‘Sing Willow, &c.’

Abstract

From less than a century after Shakespeare’s death through the present time the search for the original ‘Song of Willow’ assigned to Desdemona in Othello (4.3) has occupied a wide range of antiquarians, philologists, musicologists, composers, and stage directors. What unifies these successive explorations is nostalgia for an English musical past and a literal reading of Desdemona’s claim that the song was already ‘an old thing’ and therefore part of collective memory in Shakespeare’s day. By the time of the early music movement and coincident folk-music revival of the 1950s and ’60s, one version, first identified as the original during the eighteenth century, had become central to what emerged as an ‘authentic Shakespeare music’ canon. It still remains the most recorded and widely circulating piece in the repertory of ‘original’ or ‘authentic’ Shakespeare music. This chapter traces its much-neglected history in the context of an entire genre of willow songs, all of which are concerned with musical and cultural remembrance, against the background of a nostalgic multi-century search for ‘original’ Shakespeare ephemera.