Pub Date : 2022-02-14DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.22
P. Bullock
Although Shakespeare’s literary reception in nineteenth-century Russia has been well mapped, less attention has been given to his musical afterlife. This chapter examines Shakespeare’s place in nineteenth-century Russian music from three complementary perspectives. First, it will consider how Shakespeare’s characters and plots were taken up in the mid-century tone poem, with a particular focus on Balakirev’s overture to King Lear. Second, it will examine the use of music in stage productions of Shakespeare’s plays, taking by way of example not just Balakirev’s incidental music for King Lear, but also Tchaikovsky’s music for Hamlet (rather than his better-known tone poems, Romeo and Juliet and The Tempest). Finally, a third model of reception is explored in the form of a discussion of Musorgsky’s treatment of Pushkin’s Boris Godunov. Rather than setting Shakespeare directly, Musorgsky engages in a triangulation of literary influence, drawing on Pushkin’s historical drama (widely regarded as an attempt to import Shakespearean principles as a way of distancing himself from the precepts of French neo-classicism) as a way of distancing himself from Italian models of operatic action (including many on Shakespearean themes).
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Pub Date : 2022-02-14DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.6
Joseph M. Ortiz
This chapter considers the ways in which Shakespeare incorporates a sense of musical time into his plays and poetry. While scholars have often considered how poetic ideas might inform Shakespeare’s deployment of music in his works, less attention has been given to the possibility that musical conventions also inform Shakespeare’s experiments with verse. Unlike poetic verse, musical time structures do not easily accommodate pentameter or the metric irregularities that Shakespeare and his contemporaries liked to create in poetry. However, musical time does allow for the possibility of measurable, meaningful silence. Renaissance music theorists in particular were concerned with notational systems that could reliably indicate intervals of performed silence. This chapter first considers how Renaissance musicians such as Morley and Dowland theorized and defined the musical ‘rest’. It then considers Shakespeare’s prosodic experiments in Richard II and Hamlet, arguing that Shakespeare attempts to incorporate intentional, measured silence by alluding to musical terms and taking advantage of metric irregularities. By applying musical rules to printed verse, Shakespeare effectively prompts his audience to hear silence not as meaningful, but as scripted.
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Pub Date : 2022-02-14DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.52
A. Rodgers
While some critics have argued that music’s role in contemporary staged Shakespeare’s meaning has diminished since the Renaissance, this chapter explores music’s deeply significant role in filmed Shakespeare, particularly in the films of Vishal Bhardwaj. Arguing that a focus on alternative lexicons (such as those expressed by music and dance) that play a significant role in non-Anglophone Shakespeare, this chapter contends that the field can offer a broader hermeneutic, hence inclusive, epistemological field, via more careful attention to the ways that non-Western and non-Anglophone cultures interpret and use Shakespeare as mythic, narrative, and sociocultural commentary on their own historical moment outside of Shakespeare’s language. Such a reconsideration of language as the most significant locus of meaning within Shakespeare’s studies facilitates a more capacious template for understanding how Shakespeare can be deployed as a form of resistant participation in what Barbara Hodgdon has called ‘the Shakespeare trade’. Via a focus on Vishal Bhardwaj’s tragic trilogy—Maqbool (2003), Omkara (2006), and Haider (2014—this chapter explores how this composer-filmmaker’s Shakespearean oeuvre provides insight into these plays’ historical and performed past, and, even more significantly, their practice-based and interpretative present and future. In particular, the chapter focuses on Bhardwaj’s participation in a ‘Shakespeare’ that interrogates the (still rather strongly stratified) boundaries of its Anglophone performance and literary traditions. In doing so, these works imagine, even help bring into being, an entity that is fluid, multicultural, and endlessly ‘adaptive’.
{"title":"Rhizomatic Harmonies","authors":"A. Rodgers","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.52","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.52","url":null,"abstract":"While some critics have argued that music’s role in contemporary staged Shakespeare’s meaning has diminished since the Renaissance, this chapter explores music’s deeply significant role in filmed Shakespeare, particularly in the films of Vishal Bhardwaj. Arguing that a focus on alternative lexicons (such as those expressed by music and dance) that play a significant role in non-Anglophone Shakespeare, this chapter contends that the field can offer a broader hermeneutic, hence inclusive, epistemological field, via more careful attention to the ways that non-Western and non-Anglophone cultures interpret and use Shakespeare as mythic, narrative, and sociocultural commentary on their own historical moment outside of Shakespeare’s language. Such a reconsideration of language as the most significant locus of meaning within Shakespeare’s studies facilitates a more capacious template for understanding how Shakespeare can be deployed as a form of resistant participation in what Barbara Hodgdon has called ‘the Shakespeare trade’. Via a focus on Vishal Bhardwaj’s tragic trilogy—Maqbool (2003), Omkara (2006), and Haider (2014—this chapter explores how this composer-filmmaker’s Shakespearean oeuvre provides insight into these plays’ historical and performed past, and, even more significantly, their practice-based and interpretative present and future. In particular, the chapter focuses on Bhardwaj’s participation in a ‘Shakespeare’ that interrogates the (still rather strongly stratified) boundaries of its Anglophone performance and literary traditions. In doing so, these works imagine, even help bring into being, an entity that is fluid, multicultural, and endlessly ‘adaptive’.","PeriodicalId":166828,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Music","volume":"924 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123049797","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-14DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.10
Simon Smith
For many early modern playgoers, music was not a peripheral feature of commercial drama, but a chief attraction of the theatres—sometimes even the primary motivation for playgoing. This chapter explores early evidence of musically interested playgoers and their engagements with practical musical performance at venues like the Globe and Blackfriars. It works with a range of examples before taking The Merchant of Venice as an extended test case in the early modern relationship between drama and music. Through these materials, the chapter offers three core propositions about playhouse engagements with music during Shakespeare’s working life. The first is that musical experience was in itself a significant and widely acknowledged incentive for playgoing that can be traced across the textual record. The second is that playgoers regularly encountered music as an integral element of a play’s dramaturgy, and so their musical experiences need to be understood in the context of their wider engagements with drama. The final suggestion is that playwrights like Shakespeare anticipated the overlap of musical and dramatic experience in playhouse performance by embedding music into their dramaturgical designs, using playhouse responses to music to shape dramatic meaning.
{"title":"Early Encounters with Shakespeare Music","authors":"Simon Smith","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.10","url":null,"abstract":"For many early modern playgoers, music was not a peripheral feature of commercial drama, but a chief attraction of the theatres—sometimes even the primary motivation for playgoing. This chapter explores early evidence of musically interested playgoers and their engagements with practical musical performance at venues like the Globe and Blackfriars. It works with a range of examples before taking The Merchant of Venice as an extended test case in the early modern relationship between drama and music. Through these materials, the chapter offers three core propositions about playhouse engagements with music during Shakespeare’s working life. The first is that musical experience was in itself a significant and widely acknowledged incentive for playgoing that can be traced across the textual record. The second is that playgoers regularly encountered music as an integral element of a play’s dramaturgy, and so their musical experiences need to be understood in the context of their wider engagements with drama. The final suggestion is that playwrights like Shakespeare anticipated the overlap of musical and dramatic experience in playhouse performance by embedding music into their dramaturgical designs, using playhouse responses to music to shape dramatic meaning.","PeriodicalId":166828,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Music","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116061637","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-14DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.43
Mervyn Cooke
Director Julie Taymor and her partner, composer Elliot Goldenthal, collaborated on two location-shot Shakespeare films: Titus (1999) and The Tempest (2010). The freshness of the collaborators’ cinematic approach to Shakespeare is in part a consequence of their having also worked extensively together in the theatre (including stage productions of these two plays, and a filmed theatrical performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream released in 2015) and their refusal to eschew dramatic stylization on the silver screen in favour of a populist realism. The eclectic music for Titus ranges from choral incantations to distorted jazz idioms, dynamic minimalism, searingly expressive orchestral writing, mesmerizing electronics, and a black-comedy application of carnival music familiar from the collaborators’ stage work; almost all the music is foregrounded, yet little attempt is made to endow this powerful composite score with the specious unifying function traditionally demanded of film music. By contrast, the score to The Tempest is more subliminal in its effect, while still experimental in its exploration of soundscapes which shift from Caliban’s ‘thousand twangling instruments’ to sparse ideas expressed in novel guitar tunings and sonorities, evocative keyboard timbres, saxophone multiphonics, glass armonica, and steel cello. Above all, the film’s soundtrack is distinguished by its contemporary response to the play’s songs, which here include an additional lyric borrowed from Twelfth Night in order to enhance the romantic subplot, and the climactic isolation of the (female) Prospera’s epilogue in the end credits.
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Pub Date : 2022-02-14DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.11
Lucy Munro
While Shakespeare’s uses of music at the Theatre and Globe playhouses have been the subject of a good deal of scholarly attention, the soundscapes of other outdoor playhouses such as the Curtain, Rose, Boar’s Head, Fortune, and Red Bull have been largely dismissed or ignored. Yet from Robert Greene in the late 1580s and early 1590s, to plays written specifically for the outdoor playhouses in the 1620s, to Richard Brome at the Globe and Red Bull in the 1630s, the outdoor playhouses presented varied and often markedly experimental soundscapes. This chapter examines the musical traditions of the outdoor playhouses in detail for the first time, offering a new perspective on Shakespeare’s musical practice. It surveys the period between the construction of the outdoor Red Lion playhouse in 1567 and the acquisition of the indoor Blackfriars by Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men, paying particular attention to the late 1580s and 1590s, the years during which Shakespeare established himself as a dramatist. Looking at song and instrumental music, it draws on the histories of the playhouses, playing companies and individual actor-musicians, contemporary commentaries, and a range of plays and jigs, paying particular attention to the work of Robert Wilson, Robert Greene, Thomas Dekker, and William Kemp. It argues first that Shakespeare’s early musical practices are in line with those of other playwrights working for outdoor playhouses, and second that the musical traditions of those playhouses are more wide-ranging, original, and inventive than scholars have generally recognized.
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Pub Date : 2022-02-14DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.24
Christopher R. Wilson
This chapter re-evaluates the status of settings of Shakespeare in the context of Victorian song from Macfarren to Henry Walford Davies, taking in Sullivan, Parry, MacKenzie, Stanford, Liza Lehmann, Maude Valérie White, Wood, and Somervell. Though often neglected today, Macfarren’s songs, including a number of Shakespeare settings, represented the ‘finest products of the period’. Seen as embodying the national emblem, Parry saw Shakespeare as central in his attempt to establish English ‘serious song’ comparable with the lieder of Schumann and Brahms and the dislodgement of commercial popular song prevalent in England. Parry’s settings of various sonnets in fact started life as German songs. Parry was not altogether successful in his mission; his only true disciple was Arthur Somervell. The last of the ‘Victorians’, Henry Walford Davies, was largely dismissed as a composer out of his time, his songs old-fashioned with their ‘forthright English melody’.
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Pub Date : 2022-02-14DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.8
S. Hampton-reeves
This chapter focuses on several key moments when the history of jazz intersected with Shakespeare. It discusses, analyses, and contextualizes the three most significant jazz suites composed with a Shakespearean theme: Duke Ellington’s Shakespeare-inspired Such Sweet Thunder (1957), George Russell’s Othello Ballet Suite (1968), and Shakespeare Songs by Guillaume de Chassy and Christophe Marguet (2016). Shakespeare’s connection with jazz dates right back to the music’s early years, when both the word and the music were synonymous with modernity, youth, and Americanization. After several early attempts to set Shakespeare’s words to music, Ellington’s Such Sweet Thunder (written with Billy Strayhorn) was the first significant jazz composition to engage with Shakespeare in a creative and non-verbal way, blending swing harmonies with European atonal ideas. Russell’s experimental interpretation of Othello went even further in fragmenting the text into repeated motifs and polytonal soundscapes. The chapter concludes with a study of a recent Shakespeare suite, de Chassy and Marguet’s set of compositions inspired by lines in Shakespeare. For all these musicians, the plays are a starting point for musical creations which draw on the signature sounds of jazz and twentieth-century experiments in atonal and polytonal music.
{"title":"‘A noise of thunder’","authors":"S. Hampton-reeves","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.8","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter focuses on several key moments when the history of jazz intersected with Shakespeare. It discusses, analyses, and contextualizes the three most significant jazz suites composed with a Shakespearean theme: Duke Ellington’s Shakespeare-inspired Such Sweet Thunder (1957), George Russell’s Othello Ballet Suite (1968), and Shakespeare Songs by Guillaume de Chassy and Christophe Marguet (2016). Shakespeare’s connection with jazz dates right back to the music’s early years, when both the word and the music were synonymous with modernity, youth, and Americanization. After several early attempts to set Shakespeare’s words to music, Ellington’s Such Sweet Thunder (written with Billy Strayhorn) was the first significant jazz composition to engage with Shakespeare in a creative and non-verbal way, blending swing harmonies with European atonal ideas. Russell’s experimental interpretation of Othello went even further in fragmenting the text into repeated motifs and polytonal soundscapes. The chapter concludes with a study of a recent Shakespeare suite, de Chassy and Marguet’s set of compositions inspired by lines in Shakespeare. For all these musicians, the plays are a starting point for musical creations which draw on the signature sounds of jazz and twentieth-century experiments in atonal and polytonal music.","PeriodicalId":166828,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Music","volume":"61 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130039519","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-14DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.30
Klára Škrobánková
This chapter focuses on three operas created in Czechoslovakia, their political significance, and the problems their creators faced when adapting drama for the operatic stage. It first considers the relationship between Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors and its operatic adaptation Upheaval in Ephesus by the Czech composer Iša Krejčí. Even though written during the Second World War with the wish to uplift the Czech people, the piece was later often used by the Communist regime as an example of Czech buffa, sharing happiness as well as propaganda with the audience. The second analysed opera is the 1969 work by Karel Horký entitled Poison from Elsinore, a prequel to Hamlet. In the opera, the main character of Polonius investigates the murder of King Hamlet, yet finds himself trapped in the totalitarian world, pondering on the responsibility of the individual and the greater good. The author of both music and libretto of the third examined opera, Ján Cikker, started composing his Coriolanus under the influence of the Soviet invasion of August 1968. Premiered in 1974, the opera features many parallels between Shakespeare’s Rome and the occupied Czechoslovakia, which Cikker emphasizes by the changes he makes in the process of the adaptation. All three considered operas therefore offer valuable insight into the state of Czechoslovak opera and the reception of Shakespeare’s work in the second half of the twentieth century.
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Pub Date : 2022-02-14DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190945145.013.17
Val Brodie
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.
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