’Give me my sin again’: Disco Does Shakespeare

Abstract

In recent years, part of my research has been trying to address a series of questions: how have Shakespearean characters, words, texts and iconography been represented and reworked through popular music?¹ Do all types of popular music represent Shakespeare in the same ways? And how do the links between Shakespeare and popular music complicate what we think we know about Shakespeare, and popular music? During this research I came across a 1977 disco album called Romeo & Juliet credited to Alec R. Costandinos and the Syncophonic Orchestra (Casablanca).² Disco is — or was — many things to many people: syncretic, synthetic, kinetic, somatic, erotic, moronic. But rarely has it been seen as tragic, unless in that peculiarly contemporary sense of banal, kitsch or naff.³ So, the existence and success of Costandinos’ Romeo & Juliet prompted another question: what made this synthesis of Shakespearean tragedy and disco possible or desirable? Part of my answer derives from Raymond Williams’ comment in Modern Tragedy: ‘tragic experience, because of its central importance, commonly attracts the fundamental beliefs and tensions of a period, and tragic theory is interesting mainly in this sense, that through it the shape and set of a particular culture is often deeply realised’ (1966, p. 45). Recognising this means we might develop a compelling instance of how, in Marjorie Garber’s words, ‘Shakespeare makes modern culture and modern culture makes Shakespeare’ (2009, p. xiii).

For what was this room but a place to forget we are dying?

Andrew Holleran, Dancer From the Dance

… life is repetition …

Soren Kierkegaard, Repetition