[In the following essay, Schmidgall compares Shakespearean play texts to musical scores. Schmidgall argues that, like operas, Shakespeare's plays are designed to appeal to audiences more attuned to listening than viewing.]

Behavioral psychologists, especially those concerned with learning processes, have in recent years developed categories to describe an individual's dominant mode of sensual response. Thus, one might venture that a ballet audience will contain a high proportion of “kinaesthetic mode” dominants, an art gallery will be populated by “visual mode” dominants, and a symphony concert will largely attract “aural mode” dominants. These modes not only affect powers of appreciation but are thought to play an important part in the emergence of creative and executive talent. Applying and refining this theory in his study, Performing Power, Wesley Balk has amusingly suggested that the perfection of the facial/emotional mode dominant actor will be a Ronald Reagan, while perfection of the aural/vocal mode dominant actor will be a Sir John Gielgud.¹ Indeed, the director Peter Brook, in his analysis of Gielgud's career, described just such an outstanding performer without the psychologists' jargon: “His tongue, his vocal cords, his feeling for rhythm compose an instrument that he has consciously developed all through his career in a running analogy with his life. … His art has always been more vocal than physical: at some early stage in his career he decided that for himself the body was a less supple instrument than the head. He thus jettisoned part of an actor's possible equipment but made true alchemy with the rest.”²

Since, as Shaw asserted, the ear is the sure clue to Shakespeare, this was the obvious repertory a Gielgud could excel in. Shakespeare's is a thoroughly and preeminently aural theater. So, of course, is opera. An opera audience may applaud a pleasing stage picture when the curtain rises, but it will not stay happy long if the ensuing vocalism is inadequate. It has come to listen, as William Meredith charmingly explains in his poem “At the Opera.” In its last stanza he describes our response to the prima donna's “repetitious furor” and “rallies to applause” (the emphasis is his):

But no one minds her sawing
The air and looking perfectly unreal,
Or remembers what he's seen.
In the foolhardy ordeal
We are brought through by her being
Every decibel a queen.(3)

The consequences of being foremost an aural theater are significant and various. It is thus worth pausing here to explore how, over the centuries, the fundamental aurality of the two dramaturgies has been expressed, exploited, and (not infrequently) perverted or travestied. From this common foundation arise many of the remarkable similarities between Shakespearean and operatic style.

That Shakespeare's plays were intended more to be heard than seen has been observed by many—among them Ian McKellen, noted for his one-man program on Shakespearean acting: “I think that Shakespeare should on the whole be aural primarily rather than visual. If you don't get the language, then you've lost the heart of the matter.”⁴ He adds, on another occasion, “We can take comfort from the fact that people who come to a theater are called an audience … audio … ‘hear.’ People who watch television are viewers.”⁵ Several decades ago Granville-Barker confronted the astonishing fact that a twelve- or thirteen-year-old boy played Cleopatra at the Globe Theater. He concluded that this boy had no choice but to put all his eggs, so to speak, in an aural basket: “With the art of acting still dominantly the art of speech—to be able to listen an audience's chief need—[the boy] could afford to lose himself unreservedly … in the music of the verse, and let that speak.”⁶ And the centrality of the actor's voice and musicianly delivery on the Elizabethan stage was even noted while Shakespeare was alive. His fellow playwright John Webster offered a thumbnail sketch of “An excellent Actor” in 1615 that includes this telling remark: “Sit in a full Theater, and you will thinke you see so many lines drawne from the circumference of so many eares, while the Actor is the Center. … He addes grace to the Poets labours: for what in the Poet is but ditty, in him is both ditty and musicke” (emphasis added).⁷

Some excellent hints that vocalism took priority over gesture and “production values” are scattered throughout Shakespeare's canon. “I will hear that play,” says Duke Theseus of “Pyramus and Thisby” in A Midsummer Night's Dream. “We'll hear a play tonight,” says Hamlet of “The Mouse-trap.” “Open your ears,” inveighs Rumor in the prologue to 2 Henry IV, and the prologue of Henry V asks the audience, “Gently to hear, kindly to judge our play.” Hear also figures in the prologues to Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, while in the initial scenes of The Taming of the Shrew, characters speak of hearing a play three times. Only the oafish tinker Christopher Sly in the entire canon says of a play, “Well, we'll see it.” It is rather fleet-witted Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream who expresses the attitude of the typical Elizabethan theatergoer: “What, a play toward? I'll be an auditor.”

I am inclined to think the aural bias of an Elizabethan theatrical event is hinted in Caesar's remark about Cassius: “he loves no plays, / As thou dost, Antony; he hears no music.” This privileging of the aural over the visual is certainly expressed in Volumnia's acerbic observation, in Coriolanus, about the Roman plebeians (the sort who, in London, would be the groundlings in a Globe Theatre audience): “the eyes of th' ignorant [are] / More learned than the ears.” Hamlet, too, may be indicating to us the priority of vocalism on the stage of the day in his talk to the traveling players. For his very first concern is that they “Speak the speech, I pray you … trippingly on the tongue.”

“Language shows the man,” said Ben Jonson; “speak that I may see thee. It springs out of the most retired, and inmost parts of us. … No glass renders a man's form, or likeness, so true as his speech.”⁸ If there is a single key to Shakespeare's stagecraft, it is in this recognition. And it is no wonder that language—utterance of the “inmost parts” of passion's slaves—dominated the Elizabethan stage: elaborate costumes made finesse of gesture or carriage difficult, and the enormous platform—a thousand square feet or so, thrusting out among the standees, barren except for a few portable props—was both dwarfing and illusion-busting. Also, daylight at the Globe ruined the sometime cover of imagined darkness (several plays, like Macbeth and Othello, take place almost wholly at night). Within these constrictions there was but one great means of salvation: charismatic projection. A student of Shakespeare's stagecraft, J. L. Styan, has concluded, “It is probable that Shakespeare saw his actors as playing to their audience most of the time. … The Elizabethan actor was at all times vulnerable, and compelled to communicate with the audience, provoking it and provoked by it.” This approaches the ambience of the opera house, and Styan, in a discussion of “Shakespeare's aural craft,” does indeed use such musicianly phrases as “variation of tempo,” “staccato phrasing,” “use of tone and rhythm,” “crescendo,” and “orchestration of speech.” Almost inevitably, he is led to this conclusion: “At one extreme, Shakespeare's drama approximates to opera and its language to song.”⁹

From the very beginning, performers were likely to be subjected to “musical” criticism. A contemporary of Shakespeare's, Thomas Dekker, quipped that in theatrical “Consorts many of the Instruments are for the most part out of tune,” and he ridicules the typical miscreant thus: “let the Poet set the note of his Numbers, even to Apollo's owne Lyre, the Player will have his owne Crochets, and sing false notes, in despite of all the rules of Musick.”¹⁰ The era's greatest tragedian, Richard Burbage, was on the other hand praised for his musicality. Richard Flecknoe called his appearance on the stage “Beauty to th' Eye, and Musick to the Ear,” and explained that there was “as much difference betwixt him and one of our common Actors, as between a Ballad-singer who onely mouths it, and an excellent singer, who knows all his Graces, and can artfully vary and modulate his Voice, even to know how much breath he is to give to every syllable.”¹¹

The primal musicality of Shakespeare's verse was acknowledged in succeeding eras, too. In the preface to Purcell's Fairy Queen we are reminded, “he must be a very ignorant Player, who knows not there is a Musical Cadence in speaking; and that a Man may as well speak out of Tune, as sing out of Tune.”¹² In the following Augustan age, Colley Cibber—dean of Shakespearean adapters—set forth this musical idea: “The voice of a singer is not more strictly ty'd to time and tune, than that of an actor in theatrical elocution: the least syllable too long, or too lightly dwelt upon in a period, depreciates it to nothing.”¹³ Some years later Cibber's son Theophilus praised Barton Booth by noting simply that “the Tones of his Voice were all musical.”¹⁴ The Georgian period was dominated notably by Edmund Kean, whose point-making emotional violence and attempts to naturalize the blank verse became notorious. (He perhaps of all eminent tragedians took Hamlet's famous advice least to heart.) In 1829, toward the end of Kean's reign, a critic observed forlornly, “Shakespeare has his music as well as Handel, but where upon the stage do we find an actor who does justice to his melody? Might not Shakespeare, so far as his cadences depend for their effect on actors, have written Othello and Macbeth in prose? … Who among [current actors] studies the principles that regulate the music of passion, as singers do the principles of their art?”¹⁵ More recently, Granville-Barker began his famous series of prefaces on the production of Shakespeare's plays with this simple admonition: “The text of a play is a score waiting performance.”¹⁶

Except in Shakespeare's flattest, least tunable prose passages—which do not occur all that often—the actor must bestir himself to recognize and exploit the elaborate composition of sounds and convey not only the bare sense but also the various pleasures of vocalization for its own sake. That aural pleasure is to be had everywhere, even when a ghastly character like Lady Macbeth, Richard III, or Iago is in the limelight, is both a Shakespearean and an operatic principle. Mozart expressed this pervasive aural pleasure-principle in a letter explaining why he gave the comically bloodthirsty Osmin in Die Entführung aus dem Serail an unusual key and tempo change in his first aria: “a man in such a towering rage exceeds all control, moderation and purpose; he does not know what he's doing—just so, the music mustn't know either. But … the passions, whether violent or not, must never be expressed disgustingly, and music, even in the most terrible context, must never insult the ear, but even there must give pleasure, that is, must always remain music.”¹⁷ Iambic pentameter—even when it emerges as “Come, thick night, / And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell”—must, as Mozart urges, remain music and give aural delight. The opera repertory is full of examples of appalling evil musicalized gorgeously: for instance, the triumphal duet for that ghastly couple, Nerone and Poppea, at the end of Monterverdi's Coronazione di Poppea, most of Don Giovanni's role, or Count di Luna's “Il balen del suo sorriso” in Il Trovatore. This last villain is often asked to sing dolce (“sweetly”), a direction apt for many of the speeches of Iago and Richard III.

Getting at all the music in Shakespeare's text requires skill and attentiveness. The word that John Barton lands on in Playing Shakespeare by way of urging this challenge is relish. Quoting Hamlet, he says, “‘Words, words, words.’ The Elizabethans loved them: they relished them and they played with them.” Three of Barton's actors read a passage from Love's Labour's Lost that demonstrates this love of language, and he reiterates his theme: “Verbal relish … today we're a bit apt to fight shy of it. But until we love individual words we cannot love language.” Later he stresses “a tendency in our acting tradition to run away from verbal relish, especially of vowels.” (Incidentally, “relish” is the now-archaic musical term for the appoggiaturas or grace notes that ornament a melodic line: recall that Burbage was praised, singer-like, for knowing “all his Graces.” Especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, relishes—also called shakes, mordants, and accacciaturas—were one of a composer's principal means of eking ever more nuance from his melodic line. One might even paraphrase Barton and say that until a singer loves individual notes, he or she will be unlikely to relish music.)

At the end of Barton's session, “Making the Words One's Own,” he himself tackles a speech in heightened verse (the French King's list of knights in Henry V, 3.5.37-54), explaining, “I'll tend to pronounce every single sound within a word because I suspect that Elizabethan actors may have done that more than we do. So I'll overstress and over-relish the sounds.” The several responses to Barton's reading are worth quoting here, for they approximate the kinds of praise one encounters for an operatic aria finely interpreted:

LISA Harrow:
“There was this amazing thread that went right the way through from the beginning to the end. You never let it drop or let us flag for a moment.”
BEN Kingsley:
“It never lets us off the hook when it's done that way. It swept us along.”
ROGER Rees:
“It's wonderful to hear something like that because so much of our literature and playwriting today seems to be obsessed with the lack of language. You know … the spaces and the pauses … the absence of text sometimes. To hear a bit of text so highly encrusted with all kinds of different shapes and movement in it and in the sounds is wonderful.”(18)

Making words in a promptbook or notes in a score resonate is a vocal responsibility; it requires a constant awareness and exploitation of lyric possibilities lying on the printed page. Actors who comes to Shakespeare Cassius-like, hearing no music, are doomed to defeat at the crucial moments when lyric levitation is both possible and necessary. When this defeat occurs, an audience will be left earthbound and of Samuel Johnson's mind; for he accused Shakespeare of often clothing “trivial sentiments and vulgar ideas” in “sonorous epithets and swelling figures” … and of creating “declamations or set speeches [that] are commonly cold and weak.”¹⁹ If an unmusical actor cannot “swell” sonorously, almost any Shakespeare will seem cold and weak indeed. His meaning alone is not enough. The more hostile critics of Shakespeare, too, almost always show evidence of a tin ear. Sounding for all the world like Emperor Joseph II, who complained of the “monstrous many notes” in Mozart's Entführung, was the infamous Thomas Rymer. In his Short View of Tragedy (1693) he fumed: “Many … of the Tragical Scenes in Shakespeare, cry'd up for the Action, might do yet better without words. Words are a sort of heavy baggage, that were better out of the way … especially in his bombast Circumstance, where the Words and Action are seldom akin.” And he adds perhaps the most screwball pronouncement in the history of Shakespearean criticism: “In a play one should speak like a man of business.”²⁰ So much for verbal relish!

We can be thankful that very few Shakespearean characters speak like men or women of business. Not even his businessman of Venice speaks that way. They tend far more often to be creatures of verbal relish. This is most strikingly true of the earlier plays. Noting the “convention of word-spinning and thought-spinning” in which most of Romeo and Juliet is cast, Granville-Barker flatly asserts in his first sentence on the play, “[It] is a lyric tragedy, and this must be the key to its interpreting.”²¹ Samuel Johnson, not grasping this key, was repelled by the highly wrought speeches (“miserable conceit”) uttered by its “distressed” characters. Typically, he came to the exuberant little aria in which Romeo displays his puppy-love for Rosaline—

          O brawling love! O loving hate!
O any thing, of nothing first create!
O heavy lightness, serious vanity,
Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms …

(1.1.176-179)

—and sourly commented in his note: of “all this toil of antitheses … neither the sense nor the occasion is very evident.”²² Far more appropriate to take Granville-Barker's hint and enjoy the play as a musical entertainment. Of the passage in which Juliet puns furiously on I, Ay, and eye (3.2.45-51) Granville-Barker coolly urges: “Shut our minds to its present absurdity (but it is no more absurd than any other bygone fashion), allow for the rhetorical method, and consider the emotional effect of the word-music alone—what a vivid impression of the girl's agonized mind it makes, this intoxicating confusion of words and meanings.” And he says of the “verbal embroideries” of the long “Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds” speech (I think rightly) that they “owe their existence in great part to the bravura skill of the boy actress who could compass such things with credit.” In the subsequent speech, with all its exclamation points, we seem to be making the acquaintance of something very much like an operatic cabaletta:

Beautiful tyrant! fiend angelical!
Dove-feather'd raven! wolvish ravening lamb!
Despised substance of divinest show!

About this speech, which runs for eight more lines in this superheated vein, Granville-Barker suggested, “The boy-Juliet was here evidently expected to give a display of virtuosity comparable to the singing of a scena in a mid-nineteenth-century opera.”²³ I think Granville-Barker would not mind my adding that, as does many a treasured opera, Romeo and Juliet contains a few dreary verse “arias” (for example, Lady Capulet's lavishly extended simile comparing Paris to a book, 1.3.81-94) and the occasional overwrought ensemble that one would be perfectly happy to see cut in performance (see 4.5.34-90, which I think is Shakespeare's most awful scene).

All of which is not to say that the blank verse should be approached as thinly disguised vocalise. The ideal must always be to convey both the sound and the sense, trippingly on the tongue. Eric Bentley happened upon the rare ideal in a fine Macbeth: “Mr. Keith has few equals in this country as a speaker of Shakespearean verse; he does not yield to Maurice Evans in his eagerness to render the music but he succeeds also in delivering the sense. Voice and carriage take us back to the days of heroic acting.”²⁴ The interpretive point, rather, is to know when sense and music exchange or share the lead as the action unwinds. Shakespeare knew very well the limitations of pristine, immediately comprehensible, plain-style syntax and expression, just as he also knew, as Iago does, the enormous rhetorical powers of nonsense. Lodovico asks of Othello, “Are his wits safe?” and Iago replies with magnificent but impenetrable assurance:

He's that he is; I may not breathe my censure
What he might be. If what he might he is not,
I would to heaven he were!

(4.1.270-272)

As in the passage from Titus we have examined, Shakespeare knew when the very complex meaning of lines might not be fully grasped as they are declaimed, and yet—because of a careful concatenation of sounds and placement of words—a very powerful effect can still be achieved. The purely aural bedazzlement in Shakespeare's plays, as is well known, covers a multitude of loose plot-threads, incredible non sequiturs, and major and minor expediencies of all kinds.

The most brilliant display of Shakespearean blank verse is thought by many to be in Antony and Cleopatra, and one speech from this play has drawn special attention as an example of the author's aural alchemy. Sir John Gielgud has said, “[Y]ou have to know that a great speech like Cleopatra's speech on the death of Antony is written for the sound and not for the sense.”²⁵ Here it is:

O, wither'd is the garland of the war,
The soldier's pole is fall'n! Young boys and girls
Are level now with men; the odds is gone,
And there is nothing left remarkable
Beneath the visiting moon.

(4.15.64-68)

Granville-Barker on the speech: “This, in analysis, is little more than ecstatic nonsense; and it is meant to sound so. It has just enough meaning in it for us to feel as we hear it that it may be possible to have a little more … it gives us to perfection the reeling agony of Cleopatra's mind; therefore, in its dramatic setting, it ranks as supreme poetry.”²⁶ Shaw goes at this passage in a similar way, but, as might be expected, he drives home the parallels with musical performance more aggressively: “This is not good sense—not even good grammar. If you ask what does it all mean, the reply must be that it means just what its utterer feels. The chaos of its thought is a reflection of her mind, in which one can vaguely discern a wild illusion that all human distinction perishes with the gigantic distinction between Antony and the rest of the world. Now it is only in music, verbal or other, that the feeling which plunges thought into confusion can be artistically expressed. Any attempt to deliver such music prosaically would be as absurd as an attempt to speak an oratorio of Handel's, repetitions and all. The right way to declaim Shakespeare is the sing-song way. Mere metric accuracy is nothing. There must be beauty of tone, expressive inflection, and infinite variety of nuance.”²⁷ Shaw's views here, of course, are the perfect response to those who find opera librettos so hilariously lacking in “good sense.”

Such vigorous analyses make clear that signification in Shakespeare (as in opera) is not all. They also suggest the value of approaching the plays on the page as one might an opera score; that is, with a constant awareness that the words were never meant to exist in black-on-white. The actor Alan Howard unwittingly makes something like this point as he discusses the ways one can fail to do justice to Shakespeare on stage: “Obviously you need to comprehend as well as you can what the lines mean. But I think that the other aspect of the actual sounds, the textures and the rhythms, invoke a word which perhaps we don't understand so well today. The word is ‘apprehension’ as opposed to ‘comprehension.’ Something we sense. I think that ‘apprehension’ to the Elizabethans was a very palpable thing. They were sensually highly aware of how rhythms, sound, and texture could combine with comprehension to bring about something which goes beyond just the sense.”²⁸ Getting beyond the sense (or nonsense) is what the reader of an opera libretto is often obliged to do, and Shakespeare's lines—even very memorable ones—require the same effort. Shaw points to Othello's tremendous speech, “Like to the Pontic Sea …” (3.3.453-462), and lays some Shavian flares about it: “The words do not convey ideas: they are streaming ensigns and tossing branches to make the tempest of passion visible … If Othello cannot turn his voice into a thunder and surge of passion, he will achieve nothing but a ludicrously misplaced bit of geography.”²⁹ Granville-Barker singles out Cleopatra's speech as servants and soldiers gather around Antony's corpse (4.15.82-88). It lies a bit flat of the page, but, interpreted “musically,” it levitates in the end like Leonora's “Pace, pace, mio dio” or Aïda's “O patria mia”: “Note how actual incoherence—kept within bounds by the strict rhythm of the verse—leads up to and trebles the nobility of a culminating phrase. … The compelled swiftness of the beginning, the change without check when she turns to the soldiers, the accordant discipline of the line which follows, so that the last two lines [”Let's do it after the high Roman fashion, / And make death proud to take us”] can come out clarion-clear; here … is dramatic music exactly scored.”³⁰

Boito wrote of the “inherent, powerful musicality” in Shakespeare's Othello,³¹ and it is worth allowing Shaw to reiterate this fact of Shakespearean drama in an operatic context, before we pass on to specific “musicological” aspects of Shakespeare's poetry. Shaw thought only one thing worse on the stage than the Elizabethan “merry gentleman,” and that was the Elizabethan “merry lady.” So he wondered out loud, in a review of Much Ado about Nothing, why Beatrice and Benedick hold the stage so damnably well:

Before I answer that very simple question let me ask another. Why is it that Da Ponte's “dramma giocosa,” entitled Don Giovanni, a loathsome story of a coarse, witless, worthless libertine, who kills an old man in a duel and is finally dragged down through a trap-door to hell by his twaddling ghost, is still, after more than a century, as “immortal” as Much Ado? Simply because Mozart clothed it with wonderful music, which turned the worthless words and thoughts of Da Ponte into a magical human drama of moods and transitions of feeling. That is what happened in a smaller way with Much Ado. Shakespear shews himself in it a commonplace librettist working on a stolen plot, but a great musician. No matter how poor, coarse, cheap, and obvious the thought may be, the mood is charming, and the music of the words expresses the mood. … Not until Shakespearean music is added … does the enchantment begin. Then you are in another world at once.³²

Shaw's talk of a poor, coarse, cheap libretto and stolen plot saved by poetic music should put one in mind of any number of librettos for estimable operas … most infamously that of Il Trovatore. Add the music, though, and we are in another world at once.

Another odd libretto is that of Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera. Julian Budden says it is “often held up as a prime example of literary incompetence,” but then he goes on to ask if this is evidence of Verdi's poor literary judgment as well: “Not at all. Verdi is writing music drama on terms which are strictly his own. What mattered to him above all was the power of the individual word to shape a situation, to act as a rocket firing the music across the footlights. He knew well enough that in any cantabile, as distinct from a declamation, a line of verse as such tends to become submerged, with only the important words standing out as landmarks. It was a matter of secondary importance that the sentences should make literal sense.”³³ Budden's reasoning happily supports Shaw's and that of many others who have asserted that music often takes priority over mere syntax, coherence, and sense in Shakespeare. Play him any other way and the result is likely to be the equivalent of an evening of recitative in an opera house.

Notes

1. Performing Power (1985), pp. 306, 309.

2. The Empty Space (1968), p. 110.

3. The Wreck of the Thresher and Other Poems (1964), p. 32.

4. “On Acting Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Quarterly 32 (1982), p. 140.

5. In Barton, Playing Shakespeare (1984), p. 16.

6. Prefaces to Shakespeare, second series (1930), p. 209.

7. Characters, Complete Works, ed. F. L. Lucas (1927), IV, pp. 42-43.

8. “Explorata: or Discoveries,” in The Complete Poems, ed. George Parfitt (1975), p. 435.

9. J. L. Styan, Shakespeare's Stagecraft (1967), pp. 75-76, 157, 163. In Shakespeare's Art of Orchestration (1984), Jean Howard writes similarly of “shifts in tone and tempo,” “aural shifts and contrasts,” “changes of key,” and “crescendo/decrescendo” patterns. Wesley Balk broadens the musical comparison far beyond Shakespeare when, in The Complete Singer-Actor (1985), he refers to the “essentially musical language demands of Shakespearean, Restoration, Georgian, and Greek drama” (p. 28).

10. The Whore of Babylon (1607), sig. A2^v.

11. “A Short Discourse of the English Stage,” in Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, ed. J. E. Spingarn (1957), II, p. 95.

12. “Preface,” The Fairy Queen (1692).

13. Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber (1740), p. 62. Cibber's point is echoed in Betterton's History of the English Stage (1741): “in all good Speech there is a sort of Music, with respect to its Measure, Time and Tune” (p. 46).

14. Quoted in Alan Downer, “Nature to Advantage Dressed: Eighteenth Century Acting,” PMLA 58 (1943), p. 1023.

15. J. B., “On the Art of Acting,” The Spectator 2 (1829), p. 811.

16. Prefaces to Shakespeare, first series (1927), p. xv.

17. Letter to his father, 26 September 1781, quoted in William Mann, The Operas of Mozart (1977), p. 294.

18. Playing Shakespeare, pp. 47, 48, 54, 65-67.

19. Preface to the Plays of William Shakespeare (1765), in Brian Vickers, ed., Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage 1765-1774 (1979), p. 67.

20. In Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage 1693-1733, ed. Brian Vickers (1974), pp. 25-26. It is no wonder that Macaulay called Rymer “the worst critic who has ever lived.”

21. Prefaces to Shakespeare, second series (1930), p. 1.

22. In Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage 1765-1774, p. 152.

23. Prefaces to Shakespeare, second series, pp. 19, 64.

24. The Dramatic Event (1956), p. 131.

25. In Actors Talk About Acting, ed. Lewis Funke and John Booth (1961), p. 32.

26. Prefaces to Shakespeare, second series, p. 186.

27. Our Theatres in the Nineties (1931), III, pp. 80-81. Granville-Barker likewise often emphasizes the musicality of Shakespeare's writing: “To the last … he would write an occasional passage of word-music with a minimum of meaning to it (but of maximum emotional value, it will be found, to the character that has to speak it)” (Prefaces to Shakespeare, first series [1927], p. 8).

28. Quoted in Barton, Playing Shakespeare, p. 195.

29. Our Theatres in the Nineties, III, p. 155.

30. Prefaces to Shakespeare, second series, pp. 185-86.

31. Quoted in Frank Walker, The Man Verdi (1962), p. 489.

32. Our Theatres in the Nineties, III, p. 339.

33. The Operas of Verdi (1979), II, pp. 374-75. Richard Strauss wrote to Hofmannsthal about the loss of words in performance: “It's unbelievable, a great pity but true, how little of the text can be caught by opera-goers no matter what pains the composer takes” (letter of 20 April 1914, in A Working Friendship [1961], p. 192.