Reverberating Song in Shakespeare and Milton

Language, Memory, and Musical Representation

Erin Minear

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409435457
• eBook ISBN: 9781317063728
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In this study, Erin Minear explores the fascination of Shakespeare and Milton with the ability of music-heard, imagined, or remembered-to infiltrate language. Such infected language reproduces not so much the formal or sonic properties of music as its effects. Shakespeare's and Milton's understanding of these effects was determined, she argues, by history and culture as well as individual sensibility. They portray music as uncanny and divine, expressive and opaque, promoting associative rather than logical thought processes and unearthing unexpected memories. The title reflects the multiple and overlapping meanings of reverberation in the study: the lingering and infectious nature of musical sound; the questionable status of audible, earthly music as an echo of celestial harmonies; and one writer's allusions to another. Minear argues that many of the qualities that seem to us characteristically 'Shakespearean' stem from Shakespeare's engagement with how music works-and that Milton was deeply influenced by this aspect of Shakespearean poetics. Analyzing Milton's account of Shakespeare's 'warbled notes, ' she demonstrates that he saw Shakespeare as a peculiarly musical poet, deeply and obscurely moving his audience with language that has ceased to mean, but nonetheless lingers hauntingly in the mind. Obsessed with the relationship between words and music for reasons of his own, including his father's profession as a composer, Milton would adopt, adapt, and finally reject Shakespeare's form of musical poetics in his own quest to 'join the angel choir.' Offering a new way of looking at the work of two major authors, this study engages and challenges scholars of Shakespeare, Milton, and early modern culture.

Chapter 1 Creeping Music: Sounds, Surfaces, and Spheres in The Merchant of Venice

DOI: 10.4324/9781315606200-2

Comfortably ensconced in Belmont's moonlit garden, Lorenzo famously expresses grave suspicions of those individuals—possibly including his new bride—who fail to respond favorably to the strains of music. These sentiments are traditional to the point of banality—but they are also deeply problematic. While Lorenzo's speech on the music of the spheres was once taken as the perfect expression of Renaissance ideas of world harmony,¹ in recent years, several critics have suggested that contradictions in the young Venetian's account of music reflect contradictions in the body of musical philosophy inherited and shaped by the Renaissance—and that Shakespeare uses these contradictions to cast doubt upon the supposedly harmonious conclusion of the play.² By shifting over the course of his speech from an account of the inaudible music of the spheres to an account of the power of man-made music to move the affections, Lorenzo conflates a metaphysical conception of music with a rhetorical one, creating not harmony but dissonance through a “pattern of reference … which is not orderly and comforting but complicated and conflicted.”³ Of course, an examination of almost any aspect of the play can produce similar “dissonance” or “harmony,” as its critical history has shown. I would argue that the musical moments are special—and not merely because they offer an opportunity to reflect on harmony and dissonance in the abstract. Shakespeare portrays music as working in a particular way that imitates—or is imitated by—his own language and dramaturgy.

¹ See Lawrence Danson, The Harmonies of “The Merchant of Venice” (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978); James Hutton, “Some English Poems in Praise of Music,” English Miscellany 2 (1950): 1–63; and David Lindley, Shakespeare and Music (London: Thomson, 2006), 14. In After the Heavenly Tune: English Poetry and the Aspiration to Song (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2000), Marc Berley argues, “Lorenzo's speech is rightly the locus classicus for discussions of speculative music in the Renaissance, but it is so for a number of wrong reasons … it is not a disembodied summary of Neoplatonic treatises” (85). ² See Berley, 83–9; Elise Bickford Jorgens, “A Rhetoric of Dissonance: Music in The Merchant of Venice,” John Donne Journal 25 (2006), 123; Lindley, Shakespeare and Music, 49. ³ Jorgens, “Rhetoric of Dissonance,” 123.

Two major issues repeatedly arise in Renaissance discussions of music: the relationship between intellectual and sensible “harmony,” and the relationship between words and music. The two issues rarely collide in any overt way: they tend to be treated separately and to appear in different discourses. Nevertheless, each relationship is influenced and distorted by the gravitational pull of the other. They never quite overlap, but it is difficult to either combine them or conceive of them separately. Their strange relationship is the result of that incomplete shift from a metaphysical to a rhetorical conception of music reflected in Lorenzo's speech. A number of pressing concerns arise from the tension between a conception of music as the audible embodiment of mathematical proportions, and a conception of music as the sensuous handmaiden of rational words. Is music to be associated with the soul or the body, with inner truth or with outward ornament? How exactly do songs move listeners? These problems were rendered more difficult to define and articulate by the fact that each conception projected a duality in which the complementary opposite of sensuous sound—whether this opposite was words, or mathematical proportions—could also be called “music.”

The Merchant of Venice struggles with conflicting contemporary views of music as a sensual surface of pretty noises and as a system of harmonious proportions, possessing a special affinity—or even identity—with the soul. To some degree, the treatment of music would seem to provide yet another example of the play's general inability to fully distinguish between a Neoplatonic view of the world, in which all beauty signifies and embodies goodness, and a more rigid Platonism, in which appearances, however attractive, must be distrusted and rejected.⁴ Yet music's associations with the divine arguably lend plausibility to the conflation of the moral and the aesthetic, rendering problematic the visual division between appearance and truth, and bestowing virtue on something often considered as “surface”: the sensuous tones of measured, audible sound.

⁴ Berley reads the inconsistencies in the final scene, in which true music is at one moment inaccessible to human senses, at the next available in the sounds of earthly music, in just this way. He attributes these inconsistencies to Lorenzo's attempt to seduce Jessica with sweet words and false promises, implying that Shakespeare intends the audience to see through Lorenzo's sweet talk (94–9).

Early Christian condemnations of music focus on its abuse in the theater—a theme enthusiastically adopted by Puritan polemicists.⁵ This association of theatrical performance with practices perceived as “Popish” was a common rhetorical device, employed by those who doubted that outward and material things could usefully signify the inward and the spiritual, or draw people towards those spiritual things signified.⁶ Music presents a potential anomaly, however. As an audible art that overlaps—but only partly overlaps—with verbal practices, it does not work in quite the same way as visible “trappings,” despite the attempts of many writers to understand it in just this way. The ambiguous status of music is further complicated by the possibility that audible music does not simply signify or stand for abstract harmony, but in fact participates in it, or faintly echoes it—making truth and divinity almost sensible, but also eroding the systems of signification that make meaning possible.

⁵ For the association of music, theater, and sexual license in early Christian polemics, see Music in Early Christian Literature, ed. James McKinnon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 3–5. That most enthusiastic of early modern polemicists, William Prynne, would quote Jerome to condemn simultaneously theater and the excesses of Anglican practice: “We must sing to God with the heart, not with the voice; neither after the manner of Tragedians are the throate and chops to be anoynted with some pleasant oyntment, that theatrical songs & measures may be heard in the Church … So let the Servant of Christ sing, that not the voyce of the singer, but the words that are read may please; that the evill spirit which was in Saul … may not be brought into those, who have made a Play-house of the House of God” (Histrio-mastix [London, 1633], 276). According to Stephen Gosson in The Schoole of Abuse (London, 1579), “as Poetry and Piping are Cosen germans: so piping and plaing are of great affinite, and all three chained in linkes of abuses” (B7r). ⁶ See Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), 159–60.

In The Merchant of Venice—as elsewhere—Shakespeare portrays music as hauntingly pervasive: an elusive, even impossible object of inquiry that in its practical workings blurs and confounds the conceptual distinctions that are necessary for answering the questions that it poses. He dwells upon the lingering notes and effects of audible music, portraying them in terms of imperceptible infection, diffusion, infusion. In his treatment, music creeps stealthily, infiltrating the words that describe it and the mind that thinks about it. When words begin to touch on music or the thought of music, the rhythmic and sonic aspects of poetry become exaggerated; the language begins to induce the same sense of haunting recollection, the same mixture of emotions, the same temporal disorientation, and the same simultaneous control and overflow of affect as the music itself induces.

Sad Notes and Celestial Harmonies

In early modern England, the mere playing of music onstage could create a problem of representation, partly because of the nature of the theater, where one thing can stand for another, and partly because of contemporary controversy over the nature of music itself. Some believed that all earthly music stood for abstract harmony in a symbolic or emblematic way, and some even perceived it as an audible manifestation of the order of the world, an order that itself permitted one thing to stand “properly” for another.

To understand the implications of the practical and theoretical controversies over music, it is necessary to keep in mind three overlapping and often interdependent problems: the semantic problem, the affective problem, and the metaphysical problem. In the early modern world, none of the questions about semantics and affect in music was fully extricable from metaphysical speculation about the nature of the universe—the nature of the relations between all things. In the staging of music, all of these entangled issues come into play, creating considerable ambiguity and complexity even when there is no question of music spilling into the surrounding language. Therefore, before approaching The Merchant of Venice, I would like to begin by looking at a dramatic episode where the status of the music alone is at stake.

In Shakespeare and Fletcher's Henry VIII, the renounced and dying Katherine of Aragon calls for music. “Cause the musicians,” she commands, “play me that sad note / I named my knell, whilst I sit meditating / On that celestial harmony I go to” (4.2.78–80).⁷ As “sad and solemn music” plays, she falls asleep, and dreams of “spirits of peace” who dance and offer garlands to her. The unusually detailed stage directions describe the Queen's reaction to her dream_ “At which, as it were by inspiration, she makes in her sleep signs of rejoicing, and holdeth up her hands to heaven. And so [the spirits] in their dancing vanish, carrying the garland with them. The music continues.” The music that Katherine has requested accompanies this vision of divine spirits dancing and offering garlands. When Katherine awakens, however, she commands the musicians to cease: she now finds their music “harsh and heavy” (4.2.96)—presumably in comparison with her foretaste of celestial harmonies. As audience members, how are we to understand the music that we hear? Does it represent only the playing of the Queen's musicians, or does it also, for a moment, represent the music of heaven? What exactly is the relation between the “knell” Katherine requests, and the “celestial harmonies” that she contemplates?

⁷ Shakespeare is cited parenthetically from The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean Howard, and Katherine Eisaman Maus (New York: Norton, 1997).

If celestial harmony is to be presented on stage, it cannot be presented by any means save by earthly music. As Linda Phyllis Austern points out, “in the Renaissance world of symbolic discourse, especially in the highly emblematic world that was the English theatre, practical music could come to stand for its higher analogue or even attain some of its attributes.”⁸ In Henry VIII, however, the music cannot simply symbolize heavenly music, because it starts out as an imitation of what it actually is: music performed by a group of musicians. The episode undermines the possibility of understanding stage music in emblematic terms, as standing for something beyond itself. The complexity of the moment becomes clearer when we compare Katherine's request for music with Fulke Greville's account of the death of Sir Philip Sidney. The dying knight supposedly called “for Musick; especially that song which himself had intitled, La cuisse rompue. Partly (as I conceive by the name) to shew that the glory of mortal flesh was shaken in him_ and by that Musick itself, to fashion and enfranchise his heavenly soul into that everlasting harmony of angels whereof these concords were a kind of terrestrial echo.”⁹ Like Katherine, Sidney has “nam...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-title Page
• Dedication Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Creeping Music: Sounds, Surfaces, and Spheres in The Merchant of Venice
• 2 “We Have Nonesuch”: The Haunting Melody
• 3 “Re-speaking Earthly Thunder”: Hamlet’s Sonic Phantoms
• 4 Playing Music: Twelfth Night and The Tempest
• 5 Warbling Fancies: Milton, Shakespeare, and the Musical Imagination
• 6 “Serpit Agens”: The Song of the Blest Siren
• 7 “Minims of Nature”: Describing Music in Paradise Lost
• Conclusion: Spirits of Another Sort; or, Hymning and Humming
• Bibliography
• Index