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The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Music

Online ISBN:
9780190945176
Print ISBN:
9780190945145
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Music

Christopher R. Wilson (ed.),
Christopher R. Wilson
(ed.)
Music, University of Hull
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Christopher R. Wilson is Professor Emeritus of Music at the University of Hull. He is a graduate of the University of Oxford, where he studied with F. W. Sternfeld and John Buxton. He was the UK Research Associate for the Shakespeare Music Catalogue and wrote the Shakespeare entries for Grove Opera and Grove Music. His dictionary (with Michela Calore) Music in Shakespeare, first published in 2005, has been reissued in its third impression as one of the Arden Shakespeare Dictionaries (2014). His book Shakespeare’s Musical Imagery (2011) investigates categories and thematics in musical metaphor and contextual reference throughout the plays and poems. His database of music in Shakespeare is now available at www.shakespearemusic.bham.ac.uk under the auspices of the Shakespeare Institute. He has published books and articles on lute songs, lyric poetry, masques, prosodic theory, harmonic pedagogy, and neo-Latin verse of early-modern English writers, particularly Thomas Campion. His critical analyses of interactions between music and poetry in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have appeared in various journals showcasing comparative work. He has given invited lectures across Europe, Canada, and the United States, and has broadcast on BBC national radio and in Australia and Sweden. He was a music consultant for the Globe Theatre Permanent Exhibition in London.

Mervyn Cooke (ed.)
Mervyn Cooke
(ed.)
Music, University of Nottingham
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Mervyn Cooke is Professor of Music at the University of Nottingham. He has published on Shakespeare and music in his edited collection The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Britten (Cambridge University Press, 1999), which includes an investigation of the archival sources for Britten’s celebrated opera A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and in his A History of Film Music (Cambridge University Press, 2008), which examines a wide variety of scores for films based on Shakespeare’s plays. Among his other books are Jazz (World of Art) and The Chronicle of Jazz (Thames & Hudson, 1997 and 2013 [1998]), Britten and the Far East (Boydell Press, 1998), studies of Britten’s Billy Budd and War Requiem (Cambridge University Press, 1993 and 1996), The Cambridge Companion to Jazz (co-edited with David Horn, 2002), The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Opera (2005), The Hollywood Film Music Reader (Oxford University Press, 2010), The Cambridge Companion to Film Music (co-edited with Fiona Ford, 2016), and Pat Metheny: The ECM Years, 1975‒1984 (Oxford Studies in Recorded Jazz; Oxford University Press, 2017). He was also co-editor of volumes 3‒6 of Letters from a Life: The Selected Letters of Benjamin Britten (Faber and Faber/Boydell Press, 2004‒2012).

Published online:
14 February 2022
Published in print:
1 April 2022
Online ISBN:
9780190945176
Print ISBN:
9780190945145
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

This compendium reflects the latest international research into the many and various uses of music in relation to Shakespeare’s plays and poems, the contributors’ lines of inquiry extending from the Bard’s own time to the present day. The coverage is global in its scope, and includes studies of Shakespeare-related music in countries as diverse as China, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Russia, South Africa, Sweden, and the Soviet Union, as well as the more familiar Anglophone musical and theatrical traditions of the United Kingdom and the United States. The range of genres surveyed by the book’s team of distinguished authors embraces music for theatre, opera, ballet, musicals, the concert hall, and film, in addition to Shakespeare’s ongoing afterlives in folk music, jazz, and popular music. The authors take a range of diverse approaches: some investigate the evidence for performative practices in the Early Modern and later eras, while others offer detailed analyses of representative case studies, situating these firmly in their cultural contexts, or reflecting on the political and sociological ramifications of the music. As a whole, the volume provides a wide-ranging compendium of cutting-edge scholarship engaging with an extraordinarily rich body of music without parallel in the history of the global arts.

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