As wealth is concentrated upwards into the hands of the lucky few, so misery is concentrated in the lower echelons of society, and there is no one lower on the scale of being than hospital patients. They walk around bare-assed. They are bankrupt. They are not working.
I have a facsimile of John Dowland's First Book of Songs. It folds open with each of four musical parts facing to the four different sides of a table. Four singers and a lute player can seat themselves around it and read the music with their own part facing them. People knew how to sing music from written parts back then.
A rather fancy family might have a chest of recorders, viols, or some other consort of instruments. Sackbutts and krumhorns, anyone? It was home entertainment in a low-energy time, when we did not have electricity funneling various amusements into our homes for us.
An early music specialist came to my college and we formed a "broken consort" of unlike instruments (lute, bandora, cittern, viola da gamba, and flute,) to rehearse and perform a concert of Elizabethan music. I played the little cittern. The only time I ever have. I had been studying on my own and I could read the tablature notation, so the early music professor recruited me for the gig.
The headstock of the cittern I played had a blindfolded man's head carved into it.
Citterns, lutes, mandoras, and other instruments used to hang from the walls of Elizabethan barber shops. Loops of string tacked to the walls would hold the instruments by their headstocks. The blindfolded man was a sort of common joke, as the loop of string would circle under the neck of the hanged man.
While you were waiting for your shave or haircut, you would take an instrument down from the wall and play upon it.
Now we have fucking Fox News everywhere. So I refuse to have my hair cut at a salon anymore. It can grow to my knees.
