>From an advertisement,
>>The three Frost poems in this setting are Full Fathom Five, Under the
>>Greenwood Tree and Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind.
to which Steve Schwartz quipped:
>So now it's Robert Frost who *really* wrote Shakespeare? Take that,
>Earl of Oxford!
Not so fast! The Earl may have other posthumous tricks up his sleeve:
http://www.wsu.edu/~delahoyd/shakespeare/music.html
The suggestion is that Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, might
also have written music, in particular, English madrigals, under a
pseudonym, just as he (allegedly) penned the works of Shakespeare.
Regardless of the identity of the author(s) of the madrigals (or the
other), it is still interesting ...
"Nothing is more astonishing in the whole history of music than
the story of the English school of madrigal composers. The long
delay of its appearance, lagging behind the Italian school by
no less than half a century: the suddenness of its development:
the extent of the output: the variety and the originality as
well as the fine quality of the work: the brevity of its endurance,
and the completeness with which it finally collapsed: all these
features combine to distinguish the madrigal school as the
strangest phenomenon in the history of English music. (Fellowes,
qtd. in Kerman 255)
"The English madrigal phenomenon resembles perhaps only,
coincidentally, the Shake-speare phenomenon [...]"
Rick Mabry
Shakesport, LA
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