Shakespeare and Popular Music

Employs sophisticated critical framework (including contemporary popular musicology) delivered in a lively style.

Introduction: A Whole Lotta Shakespeare Goin' On? \ 1. 'Where should this music be?': Locating Shakespeare in/and/against Modern Popular Music \ 2. Shakespeare and the Technologies of Pop \ 3. Shakespeare, the Beatles and the 60s \ 4. Predicting Riots? Shakespeare, Pop and Politics \ 5. 'High Class Dreams': Shakespeare, Status and Country Music \ 6. 'Shakespeare with a twist': The Bard, Race, Gender and Popular Music \ 7. Rockin' All Over the Globe \ 8. Fans, Fans, Fans, Lend Me Your Ears \ Index

"This unique book combines a pop music fan's dedication with an academic's rigour - and gives us an analysis of Shakespeare in popular music and popular music in Shakespeare, in which Shakespeare is both sampler and sampled. From ballads to the Beatles and from Elizabethan sermons to internet fan sites, Hansen's enthusiasm is capacious and revealing. The rest certainly is not silence in a book which collapses distinctions between high and low culture, and is as comfortable with House as with Hamlet."
'Hansen's passion for both Shakespeare and popular music is infectious and makes me want to revisit Shakespeare's plays. I highly recommend this book so go and order it from your local independent bookstore or visit Continuum's site.'
Adam Hansen's Shakespeare and Popular Music is a work clearly informed by the author's passion for both of these subjects...
Reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement
"Adam Hansen offers an audacious analysis of the uses to which contemporary music has put Shakespeare and 'Shakespeare' has put contemporary music. The result is a delightful bricolage of early-modern and post-modern cultural history in which Freud, Adorno and Walter Benjamin rub shoulders with Duke Ellington, Cowboy Jack Clement, the Kaiser Chiefs, numerous rappers, punks and folk-singers as vital interpreters of the Shakespearean text."