Abstract: Fools and Prima Donnas Ross W. Duffin. Shakespeare's Songbook. W.W. Norton 2004. 528 pp. $39.95 QUEEN Elizabeth and her companion Olivia, seeking shelter from a storm, come to the door of a tavern-the Mermaid avern. They hope no one will recognize them: They have just seen the premiere of a new play, and Elizabeth is infatuated with the playwright, William Shakespeare. The prudish Olivia is desperately afraid for her reputation; but Elizabeth cheers her by singing a chipper song, full of giggly flourishes, about the courage of Richard the Lion-Hearted. Soon Sir John Falstaflf emerges from an inner room; he is surprised to find two charming young women in masks-probably the daughters of an innkeeper and a brewer, he thinks-and offers them his protection and a night of love. As it happens, he is paying for a grand cast party for his friend Shakespeare and the acting company; Shakespeare! Elizabeth exclaims, You know Shakespeare? Falstaff boasts that he is Shakespeare's shadow; he and Shakespeare are the sun and the moon. Shakespeare enters in triumph, borne on the shoulders of his actors; he congratulates Macbeth and Hamlet and Ophelia, all still in costume, and sings a wild drinking song, and urges general love-making. Eventually he and the disguised Elizabeth are alone; she deplores his drunken revelry and tells him that he is dissipating his genius. Later that night, Shakespeare awakens from his stupor in the middle of Richmond Park; he hears the eerie singing of a veiled goddess, his creative genius as she tells him; eventually the poet and his muse-it is of course Queen Elizabeth-confess their love for one another. This is the plot of the opera Le songe d'une nuit d'ete (1850, text by Rosier and de Leuven, music by Ambroise Thomas), a silly plot indeed, even by the standards of opera. And yet it is oddly faithful to the way that all of us, whether casual theater-goers or Renaissance scholars, understand Shakespeare's world: as a great squash, in which historical personages and fictitious characters are flattened into a single mad tableau where a playwright might flirt indifferently with his real sovereign or with a drowned girl from his own play. The queen deliberately chooses to enter an imaginary world, by staging a skit in which Shakespeare can't quite be sure whether she's a hallucination or an actual woman; and Falstaff has fully emancipated himself from the texts of Shakespeare's plays, heaved himself up into a domain where he is Elizabeth's knight and Shakespeare's buddy. For us today, Elizabeth and Shakespeare and Falstaff and Hamlet are all waxwork dummies in the same museum. Le songe d'une nuit d'ete is also, like all operas-comiques, a squash of speech and song. One doesn't usually think of Shakespeare's plays in similar terms, but reading Ross W. Duffins wonderful Shakespeare's Songbook might incline one to do so. Duffin, a professor of music at case Western Reserve who specializes in early music, prints the music for (if I've counted right) no fewer than 174 tunes-a startling number. This is because Duffin includes tunes not just for the complete songs in Shakespeare's plays but for the mere humlets and throwaway lines. As a result, the reader of Shakespeare's Songbook eventually starts to get the spooky feeling that Shakespeare didn't write anything, but only pasted together a collection of ballad-scraps. Most readers will use Shakespeare's Songbook as a reference tool, occasionally dipping into it here and there. But you should instead read it from cover to cover, because you are not likely to have occasion to look up, say, an allusion in 3 Henry VI to an obscure ballad about Daedalus, and to restrict your contemplation to famous songs in famous plays is to miss much of importance. All the same, let's begin with a look at some of the famous songs. The famous songs are the ones that call attention to themselvesthe star turns. Sometimes a specialist is brought on stage, like a contestant on American Idol, for the sole purpose of singing a song. …
Publication Year: 2008
Publication Date: 2008-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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