Abstract
This lovely song from one of the least-known plays of Shakespeare, a play of which the very authorship has been disputed, gives us the one essential fact about Orpheus in mythology, the fact from which all the other attributes are derived-that he was a consummate musician, the patron and even the inventor of all musical arts, and that his music had supernatural powers. When we come to consider the use made of the Orpheus legend by musicians we shall find that they all deal with one particular story, that of Orpheus descending into the underworld to recover by means of the power of his music his wife Eurydice, and how at the end he lost her by disobeying the orders of the gods and looking back at her. This is in itself one of the immortal stories, with love, music, death and tragedy interwoven in it, but it owes its interest almost entirely to Virgil's treatment of it. At the end of the fourth Georgic, after a long treatise on bee-keeping, he suddenly tells the story of Orpheus and Eurydice in perhaps the finest poetry that even he ever wrote. Ever since then poets and musicians have returned again and again to his words. Yet the association of Orpheus with Eurydice is due mainly to Virgil; before him Orpheus stands alone as a mysterious
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