‘Where should this music be?’

Abstract

This chapter analyses the main collections centred on Shakespearean music published in the nineteenth century with a view to determining the underlying cultural processes that led to their creation. Largely through the frequent revivals of the plays, by the early nineteenth century there developed a significant number of settings of the songs, several of which had held the stage since the early eighteenth century. William Linley was first to anthologize the plays’ songs, thus presenting them as a coherent body deserving of prominence in the cultural imagination. By the end of the century, the repertoire had become vast enough to warrant catalogues of musical references and musical settings. The central argument offered is that this emergence of ‘Shakespearean song’ as a sub-plot within bardolatory was an expression of cultural nationalism, in which the idea of Shakespeare as inherently musical dramatist filled the cultural void created by the perceived failure of English music.