Live music-making looms large at St Dogmaels, where a typical year brings together players and singers of all ages, backgrounds and abilities - from those who have never performed in their lives to members of national companies and orchestras.
Richard Morris - who has composed music for the Abbey Shakespeare Players for many years - sees a more complex sound-world in Henry IV than its first impression of marches, fanfares, drumming, bawdy songs and catches.
"Behind the ceremony and the humour, Henry IV evokes more subtle things. The Welsh song (for which we are using a lyric by Dafydd ap Gwilym) reminds us that Welsh-speaking might have been wider in Tudor London than it is today. The play hums with references to ambient sounds of 16th-century England, ‘Melancholy as a lover’s lute, or the drone of a Lincolnshire bagpipe’, while the names of proud aristocrats and vernacular figures like Jane Nightwork, Peter Bullcalf, and cousin Silence are music in themselves."
"Henry IV is a play of operatic moods, conjuring urgency at one moment, ‘sleeping upon benches after noon’ at another. Among its characters is Britain herself, which in Shakespeare’s day was being new-mapped by Tudor cartographers. Rivers like the Wye, the Trent or ‘sandy-bottom’d Severn’ wind in and out of the text as armies seek each other. Allies meet in ‘Gaultres Forest’; a messenger’s horse is ‘Stain’d with the variation of each soil’ between Scotland and London. During Elizabeth’s lifetime citizens learned to look on their surroundings with new eyes"
"Further associations arise from interactions with artists in later centuries. Gloucestershire, for instance, prominent in the play, was the birthplace of Ralph Vaughan Williams, composer of Sir John in Love. Another Gloucestershire-born composer, Gustav Holst, wrote an opera extracted from Henry IV called At The Boar’s Head , while if the sandy-bottomed Severn is associated with anyone, it is Edward Elgar, whose tone poem Falstaff evokes Shallow’s orchard (where one might ‘eat a last year’s pippin’) and Jack Falstaff’s dreaming."
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