Musical Settings for Shakespeare

Example 1: In the final scene of As You Like It, there is a lengthy and somewhat odd, almost legalistic speech that the clown, Touchstone, delivers on how the word “if” can be used to avoid arguments. Because the speech is tangential to the main plot, theatre companies sometimes try to omit this. What they often find out in the dress rehearsal is that without the speech, there isn’t enough time for a critical costume change. In a crucial plot twist, the main character, Rosalind, has to change offstage from her current disguise in men’s clothing to her prior outfit, which reveals who she is.

That’s a straightforward example of a staging problem, but they can be much more abstract and conceptual. Here’s another that I referred to earlier.

Example 2: Given that music played a crucial role in the original productions of the plays, how do we incorporate music into a production?  How do we do this so that it advances instead of hinders the narrative?  Like the prior example of the hidden need for Touchstone’s speech, this is a trickier matter than it might first appear. One can’t, for example, necessarily insert a setting that’s written primarily for the concert stage. There are a couple of reasons why this may fail. One is that it may be in a style that requires more musical training than the cast has. Another is that many settings for the concert hall don’t necessarily function well in a theatrical production because they emphasize the music as music and disregard the needs of the plot.

Staging problems can come from the physical properties of the theatrical space (e.g., Rosalind’s costume change). They can also come from historically informed performance (e.g., including music in a production). But they can also come from the audience, and in specific, the interplay between the audience and the text. Below is an example of a yet more abstract staging problem.

Example 3: Only 17% of the text in Shakespeare is delivered by female characters. Meanwhile women usually comprise at least half of the audience for a Shakespeare production. What we have, therefore, is a real disparity between the demographics within the play and the demographics in the audience that goes to see the play. How do we stage a production in a way that addresses and perhaps resolves that disparity?

A production, of course, is not necessarily required to address this staging problem. At the same time, it’s worth noting just how many recent productions have dealt with this issue. One way of measuring how pervasive this staging problem is is to look at how many Shakespeare-adjacent plays have been created in just the last few years in which the focus is redirected towards the female characters (By Shakespeare-adjacent, I mean plays that are not by Shakespeare but that borrow extensively from his works, either through direct quotes or plotlines.) Four recent examples are Emilia (2018), Jane Anger (2017), Hamnet (2023), and A Room in the Castle (2025).

Put together, these suggest how persistent this staging problem is, which leads us naturally to the following:

Example 4: Is there a way to use musical settings to refocus the audience’s attention on the female characters in a production of Shakespeare? In other words, is there a way to use a solution for the staging problem in example 2 (how to use music in a Shakespeare production) to solve the one in example 3 (how to create greater gender parity)?

Here’s one simple approach: use techniques available in music–e.g., repetition and slowing down the delivery of the text–to focus the audience’s attention on what female characters are saying. This is analogous to shining an actual spotlight on an actor but doing it with music instead to refocus an audience’s attention on that character and her perspective. As such, it’s similar to the goals of some of the Shakespeare-adjacent plays mentioned above. The difference, though, is that this method retains the original text.

Elsewhere on this site, we’ll show some examples of how musical settings can do this. Here, though, we list some other staging problems to show their richness and variety:

Example 5: How do we show the audience that they may also be characters in a Shakespeare play?

Example 6: How do we use music to meet the audience halfway?

Example 7: How do we express important attributes of a play in those cultural terms that the audience knows well?

Of course, not all staging problems need to be so abstract. Many are highly specific to individual plays. Examples below.

Example 8: In Twelfth Night, Olivia falls hard for Cesario/Viola. How do we make this believable? Can we use music to accomplish this?

Example 9: In The Tempest, we need to stage the moment when Ariel and Caliban get their freedom. How can we use music to convey what the characters are feeling?

Example 10: For audiences in Shakespeare’s day, one of the most nerve-wracking issues regarded the divine right of kings. Where does the king’s authority really come from? Who can challenge it? This is why one of the most critical moments in Richard II is when that monarch, his kingdom crumbling around him, delivers a soliloquy questioning both that divine right and also the cost of assuming the crown. Can we use music to highlight the formality of the office as well as the way Richard II’s hold on it is disintegrating? (Click here to return to intro.)

Example 11: When Puck breaks the Fourth Wall at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, how can we use this moment to reiterate the supernatural nature of the play?

Example 12: Shakespeare’s plays, of course, didn’t exist in a vacuum, but in a larger context of English culture from the late 1500s to the early 1600s. At that time was almost a celebration of melancholia, which is why you see a fair number of characters with that affliction in his works. How do you express that in musical terms?