For the past week we have been reading about the birthday and/or recorded death date of a certain prominent playwright and poet from Elizabethan England.  The literary output of this legendary (some say mythical) figure is still the source of employment for many stage actors, theater directors and university lecturers, not to mention loggers – deforesting large swaths of countryside to generate enough paper stock for the annual crop of dissertations on our subject.

It turns out that a musical thread runs through the works of our playwright and poet, whether via stage directions indicating actual songs or simply by passing reference to once-familiar ballads mentioned in dialogue, and imagery woven into the soliloquies of some of his most colorful characters.

„Grim-visag’d Warre, hath smooth’d his wrinkled Front:
And now, in stead of mounting Barbed Steeds,
To fright the Soules of fearfull Aduersaries,
He capers nimbly in a…