Sing a song of Shakespeare

“If music be the food of love, play on,” Shakespeare commands through Orsino, the highest-ranking character in “Twelfth Night,” at the very beginning of that play. But what music, whose music? Where are the notes?

Possibly nowhere, but also maybe hidden in plain sight. Many scholars believe that the music that originally accompanied Shakespeare’s plays has been lost. But perhaps it was so much a part of the popular culture of Shakespeare’s time that we simply haven’t been able to sort it out from all the surviving examples in library archives.

In the theater, directors of Shakespeare most often commission scores to fit whatever interpretive approach or period they’ve chosen -- whether that means simulating an Elizabethan/Jacobean style or making Will the Shake into a contemporary rap poet. The results usually range from unmemorable to unlistenable, but sometimes one masterpiece can beget another when a major composer reaches across the centuries to collaborate with Shakespeare and produces something as distinctive as Felix Mendelssohn’s incidental music to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

Yet even if we believe that Shakespearean music should be recomposed for every new staging, imagine the insights we could gain if we could hear what Shakespeare heard four centuries ago: the rhythms, melodic forms and sonorities he had in his mind’s ear when he asked for music or singing in a production.

In particular, imagine how our understanding of his plays might deepen if we could reunite the large number of lyrics and references to songs embedded in his plays with the music that he counted on to give them life.

Enter Canadian musicologist Ross W. Duffin, who has not only collated and reorganized all previous known studies on this subject but used computer-matching techniques to supply appropriate period music for songs that have come down to us with Shakespearean lyrics but no known melodies.

Titled “Shakespeare’s Songbook,” Duffin’s handsome new 528-page hardcover compendium offers background material, music notation and complete lyrics for the classic full-length songs from the plays as well as the fragmentary “throwaway” ditties that characters sometimes sing, or allude to, within a scene.

“Some of them had not been matched up before,” Duffin said recently. “A lot of the research on the tunes has only been done in the last few decades.”

Published by W.W. Norton & Co. at $39.95, his book also includes a CD featuring expert performances of about half the 165 song-settings in his text. Arranged alphabetically, they sometimes convey the surreal illusion of hearing an original cast album from the Globe Theatre or Blackfriars Playhouse of Shakespeare’s time.

However, Duffin quickly points out that many of the tunes newly matched to Shakespearean words have been recovered or reconstructed from instrumental arrangements of the period -- and extracting them can be a subjective and even conjectural process.

“Creating these reconstructions is a controversial thing to do,” he said. And his solutions are not presented as definitive. “Are these the original settings from Shakespeare’s productions? No, I can’t claim that. But they are plausible settings of Shakespeare’s words to music that he knew.”

The best-known song of the era is undoubtedly “Greensleeves” (mentioned in “The Merry Wives of Windsor”), a ballad that hovers in lyrical melancholy and is distinctive enough to have supported innumerable arrangements. Aristocratic accompaniment in Shakespeare’s time would have been on lute or keyboard -- sometimes with a fixed ground-bass pattern. Popular sonorities would have been earthier, involving weighty, reedy ancestors of contemporary instruments plus plenty of percussive rhythm.

Duffin says most of the melodies he used for the major songs in Shakespeare’s plays are versions of tunes Shakespeare himself cites in various places. Moreover, even when versification and rhythmic and melodic patterns all matched, he wasn’t satisfied. “I was always also looking for some further evidence, some kind of external hook,” he said.

For example, when he was searching for a melody for the ballad “Come Away, Come Away Death” from “Twelfth Night,” it happened that a tune Shakespeare had mentioned in several plays fit extremely well. Moreover, in a speech that comes just before “Come Away, Come Away Death,” Orsino talks about the song and says, “If ever thou shalt love in the sweet pangs of it....”

Those words clinched the matter for Duffin. “The official name for that tune was ‘The Pangs of Love,’ so it seemed that what I had found by matching tune to text in my computer database was supported by this verbal link in the play.”

Beyond the specific song matches that he achieved, Duffin’s project highlights a larger issue: the fact that Shakespeare’s world was as thoroughly permeated with popular music as our own, and knowledge of that music added an extra layer of meaning to his plays.

In our media-saturated society, if we refer to someone as a nowhere man or material girl, we expect people to know that these labels come from specific pop songs. Similarly, when Shakespeare’s Beatrice in “Much Ado About Nothing” talked about being so unmarriageable that “I may sit in a corner and cry, heigh ho for a husband,” her audience knew that she too was quoting a popular song title.

Long before copyright laws, the tunes for those songs represented common currency, constantly recycled with new lyrics but scarcely ever notated (except in highfalutin instrumental arrangements) because just about everyone knew them.

“This scenario would explain why such an astonishingly high percentage of Shakespeare’s songs survive without notated musical settings,” Duffin writes. “They simply were not needed or expected when the tunes were of such familiar stock.”

With that stock now gathered from widely separated sources and augmented by gleanings from the classical repertory of the time, his conclusion is as obvious as it is refreshing: “A great deal of Shakespeare’s ‘lost’ music may not be lost after all.”