In the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603), an experience of music among the great could be much more than an experience of sound. There was a space, perhaps a familiar one and opulent, with textiles, grotesquerie and heraldic panels to entice the eye and complement what was heard, for musical sound also has a surface. There was company, some attentive, some perhaps thinking of the board games that might follow, arrayed in garments that a practised gaze could interpret in terms of power and dependency. There were musicians, who might be the salaried members of a liveried group, their music intangible in performance but perhaps given material substance with pen, ink and paper – things that had a mystique of their own in an age when even the great found writing a high and formal craft. Finally, there were musical instruments: shapely, fragile and often temperamental by modern standards, the more expensive of them using inlay and exotic imported woods. Their sounds, timbres and varied repertoires evoked the indoor pleasures of the hall, chamber and tavern, or the diversions of the festive year at church ales and other ceremonies, as the seasonal flowers and fruits appeared in their annual round.

The Table and its context

The Eglantine Table, probably made during the late 1560s and now to be seen at Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire, conveys an exceptional sense of music as a variegated experience. It is 900 mm high, 3,020 mm long and 1,290 mm wide, and its entire upper surface is decorated with marquetry and inlay images depicting fifteen contemporary musical instruments, often in exquisite detail, open books and scrolls of music with legible musical notation, gaming boards, writing implements, heraldic beasts and flowers (Figure A and Plate 2). The surface also shows the arms of Elizabeth, Countess of Shrewsbury (1527?–1608), commonly known today as Bess of Hardwick. As the various biographies devoted to her reveal, Bess has been admired down the centuries for her shrewdness, her capacity for self-directed action during four marriages to powerful men, and her lavish expenditure on buildings. In 1552 she and her second husband, Sir William Cavendish, began to create a great house at Chatsworth, in the valley of the Derwent, which Bess completed in 1580 during her marriage to her last spouse George Talbot, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury (c1522–1590).

Even if depictions of musical instruments in Elizabethan art were plentiful, the Eglantine Table would count as a major source of information about the appearance and fashioning of the kinds that were played during the queen's reign. Yet such representations are, in fact, very rare. Depictions such as the scene with violinists in Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder's painting commonly known as A Fetê at Bermondsey, the broken consort and the viol consort in the portrait of Sir Henry Unton, and the citterns and bandoras carved on the staircase of Lord Burghley's house at Theobalds, now at Herstmonceux Castle, are all the more precious for being exceptional. The consequences may be imagined. Despite A Fête at Bermondsey and a handful of other examples, sixteenth-century English depictions of bowed instruments, for example, are too rare to provide a canon that might establish whether those shown on the Eglantine Table should be regarded as typical or extraordinary.

The contributors to this book must often reach for continental examples to find a comparator or illuminate a point. Without such comparators, and even with them, it is often hard to establish the relation between a representation of an instrument in an English source of the sixteenth century – the Eglantine Table or any other – and the object to which the picture alludes. Consequently, it is difficult to distinguish what may be typical from what may be anomalous, or even to verify the currency of anything answering in more than a general way to what is shown. Features or combinations of features that appear only in one depiction may be erroneous or idiosyncratic, but may also indicate something otherwise undocumented, while the absence of a feature or even a type of instrument from the pictorial record does not prove that it was unknown or even rare.

If the English material is sparse relative to what may be found abroad, it is not simply because ‘the Continent’ in this context means a riven Western Christendom extending from at least Atlantic France to Hungary. It is also, in the first instance, because a great deal of native work has been lost.

Three instruments with bows are depicted on the Eglantine Table (Plates 4 and 5), and they all pose the same question: is this a member of the viol family (viola da gamba) or of the violin family (viola da braccio)? The anonymous author of The praise of musicke (1586) believed that instruments had become so diverse by his day that they were harder to name than to make, so the question of whether the bowed instruments of the Table are to be called viols or violins would have seemed a cogent one to the best-informed Elizabethans, and yet our predicament is somewhat different from theirs. We seek and expect clear identifications, but it is likely that many early admirers of the Eglantine Table would have indifferently referred to the instruments with bows as viols, violins, or perhaps something else again.

To be sure, it is possible to draw up a list of characteristics that seem to distinguish viols and violins, in general terms, from one another as we review their history from the sixteenth century onwards. Such a list would associate viols (but not violins) with the use of frets, for example, and violins (but not viols) with the use of just four strings. To material criteria such as these we could add matters of repertoire and social context – as, for example, by associating viols (but not violins) with the cultured amateur and violins with the professional. Yet the mere possibility of framing such a list, which has perhaps already become somewhat puzzling, should not mislead us. These are all generalisations, liable to be called into question, or even falsified, by a passing reference in a contemporary text, a painting, an archival document or an engraving. However useful they may be at one level, they drain the colour from the rich and vigorous musical culture of bowed instruments that contemporaries knew. Even the trained musicians of the Elizabethan period, we may suspect, did not usually employ the kind of precision, associating the names of musical instruments with particular sets of diagnostic features, that a modern orchestral musician, for example, would use when speaking of violins as opposed to violas. It required the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, and the later concern with classification in sciences such as botany and geology, for such rigorously taxonomic thinking to become instinctive.