Shakespeare’s Songs

Shakespeare’s Songs December 7, 2015

Late at night in Lady Olivia’s great house in Illyrium, three friends – Sir Toby, the lady’s uncle, Feste her fool, and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, her hapless suitor – sing drunken songs that resound loudly through the empty halls. Malvolio, Lady Olivia’s stern steward and “something of a Puritan,” rises from bed to chide the drunkards, but they respond by mocking him with more songs:

Sir Toby: Shall I bid him go?

Feste: What an if you do?

Sir Toby: Shall I bid him go, and spare not?

Feste: O no, no, no, no, you dare not (Twelfth Night 2.3).

The scene, like the play as a whole, dramatizes a confrontation of two Elizabethan subcultures, the bawdy festive world of taverns and the strict moralistic world of Puritanism.

For the original audiences of Shakespeare’s play, the confrontation would have been more obvious than it is to us, since Shakespeare borrowed the lines that Toby and Feste exchange from a popular song of the period, first published in Robert Jones’ First Booke of Songs (1600). The song is, as Stephen Orgel says in the foreword to Ross Duffin’s Shakespeare’s Songbook, one of the “songs that drunken revelers really did sing in Elizabethan England” (p. 13). Shakespeare used Jones’ song the way a director might insert a snatch of Bob Dylan into a movie soundtrack, put lines from a rap song in the mouths of characters, or name one of his characters “Bobbie McGee.” Duffin’s book enables us to hear the joking musical allusions that would have been second-nature to Shakespeare and his audiences.

Music and dance always accompanied Shakespeare’s plays, like their Greek predecessors, but this aspect of Elizabethan drama has been difficult to reconstruct. Scholars have pieced together the musical aspects of his drama from scattered sources, but Shakespeare’s Songbook is a unique achievement, the first time anyone has “brought all of the Shakespearean tunes and texts together” (p. 25). Duffin, Fynette H. Kulas Professor of Music at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, has compiled all the songs in Shakespeare’s plays, whether they were written by Shakespeare or borrowed from elsewhere. Wherever available, he provides the full text of each song, even when Shakespeare includes only a stanza or two, or even only a few lines. Because he includes contemporary tunes for all of the songs, Duffin’s book is as useful to performers, producers, and directors as it is to scholars. He admits that he is more confident of some tunes than of others, but all the tunes were theoretically available to Shakespeare. The songs are arranged alphabetically by title, but an index of first lines and another index arranged by play make the book very easy to use. The book comes with a CD containing eighty-one songs, about half of the songs discussed in the book.

Shakespeare’s Songbook is a treasure for Shakespearean scholars, demonstrating that Shakespeare quotes from and alludes to popular songs far more than has commonly been recognized. This raises many questions, but let me limit myself to two. First, there is the question of Shakespeare’s sources. Shakespeare’s allusions to ancient myths have often been taken as evidence of his familiarity with Ovid’s Metamorphoses and other ancient literature, all available in English translations in Shakespeare’s time. As Duffin points out, however, Shakespeare’s audience would more likely have gained their knowledge of myth and history from popular song than from Ovid himself, and perhaps the same was true of the Bard himself. This might even hold some implications for the always-renewed debate over the playwright’s identity. If the plays draw from popular songs about Apollo and Daphne rather than from Ovid, perhaps the author really was an actor with an elementary education rather than a university-educated aristocrat.

Second, Duffin understandably does not attempt to explain the significance of all the quotations and allusions to songs, but that leaves a vast interpretive task to others. When Shakespeare quotes the title of a ballad, does he intend it to evoke the entirety of the ballad, so that the ballad becomes an internal commentary on the play itself? Does he intend it as a joke, a sop to hip groundlings? When he quotes the same song in two different plays (there are five allusions to “King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid” in four different plays), are we supposed to recognize the repetition and muse on larger parallels between the plays? Like the best books of criticism, Duffin’s lays out a program of new research even as it brings another research program to an impressive culmination.

Shakespeare’s Songbook is a wonderfully planned and executed piece of scholarly detection and an indispensable resource for anyone interested in Elizabethan popular music, or, more broadly, early modern popular culture. 


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