The musician I was referring to at the end of yesterday's post is Duke Ellington, whose career provides a parallel with Shakespeare's in a couple of important ways. The first is that Ellington kept a big band together for over fifty years, which is an incredible achievement by itself, but he resembles Shakespeare in that his primary reason for doing it was to make it possible for him to hear his compositions immediately and as he intended them. Shakespeare was involved with theatrical troupes for the entire twenty years of his writing career, and it's clear that every word in the plays was written with them in mind. The second is that each wrote with not only the audience in mind, but also their own performers. Whereas Ellington used to ask his musicians if they all liked their parts after they'd played a new piece, it's not hard to imagine Shakespeare doing the same with his actors. And of course, both wrote to feature and/or challenge specific individual performers. I'm convinced that it's largely because of these factors that each of these artists is now considered simply a genre of their own, with only their last names needed for identification.

In an interview I saw on television last night, Stephen Sondheim said some very interesting things in regard to his writing process, which is also apparently the subject matter of his new book, Finishing the Hat. One of the points that he made was that no one ever writes a great work for the theater on the first try, because it's only after having done one that the writer realizes the importance of the audience. As he put it, the writer soon learns that the audience is "the final collaborator". Of course, this made me realize (once again) that only a full-time theater professional could possibly have written Shakespeare's plays. They were written with actors and a stage not only in mind, but in use - not amidst tea and crumpets. Of course, one of the central characteristics of Shakespeare's plays is how well they work in front of an audience. And it becomes increasingly evident, as one spends more time with the works, that this was always one of his primary concerns - at least equal in importance with their poetic and philosophical content. (Historical accuracy was not nearly as important to him as these three.) Tomorrow: a comparison to another twentieth-century musician.