Sunday, March 3, 2013

Why not sing to Shakespeare?

I went through and skimmed almost all of my posts in our class blog, making a list as I went of different topics I blogged on and the frequency with which I was returning to the same topics. Really there were two things I returned to over and over again which were 1. time within Shakespeare's plays and 2. Shakespeare in relation to theater history/music (with more posts on the latter). So I'm currently between a couple ideas for my research paper: 1. Time is a persona within Shakespeare's works that dominates the lives of the characters (this would be an extension of our earlier paper where I focused on A Winters Tale) 2. Shakespeare the musical! Music is used so heavily within every Shakespeare work I've read, and yet the general population seems completely oblivious to it. Modern productions of Shakespeare almost never incorporate it. In fact, when I told my roommates about this idea (one of which is an English major) they both said "but Shakespeare doesn't have music Mikaela..."Why was he so concerned with music? What are we loosing in our modern productions without it? Do we now have elements of lighting/spectacle that compensates for whatever Shakespeare was trying to achieve with his music? 3. It would be interesting to look at production histories of different works in correlation to acting theory history. Different acting styles can completely affect the interpretation of a script - just like different people can read the same text and have extremely different interpretations. Well everyone - I need some help! Which idea sounds most interesting to you?

3 comments:

  1. Shakespeare as a musical sounds really cool. And funny actually. There are always songs (no music) that characters are singing. Could you imagine a whole Shakespeare play as a musical?!

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  2. Actually, Kenneth Branagh did a musical version of Love's Labour's Lost recently (it got middling reviews, but is interesting). And of course there have been operatic adaptations (Romeo and Juliet, Othello, etc.). I've been interested in Bollywood film adaptations -- all of which are musicals (though of a quite a different stripe than what we are used to in the West -- but see Omkara [Othello] for example).

    Start looking at the scholarship about Shakespeare and music. That is not the same thing as Shakespeare and musicals, but there was definitely a very strong tradition of music embedded within Shakespeare's plays.

    I also love your focus on time as a topic. Maybe you could do both? How does time take on a different perspective when a story is mediated via music, for example?

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  3. I saw a BYU adaptation of As You Like It a couple years ago, and it incorporated modern-day music--and it was kind of awful. That's not at all to dissuade you from looking at musical cues in the play and whether they're conveyed through certain productions.

    I agree with Dr. Burton--probably stay clear of musicals, but looking at how music is incorporated could make for a very satisfying paper.

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