Chaucer and Shakespeare
"flowtours" are mentioned, and one named Wicked Tongue is said to have played discordantly. "Floutys ful of armonie" are mentioned by Lydgate (c. 1406), and Caxton, writing about 1483, names the flute several times. In Dunbar's early Scottish poem, The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy (c. 1504) we find "Tak thee a fidall or a floyt to jeist." Skelton in his Vox Populi (c. 1529) has a quaint proverbial expression "They may go blow their flute"—i.e., whistle for something. The flute is frequently included in the lists of instruments which occur in our early poets. In several cases "flutes" are named as distinct from "recorders," e.g. Hollands' Pliny, v. 1 (1601), "the flute and single pipe or recorder" (see also p. 34, ante).
Shakespeare mentions both the flute and recorder, and also the fife. I need not here refer to the famous passage about the recorder in Hamlet (iii. 2). The flute is named twice in Antony and Cleopatra: inThe Flute
and Fife in
Shake-
speare act ii., 7, 137, flutes, drums, and trumpets are mentioned, and in the description of Cleopatra's barge (ii., 2, 199)—"The oars were silver, which, to the tune of flutes, kept stroke"—(which is taken almost verbatim from North's Plutarch, c. 1580: Plutarch's word is αὐλόν, which North translates "flutes").
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