ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to contextualize the variety of approaches and effects that makes the jukebox musical a usefully flexible form through which to engage with a range of William Shakespeare's plays. The practice of making significant structural, often non-diegetic, use of existing songs in dramatic works in English first flourished in the eighteenth century in the so-called ballad opera. Like the term 'jukebox musical', 'ballad opera' as a name for works with a shared compositional practice only developed some time after the genre became relatively widespread. Many ballad operas were adaptations of existing plays or other narrative works from the British or continental European repertoire. The Cobler of Preston's Opera was performed in Dublin by the child actors of the Lilliputian theatre company of the Italian rope dancer and impresario, Signora Violante, with a cast that included the young Peg Woffington, later one of Georgian London's most celebrated Shakespearean actors.
