P. 1. Romeo and Juliet: Introduction to part 1 ; The Veronese social code ; The code of love ; Love against language ; The afterlife of Romeo and Juliet ; La lance branlée : French opinions of Shakespeare ; Berlioz in the plural ; Roméo et Juliette : introduction ; Roméo et Juliette : the symphony ; Roméo et Juliette : the opera resumes -- P.1. Macbeth: Shakespeare's random ; Magic as theft ; Prophesying ; Squinting at consequences ; Macbeth's children ; Macbeth as an actor ; Two theatres ; Witches amok ; Sortileges of speech ; Lady Macbeth as witch ; Time slips ; La sonnambula -- P. 2. A midsummer night's dream: Cosmicomedy ; The picture of Cupid ; Depictorializing Cupid ; Cupid's wax ; The tedious brief scene ; Other dreams in other summers : the aesthetic of the masque ; Purcell's The fairy queen ; Lampe's Pyramus and Thisbe ; Experimenters : Mendelssohn and Korngold ; Britten's A midsummer night's dream

Albright offers insights into how composers of genius can help us to understand Shakespeare. Musicking Shakespeare demonstrates how four composers - Purcell, Berlioz, Verdi, and Britten - respond to the distinctive features of Shakespeare's plays: their unwieldiness, their refusal to fit into interpretive boxes, their ranting quality, their arbitrary bursts of gorgeousness. The four composers break the normal forms of opera - of music altogether - in order to come to terms with the challenges that Shakespeare presents to the music dramatist