The Willow Song

I have now finished one of the most heartbreaking tragedies that I have ever read. I’m not gonna lie, I almost cried twice when I got to the end of Othello! Shakespeare really did a fabulous job making this play moving and thought provoking. And within this most heartbreaking play, by far the most moving scene to me was the scene in which Desdemona sings the famous “Willow Song”.

                The song reminded me a lot of Ophelia’s Song in Hamlet, which interestingly was one of the most moving scenes for me in that play. It got me thinking a little bit about how often Shakespeare used music in his plays to express the emotions of the characters. They’re not always sad songs, some are happy, some are just drinking songs, but I think Shakespeare knew very well what he was doing when he put a song into his work.

                I decided to research it a little bit, and I found an interesting article on britannica.com, about the use of music in Shakespeare’s plays. The article included the following, taken from the Merchant of Venice (Act V, scene 1):

                Here will we sit and let the sounds of music

Creep in our ears. Soft stillness and the night

Become the touches of sweet harmony.

Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven

Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold.

There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st

But in his motion like an angel sings,

Still choiring to the young-eyed cherubins.

Such harmony is in immortal souls,

But whilst this muddy vesture of decay

Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.

I loved this! It felt like a little look into Shakespeare’s head, and how he feels about music.The article also talks about music in many aspects of Shakespeare's life, and it's cool to see a little deeper into that element of his work. I think this little bit of research really made the Willow Song more meaningful for me.

It turns out that most of the melodies to the songs in his plays are unknown. But a lot of people have just taken his lyrics and adapted them according to their own interpretations. I decided to look on YouTube, and see what kinds of things people had done with the Willow Song. There were a lot of different versions, which was cool because with each melody that someone has come up with, there’s a little bit different tone, and you can kind of see a little bit into how that person might have experienced the scene differently from what I did.

Here are a couple different versions I found: The first is from the 1995 film of Othello, and the second is one of a set of five Shakespeare songs composed by Arthur Sullivan during 1863 and 1864. (I thought it was cool to get some from different time periods.)