There is much to enjoy in this impressive study focusing on the ways Shakespearean characters, words, texts and iconography have been represented and reworked in and through popular music. The author's evident passion for both popular music and Shakespeare makes for lively and engaging reading and his exploration of the ways Shakespeare has featured in popular music and what this means for our understanding of his cultural influence is far reaching. Aiming the book at undergraduate students and music fans, Hansen employs a writing style that is fresh and accessible. There is much of value in Shakespeare and Popular Music, with the author revealing the Bard to be both sampler and sampled and demonstrating how ‘Shakespeare helps popular music assume different forms’ just as ‘popular music makes Shakespeare mean different things too, putting a new spin on his words in new contexts’ (p. 158).
Probing such questions as ‘Do all types of popular music represent Shakespeare in the same ways?’ and ‘how do the links between Shakespeare and popular music alter what we think we know about Shakespeare, and what we think we know about popular music?’, the author draws on a broad range of examples for answers (p. 2). These include Cowboy Jack Clement, Elvis Costello, the Kaiser Chiefs, Greil Marcus, Jon Savage, the Sex Pistols, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits and many more. Exploring the relationship between popular music and Shakespeare through such a diverse variety of examples – ranging from The Beatles to country music, from punk to folk-singers – enables Hansen to reveal links which challenge distinctions between high and low culture, to locate some interesting cultural shifts and to show that ‘popular music's use of Shakespeare realizes contradictions within such music, and within its relations to the contexts in which it is made and consumed’ (p. 158). But at times, the sheer volume of examples is somewhat dizzying and I do wonder whether a series of specific case studies might have afforded the author greater opportunity to unpack more fully the complexities of the questions he poses. That is, I would have liked several pit-stops to anchor the discussion more and to really drill down into the importance of the textual fragments he selects from songs.
In a comprehensive Introduction the author outlines the parameters of the book and its aim to reveal how (and why) popular musicians in different times and places have attempted to create continuities or connections between what they do and what Shakespeare did, as well as how ‘the power of these continuities between popular music and Shakespeare can disrupt understandings of cultural chronology or historical precedence’ (p. 7). Chapter 1 begins by exploring what Shakespeare himself did with popular music in his own time, by focusing on the soundscapes of early modern England. It then moves on to consider the ways in which modern popular music confuses the distinction between past and present. The second chapter moves forward to survey the various ways in which Shakespeare's relationship with modern popular music, and popular culture more generally, have been expressed in such musics, in existing Shakespearean criticism and in contemporary critical and cultural theory. Chapter 3 develops these concerns with historically specific soundscapes to consider the relations between Shakespeare, popular music and developments in technology. Arguing that the technologies of modern popular music – phonography, video, digital media – have profoundly affected modern experiences of Shakespeare, the author utilises Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet (1996) to illustrate how Shakespeare has had a role in unsettling as well as consolidating distinctions between early modern and modern popular music.
Following the critical overviews provided in the first three chapters, subsequent chapters outline some specific cultural and socio-political contexts in which Shakespeare and modern popular music can be located. The fourth chapter, ‘“Shakespeare with a Twist”: The Bard, “Race”, and Popular Music’, is for me one of the strongest chapters of the book. Here Hansen explores Shakespeare's associations with African American musics such as jazz and rap and includes interviews with artists such as Akala, examining the effects of such music's global dissemination. Chapter 5 shifts to a concentration on the cultural politics at play in referencing Shakespeare within country music, in particular paying close attention to the role of Shakespeare within the work of Cowboy Jack Clement. The next two chapters examine Shakespeare's connection with popular music in particular periods. Chapter 6 on ‘Shakespeare and the Sixties’ moves us back to the UK and charts the different ways the Beatles and their contemporaries engaged with Shakespeare, while Chapter 7, ‘Shakes-punk: “Deformed, Unfinished”, and Rotten’, analyses what happened to Shakespeare during the conflicted and challenging punk and post-punk eras with reference to the Sex Pistols, Derek Jarman, Elvis Costello and Titus Andronicus.
Chapter 8 employs the Kaiser Chiefs as a case study to unravel the ways in which the politics of early modern drama might compare and contrast with the politics of modern popular music. Hansen reveals how the group has engaged with the topography of early modern London's theatres and probes the question of whether its performance of ‘I Predict a Riot’ at the Globe ‘construct[s] Shakespeare as a subversive Britpop icon, signal[s] a nostalgia for seemingly authentically subversive early modern popular culture, or reveal[s] the limited political horizons of modern popular music’ (p. 12). Chapter 9, ‘Rockin’ All Over the Globe’, is broader in scope and situates Shakespeare in relation to the sounds made in the global-local contexts of world music. The final chapter is for me one of the most exciting sections of the book; it draws upon the developing area of fan studies in cultural theory to discuss how audiences relate and respond to popular musicians who reference or evoke Shakespeare in their music.
One of the strengths of Shakespeare and Popular Music is that Hansen draws on scholarship from a variety of different disciplines: for example, work by musicologists such as Simon Frith and Richard Middleton, Shakespeare scholars such as Douglas Lanier and Stephen M. Buhler, as well as cultural theorists such as Theodor Adorno (who figures especially prominently) and Raymond Williams. That said, I was surprised that the author did not draw on any material from the field of adaptations studies – in particular the important works by Linda Hutcheon and Julie Sanders on adaptation and appropriation, which would have provided another useful critical frame to further enrich the discussion.
Nevertheless, Shakespeare and Popular Music is an important and stimulating contribution to a growing body of work focusing on Shakespeare's place within popular culture. It should neither undermine nor detract from the appeal of the book to say that it asks more questions than it answers and that it hints at many more fascinating areas of research than it collates. Throughout the reader is provided with an accessible and rigorous challenge to rethink easy assumptions about and narrow interpretations of how popular music and Shakespeare relate. This fascinating read is a valuable resource, belonging on the shelves of anyone interested in popular music studies and/or Shakespearean appropriations.
