Reconstructing Shakespeare's Songbook. Seminar

Joint Music and Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Culture Seminar.

For nearly four hundred years, Shakespeare lovers lamented that few songs in his plays survived with original music: of about sixty song lyrics, only a handful exist in period musical settings. In addition, Shakespeare quotes fragments of about thirty other songs and, happily for us, some of these can be reconstructed in performable versions, although they remain little known today. Also little known are another sixty songs that Shakespeare merely alludes to by citing a title, character, or refrain. In Shakespeare’s Songbook, Ross W. Duffin brought all of Shakespeare’s musical source material together for the first time and, in the process, shed new light on the delicate interplay between words, music, and drama in the plays. In this talk, Duffin explains how he began and pursued this quest, and shares some of the fascinating details he discovered along the way.