Shakespearean Female Characters in Contemporary Rock Music
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“Mark the music”: Shakespearean female characters in contemporary rock music by Maria Elisa Montironi 1. INTRODUCTION: STATE OF THE ART AND OBJECTIVES On October 13th, Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel prize in literature “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition” (The Nobel Prize in Literature 2017). This honor obliges even the most purist intellectuals to redefine the boundaries of literature, because it assimilates the lyrics of a singer- songwriter to the works of the most celebrated Nobel writers, such as Thomas Mann (1929), Luigi Pirandello (1934), T. S. Eliot (1948), Ernest Miller Hemingway (1954), and Samuel Beckett (1969). This fact helps to introduce my paper, which offers an analysis of offshoots of Shakespearean women characters in classical rock songs, in order to show how these figures are used and reshaped in the lyrics and to examine how these musical products can affect the study of Shakespeare’s reception. The surprise choice of the Swedish academy was welcomed with skepticism, apparently by the winner himself, who did not attend the traditional December Nobel ceremony to accept the prize, but sent a thankful banquet speech.1 Significantly 1 Bob Dylan once said: “I consider myself a poet first and a musician second” (cited in Ricks 2004: IX); but it is at least odd that Bob Dylan did not attend the Nobel ceremony to accept the prize because of pre-existing commitments. Saggi/Ensayos/Essais/Essays Will forever young! Shakespeare & Contemporary Culture – 11/2017 107 enough for the purpose of this paper, in his message Bob Dylan called in Shakespeare while incredulously wondering how music can be considered literature. He wrote: I was out on the road when I received this surprising news, and it took me more than a few minutes to properly process it. I began to think about William Shakespeare, the great literary figure. I would reckon he thought of himself as a dramatist. The thought that he was writing literature couldn’t have entered his head. His words were written for the stage. Meant to be spoken not read. When he was writing Hamlet, I’m sure he was thinking about a lot of different things: “Who’re the right actors for these roles?” “How should this be staged?” “Do I really want to set this in Denmark?” His creative vision and ambitions were no doubt at the forefront of his mind, but there were also more mundane matters to consider and deal with. “Is the financing in place?” “Are there enough good seats for my patrons?” “Where am I going to get a human skull?” I would bet that the farthest thing from Shakespeare’s mind was the question “Is this literature?” […] Like Shakespeare, I too am often occupied with the pursuit of my creative endeavors and dealing with all aspects of life’s mundane matters. (Dylan 2016)2 After more than three months, Bob Dylan finally accepted the prize at a private ceremony in Stockholm and gave his Nobel lecture. Again, he reflected upon the nature of songs and literature, and concluded mentioning Shakespeare together with Homer: Our songs are alive in the land of the living. But songs are unlike literature. They’re meant to be sung, not read. The words in Shakespeare’s plays were meant to be acted on the stage. Just as lyrics in songs are meant to be sung, not read on a page. […] I return once again to Homer, who says, ‘Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story’. (Dylan 2017) All this further legitimizes a study of popular rock music adaptations of Shakespeare’s women, which in fact needs no justification at the present time academically speaking – neither for studying musical products nor for considering a subject belonging to popular culture in relation to Shakespeare. Time has passed and things have changed since the 1930s, when Cecil Arthur Lewis, one of the BBC’s co-founders, used Shakespeare as a symbol of elitism to denigrate popular music and praise classical music, instead, asserting: “The music doesn’t wear. It cannot be repeated, whereas good music lasts, mellows and gains fresh beauties at every hearing. It stands, like Shakespeare, through the centuries. No passing craze can shake it” (Lewis, cited in Hansen 2011: 219). More recently, popular music has been approached as a text in the field of cultural studies (see, Bennett, Shank and Toynbee (eds.) 2006), and radical, influential literary critics have provided the academy with inclusive research into the Shakespeare myth and into popular culture adaptations of Shakespeare’s words and characters, including musical ones. 2 This correlation between the means of production and consumption of Shakespeare’s and Bob Dylan’s works is also highlighted by Ricks (2003: 149). Saggi/Ensayos/Essais/Essays Will forever young! Shakespeare & Contemporary Culture – 11/2017 108 In 2014 Graham Holderness recalled the development of Shakespeare studies in his book Tales from Shakespeare. Creative Collisions, acknowledging the work that has been done so far (by himself first of all, see, Holderness 2001) to eliminate or at least reduce the drastic distinction between academic and popular Shakespeare, two dimensions that exist in a continuum, and must be considered as a whole to examine the Shakespeare phenomenon effectively. Holderness actually opened up the way for a new critical approach, according to which “criticism [meets] creative work on its own ground” (2014: 138), taking the form of creative writing. The protean subject area of Shakespeare and popular culture has been widely explored and theorized by Douglas Lanier, through different kinds of studies (investigations into Shakespearean advertisements, films, tourism and musical adaptations). His main theories on this issue can be found in a monograph published in 2002, which provides crucial reflections upon the type of terminology and the methodologies of analysis to be used in such an intricate field of research. Perfectly in tune with the purpose of this paper is his 2005 essay entitled "Minstrelsy / Jazz / Rap: Shakespearean Legitimation and African-American Culture", which specifically focuses on the role of the Bard in ennobling and inspiring African American Music. Lanier brilliantly emphasizes the relevance of the interplay between these two elements, which can be seen as tokens of two poles apart (although, on closer analysis, this might not be the case): white vs black culture, highbrow vs lowbrow art, colonizing vs colonized traditions, thoughtfully literary vs improvisational creative products. “[I]n such exchanges” – Lanier reminds the reader – “Shakespeare is often as much the object as agent of legitimation, particularly from the perspective of popular culture, within which Shakespeare so often serves as its ambivalent high-cultural Other” (Lanier 2005: 2; on this topic see also Hansen 2010: 22-23). Julie Sanders (2006) has devoted several studies to the topic of adaptation (mainly in reference to Shakespeare). In 2007 she published Shakespeare and Music: Afterlives and Borrowings, in which she analyses “the reception and interpretation of Shakespeare’s work by later ages and cultures, and […] the wholesale reimagining of that work in a musical idiom and context” (Sanders 2007: 1). Her research ranges across different genres, and considers proper adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays in the form of operas, film scores, Broadway musicals and ballets, but also musical products in which the Renaissance playwright and his literature are simply alluded to. The last chapter of Sanders’s book expressly deals with contemporary popular music, providing an outline of the influence Shakespeare has exerted, through his sonnets and characters, in this kind of song. A good number of essays and chapters on the interlinks between Shakespeare and contemporary songs and on the didactic potential of such an appealing topic can be enumerated (See, Marshall 2000; Folkerth 2002a, 2002b, 2006; and Ko 2006). Of particular importance is Stephen M. Buhler’s research into the topic (2002, 2007, 2016), which highlights the multiple intertextual nature of these appropriations: songs which rewrite Shakespeare do not simply rework a Renaissance play, but an individual play as it has been received and re-mediated in all kinds of mass-media till that moment in history. Saggi/Ensayos/Essais/Essays Will forever young! Shakespeare & Contemporary Culture – 11/2017 109 An entire volume on Shakespeare and Popular Music was written by Adam Hansen in 2010. It is a book which – starting from a fruitful reflection upon Shakespeare’s own use of early modern popular music – examines the issue from different perspectives. It goes on to investigate the reception of Shakespeare’s literature in contemporary songs, but also into the consequences of this act of appropriation for both popular music and dramatic literature. In Hansen’s own words, the book studies how Shakespeare exists and becomes popular music, [and also challenges] a few myths and misconceptions about Shakespeare, popular music, and how they may relate, [… addressing] several questions. How have Shakespearean characters, words, texts and images been represented in popular music? Do all types of popular music represent Shakespeare in the same ways? If not, why? And how do the links between Shakespeare and popular music alter what we think we know about Shakespeare, and what we think we know about popular music? (2010: 1-2) The Shakespearean references in the work of singer-songwriters are of different kinds and involve different types of music. Whatever the genre of the song and the extent of the intertextual relation are, these offshoots have been recently considered worth analyzing and ‘legitimate’ anyway. Critics have drawn an interesting parallelism between the interactive reception of a Shakespearean work and the creative reading of lead sheets in jazz, where a player finds just one stave of music with the melody, it is then up to him or her to add chord extensions and alterations (See Bristol 1996: 23, Hawkes 1986).