A consideration of the role that music plays in the dramas of Shakespeare is to be found in reference works of all kinds from the comprehensive encyclopaedia to the brief article in a periodical. General, and specifically English, histories of music include material on Shakespeare, and the forthcoming volume IV of the New Oxford History of Music will deal with music for the theatre in Shakespeare’s time.

The researches of eighteenth-century scholars provided the basis for subsequent research. It is, perhaps, not generally realized how many musical problems are touched upon in Bishop Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry of 1765. His second book 'containing ballads that illustrate Shakespeare' was a pilot study that tried to illuminate the Shakespeare lyrics by reference to sources of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This enthusiasm for the old ballads also distinguishes Thomas Warton's History of English Poetry (1774-81). The sympathies of Percy and Warton, harbingers of the coming Romanticism, differed widely from the antiquarian bent of a Joseph Ritson, yet the latter's Ancient Songs (1790; rev. W. C. Hazlitt, 1877) is also a standard source for glosses of later commentators.