Shakespeare, Fletcher e l’imprevedibilità della canzone

Abstract – This chapter explores the way songs are used in relation to female roles by Shakespeare and Fletcher. Contextual interrelated discourses on music and melancholy are highlighted to show how certain problematic assumptions are reflected and also inverted in the plays considered. Contingent and intermedial, songs help definition of female subjectivity through strategies of vicariousness, which open up paths of alternative meaning within Shakespearean ‘textuality’