This book argues for a new relationship between music, myth, lyric, and drama in Shakespeare's last plays. In the last plays, Shakespeare dramatizes these tensions between the social and the aesthetic in response to the changing roles of myth and lyricism in early seventeenth-century English culture. Looking closely at the complex roles of an Orpheus at court and on the stage, the book turns to the life and work of John Dowland, known in his time as the “English Orpheus.” The great lutenist of the Elizabethan period and one of the most widely published and performed musician of the Jacobean ag ... More

This book argues for a new relationship between music, myth, lyric, and drama in Shakespeare's last plays. In the last plays, Shakespeare dramatizes these tensions between the social and the aesthetic in response to the changing roles of myth and lyricism in early seventeenth-century English culture. Looking closely at the complex roles of an Orpheus at court and on the stage, the book turns to the life and work of John Dowland, known in his time as the “English Orpheus.” The great lutenist of the Elizabethan period and one of the most widely published and performed musician of the Jacobean age, Dowland developed a powerful self-consciousness about performance, authorship, and craft. He pressed old myths into the service of new social critique, and disseminated a new set of ideas about the place of the performing self in a changed society. Here Shakespeare and Dowland emerge as parallel performing artists, both exploring lyric poetry and music as performed and as commanded. This book also explores the place of these late plays in the First Folio printing of Shakespeare’s works of 1623. It makes a case for the meaningful place of its late plays in their respective generic sections. Drawing on recent reassessments of the printing and reception history of the First Folio, and engaging with newly discovered evidence for early readerships, the book recovers the historical moments of Shakespeare’s immediate reception.