Shakespeare and Music

Robert Johnson’s settings of “Where the Bee Sucks” and “Full Fathom Five” are often called original. But Johnson was only twelve when Shakespeare died—so what music did Shakespeare’s audiences actually hear?

In the English theatre of the early twentieth century, composer and conductor Christopher Wilson had spent years writing and conducting music for Shakespeare’s plays. When he set out to jot down a few observations, he found a far larger puzzle: composers across Europe had been drawn to Shakespeare, yet no music for the plays by his own contemporaries had survived. Wilson weighs the theories, the old tunes and the later composers, drawing on both scholarship and practical experience from the stage. If Shakespeare called for music so often, what might his first audiences have heard—and what can later musicians recover?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

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