Shakespeare's Music

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 486, 15 October 1948, Page 10

Shakespeare's Music

THINK Shakespeare himself would have approved Douglas . Cleverdon’s excellent programme "Music, in Shakespeare" which I heard (and approved) from 2YC on a recent Friday, if only because it temporarily soft-pedalled Shakespeare the poet to lay stress on Shakespeare as a working dramatist, writing with one eye on the potentialities of his cast and the other on the box office, juggling the sometimes inadequate means to achieve the most effective ends. Shakespeare’s heroines owe some of their quality to the fact that they were tailored to fit boy players; his leading characters grow older to keep pace with Richard Burbage. And so with the songs, I learnt from this programme. Ophelia and Desdemona sing partly because Shakespeare’s players included the talented Jack Wilson, and "Come Away Death" did not become Feste’s till Wilson’s voice broke. But there is far more to this programme than a, discussion of ends and means, mending and making do. There are the Dolmetsch viols and recorders, playing eirs Ferdinand might have heard, or tavern music that the Merry Wives didn’t listen to. There are almost all the songs, and the whole of Ophelia’s mad scene. But I thought ‘it a structural weakness in the programme that Ophelia and Desdemona were not. played and sung by boys. It meant that we were listening to Shakespeare’s music as we, rather than the Elizabethans, heard it, and this largely cancelled out the careful authenticity of the rest of the programme.