Shakespeare and Music

Catalog description

This course explores Shakespeare and music from two directions. First, the course will explore the complex and variegated ways that music features in Shakespeare’s plays and poems - from music as a topic that characters discuss on the stage to Shakespeare’s reliance on rhythm and sonics in the poetic line to the musical interludes played by real musicians during the course of individual performances. Second, we will examine selected aspects of the long tradition of setting Shakespeare to music. The course is organized into units focused on individual Shakespeare works: in each unit we will divide our time into conversation of key passages of text and music, and viewing and listening together to selected performances and settings of the play or poem in question. The formal work will consist, for each assigned play, of reading the text, viewing one recorded performance, and reading assigned selections of secondary texts pertaining to each assigned play. The last two weeks of class will be devoted to in-class student presentations that will serve in turn as drafts of the final project for the course.