Music in the plays of William Shakespeare includes both music incidental to the plot, as song and dance, and also additional supplied both by Shakespeare's own company and subsequent performers.[1] This music is distinct from musical settings of Shakespeare's sonnets by later composers.
Music in Shakespeare's own theatre productions
Songs as text within the plays
The following are among the most notable examples of songs in Shakespeare's plays:
Among the dances associated with Shakespeare's company is "Kemp's Jig" named after the actor Will Kemp.
Music for later theatre productions
The generations after Shakespeare saw many composers create or arrange incidental music and song settings for his plays. Among the most notable were Thomas Morley, Henry Purcell, Matthew Locke, Thomas Arne, William Linley, Sir Henry Bishop, and Sir Arthur Sullivan. Felix Mendelssohn’s overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1826) was a descriptive piece intended for concert performance, though he later added incidental music for a production of the play in 1843.[2]
The Shakespearian music of the 19th century was more often associated with the opera house or concert hall than with productions of the plays. In the early 20th century Elizabethan music began to be used as incidental music in a bid for more authenticity. Gradually some new scores were introduced. Vaughan Williams was engaged to write incidental music at Stratford between 1912 and 1913. Rosabel Watson directed and arranged music for many productions at Stratford and elsewhere.[3]
A Shakespeare Music Catalogue (1991) lists over 20,000 items of theatrical and non-theatrical music associated with Shakespeare, much of it unpublished.[4]
Recordings
Attempts at reconstructing and performing the "original" songs from the plays and related folk songs have been recorded by various musicians, from Shakespeare Songs by Alfred Deller (1967), to the recordings of Philip Pickett.
References
^David Lindley, Shakespeare and Music (2014) 1408143666 "Focusing throughout on the plays as theatrical performances, this work analyzes the ways Shakespeare explores and exploits the conflicting perceptions of music at the time and its dramatic and thematic potential."
