Poetry and Song of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries Part I

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Three articles, as Part I, II and III, investigate the relationship between poetry and song in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. All know that poetry is music, that its forms, rhythms and effects are musical as much as linguistic. The writers of this period were exploring the possibilities of an English that was fresh and exciting, a symbol of national pride as recently distilled from the mixture of tongues that had invaded England. Elizabeth had the Anglican Prayer Book translated into English and James I the Bible. Both used a rich new vocabulary and a rhetorical, musical prose. In the period, the English language doubled and again in vocabulary as writers coined new words or introduced Latin words and Greek, and other languages as the world expanded round them. Shakespeare added 25,000 or so words to the language, some of which remained solipsisms, like jointress in Hamlet, but most enriched our general vocabulary.These writers discovered how to make English among the most musical languages in the world, with an agile flexibility able to express almost any subtlety or nuance of meaning. We can see this happening in these songs.When English poets began to write in English, they did so using Italian models; this was equally true of music. Miraculously, there was a coincidence of the greatest creative geniuses in English in both spheres during these two reigns. Whether the time made the men, or the men the time, the same miracle had happened in Florence a century earlier and in Athens in the 5th century BCE. Generally, students of art, music and literature don blinkers and focus exclusively on their specialism. Renaissance man was quite the opposite.In Part I are explored some aspects of Shakespeare's art, principally the subtlety of songs he wrote for his Comedies and Romances. In Part II, these are compared with lute songs of John Dowland, who also set some in the style of John Donne. In Part III the love poems of John Donne of the first period of his poetry to 1601 and his Holy Sonnets of the third period, full of the terror of death and hell. Many poems and songs concern love, the game of love, a love chase, rejection, joy, despair; in Shakespeare they reflect a mythological framework derived from Celtic myths, a framework that was of seasonal importance to country-folk in Shakespeare's England.Shakespeare's songs are placed into their dramatic context and intention, within which it is possible to discover a mythological thread which binds them together. Parts II and III are more technical analyzing structural and musical forms of poems as songs and their vocal interpretation.

Poetry and Song of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries Part I

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