Music for Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon

Abstract

This chapter explores music in the performance of Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon in two crucial but very different eras. The Shakespeare Memorial Theatre opened in 1879, and in the thirty years before the First World War, most of the time actor-manager Frank Benson was in charge during the annual festivals. The study reveals the financially threadbare workings of a provincial touring company for whom music was a necessary add-on. Audiences had a lingering nineteenth-century taste for sumptuous effects with ballet and familiar songs, but it was a style that was waning. Latterly Ralph Vaughan Williams attempted to pare back extraneous effects (something that was to come fifty years later), but he struggled to change entrenched Bensonian practices. Radically different in the 1960s was the approach of the newly renamed Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), which, under the rejuvenating leadership of Peter Hall, was rapidly established as a major national and international company. The influx of new talent included Guy Woolfenden embedded in a team of innovative directors and designers; he studied the work of the actors in rehearsal and sensitively wrote songs for their individual voices. He developed a skilled permanent instrumental team and a cornucopia of percussion was purchased. Eventually Woolfenden wrote for all the plays in the canon, some several times. This chapter argues that he influenced the approach to theatre-music in the second half of the twentieth century; it explores some of his scores and edges towards an understanding of the impact of his thirty-seven years with the company.