Duffin, Ross. W. Shakespeare’s Songbook. New York and London: Norton, 2004. 528 pp + accompanying I Audio CD.
Abstract
If ever you thought you could properly evaluate a Shakespeare drama without using your ears, this is the time to finally surrender your stance and bow to the supreme orality and aurality of the Bard. As students, our “fieldweek” some thirty years ago was a long weekend at Stratford-upon-Avon, and the author of this book was raised “forty miles from the Stratford Festival in Ontario” (15). To witness my own professors (among them S.H. Burton, author of Shakespeare’s Life and Stage [1989]) rolling in the aisles at the musical version of A Comedy o f Errors was more than enough to persuade me that something magical was happening that could not be extracted from the text; in Ross Duffin’s case, theatre-going has at length resulted in the fruit of eight years of labour, Shakespeare’s Songbook, a collection of 160 songs, many of them associated with other songs contemporary with or antecedents of them.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
FOCUS: Papers in English Literary and Cultural Studies follows the principles laid down by Creative Commons, which provides guarantees for the Author’s copyright while also ensuring that intellectual properties are made available for the wider public in a digital form. All papers submitted to the journal apply the following licence conditions (indicated on the journal’s website as well as in individual publications):
“© This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.”
You are free to:
- Share, copy and redistribute the material included in the journal in any medium or format under the following terms:
- Attribution — You must give appropriate credit to the Author, and indicate the original place of publication [FOCUS: Papers in English Literary and Cultural Studies, Issue nr., page numbers.].
- NonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes.
- NoDerivatives — You are not allowed to remix, transform, or build upon the material.
- The above conditions must always be indicated if the journal material is distributed in any form.
- The above conditions must always be met, unless a written permission signed by the Author and the Editor-in-Chief states otherwise.
