Story of the Flute
dance" (Coriolanus v., 4, 52),—a passage recalling Nebuchadnezzar's band; "The spirit-stirring drum, the ear-piercing fife" (Othello, iii., 3, 352), and in The Merchant of Venice (ii., 5, 29), "the drum and the vile squeaking of the wry-neck't fife." The epithet "wry-neck't" probably refers to the neck of the player="wry-necked fifer"; as Barnaby Rich in his "Irish Hubbub" (Aphorisms, 1618) says, "a fife is a wry-neck't musician, for he always looks away from his instrument," and the footman in Overbury's Characters (1614) "with a wry neck falls to tuning his instrument."
The fife is mentioned by Holinshed (1577), by King James 1st in Chorus Venetus (c. 1600); and frequently in our early dramatists (almost always along with the drum).[1] In Cartwright's Ordinary, ii., 1 (1651), a military character comparing dishes of food to militaryThe Fifeand Flute
in the Early
Dramatists instruments has a fat collar of brawn served for a drum, and "a well-grown lamprey for a fife"; a curious allusion to the alleged derivation of the word "flute", just as Browne in Britannia's Pastorals says a little stiffened lamprey's skin served the fairies for a flute. Sackville's Gorboduc (1561) mentions flutes and drums
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- ↑ e.g., Marlowe's Edward II. (1598), and his translation of Lucan (1600), Kyd's Spanish Tragedy (c. 1594), The True Tragedy of Richard III. (1594), Chettle's Death of Robert Earl of Huntington (1601), Middleton's Spanish Gipsy (1623), his Fair Quarrel (1617), also Lingua (1607), Lady Alimony (1659), Jonson's Masque of Hymen (1606), and Jonson's Masque at Christmas (1616).
