’Tis Master’s Voice: A Seventeenth-Century Shakespeare Recording?

Abstract

Musical notation may be the closest we can ever approach to a recording of Shakespeare himself speaking. However, to play it back accurately, we need to adjust our decoding of the recorded information to be compatible with seventeenth-century standards. Recent findings from the Text, Rhythm, Action! research project within the Performance programme of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe 1100–1800)1 indicate that the correspondence between seventeenth-century musical Recitative and spoken declamation on stage was very close: closer than previously suspected, much closer than is heard in musical renditions today.2 Contrary to modern assumptions, such Recitative was not rhythmically ‘free’; the notation specifies high-precision, split-second dramatic timing. Combining these new insights with previous research tracing links from the 1680s back to Shakespeare himself, this chapter offers a new analysis of a seventeenth-century Recitative-song as a record of contemporary speech.