TY - CHAP

T1 - ‘Where should this music be?’: Cataloguing Shakespeare Music’

AU - Cunningham, John

PY - 2022/5

Y1 - 2022/5

N2 - 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.

AB - 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.

KW - Shakespeare

KW - Shakespeare and music

KW - Shakespeare Reception

UR - https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-handbook-of-shakespeare-and-music-9780190945145?cc=gb&lang=en&

M3 - Chapter

SN - 9780190945145

SP - 33

EP - 74

BT - The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Music

A2 - Wilson, Christopher R.

A2 - Cooke, Mervyn

PB - Oxford: OUP

CY - Oxford

ER -