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 dance" (Coriolanus v., 4, 52),a passage recalling Nebuchadnezzar's band; "The spirit-stirring drum, the ear-piercing fife" (Othello, iii., 3, 352), and in The Merchant of Venice (ii., 5, 29), "the drum and the vile squeaking of the wry-neck't fife." The epithet "wry-neck't" probably refers to the neck of the player="wry-necked fifer"; as Barnaby Rich in his "Irish Hubbub" (Aphorisms, 1618) says, "a fife is a wry-neck't musician, for he always looks away from his instrument," and the footman in Overbury's Characters (1614) "with a wry neck falls to tuning his instrument."

The fife is mentioned by Holinshed (1577), by King James 1st in Chorus Venetus (c. 1600); and frequently in our early dramatists (almost always along with the drum). In Cartwright's Ordinary, ii., 1 (1651), a military character comparing dishes of food to military instruments has a fat collar of brawn served for a drum, and "a well-grown lamprey for a fife"; a curious allusion to the alleged derivation of the word "flute", just as Browne in Britannia's Pastorals says a little stiffened lamprey's skin served the fairies for a flute. Sackville's Gorboduc (1561) mentions flutes and drums