Robert Armin and Shakespeare's Performed Songs

Shakespeare's plays are not complete. They are missing the original music that accompanied the plays’ songs. Significantly, vocal music on the early modern theatrical stage, far beyond just providing entertainment, was believed to alter the bodies and souls of both performers and auditors to agree with its characteristics, directly inciting passions such as love or melancholy. Until Shakespeare's Songs Restored, however, the songs have been virtually lost. Interdisciplinary literary scholar Catherine Henze has located original music for seventeen songs from nine of Shakespeare’s most famous plays, including Othello, As You Like It, Hamlet, and The Tempest. By collaborating with early modern music editor and performing artist Lawrence Lipnik, the author is able to provide new, authoritative reconstructions of the songs as they would have been sung on Shakespeare's stage, including spoken interruptions and cuts and rearrangement of the music to accommodate the dramatist's words. Next, while acknowledging ambiguities, Henze presents the first thorough analysis of the complete songs, words and music, according to Renaissance literary and music primary sources, and applies the new information to interpretations of characters and scenes, frequently challenging commonly held literary assessments. The book is organized according to categories of singers (musicians, women, spirits, and comics), with a particular focus on Robert Armin, Shakespeare’s comic, singing actor. This study provides access to many of the songs from Shakespeare's plays. It offers students and scholars the tools to interpret not only these newly recovered works, but also songs in dramas by other early modern playwrights. Written with non-specialized terminology, Shakespeare's Songs Restored provides a gateway to new areas of research and interpretation in an increasingly significant interdisciplinary field for all interested in Shakespeare and early modern drama.

Catherine A. Henze is Associate Professor of Humanistic Studies-English, and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, USA.