Eight years in the making, "Shakespeare's Songbook" is a meticulously researched collection of 160 songs--ballads and narratives, drinking songs, love songs, and rounds--that appear in, are quoted in, or alluded to in Shakespeare's plays.
This unique and comprehensive study examines how music affects Shakespeare's plays and addresses the ways in which contemporary audiences responded to it. David Lindley sets the musical scene of Early Modern England, establishing the kinds of music heard in the streets, the alehouses, private residences and the theatres of the period and outlining the period's theoretical understanding of music. 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.
First published in 1963. When originally published this book was the first to treat at full length the contribution which music makes to Shakespeare's great tragedies, among them Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear. Here the playwright's practices are studied in conjunction with those of his contemporaries: Marlowe and Jonson, Marston and Chapman. From these comparative assessments there emerges the method that is peculiar to Shakespeare: the employment of song and instrumental music to a degree hitherto unknown, and their use as an integral part of the dramatic structure.
This book is a history of love and the challenge love offers to the laws and customs of its times and places, as told through poetry from the Song of Songs to John Milton’s Paradise Lost. It is also an account of the critical reception afforded to such literature, and the ways in which criticism has attempted to stifle this challenge. Bryson and Movsesian argue that the poetry they explore celebrates and reinvents the love the troubadour poets of the eleventh and twelfth centuries called fin’amor: love as an end in itself, mutual and freely chosen even in the face of social, religious, or political retribution. Neither eros nor agape, neither exclusively of the body, nor solely of the spirit, this love is a middle path. Alongside this tradition has grown a critical movement that employs a 'hermeneutics of suspicion', in Paul Ricoeur’s phrase, to claim that passionate love poetry is not what it seems, and should be properly understood as worship of God, subordination to Empire, or an entanglement with the structures of language itself – in short, the very things it resists. The book engages with some of the seminal literature of the Western canon, including the Bible, the poetry of Ovid, and works by English authors such as William Shakespeare and John Donne, and with criticism that stretches from the earliest readings of the Song of Songs to contemporary academic literature. Lively and enjoyable in its style, it attempts to restore a sense of pleasure to the reading of poetry, and to puncture critical insistence that literature must be outwitted. It will be of value to professional, graduate, and advanced undergraduate scholars of literature, and to the educated general reader interested in treatments of love in poetry throughout history.
"This compendium reflects the latest international research into the many and various uses of music in relation to Shakespeare's plays and poems, the contributors' lines of enquiry extending from the Bard's own time to the present day. The coverage is global in its scope, and includes studies of Shakespeare-related music in countries as diverse as China, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Russia, South Africa, Sweden, and the Soviet Union, as well as the more familiar Anglophone musical and theatrical traditions of the UK and USA. The range of genres surveyed by the book's team of distinguished authors embraces music for theatre, opera, ballet, musicals, the concert hall, and film, in addition to Shakespeare's ongoing afterlives in folk music, jazz, and popular music. The authors take a range of diverse approaches: some investigate the evidence for performative practices in the Early Modern and later eras, while others offer detailed analyses of representative case studies, situating these firmly in their cultural contexts, or reflecting on the political and sociological ramifications of the music. As a whole, the volume provides a wide-ranging compendium of cutting-edge scholarship engaging with an extraordinarily rich body of music without parallel in the history of the global arts"--
A Goodreads Choice Award nominee The Bard meets the Backstreet Boys in this collection of 100 classic pop songs reimagined as Shakespearean sonnets This hilarious book of poetry transforms disco staples, classic rock anthems, and recent chart-toppers into hilarious iambic pentameter! All your favorite songs are here, including hits by Jay-Z, Johnny Cash, Katy Perry, Michael Jackson, Talking Heads, and many others. An entertaining journey into the world of Elizabethan poetry, and based on the immensely popular Tumblr of the same name, Pop Sonnets is the perfect gift for Shakespeare fans and music lovers alike. “Ever wonder what Taylor Swift and Beyoncé would sound like in iambic pentameter? We hadn’t either, but now we can't get enough.” —TIME