From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited.

I'm Michael Whitmore, the Folgers director.

This podcast takes a look at a subject that has surprisingly been relatively absent from Shakespeare scholarship.

The custom of making up music to go along with the lyrics in Shakespeare. surprisingly been relatively absent from Shakespeare scholarship.

The custom of making up music to go along with the lyrics in Shakespeare's plays.

The majority of the plays call for singing.

Sometimes it's part of the action, sometimes it seems to spring out of nowhere.

And while the lyrics to the songs appear to have always been part of the text,

the musical notes those lyrics were to be sung to have been lost over the years.

One of the few people who is written on this subject is David Lindley,

Professor Emeritus of Literature and Music at the University of Leeds.

He joins us for a tour of this 400-year-old tradition.

We call this podcast, I, Prithi, Sing.

David is interviewed by Neba Grant.

Could you tell me, how old is musical notation, as we know it today?

Did they even have it in Elizabethan time?

Oh, certainly, and had

for two or three centuries beforehand, at least. I mean, there are traces of Greek notation,

though nobody quite knows what they mean. But by the 14th century, notation was around and

quite complex. By the 16th century, it was being printed as well.

There's printed music, printed notation, which we can recognise now.

And in Shakespeare's time, do they have the tools for a printer to print musical scores?

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