Introduction; 1. Listening; 2. Looking; 3. Imagining; 4. Remembering; Coda.
This book re-examines early modern musical culture to suggest how music shapes meaning in plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
Simon Smith is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon and the Department of English Literature, University of Birmingham. He has published widely on music in Shakespeare and early modern drama, and co-edited The Senses in Early Modern England, 1558–1660 (with Jackie Watson and Amy Kenny, 2015). His theatre-historical research informed the design of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at Shakespeare's Globe and he has provided historical music research - and occasionally musical direction - for many productions including Twelfth Night and Richard III at Shakespeare's Globe in 2012, The Tragedie of Cleopatra in 2013 at University College London and Wolf Hall on the BBC in 2015.
'With his announced focus on 'response' Smith makes a genuinely
fresh and provocative contribution to the study of early modern
theatre in England and, I would argue, to sound studies and
musicology. This is the perfect moment for Smith's book to be
published. It will find readers among younger, boundary-changing
scholars in sound-based disciplines as well as among students of
Shakespeare and early modern drama.' Bruce Smith, University of
Southern California
'Music will no longer be conceived as somehow a pleasant interlude
within a play's dramatic action. Simon's rich examination has much
to say about the way we attempt to understand the period's
performance and theatre. … It is fitting that a study about music
in plays attains such a happy concord of substance and style.' Tom
Healy, University of Sussex
'Simon Smith has written an elegantly structured book, drawing its
examples from a wide range of theatrical and musical sources. There
are already several books on music in Renaissance drama, but he has
found what I think is a new approach in his analysis of how music
was thought of, in both theoretical and popular terms, and how
audiences, offstage and on, respond to it.' Lois Potter, University
of Delaware
'This book is highly original in several ways … [it] will be an
essential reference for further work on music within early modern
drama and for future accounts of musical affect in the period. It
will also be essential reading for those working in
interdisciplinary literature and music studies or the wider field
of sound studies, both of them currently expanding fields of
scholarship.' University English Book Prize Report
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