Shakespeares Songs: Black Spirits (Macbeth)

So few songs in Shakespeares

plays have survived with original
music. Of about 60 song lyrics, only
a few exist in musical settings.
Printers in the early 1600s provided
titles of tunes but not the music. The
tunes survived separately, mostly as
arrangements for solo instruments,
like the lute, cittern, harpsichord,
bandora or orpharion,

For over 150 years, scholars have tried to find these

songs (with music). The first scholar to do this
successfully was Ross W. Duffin who wrote
Shakespeares Songbook, published in 2004 1.
It took Duffin 8 years to research collections of
ballads, narratives, drinking songs, love songs, and
rounds that are associated with Shakespeares plays.
Using the resources of the Folger Shakespeare
Library, Duffin brought together complete lyrics (many
newly recovered) and music for the first time.
The Songbook enriches the experience of reading or
watching plays because it adds greatly to the context and sheds new light on Shakespeares
imagination. Stephen Orgel writes in the Foreword:
Ross Duffin shows us more than the practical aspects of Shakespeares music: he
shows the popular songs of the age deeply embedded in the texture of the dramatic
language itself, through a multitude of allusions and snatches of lyrics--shows us, that
is, that music represents a significant element of the imagination of Shakespeares
theater. That dimension of Shakespeares text is necessarily lost to us, but this book
represents a remarkable project of recovery.

Duffin, Ross W. (2004) Shakspeares Songbook. W.W. Norton and Company, Inc.

Shakespeares dramatic poetry performed on the Elizabethan stage was full of real, practical
music that contributed to the story, for example, sad songs for sad settings or magical songs
for supernatural settings.
Macbeth 4.1: Context of the song, Black Spirits
HECATE (head witch):
Oh well done: I commend your pains,
And every one shall share ith gains:
And now about the Cauldron sing
Like Elves and Fairies in a Ring,
Inchanting all that you put in.

Song sung here

HECATE:
Black Spirits and White: Red Spirits and Gray,
Mingle, Mingle, Mingle, you that mingle may.
Titty, Tiffin: keep it stiff in.
Fire-Drake, Puckey, make it Luckey.
Liard, Robin, you must bob in.
Round, a-round, a-round, about, about
All ill come running-in, all Good keep-out.