This comprehensive study formulates an original theory that dramatic song must be perceived as a separate genre situated between poetry, music, and theater. It focuses on John Arden, Margaretta D'Arcy, Edward Bond, Peter Barnes, John Osborne, Peter Nichols, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Peter Shaffer, and John McGrath.

This book challenges the assumption that Franz Schubert (1797-1828), best known for the lyricism of his songs, symphonies and chamber music, lacked comparable talent for drama. It is commonly assumed that Franz Schubert (1797-1828), best known for the lyricism of his songs, symphonies, and chamber music, lacked comparable talent for drama. Challenging this view, Drama in the Music of Franz Schubert provides a timely re-evaluation of Schubert's operatic works, while demonstrating previously unsuspected locations of dramatic innovation in his vocal and instrumental music. The volume draws on a range of critical approaches and techniques, including semiotics, topic theory, literary criticism, narratology, and Schenkerian analysis, to situate Schubertian drama within its musical and cultural-historical context. In so doing, the study broadens the boundaries of what might be considered 'dramatic' within the composer's music and offers new perspectives for its analysis and interpretation. Drama in the Music of Franz Schubert will be of interest to musicologists, music theorists, composers, and performers, as well as scholars working in cultural studies, theatre, and aesthetics. JOE DAVIES is College Lecturer in Music at Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford. JAMES WILLIAM SOBASKIE is Associate Professor of Music at Mississippi State University. Contributors: Brian Black, Lorraine Byrne Bodley, Joe Davies, Xavier Hascher, Marjorie Hirsch, Anne Hyland, Christine Martin, Clive McClelland, James William Sobaskie, Lauri Suurpää, Laura Tunbridge, Susan Wollenberg, Susan Youens

Popular song is a liminal, hybrid form of cultural production. As a manifestation of adaptation studies, it has lacked visibility by comparison with more dominant adaptation practices, especially those for the screen. This book serves to fill this gap. It investigates what songwriters read and write before they start singing, showing that they need either to adapt material from existing sources or write their own lyrics drawn from a wide range of source texts and personal experiences. They are subject to myriad influences, and among these are other song lyrics, poems, novels, plays, films and hybrid cultural forms. This deep-structure intertextuality is embedded in the cultural flux of language, and operates at both conscious and subconscious levels. This book thus explores the complex and multifarious intertextual connections between popular songs of various genres, styles and eras and literary works, including, but by no means limited to, the Bible and Shakespeare. As such, it offers a valuable resource, by exploring the deep intertextual significance of literary source material for the intellectual and emotional diversity that can be found in the popular song form; the inverse reciprocal relationship, while much less common, is also considered in the study.

First published in 1963. When originally published this book was the first to treat at full length the contribution which music makes to Shakespeare's great tragedies, among them Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear. Here the playwright's practices are studied in conjunction with those of his contemporaries: Marlowe and Jonson, Marston and Chapman. From these comparative assessments there emerges the method that is peculiar to Shakespeare: the employment of song and instrumental music to a degree hitherto unknown, and their use as an integral part of the dramatic structure.

First published in 1963. When originally published this book was the first to treat at full length the contribution which music makes to Shakespeare's great tragedies, among them Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear. Here the playwright's practices are studied in conjunction with those of his contemporaries: Marlowe and Jonson, Marston and Chapman. From these comparative assessments there emerges the method that is peculiar to Shakespeare: the employment of song and instrumental music to a degree hitherto unknown, and their use as an integral part of the dramatic structure.