Twelfth Night I, i, 1
Those first words of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, spoken by the lovesick Duke Orsino of Illyria, is indicative of the lofty esteem in which music was held during the Renaissance. Having most of its roots in the devotional liturgies of church and abbey, music in Shakespeare's age was expanding and developing along increasingly secular lines. Its use as an accompaniment to poetry was in keeping with the conception of music's function in ancient Greece and Rome, those touchstones of all things civilized in the Renaissance mind.
One of the more striking musical instruments in Agecroft Hall's collection is this clavicytherium (pictured), dating to the first quarter of the seventeenth century and Italian in origin. About 59 inches high, it's suggestive of an upright harpsichord, and that's essentially what it is. Like the harpsichord, its strings are designed to be plucked, rather than struck with a hammer like the later piano. The result is a delicate sound, soothing to the ear of the lovelorn, no doubt. Apparently the upright alignment of the instrument, while taking up less space in a room, did make for more complications in maintenance and proper tuning. The clavicytherium came to be regarded as more problem-prone than the horizontally-aligned harpsichord, and far fewer were made.
Agecroft's clavicytherium has a keyboard with 38 white and 20 black keys. Its strings are of brass. The instrument was acquired from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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