An Annotated Catalogue of the Music Manuscripts in the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C. (review)

The collection at the Folger Shakespeare Library includes, according to its website, "materials related to the entire early modern age in the West, from about 1450 to the mid-1700s, and materials related to William Shakespeare and the theater, up to the present day" (http://www.folger.edu/template .cfm?cid=506 [accessed 31 May 2007]). Some scholars may not know about the wealth of music housed in the Folger collection. It is for this reason that Richard Charteris's An Annotated Catalogue of the Music Manuscripts in the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C. is a welcome reference source.

Charteris is a musicologist, writer, editor, and professor in Historical Musicology at the University of Sydney. He has examined and written informative entries for 168 manuscript items ("all the known music materials in the library," as he notes on p. ix of the preface). He notes that many of these items, which range from fragments to complete scores, have never come under scholarly scrutiny. One goal of this book is to bring to light these manuscript items; among these sources are letters from Felix Mendelssohn, Arthur Sullivan, Giuseppe Verdi, and singers such as Adelina Patti. The letters by Mendelssohn and Verdi, he explains, deal with those composers' settings of Shakespearean themes. Copyist scores of works by Verdi, Gioachino Rossini, Henry Rowley Bishop, and Louis Moreau Gottschalk (to name but a few) are also present in this diverse mix. There are also part-books with incidental music used for Shakespeare plays performed on the North American stage (see item 161) as well as volumes of manuscript copies of partial score and part books of stage works, incidental music and sacred pieces of British and Continental composers (see item 108). Only a catalog as detailed as Charteris's could reveal all of the items the Folger houses.

In this volume, the music manuscripts are arranged by pressmark order (or what many of us know as call number or shelf mark). According to Charteris, the pressmark arrangement enables sources to be located expediently. As he explains in the introduction, "An arrangement based on chronology, or composer names, or genres would have been problematic, especially since some sources were copies over several centuries and encompass a wide variety of works" (p. xxv). Entries include a description, imprint (when published versions of the music are in the collection as well), comments on the paper, provenance, accession number, former pressmark or former description, commentary (about the features of individual manuscripts), microfilm available at the library, related literature, and an inventory of the music contained in an individual source. Following the main sections are three appendices (Concordance of Accession Numbers and Former Pressmarks, Bibliography of Pre-1800 Printed concordances, and Bibliography of Modern Materials) and three indexes (Index of Former Owners, Index of Names and Places, and Index of Titles and Genres).

Scholars needing to do music research at the Folger Shakespeare Library will find Charteris's catalog an invaluable resource; especially since it seems that not all these sources appear in Hamnet, the Folger Shakespeare Library online catalog (http://shakespeare.folger.edu/ [accessed 31 May 2007]).