‘Let him stay at home and sing for his dinner’, advises Mistress Merrythought about her highly musical husband, Old Merrythought, who believes in achieving mirth and health through much singing, a good portion of which has the pretext of conviviality, in particular, drinking.1 The philosophy embedded in Old Merrythought’s sundry songs in Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle (c 1607)2 shows the coexistence of orderliness and disorderliness related to music, a duality pervasive in the use of music in English Renaissance drama. Early modern English culture attached a wide range of associations to music; various pairs of ideological dichotomies can be identified, such as sublimation and corruption of the soul, love and lust, masculinity and femininity, and destruction and restoration of sanity.3 In this essay, I first provide a brief contextual background of the perception and practice of music, and illustrate with a few episodes from Elizabethan and Jacobean plays the diversity of connotations carried by music as well as how music can be incorporated into various types of dramatic scenarios.4 These examples reflect the general musical landscape of Renaissance drama. I then evaluate the dramaturgical characteristics of Merrythought’s songs in relation to the contemporary cultural and dramatic milieux.