A Dramaturgical Study of Merrythought's Songs in The Knight of the Burning Pestle 'Since singing is so good a thing, / I wish all men would learne to sing'. 12 Singing was meant to be common for everyone in Elizabethan England. As F.W. Sternfeld writes, paraphrasing Thomas Morley, 'the art of singing was cultivated with equal zeal and discernment in every grade of social rank'. 13 Such inclination, however, often found constraint in contemporary society since it was deemed inappropriate for aristocrats or gentlefolks to either sing or play musical instruments in public, as is made clear by Henry Peacham: 'I desire no more in you than to sing your part sure, and at the first sight, withall, to play the same upon your Violl, or the exercise of the Lute, privately to your selfe' (my emphasis). 14 Society expected a distinction to be maintained between members of the nobility and their music-providing attendants. Benefits in music, however, can be overridden by anxieties about the possible detrimental effects it may cause. Puritan writer Philip Stubbes, for example, denounces music in Anatomy of Abuses. He accuses it of contaminating young girls' minds: 'if you would have your daughter whorish, bawdy, and uncleane, and a filthy speaker, and such like, bring her up in musicke and dauncing'. Regarding the upbringing of boys, he writes: If you would have your sonne soft, womannish, uncleane, smooth mouthed, affected to bawdry, scurrility, filthy rimes, and unseemly talking: briefly, if you wold have him, as it were transnatured into a woman, or worse, and inclined to all kind of whordome and abhomination, set him to dauncing schoole, and to learn Musicke, and then shall you not faile your purpose. 15
