Shakespeare and Music

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph M. Ortiz
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Musical Meaning ◽  
Musical Performances ◽  
Unified Theories ◽  
Musical Resources ◽  
Theatrical Practice ◽  
Popular Ballads ◽  
Performed Music ◽  
Universal Nature

William Shakespeare entertained many ideas about music, some of them conflicting, and he frequently represented these ideas in his plays. Music was a multifaceted art and science in early modern England, and debates over the nature and interpretation of music played out in a variety of contexts: academic, religious, political, commercial, and aesthetic. At the same time, music was a vital part of Shakespeare’s theatrical practice. He made use of his company’s musical resources to include performed music in his plays, and his characters frequently sing and quote popular ballads and songs that would have been recognized by his audiences. The combination of words about music and musical performances gave Shakespeare the opportunity to test various theories of music in complex and original ways. His plays are especially demonstrative of the ways in which certain views of music were connected to other ideological perspectives. Shakespeare’s most modern idea about music is the notion that musical meaning derives from its contexts and conventions rather than from an inherent, universal nature. Taken together, his plays provoke skepticism about unified theories of music. At the same time, they demonstrate that the seeming universality of music makes it an extremely powerful tool for both the polemicist and the dramatist.

Doubtful Readers

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin A. McCarthy
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
English Literature ◽  
John Donne ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Aemilia Lanyer ◽  
Quantitative Evidence ◽  
Early Modern Poetry ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
Over Time

Doubtful Readers: Print, Poetry, and the Reading Public in Early Modern England focuses on early modern publishers’ efforts to identify and accommodate new readers of verse that had previously been restricted to particular social networks in manuscript. Focusing on the period between the maturing of the market for printed English literature in the 1590s and the emergence of the professional poet following the Restoration, this study shows that poetry was shaped by—and itself shaped—strong print publication traditions. By reading printed editions of poems by William Shakespeare, Aemilia Lanyer, John Donne, and others, this book shows how publishers negotiated genre, gender, social access, reputation, literary knowledge, and the value of English literature itself. It uses literary, historical, bibliographical, and quantitative evidence to show how publishers’ strategies changed over time. Ultimately, Doubtful Readers argues that although—or perhaps because—publishers’ interpretive and editorial efforts are often elided in studies of early modern poetry, their interventions have had an enduring impact on our canons, texts, and literary histories.

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Reference Point ◽  
The Body ◽  
Single Source ◽  
Dance Studies ◽  
Disciplinary Field ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Integral Feature

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance is the first collection of essays to examine the relationship between William Shakespeare and dance. Despite recent academic interest in movement, materiality, and the body—and the growth of dance studies as a disciplinary field—Shakespeare’s employment of dance as both a theatrical device and thematic reference point remains under-studied. The reimagining of his writing as dance works is also neglected as a subject for research. Alan Brissenden’s 1981 Shakespeare and the Dance remains the seminal text for those interested in early modern dancing and its appearances within Shakespearean drama, but this new volume provides a single source of reference for dance as both an integral feature of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century culture and as a means of translating Shakespearean text into movement.

Seeking the historical listener

Early Music ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Plank
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Performance Practice ◽  
Affective Response ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
Male Gaze ◽  
Queen Elizabeth I ◽  
Focus Questions ◽  
Robert Herrick

Abstract This article considers questions relating to the performance practice of listening to music in early modern contexts. The evidence of paintings by Pieter Lastman, Gerard ter Borch and Hendrik Sorgh, poetry by Robert Herrick, William Shakespeare and Edmund Waller, and accounts of performances by Francesco da Milano, Nicola Matteis and Queen Elizabeth I all help to bring into focus questions of attentiveness, affective response and analogical understanding. The source material also interestingly raises the possibility of occasionally understanding the act of listening within a frame of erotic relationship modelled on Laura Mulvey’s well-known concept of the ‘male gaze’.

Whoso List to Find?

2022 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-26
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Health And Wellness ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Female Poets ◽  
Popular Ballads ◽  
Cheap Print

Seeing what Englishwomen saw in the early modern period brings them into view in a variety of new ways, many of them managed and enhanced by the machinery of cheap print. In contrast with Petrarchan poetry, which imagined women with fear and described love as plague, print established other models of health and wellness, and other ways of registering women’s powers. Women known as searchers who were charged to enter houses and locate plague rather than flee from it shared their findings with town officials who printed up statistics in weekly Bills of Mortality. The searcher was both a ‘harbinger of disaster’ and a tool of recovery, and popular ballads of the time frequently deploy her example along with her abilities to avoid ruin and register signs of life. These ballads supply alternatives to Petrarchan demographics, and I examine the ways early modern female poets draw upon their methodology, too.

Calculating History: A Mid-Seventeenth-Century Reader of Robert Persons’ A Conference about the Next Succession (1594/1595)

2019 ◽  
Vol 71 (299) ◽  
pp. 272-291
Author(s):  
Christopher Archibald
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Historical Consciousness ◽  
Reading Practice ◽  
History And Memory ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Catholic History ◽  
Popular Ballads

Abstract This article examines one of the Bodleian Library’s copies of Robert Persons’ Elizabethan succession tract A Conference about the Next Succession that a 1650s reader has heavily annotated and used to compile a miscellany of poems and extracts from religious, political and historical works. The annotations and miscellany are concerned primarily with recent religious and political history. The reader compiles copies of popular ballads and poems, quotations from religious polemic by Catholic authors and a set of calculations of the dates of recent events in English Catholic history. This marked book serves as a case study through which to explore historical consciousness and the production of particularly Catholic forms of history and memory in the early modern period. This article seeks to query critical narratives concerning apparently combative seventeenth-century political reading practice by extending the remit of the ‘political’ to encompass different generic forms and approaches. It argues that by combining chronological and analogical perspectives this reader constructs a distinctively recusant history. An appendix identifies all of the works used by the annotator and all of the known editions or manuscripts they may have used.

Last Acts

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maggie Vinter
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
Christopher Marlowe ◽  
The Political ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Economic Management ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Art Of Dying

Last Acts: The Art of Dying on the Early Modern Stage argues that the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater offered playwrights, actors, and audiences important opportunities to practice arts of dying. Early modern plays also engage with devotional traditions that understand death less as an occasion for suffering or grieving than as an action to be performed, well or badly. Active deaths belie the narratives of helplessness and loss most often used to analyze representations of mortality and instead suggest ways that marginalized and constrained subjects might participate in the political, social, and economic management of life. Some of these strategies for dying resonate with ecclesiastical forms or with descriptions of biopolitics within the recent work of Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito. Yet the art of dying is not solely a discipline imposed upon recalcitrant subjects. Since it offers suffering individuals a way to enact their deaths on their own terms, it discloses both political and dramatic action in their most minimal manifestations. Rather than mournfully marking what we cannot recover, the practice of dying reveals what we can do, even in death. By analyzing representations of dying in plays by writers including Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson alongside both devotional texts and contemporary biopolitical theory, Last Acts shows how theater reflects, enables, and contests the politicization of life and death.

Musical Expression among Deaf and Hearing Song Signers

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anabel Maler
Keyword(s):  
Deaf Culture ◽  
Deaf People ◽  
Musical Expression ◽  
Musical Performances ◽  
Use Of Space ◽  
The Third ◽  
Musical Works ◽  
Musical Resources

Deaf people are often portrayed as living in a world of silence, cut off both from experiencing musical works and from musical expression. There are, however, many different forms of musical expression in Deaf culture, including “song signing.” This essay explores the idea that deafness, rather than being a disadvantage for musical expression, actually enables distinctive musical performances within the context of song signing. The first section surveys the different varieties of signed song performance, the second contains analyses of videos, and the third compares the Deaf and hearing song-signing communities. Analysis of multiple song-signing videos reveals that deaf and hearing song signers exploit different techniques in expressing themselves musically. The analyses explore the signers’ principal differences in terms of communication, use of space, and rhythmic techniques. The videos analyzed throughout the article reveal how both deafness and hearing can be musical resources in the context of song-signing performance.

scholarly journals Shakespeare and the Demonization of Fairies

Text Matters ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 194-213
Author(s):  
Piotr Spyra
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
The Many ◽  
Historical Reflection

The article investigates the canonical plays of William Shakespeare - Hamlet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest - in an attempt to determine the nature of Shakespeare’s position on the early modern tendency to demonize fairy belief and to view fairies as merely a form of demonic manifestation. Fairy belief left its mark on all four plays, to a greater or lesser extent, and intertwined with the religious concerns of the period, it provides an important perspective on the problem of religion in Shakespeare’s works. The article will attempt to establish whether Shakespeare subscribed to the tendency of viewing fairies as demonic agents, as epitomized by the Daemonologie of King James, or opposed it. Special emphasis will also be put on the conflation of fairies and Catholicism that one finds best exemplified in Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. The article draws on a wealth of recent scholarship on early modern fairies, bringing together historical reflection on the changing perception of the fairy figure, research into Shakespeare’s attitude towards Catholicism and analyses of the many facets of anti-Catholic polemic emerging from early modern Protestant discourse.

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