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PAN PIPES WintER 2014 sai-natiOnal.ORg 16 putting shaKespeare to musiC of all 154 Shakespearean sonnets. Aer reading Simpson's imaginative and thorough literary analysis of the sonnets, I surmised that he would have been equally imaginative and thorough in his musical settings. As a result of my pilot research of analyzing his thirteen published sonnet settings, and then looking in depth at the musical manuscripts from the British Library, I found that he displayed a musical virtuosity in these miniature settings that was quite astounding. His understanding of harmony, theory, and small musical song forms and his creative manipulation of all these musical elements as they encountered Shakespeare's fourteen- line miniature poetic masterpieces were amazing. Sometimes he seemed to be writing in the manner of Foster or Mendelssohn or even Schubert in the way he set these sonnets to music. His depth of understanding of the sonnets was extraordinary, as he married words to music and through his musical settings illuminated the meaning of the texts in exacting detail and profound depth. Richard Simpson was born on Sept. 16, 1820 at Beddington, Surrey, and educated first at Merchant Taylor's School and then at Oriel College, Oxford, where he graduated with a B.A. on Feb. 9, 1843. In 1844, he was ordained in the Church of England, became vicar of Mitcham, Surrey, and married his cousin, Elizabeth Mary Cranmer. He resigned his position as vicar and converted to the Roman Catholic Church in 1846. In 1847, he spent some years traveling on the continent, where he acquired an unusual command of French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Flemish. On his return to England, he devoted himself to literary pursuits. In 1856, he became a sub-editor, under the supervision of the famous Lord Acton, then regular editor in 1858 of e Rambler, a Catholic monthly magazine of recent converts with liberal tendencies which was discontinued in 1862. In July of the same year, in conjunction with Lord Acton, he started the Home and Foreign Review, a quarterly periodical. He subsequently became a well-known Shakespearian scholar and was elected a member of the committee of the New Shakespeare Society in 1874. Simpson published a number of books on Shakespeare, and he was one of the first to advance the theory that Shakespeare had been a Catholic. He is probably best known for his biography of the English Jesuit martyr, Saint Edmund Campion. Simpson died of cancer in Rome on April 5, 1876. 5 e Athenaeum, a literary chronicle, in its obituary of Richard Simpson on April 22, 1876, noted rather curiously that "Mr. Simpson was a prolific composer, and, but for some eccentricities of style, he might have attained to some fame as a musician but he had theories of his own, and he clung to them tenaciously." 6 Simpson was a well-known Victorian critic, and, while he did not produce a vast amount of literary criticism, his writing was of consistently high standard, and several of his essays have become recognized as outstanding Above, from left, Composer Hollis Thoms and Dr. Heather Wolfe, curator of manuscripts at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC accepting the study into its collection. At right, Thom's transcription of Simpson's Sonnet 130. SIMPSON continued from page 15

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