Music for Shakespeare in Nineteenth-Century American Theatre

Abstract

On the American stage, especially in the first half of the nineteenth century, performances of Shakespeare were closely allied with British practices since so many actors emigrated from Britain or toured in the United States. This tendency was also reflected in the musical provision for American productions of the Bard’s plays. The gradual development away from British-inspired scoring practices is surveyed in this chapter, which draws on evidence from six distinct sources: (1) individual songs or composers identified on theatrical playbills; (2) references to music in secondary sources such as books and scholarly articles; (3) promptbooks used in productions; (4) instrumental and/or vocal parts (typically in manuscript) found in libraries, mostly in theatre collections; (5) notices of music in primary sources such as reviews or autobiographies; and (6) printed music. The chapter covers music for the professional stage (notably at Daly’s Theatre in New York City, and melodramatic treatments of Macbeth), lower-budget touring and amateur productions, and the highly popular burlesque. The last of these, more than any other stage genre, transformed the Bard’s work into a middlebrow form of entertainment uniquely American in the diversity of the cultural and musical influences it embodied.