although it is neither meant to be comprehensive nor to be a reference book, it covers the field pretty well. A reader with little or no musical training will learn a great deal both about the actual music encountered in the Shakespearean theater and about the figurative or imagined music to which Shakespeare is continually referring in his verse. From that standpoint, the most useful chapters will probably be those on “Consonance and Harmony” and “Music Theory and Pedagogy.”

There are informative chapters on the symbolic “language” of drum-and-trumpet military music, on the significance of dance, and on the natural “music” of birds — though one suspects that modern explanations of the biologically-determined nature of birdsong have little connection with Shakespeare’s poetical birds. (One can’t help wishing, too, that Professor Wilson had widened the scope of the chapter to include the dog-music of Elizabethan and Jacobean hunting packs, including Theseus’s.)

A chapter on popular song begins by noticing that neoclassicists attributed to Shakespeare a somewhat unsophisticated taste for the popular, but concludes that post-Shakespearean distinctions between the musical status of art and popular music simply break down if applied to Shakespeare’s practice. This is true enough, and not at all peculiar to Shakespeare in an age when the great Elizabethan keyboard masters Byrd and Bull composed variations on popular songs, including Ophelia’s “Walsingham” ballad. Professor Wilson’s reading of the thematics of that song, incidentally, would have benefitted greatly from the findings of Bradley Brookshire’s recent essay on Byrd’s “Walsingham” Variations.

Was Shakespeare himself musically trained? Louis Marder argued as much many years ago. Although Professor Wilson notices that Shakespeare knew a good deal about lutes, and had a real knowledge of practical and speculative musical theory, he will only allow that Shakespeare’s personal lute-playing is “an intriguing possibility.” In fact, this wide-ranging book shares an assumption to be found, probably, in every book of its kind: that despite the density of informed musical reference in the plays, and the sheer volume of actual music they call for, music in Shakespeare’s work is a decorative, if often significant, add-on to an essentially verbal set of artifacts. It’s an assumption that leads to a diminished awareness of the extent of the musical presence in Shakespeare as well as its significance. For instance, Professor Wilson writes that we find only the simpler ayres or solo lute songs in Shakespeare’s plays, when in fact there’s a good deal of ensemble music required for both voices and instruments, especially in Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, and The Tempest. Another kind of musical effect that goes unnoticed, which Shakespeare valued and the modern reader can easily miss, is the use of on-stage instrumental music to accompany spoken words. 1 Henry IV, Twelfth Night, and The Tempest offer striking examples of this eloquent mixing of words and music, later to be called “melodrama.”

The complete break in the transmission of performing styles, plus the loss of the music itself, means that we have little or no idea how complex the original effect of these uses of music might have been, although the survival of the lovely duet for the two page-boys in As You Like It gives us some idea. Yet if we judge by Shakespeare’s references, he was a connoisseur of good musical performance, and we have no reason to doubt that the music concluding A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It gave adequate musical expression to the social — and even cosmic — harmony implied by the resolution of the plays’ actions. In that connection, too, one could wish that Professor Wilson had indicated more clearly in his interesting treatment of “sweet” music that musical “sweetness” was an effect of a certain kind of tuning and intonation, itself — in the theory of the time — having cosmic, including religious, implications.

Nonetheless, and all reservations aside, Professor Wilson has written a helpful, informative, if sometimes rather clumsily written book.