Keynote: Gary Taylor: Lyrical Middleton

Welcome to the first day of the Blackfriars Conference. We open this morning with Gary Taylor's salutatory keynote "Lyrical Middleton."

ASC co-founder and director of mission Ralph Alan Cohen first introduces the American Shakespeare Center staff, and director of the Mary Baldwin College M.Litt/MFA program director, Paul Menzer, who introduces Dr. Taylor.

Dr. Taylor introduces his band, The Goddess Flora and The Four Seasons. The keynote is called "Lyrical Middleton," after all, so it seems to follow that he would need a band. No one wastes anytime in getting to the music. The Blackfriars Conference is only just getting underway, and it feels like an ASC show. That's a good sign. I'm going to try to keep up with Dr. Taylor's main points in summarizing his address.

Dr. Taylor presents a textual history of Middleton with songs disconnected from their music. Indeed, the music for the first song ("the Song of Flowers") presented has been created by ASC company members. He highlights the difference between written poetry and song lyrics, and explores the evolution of poetry read as opposed to be heard. Blake's "Songs of Innocence," for example, were clearly designed to be seen and not heard.

Middleton wrote more songs than Shakespeare, and his songs were more admired than Shakespeare's in the 17th century. Dr. Taylor poses three questions. How can we/why should we recover the musicality of lyrics for which music no longer survives? What do we mean by lyricist?

If the modern classroom has evolved from the text based-visual tradition of the eighteenth century, modern multimedia classrooms have the chance to break from this tradition with the inclusion of audio and visual elements to instruction. He demonstrates this point by comparing Fred Astaires performance of "Puttin' on the Ritz" with Gene Wilder's in "Young Frankenstein," and the text printed on a screen.

On the Blackfriars stage, as in a multimedia classroom, we have the opportunity to use these media to contrast performances for audiences and students in a way that makes signature differences in styles clear. Dr. Taylor's cast performs two dances from "Women Beware Women," and demonstrates his point with contrasting dances between Hypolito and Isabella, and the Ward and Isabella. Even if we don't have the Middleton's music, we can see the juxtaposition in character, and can infer a similar juxtaposition in musicality.

Dr. Taylor offers the metaphor of song lyrics being islands within archipelagos of the text. They are connected and dependent upon the context of the text, but just like "Puttin' on the RItz," will sometimes stand apart from the text and find their own context. Likewise, early modern lyrics sometimes found themselves being used in multiple texts.

Some points in brief:

* Middleton's lyrics tend to be more focused on social contexts than Shakespeare.

* Middleton's contemporaries had no compunctions about taking his lyrics out of their context, and so it is not anachronistic for us to do it either.

* Lyricism is about intensity, and lyrical moments can make the audience forget the context of the play itself.

* Middleton's dances also found their way into other texts.

Dr. Taylor's use of Middleton's songs demonstrate what a skilled lyricist that Middleton can be. Is anyone out there interested in writing a thesis on Middleton as singer/songwriter? in Q&A Dr. Taylor argues this aspect is so overlooked because we have become so accustomed to reading Middleton's irony.

So it looks like we've got this conference off to a great start. We'll be back with another update after the 1 PM session.