Cataloguing Shakespearean Music

Abstract: This article analyses the main collections centred on Shakespearean music published in the nineteenth century with a view to determining the underlying cultural processes that led to their creation. Largely through the frequent revivals of the plays, by the early nineteenth there developed a significant number of settings of the songs, several of which held the stage since the early eighteenth century. William Linley was first to anthologise the plays songs thus presenting them as a coherent body deserving of prominence in the cultural imagination. By the end of the century the repertoire had become vast enough to warrant catalogues of musical references and musical settings. This article argues that this emergence of “Shakespearean songs” as a whole was an expression of cultural nationalism, in which the idea of Shakespeare as inherently musical dramatist filled the cultural void created by the perceived failure of English music.
This essay discusses nineteenth-century collections of and on ‘Shakespearean music’: how they relate to bardolatory, the formation of a quasi-canonic repertoire, and the shift from antiquarian concerns to the beginnings of modern scholarship into Shakespearean music.