Shakespeare in the Round: Harmonic Logic of the Globe

Today, we might go “see” a play. Shakespeare’s contemporaries, however, went to “hear” them. Using historically grounded modes of understanding harmony as a governing principle of instrumental music and the cosmos itself, I perform close readings of The Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream to show how music surfaces not only in interludes and songs, but also in the structures of dialogues, plots, and player-audience interaction. Teasing out the musical logic that informs Renaissance theatrical composition, we find ourselves surrounded by—and partaking in—the “music of the spheres.