Dramaturgy of the Shakespearean Libretto

From the late seventeenth century (Purcell’s The Fairy-Queen, 1692), Shakespeare’s plays have entered the realm of music theatre and opera, inspiring both composers and their librettists. Operas on Shakespearean themes have played a seminal role in the repertoire and continue to do so—just as Shakespeare’s own plays have done in the spoken theatre. This chapter analyses examples of libretti that adapt and translate Shakespeare’s plays into the operatic genre. Special attention is paid to dramatic situations, character construction, performative poetry and the role of music—the very making of musical theatre (or the melodramatic arts) that librettists and composers undertake in developing the potential and inspiration from Shakespeare. Rather than being exhaustive and extensive in mapping the wide field of Shakespearean opera, this chapter offers a detailed analysis of different types of dramaturgy and libretto, relating them to the cultural moments in which the works were created and revived, forming musical variants of the Shakespearean canon. The case studies of the libretti’s melodramatic imagination are Henry Purcell’s The Fairy-Queen (1692), Jiří Antonín Benda and Friedrich Wilhelm Gotter’s Romeo und Julie (1779), Antonio Salieri and Carlo Prospero Defranceschi’s Falstaff, o le tre burle (1799), Carl Maria von Weber and James Robinson Planché’s Oberon, or The Elf King’s Oath (1826), and Thomas Adès and Meredith Oakes’ The Tempest (2004).