What are you laughing at?

David Lindley's study of Shakespeare's music and RW Maslen's examination of the Bard's comedy are both fine pieces of work, but left Stanley Wells with unanswered questions

Shakespeare and Music
David Lindley
The Arden Shakespeare
£18.99, pp284

Shakespeare and Comedy

RW Maslen

The Arden Shakespeare

£18.99, pp270

These titles aroused false expectations. I hoped that Shakespeare and Music would tell me about music inspired by Shakespeare's plays, but scanned the index in vain for the names of Arne and Britten, Verdi and Berlioz. And I hoped that Shakespeare and Comedy might at last give us the much-needed study of how Shakespeare provokes laughter; but this book mainly concerns the engagement of Shakespeare's Elizabethan comedies with ideas of his time, followed by an afterword on Measure for Measure

Both books see Shakespeare in relation to contemporary thought; both are immensely well-informed and deeply considered studies of the interaction between theorists and moralists and Shakespeare's creative mind.

Early in the playwright's career, comedy and music came under attack from polemicists such as Stephen Gosson and Philip Stubbes. Both music and the theatre were seen as effeminising influences. Stubbes wrote: 'If you would have your son soft, womanish, unclean, smooth-mouthed, affected to bawdry, scurrility, filthy rhymes and unseemly talking, briefly, if you would have him, as it were, trans- natured into a woman, or worse, and inclined to all sorts of whoredom and abomination, set him to dancing school, and to learn music.' Phew! Shades of Billy Elliot

Half of Lindley's book is introductory, offering accounts of attitudes to music in Shakespeare's time, and followed by a detailed study of 'Music in Practice'. The rest is a perceptive critical study of how Shakespeare puts music of various kinds to use for dramatic effect. Lindley usefully distinguishes between practice in public, arena theatres such as the Globe and private playhouses such as the Blackfriars.

It is salutary to be reminded that music was not employed simply for atmospheric effect: 'Instrumental music is almost always assumed to be audible to the characters on stage.' Discussion of the interpretative effect of music is hampered by deficiencies in stage directions and by the fact that very little of the music used in the theatre of Shakespeare's time survives. We can't even always be sure who should sing the songs. And Shakespeare may have been using pre-existing words for many of his songs.

Maslen's study integrates his briefer preliminaries more closely with his interpretations of plays. He writes about the comedies not as escapist fantasies but as comic manifestoes, contributions to the debates about the moral consequences of comic theatre. For him, The Two Gentlemen of Verona is a defence of the theatre against the anti-theatrical polemicists, and Shakespeare 'never wrote a more complex analysis of the relationship between actor, audience and dramatic spectacle' than the disguised Julia's account of how she played 'Ariadne, passioning for Theseus's perjury and unjust flight'.

The theme returns in full force in the afterword, which sees Measure for Measure as 'a daring conversation' with James I, and explains the provisionality of its ending as a recognition that the conversation is only just beginning. Maslen admits this is only one possible reading of the play, but it is an intriguing one. His book makes a fascinating and original contribution to the study of Shakespeare's earlier comedies, but I still wish that someone would give us more help in understanding how they make us laugh.

· Stanley Wells is chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust