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Does the presence of such sounds compensate for or emphasize Shakespeare’s absence (or the lover’s)? Who, to appropriate the poem’s lexicon, is the ‘accessory’ to whom here? These questions are not easy 33 SHAKESPEARE AND POPULAR MUSIC to answer, and are made more difficult because the track and the poem are themselves so unsettled. The song has a regular 4/4 time but this groove is disrupted by an irregular snare beat. This may cause a disjunction between the generally iambic rhythm of the poem and the stilted tempo of the song, or that stilted tempo might amplify those moments in the poem when the iambic rhythm is strained (lines 6 and 13, for example).

Most importantly perhaps, popular music persisted in the plays, because it consolidated the plays’ own success. Put differently, it could be argued that in some cases Shakespeare survived because of popular music. This has been true in the present and the past. A far-from-popular play such as Timon of Athens was given a new lease of life, thanks to its association with Duke Ellington’s 1963 score (revived in the 1990s in stagings, and recordings such as Stanley Silverman’s adaptation). Looking further back, Julie Sanders reminds us that during the Restoration, London’s stages were ‘anything but precious’ about songs in Shakespearean texts, and ‘the theatres of William Davenant and Thomas Killigrew were more than willing to add songs by contemporary musicians’ (2007, 31).

Which it promises’, meaning we experience a blissful, almost orgasmic pleasure in what he and we get up to with words (1986, 88–89). Developing this notion, Hawkes makes jazz his ‘abstract model’ for potentially subversive interpretations and appropriations, whereby ‘interpretation constitutes the art’ not only of the ‘jazz musician’, or the critic, reader or performer, but also of Shakespeare (1986, 117–18). In Shakespeare in the Present, Hawkes returns to this model of critical play straying from textual certainty.