Last Friday, 16th May, the members gathered, not for a recital, but for a long-awaited talk by Dr. Simon Smith, FSA, Associate Professor of Shakespeare and early modern drama at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. Growing up in Maidenhead, he attended the local comprehensive school and benefited from musical tuition at Berkshire Young Musicians’ Trust’s East Berkshire Music Centre. A scholar rather than a musician, his only notable claim to fame as a performer was being the only boy treble among the sopranos for a performance of Rutter’s “Requiem” in St. George’s Chapel, Windsor in the late 1990s! His research is concerned with the musical and theatrical culture of the early modern period and especially the intersection of the two. He has worked as consultant for Shakespeare’s Globe, the BBC, the Independent and the RSC. He was the historical music researcher and early modern theatre adviser for the BBC’s “Wolf Hall” adaptation.

His current projects include an edition of “Twelfth Night” for Cambridge Shakespeare Editions for which he has been exploring the play’s performance history. This research has taken him to archives across the UK and USA and will take him to France and Germany in 2025. With Carla Della Gatta he is co-editing “The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Sound” exploring music, sound and identity in Shakespearean performance across the centuries. He is also writing a short book “Shakespeare and Music” for the “Oxford Shakespeare Topics” series.

For his talk “Music in Shakespeare and Shakespeare in Music” Dr. Smith began with the question of “How does music affect us?” and “Does the use of simple, portable instruments (such as the early pipe and tabor, or the lute) add to a performance?” As an example in “Falstaff” the shaming of Falstaff by the fairies is often accompanied by enthusiastic banging and blowing from instrumentalists on stage. Shakespeare’s works have often provided inspiration for composers: Verdi’s “Othello” (1887) and “Falstaff” (1893) often called operas but are more like music dramas than full scale operas. Then came Gustav Holst with “At the Boar’s Head” in which Falstaff was expected to move to genuine folk tunes! Vaughan Williams too was inspired by Shakespeare with “Hugh the Drover” (1924) and “Sir John in Love” (1929, both thought of as being robust and very “English”. In the latter the well-known melody that most people have heard (perhaps during their schooldays) is commonly referred to as “Greensleeves”. Originally it appeared as “Alas, my love you do me wrong”. William Walton was inspired by “Henry Vth” and was asked to compose the score to accompany the film which he did. It is a fantastic score.
What an excellent evening this was with such an inspired speaker. We do hope he will return at some point in the future.