Shakespeare being Shakespeare, his plays are dotted with songs, which are more
or less integrated into the flow of the drama -- sometimes they tail off,
incomplete; sometimes they function as distractions; sometimes they point the
action in a manner that may be so concise as potentially to escape attention.
Shakespeare being Shakespeare, each of these tiny lyrics has been treated
with enthusiastic reverence by composers from the Bard's own time down to
date; settings abound, those by British composers understandably dominating,
although the single most familiar song may be Schubert's An Sylvia,
D891.
Schubert being Schubert, his setting of "Who is Sylvia?" (from Act 4, Scene
2 of The Two Gentlemen of Verona) totally misses the point of the
original, which is a parody sonnet. Put into the mouth of an incompetent
serenader, this verse of 5+5+5=15 lines (instead of 4+4+6=14) stands out for
the deliberate crudeness of its prosody. The setting tries to be musically
"off" in ways analogous to those in which the text is poetically "off".
"Full Fathom Five" (from Act 1, Scene 2 of The Tempest) is another
well-known verselet, here set as a simple tone painting emphasizing the
repetitiousness of the waves and the bells, which are Shakespeare's metaphors
for the repetitiousness of the experience of death: a shocking sentiment for
his time, put for safety in the mouth of a supernatural/eccentric character
whose views are not obligated to be in any sense "normal".
"O Mistress Mine" (Twelfth Night, Act 2, Scene 3) is another jagged
little pill, subverting the conventions of courtly love songs in each of its
four brief, tight stanzas. ("...sing both high and low"?!) The last line of
all, as it pulls the trap door and sends the whole business sliding to Hell,
is one of Shakespeare's finest. Think what anyone else would have done with
it, and you will see how he got it: "Youth's a thing that won't endure"...
"Youth's a thing will not endure"..."Youth's a stuff
will not endure." But genius will.
"Blow, blow" (Act 2, Scene 7 of As You Like It) is yet another glass-
edged parody, this time of the love-denied trope. Orlando Gibbons may have set
it (or any of these); and who may doubt that he recalled it when, a few years
later, he tied off "A Silver Swan" with the surprise ending "More geese than
swans now live,/More fools than wise." The setting deliberately overemphasizes
the bitter insincerity of the conventional, but utterly inappropriate,
heigh-ho refrain.
After all this transgressively-expressionistic sarcasm, the cycle ends on an
innocent note with "Orpheus" from Act 3, Scene 1 of King Henry VIII.
Shakespeare purists may jib, inasmuch as the latest scholarship leans toward
attributing this scene to Fletcher; but the language of this song is worthy of
Shakespeare and after all, could we praise him more than to say that he
impelled his contemporaries to rise to the standards he set? (See also, above,
re: Gibbons.) "In sweet music is such art": that he knew, and we know still.
Copyright © 2015 -- 2022 Frank Wilhoit