Continuum Shakespeare and Popular Music

Exploring the interactions between Shakespeare and popular music, this book links these seeming polar opposites, showing how musicians have woven the Bard into their sounds. How have Shakespearean characters, words, texts and iconography been represented and reworked through popular music? Do all types of popular music represent Shakespeare in the same ways? And how do the links between Shakespeare and popular music challenge what we think we know about both Shakespeare and popular music? One of the enduring myths about how Shakespeare and popular music relate is that they don't - after all the antagonism between high culture and pop music could be considered mutual. In the first book of its kind, Adam Hansen shows what happens to Shakespeare when he exists in and becomes popular music, in all its diverse and glorious forms. Exploring these interactions reveals as much about the functions of the diverse genres of popular music as it does about Shakespeare as a global cultural form. Discussing a wide range of examples in a critically-informed but lively and accessible style, this book brings something new to Shakespeare and popular music, capturing the excitement and energy of both for its readers. Review 'Hansen's passion for both Shakespeare and popular music is infectious and makes me want to revisit Shakespeare's plays. I highly recommend this book so go and order it from your local independent bookstore or visit Continuum's site.'--Sanford Lakoff"Adam Hansen offers an audacious analysis of the uses to which contemporary music has put Shakespeare and 'Shakespeare' has put contemporary music. The result is a delightful bricolage of early-modern and post-modern cultural history in which Freud, Adorno and Walter Benjamin rub shoulders with Duke Ellington, Cowboy Jack Clement, the Kaiser Chiefs, numerous rappers, punks and folk-singers as vital interpreters of the Shakespearean text."--Sanford Lakoff"This unique book combines a pop music fan's dedication with an academic's rigour - and gives us an analysis of Shakespeare in popular music and popular music in Shakespeare, in which Shakespeare is both sampler and sampled. From ballads to the Beatles and from Elizabethan sermons to internet fan sites, Hansen's enthusiasm is capacious and revealing. The rest certainly is not silence in a book which collapses distinctions between high and low culture, and is as comfortable with House as with Hamlet."--Sanford LakoffAdam Hansen's Shakespeare and Popular Music is a work clearly informed by the author's passion for both of these subjects...--Sanford LakoffReviewed in The Times Literary Supplement About the Author Adam Hansen is Lecturer in English at Northumbria University, UK.