Musical Response in the Early Modern Playhouse, 1603–1625

This book re-examines early modern musical culture to suggest how music shapes meaning in plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

Simon Smith (Author)

9781316632369, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 13 September 2018

262 pages, 10 b/w illus. 2 music examples
22.6 x 15.4 x 1.5 cm, 0.4 kg

'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

Presupposing no specialist musical knowledge, this book offers a fresh perspective on the dramatic role of music in the plays of Shakespeare and his early seventeenth-century contemporaries. Simon Smith argues that many plays used music as a dramatic tool, inviting culturally familiar responses to music from playgoers. Music cues regularly encouraged audiences to listen, look, imagine or remember at dramatically critical moments, shaping meaning in plays from The Winter's Tale to A Game at Chess, and making theatregoers active and playful participants in playhouse performance. Drawing upon sensory studies, theatre history, material texts, musicology and close reading, Smith argues for the importance of music in familiar and less well-known plays including Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, The Revenger's Tragedy, Sophonisba, The Spanish Gypsy and A Woman Killed With Kindness.

Introduction
1. Listening
2. Looking
3. Imagining
4. Remembering
Coda.

Subject Areas: Shakespeare studies & criticism [DSGS], Baroque music [c 1600 to c 1750 AVGC3], Theatre studies [AN]