Audio Shakespeare in its broadest sense includes all of the ways in which versions of Shakespeare's works are transmitted and disseminated in sound only formats, whether these take the form of radio dramatizations, recordings for LPs, audio cassettes, CDs, or digital downloads for DAB radio, computers, or MP3 players. As such it is the mode of performance which is most ubiquitous and the most fully integrated into the cultures of everyday life, potentially capable of being heard anywhere, anytime. In this essay I have chosen to concentrate solely on broadcast Shakespeare; primarily the derivatives, parodies, and citations which have been part of radio from the beginning. As a radio reviewer once complained, “there are times when Shakespeare seems to get everywhere, like ants, or mice; it would be nice to be able to call in some kind of pest control service, Bardokil or Swannicide, to eliminate unwanted Shakespearean references from your life.” It may well be the case, though accurate statistics would be impossible to gather, that radio has originated and disseminated more allusions and references to Shakespeare than any other form of mass media. And yet historically it has also been one of the most unacknowledged and often ephemeral forms of Shakespearean remediation, and, partly for this reason, the one which has received least critical attention. In this sense Shakespeare has more frequently been “under” than “over” heard.

I begin with the desire to see Michael Gambon play Falstaff – a desire initiated by memories of his past performances and fueled by Michael Cordner's description of a South Bank Show's fly-on-the-wall recording of rehearsing 1 Henry IV's great tavern scene:

Dancing the role, inflecting Falstaff with movements borrowed from Asian warrior figures in recent award-winning films, writing Jet Li, Lucy Liu, or Uma Thurman over “Shakespeare,” adapting the part, one might say, to contemporary understanding or popular taste. (Gambon: “I try to move like a dancer. If I had been born again . . . I would be a ballet dancer.”) Whether or not these moves travel from rehearsal to performance, I anticipate a Falstaff so light on his feet that he makes me want to dance with him, a Falstaff performed by the actor Ralph Richardson dubbed “The Great Gambon” and whom Deborah Warner called “heavenly, super great.” A star, yes, but is Gambon a Shakespearean star? He has played Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, and Antony, but he probably is better known - in the sense of being “popular” - for The Singing Detective's Philip Marlow (1986), Inspector Maigret (1993-94), Lyndon Johnson in Path to War (2002), Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), or even the voice of the washing machine in a Wisk television commercial. Does the starring role “make” the Shakespearean star actor?

One side-effect of the increasing veneration of Shakespeare over the course of the eighteenth century – a period that turned Shakespeare from a rough untutored playwright of incidental “beauties” into the National Poet – was the first stirrings of the Stratford tourist industry as we know and love it today. To visit Stratford-upon-Avon today is to visit Shakespeare's town, set in the heart of Shakespeare Country. Indeed, Stratford has been Shakespeare's town for the better part of two centuries, even though the euphoric road signs announcing this are of relatively recent date. The sheer extravagance of the tourist industry in Stratford would seem to a skeptical glance to have developed in defiance of likelihood; on the evidence of his plays and poems (with the exception of the history plays), Shakespeare had little interest in real locations realistically portrayed, and certainly none at all in the area around Stratford – the chief exception being Sly's offhand reference to “Marian Hacket, the fat alewife of Wincot” (Wincot being a village in the environs of Stratford) in the Induction to The Taming of the Shrew. Moreover, the relative scantiness of Shakespeare's biographical record prior to his London fame and fortune, and its thoroughly unromantic documentation of his thrifty prosperity thereafter, might equally and reasonably have damped the spirit of literary pilgrimage. Yet Stratford, an unremarkable and rundown little market town, came as a result of eighteenth-century bardolatry to be looked at differently, and eventually actually to look different. Shakespeare, too, has come to look different as tourism has established itself as one of the principal means by which popular culture understands and exploits him.

Perhaps more than any other composer, Robert Schumann is known for his lifelong passion for literature. The son of a book dealer, publisher and translator, he earnestly contemplated a literary career during an adolescence focussed as much on poetic as on musical pursuits. ‘Poet and composer in one person’, Schumann later recalled of himself; he was referring particularly to Lieder he composed in the late 1820s, yet one could also read the epithet as expressing a broader compositional ambition. One regularly finds belles lettres paired with music in Schumann's autobiographical comments about his formative years: Jean Paul stood alongside Schubert, Goethe alongside Bach. Music helped feed a burning Theaterpassion: between 1823 and 1827 he heard Weber's Der Freischütz and Preciosa, Cherubini's The Water Carrier (Der Wasserträger), Rossini's The Thieving Magpie (Die diebische Elster) and Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail, among several other stage works.

Not surprisingly, Schumann's initial compositional forays nourished his literary bent, beginning with some larger choral and orchestral works written in his eleventh year, and soon after ‘some numbers for an opera, several vocal pieces, [and] several things for piano’. As a twelve-year-old, he bestowed the distinction of ‘Œuvre 1’ on a setting of Psalm 150, the vivid timbral imagery of the text realized by an unusual bevy of instruments. When Schumann ultimately decided to follow a career in music, against his mother's wishes that he study law, he expressed his choice in literary terms, equating music with poetry, jurisprudence with prose.

In his review of the 1888 première in Vienna of Brahms's ‘Double’ Concerto for violin, cello and orchestra, Op. 102, Eduard Hanslick concluded that, unfortunately, the work did not belong ‘in the first rank’ of his old friend's creations. The first movement in particular struck a sour note, seldom breaking free from ‘its half-defiant, half-depressed mood, or from its A minor tonality. Daylight rarely shines through its many suspensions, syncopations, rhythmic jolts, and its augmented and diminished intervals. We are almost reminded of Schumann's late manner.’ In the 1880s, to ascribe the stylistic features of Schumann's ‘late manner’ to a musical work was tantamount to delivering the kiss of death, and despite the efforts of a small band of revisionists, received opinion of the music of Schumann's later years remains largely negative over a century later. Sounding a typical refrain, a reviewer of a 1978 recording of Schumann's Violin Concerto describes the slow movement of that work as music ‘with so much insanity in its innards that it's frightening’. Sympathetic critics, fearful that their remarks will be met with scepticism, feel compelled to go on the defensive. Joseph Kerman, for instance, prefaces his thoughtful remarks on the ‘visionary’ cadenza near the end of Schumann's Concert-Allegro mit Introduction for piano and orchestra, Op. 134, with the reminder that even though it is ‘a late work, composed shortly before [Schumann's] commitment’, it should ‘by no means … be dismissed on that account’.

A story of decades

Song and Schumann are as inextricably linked in the public mind as they are in the minds of performers and musicologists, and this has been the case for roughly a century and a half. It is clear from the history of later nineteenth- and twentieth-century music that Schumann's songs have never gone out of fashion. They seem no more likely to do so than do Mozart's symphonies, or Debussy's piano music. When we are entranced by the experience of a Schumann song we do not need to think about all his other songs: the dominant 13th chord at the end of ‘Morgens steh’ ich auf' (Liederkreis, Op. 24, No. 1) seems to belong to a different universe from the dominant 13th at the end of ‘Die alten, bösen Lieder’ (Dichterliebe, Op. 48, No. 16); even the theorist determined to make connections in the quest for the identification of a musical ‘language’ will note the different context, register, key and so on – a matter of technical comparison such as will be important in the further investigations below. Instead, our cumulative experience of Schumann song is part of the trust that builds up in this repertoire, a belief common already perhaps to most readers of these words that if you happen to encounter one not encountered before, it will be time well spent in a magical world where everything is in its mysterious place.

Writing with exquisite scorn – that cluster of denigration in “woman,” “novelist,” “serial” and “American,” the implied bathos of the contrast between these lowbrow signifiers and “Shakespeare” – the Evening Standard's “Londoner” ridicules the idea that Shakespeare might be serialized, quoting the cliffhanger from the penultimate episode: “Will Friar John overtake Romeo on the road? Or will Romeo reach Juliet's tomb before he can be saved? Don't miss to-morrow's concluding chapter!” This short, snide review takes as a given the aesthetic mismatch between the commercial practices of serialization and the exalted cultural status of Shakespeare. In this chapter, however, I want to start from a different premise in order to engage with the question and practice of Shakespearean serialization, juxtaposing eight of the plays based on medieval English history written by Shakespeare during the 1590s with their publication in chronological sequence in the First Folio text of 1623, and their performance as a cycle or series during the twentieth century, in particular in the television series An Age of Kings broadcast by the BBC in 1960. What can the formal practices of the construction and consumption of television serialization tell us about original serial or cycle composition of the plays? Rather, therefore, than engaging with the television adaptation of Shakespeare as always and already parasitic and secondary, I want to invert the order of priority. By focusing on the specifically televisual aspects of An Age of Kings I hope to reveal something about the functions of serial narrative in Shakespeare's plays, as well as something about their adaptation onto the small screen.

For the past few years, as “prep” for their first Shakespeare seminar, I've set my undergraduates the opening two pages of a play I'm pretty certain they won't know, Henry VI Part I, reproduced from Hinman's facsimile of the First Folio. Their assignment: to answer what sounds like a simple enough question, “Where does a play begin?” Showing up for class a couple of days later, however, they know they've been stung. “Which play?” they now ask. “The play read? Or the play performed? And who are 'we' - early moderns or postmoderns?” There's a different beginning to a play, they observe, if “we” are picking up a book or taking a seat in the stalls - or, neo-Elizabethans, standing in the yard of the London Globe. One brave student offers Bedford's opening speech as the beginning - perhaps the standard place to start as a reader. But another student points out that Bedford has to get on stage before he starts talking. So the play has to begin with an entrance - like the stage direction says: “Enter the Funerall of King Henry the Fift.” But before that, someone else observes, “There's a music cue: 'Dead march.' The play begins with sound.” Then even that beginning recedes under pressure from another student's rhetorical musing, “Wouldn't you know what play you were going to? Wouldn't the play begin when you went to The Comedy of Errors, not King Lear?” (Or Henry VI not Henry V: what a world of narrative difference stands in that single digit.) Of course: spectators anticipate a different experience when they - notional Elizabethans - pay their penny for “The Tragedie of Othello the Moore of Venice” as against “The Famous History of the Life of Henry the Eight.” We do too, Shakespeare's latest spectators, for whom, besides, the play undoubtedly (also) begins with the great heap of what we already know (from school, adaptations and remakes, advertising, greeting cards, tabloid newspaper headlines, pop songs, the very air we breathe) about, say, a play called Romeo and Juliet before we see it, even for the first time. Can we offload our cultural baggage, think our way back to the Shakespeare play as premiere?

In recent years, the study of the past and present relationships between Shakespeare and popular culture has been transformed: from an occasional, ephemeral, and anecdotal field of research, which, if it registered at all, was generally considered peripheral to the core concerns of scholarship and pedagogy, to one which is making an increasingly significant contribution to our understanding of how Shakespeare's works came into being, and of how and why they continue to exercise the imaginations of readers, theatergoers, viewers, and scholars worldwide. A range of factors have prompted this shift, among them the increased priority afforded to theatrical performance; the growth of interest in Shakespeare on film and television; the theoretical debates and methodological innovations of the 1980s and 1990s, which have encouraged new kinds of interdisciplinarity in the field of Shakespeare studies, as well as turning attention to the larger forces that have shaped Shakespearean production and reproduction in material culture; the condition of postmodernity itself, in which traditional distinctions between high and low culture have been eroded; and, not least, the changing patterns of educational participation and provision that have characterized the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. Contemporary research and pedagogy in the field of Shakespeare and popular culture is concerned with the Shakespearean theatre and drama's immersion within the festivities and folk customs, entertainment industries, and traditions of playing of its own time; it is also interested in the reinvention, adaptation, citation, and appropriation of the plays (and, to a lesser extent, the poems), and the myths and histories that circulate around them, across a wide range of media in subsequent periods and cultures.

It is hard to imagine a more dramatic shock at the opening of a symphony than that which occurs moments into Robert Schumann's First Symphony (1841). The movement begins with a brief motto theme in trumpets and horns, assertive in rhythm and timbre, yet slightly unsettling (Ex. 8.1). It is in fact ambiguous as to tonality – it could be G minor, B flat major or even D minor. After a fermata, the next iteration of the motto clarifies the tonality as B flat major, with a somewhat odd emphasis of the third, D (it is much more common for the repeated note in an opening figure like this to be the fifth or the tonic). Fuller orchestration (winds and strings), cadential harmony and another fermata set this second version of the motto as an orotund, closed-off statement (compare the much more open-ended effect of the initial two fermatas of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony). The motto seems to be headed on a progressive course of consolidation: first a brass declamation on a single line, followed by a tutti-like confirmation. But then everything falls away, into the suddenly gaping abyss of D minor. Here is the real tutti: trombones and timpani join angrily swarming strings; the effect freezes us as in terror. The untoward emphasis on the pitch D in the opening strain proves to have been the only hint that we could possibly find ourselves in this spot.

The earliest illustration of a Shakespearean subject, and the only one surviving from Shakespeare's lifetime, is a drawing related to Titus Andronicus. (Figure 2) It appears on a single sheet preserved in the collection of the Marquess of Bath at Longleat; it is inscribed with the name of Henry Peacham, presumably the emblem writer and author of The Complete Gentleman, and a date that has been interpreted as either 1595 or (more persuasively) 1614/15. The picture is so well known that to reproduce it yet again would be superfluous were it not for its uniqueness as the sole visual testimony of a spectator contemporary with Shakespeare – this is where any discussion of Shakespearean illustration must begin.

The drawing shows Queen Tamora pleading with Titus for the life of her two sons, who kneel on the right, guarded by Aaron the Moor, as two soldiers watch. These are all characters in the play, and they are certainly performing a scene; but the scene is not in the play – or at least, not in any version that survives. There is a portion of the opening scene that includes all the figures depicted in the drawing, but at this point Aaron is a prisoner along with the two sons, and could not be standing over them with drawn sword. Below the drawing is a dramatic extract. It is this that identifies the drawing as relating to Shakespeare's Titus, but the passage transcribed is not simply a quotation from the play. It combines passages from two separate scenes: an exchange between Tamora and Titus from Act 1 is answered by a speech of Aaron's from Act 5 – both the scene and the text represent a conspectus or epitome of the drama.

Shakespeare's transformation from popular entertainer to literary lion was a complex, fascinating process, but it is only one of several plots in the drama of his ever-widening success and influence. Although it is undeniable that Shakespeare has become the Bard of high culture, he has never been exclusively or stably held aloft. Indeed, his story convincingly demonstrates the instability of the line dividing high and low, elite and popular, revealing the multiple (and sometimes colliding) meanings of those terms. Certainly never “unpopular,” Shakespeare worked in a theatre that was attended by a broad cross-section of the London populace and drew on a range of ritual and folk elements; at the same time, his theatre belonged to an emergent protomodern economy that arguably displaced oral and amateur traditions. Through greater attention to marketplace and medial transformations as well as distinct variations among non-elite groups, the last forty years of research have shown the inadequacy of simple, singular definitions of “the Elizabethan stage,” “popular culture” - and even “Shakespeare.” Thus, rather than engage in the potentially “futile endeavor” to “isolate what was purely popular” in the early modern period, this chapter works outward from narrow signifiers to broader contexts, dancing through the evidentiary thickets. It thereby reveals both the importance and rich multiplicity of relationships between Shakespeare and popular culture.

I began thinking about this essay in the central library of the Czech Academy in Prague, as good a platform as any to stage an inquiry into the ways Shakespearean drama engages with digital culture. It's a large nineteenth-century room, two stories, with a mezzanine of book stacks around the upper level, a large ironwork skylight, and modern furniture. Although the shared computers for internet use are old and slow, the worktables each have several high-speed ports, so that you can connect your own laptop and work at your usual speed; there is high-speed wireless as well. As the day waxes, a number of writers, scholars, and students arrive to check mail, do research, and watch movies online. Cellphones are strictly prohibited, according to the signs at least: we are warned that even one ring will be cause for immediate ejection and loss of privileges. But phones ring, and to judge by the number of people grabbing for their pockets, many people simply have the ringer set to vibrate: there's little apparent concern about having a yellular conversation - at that somewhat irritating, loudish cellphone volume – though most other conversations are ritually hushed. This is not really a problem, though. No one complains, there are even relatively few nasty glances. Some people wear headphones; the woman opposite me seems to be transcribing or perhaps translating a long document, occasionally speaking into a webcam; and between bouts of actual writing, email, and internet searching, I'm playing and replaying the Almereyda Hamlet. Others are watching movies, too, and not always with headphones: a group of college-age men are gathered around a laptop which issues, with increasing frequency, the sounds of screeching tires and muffled explosions.

Robert Schumann's music is not romantic and irrational Träumerei; the history of the aesthetics of genius in the Romantic era is not the history of Schumann's Romantic music or aesthetics. The latter history begins in the literature Schumann read all his life, and continues in his music. To understand the history of Schumann's music, however, we need to approach it through the life, the literature, the poetry and the philosophy.

The literature in the life

Robert Schumann's aesthetics needs to be understood as a process of enculturation within an educated and cultured bourgeoisie, in terms of social history, and – as one of lifelong appropriation and reification of art, literature and music – in terms of developmental psychology. The premises of the former are to be found partly in the protestant ethic that Schumann inherited first and foremost from his father and grandfather. Schumann's father, himself the son of an evangelical (Lutheran) clergyman, was a businesslike and hardworking publisher-bookseller and an author of scholarly and bellettristic works, with a reputation that went beyond the bounds of Zwickau or Saxony. Friedrich August Gottlob Schumann was a member of what had at last come to be recognized in Germany from the 1790s onwards as the educated, cultivated middle classes, comprising government officials; judges; university professors; schoolteachers; private tutors; protestant clergy; and university-educated professionals such as physicians, pharmacists, advocates and notaries; as well as self-employed artists, writers and journalists.

As a largely self-taught composer who for the first part of his career was equally if not more active as a critic, Schumann was intensely aware of his own and his contemporaries' historical moment. Studying Wilhelm Christian Müller's Aesthetisch-historische Einleitung in die Wissenschaft der Tonkunst around 1834, he would have encountered the view that the period 1800–30 marked the highpoint – indeed, the perfection (Vollendung) – of musical history. But for Schumann the past mattered above all to the extent that it paved the way for a future music that it was the duty of his generation to cultivate. In his editorial for the first 1835 issue of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (NZfM) he set out his critical position as being ‘to keep emphatically in mind the former age and its works, to draw attention to the fact that only at such a pure source can new artistic beauties be invigorated – and thereby to resist the immediate past as inartistic, bent only on the enhancement of superficial virtuosity – and finally to prepare and hasten the coming of a new poetic age’.

The image takes shape

The reactions of his immediate circle to the musical exploits of the young Schumann, from domestic music-making to performances in the school context, are known to posterity almost entirely in the form of later reminiscences: we see him in his social environment but learn little that is specifically musical. We have rather more precise information about his progress and setbacks in his study of the piano, as well as about the appearances as a soloist in Zwickau, Schneeberg and even Heidelberg. The primary source is Schumann himself, but at least he collected the opinions voiced in Heidelberg and compiled a unique list in his diary of various views (possibly edited or touched up, but clearly representative). There are no reports of the occasional performances of his music during his childhood, in private or semi-public contexts, all under his personal supervision and with his own participation, but he profited by even such modest exposure. What is clear from these events is that Schumann grew up in an environment where music was not only loved but also eagerly discussed.

After his first lessons with Kuntsch, who may have been a provincial musician but was by no means deficient in judgement or understanding, Schumann turned to various professional musicians with a reputation extending beyond Saxony in his search for a formal course of study. Carl Maria von Weber responded affirmatively to an enquiry from August Schumann, but was prevented from taking his son as a pupil: Robert suffered the deaths of potential musical fathers (Weber, 1826; Beethoven, 1827; Schubert, 1828) as well as his birth father (1826) one after another in close succession. The opinions of the teachers he then chose, or half-heartedly considered choosing, communicated as little as the compositions he sent them. At a later date he published, without attribution, the assessment of the Lieder composer Gottlieb Wiedebein as one that he could accept as fair comment.