Reverberating song in Shakespeare and Milton: language, memory, and musical representation

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Reverberating Song in Shakespeare and Milton

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.

Erin Minear is Assistant Professor of English at the College of William and Mary, USA.

For Kate

Reverberating Song in Shakespeare and Milton

Language, Memory, and Musical Representation

Erin Minear College of William and Mary, USA

© Erin Minear 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Erin Minear has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East Suite 420 Union Road 101 Cherry Street Farnham Burlington Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-4405 England USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Minear, Erin. Reverberating song in Shakespeare and Milton: language, memory, and musical representation. 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616 – Knowledge – Music. 2. Milton, John, 1608– 1674 – Knowledge – Music. 3. Authors and music – Great Britain – History – 16th century. 4. Authors and music – Great Britain – History – 17th century. 5. Music and literature – Great Britain – History – 16th century. 6. Music and literature – Great Britain – History – 17th century. 7. Music and language. I. Title 822.3’3–dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Minear, Erin. Reverberating song in Shakespeare and Milton – language, memory, and musical representation / by Erin Minear. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Language. 2. Milton, John, 1608–1674— Language. 3. Music in literature. 4. Memory in literature. 5. English language—Early modern, 1500–1700. I. Title. PR3072.M46 2011 822.3’3—dc23 2011030107 ISBN 9781409435457 (hbk) ISBN 9781409435464 (ebk) II

Contents Acknowledgments   Introduction  

vii 1

1

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

17

2

“We Have Nonesuch”: The Haunting Melody  

53

3

“Re-speaking Earthly Thunder”: Hamlet’s Sonic Phantoms  

89

4

Playing Music: Twelfth Night and The Tempest  

125

5

Warbling Fancies: Milton, Shakespeare, and the Musical Imagination  

165

6 “Serpit Agens”: The Song of the Blest Siren   7

“Minims of Nature”: Describing Music in Paradise Lost  

197 227

Conclusion: Spirits of Another Sort; or, Hymning and Humming  

257

Bibliography   Index  

265 279

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Acknowledgments This book could not have been written without the assistance and encouragement that I received from a number of people. I would like to take this opportunity to express my great debt to Stephen Greenblatt and Barbara Lewalski, who gave guidance, help, and support from the inception of this project and throughout its development. I also received much assistance and advice from Gordon Teskey, Marjorie Garber, and Nicholas Watson: thank you. Over the years many thoughtful readers of my work have given feedback and suggestions that helped to shape this book, including Leslie Dunn, Wes Folkerth, Ken Hiltner, Wendy Hyman, Catherine Keyser, Jennifer Ohlund, Adam Potkay, Elizabeth Rivlin, Marie Rutkoski, and Sarah Wall-Randall. I am most appreciative of all their help. The anonymous reader for Ashgate gave excellent suggestions that helped shape the final form of this book. I owe special thanks to Brett Wilson, who read the manuscript with care and insight, and asked all the right questions. Finally, I would like to express my deep gratitude to Paula Blank, for unfailing support, advice, and encouragement. And of course, I owe the most to my wonderful family: Mom, Dad, and Kate— none of this would have been possible without you. An earlier version of the final section of Chapter 2 was previously published as “Music and the Crisis of Meaning in Othello,” and is reprinted with permission from SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 49, 2 (Spring 2009). A version of the first section of Chapter 2, combined with some material now in Chapter 3, was previously published as “‘A Verse to this Note’: Shakespeare’s Haunted Songs,” and is reprinted with permission from The Upstart Crow: A Shakespeare Journal 29 (Fall 2010). I am grateful for the permission to reprint these pieces.

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Introduction One of Shakespeare’s most perceptive readers, Milton famously described the playwright as “sweetest Shakespeare, fancy’s child / Warbl[ing] his native woodnotes wild.” These lines have suggested to a number of readers that Milton viewed his predecessor not only as a writer of “natural” facility, but also as a poet of wide-ranging—and possibly undisciplined—imagination, or fancy. Fancies, or fantasies, however, are also a particular type of music: a music without words. I argue that Milton’s account of Shakespeare’s warbled notes suggests that he saw Shakespeare as a peculiarly musical poet, deeply and obscurely moving his audience with language that has ceased to mean. This reaction to Shakespeare, while scarcely complete—and perhaps a touch condescending—nevertheless indicates a profound insight into the affective workings of Shakespearean drama. Milton’s condescension only half-conceals his own desire to emulate this Shakespearean approach to poetry, despite his deep misgivings about such a project. Obsessed as he was 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 particular form of musical poetics in his own quest to “join the angel choir.” My title, Reverberating Song, reflects the multiple and overlapping meanings of reverberation in the story that I tell. These include the acoustic and affective properties of music, as infectious sounds that linger in the air and in the memory; the questionable status of audible, earthly music as an echo of celestial harmonies; and one writer’s allusions to another. All these meanings intersect with another kind of reverberation suggested by the title, if only through a false etymology: an echo as a translation of sound into the verbal medium of language. While a number of early modern English poets and dramatists, including Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson, and John Marston, use and represent music in complicated ways, drawing attention to its mingled dangers and attractions, they do not display a similar interest in the ability of music—heard, imagined, or remembered—to infiltrate language. Both Shakespeare and Milton repeatedly suggest that music possesses the disturbing and exhilarating capacity to spread beyond its boundaries, to reverberate throughout the larger structure of the narrative or dramatic text. Consequently, even their descriptions of music are less like set-pieces or fixed pictures than like a dye soaking through cloth, or a disturbance in water. These musical representations do not point solely towards some real or fictive music outside the text, but towards something that potentially inheres within the text itself, or begins to inhere as soon as it is described. Milton’s verse self-consciously strives for such effects, while in Shakespeare’s plays, the agency is considerably less clear: music seems to creep into language of its own volition, beyond the awareness or desire of the speaker.

Reverberating Song in Shakespeare and Milton

2

I argue that Shakespeare and Milton reproduce not the specific formal or sonic properties of music, but its effects. Their understanding of these effects was determined by history and culture as well as individual sensibility. Indeed, their historical context gave particular urgency to the attempt to emulate music, an art which was viewed, paradoxically, both as the ordering principle of the world and as a chaotic force undermining meaning. Shakespeare and Milton wrote during a time of transition, when the ancient Pythagorean conception of the universe, with its harmoniously ordered spheres and its concordant microcosms and macrocosms, contended with new theories about the nature of sound and the structure of the world.1 Early modern complaints about music’s unintelligibility and sensuality drew upon a tradition of criticism familiar since late antiquity, but the Reformation had raised anxiety about the effects of music to a new level of intensity, and humanism placed increasing importance upon the need for music to serve as handmaiden to words.2 The connection between earthly music and heavenly “harmony,” never entirely certain, was on the verge of breakdown at the end of the sixteenth century, but even as the conception of the harmonious cosmos lost its explanatory power, it continued to exert a powerful influence over the seventeenth-century imagination and world-view. This idea of a musical cosmos lingered between the literal and the figurative: a half-dead metaphor still possessed of an insistent, and sometimes uncanny, life. Music in this period was more than a figure for the continuity between earth and heaven: it either constituted this continuity or generated the dangerous illusion of a continuity that in the post-Fall cosmos could no longer exist. In such a context, music became a site of irresoluble contradictions. Though nonsignifying, it was inherently significant, an audible manifestation of order and harmony. “Keep time,” exhorted moralists, using a musical metaphor to enforce decorous, “harmonious” behavior—but the experience of music could distract from time, context, and circumstances. In music, the eternal mathematical proportions that structured all creation took the form of evanescent sounds that could nonetheless bring listeners to experience the illusion of suspended time. Rational proportions could induce overwhelming and irrational feelings; a system built upon tempered sounds could move the hearers to intemperate behavior. Shakespeare exploits these contradictions, repeatedly portraying music as a mode of expression inextricably involving the transcendent with the uncanny. See Gretchen Finney, Musical Backgrounds for English Literature: 1580–1650 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1962), ix; and Claude Palisca, Music and Ideas in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 27. 2 See David Lindley, Shakespeare and Music (London: Thomson, 2006), 37–8; and Brian Vickers, “Figures of Rhetoric/Figures of Music?” Rhetorica 2 (1984): 16. For a general account of the changing relationship between music and words in Western civilization, see James Winn, Unsuspected Eloquence: A History of the Relations Between Poetry and Music (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981). 1

Introduction

3

In seeking to capture musical effects, Shakespeare focuses on three connected aspects of music as it was understood in early modern culture: its paradoxical relationship to temporality, its simultaneous expressivity and opacity, and its infectiousness. His characters experience music as fluid, a phenomenon slipping easily from one context to another. In consequence, music in Shakespeare’s plays promotes associative rather than logical thought processes, inducing inappropriate ideas and unearthing unexpected memories. He frequently figures music as frightening and spectral, the language of madness; but simultaneously, his music always seems to offer the beguiling promise of a return to sanity, access to a transcendent truth that will set things right. Milton would later come to perceive this same promise as a great temptation and a great danger. Through the emulation of musical effects in poetry, he might achieve the quasi-divine authority of heavenly song; but he also might lose control over the meaning and moral purpose of his work. The dissolution of temporality, the experience of presentness and plenitude that he found in music offered the possibility of a return to the golden age—and for the poet who could reproduce musical effects, access to an Edenic mode of expression. Milton was all too aware, however, of the impossibility of recapturing Eden, and of the moral necessity of perceiving the world in terms of a teleological progression towards Judgment. Music’s power to suspend and dissolve time could be only negative, its promises of transcendent meaning treacherous. The word “music” can be employed and understood in a number of ways. A book on poetry and music might examine the formal qualities of the verse, or explore an author’s attempts to reproduce a microcosm of the ordered “harmonies” of creation. It might establish structural resemblances between music and poetry, or it might draw attention to especially lyrical passages.3 In studying a time when the word “music” could refer to lascivious sounds devoid of moral or intellectual content; to the ordered workings of the universe, the human body, and the state; and to poetry, a researcher seemingly must delimit his or her investigation 3 For studies of the influence of early modern music on poetry and vice versa, see Edward Doughtie, English Renaissance Song (Boston: Twayne, 1986); Paula Johnson, Form and Transformation in Music and Poetry of the English Renaissance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972); Elise Bickford Jorgens, The Well-Tun’d Word: Musical Interpretations of English Poetry, 1597–1651 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1972); Wilfrid Mellers, Harmonious Meeting: A Study of the Relationship Between English Music, Poetry, and Theatre, c. 1600–1900 (London: Dobson, 1965); Diane McColley, Poetry and Music in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Bruce Pattison, Music and Poetry in the English Renaissance (London: Methuen, 1948); Louise Schleiner, The Living Lyre in English Verse from Elizabeth Through the Restoration (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984); and John Stevens, Music and Poetry in the Early Tudor Court (London: Methuen, 1961). There are also numerous studies on the music of drama and masque, such as Linda Austern’s Music in English Children’s Drama of the Later Renaissance (Philadelphia: Gordon and Breach, 1992); and Mary Chan’s Music in the Theatre of Ben Jonson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980).

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to avoid confusion. Nevertheless, I would argue that the ambiguity of the term is precisely where the interest lies. People of the time were very aware of this ambiguity and the problems that it caused; nevertheless, many were reluctant to definitively relegate any of the meanings of “music” to the realm of metaphor. While the music of words, the music of symbolic harmony, and the music performed by musicians cannot be conflated, nor can they be separated from—or simply opposed to— one another. In the last three decades, critics have sought to emphasize the division between philosophical conceptions of abstract “harmony” and the sonic seduction of actual performance.4 This approach has led to several fine and specific accounts of how music or the idea of music operates at various moments throughout Shakespeare’s plays. In Shakespeare and Music, David Lindley provides an excellent overview of questions and problems surrounding music for Shakespeare and his audience, as well as an account of the complex responses solicited by Shakespeare’s songs in context. I argue, however, that music has a more pervasive presence in Shakespeare than has been generally realized, a presence that extends beyond the musical interludes, the punctuating trumpet flourishes, and the inset songs. This pervasiveness is made possible by the dynamic relationship that the playwright establishes between music and the words that surround and describe 4 For a detailed account of the conflicts surrounding ideas about music in Shakespeare’s time, and an analysis of how these complexities are reflected in the representation of music in the plays, see Lindley, Shakespeare and Music. I regret that Broken Harmony: Shakespeare and the Politics of Music (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), by Joseph M. Ortiz, appeared too late for me to consult for this book. We cover a number of the same texts, but whereas Ortiz emphasizes the disjuncture between the way music and text communicate meaning and are experienced, my study explores the infiltration of language by music and musical memories. Other accounts of music in Shakespeare include Leslie Dunn, “Ophelia’s Songs in Hamlet: Music, Madness, and the Feminine,” in Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture, ed. Leslie Dunn and Nancy A. Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 50–64; Jacquelyn Fox-Good, “Ophelia’s Mad Songs: Music, Gender, and Power,” in Subjects on the World’s Stage: Essays on British Literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. David Allen and Robert White (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995), 217–38; Pierre Iselin, “Music and Difference: Elizabethan Stage Music and Its Reception,” in French Essays on Shakespeare and His Contemporaries: “What would France with us?” ed. Jean-Marie Maguin and Michèle Willems (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995), 96–133; and Amanda Eubanks Winkler, “O Let Us Howle Some Heavy Note”: Music for Witches, the Melancholic, and the Mad on the Seventeenth-Century English Stage (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). A number of useful articles by Linda Phyllis Austern include “‘Sing Againe Syren’: The Female Musician and Sexual Enchantment in Elizabethan Life and Literature,” Renaissance Quarterly 42 (1989): 420–48; “‘For, Love’s a Good Musician’: Performance, Audition, and Erotic Disorders in Early Modern Europe,” Musical Quarterly 82 (1998): 614–53; “Nature, Culture, Myth, and the Musician in Early Modern England,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 51 (1998): 1–47; and “Words on Music: The Case of Early Modern England,” John Donne Journal 25 (2006): 199–244.

Introduction

5

both heard and unheard harmonies on his stage. While Shakespeare regularly employs singers and musicians, he demonstrates still greater interest in the ability of language to serve as a substitute or surrogate for music. He had practical reason to be drawn to music as a means of dramatic entertainment, as he competed directly with companies of boy actors trained as singers. For much of his career, he lacked the musical resources to match these companies on their own terms. Instead, I argue, he became interested in the way that words could—or could not— fill in for absent music, or expand the effects of what music he had available to him. His plays also reveal a broader interest in how various kinds of music— chanted ballads, artful lute-songs, and instrumental fantasies—could affect the minds and memories of listeners. I argue that the experience of music suggests for Shakespeare a specific kind of movement of the mind: a drifting of thought, the following of associative rather than logical connections between things. Music does not play an equally important role in all of Shakespeare’s plays, but ideas about its workings crucially inform his treatment of language, affect, and subjectivity. Shakespeare’s associative use of music helps to generate some of the most characteristic aspects of his work: its tonal ambiguity and metaphysical uncertainty; the curious weightiness of its nonsense and wordplay; its projection of insistent but illusory inwardness. These disparate aspects of Shakespearean dramaturgy consistently overlap and prove interdependent in moments of music that refuse to remain momentary. While my book focuses on specifically musical sound, I also emphasize the close proximity of music and noise. In early modern England, “noise” and “music” were simultaneously synonyms and antonyms, as the former term could be applied quite legitimately to harmonious sounds and to pure cacophony. Furthermore, it is not always clear which sounds, however raucous, are harmoniously formed, or may produce harmonious effects. In The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton describes how “many times the sound of a trumpet on a sudden, bells ringing, a carman’s whistle, a boy singing some ballad tune early in the street, alters, revives, recreates a restless patient that cannot sleep in the night.”5 Some of these sounds might legitimately be described as “noisy”—particularly by people who can sleep in the night, until the sound of a trumpet startles them awake. Yet Burton describes these sounds as healing through their status as music. A boy singing a ballad tune in the street can restore a listener to harmony. The association of audible music and abstract harmony does not necessarily make music “safe,” however. Shakespeare repeatedly indicates as much through an unsettling habit of reversing musical metaphors. If noises in the night can be understood in terms of harmony, harmony can be understood in terms of noises in the night. Recently, such critics as Bruce R. Smith, Kenneth Gross, Wes Folkerth, and Gina Bloom have provided important accounts of early modern acoustic theories 5 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1628), ed. Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan-Smith (New York: Tudor, 1955), 479. See Winkler for the problems of definition and representation surrounding the very idea of “disorderly music” (3).

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and the workings of sound in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. In spite of differences in focus and approach, most of these books share an interest in the subversive potential of sound, its materiality, and its difference from the systems of abstract signs that constitute language.6 They also have established a crucial connection between sound and the formation of subjectivity, a connection based on the “inwardness” of the sense of hearing. The exciting work of these critics has revealed a great deal about how sounds were understood in early modern England: material but elusive; potent, but easily diffused. I would like to suggest that such conceptions of sound inform Shakespeare’s treatment of music, affecting not only his inset songs, but also the language that seeks to recollect or recapture a musical effect. As I will show, the sonic aspects of Shakespeare’s language become more prominent in proximity to music, whether audible, imagined, or remembered. Critics have tended to think of Shakespeare’s music in terms of individual musical interludes. (Similarly, his characters’ speeches about music—like Lorenzo’s account of the music of the spheres in The Merchant of Venice— are often conceived as set-pieces.) I find that critical accounts of these musical interludes, especially the inset songs, have generally taken one of two forms. Songs are perceived either as microcosms of the larger structure of the play, or as mysterious emblems whose meaning must be fixed and explained—whether adequately or inadequately—by words. While the microcosmic model considers the song in terms of its relation to the play as a whole, the emblematic model considers its relation to the immediately surrounding language and action. In the microcosmic model, the song’s words encapsulate the central themes and conflicts of the play and the music reflects the drama’s harmonious form and ultimate resolution, simply by being music.7 Consequently, the microcosmic and emblematic 6 Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Kenneth Gross, Shakespeare’s Noise (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Wes Folkerth, The Sound of Shakespeare (New York: Routledge, 2002); Gina Bloom, Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). Similar issues arise in Carla Mazzio’s recent study, The Inarticulate Renaissance: Language Trouble in an Age of Eloquence (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). 7 Naturally, this kind of reading is better suited to comedy and romance than to tragedy. Nevertheless, mid-twentieth-century critical approaches to music in Shakespeare emphasize the way songs fit into a larger whole. See F.W. Sternfeld, Music in Shakespearean Tragedy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963) on Shakespeare’s techniques for making songs in tragedy “part of the general artistic design” (9). Studies that tend to treat songs as microcosms include Mary Chan, Music in the Theatre of Ben Jonson; John H. Long, Shakespeare’s Use of Music, 3 vols. (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1955–71); and Peter J. Seng, The Vocal Songs in the Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967). The microcosmic model has not vanished with critical confidence in the wider harmonies of Shakespearean drama. Even critics who reject the neat equation of song and macrocosmic order tend to see individual moments of music as reproducing in miniature the metaphorical dissonances of the play, as opposed to its metaphorical

Introduction

7

models overlap in the work of critics who perceive musical interludes, in most instances, as emblematic of larger social and cosmic harmonies. More recently, as scholars have emphasized the considerable ambiguity of visual emblems, and the correspondingly crucial role of verbal mottoes in determining their “meaning,” the designation of songs as emblems has taken on new implications.8 A non-verbal artifact—or, in the case of a song, an artifact with an extra-verbal element—proves excitingly but dangerously opaque, suggesting multiple possible meanings and provoking multiple reactions: words prove necessary to fix its significance.9 When songs are sung on the early modern stage, characters frequently inform the other characters and the audience—sometimes in anxious or coercive ways—how to respond to what they have heard or will hear. Recent critics who insist on the importance of considering songs as sensuous sound rather than as rational discourse or abstract harmony thus perceive the relationship between song and surrounding speech as antagonistic: words attempt to control and fix dangerous sound.10 From this critical perspective, even if music harmonies. See E ­ lise Bickford Jorgens, “A Rhetoric of Dissonance: Music in The Merchant of Venice,” John Donne Journal 25 (2006): in The Merchant of Venice, the treatment of music “mirrors … the uneasy moral and ethical values that contemporary readers find in this play” (126). See also Pierre Iselin, “‘My Music for Nothing’: Musical Negotiations in The Tempest,” Shakespeare Survey 48 (1995): “[music’s] plural meanings in the play do but reproduce its contested meanings in the culture of the period” [emphasis mine] (137). 8 See Stephen Orgel, The Authentic Shakespeare: And Other Problems of the Early Modern Stage (New York: Routledge, 2002): “Images are not limited by their inventors’ intentions; moreover, they always say more than they mean … The image, unlike the word, that is, also represents what does not signify, the unexplained, the unspeakable—all those meanings we reject because we believe nobody in the Renaissance could have conceived them” (116–17). 9 In “Music and Difference,” Pierre Iselin remarks that “in terms of emblems, the music is the image, discourse the inscription” (99). See also David Lindley, “Shakespeare’s Provoking Music,” in The Well-Enchanting Skill: Music, Poetry, and Drama in the Culture of the Renaissance, ed. John Caldwell, Edward Olleson, and Susan Wollenberg (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 79–90. Lindley explores the “ambiguities of response” demanded by Shakespearean music, and declares perceptively, “It is context and reflection that can qualify our response to a song, and they are only possible when we are released from the song’s spell.” Once the “stasis” of a song is dispelled and the action continues, the song “invites interpretation as a fixed picture or emblem” (79). Many of these insights are developed in Lindley’s Shakespeare and Music. For formal songs as “‘framed’ events,” see especially pp. 168, 175, and 211. 10 In “Other Voices: The Sweet, Dangerous Air(s) of Shakespeare’s Tempest,” Shakespeare Studies 24 (1996), Jacquelyn Fox-Good argues that literary critics addressing music in Shakespeare have erred in regarding “Shakespeare’s songs not as music but chiefly as poems” (243). For similar opinions on the importance of considering music and poetry as separate forms of expression, see Dunn, especially the account of Laertes’s “tendency to emblematize Ophelia,” translating her into “an image for which he supplies the text, inscribing it with an apparently self-evident, unambiguous cultural meaning” (50).

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resists the emblematizing and ordering force of language, it remains alien, other. In the critical response to Ophelia’s singing, as well as in the reactions of Hamlet’s characters, Leslie Dunn finds “an uneasiness when confronted with an alien discursive medium, a resistance to that which is perceived as textual ‘overflow.’”11 While I hope to avoid falling into the category of scholars who, in Dunn’s words, have “written [music] out of hearing,” I want to show that Shakespeare frequently makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to disentangle singing from speaking voices, and material sounds from imagined noises in the mind. Neither the microcosmic nor the emblematic model can do full justice to the complexity of the interdependent relationship that Shakespeare creates between play and songs. A microcosm implies a closed and coherent system that corresponds, in miniature, to a larger system of which it is a part. In such a model, the boundaries between microcosm and macrocosm remain quite clear. In contrast, Shakespeare, drawing on the acoustic knowledge of the time, repeatedly figures the relationship between play and inset music in terms of ripples moving out from a point of disturbance. For, in the words of Thomas Wright, “the very sound itselfe” was considered “nothing else but a certaine artificiall shaking, crispling, or tickling of the ayre (like as we see in the water crispled, when it is calme, and a sweet gale of wind ruffleth it a little; or when we cast a stone into a calme water, we may perceiue diuers warbling naturall circles) which passeth thorow the eares.”12 These comparisons were quite conventional; from ancient times, sound had been described by this analogy of a stone dropped into water. Shakespeare adopts the analogy, and dramatizes the effects of music moving out from points of origin in “diuers warbling circles.” The resulting dramatized disturbance, however, like the natural phenomenon, can be understood in more than one way. In The Purple Island (1633), Phineas Fletcher provides a representative, but highly suggestive, account of sound production: As when a stone, troubling the quiet waters, Prints in the angry stream a wrinkle round, Which soon another and another scatters, Till all the lake with circles now is crown’d: All so the aire struck with some violence nigh, Begets a world of circles in the skie; All which infected move with sounding qualitie.13

All sounds moved in this way; but the model—the world of circles in the sky—is most appropriate to the operations of music. Music was thought to affect souls because of the circular motion that they shared; and in their perfect revolutions, 11 Dunn, 64. Like a number of recent scholars of this topic, Dunn draws upon Roland Barthes’s claim that the singing voice escapes the “tyranny of meaning,” and on Julia Kristeva’s distinction between the semiotic and symbolic in language. 12 Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde in Generall (London, 1604), 170. 13 Phineas Fletcher, The Purple Island (Cambridge, 1633), 58.

Introduction

9

the spheres made music. The series of concentric circles produced by sound was considered by some “the image of perfection.”14 While Fletcher’s description provides a material explanation of sound, it also shares many elements with accounts explicitly metaphysical in nature, such as that presented by George Chapman in Ouid’s Banquet of Sence (1595). Here, a lover responds to a kiss: The motion of the Heauens that did beget The golden age, and by whose harmonie Heauen is preserud, in mee on worke is set, … This kisse in mee hath endlesse Musicke closed … And as a Pible cast into a Spring, Wee see a sort of trembling cirkles rise, One forming other in theyr issuing Till ouer all the Fount they circulize, So this perpetuall-motion-making kisse, Is propogate through all my faculties …15

The golden movements of the heavens and the percussion of the air both create “circles in the sky.” Chapman’s comparison of spherical movement and disturbed water, however, confuses the idea of revolution with the idea of circles rippling outwards from a central disturbance. This latter motion is neither revolution nor linear progression, but outward expansion. Such movement is not endless in the way that the turning spheres and their music are eternal; but it is difficult to say exactly where or when it does end. The disturbance may continue outwards even after it may no longer be perceived by the senses. If the ripples strike the outer edges of a pool or vessel, they travel back towards the center, returning through reverberation. In the end, the pebble cast into the spring creates two movements: an outward expansion and an overlapping and interfering response. The “perpetual-motion-making” movements of “endlesse Musicke” can seem to abrogate time, re-begetting the golden age; but simultaneously, such motions are a haunting disturbance. Milton will find both haunting and regeneration inextricably entwined in Shakespeare’s treatment of music. In Shakespeare, the entire range of contradictory effects that early modern culture attributed to music arise specifically around moments of actual staged music, as if music were rippling out through the words, infecting the surrounding language as it infects the minds of its hearers. Such effects confound temporality, often beginning before the music starts: in retrospect, the moment of music gives the illusion of “circulizing” movement, rippling outwards and working against the linear progression of the narrative. Music in Shakespeare is often alreadyheard music, for the characters at least, if not for the audience. Characters are thus imagined as anticipating and remembering music before the audience hears it. Finney, Musical Backgrounds, 79. Chapman, Ouid’s Banquet of Sence (London, 1595), E1v–E2r.

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Even music that the audience never does hear is figured as infiltrating the language describing it. “Musical” speech is positioned as a verbal echo: reliving and prolonging a memory. Such near equivalence between music as performance and music as a subject of speech is one of the more striking and counterintuitive aspects of Shakespeare’s treatment. He suggests that remembering music, and then talking about remembering, can produce some of the same effects as performing music. Understood as subtly infectious and all-pervasive, music can permeate words and minds in similar ways. Music and memory thus are intertwined for Shakespeare, as music’s infiltration of language is imagined as music’s effect on the fictive minds of the speakers. The recollection of music, however, operates very differently from that art of memory that locates concepts in mental palaces or theaters, for ease of later retrieval. From antiquity through the early modern period, Western theories of memory are relentlessly visual. Memories are stored and retrieved in the form of mental images. This “visual form of sense perception,” writes Mary Carruthers, “is what gives stability or permanence to memory storage …. Material presented acoustically is turned into visual form so frequently and persistently, even when the object is sound itself, that the phenomenon amounts to a recognizable trope.”16 Sequences had to be translated into shapes. The rememberer could then mentally stroll into the gallery of memorized information and pick out the relevant items, rather than running a sequence in temporal order until the desired piece arrived. So conceptualized, true recollection works independently of the temporal movement of experience. As Pierre Iselin points out, theoretical and philosophical writings in the early modern period represented music, like memory, in spatial terms, representations that clashed with temporal experience of music.17 There is, however, an insistently sonic aspect to Shakespearean memory. Words recall other words that sound similar, despite differences in meaning—a process at the very root of punning and wordplay—and the characters’ imaginary minds are frequently disturbed by snatches of familiar songs. Perhaps the most startling aspect of these musical memories is that the remembered music never remains fully in the past: recollection stimulates repetition and return, breaking down the distinction between memory and experience. To sing or hear a familiar song—or a fragment of song—makes memory experience, and vice versa. Musical memories insist on temporality, even as they distort proper temporal progression. Recent studies of memory on the early modern stage by Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr., and Lina Perkins Wilder have drawn important connections between memory, 16 Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 17–18. For more on the spatial nature of memory images, see Carruthers, 19, 27–8. For Protestant anxiety over these imagebased methods of mnemonics, see Lina Perkins Wilder, Shakespeare’s Memory Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 26. 17 Pierre Iselin, “Myth, Memory and Music in Richard II, Hamlet, and Othello,” in Reclamations of Shakespeare, ed. A.J. Hoenselaars (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 180.

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forgetfulness, and the representation of subjectivity.18 In Wilder’s compelling account, a Shakespearean character’s subjectivity takes shape “in the disjunction between the audience’s recollection of the fictional and theatrical ‘past’ surrounding the play and the character’s.”19 For Wilder, it is the “physical properties of the theatre” that “become the materials for [this] mnemonic dramaturgy”; and the “language of remembering … is the material language of the prop-table and the costume inventory.”20 I would argue, however, that the most obscure but most persistent workings of the memory on the Shakespearean stage are associated not with objects, but with sounds that are both fleeting and peculiarly tenacious. The two ways of thinking of the concentric circles of sound—as the perpetual motion of souls and spheres, and as the ephemeral but pervasive result of a disturbance—parallel two possible ways of considering musical recollection. Aristotle uses a musical example to illustrate the habitual and involuntary workings of the memory when it escapes the control of the will, referring to “the case of names, tunes, and sayings, when any of them has been very much on our lips; for even though we give up the habit and do not mean to yield to it, we find ourselves continually singing or saying the familiar sounds.”21 Wilder draws attention to the frequency of unwilled and unexpected remembering in Shakespeare’s plays.22 Nowhere are the movements of memory more elusive, or more insistent, than in characters’ recollections of music. In fact, I suggest that Shakespeare figures such elusive recollections as working in the way that music itself works. In the memorable words of Jonathan Baldo, music is “the art of vanishing,” gone as soon as it is sounded.23 At the same time, it persists, haunting the memory with the reverberations of half-recalled and half-forgotten phrases. This remembering creates and constitutes the self: but this self is an uncertain thing, partly a reflexive system responding involuntarily to familiar stimuli, and partly a soul vibrating to half-forgotten harmonies. After all, the peculiar relationship between music and memory takes on a very different cast in the context of the Neoplatonic commonplace that “we respond to music because we ‘recollect’ the divine music, or having ‘forgotten’ the divine Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr., Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance Drama: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Webster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Wilder. Important studies of the artes memorativae include Carruthers; Janet Coleman, Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966). 19 Wilder, 12–13. 20 Wilder, 2, 250. These physical properties may be rhetorically rather than literally present, “imagined objects” that “prompt both the audience and the players to remember past performances” (10–11). 21 Quoted in Wilder, 45. 22 Wilder, 198. 23 Jonathan Baldo, “Exporting Oblivion in The Tempest,” Modern Language Quarterly 56 (1995): 130. 18

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Reverberating Song in Shakespeare and Milton

music because of mixture with body are reminded of it by earthly music.”24 As Macrobius put it, in his extremely influential fifth-century commentary on Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis, “the soul brings to the body a memory of the celestial music; and thus no breast is so savage and hard as not to delight in it” (2.3–4). These ideas were frequently rehearsed in the Renaissance, despite their incompatibility with Christian theology.25 Shakespeare implicitly associates this Neoplatonic musical reminiscence with the random and invasive recollections described above. Meaningless iterations are touched with the shadow of eternity, rendering odd musical echoes deeply meaningful, and at the same time infecting conceptions of celestial perfection with the disturbing vagaries of the earthly music that supposedly reflects it. Shakespeare’s treatment of music and memory—and his suggestion that the hypnotically mnemonic effects of music could be reproduced in language recollecting music—had a most powerful effect on Milton. Platonic reminiscence aside, music can “recall” the prelapsarian world because, from the ideal mathematical perspective, music is unchanged: the numerical proportions that it makes audible are eternal, perfect, unfallen.26 Nevertheless, music, with its powerful and less than fully explicable pull on the affections, can create a dangerous illusion of remembering—and even momentarily regaining—Paradise, as we forget that it is lost. The more seriously these powers of music to recall the soul to a more perfect state are taken, the more problematic they become for Milton. It is these very promises that make music ghostly, an intoxicating revenant that pretends to dissolve the very temporality that relegates it to the past. In Paradise Lost, the demons are characterized by a “compulsion to repeat, to repossess in all its fullness a lost state of bliss.”27 And what better way to fulfill this compulsion than to sing their own heroic deeds, in notes that suspend Hell? The poet’s description of these notes, however, creates a problem: the poem acts as the music does. The effect of recollected or imagined—“fancied”—music upon language provides the connection between the music of Shakespeare and the music of Milton. There has been no surge of critical interest in music and sound in Milton 24 James Hutton, “Some English Poems in Praise of Music,” English Miscellany 2 (1950): 10. 25 The Platonic conception of knowledge as reminiscence was in a fashion Christianized by some Neoplatonists who “replac[ed] the memory of the individual by a theory of the memory of mankind” (E.H. Gombrich, Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance [London: Phaidon, 1972], 150). For Augustine’s response to this Platonic theory of reminiscence in the context of seventeenth-century poetic treatments of inward illumination, see Louis L. Martz, The Paradise Within: Studies in Vaughan, Traherne, and Milton (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1964), xvi. 26 McColley, 4. 27 Ronald R. MacDonald, The Burial-Places of Memory: Epic Underworlds in Vergil, Dante, and Milton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), 172. See also Regina M. Schwartz, Remembering and Repeating: Biblical Creation in “Paradise Lost” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 6, 92–9.

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corresponding to the new acoustical approaches to early modern drama (though, as with Shakespeare, there exists a considerable body of criticism examining Milton’s knowledge of music and his idea of world harmony.28) I would attribute this lack to Milton’s status as a poet rather than a dramatist (despite his dabbling in the writing of masques). Milton writes about sounds rather than staging them, subordinating sound to the signifying order of language. My reading of Shakespeare suggests, however, a way in which staged, imagined, and described sound can blend into one another. Shakespeare often does not so much stage music as stage the process by which characters’ language becomes musical, producing distortions of time, strange combinations of emotion, and impressions of what we now call déjà vu (which in this context might be more aptly christened déjà entendu). Such verbal reproduction of effects attributed to music can occur on the page as well as on the stage. Very little work has been done in recent years on Milton’s response to Shakespeare.29 The practice of separating early modern drama from non-dramatic poetry has produced numerous excellent studies in both fields, but this somewhat artificial division can lead scholars to overlook important areas of affinity and influence. Those critical accounts that do address the relationship between 28 Studies examining the influence of contemporary music on Milton’s poetry include Finney, McColley, and Schleiner. For accounts of Milton’s representation of music in his poetry, see, among others, Sigmund Spaeth, Milton’s Knowledge of Music (Princeton, NJ: University Library, 1913); Nan Cooke Carpenter, “The Place of Music in L’Allegro and Il Penseroso,” University of Toronto Quarterly 22 (1953): 354–67; John Hollander, The Untuning of the Sky: Ideas of Music in English Poetry, 1500–1700 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961); Peter Le Huray, “The Fair Musick That All Creatures Made,” in The Age of Milton: Backgrounds to Seventeenth-Century Literature, ed. C.A. Patrides and Raymond B. Waddington (Manchester: Manchester University Press; Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1980), 241–72; and Joseph M. Ortiz, “‘The Reforming of Reformation’: Theatrical, Ovidian, and Musical Figuration in Milton’s Mask,” Milton Studies 44 (2005): 84–110. Stephen Buhler examines Milton’s suspicions of polyphony and other kinds of music where sound obscures sense in “Counterpoint and Controversy: Milton and the Critiques of Polyphonic Music,” Milton Studies 36 (1998): 18–40; and in “‘Soft Lydian Airs’ Meet ‘Anthems clear’: Intelligibility in Milton, Handel, and Mark Morris,” John Donne Journal 25 (2006): 333–53. John Carey makes a similar point in “Milton’s Harmonious Sisters,” in The Well-Enchanting Skill: Music, Poetry, and Drama in the Culture of the Renaissance, ed. John Caldwell, Edward Olleson, and Susan Wollenberg (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 245–57. 29 Studies of Shakespeare and Milton have focused on Milton’s association of Shakespeare with the imagination and with nature. For accounts of a Milton antagonistic to the Shakespearean imagination, see Leslie Brisman, Milton’s Poetry of Choice and Its Romantic Heirs (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973); Jonathan Goldberg, Voice Terminal Echo: Postmodernism and English Renaissance Texts (New York: Methuen, 1986); and John Guillory, Poetic Authority (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). In Imagination and the Presence of Shakespeare in “Paradise Lost” (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), Paul Stevens opposes Guillory’s influential argument, and presents a case for a Milton friendly to the Shakespearean imagination.

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Reverberating Song in Shakespeare and Milton

Shakespeare and Milton have focused, understandably, on the latter. There is something considerable to be gained, however, by reading Shakespeare through the insight that Milton provides: the insight of a strangely musical Shakespeare. For Milton, “Shakespeare” seems to stand in for a particular kind of musical action or effect. In Shakespeare’s reverberating fantasies, meaning is not a matter of telos: it is not shaped or constituted by an ending, nor does it always lie in the kind of narrative progression that we might expect. Shakespeare’s language tends to generate associative meanings, meanings that the plays themselves implicitly define as musical. For Milton, such language ceases to refer: it is either harmonious meaning in itself, or it means nothing at all. The book contains four chapters on Shakespeare, and three chapters and a brief conclusion that focus on Milton. The Milton chapters and the conclusion are arranged chronologically, dealing with the early poems, the Ludlow Masque, Paradise Lost, and Paradise Regained, respectively, as I trace Milton’s shifting response to Shakespearean music. The organizing principles behind the Shakespeare chapters are more complex. Taken together, they work to demonstrate a crucial claim of this book: that Shakespeare repeatedly works to break down the distinctions between speech and music—and ultimately, between the workings of music and the workings of the play itself. The chapters approach the stakes of this drive towards musical expression from different directions. In the first chapter, I argue that The Merchant of Venice explores the problems involved in staging music, all the while expanding our understanding of how music can be staged. A character merely speaking of music, in the right way and under the right conditions, can be enough. Does the staging of music, however, merely add another seductive ornament to the entertainment, or can it transcend the fictive conditions of performance, offering an intimation of truth amidst theatrical shows? Early modern debates about the use of music in religious services offer conflicting accounts of music as sensuous—and implicitly theatrical—surface and as an art peculiarly associated with inwardness, possessing a special and mysterious affinity with the human soul. Merchant conveys deep ambivalence over theatricality in general, and tries to use music to think beyond the dichotomies of surfaces and depths, inward truth and outward show. Nevertheless, music’s refusal to fit the paradigms of appearance and figuration provides only a tantalizing possibility of reconciliation for both the characters and the play itself. In early modern culture, even the “lowest” and noisiest forms of music remain tangled—half-jestingly, half-seriously—with the supposedly elevated discourse of the harmonious cosmos. In Chapter 2, I show how Shakespeare emphasizes and exacerbates this entanglement, imbuing elusive snatches of song with the uncanny aura of another world. This uncanniness is further manifested in what Shakespeare perceives as the uncertain tonality of music: not only may sweet notes transform pain into pleasure, but numerous sets of words—some merry, some doleful; some bawdy, some spiritual—may be set to the same tune. The complex affect of Shakespeare’s haunted songs, those multiple verses set to the same note, is generated elsewhere in the plays when characters remember sounds

Introduction

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that summon up emotional states that resonate and jar with the present. The distinctive movements of reverberating song evoke complex and contradictory moods, as remembered and current emotions overlap. These concerns come together in Othello, where an illusion of subjectivity rises from songs that repeat in the mind and words that become infected with musical sound. Chapter 3 finds in Hamlet a still more extensive and searching treatment of the ability of song to suggest an inward self both integral and hollow, and the possibility of an otherworldly presence lingering in audible sounds. I argue that Hamlet is saturated with music, to an extent that criticism has not recognized. Characters attempt to make sense of strange and unsettling noises—Ophelia’s songs, the crowing of the cock—by describing them in terms of harmonious music. At the same time, language, undermined and interpenetrated by strange noises and fragments of old songs, threatens to collapse into senseless sound. Music in Hamlet retains its otherworldly associations, but it no longer serves as a symbol of divine harmony; it becomes instead a ghostly manifestation. Shakespeare repeatedly raises the possibility that the time is not “out of joint”—that the world of Denmark is not “out of tune” with the cosmos, but in fact faithfully echoes and reproduces the structure of the universe and the soul. These structures, however, appear increasingly unfixed, alien, and incomprehensible, reverberating with eerie, forbidding, and sometimes alluring dissonance. In Chapter 4, I examine two of Shakespeare’s most famously “musical” plays: Twelfth Night and The Tempest. In these dramas, Shakespeare subtly links the problems and possibilities of communication through music to the way that the plays themselves transmit meaning and affect to an audience. Paradoxically, artful remoteness and emotional intensity feed off one another in the language of Twelfth Night and The Tempest, in a manner that reproduces the effects of the pervasive music in these plays. Characters are profoundly moved by music, but in strangely indirect ways. While Twelfth Night emphasizes the ameliorating power of music, however, The Tempest struggles with the question of how pain and violence can be presented and received as “harmonious” and “pleasing.” Not for the first time, Shakespeare asks if music can express and bring to life the endlessly complex and contradictory tonality of experience or if it risks obscuring unpleasantness and suffering with a lyrical surface. The fifth chapter addresses Milton’s response to Shakespeare. I argue that Milton locates Shakespeare’s descriptions of music as the site where the Shakespearean text begins to become a beautiful and disturbing fancy, a wordless music made up of words. Milton shows a particular fascination with A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, plays presenting worlds that echo with enchanting and often inarticulate music of uncertain origin, where nature itself is literally, and sometimes eerily, harmonious. Milton perceives such inherently musical worlds as simultaneously fallen and unfallen, terrible and idyllic. In a number of his own early poems, including L’Allegro, Il Penseroso, and the Nativity Ode, Milton devotes significant passages to describing the sounds of music; nevertheless, he also expresses reservations about the possibility—and morality—of imitating such

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“unexpressive song,” song that offers the dangerous if desirable illusion of a return to an unfallen world. In the musical collapse of time, the lingering past ultimately becomes a haunting rather than a living presence. My discussion of Milton’s response to Shakespeare continues in Chapter 6, “‘Serpit Agens’: The Song of the Blest Siren.” A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle has long been recognized as Milton’s most explicit treatment of Shakespeare. I show that in the Masque, Shakespearean echoes cluster with particular density around descriptions of music that Milton positions as verbal echoes. In these echoes, Milton regretfully imagines a lost music alive with the imperceptible, serpentine movements of unaccommodated truth, the divine voice speaking in nonreferring sound. Although the transcendence of symbolism and signification can occur truly in one environment only, it is an environment that resonant, sweet sound repeatedly begins to generate around itself: the unfallen “age of gold.” The final chapter, “Minims of Nature: Describing Music in Paradise Lost,” examines Milton’s representations of music in his biblical epic. As Milton demonstrates in the first two books of Paradise Lost, a poem that evokes the sounds of music with too much enthusiasm can all too easily find itself joining the infernal choir. The “charming” music of Hell, by its very nature, suspends Hell, either abstracting its listeners from their surroundings, or altering those surroundings altogether. Milton reveals the dangers of demonic music by representing it in this way, but such a revelation is inevitably subject to the charming forgetfulness it demonstrates. When the scene shifts to heaven, the narrator is careful to describe only the content of angelic song—not its sounds. Only in an unfallen world are nonverbal music and the poetic reverberation of such music right and safe. Nevertheless, any poem hoping to evoke Eden, however briefly, must recreate this music, even at the cost of a potential dissolution of moral meaning. The conclusion describes Milton’s final rejection of Shakespearean music, his ultimate association of delightful sound with falseness and playacting. In Paradise Regained, the sonic aspects of music and the world of The Tempest appear in purely negative contexts. Demonic actors play elemental spirits who act out charming and musical masques, and only the devil describes and attempts to echo musical sound. For angels, song and action, music and word, are all one and the same. In contrast, Satan’s music and tempests are not only empty of meaning but completely ineffectual: they are ephemeral performances, not true actions. Ultimately, the poem itself works to become—for however brief an instant—not what is played, or even what is sung—but what “is written.”

Chapter 1

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

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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. Early Christian condemnations of music focus on its abuse in the theater— a theme enthusiastically adopted by Puritan polemicists.5 This association of 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). 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). 4

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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. 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 6 See Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), 159–60.

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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? 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 “named [his] knell”: the title of the

Shakespeare is cited parenthetically from The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean Howard, and Katherine Eisaman Maus (New York: Norton, 1997). 8 Linda Phyllis Austern, “‘Art to Enchant’: Musical Magic and Its Practitioners in English Renaissance Drama,” Journal of the Royal Music Association 115 (1990): 196. 9 The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, ed. John Gouws (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 82. 7

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song refers to the wound that Sidney had received in his thigh.10 In each case, the earthly music both reminds of mortality and leads the listener towards heavenly harmony. In the play, however, the “knell” does not merely provide a “kind of terrestrial echo” of divine music: the very same solemn sounds represent the music performed by Katherine’s servants and the music to which the heavenly spirits dance. Here the problem of representation reproduces metaphysical questions about the nature of music itself. Music conceived as the eternal and harmonious proportions that make up the fabric of the universe could never be entirely reconciled with music conceived as the sensual and ephemeral movement of sounds through time,11 but the status of practical, audible music was a particularly weighted issue in the context of theatrical performance. In the late sixteenth century, complaints about theater and music were often combined; and theater music was condemned even by those who had positive things to say about music in general. Stephen Gosson, who complains about the abuses of music, poetry, and the theater in the same breath, offers the following—far from unusual—advice to aspiring musicians: If you will bee good Scholers, and profite well in the Arte of Musicke, shutte your Fidels in their cases, and looke up to heauen: the order of the Spheres, the unfallible motion of the Planets, the iuste course of the yeere, and varietie of seasons, the concorde of the Elementes and their qualities … The politicke Lawes in well gouerned common wealthes, that treade downe the prowde, and upholde the meeke, the loue of the King and his subiectes, the Father and his childe, the Lorde and his Slave, the Maister and his Man … are excellent maisters too shewe you that this is right Musicke, this perfect harmony.12

In theory, music is order. Gosson attempts to curb the disorder inevitably created by the actual sounds of music by making “music” purely theoretical. His attitude implies that given an audible voice, music can destroy the neat hierarchies of the world that it supposedly symbolizes. Tellingly, Gosson is frightened by the material manifestation of this principle of order, and he spoke for many of his contemporaries—but not all. Thomas Lodge disputes Gosson’s point with refreshing pragmatism: “Pythagoras, you say, allows not that music is discerned by ears, but he wisheth us to ascend unto the sky, and mark that harmony. Surely this is but one doctor’s opinion (yet I dislike not of it) but to speak my conscience, methinks music best pleaseth me when I hear it.”13

The song has not survived. It is not known if the words were written by Sidney himself. 11 See Pierre Iselin, “Myth, Memory and Music in Richard II, Hamlet, and Othello,” in Reclamations of Shakespeare, ed. A.J. Hoenselaars (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 173–86. 12 Gosson, A8r–v. 13 Quoted in Frederick Sternfeld, Music in Shakespearean Tragedy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), 223. 10

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In his diatribe, Gosson articulates the ideal, metaphysical, and mathematical understanding of music that originated in the ancient world with Pythagoras and Plato. At the beginning of the sixth century C.E., Boethius’s De institutione musica incorporated Greek and Roman musical theory in a form that would shape conceptions of music throughout the Middle Ages and into the early modern era.14 Boethius divided the term “music” into three corresponding levels: musica mundana, musica humana, and musica instrumentalis. The first two types of music (referring respectively to the harmonious proportions of the cosmos and the harmonious proportions of the human body and soul) constitute what was often called theoretical or “speculative” music; musica instrumentalis refers to all kinds of “practical music,” including singing, playing, and even the composition of poetry.15 A true musician was a speculative musician: he did nothing so vulgar as perform music, nor did he even, in most cases, compose. Instead, he contemplated the eternal numbers and proportions that make up the harmony of the world, pondering the mystical significance of the mathematics underpinning the art of music. Speculative “music” could thus cover any number of areas, including mathematics, morality, and metaphysics. (Or, in Gosson’s terms, “the politicke Lawes in well gouerned common wealthes,” etc.) Practical music, in its turn, did not so much imitate as reflect, in a transitory and problematic form, this cosmic order studied by the speculative musician. A reverent appreciation for abstract harmony did not always result in the rejection of performance, however. In Religio Medici, Thomas Browne’s love for the intellectual harmony of creation would lead him to the extreme position of embracing all earthly music. [E]ven that vulgar and Taverne Musicke, which makes one man merry, another mad, strikes mee into a deepe fit of devotion, and a profound contemplation of the first Composer; there is something in it of Divinity more than the eare discovers. It is a Hieroglyphicall and shadowed lesson of the whole world, and the Creatures of God, such a melody to the eare, as the whole world well understood, would afford the understanding. In brief, it is a sensible fit of that Harmony, which intellectually sounds in the eares of God.16 14 Boethius’s treatise was considered authoritative throughout the Middle Ages, and was highly valued by later Italian humanists as a source of ancient music theory. De institutione musica was one of the first books on music to be printed (1491–92). See Calvin M. Bower, “Introduction,” and Claude V. Palisca, “Preface by Series Editor,” in Fundamentals of Music, trans. Calvin M. Bower, ed. Claude V. Palisca (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), xiii–iv, xviii, xx, xxiv. See also John Hollander, The Untuning of the Sky: Ideas of Music in English Poetry, 1500–1700 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), 24–5; and Penelope Gouk, Music, Science and Natural Magic in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 81. 15 Boethius, 9. 16 Religio Medici (1642), The Prose of Sir Thomas Browne, ed. Norman Endicott (New York: Anchor, 1967), 80–81.

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While Gosson sees no connection between audible music and abstract harmony, Browne finds the intellectual in the sensible. Though the ear is incapable of perceiving the full divinity of music, which becomes an object of “contemplation” rather than of hearing, Browne refuses to separate harmony from sonority: God himself—however figuratively—perceives the “sounding” of the universal music through the ear. This resonant hieroglyph creates serious conceptual problems that become representational problems on stage. Browne’s phrase “shadowed lesson” suggests music-as-allegory, a sensible representation of the abstract or ineffable. The Neoplatonic hieroglyph, however, was more than a sign. It manifested the essence of what it signified, not merely standing for an abstract concept, but mysteriously embodying it.17 Such an embodiment is more than a mere shadow. Unlike a “hieroglyphicall” image, however, “sensible” music does not stay still to be contemplated. Its very nature requires change, an evanescent movement through time. Indeed, many commentators of the time insisted that music’s “motions” are precisely what “move” listeners.18 Yet music’s effects are unpredictable: what makes one listener contemplative makes one merry, another mad. Browne’s praise of music winds together all three problems I mentioned above: the metaphysical, the affective, and—implicitly—the semantic. The music can be understood only if the whole world is understood already; or, perhaps, the music can offer understanding of the whole world once the world is understood. Such fits of harmony must be both tantalizingly revelatory and opaque. The episode of Katherine’s dream in Henry VIII not only entwines doubts about the status of earthly music with the ability of the early modern stage to represent the ineffable; it also raises the question of how to determine musical meaning and tone. We have no way of knowing exactly what kind of music was played in this scene. The stage directions characterize it as “sad and solemn”—but what exactly does this mean? “Sad” could mean both serious—a synonym, then, for solemn— or sorrowful. Katherine’s request for the musicians to play “that sad note / I named my knell” certainly suggests something mournful, rather than simply dignified. Yet this “sad note” must also provide an appropriate accompaniment to a celestial dance.19 The same music that evokes mournfulness and signifies death—as does a literal, tolling “knell”—can seemingly inspire solemn “rejoicing” and signify heavenly bliss. These associated problems of affect and meaning lead us back E.H. Gombrich, Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon, 1972), 159–60. See also S.K. Heninger, Touches of Sweet Harmony: Pythagorean Cosmology and Renaissance Poetics (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1974), 343. 18 See Gouk, 99; Gary Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 87–8; and D.P. Walker, Spiritual & Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 14. 19 It is possible that the music changes markedly when Katherine falls asleep, but the detailed stage directions do not suggest this. The spirits enter “solemnly tripping one after another,” and when they exit, “the music continues”—the same music, presumably, that Katherine finds “harsh and heavy” a few lines later. 17

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to the metaphysical question. It makes perfect devotional sense for groaning and mourning to prepare the repentant soul for ascent to the heavenly harmonies; but such a process of ascent implies a view of the relationship between heaven and earth incompatible with the perception of earthly and heavenly music as, in some sense, continuous. The incompatibility of groans and sweet music as preparation for heaven, however, did not prevent both paths from being recommended, sometimes even in the same breath. Humphrey Sydenham expresses the familiar sentiment that to the “most pure and sanctified … the most curious Ayre that ere was set, is not half so harmonious as one groane of the Spirit,” but then goes on to describe church music as “this sacred sensualitie, which as a pleasant path leadeth to the Fountaine of spirituall joy and endlesse comfort.”20 In Henry VIII, Katherine has it both ways: her “knell” cannot be distinguished from “sacred sensualitie.” In such uncertainty, language should serve as an anchor. Lyrics would seem to provide the simplest way of fixing the meaning and affect of a song. But Greville’s account of Sidney’s death hints at the flaws in any such assumption. The dying knight requests song for two reasons: “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” (emphasis mine). The song commemorates Sidney’s death wound—Le Cuisse Rompue—and thus potentially operates as a groan over the corruptibility of the flesh, encouraging abandonment of one world to hasten the embrace of another. Yet this penitential function is only part of the reason that Sidney calls for song. The music elevates the soul towards heaven, allowing an almost seamless passage from terrestrial echo to angelic harmony. The song recollects the wound—which by this time had begun to rot. But the “Musick itself” seems to operate differently from the mortifying words. Startlingly, music and words work in the opposite way to the same end: the enfranchisement of Sidney’s soul. Indeed, this end seems to require that they work against each other. The words insist on mortality while the accompanying music forgets and transcends it. Greville’s story suggests that words and music may work fruitfully in tension with one another—despite widespread contemporary insistence that the music must serve the words. Generally acknowledged as possessing unparalleled power to stir the passions, music was treated with considerable suspicion by some Reformers precisely because it could intensify the emotional response of an audience to seductive or immoral lyrics, but also—paradoxically—because music might distract a congregation from the verbal content of a hymn. In a passage of The Confessions much cited in Protestant polemics against elaborate church music, Augustine worried that even as music amplifies the words and endows them with new affective power, it may also work against the words, enticing the mind to drift in sensible delight. 20 Humphrey Sydenham, Sermons upon Solemne Occasions: Preached in Severall Auditories (London, 1637), 29.

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I feel that when the sacred words are chanted well, our souls are moved and are more religiously and with a warmer devotion kindled to piety than if they are not so sung … Yet when it happens that the music moves me more than the subject of the song, I confess myself to commit a sin deserving punishment, and then I would prefer not to have heard the singer.21

Music helps to move the soul; but at the same time, its sounds touch only the senses, inspiring “physical delight, which has to be checked from enervating the mind.”22 John Calvin echoed Augustine’s concern, warning “that our ears not be more attentive to the melody than our minds to the spiritual meaning of the words.”23 Greville, however, puts a positive spin on the very phenomenon that Augustine feared. Simultaneously, he suggests a parallel between words and dying flesh—le cuisse rompue—and between melody and the “heavenly soul.” Such associations, though diametrically opposed to those articulated by Augustine and Calvin, drew upon an equally established Platonic tradition, which understood the soul itself as harmony. The relationship between music and words, and their respective associations with transitory and deceptive surfaces and with immortal, spiritual truth and meaning, are of considerable importance to Shakespeare, and nowhere more so than in the Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare maps the tension between sound and sense within words—especially words arranged as poetry—onto this uncertain relationship between music and words, by bringing such tensions to the surface around moments of literal music. In Merchant, these key musical moments are the final act and the casket test. Becoming Music: Terrestrial Echoes and Verbal Transformations Critics who view The Merchant of Venice as coming to a harmonious and satisfactory conclusion have found this harmony expressed in its purest and clearest form in Lorenzo’s speech, while critics who read the play as a dark comedy or problem play emphasize either the irony of the speech or its superficiality. Though recent scholars have tended to emphasize irony over harmony, the conflict is of long standing. C.L. Barber declared: “No other comedy, until the late romances, ends with so full an expression of harmony as that which we get in the opening of the final scene of The Merchant of Venice. And no other final scene is so completely without 21 Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 207, 208. 22 Augustine, Confessions, 208. 23 Quoted in William Bouwsma, John Calvin: A Sixteenth-Century Portrait (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 225. See also Richard Mulcaster, Positions (London, 1581): “And in matters of religion also, to some it seemes offensiue, bycause it carieth awaye the eare, with the sweetnesse of the melodie, and bewitcheth the minde with a Syrenes sounde” (37).

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irony about the joys it celebrates.”24 A.D. Moody, on the other hand, announced: “I have to confess that what seems to me obvious, is that the promised supersession of justice by love and mercy does not come about, and that the end is something of a parody of heavenly love and harmony.”25 Audiences and readers sometimes have felt that the final act works “to drown in soft music the harsh discords of the trial scene, to rinse from the spectator’s mouth with a draught of romantic sweetness the bitter taste of Shylock’s humiliation and defeat.”26 Such phrasing implies that music does not resolve figurative discords—it simply obscures them. This suspicious view of music was hardly unfamiliar to Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Nevertheless, music does not necessarily drown all harshness with its sweetness. Music in Merchant evokes a curious mixture of emotions: its operations erase and reinforce irony; it simultaneously provokes joy, regret, and eroticism. “I am never merry,” says Jessica, “when I hear sweet music” (5.1.68). She perceives a knell in the celestial harmonies. The Merchant of Venice seemingly avoids the problem of representation that surrounds Katherine’s dream in Henry VIII. The music that the audience hears in the final act is clearly the music of Portia’s house, not the inaudible music of the spheres. Nevertheless, the episode is considerably complicated by the role that language plays in evoking and placing the music. Lorenzo’s famous speech encourages us to take the idea of “verbal music” very seriously indeed. [B]ring your music forth into the air. How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank! 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. Come, ho, and wake Diana with a hymn. With sweetest touches pierce your mistress’ ear And draw her home with music. (5.1.53–67)

In its subtle but persistent synaesthesia, the passage celebrates the way sounds generate similar sounds. In the sweetness of its sleep, the moonlight somehow 24 C.L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959), 187. 25 Quoted in Danson, 14. 26 Graham Holderness, “Comedy and The Merchant of Venice,” in New Casebooks, ed. Martin Coyle (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998), 28.

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resembles the sweetness of the harmony appropriate to such a setting. Most suggestively of all, the passage subtly gestures towards its own language and the sounds of this language. Lorenzo’s impressionistic perception of the moonlight’s sweet sleep springs from the need for the internal half-rhyme. As the passage progresses, the sleeping of the sweet moonlight becomes the creeping of the sounds of music, the sweet harmony. When Lorenzo declares that “soft stillness and the night / Become the touches of sweet harmony,” does he mean that stillness and night are an appropriate setting for sweet harmony, or that they turn into sweet harmony?27 The language works to achieve the transformation suggested in the second possibility. “Stillness” becomes movement and sound, a transformation later recalled when the orbs in their motion sing, “still choiring.” As silence becomes perpetual singing, the music “becomes” the night, the place, and the speaking voice, through an alchemy initiated by the voice itself. “Bring your music forth into the air,” Lorenzo commands, with subtle tautology. An “air” is already music: Lorenzo requests the musicians to bring the music into the music, the air into the air.28 “Here we will sit,” he continues, and here they will hear, letting music creep into their ears. Sight and sound come together, joined by feeling in Lorenzo’s repeated punning references to the sweet “touches” of music.29 The passage figures all music, and not merely the music of the spheres, as tantalizingly elusive. It creeps into the ears, and is almost but not quite present in the moonlight, the silence, and in Lorenzo’s voice. As he continues to speak, Lorenzo asks Jessica and the audience to apprehend and accept a sharp divide between sight and hearing—a divide that the rest of the speech works assiduously to overcome. As Gosson reminded aspiring musicians, one can look up and see the golden floor of heaven and the motions of the orbs, while the music of these orbs cannot be heard by mortals. The Merchant of Venice, however, was performed in an outdoor theatre, in broad daylight. The actors are responsible for transporting the audience into an illusory moonlit night, a transformation of reality possible only through language. Lorenzo’s descriptions of night are only successful insofar as they make us imagine a moonlit bank instead of a sunlit stage. Should his description of inaudible music work similarly? If we are willing to see the shadows, the moonlight, and the stars in our imagination, then surely we are just as ready to hear the orbs singing in their motions like angels—a sound that mortals are not permitted to perceive. The juxtaposition 27 Jorgens emphasizes the second possibility, generally ignored by editors. She reads Lorenzo as indicating that silence is the only form in which mortals can apprehend the music of the spheres (“Rhetoric of Dissonance,” 123). 28 Later, Lorenzo describes the reaction of animals if “any air of music touch their ears” (75). 29 See Leo Spitzer, Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony, ed. Anna Granville Hatcher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963): “Synesthetic apperception always bears witness to the idea of world harmony … all the senses converge into one harmonious feeling” (24).

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and the synaesthetic entanglement of these descriptions of night and song open dangerous and dizzying possibilities.30 Just as Lorenzo’s speech confounds sound with silence, it collapses the distinctions between singers and hearers. Each orb “like an angel sings, / Still choiring to the young-eyed cherubins.” Who precisely is choiring here: the angels that the orbs resemble, or the orbs themselves? We cannot answer that question unless we can determine where the simile ends—and we cannot determine this with any certainty.31 The figurative and the literal melt together. Similarly, outward becomes inward, and vice versa, as Lorenzo’s referents become increasingly unclear: “Such harmony is in immortal souls, / But whilst this muddy vesture of decay / Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it” (emphasis mine). To what does the second “it” refer?32 The music “closed within” and the unheard music without are the same—or, at any rate, the speech makes it impossible to distinguish between them. As Lorenzo implicitly reminds his hearers, the Platonic tradition explained human attraction to music by suggesting that music awakens faint memories of something previously heard—something perhaps still lingering within. The author of The Praise of Musicke (1586) speaks of music’s “diuine influence into the soules of men, whereby our cogitations and thoughts … are brought into a celestiall acknowledging of their natures. For as the Platonicks & Pythagorians think al soules of men, are at the recordation of that celestial Musicke, whereof they were partakers in heaven, before they entred into their bodies so wonderfuly delighted, that no man can be found so harde harted which is not exceedingly alured with the sweetnes therof.”33 The entire scene, even before music becomes an explicit topic of conversation, works to stimulate a similar sense of recollection, deepening the illusion of likeness—or even identity—between the music played 30 When directing Jessica’s attention to the stars, Lorenzo may point to the constellations painted on the “heavens” of the stage. But if these painted stars represent the spheres, then it would seem that the playing of the stage musicians could just as well represent their music. The strange disjunction between sight and sound remains. 31 Shakespeare or Lorenzo may or may not be making a distinction between the angelic order of cherubim and the ordinary rank and file of angels. (In many cosmologies, one order of angels was associated with each heavenly sphere, further complicating the issue. The cherubim were usually associated with the Starry Sphere—making their evocation particularly appropriate in this context.) Around this time, the image of cherubim was shifting: from awe-inspiring and blazing figures, the second-highest rank of angels, they were becoming chubby children with wings and rosy cheeks. See Lindley, Shakespeare and Music, 17. 32 Hutton denies the possibility of any real confusion: “[Lorenzo] cannot mean [that we cannot hear the music in our souls]; for it is grotesque to speak of hearing the harmony of our own souls, whether in the flesh or out of the flesh. His words are only hints, to be understood from the tradition” (34). 33 John Case [attributed], The Praise of Musicke (1586), facsim. edn (New York: G. Olms, 1980), 40–41. See also Hutton, 10.

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on the moonlit bank and the angelic choiring that we cannot hear. We are invited to imagine that the music begins before it begins, in the same way that the sweetly sleeping moonlight anticipates the sweetly creeping harmony. In The Arte of English Poesie, George Puttenham describes rhymes as “a certain tunable sound: which anon after with another verse reasonably distant we accord together in the last fall or cadence: the eare taking pleasure to heare the like tune reported, and to feele his returne.”34 Lorenzo’s internal rhymes are more elusive, and work more subtly: they never quite accord in a final cadence. Nevertheless, on some level, the listener feels the “return” of sounds. The “musical” words stimulate recollection, not of divine music, but of the opening lines of the scene. The moon shines bright. In such a night as this, When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees And they did make no noise—in such a night ….” (5.1.1–3)

This initial exchange between Jessica and Lorenzo is repetitive, echoing, incantatory: “In such a night …. In such a night ….” The sonic echoes evoke a sense of repetition and return already inherent in the similarity of past and present nights, and briefly crystallized in “come again to Carthage” (12). The repetitions thus reinforce the subject matter of the exchange—but they may also distract from it, rendering an already strange mood all the more difficult to analyze. Jessica and Lorenzo work to bring fictions to life, conjuring up legendary nights of the past, which then “become” the night that they currently inhabit. In the same way, Lorenzo will soon draw the potentially fictive music of the spheres towards audibility. In these earlier lines too, a sweet but silent air blends imperceptibly with the brightness of the night; here the “sweet touches” are plainly sensual, taking the form of kisses. Here is another unheard music: soft stillness and the night become the touches of sweet harmony. Lorenzo may be trying to seduce Jessica with his speech; but the music in the language appears increasingly independent of anything we might attribute to the character’s agency. Pierre Iselin uses this very scene to support his assertion that in Shakespearean drama “too much is said about music for music to unfold as a signifying system.”35 The difference between speech and music is indeed crucial and must not be overlooked. Nevertheless, once we do recognize this distinction, we can recognize how Shakespeare both acknowledges the distinction and explores ways of blurring it. The famous exchange between the lovers not only resonates sonically and conceptually with Lorenzo’s later speech on music, but also places a pronounced emphasis on sounds—internal rhyme, assonance, alliteration: “The moon Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Doige Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936, rpr. 1970), 76; emphasis mine. 35 Iselin, “Music and Difference: Elizabethan Stage Music and Its Reception,” in French Essays on Shakespeare and His Contemporaries: ‘What Would France with Us?’ ed. Jean-Marie Maguin and Michèle Willems (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995), 101. 34

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shines bright. In such a night”; “as this, / When the sweet wind did gently kiss.” Later, we hear “ran dismayed away” and “stood Dido with a willow” (5.1.9–10). Removed from their context, the phrases jingle like nursery rhymes: they sound almost silly until spun out into pentameter, set in a wider web of mutually resonating words. Similarly, in Lorenzo’s following speech on music, the delicate response of “ears” to “here” over the distance of a line and a half is an artful expansion and modulation of the jingle that comes across as sheer idiocy in Pistol’s pretension to the poetic in The Merry Wives of Windsor: “He hears with ears.” In that case, Evans’s response is justified: “What phrase is this? ‘He hears with ear’! Why, it is affectations” (1.1.123–5). Nevertheless, George Orwell’s comment on Pistol is illuminating: “How deeply Shakespeare himself was fascinated by the music of words can probably be inferred from the speeches of Pistol. What Pistol says is largely meaningless, but if one considers his lines singly they are magnificent rhetorical verse. Evidently, pieces of resounding nonsense (‘Let floods o’erswell, and fiends for food howl on,’ etc.) were constantly appearing in Shakespeare’s mind of their own accord, and a half-lunatic character had to be invented to use them up.”36 The exchanges between Lorenzo and Jessica are not quite “pieces of resounding nonsense,” but sound and sense unfold in a strange and unsettling relationship to one another, as the rich patterns of alliteration, assonance, and rhyme lyrically shape stories of doomed or betrayed love. Marc Berley suggests that in these nocturnal ruminations, the depressing subject matter “speaks against the harmony of the echoic form …. The serious subject of the exchange pushes the limits of playful banter, signaling a conflict between beautiful form and ugly content, between the charm of sound and the trouble of its meaning.”37 His point is that harmonious sounds do not always express harmony. The “music” of language becomes a deceptive surface, hiding something unpleasant and even frightening that is beginning to take shape between Lorenzo and Jessica. A different critical formulation, however, might align the “music” of the passage with its true meaning and the mere subject matter with the superficial surface: “The ‘letter’ of [Lorenzo and Jessica’s] lyrical exchange is the infidelity of lovers, but the ‘spirit’ is the fidelity of lovers who tease one George Orwell, “Lear, Tolstoy, and the Fool,” in Inside the Whale, and Other Essays (New York: Penguin, 1962), 117. 37 Berley, 92–3. Berley reads this disjunction as Shakespeare’s examination of the need for speculative, Platonic music in life, of the importance of “tuning” practical music to true concord—concord that cannot be found in pleasant sounds alone. In this vein, Berley argues that the play invites us to distinguish between “eloquence and truth, between form and content, between words and deeds” (120). Berley does not make any distinction between practical music as music and practical music as poetry, although his description of Jessica’s dialogue with Lorenzo suggests a very interesting tension between words and music—a tension that Shakespeare maps onto poetry itself. See also Catherine Belsey, “Love in Venice,” Shakespeare Survey 44 (1992): “The rhythms and the internal rhymes … all serve to contain and dissipate what is most distressing in Shakespeare’s classical and Italian narratives …. The effect is thrilling to the extent that pleasure is infused with danger” (43). 36

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another … only to summon forth a fuller profession of love.”38 These two opposing accounts of the exchange reproduce opposing early modern perspectives on the relationship between music and words. Either music disguises and prettifies the bleak content, or it expresses the deeper truth of the speakers’ love beneath the playful surface “teasing” of their foreboding literary references. This tension seems particularly apt in a play that places so much emphasis upon the discrepancy between false surfaces and reality. At certain points, the treatment of music in The Merchant of Venice offers yet another example of the problematic relationship between surfaces and inner truth. At other moments, however, music presents a possible solution or at least an erasure of the terms in which the problem has been formulated. The scene offers a kaleidoscopic treatment of the troubled relationship between words and music, a relationship that also can be understood in terms of the relationship between sound and sense within words themselves. In his compelling account of Shakespeare’s late style, Russ McDonald describes the playwright’s “new and virtually unalloyed pleasure in sounds,” and argues that the “elaborate surface of the verse in the romances implies that Shakespeare has committed himself without apology, although not without self-scrutiny, to the value of surfaces generally.”39 In these late plays, Shakespeare “embraces … ornament and verbal pleasure,” in a style that is “aurally demanding and self-consciously artificial … involv[ing] a contest between sense and form, between the semantic energies of the sentence and the restrictions of the pentameter.”40 Such style is certainly characteristic of the late romances, but Shakespeare throughout his career takes pleasure in sounds, as in the Merchant episode under discussion. By repeatedly situating “aurally demanding” passages as responses to music, Shakespeare asks us to think about tensions between form and sense in the context of contemporary musical debates. In such a context, aural language does not necessarily signal a commitment to the value of surfaces. Outward Actions and Inward Motions How does music figure into Merchant’s obsession with the relationship between outward shows and inner truth? The question is an especially pressing one, because their responsiveness to music becomes the Christians’ last, best claim to transcendence and moral rightness. Antonio takes the first opportunity to project the dichotomy of appearance and essence onto Shylock, exclaiming selfrighteously: “O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!” (1.3.98). Yet Shylock does not possess an especially “goodly outside.” He is blunt, miserly, and seemingly 38 Joan Ozark Holmer, “Loving Wisely and the Casket Test: Symbolic and Structural Unity in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Studies 11 (1978): 67. 39 Russ McDonald, Shakespeare’s Late Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 218. 40 McDonald, Late Style, 75.

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uninterested in the finer things in life. He may initially dissemble the depth of his hatred for Antonio, but to think of him in terms of evil alluringly ornamented with outward graces leads quickly to absurdity. On the other hand, it is hardly necessary to enumerate the many examples of the Christian characters’ attachment to appearances: Bassanio’s desire to cut a fine figure in Belmont; Portia’s abhorrence of Morocco’s dark complexion; the Venetians’ fondness for various types of masquerade; etc, etc. The bad faith of the Christians stems from the way they profess values that transcend appearances and the material world, but then implicitly claim that these values are manifested in the appearances of the material world. This is why it is so important for them to see Shylock as simultaneously possessing a “goodly outside” and as obviously villainous, base, and damned. The Christian characters in Merchant persistently attempt to shift virtue to the surface of things, driven partly by blatant hypocrisy and partly by frustrated desire for a comfortable world in which truth and goodness can be definitively obtained and attractively displayed. Launcelot piously informs his new master Bassanio of his moral superiority to the clown’s old master: “The old proverb is very well parted between my master Shylock and you, sir; you have the grace of God, sir, and he hath enough” (2.2.134–6). Launcelot has already indicated, however, that Bassanio is a desirable employer not so much because he has the grace of God, but because he “gives rare new liveries” (97). Lest anyone should forget this detail, Bassanio answers Launcelot’s sally about grace with acceptance and reward: “Thou speak’st it well … Give him a livery more guarded than his fellows” (137, 139–40). Grace is decoration. This makes a certain sense. In its common, nontheological meaning, the word suggests attractiveness, elegance, seemliness—even embellishment or outward flourish. It may be precisely “something that imparts beauty; an ornament” (OED n., 2b). For Castiglione, the grace of the courtier is of this kind, and such grace inevitably becomes involved with the suspicion of deception and pretense. The ideal courtier “will be at pains to do nothing without ‘a certaine grace,’ to serve as ‘an ornament to frame and accompany all his acts.’”41 Even in the theological sense, however, grace is something extra, unmerited. Yet the conflation of the theological and ornamental meanings can create considerable dangers. As Bassanio carefully points out, in law a “gracious voice … obscures the show of evil” (75–6). The play is full of gracious voices. But are they voices imbued with grace?42 Barish, Antitheatrical Prejudice, 168. For the full discussion of ostentation and dissimulation, see pp. 168–71. Frank Whigham, “Ideology and Class Conduct in The Merchant of Venice,” Renaissance Drama 10 (1979): 93–115, reads the play as “a study of courteous ideology,” and notes “a double attitude towards assumed surfaces” (103, 105). 42 See Rene Girard, “To Entrap the Wisest: Sacrificial Ambivalence in The Merchant of Venice and Richard III,” in Shakespeare: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1945– 2000, ed. Russ McDonald (Maldon, MA: Blackwell, 2004): “Let us listen to the reasons given by Bassanio for trusting in lead rather than in silver or gold, and we will see that they apply word for word to the play itself” (360). 41

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The uneasy equivalence of the moral and the aesthetic, implicitly assumed though explicitly denied by the “good” characters in the play, is finally and triumphantly affirmed in Lorenzo’s condemnation of the man with “no music in him.”43 In the final scene, music serves as a kind of moral trump card: only those who are moved by music can be moved to sympathy—and deserve sympathy. Those with no music in them are less than human (less, even, than animals). The association between humanity and responsiveness to music remains very much alive today. Trevor Nunn’s 1999 production of Merchant ended with Jessica singing a Hebrew song that she had earlier sung with her father, and the director thus restored to Shylock the music—and the humanity—denied him by Lorenzo. It was apparently unthinkable for a production intent on showing Shakespeare’s humanism to present Shylock as a man with “no music in himself.”44 Nevertheless, the fact remains that Shakespeare did not give Shylock music. Instead, he allows Shylock to make a connection between music and theatricality, to suggest that music is merely another form of deceptive appearance. While Lorenzo insists upon the “harmony … in immortal souls,” and warns against the man who has “no music in himself,” Shylock associates music—to him, “the drum / And the vile squealing of the wry-necked fife” (2.4.27–8)—with false surfaces and masquerades enacted by “Christian fools with varnished faces” (2.4.32). Music is “the sound of shallow fopp’ry” (34). Ironically enough, Shylock articulates the threat of empty but seductive sound felt by a number of the early Christian fathers—and, more recently, by Protestant reformers. Associating visual stimulus with Catholicism, many Protestant thinkers placed Word above ritual, the ear above the eye.45 Nevertheless, while the reformers emphasized the miraculous power of the Word to penetrate the soul through the ear, they tended to treat music as sensual noises that please the ear but go no deeper. Elaborate music, they felt, was performed in church “not to instructe the audience withall, nor to stirre up mens mindes unto deuotion but with an whoryshe armonye to tickle theyr eares.”46 This language of tickling—or even “overtickling of the Sense by the plausibility of sounds”47—implies an effect that plays across a surface. See Gary Rosenshield, “Deconstructing the Christian Merchant: Antonio and The Merchant of Venice,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 20.2 (2002): 36; and Whigham, 101. 44 See the interview with Nunn at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/merchant/ ei_nunn.html. Accessed May 15, 2011. 45 Bouwsma, 158; Bryan Crockett, “‘Holy Cozenage’ and the Renaissance Cult of the Ear,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 24 (1993): 47–65; Wes Folkerth, The Sound of Shakespeare (New York: Routledge, 2002), 48; and Ramie Targoff, Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 23. 46 Becon, The Reliques of Rome (London, 1563), S1v. 47 Sydenham, Sermons upon Solemne Occasions, 29. 43

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In this environment, a number of writers seized on Augustine’s ambivalent passage in the Confessions, with its distinction between sensuous sound perceived by the ear and spiritual words apprehended by the reason. Humphrey Sydenham’s dutiful reference to the Confessions in his 1637 Sermons emphasizes Augustine’s implicit opposition between surface and deeper meaning: “And yet, by the way let us take heed, whilst wee too much indulge this outward modulation, wee are not more transported with the melody of the Tune than the sense of the Psalme.”48 The anonymous author of The Praise of Musicke succinctly articulates this central argument against the use of music in church services: “The first obiection beareth great shewe of trueth, affirming (which wee can by no meanes denie) that GOD is a spirite, and will bee worshipped in spirite and trueth, and requireth not the outwarde actions and service of the body, but the inwarde motions of the heart.”49 Music, like rich vestments, is “outward” in two senses: it is offered by the body rather than the soul; and it is a thing that appeals only to the senses, penetrating no deeper. Nevertheless, in other contexts, music is associated precisely with “the inward motions of the heart.” It is a direct expression of the affections of the music-maker, and a medium that “hath a certaine diuine influence into the soules of men, whereby our cogitations and thoughts … are brought into a celestiall acknowledging of their natures.”50 Even when music was not described in terms of its special affinity with the soul, discussion of its affective power tended to require a language of depth. This language provided a stark contrast to equally common accounts of music as attractive “bait” to lure men to spiritual things, comparable to honey smeared on the mouth of a cup of medicine.51 According to Richard Hooker, music could “expresse and represent to the minde more inwardly then [sic] any other sensible Sydenham, Sermons upon Solemne Occasions, 25. Praise of Musicke, 143–4. 50 Praise of Musicke, 40. These different positions could be held simultaneously, 48 49

despite their seeming incompatibility. Richard Hooker declares that some music “carryeth as it were into exstasies, filling the mind with an heauenly ioy and for the time in a maner seuering it from the body,” but goes on to admit the possibility that artful music in the church “was not instituted so much for their cause which are spirituall, as to the end that into grosser and heauier mindes whome bare words do not easily moue, the sweetnes of melodie might make some entrance for good things” (Of the Laws of Ecclesiasticall Politie: The Fift Booke [London, 1597], H2r–v). For a very similar account, this time from a Jesuit, see Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde in Generall (London, 1604). Music “hath a certaine secret passage into mens soules, and worketh so diuinely in the mind, that it eleuateth the heart miraculously, and resembleth in a certaine manner the voices and harmonie of heauen”; but at the same time, “this sensuall delight appertaineth more to yonglings in deuotion, than graue, perfit, and mortified men” (164, 165). 51 See Praise of Musicke: “whiles the eares are delighted with the sweeteness of the verse, the profit of the worde of God might by little and litle [sic] distill into their minds: much like unto a skilfull Physition: who when he wil minister anie sharpe or bitter potion to his patient useth to anoint the mouth of the cup with hony” (120–21).

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meane the very standing rising and falling, the very steps and inflections euery way, the turnes and varieties of all passions whereunto the minde is subiect: yea so to imitate them.”52 Calvin saw potential benefits and dangers in music’s power to stir listeners deeply: “It is true that, as Saint Paul says, every evil word corrupts good manners, but when it has the melody with it, it pierces the heart much more strongly and enters within; as wine is poured into the cask with a funnel, so venom and corruption are distilled to the very depths of the heart [au profound du coeur] by melody.”53 Melody has access to “depths” that words alone could not sound—to use a common Shakespearean pun.54 Calvin is very clear, of course, that such effects can occur only when music and words work together. He elsewhere rejects instrumental music and polyphony with the contemptuous observation that “men that are given to outward pompes delight in suche noise.”55 The very same language of depth could be used, however, to defend polyphony. The author of The Praise of Musicke claims that “artificial singing” exceeds “plain Musicke, for it striketh deeper, and worketh more effectually in the hearers.”56 But exactly how does music “strike deep” and how does it work in the hearers? In The Passions of the Mind (1604), Thomas Wright offers four possible explanations for music’s power to move the affections, demonstrating in the process the wide range of approaches to music that were possible on the cusp of the seventeenth century. The first explanation is the oldest and the simplest: “a certaine sympathie, correspondence, or proportion betwixt our soules and musick.” Wright questions, however, the theory that a sensible object can directly affect a spiritual faculty. God’s providence may bridge the gap between the material and the spiritual, allowing sound to move the soul—this is the second possible explanation. On the other hand, music may not work on the soul at all: the sound itself, which “is nothing else but a certaine artificiall shaking, crispling, or tickling of the ayre” passes through the ears to the heart, “and there beateth and tickleth it in such sort, as it is moued with semblable passions. For as the heart is most delicat and sensatiue, so it perceiueth the least motions and impressions that may be: and it seemeth that musicke in those celles playeth with the vitall and animate spirits, the onely instruments and spurres of passions.” Wright himself Hooker, H2r; my emphasis. John Calvin, Preface to The Geneva Psalter, in Source Readings in Music History,

52 53

ed. Oliver Strunk, rev. ed., ed. Leo Treitler (New York: Norton, 1998), 366; my emphasis. “Il est vray que toute parole mauuaise … peruertir les bonnes moeurs: mais quand la melodie est auec, cela transperce beaucoup plus fort le coeur, & entre au dedans: tellement que comme par vn enronnoir le vin est ietre dedans le vaisseau: aussi le venin & la corruption est distillee iusques au profound du coeur par la melodie” (Les Pseaumes mis en rime françoise par Clement Marot & Theodore de Beze [Geneva, 1563], *5r). 54 See Folkerth, 25. 55 The Psalmes of Dauid and Others. With M. Iohn Caluins Commentaries, trans. Arthur Golding (London, 1571), Q2r. 56 Praise of Musicke, 143; emphasis mine.

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favors the fourth and final possibility: hearing is a sense just like the others, and listeners’ diverse responses are shaped by inclination and personal associations.57 These different understandings of human response to music are implicitly introduced in The Merchant of Venice. While Lorenzo believes a man is “moved with concord of sweet sounds” to the degree that he has “music in himself” (5.1.82–3), Shylock sees no difference between reactions to music and reactions to other stimuli. These responses are idiosyncratic, irrational, and amoral: Some men there are love not a gaping pig, Some that are mad if they behold a cat, And others when the bagpipe sings i’th’ nose Cannot contain their urine; for affection, Mistress of passion, sways it to the mood Of what it likes or loathes …. (4.1.46–51)

Shylock’s account of a response to bagpipe music in terms of involuntary reaction to physiological stimulus would seem to provide a clear contrast with Lorenzo’s elevated spiritualism. But while Shylock’s extension of his argument to justify his hatred of Antonio—and to disclaim any moral responsibility for this hatred—is clearly specious, he could be perfectly right about how people respond to cats, gaping pigs, and bagpipes. If a man is impelled to urinate at hearing a particular sound, this reaction does not necessarily say anything about his moral character or propensity towards charity. In fact, Lorenzo himself is far from consistent in his account of how music works on the affections. In his shift from discussing the music in “immortal souls” to describing the power of musical sounds on “attentive spirits,” he appears to move from Wright’s first to his third explanation, implicitly rejecting a metaphysical account of musical affect.58 George Sandys would make just such a discrimination in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1632): Yet musick in it selfe most strangely works upon our humane affections. Not in that the Soule (according to the opinion of the Platonists) consisting of harmony, & rapt with the sphearicall musick before it descended from Heaven to inhabit the body, affects it with the like desire … but because the Spirits which agitate in the heart, receave a warbling and dancing aire into the bosome, and are made one with the same where with they have an affinity; whose motions lead the rest of the Spirits dispersed through the body … the sense of hearing stricking the Spirits more immediately, then the rest of the sences.59

Wright, 167, 168, 170, 171. See Lindley, Shakespeare and Music, 29–30. 59 Quoted in Hollander, Untuning of the Sky, 172–3. Hollander uses this very passage 57 58

to illustrate the shift from a metaphysical to a rhetorical understanding of music. Robert Burton presents the same two explanations in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1628), ed. Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan-Smith (New York: Tudor, 1955), but does not choose between them: “Scalinger gives a reason for these effects, because the spirits about the heart take in that

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Francis Bacon similarly explained the power of music solely in terms of its effects upon the spirits.60 Such an explanation avoids mention of the soul and does not depend on the increasingly dubious Pythagorean numerical ratios; but it continues to depend, though in a different way, upon the special “inwardness” of the sense of hearing. The ability of music to penetrate inward spaces even Shylock acknowledges: “Stop my house’s ears—I mean my casements. / Let not the sound of shallow fopp’ry enter / My sober house” (2.5.33–5). The music itself may be shallow, but it can invade the inner sanctum of sobriety. This ability, however, could render sounds the opposite of “shallow.” As Wes Folkerth observes, “while sight presents only the veneer of the world, sound’s affinity with the internal spirits provides access to interior truths and essences unavailable through other sensory avenues.”61 Similarly, while Bacon characterized sight as “the most spiritual” sense, he nevertheless awarded hearing a greater power over the passions because it “striketh the Spirits more immediately than the other Senses.”62 It is difficult to choose between a material and a “spiritual” explanation for the effects of music: the two are profoundly blurred. Bacon’s position draws attention to the potentially ambiguous meaning of “spirit”—an ambiguity also present in The Merchant of Venice. While Lorenzo’s reference to Jessica’s “spirits” seems straightforwardly physiological, he is less clear when he declares, “The man that hath no music in himself, / Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds … The motions of his spirit are dull as night” (5.1.82–3, 85). Music’s “motions” were sometimes compared to the movement of the spirits, sometimes directly linked to the movement of the soul.63 Indeed, in discussions of music, the term “spirit” could prove more than usually ambiguous, as accounts of music’s physiological power over the spirits were not always clearly distinguished from metaphysical accounts of its effect on the soul. In the mid-seventeenth century, George Wither would affirm: “Yea, the inarticulate trembling and dancing air into the body, are moved together, and stirred up by it, or else the mind, as some suppose, harmonically composed, is roused up at the tunes of musick” (479). 60 Gouk, 165. Referring to Burton and Wright, among others, Gouk points out that “Bacon’s radical critique of mathematically-based explanations for music’s effects was clearly based on an existing tradition of medico-theological discourse” (166). 61 Folkerth, 55, 58. See also Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 103; and Austern, “‘Sing Againe Syren’: The Female Musician and Sexual Enchantment in Elizabethan Life and Literature,” Renaissance Quarterly 42 (1989): 425. Tomlinson discusses the influence of Ficino’s “compelling auralist alternative” to dominant visualist discourse, “grant[ing] sounds, words, and music a special intimacy with and effect on the soul not equaled … by the things of vision” (136). See also Andreas Ornithoparcus His Micrologus, or Introduction: Containing the Art of Singing, trans. John Dowland (London, 1609): “For among all those things which doe admit sense, that onely worketh upon the manners of men, which toucheth his eares” (B1v). 62 Sylva Sylvarum, nos. 873 and 114, quoted in Smith, Acoustic World, 103. 63 See Tomlinson, 111; Austern, “Art to Enchant,” 194.

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sounds have, in themselves, I know not what secret power, to move the very affections of mens soules …. Some raise the spirits to that excessive height, as the soule is almost ravished, and in an extasie.”64 As Gina Bloom points out, the “Christian sense of spirit as the sacred breath that miraculously delivers meaning through vocal sound pervades much early modern philosophizing about vocal transmission.”65 Music is closely associated both with distracting surfaces and with inward truth, with the body and with the soul (and, indeed, with the uncertain interface between the two).66 It slips from one side to the other of such dichotomies in the way that other kinds of “surfaces” or “ornaments”—makeup, clothing, jewels, paintings—cannot. It is possible to understand many of these contradictions in Renaissance musical thought in terms of an incomplete shift from a mathematical view of music—the ordered proportions of harmony that structure the universe itself—to a focus on its rhetorical power to move the affections.67 In an influential study, John Hollander has argued that in the seventeenth century, “received ideas of music’s importance” became “more and more confined to a rhetorical ability to elicit passion, on the one hand, and to provide ornament to the cognitive import of a text, on the other.”68 Music is thus in the process of shifting from essence to ornament. Several studies have complicated this view, however, showing that the shift was not so quick or complete as had been thought.69 Indeed, the “new” rhetorical emphasis was not fully extricable from the idea that music’s power derived ultimately from its resemblance to the soul.70 George Wither, A Preparation to the Psalter, quoted in Gretchen Finney, Musical Backgrounds for English Literature: 1580–1650 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1962), 66. 65 Gina Bloom, Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 81. 66 See Austern, “Words on Music: The Case of Early Modern England,” John Donne Journal 25 (2006): 225. 67 See Dietrich Bartel, Musica Poetica: Musical-Rhetorical Figures in German Baroque Music (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 19; Hollander, Untuning of the Sky, 158–9; and Lindley, Shakespeare and Music, 228. Both conceptions originated in the classical era. In the ancient world, cosmic harmony and the ability of music to “imitate” and even alter character (ethos) were sometimes discussed in tandem or loosely associated, but there were few attempts to show how these essentially mathematical and rhetorical approaches to music might fit together. See Tomlinson, 67–84. 68 Hollander, Untuning of the Sky, 158–9. See also Austern, “Nature, Culture, Myth, and the Musician in Early Modern England,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 51 (1998): 5. 69 Gouk has shown that in England, music retained its traditional position among the mathematical disciplines throughout the seventeenth century (77). 70 Tomlinson argues that the revival of Neoplatonism in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries permitted an unprecedented integration of musical ethos and cosmic harmony, as figures like Ficino and Agrippa attempted to capture celestial influences by 64

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The rhetorical and mathematical strands are inextricably tangled in Richard Mulcaster’s conventional catalogue of the benefits of music: “[I]t is verie comfortable to the wearyed minde: a preparatiue to perswasion: that he must needes haue a head out of proportion, which cannot perceiue: or doth not delite in the proportions of number, which speake him so faire: that it is best learned in childehood, when it can do least harme, and may best be had: that if the constitution of man both for bodie and soule, had not some naturall, and nighe affinitie with the concordances of Musick, the force of the one, would not so soone stirre up, the cosen motion in the other.”71 The shift from music as mathematics to music as rhetoric is in progress, but hardly complete. The “proportions of number” speak the hearer fair, and music therefore persuades all those who have heads that are not out of all proportion. Music’s power of persuasion is a matter of morality: not only does it move its listeners in an amazing manner, but if it does not move them, it reveals that something is terribly wrong with them.72 Such, of course, is Lorenzo’s conviction. In the very same sentence, however, Mulcaster admits that music may cause harm. He then goes on blithely, having earlier registered that “[s]ome men thinke [music] to be too too sweete,”73 to reiterate the venerable claim that music moves not because of its excessive sweetness but because of its natural concordances with both body and soul. Music may certainly be used to seduce or to uplift: but sometimes it seems seductive and uplifting simply in itself, in the dangerous sweetness of its mathematical perfection. The proportions themselves “speak fair”—they are seductive even in the absence of a specific seducer. The tension between these conceptions of music as pleasing surface and soul-like essence—and a general inability to fully separate these two seemingly incompatible ideas—affected the understanding of poetry as well, the more so in that the two media were not themselves entirely distinguishable, in theory or in practice. From the early modern perspective, poetry contained at least two “musical” elements that were by no means to be confused: sound and proportion. To a certain extent, one’s view of poetry—in terms both of its nature and its value—depended on one’s interpretation of poetry’s “music.” The arrangement of words into intricate and pleasing patterns, rhythmic and sonorous, could be imitating the specific kinds of music that they associated with different heavenly bodies. For the Neoplatonists, music was powerful not merely because it shared the proportionate structure of man and universe, but because it moved like the soul and like the planets, and therefore the right kind of music could move the soul to receive astral influences (67–84, 87–8). See also Walker, 14–16. 71 Richard Mulcaster, Positions, 37; emphasis mine. 72 For similar sentiments, see Pierre de Ronsard, Dedication to Livre des mélanges (1560): “For he, Sir, that hearing a sweet accord of instruments or the sweetness of the natural voice feels no joy and no agitation and is not thrilled from head to foot, as being delightfully rapt and somehow carried out of himself—’tis the sign of one whose soul is tortuous, vicious, and depraved” (Source Readings in Music History, 300–301). See also Praise of Musicke, 46. 73 Mulcaster, Positions, 36.

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perceived as encouraging attention to sound rather than meaning.74 On the other hand, “music,” considered in another sense, could bestow meaning on poetry beyond the meaning of words. “Proportion” and “number” could embody truths based in eternal mathematics, signified only arbitrarily by language. While in the Confessions, Augustine worries that the sensuous pleasure that music provides to the ear may distract the reason from intellectual engagement with the words, in De Musica, he suggests that poetry itself is rational not because of its semantic content, but because it, like music, is shaped according to the ratio of numerical proportion.75 Throughout the Middle Ages, these two conceptions of rationality in music—one bestowed by words, the other inherent in the form—existed, at least potentially, in tension with one another.76 Both views were still possible in the Renaissance; but the gradual erosion of the distinction between “speculative” and “practical” music made it increasingly difficult to separate the proportions of music from its sonic properties. The differing possible understandings of poetic musicality become explicit in debates over the virtues of English quantitative verse. Proponents of quantitative verse seemingly can make larger and more elevated claims for music in general because they define their own “music” in terms of number and proportion. In an episode included in some manuscripts of Sidney’s original Arcadia, Dicus proclaims the virtues of quantitative poetry, and believes that “verses ha[ve] their chief ornament, if not end, in music,” while Lalus disagrees not only with Dicus’s taste in versification, but with his seemingly connected subordination of words to music. Expressing his preference for rhyming poetry, he adds that “Dicus did much abuse the dignity of poetry to apply it to music, since rather music is a servant to poetry, for by the one the ear only, by the other the mind, was pleased.”77 At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Thomas Campion and Samuel Daniel would argue with one another in very similar terms. Campion rejects the trivial chiming of rhymes and campaigns in favor of quantitative verse by appealing to the musical structure of the universe: “The world is made by Simmetry and proportion, and See Stephen M. Buhler, “The Sirens, the Epicurean Boat, and the Poetry of Praise,” in Music of the Sirens, ed. Linda Phyllis Austern and Inna Naroditskaya (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 177. 75 See James Winn, Unsuspected Eloquence: A History of the Relations Between Poetry and Music (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 54. 76 In Words and Music in the Middle Ages: Song, Narrative, Dance and Drama, 1050–1350 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), John Stevens argues that the relationship between words and music occupied small place in medieval musical thought (377); but more recently, in Sung Birds: Music, Nature, and Poetry in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), Elizabeth Eva Leach has written that music could be considered “rational” in two overlapping ways: by exhibiting pitches tuned by music ratios and/ or by conveying “linguistic sense (verbum)” (26). Her book demonstrates the urgency with which many medieval thinkers debated what constitutes rationality in music. 77 Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia), ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 363. 74

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is in that respect compared to Musick, and Musick to Poetry: for Terence saith speaking of Poets, artem qui tractant musicam, confounding musick and Poesy together. What musick can there be where there is no proportion obserued?”78 Implicitly masculine Greeks and Romans “tyed themselues to the strict obseruation of poeticall numbers … abandoning the childish titillation of riming.”79 The defenders of rhyming poetry, on the other hand, admit that its chief “music” lies in sonic repetition; but for these advocates, the lesser, ear-pleasing music fades in importance—as does all other possible music—when compared with the content of the words. In his response to Campion, Samuel Daniel insists that rhyme is “a Harmonie, farre happier than any proportion Antiquitie could euer show us”—but such harmony is very much a matter of sound: English poetry is more successful than classical poetry because its music is “more certain and more resounding.”80 In the final analysis, the value of classical poetry lies not in its rhythmic “measures,” but in its subject matter. The quantitative numbers, just like rhymes, are “but as Musicke for the eare,” and “[w]hen we heare Musicke, we must be in our eare, in the vtter-roome [outer room?] of sense, but when we intertaine iudgement, we retire into the cabinet and innermost withdrawing chamber of the soule.”81 The tension between different ways of understanding the music and “harmony” of poetry comes across most explicitly in these debates, but such tension is hardly limited to the relatively esoteric battleground over quantitative experimentation. In The Art of English Poesie, George Puttenham sets up a suggestive—and not entirely consistent—distinction between poetic “proportion” and poetic “ornament.”82 The section on proportion covers not only meter and division into stanzas, but also— surprisingly—rhyme; and it opens with a conventional reflection on the similarity of poetry to music, phrased very similarly to Campion’s later attack on rhyme: It is said by such as professe the Mathematicall sciences, that all things stand by proportion, and that without it nothing could stand to be good or beautiful … as we sayd before Poesie is a skill to speake & write harmonically: and verses or rime be a kind of Musicall vtterance, by reason of a certain congruitie in sounds pleasing the eare.83

Thomas Campion, Obseruations in the art of English poesie (London, 1602), 2. Campion, 5. 80 A panegyrike congratulatorie deliuered to the Kings most excellent Maiestie at 78 79

Burleigh Harrington in Rutlandshire. By Samuel Daniel. Also certain epistles. With a defence of ryme heretofore written, and now published by the author (London, 1603), G4r. Daniel does seem reluctant to deny a music of proportion and number to English verse, arguing that observation of accents yields harmony. Even these “numbers,” however, are described as successful because “resounding” (G4r; emphasis mine). 81 Daniel, H6r. 82 For an account of Puttenham’s combination of classical and medieval ways of thinking about poetry, see Winn, 128. 83 Puttenham, 65.

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Poetry resembles music in its harmonious proportions; but this similarity quickly becomes not so much a matter of measure and “number” as a matter of pleasing sound. Puttenham considers rhyme the most “musical” aspect of “vulgar”— as opposed to classical—poetry: “before all other things let [the poet’s] ryme and concords be true, cleare and audible with no lesse delight, then almost the strayned note of a Musicians mouth.” Rhymes, in fact, are “a certain tunable sound.”84 After the section on “proportion,” Puttenham moves on to “ornament”— a category involving “the fashioning of our [poet’s] language and stile.”85 Here Puttenham deals largely with rhetorical figures, dividing these “ornaments” into two categories: “one to satisfie & delight th’eare onely by a goodly outward shew set vpon the matter with words, and speeches smoothly and tunably running: another by certaine intendments or sense of such wordes & speeches inwardly working a stirre to the mynde.”86 These two categories conform to the Renaissance distinction described by Debora Shuger between schemes of words and figures of thought, the former usually disparaged “as merely sensuous and distracting ornament.”87 Campion describes rhyme in just such terms, as figura verbi.88 Yet for Puttenham, both schemes of words and figures of thought are “ornaments,” and both are distinct from poetic “proportion,” in which the musical qualities of poetry supposedly rest, including the sonic delight of rhymes. It becomes very difficult to associate the “music” of poetry solely with sonic surfaces, or solely with “harmonious” measures—the two blur together despite considerable historical and even contemporary distinctions between them. While it is possible to distinguish between aspects of poetry that please the ears and aspects that inwardly stir the mind, another current of thought insists that “all things stand by proportion,” and makes such “harmonical” aspects of poetry more than mere “ornament”—while simultaneously confusing proportion with the chiming sound of rhymes. Patterns of sound may be mere ornament; but their association with the harmonies that structure all existence hint that they may be somehow meaningful, indicating true relations between things, just as musical pitches were supposedly based on the essential numeric ratios. In his account of Shakespeare’s late style, McDonald notes the playwright’s tendency “to magnify the relations between similar words and sounds, making their identities more audible and more potentially, or at least apparently, significant … [S]uch echoing is aurally satisfying and intellectually tantalizing: it seems to give ‘the word of promise to our ear.’”89 Again, I would suggest that this tendency is traceable in Shakespeare’s earlier work as well—and

86 87 84

Puttenham, 76; emphasis mine. Puttenham, 137. Puttenham, 142–3; emphasis mine. Deborah Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 127. 88 Campion, 4. 89 McDonald, Late Style, 45. 85

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frequently associated directly with the operations of music. In The Merchant of Venice, the aural echoes of a song prove very significant indeed. You That Choose Not By the View Bassanio wins Portia by rejecting the gold and silver caskets in favor of unprepossessing lead. His choice, made to the accompaniment of music, supposedly reflects the value of inward truth over outward appearance. Here music. A song the whilst BASSANIO comments on the caskets to himself Tell me where is fancy bred, Or in the heart, or in the head? How begot, how nourishèd? Reply, reply. It is engendered in the eyes, With gazing fed; and fancy dies In the cradle where it lies, Let us all ring fancy’s knell. I’ll begin it: ding, dong, bell. Ding, dong, bell. BASSANIO. So may the outward shows be least themselves, The world is still deceived with ornament. (3.2.63–74)

He continues for some 30 lines to build an argument on the untrustworthiness of appearances, culminating in his choice of the lead casket: “Thy paleness moves me more than eloquence” (106). His choice is, of course, correct. But how does he arrive at it? Some time ago, it was first observed that the opening lines of the song all end in words that rhyme with “lead”—potentially hinting at the right answer to the riddle. Various critics have protested in response that such “cheating” fits neither Portia’s character nor the solemnity of the moment and—more crucially—that an audience would be unlikely to notice anything so subtle.90 Of course, if critical analysis of Shakespeare were based only on things that an audience would be likely to catch, there would be a good deal less of it. But more importantly, the rhyming “hints” correspond so closely to the way Shakespeare works in general. Words are always reminding characters of other words. These reminders occur obviously and explicitly in the endless punning exchanges of the early plays, but the same process operates throughout Shakespearean drama on a quasi-subliminal level. Such reminders are built into the fabric of the plays.91 In this case, neither Bassanio nor the audience may respond consciously, but this seems to be part of the point.

90 For a summary of the debate, see Peter J. Seng, The Vocal Songs in the Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 36–40. 91 In regard to Merchant itself, Sigurd Burckhardt points out how the word “use” draws Shylock into his parable of the “ewes,” while the subject of a proper interest “rate”

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Bred, head, nourishèd, fed—and, by implication, “dead”— may engender “lead” in Bassanio’s head; but have surfaces been rejected for something deeper, as the test demands? When Bassanio opens the correct casket, he discovers a scroll praising him as “you that choose not by the view,” but choosing by the sound hardly seems a superior method of discrimination. The conclusion of “Tell me where is fancy bred” does imply that sound patterns are inherently meaningful, reflecting essential relations. “Let us all ring fancy’s knell” will inevitably produce the word “bell,” and the link between knell and bell is semantic as well as sonic. Nevertheless, such semantic associations do not always exist. “Bred,” “head,” and “nourishèd” have no essential relation to lead. If Bassanio responds to the rhymes, he bases his choice on connections that are random rather than meaningful. This association of sounds becomes entangled, however, with an association of ideas: tolling bells, funeral, coffin, lead casket. The song implies an inextricable connection between sound and sense; but the two never quite line up. Ironically, given the ultimate lack of correspondence between sound and sense in the song, theories of natural, inherently meaningful language depended upon a musically constructed cosmos, where one thing could stand naturally—not arbitrarily—for another. David Lindley argues that it is possible to see Lorenzo’s speech in The Merchant of Venice “as actually marking the retreat of musica mundana into metaphor; still potent, but increasingly detached from the workings of music in the real human world.”92 Musica mundana may retreat into metaphor— but in so doing, it alters the very nature of metaphor. “It is said,” declared George Puttenham, “that all things stand by proportion.”93 Significantly, all things also stand for things by proportion. In general, the concept of metaphor could be understood in two very different ways in the premodern and early modern eras. In the Aristotelian tradition, a metaphor was a figure of speech, a “decoration.”94 The Neoplatonic tradition, however, saw metaphors not as “mere tropes of imagined relationships where none existed in reality … but that instead discovered in their creation truths about the

reminds him of his grievance about the way Antonio has “rated” him (Shakespearean Meanings [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968], 214). 92 Lindley, Shakespeare and Music, 49. Well into the seventeenth century, however, there were still people who took the idea of musical spheres absolutely literally. See Tomlinson, 73–4. On the other hand, the status of the “music of the spheres” as literal fact or metaphor had been questioned almost from the earliest inception of the idea. See Claude Palisca, Music and Ideas in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 25–8. 93 Puttenham, 65. 94 See Gombrich, 165–6; Heninger, Touches of Sweet Harmony, 340; and Brian Vickers, “Analogy versus Identity,” in Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, ed. Brian Vickers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 116.

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structure itself of the world.”95 This latter view of metaphor—often accompanied by ideas of language as natural rather than arbitrary—depends for its validity on a “musical” model of the universe as an elaborate system of correspondences, levels of existence that “harmonize” with one another.96 As Penelope Gouk explains, “not only did sympathetic resonance between the strings of two instruments serve as a literary metaphor for some of the deepest feelings aroused by music, but this same image came to be seen as a causal mechanism that could explain such effects.”97 To correspond meant “to be similar to or analogous to” and “to be congruous or in harmony with” (OED 2, 1). In Donne’s words, “God made this whole world in such an uniformity, such a correspondency, such a concinnity of parts, as that it was an Instrument, perfectly in tune.”98 This harmony of correspondences allows one object to signify another, in a “true” and natural, rather than arbitrary, way: For even as the three worlds [angelic, celestial, elemental] being girt and buckled with the bands of concord doe by reciprocall liberalitie, interchange their natures; the like doe they also by their appellations. And this is the principle from whence springeth and groweth the discipline of allegoricall sense … [The ancient fathers] have oftentimes, and very fitly figured the natures of the one world, by that which they knew to be correspondent thereto in the others.99

A true metaphor thus reveals a genuine correspondence, a correspondence that is itself rooted in the idea of “world harmony.” In turn, the very conception of world harmony depends upon the kind of “metaphoric” structure it creates. (Man is a little world; a hierarchical society is harmonious, because it corresponds to the proportional order of the universe, which itself corresponds to the series of tuned strings on a musical instrument, etc.) In other words, the truth of metaphoric language depends on the metaphor of the world as a resonating stringed instrument being more than a metaphor in the purely rhetorical sense. Metaphor may be an ornament or a structural truth; and music may be an embodiment of the structural

95 Tomlinson, 50. See also Judith H. Anderson, Translating Investments: Metaphor and the Dynamic of Cultural Change in Tudor-Stuart England (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 61; Heninger, Touches of Sweet Harmony, 325; and Debora Shuger, Habits of Thought in the Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 50–58. 96 See Gombrich, 152. 97 Gouk, 268–9. The image first appears in Plotinus, Enneads, 4.4.40–44, describing the operations of sympathy in terms of strings on a lyre: “When it has been struck in its lower part, the upper part vibrates as well. And it often happens that when one string has been struck, another one, if I may say so, feels this, because they are in unison and have been tuned to one and the same pitch” (quoted in Gouk, 87). 98 Quoted in Heninger, Touches of Sweet Harmony, 329. 99 Pierre de la Primaudaye, The third volume of the French academie, tr. R. Dolman (London, 1601), quoted in Heninger, Touches of Sweet Harmony, 342; emphasis mine.

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principle of the world or a sensuous sonic surface; but the nature of the one depends obliquely on the nature of the other. Shakespeare hints at the interdependence of the status of music and the status of figurative language as truth or ornament in the casket scene. Here, Portia stages music. In fact, like Shakespeare and Fletcher in Henry VIII, she stages a celebratory “knell.” She does so deliberately and self-consciously, explaining at length why music will provide an appropriate background to Bassanio’s trial. As the speech continues, her rhetoric becomes increasingly lofty. She follows her meditations on music with a comparison of Bassanio to Hercules saving a princess from a seamonster, and then proclaims the weighted phrase: “I stand for sacrifice” (3.2.57). These words cut directly to the central issues of the play and prepare us for the final scene when she will argue for Christian mercy in opposition to a Jew who “stand[s] for judgment,” and “stand[s] here for law” (4.1.102, 141). The Merchant of Venice repeatedly gestures towards an allegorical understanding of its action, and just as consistently undermines any such understanding.100 The working of music in this scene begins to suggest why the allegory proves unsustainable—but also why it never quite goes away. Bassanio may be the improved, Christian Hercules, advancing “with much more love” (3.2.54). On the other hand, Portia’s rhetoric is a bit overheated for what is physically occurring onstage: when you say, “Go Hercules!” to a man who ambles forward and meditates on a choice between boxes, you invite a certain amount of bathos. Bassanio’s heroism must be understood in a symbolic sense; and music can create an impression of heightened meaning because of its own symbolic associations, and the way that its affect can reinforce these associations. Portia’s call for music thus signals a shift to another plane of action: Bassanio’s trial is a solemn, ritual moment, and it is the symbolic heart of the play. The worthy suitor will reject appearances for truth, letter for spirit; and the audience will understand that he chooses faith, and that Portia at this moment is not merely a desirable woman: she “stands for sacrifice.” Portia’s lengthy meditation on the various functions of music, however, disturbs the implicit assumption that the ritual action of the trial shadows forth a higher level of significance just as performed music corresponds to a higher harmony. She painstakingly—and rather artificially—seeks to make her “comparison[s] / 100 For accounts that take this allegorical aspect of the play seriously—though without necessarily reading the entire drama in allegorical terms—see Barbara K. Lewalski, “Biblical Allusion and Allegory in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Quarterly 13 (1962): 327–43; Danson; and Holmer. For readings that problematize the seeming dichotomy between Jewish Law and Christian Grace, see Lisa Freinkel, “The Merchant of Venice: ‘Modern’ Anti-Semitism and the Veil of Allegory,” in Shakespeare and Modernity: Early Modern to Millennium, ed. Hugh Grady (London: Routledge, 2002), 122–40; René E. Fortin, “Launcelot and the Uses of Allegory in The Merchant of Venice,” SEL 14 (1974): 259–70; Steven Marx, Shakespeare and the Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 105; and Marc Shell, “The Wether and the Ewe: Verbal Usury in The Merchant of Venice,” Kenyon Review 1.4 (1979): 65–92.

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Stand more proper,” but the self-consciously poetical metaphors that she constructs serve as a dangerous prelude to her claim to “stand for sacrifice.” By undermining the idea that music can work as figure, sign, or emblem, her speech implies that neither words nor things can dependably “stand for” or correspond to other things—on the stage or elsewhere. Let music sound while he doth make his choice. Then if he lose he makes a swanlike end, Fading in music. That the comparison May stand more proper, my eye shall be the stream And wat’ry deathbed for him. He may win, And what is music then? Then music is Even as the flourish when true subjects bow To a new-crownèd monarch. Such it is As are those dulcet sounds in break of day That creep into the dreaming bridegroom’s ear And summon him to marriage. (3.2.43–53)

The metaphor of swan and watery deathbed is nothing if not ornamental. It also distracts from the actual situation rather than clarifying its symbolic significance. Portia’s language dignifies Bassanio’s possible loss, creating an aura of mournful sadness rather than humiliation. (If Bassanio picks the wrong casket, he will discover either a death’s head or the portrait of a blinking idiot, along with an insulting verse—not exactly the romantic “swan-like end” that Portia imagines.) Here, Portia’s music and her pretty figures work together to make to a potentially ugly moment palatable, not to prepare the audience for a symbolic revelation. Simultaneously, music itself signals a bewildering array of incompatible things. Portia suggests that one song can fit not two but three completely different emotional contexts: it can serve as a dirge, a formal announcement of sovereignty, and an amorous call to marriage. Here language eclipses music with a vengeance, as Portia seems far more interested in making abstract statements about “music” as a general idea than in thinking about the actual attributes of the music she wants played. Nevertheless, the passage does more than present a series of elegant conceits prompted by the thought of music. It demonstrates the malleability and the constructed nature of seemingly “proper” comparisons; simultaneously, it suggests the Protean quality of musical affect. On the one hand, music is seemingly irreducible: it figures as itself. On the other, a single piece of music can draw responses as diverse and incompatible as solemn submission, mournful sadness, and dreamy eroticism. In the process of seeking out comparisons, Portia arrives at strangely tautological results. The elaborate conceit of the swan and the watery eye collapses into something that works not quite as a metaphor, but rather as synecdoche or metonymy, depending on how we understand Portia when she speaks of “music.” (If Portia is thinking of “music” in abstract terms, then the dirge, flourish, or aubade stands in for the general category in synecdochic fashion. If, on the other hand,

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Portia means, “what will this specific song that I am about to hear be?” then song, dirge, flourish, and aubade are related metonymically, as if any kind of music can stand for—or stand in for—any other kind.) The passage might seem to indicate Portia’s complete estrangement from the actual experience of listening to music; but in fact, her speech hints at a melting of distinctions and boundaries that reflects the operation of practical music in the play. Different and seemingly irreconcilable emotional responses fuse together in answer to a single piece of music. Shakespeare characteristically portrays music as provoking moods and reactions that seem incompatible but do not cancel one another out. Though Portia figures the swan song as the accompaniment and expression of loss, she imbues this music with eroticism: Bassanio fades in music, in the watery deathbed of her eyes. Such erotic music might appropriately creep into a dreaming bridegroom’s ear. What, after all, is the tone of the swan song? Some contemporaries imagined it as a dirge; but in other accounts, the swan “foreseeing what good is in death, by a natural instinct, finisheth her life with singing and with joy.”101 The trumpet flourish would seem to belong to a different order of musical sounds—a signal announcing a monarch’s entrance, not a bewildering caress of the senses. Bassanio himself, however, gives a rather different sonic account of joyful submission to authority: Madam, you have bereft me of all words, Only my blood speaks to you in my veins, And there is such confusion in my powers As after some oration fairly spoke By a beloved prince there doth appear Among the buzzing pleased multitude, Where every something being blent together Turns to a wild of nothing save of joy, Expressed and not expressed. (3.2.175–83)

Here, “the flourish when true subjects bow / To a new-crownèd monarch” has become a buzzing of pleasure, “a wild of nothing save of joy, / Expressed and not expressed.” Though Bassanio keeps the language of subjects and sovereign to describe his relation to Portia—gallantly reversed in his account—orderly hierarchy seems endangered along with clear signification. The confusion expresses the proper love of the people for their prince, but love remains confusion and not order: the sound exceeds what it is meant to symbolize. Portia’s musicians ultimately play a “knell” for fancy—a choice seemingly inappropriate for either a joyful or a sorrowful outcome. The music for the song has not survived, but the words suggest that it would have taken the form of a dirge, with Praise of Musicke, 50; John Bossewelle’s book of heraldry (1572), explains: “The Swanne … singeth moste swetely towardes ye time of hys death, as it were to bewaile hys departure and buriall” (quoted in John Long, Shakespeare’s Use of Music, vol. 3 [Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1971], 159). 101

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singers imitating a funeral bell.102 The text of the song, however, indicates a tension between music and subject matter. As Elise Jorgens points out, “if [the song] is a dirge it is obviously a mocking one, memorializing not a person but a state of mind, and a frivolous one at that … At the same time, it would surely have mimicked the musical style of [similar surviving dirges], if only in order to make its ironic point the more palpable. Recognition of its mock seriousness, however, would undermine the song’s suitability to accompany Bassanio’s potential failure.”103 Jorgens compares the song to a dirge whose music does survive: Ariel’s “Full Fathom Five” from The Tempest, which also includes a “Ding-dong bell” refrain. Howell Chickering’s analysis of Robert Johnson’s setting of the latter, however, suggests that imitative tolling need not produce a dirge-like effect. As Chickering points out, the sounds of the mournful bells are to a certain extent estranged in the musical setting. Overall, he finds the setting of “Full Fathom Five” reminiscent of a lullaby.104 Such a setting would be appropriate to “Tell Me Where Is Fancy Bred” as well: Fancy is engendered in the eyes, which are both cradle and deathbed—recalling Portia’s description of her eyes as the deathbed for the swan-like Bassanio. The ideal setting, perhaps, would combine tolling and rocking.105 This combination of eroticism, tragedy, and irony will return in the Act 5 exchange between Jessica and Lorenzo. Portia’s final comparison suggests a very different kind of operation from symbolizing or signifying, as she evokes “those dulcet sounds in break of day / That creep into the dreaming bridegroom’s ear” (3.2.51–2). Music is no longer an announcement or a signal, but a seduction. It creeps into the ears, slipping across the boundary between sleeping and waking, dream and reality. In its own way, it reveals the “truth,” the answer to the riddle, through an association of sounds. By means of the song, Shakespeare suggests that music in general works in this associative way—similar to the workings of his own language. The echoes and reminiscences in the final scene work similarly, although in that case, there is no explicitly stated riddle to be answered. Lorenzo invites Jessica to “sit, and let the sounds of music / Creep in our ears.” Here the word suggests the almost imperceptible, even insidious way that music infiltrates its surroundings. Shakespeare will use the word again, unforgettably, in The Tempest: “this music crept by me upon the waters” (1.2.395), a line half-recalling the moment before Creation, when “the earth was without forme and voyde, and darkenes was vpon the depe, and Spirit of God moued vpon the waters” (Genesis 1.2).106 Why does Shakespeare’s music creep? Jorgens, “Rhetoric of Dissonance,” 111–14. Jorgens, “Rhetoric of Dissonance,” 114. 104 Howell Chickering, “Hearing Ariel’s Songs,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance 102 103

Studies 24 (1994): 161. 105 Interestingly, “O Death, rock me asleep” is one of the possible analogues suggested by Jorgens. See “Rhetoric of Dissonance,” 114–15. 106 The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969).

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The verb inevitably evokes the first chapter of the Book of Genesis: God says, “Let the waters bring forthe in abundance euerie creping thing that hath life”; Earth is later commanded to bring forth further living things, including “that which crepeth”; and Man is to rule “ouer euerie thing that crepeth & moueth on the earth” (1.20, 24, 26). Creeping things are of the earth, mortal. When Coriolanus seems no longer like a man but like a god, “He has wings, he’s more than a creeping thing” (5.4.11). Of course, the most famous creeping thing is the serpent—the creature whose creeping is in fact a punishment of God. Quite often, Shakespeare uses the word to carry the sense of infiltration or infection. In 1 Henry IV, Northumberland is instructed to “secretly into the bosom [of the archbishop] creep,” to foment rebellion (1.3.262); in Antony and Cleopatra, Pompey “creeps apace / Into the hearts of such as have not thrived” (1.3.50–51). Timon of Athens prays for “lust and liberty” to “creep in the minds and marrows of our youth” (4.1.25–6), while the attractions of Cesario “creep in” at Olivia’s eyes, “with an invisible and subtle stealth,” causing her to “catch the plague” of desire (TN 1.5.265–8). In Merchant of Venice, music “creeps” over a bank in the earthly paradise of Belmont, its stealthiness and subtlety reminiscent of the serpent in the garden. Music’s subtle and creeping power was both admired and feared. In his commentary on Psalm 33, Calvin indicates that the dangers outweigh the benefits, in terms that might give Lorenzo pause. “If any man obiecte,” Calvin writes, “that Musick auayleth greatly to the stirring up of mens mindes: truly I graunt it dooth so, howbeeit it is always to be feared lest some corruption should creep in which might both defile the pure service of God, and also binde men with superstition.”107 For Calvin, music leads to superstition in its capacity as “outward pomp,” distracting worshippers from the divine Word.108 Yet at the same time, it secretly penetrates the depths of the mind, drawing with it mysterious corruption. As Calvin himself admitted in another context, “we find by experience that [music] has a secret and almost incredible power to move our hearts in one way or another.”109 Richard Hooker—who champions sophisticated church music—also admits the danger: “there is nothing more contagious and pestilent then [sic] some kindes of harmonie; then some nothing more strong and potent vnto good.”110 This creeping insinuation and contagion produce positive effects; music “insinuating strangely with the outward Sense, steales subtilely into the minde of man, and not onely invites but drawes it to a holy charitie and immaculateness.”111 Ultimately, the music of The Merchant of Venice neither stands properly nor moves directly: it creeps. Portia’s staged music creates an aura of symbolic Psalmes of Dauid, Q2r; emphasis mine. Psalmes of Dauid, Q2r. 109 Calvin, Preface to The Geneva Psalter, in Source Readings in Music History, 366; 107

108

emphasis mine. In French: “une vertu secrete & quasi incroyable à esmouuoir les coeurs en une sorte ou en l’autre” (Pseaumes, *5r). 110 Hooker, H2r; emphasis mine. 111 Sydenham, Sermons upon Solemne Occasions, 25; emphasis mine.

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rightness that almost imperceptibly becomes something more insidious: the forbidden answer to the question, which by the very means of its expression undermines the meaning behind that answer. (“Lead” is no longer a significant concept: it is a sound.) Shakespeare’s own staged music operates similarly, but it does not provide answers. Nevertheless, the operations of music are not— and cannot be—purely deconstructive, as music’s claims to echo and produce true harmony remain inextricable from the “secret power” of “the inarticulate sounds … in themselves.”112 The play’s music generates a dynamic in which affect reinforces symbolism at one moment and denies the very possibility of a symbolic understanding the next. In consequence, the play refuses to work as the allegory that it repeatedly adumbrates, but also never quite collapses into that allegory’s ironic inversion. The play partially expresses and acknowledges the idea of music as prettifying and obscuring unpleasant truths; nevertheless, the audience retains a powerful impression of music as a redemptive force, an echo of truth and of the soul. It is only through this contradictory impression that “grace” and truth can attach with any legitimacy to surfaces: a most desirable outcome not only for the Christians in the play, but for the playwright as well, in the face of anti-theatrical rants about falsity and disguise. In fact, Bassanio’s meditation over the caskets is intensely, if implicitly, anti-theatrical, with its condemnation of wigs, make-up, and disguises. The difficulties created by the speech extend beyond the simple connection between theater and immoral pretence. As Bassanio establishes at considerable length, neither beauty nor wealth can reliably indicate inner worth; but on the stage, the beautiful and wealthy Portia can potentially “stand for” the joys of heaven, Christian faith, grace, mercy, etc. The problem is emblematic as well as theatrical. After such a speech, the play can hardly demonstrate what its basic structure seems to demand that it demonstrate: the value of inwardness, the falsity of surfaces, the Christian prioritizing of spirit over letter. Music’s refusal to fit the paradigms of appearance and figuration provides a tantalizing possibility of reconciliation for both the characters and the play itself. When the music stops, however, the illusion fades: not merely the illusion of happiness and rightness in the marriages, but, more subtly, the theatrical illusion itself. The play offers access through imagination to the music of the spheres, and then denies it. When Portia enters in the final act, she silences the music, and prepares to confront Bassanio with his breach of faith in giving away her ring. Just before the entrance of her husband, she remarks, “This night, methinks, is but the daylight sick. / It looks a little paler. ’Tis a day / Such as the day is when the sun is hid” (5.1.123–5). In this sick daylight, the remainder of the drama plays out. The resonant “such a night as this” becomes an overcast afternoon—perhaps the very afternoon of the performance. We have returned, in other words, to reality. Portia’s words also harken back to the casket of dull lead, whose “paleness” moved Bassanio more than eloquence. After glimpses of the floor of heaven, thick inlaid Wither, A Preparation to the Psalter. See above, 38.

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with patens of bright gold, this leaden daylight seems empty. We are faced with disenchantment, in the most literal sense. In The Merchant of Venice, music offers the redemption of surfaces, or perhaps even the elimination of the very division between surface and underlying reality. Though the play expresses an uneasy awareness of its characters’ hypocrisy, it also reveals the great attraction of associating its own working with the operations of music, which offer an evasion of theatrical “falsity,” lending shiny surfaces an aura of grace and truth. A drama that works like music, however, also opens an unpredictable, if imaginary, inward space, as the musical creeping, the elusive and associative chiming of sounds, works subtly on the memories of the audience, creating an illusion of similar mental workings on the part of the characters. In the following chapters, we will see how, through its dual associations with alluring surfaces and secretive creeping, music becomes a partial answer to the question of how to represent inwardness through an art of masks, costumes, and disguises. In the casket scene, Shakespeare insidiously confuses song and silent thought process. When Bassanio begins his chain of reasoning with the declaration, “So may the outward shows be least themselves,” his implicit parallel is unclear. His words may refer either to something he has been thinking or to something that he has heard—in other words, to the song. The speech may be an elaborate rationalization for an answer that on some level Bassanio already knows. He spells out his reasoning in detail for the audience, but the song suggests and initiates a thought process that is secret, unspoken, and operating just beyond the character’s own awareness. In other words, music gives Bassanio an unconscious mind.

Chapter 2

“We Have Nonesuch”: The Haunting Melody “When Desdemona spoke her last words,” A.C. Bradley muses, characteristically referring to the character in the past tense, as to a historical personage who had once lived and breathed, “perhaps that line of the ballad which she sang an hour before her death was still busy in her brain …. Nature plays such strange tricks, and Shakespeare almost alone among poets seems to create in somewhat the same manner as Nature.” As another example of such “strange tricks,” Bradley offers Othello’s “unconscious reminiscence” of Iago’s earlier words in his cry of “Goats and monkeys!”1 I would suggest that these moments are not simply parallel instances of Shakespeare’s natural methods of creation. The reminiscence of half-forgotten words works like the elusive recollection of song. In Othello and elsewhere, sonic echoes play strange tricks on the mind, and Shakespeare then seems to create in somewhat the same manner as music. These musical tricks help to create the impression of a “real” person, a real brain in which phrases of songs are busy. Disturbingly persistent phrases of folksongs seem quite distinct from the universal music posited by philosophy. Nevertheless, Shakespeare plays with possible connections between the two—connections posed, if only in a jocular register, by the culture at large. Thomas Tomkis’s play Lingua, published in 1607, contains a brief but suggestive joke about the relationship between popular ballads and heavenly melodies. Attempting to demonstrate the superiority of hearing to the other senses, Auditus encourages everyone on stage to attend to the music of the spheres—which no one else can hear. Commonsense thinks Auditus must be mad. Phantastes initially jokes at Auditus’s expense; but as Auditus extols the wonders of the music—“Hearke, hearke, hearke, hearke, peace, peace, O peace: O sweete, admirable, Swanlike heauenly, hearke, O most melodious straine”—he comes to believe that he can hear it, too: “I heare the celestiall musicke of the spheares, as plainely as ever Pithagoras did. O most excellent diapason, good, good, good. It plaies fortune my foe, as distinctly as may be.” Commonsense is unmoved, and deplores Phantastes’ suggestibility with an appropriately sonic comparison: “As the foole thinketh, so the bell clinketh, I protest I heare no more than a post.” Commonsense then asks if Memory can hear the harmony of the spheres; and Memory replies: “Not now my Lord, but I remember about some 4000 years ago, when the Skie was first made, we heard very perfectly.” Memory’s page, Anamnestes (Recollection), then A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (1904; New York: Penguin, 1991), 194n1.

1

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chimes in: “By the same token the first tune the planets plaied, I remember … was Sellenger’s round, in memory wherof euer since, it hath been called the beginning of the world.” We cannot hear this interesting performance anymore because “our eares are so well acquainted with the sounde, that we neuer marke it.”2 Commonsense ultimately comes to the unsurprising decision that Visus is the best of the senses. The contrast between Visus’s display of his virtues and Auditus’s rant about the music of the spheres makes the judgment a foregone conclusion. Whereas Visus enters with a character representing the Heavens in tow, and demonstrates that the sense of sight draws the soul to contemplation of the firmament, the heavens clearly cannot be perceived through the sense of hearing, despite Auditus’s claims. Only Phantastes, his overactive imagination inspired by Auditus’s rapturous account of this inaudible sound, fantasizes that he can hear it. Bizarrely, he also imagines that the planets are playing a very familiar—and surprisingly lugubrious—tune: “Fortune my Foe.” Numerous ballads, usually with a gloomy theme, were set to this melody, which went under the name of one of its many incarnations. Recollection alludes to this use and reuse of ballad tunes when he remarks that “Sellenger’s Round” is also known as “The Beginning of the World.” Part of the humor in this exchange depends upon the suggestion that the planets, like celestial organ-grinders, play popular tunes. In fact, this celestial music is so very common and incessant—like street-cries and chanted broadsides—that no one notices it anymore.3 While the combination of metaphysical speculation and popular music in Lingua is comically incongruous, the joke is almost inevitable in a culture where the relationship between sensible and ideal music was constantly debated. The episode clearly emanates from the same cultural climate in which Stephen Gosson could command musicians to return their fiddles to their cases and contemplate with their eyes and minds the “harmony” of the heavens, the elements, and the natural hierarchies in human relationships. On the other hand, Thomas Browne’s claim that even the most vulgar tavern music could put him in mind of the First Composer suggests that it was not impossible to take the “joke” with some seriousness.4 Moreover, even if the planets did not play ballad tunes, sophisticated musicians 2 Tomkis, Lingua (1607), facsim. edn (New York: AMS, 1970), G3r–v. For the Aristotelian distinction between the two functions of the memory personified here— “the retentive function (memoria or mnesis), and the searching function, reminiscentia or anamnesis”—see Lina Perkins Wilder, Shakespeare’s Memory Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 13, 44–8. 3 This explanation for human inability to hear the music of the spheres was common, and sometimes overlapped with a similar explanation—that the music is so loud that human senses cannot perceive it. By associating sphere music with popular ballads, however, Tomkis comically emphasizes the inherent suggestion that planetary music, instead of being too wonderful to be heard, is in fact too common and ordinary to be heard. In Shakespeare’s Songbook (New York: Norton, 2004), Ross Duffin cites this exchange as an illustration of the familiarity of the early modern audience with the ballad tunes (17–18). 4 See Chapter 1, 21–3.

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did. Old, familiar melodies, and even street-cries, frequently served as the basis of elaborate theme-and-variation pieces for keyboard by William Byrd, Orlando Gibbons, Thomas Morley, and others.5 The ballad tunes proved remarkably fluid, appearing in widely disparate contexts, sometimes accompanying one set of words and sometimes another, and sometimes stripped of words altogether.6 Despite the confusion of Auditus’s companions, they are in the one place where the music of the spheres might actually be audible on earth: the theater. As we have seen, in a drama actual music could represent heavenly harmonies.7 The stage, however, was also a place where popular ballads were frequently heard. In fact, theater and ballads were closely associated in people’s minds. As Bruce R. Smith points out, “On a number of fronts—cost, academic contemptibility, Puritan objectionableness, sensuality, morality—ballads and drama belonged to the same sphere of imagination, and within that sphere the communication between them was greater than the communication between drama and any other kind of printed text.”8 Perhaps most importantly, both plays and ballads allowed the performer to occupy multiple subject positions.9 I would argue that Shakespeare capitalized upon this connection between plays and ballads in order to harness some of the surprisingly complex powers and associations of familiar song. Tomkis’s personified Imagination is absurdly fired by the mere recounting of Auditus’s experience. As we have seen in The Merchant of Venice, however, Shakespeare is deeply—and seriously—interested in the effect that a character talking about the imperceptible music of the spheres can have on an audience’s imagination. Tomkis’s treatment of Auditus, Recollection, and Phantastes suggests that we should not be too hasty to separate Shakespeare’s interest in cosmic harmony from his equally deep interest in the ubiquity and permutability of popular ballads. Critics who examine Shakespeare’s use of ballads, and his immersion in the culture that produced these ballads, are rarely or never the same See David Lindley, Shakespeare and Music (London: Thomson, 2006), 73; Claude Simpson, The British Broadside Ballad and Its Music (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1966), xii; and David Wulstan, Tudor Music (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986), 55. 6 Despite vigorous debates about the relative value of music and words, practical concerns often made wordless and worded melodies interchangeable. In much printed partmusic, voices could be replaced by instruments and vice versa, depending on available resources. See Morrison Comegys Boyd, Elizabethan Music and Musical Criticism, 2nd edn (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1973), 108. 7 See Chapter 1, 20–21. 8 Bruce R. Smith, “Reading Lists of Plays, Early Modern, Modernist, Postmodern,” Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991): 138–9. Smith makes similar points in The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 201–5; and in “Shakespeare’s Residuals: The Circulation of Ballads in Cultural Memory,” in Shakespeare and Elizabethan Popular Culture, ed. Stuart Gillespie and Neil Rhodes (London: Thomson, 2006), 193–217. 9 See Smith, Acoustic World, 175–205. 5

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critics who discuss the musicality of his verse. I propose to do both these things in this chapter, under the conviction that these two aspects of Shakespeare’s work cannot be fully understood apart from one another. An insistent memory of an “old song” comes together with self-consciously “musical” verse in a particularly crucial way in Othello, a play that dramatizes its villain’s attempt to “set down the pegs that make this music” (2.1.197). Where do we find the music of this play, and how do we define it? G. Wilson Knight memorably remarked that “the beauties of the Othello world are not finally disintegrated: they make ‘a swan-like end, fading in music.’”10 By “music,” he refers to a poetic style characteristic of the play and its hero, although the character who explicitly chooses to “play the swan / And die in music” (5.2.254–5) is not Othello but Emilia, and when she speaks of music, she means Desdemona’s Willow Song, and not the elevated and resonant rhetoric of the Moor’s finest moments. Lisa Hopkins has criticized Knight for focusing on the hero’s verbal music and ignoring the actual music sung by the play’s women; and several critics have drawn compelling distinctions between Desdemona’s song and Othello’s self-centered and easily undermined flights of poesy.11 Kenneth Gross reads Desdemona’s Willow Song as a corrective response to Othello’s madness, a “lyrical babble that does not explain itself, that neither pretends to more sense than it has nor uses its nonsense to stop another’s speech,” while Eamon Grennan finds that “Othello’s magniloquent farewells … are utterances at the far end of a performative spectrum from those of the women.”12 G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire (London: Methuen, 1930), 119. Lisa Hopkins, “‘What Did Thy Song Bode, Lady?’: Othello as Operatic Text,” The

10 11

Shakespeare Yearbook 4 (1994): 61–70. Critics examining the role of music in the play have tended to use the word “music” in very different and even contradictory ways. In “Shakespeare’s ‘Dull Clown’ and Symbolic Music,” Shakespeare Quarterly 17 (1966): 107–28, Lawrence J. Ross discusses the play’s treatment of speculative music, and touches only briefly on its actual songs and not at all on the style of its poetry. For other critical treatments of music in Othello, see Pierre Iselin, “Myth, Memory, and Music in Richard II, Hamlet, and Othello,” in Reclamations of Shakespeare, ed. A.J. Hoenselaars (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994); “Les Musiques d’Othello,” in Autour d’Othello, ed. Richard Marienstras and Dominque Goy-Blanquet (Amiens: Presses de l’UFR CLERC, Université Picardie, 1987), 63–73; and Rosalind King, “‘Then Murder’s out of Tune’: The Music and Structure of Othello,” Shakespeare Survey 39 (1987): 149–58. Longer works that devote space to the music of Othello include David Lindley, Shakespeare and Music; John H. Long, Shakespeare’s Use of Music Vol. 3, Histories and Tragedies (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1971); Winifred Maynard, Elizabethan Lyric Poetry and Its Music (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986); Peter J. Seng, The Vocal Songs in the Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967); and F.W. Sternfeld, Music in Shakespearean Tragedy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963). All five of these authors deal largely with the actual music of the play, with particular emphasis on the Willow Song. 12 Kenneth Gross, Shakespeare’s Noise (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 124; Eamon Grennan, “The Women’s Voices in Othello, Speech, Song, and Silence,” Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987): 292n30. See also Grennan, 227.

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Nevertheless, Othello intently and repeatedly questions and blurs the distinctions that separate different kinds of music. Desdemona’s Willow Song is both the culmination and the paradigmatic example of the lingering songs that I will discuss in this chapter, bearing the richest and most complicated relationship to the drama through which it winds. It fails to serve the emblematic function that the characters and its own words design for it. It slips in and out of the dialogue, and is even imagined as the source of some of the words and thoughts of the characters. It disjoints time, and stimulates a sense of something already heard. Its strophic form invites confusion and conflation of its different verses and versions in the memory, producing a strange combination of lyricism and irony. Finally, the song exists in an uncertain but inextricable relation to heaven, “harmony,” and truth. Characters in Othello turn towards “music”—in some cases, quite literally—to establish or prove the truth of language and the truth of the self. Though Emilia sings the Willow Song with her dying breath, music in Othello is not what it was for Sir Philip Sidney, who supposedly ordered music to be played at his death “to fashion and enfranchise his heavenly soul into that everlasting harmony of angels whereof these concords were a kind of terrestrial echo.”13 In Othello, all audible music may be nothing but a satiric terrestrial echo of the everlasting harmony of angels: heaven mocking itself. The play’s language, in its own partially metaphorical and partially literal relation to music, does not slide between the two poles of empty noise and transcendent poetry, but struggles to negotiate and express the idea that by some seeming impossibility, these opposing poles occupy the same space. Before treating Othello, however, I need to sketch out some general tendencies in Shakespeare’s treatment of song, temporality, and recollection. In the following two sections of this chapter, I will discuss first Shakespeare’s treatment of familiar song, and then the parallels he draws between the operations of these songs and the operations of echoing sound. Both songs and wordless music are represented as working their way into the drama, in such a way that language and drama begin to work as they do. The play then maintains a precarious balance in the face of two dangers: that language will become empty noise—or that in becoming “musical,” it will soften, distance, and aestheticize events that should horrify. Vagrant Poesies On Shakespeare’s stage, music is evanescent in experience, but it has a tendency to linger, in the air and in the mind. His characters do not seem to hold images of music printed in their memories: these recollections of music work like echoes, not like seals in wax.14 Nevertheless, they are remarkably persistent—and infectious. 13 The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, ed. John Gouws (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 82. 14 For an account of the ancient analogy between memories and imprints in wax, see Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge:

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Furthermore, these echoes disturb tonality along with temporality, mingling sadness with good cheer and irony with joy, even as they allow the past to linger in the present. Shakespeare’s moments of literal music often seem designed to suggest that the music was always there, in some form, even before it was performed. Songs are never sung for the first time: they may as well have been going on somewhere, silently, since the beginning of the world. Twelfth Night provides the classic example. The Duke enters demanding a repeat performance of the “song we heard last night” (2.4.3). He wants music that is already familiar to him, music that he remembers. In the absence of the singer, Orsino tells his musicians to play the tune, which unwinds repeatedly behind the subsequent conversation between the Duke and his page, until it emerges at last into the foreground with Feste’s sung performance. Twelfth Night takes the pervasiveness of music to an elaborate extreme—but very similar things occur in plays where music is less obviously central. “Come, Balthasar,” says Don Pedro in Much Ado About Nothing, “We’ll hear that song again” (2.3.38); and Caliban requests “the catch / You taught me but while-ere” (Tempest 3.2.112–13). In 2 Henry IV, Silence lives up to his name until he gets drunk, and then he becomes very vocal—but he converses no more than he did before; instead, every remark made in his vicinity serves as a stimulus to song. “A cup of wine, sir?” pulls forth “A cup of wine / That’s brisk and fine”; and “Why, now you have done me right!” calls up “Do me right, / And dub me knight” (5.3.43–5; 68–70). Silence’s behavior imparts a sense of deep familiarity with his musical material. The connections that he makes with song are not rational; they are automatic, associative. These connections remain when all others have been lost. A character’s imagined past—“I have been merry once or twice before now” (5.3.39)—surfaces, with strangely melancholy overtones, in the present. The revelers are all old.15 Familiar ballads certainly can evoke a sense of communal belonging that extends from the stage to encompass the audience, as Smith suggests;16 but more often, Cambridge University Press, 1990), 16–17. Stephen Greenblatt points out that “the unwilled, ghostly return and renewal of an old impression cannot be easily accommodated to this scheme” (Hamlet in Purgatory [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001], 214). 15 Lindley provides an insightful account of the “poignantly comic” effect of this scene, and describes Silence’s ballads as “songs of recollection; the characters call to mind ballads with which we might assume the audience are familiar, and at the same time function … as painful reminders of a time that is irrevocably gone” (Shakespeare and Music, 148). 16 Smith, “Shakespeare’s Residuals,” 196, 200. Suggestively, Wilder’s description of the way theater properties work mnemonically resembles Smith’s account of ballads in Shakespeare’s plays. She suggests, however, that while the past that Shakespeare creates from “theatrical materials … joins [the audience] together as a distinctly theatrical community who remembers together,” it also “separates them from a personage whose recollection of an unstaged past gives the illusion that he exists separately from the play” (14–5). I would argue that familiar songs can create a similar illusion of a separate consciousness in the character who sings or remembers singing.

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Shakespeare’s singers involuntarily isolate themselves even as they draw on these shared materials of memory. Silence sings songs that evoke communal festivity, but his singing reveals just how disjointed from the company he is, as his snatches of song are only obliquely relevant to what is going on around him. In such moments, Shakespeare communicates the sense that music perpetually lingers somewhere just beyond the awareness of the audience, both within the language and in the imaginary minds of the characters who speak it. Allusions to old songs open a suggested space within or beyond the figures on the stage, endowing them with a past and an “inner” space where tunes, if not thoughts, resonate unspoken. In the form of a reminiscence of a familiar tune, we are confronted with a past that surfaces in the present from some place that the audience cannot quite access. Actions and words are seemingly shaped by some unspoken and even unacknowledged memory. According to a Platonic tradition quite familiar to the Renaissance, music moves listeners because it reminds of them of the divine music that they once knew. In Shakespeare, the association between music and memory is similarly strong—but it is not always clear just what the music recalls to mind. The elusive ubiquity of familiar song is tangled with the incessant but inaudible sphere music that might be apprehended in a state of ecstasy—and for Shakespeare this experience of the inaudible becomes both common and uncanny. Music in Shakespeare thus provides a way of thinking about and transmitting the experience of the shock of recognition, the nagging sense of familiarity. It embodies the experience of déjà vu, only it is the already-heard instead of the already-seen. For Shakespeare, music tends to bubble up from some uncertain origin. “Where should this music be?” asks Ferdinand, and the question arises even when the music in question is not performed by an invisible aerial sprite. Songs are infectious: in Sir Toby’s words in Twelfth Night, they are “dulcet in contagion” (2.3.52).17 Songs appear in Shakespeare in brief allusions to popular tunes and in fullfledged performances; but perhaps most frequently, they appear in snatches. Spontaneous Shakespearean singers seem plagued by memories that are simultaneously tenacious and sieve-like. Certain phrases will drift into their heads at inopportune moments, but these snatches are seldom complete or even accurate. This representation of song is partly mimetic, the dramatization of an experience of incomplete memory no less common now than in the sixteenth century. The problem is inherent in the strophic settings characteristic of popular ballads. Verses get out of order, phrases drift from one half-remembered verse to another. The very setness and lack of flexibility of form in strophic song leads to formlessness, to random fragments bobbing up in the mind, as a number of different verbal phrases are all shaped to the very same returning musical phrase. In The Anatomy of Melancholy (1628), ed. Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan-Smith (New York: Tudor, 1955), Robert Burton writes that music is good for a melancholy man, “provided always, his disease proceed not originally from it …. In such cases Musick is most pernicious … it will make such melancholy persons mad, and the sound of those Jigs and Hornpipes will not be removed out of the ears a week after” (481; emphasis mine). 17

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Edward Doughtie describes this memory of one stanza overlying the next as an “echo phenomenon.”18 Shakespeare demonstrates a powerful interest in this phenomenon, particularly in the figure of Desdemona, who cannot keep the verses of her Willow Song in order—“Nay, that’s not next” (4.3.51); but his interest seems to go beyond the desire to accurately imitate the workings of the memory. In early modern England, the confusion of song verses was exacerbated by the exceedingly common practice of setting multiple ballads to “well-known melodies which wandered from text to text.”19 Some texts were related by topic; but in other cases, the choice of a tune seems to have been based more on the popularity of the melody than on its suitability for the new subject matter.20 The tune of “Greensleeves,” for instance, was called into service to accompany “A warning to all false traitors by example of 14 … executed … August, 1588.” This delightful song opened with an address, not to the beloved, but to “You Traitors all that doo deuise.” Another ballad to the same tune was entitled “A most excellent Godly new Ballad … abuses of this wicked world.”21 Given such practices, Phantastes might well imagine the spheres playing the lugubrious “Fortune my foe.” Ideally, music and verbal content should accord: such, at any rate, was the unanimous opinion of composers of new music. Thomas Morley, creator of settings of “It Was a Lover and His Lass” and “O Mistress Mine”—settings possibly used in As You Like It and Twelfth Night—was most explicit on this point. “If you have a grave matter,” he informs interested amateurs, “apply a grave kind of music to it; if a merry subject you must make your music also merry, for it will be a great absurdity to use a sad harmony to a merry matter or a merry harmony to a sad, lamentable, or tragic ditty.”22 This rule was not always followed in the adaptation of a new ballad to an old tune. When the Clown in A Winter’s Tale exclaims, “I love a ballad but even too well, if it be doleful matter merrily set down, or a very pleasant thing indeed, and sung lamentably” (4.4.187–9), the lines may indicate the character’s poor taste in music instead of his shaky grasp of the English language. (“Lamentably,” of course, suggests poorly sung as well as mournfully rendered.) Shakespeare’s mind, however, seems to have lingered over this idea of “doleful matter merrily set down.”23 Edward Doughtie, English Renaissance Song (Boston: Twayne, 1986), 132–3. F.W. Sternfeld, “Music and Ballads,” Shakespeare Survey 17 (1964): 220. See also

18 19

Simpson, British Broadside Ballad, ix. 20 See Mark Booth, The Experience of Songs (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 110. 21 Simpson, British Broadside Ballad, 270. 22 Thomas Morley, A Plain and Easy Introduction to Practical Music (1597), ed. R. Alec Harman (London: Dent, 1952), 290. 23 The question may take sonic shape in the “merry” ballad of “Two maids wooing a man,” which Dorcas and Mopsa sing with Autolycus. A contemporary setting, possibly by Robert Johnson, survives, but seems inappropriately courtly and melancholy for the pastoral and humorous context (Lindley, Shakespeare and Music, 167–8).

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The issues involved in the substitution of words are religious as well as tonal. In The Merry Wives of Windsor, Parson Hugh Evans, singing to quiet his nerves before a duel, gets the words to a metrical version of Psalm 137 hopelessly tangled up with Marlowe’s “Come live with me and be my love”: “Melodious birds sing madrigals— / When as I sat in Pabylon— / And a thousand vagram posies …” (3.1.19–21). The “fragrant posies” of the original become “vagram” (vagrant) posies, and the mistake amusingly reflects the wandering of the parson’s mind. The juxtaposition of the weeping Israelites hanging their harps on trees and praying for the ruin of Babylon with the melodious madrigals of Marlowe’s birds is hilariously inappropriate. Here Babylon and Babel seem to have the upper hand. Winifred Maynard suggests that this verbal humor might have been reinforced by a musical joke in which the parson, reversing the practice of the sacred parody—“edifying words written to popular tunes ‘for auoyding of sin and harlatrie’”—sang his confused recollections of the love-lyric to the psalmtune.24 In a sacred parody, a new song could become the negation of an old one, the edifying words opposing the sinful ones by taking their places. The idea, of course, was to take advantage of the popularity of a catchy tune by giving it a new moral or spiritual text. As Sir Hugh’s muddled singing suggests, the strategy could backfire. Even if the scene in Merry Wives did not involve a joke about song parodies, it suggests Shakespeare’s interest in the idea of one song slipping into another song, the idea of sets of words tangled together by musical associations. The snatch of song performed by Poor Tom and the Fool in The History of King Lear provides a powerful example of the almost surreal permutations possible to a song. During the mad Lear’s “trial” of his absent daughters, Poor Tom sings—apropos of nothing in particular—“Come o’er the burn, Bessy, to me.” The Fool then responds with what seems to be his own variation on the old song: “Her boat hath a leak, / And she must not speak / Why she dares not come over to thee” (13.20–23). In providing new words for the song, the Fool is merely participating in a history of transformations. “Come o’er the burn Bessy” was originally a love song, later translated to a spiritual plane:

24 Maynard, 181. For a discussion of the possibility of the drinking song in Antony and Cleopatra being set to a hymn-tune, see Peter J. Seng, “Shakespearean Hymn-Parody,” Renaissance News 18 (1965): 4–6. Parson Hugh Evans was hardly the first churchman to have experienced such difficulties. In The Owl and the Nightingale: Musical Life and Ideas in France 1100–1300 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), Christopher Page quotes a thirteenth-century friar describing the travails of a contemporary: “Secular songs echoed continuously in his ear and brain … and they gave him no pleasure, as they had done before, but rather vexed him a good deal.” Page goes on to relate the story of an unfortunate priest who “inadvertently sang” the contagious refrain of a popular song “instead of the customary benediction Dominus vobiscum” (126).

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The singing voice of the song becomes the voice of Christ, calling all men away from the sinful world. In a later version, “Bessy” becomes Queen Elizabeth, summoned over the burn by the adoring population of England.26 Frederick Sternfeld’s suggestion that “the clowning scene and its song provide an oblique comment on the all-powerful emotion of love which ennobles the dying Lear”27 seems inadequate, as the fool’s song provides nothing so simple as a comment, however oblique. Does his version of the ballad mock love? Religion? The authority of the monarch and the love of the people for the monarch? All of these things at once? Yet the words also seem random—a fool seizes any chance for an obscene joke—and do not refer definitely to anything at all. The fool’s ditty is itself a “moralization” of a familiar song, a parody that undermines the whole project of setting moralizations to familiar tunes. In some moral song parodies, old refrains cling to the old tune—ghostly, meaningless in their new setting, but pointing back towards the former content of the song, for anyone who might remember it. Such is the case with one of the ditties belted out by the drunken Sir Toby in Twelfth Night. Toby is not alarmed by Maria’s threat that “my lady” will turn him out of the house. “Am not I consanguineous? Am I not of her blood? Tilly-vally—‘lady’! ‘There dwelt a man in Babylon, lady, lady’” (2.3.69–71). The appeals to the authority of “my lady,” which Sir Toby is finding increasingly monotonous, remind him of the refrain of a popular song telling the story of the chaste Susanna. The song, of course, has nothing whatsoever to do with the situation at hand, and Toby’s singing is a refusal to engage with Maria’s concerns. Not only does he continue the objectionable caterwauling, but he also responds associatively, not rationally, to Maria. He picks up the central word in her speech, mocks its significance, and continues with what the word reminds him of. There dwelt a man in Babylon, of reputation great by fame; He took to wife a fair woman, 25 Quoted in Sternfeld, Music in Shakespearean Tragedy, 167. Sternfeld dates the sacred parody to the early sixteenth century (167–8). 26 See Sternfeld, Music in Shakespearean Tragedy, 167–8. The text of the Queen Elizabeth-as-Bessy version, from the broadside registered in 1564, is printed in Duffin, 105–7. 27 Sternfeld, Music in Shakespearean Tragedy, 170.

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Susanna she was call’d by name; A woman fair and virtuous, lady, lady, Why should we not of her learn thus To live godly?28

It is impossible to talk with someone who insists on hearing nothing but reminiscences of songs. Words dredge up snatches of tune rather than provoking a reasoned response. Toby rings changes on the word as a sound rather than a signifier—as, in this particular song, it really is: “lady, lady” might as well be “hey nonny nonny” as far as content is concerned. Sometimes “lady” refers to Susanna, but it usually functions as a nonsense word to fill up the tune. This refrain is actually a remnant of a popular song entitled “The Pangs of Love” that was set to this tune before its words were replaced with the edifying narrative of Susanna. This ballad started with a biblical example, but was hardly a religious song. Was not good King Solomon Ravished in sundry wise With every lively paragon That glistered before his eyes? If this be true as true it was, lady, lady, Why should I not serve you alas, my dear lady?29

In this song, the repeated burden, “lady, lady,” is an address to the imagined beloved. In the Susanna version, this refrain is left over, a ghost of the love song that clings to the tune and cannot be discarded, even if it no longer makes sense. The plea for love (“Why should I not serve you alas, my dear lady?”) has been replaced by an exhortation to godliness, but the original exhortation still echoes in the form, reduced to meaningless “filler.” Sir Toby is hardly represented as thinking of all this—his selection of the song seems entirely random—nor would the audience be expected to remember the origins of the lingering refrain, “lady, lady.” At least, not consciously. Yet on one level the song fits the situation perfectly, as Toby reduces Olivia’s authority to a meaningless chanting. Nevertheless, song proves an uncomfortable weapon, and an undependable vehicle for mockery or satire. Sir Toby makes this discovery when he employs song to mock Malvolio’s threats. The steward’s cold remark that Olivia is only too ready to bid Toby farewell, intended as an ultimatum, shrinks to the associations of the final word when the knight responds by singing. Feste joins in, and the two improvise a spontaneous parody of a fashionable lute song, very recently published.30 Duffin, 384. Duffin, 245. 30 Lindley, Shakespeare and Music, 212. 28

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The humor comes from the way something so inapplicable is made to apply. The original song represents the lament of a vacillating lover: Farewell dear love since thou wilt needs be gone, Mine eyes do show my life is almost done, nay, I will never die so long as I can spy, there be many mo’ though that she do go, There be many mo’ I fear not, Why then let her go, I care not. Farewell, farewell, since this I find is true, I will not spend more time in wooing you: but I will seek elsewhere if I may find her there, shall I bid her go, what and if I do? Shall I bid her goe and spare not? O no, no, no, no, I dare not.31

In their version, Sir Toby and Feste do not so much make up new words as conflate the two stanzas quoted above. Sir Toby confuses the verses, or jumps from the first to the second, demonstrating the ease with which verses can be recombined and temporal order jettisoned in strophic song settings. Feste proves—as one might expect—the most adept at this kind of musical “fooling,” and he draws Sir Toby in over his head, while seeming to encourage and abet him. SIR TOBY. ‘Farewell, dear heart, since I must needs be gone.’ MARIA. Nay, good Sir Toby. FESTE. ‘His eyes do show his days are almost done.’ MALVOLIO. Is’t even so? SIR TOBY. ‘But I will never die.’ FESTE. ‘Sir Toby, there you lie.’ MALVOLIO. This is much credit to you. SIR TOBY. ‘Shall I bid him go?’ FESTE. ‘What an if you do?’ SIR TOBY. ‘Shall I bid him go, and spare not?’ FESTE. ‘O, no, no, no, no, you dare not!’ (2.3.91–101)

The song offers two sentiments to the same musical phrase: “Why then let her goe, I care not” and “O no, no, no, no, I dare not.” In the complete original, the change shows the lover’s vacillation from one mood to another; but in the impromptu compression of Toby and Feste, the two lines overlie one another as alternate possibilities, one voiced and the other not. The song ends in a rather Quoted in Duffin, 138–9.

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uncomfortable place for Sir Toby, and he is forced to deny Feste’s insinuation and confront Malvolio: “Out o’ tune, sir, ye lie. Art any more than a steward?” (2.3.102–3). He takes up the fool’s dare; yet there is an uncomfortable truth in the final line of the song. Feste can see where the song is going, and he unerringly draws Sir Toby to the uncompromising conclusion. The song suddenly ceases to be a collaborative effort and becomes a taunt. Toby does not sing again for the rest of the play. In the middle of the joke, the reminder of mortality surfaces, the retort that the would-be Puritan Malvolio might have made to Toby’s insistence on the permanent ascendance of cakes and ale: “Sir Toby, there you lie.”32 Shakespeare repeatedly demonstrates a fascination with the dramatic and tonal possibilities that arise when two different (and completely opposing) sets of words are applied to the same tune.33 In As You Like It, Amiens sings “Under the Greenwood Tree,” praising the joys of forest life. Jacques then gives the company “a verse to this note that I made yesterday,” mocking the lords’ flight to the supposed golden world of the forest: “If it do come to pass / That any man turn ass …” (2.5.44–5). He provides a satirical commentary on the original song, yet this commentary is superimposed over the song, part of it, inextricable, because sharing the same melody. The intended presentation of Jacques’s verse remains unclear. Jacques may sing it, or speak it, or he may hand a written version to Amiens, who then sings the new lines. The First Folio suggests the last option by giving the verse to Amiens, and placing it in italics like the rest of the song. David Lindley favors this staging and suggests that song and parody, sung in the same voice, may serve “as a dramatic emblem of the way in which pastoral is the product of a subjective interpretation of circumstance. The original and its See Lindley, Shakespeare and Music, 213. The songs of the owl and the cuckoo at the end of Love’s Labour’s Lost, for instance,

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were likely set to the same tune. See Duffin, 447. The two seasons are figured as two verses of the same (endlessly repeating) song, a song that serves both as a means of resolution for the play, and as a device for escaping resolution. These songs are also tonally ambiguous in the way that I have been discussing. As Lindley points out, “The first stanza of the dialogue song … complicates its seasonal picture by characterizing the cuckoo’s song, the conventional harbinger of spring, as a ‘word of fear / Unpleasing to a married ear,’ and the second stanza … invokes an appropriately wintry picture, ending with the unlikely claim that the owl’s call is a ‘merry note’” (215). The “word of fear” (“cuckoo, cuckoo”) and the “merry note” (“tu-whit, tu-whoo”) occupy the same sequence of notes—as do the phrases “word of fear” and “a merry note.” The one that seems as if it should be merry (a spring sound) arouses fear, and the call of the “staring owl” is called “merry”—but in one sense, they are the same call. See also Lindley’s comment on “O Mistress Mine”: “If the tune for the song is indeed a version of that employed by Morley and Byrd in their instrumental compositions of the same name … there is a tension between the positive tone of the lyric— with its suggestion that ‘journeys end in lovers meeting’ (2.3.43), and its encouragement of the lover to seize the day—and the melody, which has a melancholy tone, one which enforces the second stanza’s awareness of the passing of time, rather than the optimism of the first” (Shakespeare and Music, 210).

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opposite become, if Amiens sings both, two sides of the air’s coin.”34 In Lindley’s reading, the song does as the rest of the play does, in little. I would argue that the play strives to do what the song does—not in presenting two sides of a coin, but in making the celebration of sweet birds and greenwood trees a satirical commentary on the absurdity of the pastoral project—and vice versa. Celebration and satire are not merely juxtaposed in the verses of the song: they are as if set to the same tune; they fall into the same form. Echoes of the celebration haunt the satire and vice versa. If the play ever does achieve harmony, these multiple verses to the same note provide the best model for the harmony that it achieves. Shakespeare’s fascination with multiple songs set to the same “note” seems to spring from the same source as his idiosyncratic obsession with certain types of wordplay. As Sir Toby bellows out his snatch of “There dwelt a man in Babylon,” Feste remarks: “Beshrew me, the knight’s in admirable fooling” (2.3.75). Feste the Fool is both a musician and a “corrupter of words” (3.1.31)—he dallies with them until they turn wanton (3.1.13–14), cease to mean what they should mean, and even skirt the edges of meaninglessness. Most of these verbal games depend upon words that take the same sonic form, but express different semantic content: closely compressed versions of those “ghost lyrics” that we have been considering. Those multiple messages, expressed in identical tunes, are for Shakespeare long drawn-out puns, a playing on sound and meaning extended radically in time. As we have begun to see, however, these elongated musical puns tap into immense and complicated affective powers unavailable to simple words with double or triple meanings. They unite an intensity of feeling and personal association to a game that could otherwise seem merely clever or cynical in its play of meaning. Shakespeare suggests the closeness of song and excessive punning that tends towards nonsense in Much Ado About Nothing. Balthasar rather lamely insists upon his inadequacy as a singer, and in response to Don Pedro’s “if thou wilt hold longer argument, do it in notes,” replies, “Note this before my notes: / There’s not a note of mine that’s worth the noting.” “Why,” answers the rather exasperated Prince, “these are very crotchets that he speaks— / Note notes, forsooth, and nothing!” (2.3.48–52). If the audience by this point has not noted the pun imbedded in the title of the play, they have little excuse. (“Noting” and “nothing” would have been pronounced the same way.) Don Pedro and Balthasar go into a positive fantasia on “note” and “noting,” generating an excess of meanings. The Prince describes this wordplay with a musical term: “these are very crotchets that he speaks.” Crotchets are “whimsical fancies,” “perverse conceits,” and quarter notes (OED, n.1, 9a–b, 7). Balthasar’s clever little explosion of “notes” is whimsical nonsense, and the Prince indicates that these variations on the word “note” ought to be replaced by the actual musical notes for which the speech apologizes. But this spoken bit of nothing already resembles the whimsical noting that follows, the song that exhorts its listeners to take nothing too seriously, and ends in the nonsense of “hey nonny nonny” (2.3.63). In its most playful form, wordplay is the speaking of crotchets. Lindley, Shakespeare and Music, 194.

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It shrugs off the responsibility of pointed meanings, and in the process becomes infinitely suggestive.35 “Crochets” make “nothing” of words. While demonstrating the multiple meanings of a single word, punning also serves as a means of “divesting a word of its meaning.”36 This kind of play characterizes Feste’s use of nonsense words in Twelfth Night. A similar process works in the refrain of his final song, where every repetition of the phrase “hey, ho, the wind and the rain” simultaneously increases an atmosphere of storm and gloom, and removes us further from actual wind and rain as the words become sounds, necessary but meaningless filler. Sometimes Shakespeare obviously intends a musical pun on “nothing,” as when Laertes says of Ophelia’s songs and scattered speech, “This nothing’s more than matter” (4.5.172). In The Winter’s Tale, Autolycus gloats over his success at picking the pockets of a whole crowd absorbed in a song: “No hearing, no feeling but my sir’s song, and admiring the nothing of it” (4.4.598–9). The pun of “nothing” and “noting” (in its musical sense) proves apt and suggestive in a number of plays.37 As Anne Barton points out, any single word, when repeated a number of times, takes on “a bizarre, essentially mysterious quality of its own, like a word in some arcane and alien tongue.”38 Barton’s discussion moves directly from repetition to the speaking of nonsense to the singing of snatches of song. Lear, Poor Tom, and the Fool are drawn to “nonsense words: ‘Fie, foh, and fum’, ‘nonny’, ‘alow’. Non-words of this kind are a familiar feature of ballad refrains and nursery rhymes. Used, however, as a substitute for normal speech, as the place towards which language tends when hard-pressed, they become sinister and disturbing.”39 In Twelfth Night, this is the place towards which language tends, almost naturally, in play. It is a place of song, shaped by 35 Nonsense refrains like “hey nonny nonny” and “fa la la” were “sometimes used in place of bawdy rhyme-words” (Maynard, 160)—and perhaps inevitably associated with the words that they were meant to replace. See also Mark Booth, 39. 36 Sigurd Burckhardt, Shakespearean Meanings (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 24. Burckhardt describes the pun as “the creation of a semantic identity between words whose phonetic identity is, for ordinary language, the merest coincidence. That is to say, it is an act of verbal violence, designed to tear the close bond between a word and its meaning” (25). See also Russ McDonald, Shakespeare’s Late Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006): “John Hoskins, in Directions for Speech and Style [1599] considers the effects of alliteration and paronomasia under the same rubric, as if one grew from the other, and modern critics have suggested ways in which the double entendre is part of the larger strategy of calling attention to the surface of language” (198). 37 Wilder offers a different, but complementary account of the “noting” pun, suggesting that Shakespeare quibbles on “nothing” and “noting” in the sense in which the latter is used “in the vocabulary of the memory arts” to signify “the gathering of materials” to strengthen “intellectual receptivity” and memory (5). 38 Anne Barton, “Shakespeare and the Limits of Language,” Shakespeare Survey 24 (1971): 26. 39 Barton, “Limits of Language,” 27.

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the unaccountable movements of the mind, evoking a mingled carelessness and eeriness, where meanings appear and vanish, replacing but never entirely erasing one another. In plays like Othello and Hamlet, however, the effect is much closer to what Barton describes. The Double Hunt The familiar word that becomes nonsensical and mysterious through repetition is the word subjected to echo. Shakespeare also understands the doubleness that occurs when two sets of words occupy the same tune—Doughtie’s “echo phenomenon”—as echoic return. The complex affect of Shakespeare’s haunted songs, those multiple verses set to the same note, is generated elsewhere in the plays when characters remember sounds that summon up emotional states that resonate and jar with the present. The affective responses elicited by these recollections do not work in the manner described so influentially by Augustine, who observed that affections contained in the memory “are not there in the same way in which the mind itself holds them when it experiences them …. So I can be far from glad in remembering myself to have been glad, and far from sad when I recall my past sadness.” This distinction between emotion and remembered emotion fascinated Augustine. “We call memory itself the mind,” he puzzled. “Since that is the case, what is going on when, in gladly remembering past sadness, my mind is glad and my memory sad?”40 This peculiar separation, however, begins to dissolve in Shakespeare’s musical echoes. The distinctive movements of reverberating song evoke complex and contradictory moods, as remembered and current emotions overlap. The music meant something once and something different now: but the two moments—like an echo and a sound—cannot be fully separated. The idea of the echo is crucial to Shakespeare’s dynamic treatment of song and surrounding speech, drama and inset music. Rebounding echoes can create sonic confusion, making it difficult to distinguish the original sound from the reverberation—at least, this is the illusion that the text works to create. Shakespeare evocatively describes such confusion in Titus Andronicus in the context of a hunting scene: “the babbling echo mocks the hounds, / Replying shrilly to the well-tuned horns, / As if a double hunt were heard at once” (2.3.17–19). The confusion is replicated in the language. Who is replying to the horn? The echo or the hounds? Here “mocking” means “imitating,” but derisive possibilities remain inherent in the very idea of the echo. Indeed, two conflicting traditions, both familiar to the Renaissance, surround the mythological figure of Echo. Macrobius allegorized her as the music of the spheres; but in the tradition of the Ovidian Narcissus story, she is “a powerful mocker” and “Ovid’s poetic device in telling her story becomes in later poetry a way of 40 Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 191.

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deconstructing words, often of love, into their hidden but operative ultimate.”41 In the popular genre of the echo song, Echo could either affirm or negate. The song, however, always takes the form of question and response. After each line, there is a pause for an answer. The overlapping effect described in Titus depends upon extending the sound, as one would in an ordinary song. Instead of in question and answer, voice and echo join in polyphony, or in a round, with one voice trailing just behind another. The result, in fact, is a catch, a term derived from the Italian caccia—“hunt.”42 In the sonic “double hunt” that Tamora describes, it becomes more than usually difficult to distinguish between sound and resonance. We are reminded that an echo is a sonic realization of the past haunting the present, a confounding of temporality that nevertheless depends upon temporality for its existence. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the echoing “double hunt” returns, participating in the play’s sustained engagement with the idea of doleful matter merrily set down. This moment of musical reverberation occurs in a context that illuminates the complex relationship between echoing sound, ballads, and theater. A Midsummer Night’s Dream ultimately sets forth an elusive and dizzying parallel between a drama and a song: at one key moment, as the drama reaches for an absurd, bathetic transcendence, the two funnel into one another, and the play, for an instant, becomes a phantasmagoric projection of an old ballad that is not only absent, but nonexistent. At the opening of the play, Theseus confidently orders his master of ceremonies to banish melancholy and waken mirth, promising to abandon his warlike and injurious “wooing,” and to wed Hippolyta in “another key / With pomp, with triumph, and with reveling” (1.1.13–19). In this formulation, melancholy and mirth are mutually exclusive, and can never be combined without terrible discord. The comedy itself must be understood as set in a metaphorical key of merriment; or else, we must see it as “changing key” when confusion and discord between lovers ultimately reaches a harmonious conclusion.43 The play, however, does not clearly distinguish between mirth and melancholy, and it characterizes its own complex tonality by a very different sonic metaphor: the echo, a past sound reverberating in the present. This second metaphor is more than illustrative, as the uneasy combination of mirth and melancholy manifests itself literally in a musical echoing on the verge of the dramatic resolution, just before the sleeping lovers are discovered and their new and proper pairings ratified by law. 41 John Hollander, The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 9, 12. 42 David Wulstan, Tudor Music, 54. 43 A composer, however, was not supposed to change key in the middle of a piece; for “every key hath a peculiar air proper unto itself, so that if you go into another than that wherein you begun you change the air of the song, which is as much as to wrest a thing out of his nature, making the ass leap upon his master and the spaniel bear the load” (Morley, 249).

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At this moment in the fourth act, Theseus desires Hippolyta to “hear the music of [his] hounds … And mark the musical confusion / Of hounds and echo in conjunction” (4.1.103, 106–7), but the company stumbles over the four sleeping lovers before either the royal couple or the audience gets a chance to hear this muchanticipated canine consort. This moment is exactly parallel to Theseus’ earlier discussion of musical keys. In both instances, the Duke anticipates festivities that the young lovers interrupt. In the second instance, however, Hippolyta provides a very different account of music and mood. I was with Hercules and Cadmus once, When in a wood of Crete they bayed the bear With hounds of Sparta. Never did I hear Such gallant chiding, for besides the groves, The skies, the fountains, every region near Seemed all one mutual cry. I never heard So musical a discord, such sweet thunder. (4.1.116–22)

Hippolyta seizes Theseus’ phrase “musical confusion” and sharpens it into the oxymoronic “musical discord.” The Amazonian queen hints at something more than the traditional Renaissance idea of the cosmos as concordia discors, the reconciliation of opposites that “retain their autonomous identity though they function coordinately or harmoniously in a stable system.”44 What might concordia discors actually sound like? In Hippolyta’s account, sounds and the echoes of the sounds are not reconciled but confused. This musical discord resembles less the orderly arrangement of discordant elements in which the warmth of summer inevitably and properly follows the chill of winter,45 than it resembles the seasonal disturbances created by the fairies’ discord: hoary-headed frosts Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose, And on old Hiems’ thin and icy crown An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds Is, as in mock’ry, set. (2.1.107–11)

The fairies supposedly move from discord to harmony over the course of the plot, as the lovers move from frustrated desire to wedded bliss; but the sound of hounds and echo in conjunction suggests a way in which this temporal shift in “key” can hardly be distinguished from a “mutual cry,” where the old sounds continue to resound in the present, hopelessly mingled with the new.

S.K. Heninger, Touches of Sweet Harmony: Pythagorean Cosmology and Renaissance Poetics (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1974), 150. 45 For Boethius, the passage of the seasons was yet another manifestation of musica mundana. See Fundamentals of Music, trans. Calvin M. Bower, ed. Claude V. Palisca (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 9. 44

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Hippolyta’s own speech is situated as an echo, a returning of the past. Her account suggestively focuses not on the baying itself, but on the echoes of the baying, the response of the groves and skies and fountains. These echoes have long since faded away; they now exist only in Hippolyta’s memory—and, however faintly, in her account of this memory. Nevertheless, the passage insists on the “conjunction,” the “mutual cry” of sound and echo. Past and present collapse into one another even as Hippolyta lingers on the irrecoverable wonders of a vanished heroic age. (She plainly doubts that Theseus’ hounds can compete with those of Hercules and Cadmus.) Her language imitates this lingering, prolongs the memory through repetition: “Never did I hear … I never heard.” Where are these “nevers” located in time? If Hippolyta is remembering her original reaction to the sound—“I never heard such a thing before”—her words evoke delighted wonder; but if she speaks in the present, looking back, the tone becomes quite different: “I never heard such a thing again.” The hunt remains a singular experience, but it is experienced differently in recollection and reality. Nevertheless, as the memory itself suggests, the experience is not simply replaced by the memory: the affect of the one overlaps with the other in a “musical discord.” “Music” is not entirely metaphorical here because, as we have seen, this experience of the revenant past is realized most fully through memories of music, through the particular way that songs work in the memory. Both the play itself and this brief speech within the play unfold in linear time, but Shakespeare also works against this linear progression, generating the illusion of folded time that Hippolyta evokes. An earlier musical moment in the play is also a memory—a memory that, suggestively enough, produces the central mechanism of the plot. Oberon introduces the subject of the magic flower with an appeal to Puck’s recollection: OBERON. Thou rememb’rest Since once I sat upon a promontory, And heard a mermaid on a dolphin’s back Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath That the rude sea grew civil at her song And certain stars shot madly from their spheres To hear the sea-maid’s music? ROBIN. I remember. (2.1.149–55)

The two recall a moment of simultaneous violence and calm, when stars shot madly from their spheres and the seas grew civil. To the sounds of the music that caused such contradictory reactions, Cupid’s shaft stains a flower, and a chaste maiden moves on, indifferent. The sea and stars—themselves traditionally a part of the musica mundana, the concordia discors—here join in a very different kind of concordia discors, a musical confusion that harmoniously disrupts the spheres themselves. The plot of the play originates in this memory of the mermaid and the paradoxical effects of her music. A similar mingling of wildness and rapt tranquility characterizes Hippolyta’s speech, suggesting that while her war with Theseus has yielded to festivity, the

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violence of the past is still present, part of the “mutual cry” that renders the hunting music simultaneously beautiful and frightening. The pleasurable aspect, however, wins out: this sound is something that people desire to hear. Despite the discord and the cry, nothing is actually going to be killed. It seems unlikely that the hounds will catch any game; they are “slow in pursuit, but matched in mouth like bells” (120). The music of the hounds is itself a kind of play. Theseus and Hippolyta enter in Act Four not as hunters, but as auditors: the Duke urges his bride-to-be to accompany him to the mountaintop, where the acoustics will be best. The performance is cancelled when the Duke decides to return to the city with the lovers to hear their stories of their adventure in the woods, and the musical entertainment is replaced by this (off-stage) account of the night’s events, and by the on-stage performance of The Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe. This “comedy,” however, has a great deal in common with the glorious, unheard hunting music. Theseus echoes Hippolyta’s nostalgic description of the hounds of Sparta in his amused response to the title of Peter Quince’s extravaganza— a response that also recalls Titania’s description of mingled summer and winter: “Merry and tragical? Tedious and brief? / That is hot ice and wondrous strange snow! / How shall we find the concord of this discord?” (5.1.58–60). Philostrate, the Duke’s master of ceremonies, obligingly finds the concord for him. The “lamentable comedy” can exist only because it is lamentably bad, and not because it is possible for comedy to be lamentable or for tragedy to be merry. Philostrate presumably would provide a similar interpretation of the Clown’s words in The Winter’s Tale. Doleful matter can become merry, and a “very pleasant thing indeed” can be “sung lamentably” only through incompetence. As far as Bottom and his companions are concerned, however, the impossible task of producing “tragical mirth” is inherent in their assignment of presenting a bloodthirsty lion and a double suicide as entertainment. They see to the roots of the problem, to a fundamental philosophical conundrum that the sophisticated court has not even noticed: how can representations of misery and violence be pleasing? The mechanicals are forced to invent the wheel all over again, and their solutions to the dilemma are only ridiculous in the ineptitude of their execution. First, they invent metatheatricality. They will repeatedly remind the audience that they are watching actors playing parts. The next thing that they invent—even if they fail to implement it—is a kind of dramatic musicality. The part that Bottom covets most is the part of the lion—especially when he learns that it is “nothing but roaring.” His roaring, Bottom imagines, will prove so impressive and enjoyable that the audience will demand an encore: “I will roar that I will do any man’s heart good to hear me. I will roar that I will make the Duke say ‘Let him roar again. Let him roar again!’” (1.2.58–60). When the other actors object that Bottom will frighten the ladies, he has an answer: “But I will aggravate my voice so that I will roar you as gently as any sucking dove. I will roar you an ‘twere any nightingale” (67–8). Bottom, however incoherently and confusedly, aspires towards “sweet thunder,” a violent animal noise that sings sweetly in

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performance, without ever losing its identity as roaring. If the mechanicals can just get the lion to roar like a nightingale, their comedy will please—in spite of its violent deaths and bloody corpses. Pyramus and Thisbe ends up pleasing through its sheer silliness. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, however, in its complex tonality, its combination of danger and delight, works very much like the evoked music of the double hunt—or like a ballad tune trailing multiple different songs and stories. After Theseus and Hippolyta abandon their intention of listening to the hounds and exit followed by the lovers, Bottom wakes and attempts to describe his “dream.” The dream is only half-remembered; and its elusiveness somehow makes it suitable for song. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream. It shall be called “Bottom’s Dream” because it hath no bottom; and I will sing it in the latter end of a play, before the Duke. Peradventure, to make it the more gracious, I shall sing it at her death. (4.1.204–11)

In a mangled allusion to Saint Paul’s epistle to the Corinthians, Bottom establishes the inconceivability of conceiving or reporting his dream—and then immediately resolves to get it turned into a ballad. This ballad will be most appropriately presented in “a play”—not a specific play, but some indefinite play—and will be sung at the death of some unidentified lady to make “it” more gracious.46 (What is “it”? The death? The play? The ballad?) In A Midsummer Night’s Dream we are presented not merely with plays within plays, but with a ballad within the play within the play—a ballad that never actually materializes, a ballad that is a midsummer night’s dream. Bottom’s dream is called Bottom’s dream because, like one of those M.C. Escher staircases that go around in circles, simultaneously ascending and descending, it has no bottom. This imagined, bottomless ballad simultaneously promises to encapsulate the play, and refuses to contain it. A song within a play tantalizingly edges towards identity with the play; but this song does not exist, is only spoken of. In this way, the relationship between Bottom’s Dream and A Midsummer Night’s Dream is something like the relationship between the play and the unheard music of the hounds. To our horror and delight, drama’s “walking shadows,” strutting and fretting on stages within stages, are always on the verge of collapsing into that mysterious ballad, Bottom’s Dream: a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying—maybe—nothing.

Some critics link this “ballad” with the jig traditionally performed after each play. See Lindley, Shakespeare and Music, 144; and David Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 55. But this connection does not quite explain Bottom’s weird plan to “sing it at her death.” Bottom seems to imagine his ballad set within the play. 46

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Heaven Mocks Itself “Peradventure, to make it the more gracious,” says Bottom hazily, “I shall sing it at her death.” Othello returns to Bottom’s implied confusion between song, play, and dramatized female death in that first vague “it.” The later play similarly worries at the idea of death or tragedy becoming “gracious” through musical presentation. As Bassanio so didactically points out in The Merchant of Venice, a “gracious voice … obscures the show of evil” (3.2.75–6). Music may express a deeper meaning in events, and so provide some consolation; on the other hand, it may simply make violence and cruelty graceful and gracious. The tendency of Shakespearean music towards noise, eeriness, and secretive creeping, however, tends to undermine both possibilities. Musical speech (particularly theatrical speech) may become sound and fury, signifying nothing. On the other hand, “noting” may be more than matter: making speech into music may—or may not—locate integrity and truth in reverberating hollowness. In Othello, an illusion of subjectivity rises from songs that repeat in the mind and words that become infected with musical sound. In his diatribe against Othello, Thomas Rymer expressed particular frustration over what he perceived as the play’s substitution of “vanity, confusion, Tintamarre, and Jingle-jangle” for moral meaning.47 This complaint suggests Rymer’s awareness that the sonic aspects of Othello work against a neat encapsulation of the play’s meaning. The Willow Song, paradoxically, encapsulates this refusal to encapsulate. If Desdemona had managed to reach the last verse, the audience might have heard that the song itself serves as an epitaph for the singer: “Take this for my farewell and latest adieu / Write this on my tomb, that in love I was true.” Certainly this would be an appropriate epitaph for Desdemona, but the possible variants to the song render it problematic. In the traditional ballad, preserved in several slightly differing versions, the male speaker, deserted by his mistress, asks his listeners to hang the willow garland over his grave, so that this “sign of her falseness” will “blaze her untrue.”48 The song itself, presented as the last words of the lover, becomes the emblematic willow garland, which will provide an epitaph for the speaker by its mere existence, permanently pronouncing him true and his love false. The original ballad and the emblem of the willow prove almost interchangeable: the content of the song can be summed up in the symbol of unrequited love. This same emblem is completely inadequate to the events of Othello, a play that has little or nothing to do with unrequited love. Nevertheless, both Desdemona and Emilia treat the song as an epitaph, as a final pronouncement that will proclaim and determine, at the moment of their deaths, the essence and meaning of their lives. “An old thing ’twas,” says Thomas Rymer, A Short View of Tragedy (1693), facsim. edn (New York: AMS, 1970), 146. 48 Quoted in Sternfeld, Music in Shakespearean Tragedy, 33. It is difficult to know which version or versions of the song the audience might have known. See Lindley, Shakespeare and Music, 149–50. 47

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Desdemona, “but it expressed her fortune, / And she died singing it” (4.3.28–9). The women’s echoes of the song blaze them true—or would, if songs in Othello could work as blazons or emblems. “Willow” is not a sign, either of falseness or truth; and the “song of Willow” does not work as a sign does. The Willow song manages to be both appropriate and inappropriate to the fortunes and the situations of the women who sing it. The song further resists emblematic treatment by the fragmentary form in which it appears and by its refusal to remain in one place. Desdemona’s protestation of her love for Othello is interrupted by a practical request: “My love doth so approve him / That even his stubbornness, his checks, his frowns— / Prithee unpin me—have grace and favour in them” (4.3.18–20). This interruption anticipates Desdemona’s following interruptions of her song: ‘Sing willow’— Lay by these.— ‘willow, willow.’ Prithee, hie thee. He’ll come anon. ‘Sing all a green willow must be my garland. Let nobody blame him, his scorn I approve’— Nay, that’s not next. Hark, who is’t that knocks? (4.3.45–51)

Here the practical request—“Prithee, hie thee”—interrupts her singing of words that echo the earlier, spoken ones: “My love doth so approve him”; “His scorn I approve” (18; 50). The literal song and the lyrical verse are parallel not only in content but also in form, both broken by similar asides. The song is implicitly situated as the origin of the spoken words, even though Desdemona speaks them before she ever begins singing. As she explains, the song is in her thoughts before it ever breaks forth into utterance: “That song tonight / Will not go from my mind” (4.3.29). This particular line—“let nobody blame him” seems especially persistent, since it pushes its way in out of order. The line between Desdemona’s speech and her singing is constantly on the verge of breaking down, the song intruding insistently even when not explicitly acknowledged. Simultaneously, time begins to unravel, as Desdemona anticipates Othello’s arrival, and then thinks she hears knocking. Already, the song, winding in and out of the text, encompasses and compresses Othello’s entrance and Emilia’s violent knocking in the final scene, just before Desdemona’s dying absolution of Othello. The moment of the entrance of the Willow Song into the play can be traced still further back to the conversation between Iago, Emilia, and Desdemona just after the so-called “brothel scene.” (Only a brief encounter between Iago and Roderigo separates this episode from the “Willow” scene.) Here Desdemona first formulates the idea that echoes in the song and re-emerges in her dying speech. “Unkindness may do much,” she declares, “And his unkindness may defeat my life, / But never taint my love” (4.2.163–5). Suggestively, these lines appear only in the Folio, like

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the Willow Song itself.49 Desdemona goes on to tell Emilia, “I cannot weep, nor answers have I none / But what should go by water. Prithee tonight / Lay on my bed my wedding sheets, remember” (4.2.105–8). This speech seems to leap ahead to the next scene, where Emilia reminds Desdemona of the sheets, and Desdemona drifts into a song that describes how “The fresh streams ran by her and murmured her moans” (4.3.42). Desdemona still has no answers save answers that go by water. In the earlier scene, still stunned, she says that Othello should have “chid” her gently, “for, in good faith, / I am a child to chiding” (4.2.116–17). Several versions of the Willow song survive separately from the play, none exactly like the one Desdemona sings. The line that is of such particular importance for Othello, “Let nobody blame him, his scorn I approve,” appears in two different versions. One reads: “Let nobody blame me, her scorns I do prove,” the other reads: “Let nobody chide her, her scorns I approve.”50 In her alteration of the song at this line, and in her general deportment, Desdemona confuses the two different versions of the song, as well as her own situation and the situation of the man in the song. Should it be “let nobody blame him?” Or “her”? Or “me”? Her multiple possible responses to the situation correspond to different song possibilities. In Desdemona’s own singing, the mournful but comforting phrase “the fresh streams ran by her and murmured her moans” occupies the same sequence of musical notes as the bitingly cynical “If I court more women, you’ll couch with more men,” and Desdemona cannot work out the order of the verses. It is impossible to establish which version has priority, as the song evades temporal sequence. The idea of replacing one set of words for another with the same tune embodies the irony at the center of Shakespearean music, an irony that eats at everything around it, and simultaneously dissolves itself into nothing. The Othello music is an echoing both lyrical and mocking; the mockery viciously undercuts the lyricism, and the lyricism simultaneously overwhelms the mockery. The overlap of phrases protesting truthfulness with other phrases promising infidelity—if I court more women you’ll couch with more men—proves strikingly parallel to Desdemona’s own language in her prior declaration of innocence. Just after her insistence that Othello’s unkindness can never taint her love, she declares: “I cannot say ‘whore’. / It does abhor me now I speak the word” (4.2.165–6). In one word, Desdemona expresses her distance from and her identification with “whore,” a syllable that creeps sonically into her abhorrence of the idea and the word itself. The moment is bizarre—and characteristically Shakespearean. At a moment of 49 For an account of the Folio as Shakespeare’s revision of the Quarto Othello, see John Jones, Shakespeare at Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 250–51. These additions in the Folio have been characterized as adding pathos through the expansion of Desdemona’s role. I would suggest that these particular additions are inextricably linked, and do not merely strengthen the pathetic element: the Willow Song is implicitly introduced before we ever hear it. 50 Emphasis mine. For the first version, see Duffin, 468; for the second, see Sternfeld, Music in Shakespearean Tragedy, 33.

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intense pathos, as the innocent Desdemona expresses sorrow, bewilderment, and eternal devotion, Shakespeare seemingly cannot resist what Samuel Johnson described as his fatal Cleopatra—the quibble. The pun draws attention from the character’s plight to the sonic surfaces of her language at the most inappropriate moment, introducing the danger of a comical rather than pathetic effect. More ominously, Desdemona cannot escape from the name of “whore,” even as she rejects it. On the other hand, her pun—intentional or unintentional—opens the possibility of just such an escape: ideally, “whore” would become just a sound, without the weight of meaning. Theories of natural language, positing a harmonious correspondence between words and things, tend to be unsettled by puns, which draw attention to the disparity between sound and sense.51 In this situation, however, it is a relief if “whore” and “abhor” are simply arbitrary sounds. As Gross points out, it is Iago’s strategy to imbue words and phrases with meaning that they do not in fact possess.52 These words and phrases then return repeatedly, insistent fragments of language that seem both empty and possessed of a revelatory significance. Music, disturbingly, acts in a similar manner. Overall, the play suggests that certain moments are “musical” not because they are harmonious, but because they return again and again in different contexts, to painful and ironic effect. The contested relationships of language and music, earthly sounds and divine harmonies come together at the most important of these moments. As the hero and heroine meet on the shores of Cyprus they exchange an ecstatic greeting while Iago promises to “set down the pegs that make this music” (2.1.197). What does Iago mean by “this music”? Marital concord? The ravishing blank verse lines that Othello and Desdemona have been spinning out? During the course of the following two acts, Iago reduces Othello to incoherent prose, even as he destroys the symbolic concord between husband and wife. Yet even at this moment of perfect music, Othello approaches another kind of incoherence, in speech that edges towards the dissolution of speech. This expression of inexpressibility is set forth in terms of music—though in a way that makes it difficult to separate harmony from discord. I cannot speak enough of this content; It stops me here; it is too much of joy. And this, and this, the greatest discords be That e’er our hearts shall make! (2.1.193–6).

Although Othello insists on the inexpressibility of his joy, he continues to speak; but this speech does not resemble his earlier performance before the Senate, where his insistence on the rudeness of his language made a rather disingenuous prelude to a brilliant rhetorical set-piece. Here the referents of important words become increasingly unclear. “It” presumably refers to Othello’s “content,” but in its very vagueness, the word simultaneously seems to refer to more, to the inexpressibility See Chapter 1, 44–6. Gross, 109–10.

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of what the speaker feels. As Othello repeats “it” a second time, the word’s meaning both empties out and becomes richer as “it” becomes, tautologically, “too much of joy,” in its iteration standing in for an ecstasy that becomes more unspeakable with each repetition. This powerful expression of the inexpressible is effected partly through the potentially empty repetition of the vague little word “it,” and through the perfect measure and balance of the line. The form crystallizes as the content evaporates. On the page, the referent of “here” remains unclear. On the stage Othello might point to his heart; but “here” could also refer to the place in the line where Othello literally does “stop” with a strong caesura. The line points self-reflexively to its own formal arrangement even as it gestures outward towards the indefinite. The Quarto stage direction indicates that “this” and “this” refer to kisses, but here too the conveyance of meaning depends upon gesture, action. Othello’s language stands at the very verge of dissolution, yet his words roll out in formally perfect iambic pentameter. Only inevitable pauses for the kisses disturb the rhythm of the line; from this perspective, the kisses might be considered discords. On another level, the sounds of words make kisses—this and this—into discords.53 The need for concordant sounds in the line literally produces “discord.” One could say that at this moment Othello’s language goes as far as language can go before it becomes music, whereas in his later epileptic babbling his language disintegrates into noise. These linguistic categories of noise and music, however, do not correlate neatly with the speculative ideas of harmony and chaos current at the time. Iago’s threat to untune “this music” implies that Othello’s inner harmony and marital accord are one with the music of his language; but several critics have noted hints of future trouble in this speech itself, before Iago has the chance to create discord.54 Othello’s words are almost too ecstatic for concord, perhaps too erotic for harmony. Iago may disrupt metaphorical harmony by ruining a happy marriage. On the other hand, in transforming Knight’s Othello music into fragmented and profane prose, he simply may make literal the figurative “foul disproportions” (3.3.238) inherent in sweet, seductive sound. The play repeatedly returns to this moment of musical meeting and discordant kisses on the shore; just as insistently, it reiterates scenes of alarm bells and noises in the dark. These two paradigmatic moments could not seem more different: one presents harmony in the reunion of a wedded couple; the other introduces disturbances that threaten this harmony. But as the play progresses, the musical The idea of a kiss as a discord is in itself odd: “The kiss is a symbolic marriage of souls, for by its means the breath, which is soul, passes from one body into the other” (Gretchen Finney, Musical Backgrounds for English Literature: 1580–1650 [New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1962], 96). 54 See for instance Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980): “In Othello’s ecstatic words, the proper sentiments of a Christian husband sit alongside something else: a violent oscillation between heaven and hell, a momentary possession of the soul’s absolute content, an archaic sense of monumental scale …. Nothing conflicts openly with Christian orthodoxy, but the erotic intensity that informs almost every word is experienced in tension with it” (241–2). 53

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moments and the moments of violent noise seem less and less like different moments. Violence already sounds as Iago sings, “And let me the cannikin clink, clink” (2.3.60). In his subsequent account of the fight, he tells of “the clink and fall of swords” (2.3.217); and the sound of drinking cups hitting one another becomes the clash of weapons in a chaotic brawl. Iago’s dangerous drinking music is hardly the symbolic harmony of the wedded couple; but the greeting of the lovers at Cyprus is later re-enacted in violent and distorted form as Othello strikes Desdemona and tells Lodovico: “You are welcome, sir, to Cyprus. Goats and monkeys!” (4.1.260). Iago’s crude language of lustful animals, used to wake Brabantio in the opening scene, now erupts from Othello, and the “music” of the Moor’s speech and the “music” of his harmonious meeting with his wife are simultaneously untuned. The supposedly harmonious meeting at Cyprus returns in an even more disturbing form in the murder scene. Thomas Rymer was shocked, perhaps quite rightly, at the language of Othello’s soliloquy preceding the murder of his wife: “But for our comfort, however felonious is the Heart, hear with what soft language, he does approach her.”55 Knight perceives this same “softening” of horror in terms of music, and refers to “the final tragedy, itself so beautiful that passion’s tempests themselves become a noble music.”56 This transformation of tragedy into music is implicit in the play itself. In the speech preceding the murder, Othello has regained his lyrical vein of speech, and his response to the sleeping Desdemona seems designed to recall the earlier moment of happiness at their reunion. In his operatic adaptation of Othello, Giuseppe Verdi makes powerful use of a returning kiss motif. It appears for the first time at the conclusion of a love duet for Otello and Desdemona that borrows material from Shakespeare’s scene of meeting at Cyprus. The motif returns as Otello approaches and kisses the sleeping Desdemona in the final act, and then makes its final appearance as Otello attempts to die upon a kiss. The motif is one of many examples of Verdi’s success at translating the play into another medium; but in this case, he draws on something in Shakespeare that has already been conceived in musical terms. The results in the play, though less viscerally effective, are somewhat more complex, because the very musicality of the moment—taken for granted in an opera—is deeply problematic. As Othello stands over his sleeping wife, the resurgence of his euphonious blank verse and the repeated series of concordant discords—kisses—that marked the arrival in Cyprus, create the impression of a musical return. The mysterious “it” returns as well, though with considerably darker implications, in Othello’s oblique entrance lines: “It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul. / Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars. / It is the cause” (5.1.1–3). The reiteration of something that cannot be named becomes almost incantatory. Several lines later, a similar reiteration half-disguises murderous intent: “Put out the light, and then put out the light” (7). Following the repeated phrases of the speech’s opening, the sentence Rymer, 138. G. Wilson Knight, The Shakespearian Tempest, 3rd edn (London: Methuen,

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deceptively suggests that the second clause repeats the first for sonic reasons, to fill out the line. But in fact, the second “light” is Desdemona’s life. Violence is obscured by sonorous repetition. Further linguistic iteration comes with Othello’s kisses, as he reworks his original declaration—“And this, and this, the greatest discords be”—into “One more, one more … one more, and that’s the last” (5.2.17–19).57 In answer to Desdemona’s repeated pleas for the mercy of Heaven, he twice returns: “Amen, with all my heart … I say amen” (5.2.36, 62), just as he had replied, “Amen to that, sweet powers,” in response to her earlier prayer for their future happiness (2.1.192).58 This disturbingly musical approach to murder— a murder brought “out of tune” (5.2.124) only when Othello discovers that Cassio lives—is almost interrupted by Emilia’s frantic calling and knocking at the door. Her interruption provides yet another collision between the metaphoric duet of the lovers and the noises in the night, a collision that completely reverses our sense of how we are to understand the two phenomena. Emilia’s noise eventually sets at least some semblance of justice in motion. If echoes of the unheard music of the divinely ordered world ever enter audibly into the play, it is difficult to tell just where these entrances occur, and how these echoes manifest themselves. The problematic relationship of music and noise illuminates and informs the play’s treatment of language in general. Both Joel Fineman and Kenneth Gross have addressed the question of language and meaning in Othello in terms that touch upon the play’s noise and music. Fineman links Othello’s hollowness as a subject with the hollowness of the play’s language, which echoes with “the sound of ‘O.’”59 Gross focuses on Iago’s language and its effects on Othello, describing the ensign’s words as “a kind of disguised babble.” Iago “renders words such as ‘honest’ and ‘think’ at once empty and full, vacant purses burdened by the illusion that there is meaning inside them.”60 In describing this “babble,” Gross makes an explicit move away from musical terms: “Chorusing with [Knight’s ‘Othello music’] however, is what I would call the Othello noise, or the Othello babble … a kind of furious blankness of meaning that gathers around certain words and utterances in the play.”61 Gross makes a distinction between this “furious 57 There are other reminiscences as well: “If after every tempest come such calms, / May the winds blow till they have wakened death” (2.1.182–3) becomes decidedly macabre, but remains recognizable in “Be thus when thou art dead, and I will kill thee / And love thee after” (5.2.18–19). Othello’s final line—“I kissed thee ere I killed thee. No way but this: / Killing myself, to die upon a kiss” (5.2.368–9)—fits this pattern, and also recalls “If it were now to die / ’Twere now to be most happy” (2.1.186–7). 58 Gross describes the Othello who enters the bedroom in the final act as “the strange, covert embodiment of that more violent, intrusive noise (whose penetration into bedrooms we have not previously been in a position to witness)” (125). 59 Joel Fineman, “The Sound of O in Othello: The Real of the Tragedy of Desire,” in The Subjectivity Effect in Western Literary Tradition: Essays Toward the Release of Shakespeare’s Will (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 151. 60 Gross, 109, 110. 61 Gross, 120.

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blankness of meaning” and the play’s moments of cacophony; but the play itself suggests that both kinds of “noise,” taken to an extreme, are impossible to separate from one another—and from music. George Bernard Shaw, half-admiringly, halfcontemptuously, described the play in terms of “word-music … in which sense is drowned in sound. The words do not convey ideas: they are streaming ensigns and tossing branches to make the tempest of passion visible.”62 “Streaming ensigns”—a suggestive choice of words. Iago is the ensign, the standard bearer, the one who repeatedly produces signs lacking in significance. Inadvertently or not, Shaw suggests a weird overlap between the thundering music of Othello’s passion and the blankness of Iago’s language. In his farewell to arms, Othello conceives of the order of his life in terms of musical sounds of war. It is not immediately clear, however, whether war is musical to Othello because it is orderly,63 or because the sounds of war appeal to him in a direct, even sensual way, as music does. The speech, in its own sonic richness, suggests the latter possibility; and simultaneously, the sensual music of war is partially or entirely a creation of the speech. Othello’s farewell serves as an eerie illustration of the way that the “music” of the poetry begins to act like the noisy music it describes. Indeed, the speech suggests that Othello’s verbal “music” actually originates in the Moor’s habitual speaking of “broils and battle” (1.3.87). Here his words are at once recollection and re-experience, as his language summons the glorious noises that he has lost forever. O, now for ever Farewell the tranquil mind, farewell content, Farewell the plumèd troops and the big wars That makes ambition virtue! O, farewell, Farewell the neighing steed and the shrill trump, The spirit-stirring drum, th’ear piercing fife, The royal banner, and all quality, Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war! And O, you mortal engines whose rude throats Th’immortal Jove’s dread clamours counterfeit, Farewell! (3.3.352–62)

The sounds of war exert a seemingly irresistible force on Othello’s imagination. He moves on from the music of war—the drum and the fife—to war’s pageantry, but then circles back to the sound of the cannon, through yet another inarticulate “O!” This “O”—the indication of the hollowness of Othello’s language and of Othello himself?—appears three times, along with the iteration of “farewell.” Indeed, Othello says “farewell” so many times that, like any overly repeated word, Shaw on Shakespeare, ed. Edwin Wilson (New York: Dutton, 1961), 160. Shakespeare and his contemporaries often described war in terms of music, referring

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it begins to lose its meaning, taking on, in Barton’s words “a bizarre, essentially mysterious quality of its own, like a word in some arcane and alien tongue.” But unlike Lear or Poor Tom, Othello at this point is neither mad nor feigning madness: this is not the fragmented prose of Shakespeare’s insane characters, but well-ordered blank verse. The Moor turns the noises of war into music through his description of them; but in the process, his own language starts to act as both more and less than words. A commentator sympathetic to Othello’s style might think of this speech in terms of “word-music,”64 but one less sympathetic might begin to think in terms of windy bluster. Thomas Rymer quotes this same speech of Othello’s farewell to arms, and then adds: “These lines are recited here, not for anything Poetical in them, besides the sound, that pleases.”65 While Rymer is hardly the most sensitive or sympathetic critic of the play, most of his points, including this one, deserve attention, as the aspects of Othello that Rymer tends to find most appalling or irritating are generally its most central, idiosyncratic, and characteristic features. Shaw praises the speech (rather condescendingly) for the very reason that Rymer condemns it: “Tested by the brain it is ridiculous, tested by the ear, it is sublime …. It is no use to speak ‘Farewell the tranquil mind’; for the more intelligently and reasonably it is spoken the more absurd it is. It must affect us as ‘Ora per sempre addio, sante memorie’ affects us when sung by Tamagno [the creator of the role of Verdi’s Otello].”66 Shaw here returns to a favorite theme, the idea that Othello is actually an Italian opera in disguise. In his opinion, “Othello’s transports are conveyed by a magnificent but senseless music which rages from the Proponick to the Hellespont in an orgy of thundering sound and bounding rhythm.”67 Shaw’s description recalls Desdemona’s own confused protestation to Othello: “What doth your speech import? / I understand a fury in your words, / But not the words” (4.2.33–4). In other words, his speech is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Shaw’s designation of Othello as Romantic Italian opera is of course appallingly unhistorical; but there is also something right about it. The qualities of Othello that Shaw considers operatic remain musical, if musical in a rather different and problematic way, when considered in their historical and cultural context. I would suggest that the effect described by Shaw is deliberate, part of the play’s intense questioning of the nature of music, and of poetic language that seeks to achieve the effects of music. Othello’s emphasis on the trappings of war—its pomp and circumstance—would certainly support the idea of some essential hollowness in his identity and speech. Although George Bernard Shaw is not exactly a sympathetic commentator, his description is instructive. See Shaw on Shakespeare, 160. 65 Rymer, 124. 66 Shaw on Shakespeare, 159–60. 67 G.B. Shaw, “A word more about Verdi,” in the Anglo-Saxon Review, March 1901, reprinted in the appendix to London Music 1888–9 as heard by Corno di Bassetto (London, 1937), 394. 64

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He portrays war—and, implicitly, his own speech—as the counterfeiting of thunderclaps. The cannon, like other kinds of earthly music, “mocks” heavenly sound: only in this case it imitates not the everlasting harmony of angels, but the noise of thunder. The “rude throats” of the mortal engines may remind us of Othello’s earlier self-deprecatory insistence on the “rudeness” of his soldier’s speech (1.3.81). Here, the rude throats of the cannon are the source of their power to imitate Jove. At the same time, while the cannons are “mortal” in their deadly power, they are also the instruments of mortals, in stark contrast to the roar of immortal Jove. Yet the conclusion of the play hints that “Jove’s” true thunder is no more meaningful or efficacious than mortal voices. “Are there no stones in heaven,” cries Othello, when he discovers Iago’s treachery, “But what serves for the thunder?” (5.2.241–2). In other words, heaven does not punish villains: it only makes empty noises. It is precisely this lack of heavenly justice in the play that upset Thomas Rymer. In the farewell to arms, the confusion of orderly noise and chaotic music that Othello describes enters into his speech; but such confusion is also typical of the language of the play as a whole. Critics have frequently noted how the verbal “music” of the play eventually dissolves into incoherent fragments and echoes of the cries of animals. Knight describes this “ugliness” as the other, darker side of the Othello music.68 The baroque style of Othello’s verse can all too easily become bombast, and may degenerate into empty noise. Knight asserts the resurgence of poetic music at the end of the play; yet in drawing an intimate connection between music and the noise that would seem to be its opposite, he echoes Rymer, who sees no distinction between the two sides of the “Othello music.” For Rymer, all the play’s language is like the howling of animals. He declares derisively that “in the Neighing of an Horse, or in the growling of a Mastiff, there is a meaning, there is as lively expression, and, may I say, more humanity, than many times in the Tragical flights of Shakespear.”69 Perhaps deliberately, these words recall the bestial imagery in Othello, particularly Iago’s lines to Brabantio: “you’ll have your daughter covered with a Barbary horse, you’ll have your nephews neigh to you” (I.i.112–14). Here Rymer places his finger on something of great interest. For this “ugliness” that he obliquely quotes is inextricably interwoven with the play’s literal and figurative musics. For Othello, the neighing horse makes up one instrument in a consort of military music; and Desdemona’s Willow Song was passed down to her by a maid called Barbary. The song thus seems to have an exotic origin: but in fact, it is an “old thing,” familiar to the English audience. The potential “hollowness” of Othello’s language, its musicality and the ease with which it degenerates into noise, can seem a function of exoticism. It proves impossible, however, to project all the problems of language, sound, and emptiness onto the foreign Othello. In some obscure way, animal noises are the origin of all sung and spoken music. The transformation from obscene neighing to melody and lyricism can suggest that the language of the play possesses a transformative Knight, The Wheel of Fire, 98. Rymer, 95–6.

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power; but it can also suggest, more ominously, that when reduced to essentials, all kinds of audible music are merely lustful noises, and any true harmony can manifest itself on earth only in dead silence. In a brief and frequently omitted scene, the Clown silences Cassio’s troop of musicians. “[T]he general so likes your music,” he declares, “that he desires you, for love’s sake, to make no more noise with it … If you have any music that may not be heard, to’t again, but, as they say, to hear music the general does not greatly care” (3.1.11–16). Several critics have identified the “music that may not be heard” as the music of the spheres, the concord of men’s lives.70 Lawrence Ross reads this little scene as an emblematic representation of the conflict between the inaudible music of universal order and the degenerate and transitory piping of earthly music.71 Yet the clown’s mockery does not provide the purest or safest vehicle for the communication of symbolism. He evokes an image of the group of musicians going “to’t again”: standing about and blowing into their bagpipes, but this time without making a sound. The image is not only grotesque, but eerie. Startlingly, Fineman also finds this scene “emblematic,” but not of the conflict between earthly and spiritual music. He takes the “music without sound” to be “a definition … of the sound of O in Othello,” the sound in which Othello’s hollowness is materialized.72 I would argue that the phrase “music that may not be heard” does evoke the idea of divine harmony, but it does so in a context that makes the idea seem alien, even frightening. Music that may not be heard, after all, from an empirical perspective, is silence.73 This association of divine music and silence is potentially terrifying. The clown’s banter plays dangerously with the relationship between the two: on earth, the only true music is silent music; but if it is silent, does it exist any longer? The Clown also brings the potential identity of music and noise to the attention of the audience when he tells the players to make no more noise with their music. To modern ears, the Clown simply tells the musicians that they are producing noise not music; but the word “noise” had a broader range of meanings for an early modern audience, and could mean sweet musical sounds as well as cacophony.74 This particular music may be noisy in the worst sense; but in another sense all music is noise—or all audible music, at any rate. Fineman argues that the Clown’s “music without sound” returns in the Willow Song.75 In his reading, “Willow” refers back to Othello and to “Will” Shakespeare, and the singer herself serves only as a mouthpiece for this sonic representation of subjectivity. The song, however, is Desdemona’s and later Emilia’s. Interestingly, the implicit musicality of Othello’s death echoes the last moments of the women. 72 73 70

See King, 155; Ross. Ross, 124. Fineman, 157. The Clown’s insistence on silence makes him a potential Iago figure, since the ensign seeks to “untune” music, and retreats into silence at the end of the play. See Stephen Rogers, “Othello: Comedy in Reverse,” Shakespeare Quarterly 24 (1973): 210–20. 74 See Introduction, 5. 75 Fineman, 157. 71

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When Othello punctuates his final speech with the “bloody period” of suicide, the Venetian spectators conclude in horror that “all that’s spoke is marred” (5.2.367). Fineman describes this line as one of the morals of the play.76 Nevertheless, like Emilia—and like his wife—Othello continues to speak even after he has been pronounced dead, in an attempt to bring murder back in tune with a last discordant— and rhyming—kiss. The voice that continues to speak after death is a musical voice. This musicality becomes explicit in the case of Emilia. “[Iago] hath killed his wife,” Gratiano announces; “He’s gone, but his wife’s killed” (5.2.243–5). Emilia, however, still lives long enough to “play the swan.” Desdemona is pronounced dead even more definitively, but she returns to life long enough to echo the sentiments of her song in her attempt to deflect blame from her husband. Othello’s final couplet may be as “marred” as his earlier speech, and his selfconsciously musical ending may not be sufficient to transform his story into a tale of doomed but transcendent love; still, he keeps trying to speak, to conjure up the earlier music of his language, at the edge of ultimate silence. All that’s spoke may be marred; but these people simply will not stop trying to speak.77 Emilia offers the best commentary on the efficacy of dying words. In her return to the song, she proclaims her own truth and Desdemona’s. Yet even this moment is marked by doubt, doubt in the possibility of truth—and true speech—and doubt in the continuance of the self beyond death. What did thy song bode, lady? Hark, canst thou hear me? I will play the swan, And die in music. [Sings] ‘Willow, willow, willow’— Moor, she was chaste. She loved thee, cruel Moor. So come my soul to bliss as I speak true. So, speaking as I think, alas, I die. (5.2.253–8)

The juxtaposition of Emilia’s last two lines implicitly questions the possibility of truth in both words and music. These lines appear syntactically parallel, but in the final line, death replaces entrance into bliss, and “speaking as I think” replaces speaking true. The echo of “so” calls attention to the fact that the word works differently in the two lines. The first “so” is conditional; the second introduces a statement of fact. Emilia cannot work out what the song boded and we cannot work out the implications of her “swan-like end”—an end that Knight, I think rightly, attributes to the play as well as to Emilia. Emilia’s last words urgently pose the question of whether language itself—and the sounds out of which language is formed and into which it vanishes—can ever become “true.” For Fineman, “it is only to the extent the play manages to make its own language perform, as does the Liar’s Paradox, the truth of its own falseness, Fineman, 151. Even the pathetic Roderigo is reportedly possessed by the same almost miraculous

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impulse; as Cassio explains: “And even now he spake / After long seeming dead, Iago hurt him, / Iago set him on” (5.2.336–8).

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that Othello, as the representation of a person, exudes a powerfully psychologistic subjectivity effect.”78 Yet despite his lack of interest in the “subjectivity effect” exuded by Desdemona, Fineman’s conception of the materialization of hollowness in sound applies eerily well to the heroine’s terrifying final words: “Nobody, I myself. Farewell” (5.2.133). These words are a spoken recapitulation of her earlier interrupted melody: “Let nobody blame him, his scorn I approve.—Nay, that’s not next.” With her last breath, Desdemona continues to imitate Barbary, who “died singing it.” In claiming guilt for the murder, Desdemona identifies herself with Othello and makes the two again one flesh.79 Yet her words simultaneously deny his very existence: she is all alone, there is nobody there but herself, and she is not only already vanishing into nothingness, but the self-assertion—“I myself”—is also a denial of self—“Nobody.” These four words come close to encapsulating Fineman’s “idea of a ‘one’ inhabited by ‘none,’” which he sees as necessary to an understanding of the play’s account of the falseness of language and the subject “compact of its own loss.”80 Nevertheless, the Willow Song and the lyrical words which it haunts and shapes are more than the materialization of hollowness: this is the place where the empty and the meaningful overlap in a moment of mutual disturbance. The denial, after all, is followed, however tenuously, by the assertion—not the other way around. “Nobody, I myself. Farewell”—this is a statement that on some level enacts the Willow song. It is a gesture of forgiveness—“Let nobody blame him; his scorn I approve”—but also a claim for integrity that vanishes even as it is spoken. It combines touching intimacy and closeness with an appalling distance, in which the familiar becomes strange. Desdemona’s song is a way for her to reclaim her past— she remembers it from childhood—and a way to express feelings that she seems unable to articulate in any other way. At the same time, she loses herself in it. Who is “Desdemona” after all, when she sings? Herself? Barbary? An anonymous “poor soul”? The voice of folk tradition? And who is Emilia when she takes up the song, and emphatically asserts her own identity and truth? (“So speaking as I think, alas, I die.”) The self takes shape only at the edge of the abyss. The space from which Desdemona and Emilia sing, whether full or hollow, is a space that the original audience might have been forced to occupy, as they would have been familiar with the tune of the old song, and may have experienced, like Emilia, its lingering effects. In describing how the song haunts her, Desdemona emphasizes its prior existence in the world, independent of her own story, and even of Barbary’s story: “She had a song of willow. / An old thing ’twas, but it expressed her fortune, / And she died singing it. That song tonight / Will not go from my mind” (4.3. 27–30). The “old thing” breaks down clear divisions between the stage world and the real world, between the characters and the audience, as it reverberates in the heads of the listeners just as it does in the imaginary minds of Desdemona and Emilia. Fineman, 151. See Grennan, 290. 80 Fineman, 148, 150. 78 79

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Desdemona is a character in a drama with no internal thoughts: nothing that she does not express to the audience exists. Nevertheless, Desdemona’s reference to a song that will not go from her head provides her with a new, illusory interiority, as an audience who knows the old tune can hear what is going on in her mind before she ever begins to sing aloud. She gives the impression of having thoughts that precede her speaking. In referring to a memory (the song) to which she has not yet given voice, she establishes a personal chronology askew from the chronology of the play. She remembers hearing the song in the past, but it hasn’t happened yet for the audience—or has happened only to the extent that the audience momentarily shares this interior space, remembering the song that Desdemona says she remembers. This old song is simultaneously shared and not shared. If the audience knows the song, they can “hear” for a moment what is going on in Desdemona’s mind; yet this mind remains separate, distinct and foreign, because of the different and unknowable associations that the audience must imagine “Desdemona” bringing to the song. She and Barbary both know the same song, but it cannot mean precisely the same thing to both of them—so it both is and is not the same song. Desdemona’s singing provides access to a secret mind and at the same time renders it opaque. The Willow Song, twisting in and out of the play’s noise, and in and out of the minds of characters and audience, provides an oblique and dynamic model for the “music” of the play itself. When the Clown mockingly asks the musicians for music that cannot be heard, they respond that they have “none such.” This response contains yet another musical pun, as “Nonesuch” was in fact a popular contemporary tune.81 The musicians’ response is thus both denial and affirmation: they have no music that cannot be heard, but they do have something else. Through the pun, the absence of “such” music becomes an elusive presence. When the double meaning of the phrase is registered, it becomes difficult to tell if the musicians have answered the Clown’s question or not. “Have you any music that cannot be heard?” “We have an old tune.” The song becomes the expression of something that cannot be expressed. In his own final words—which point towards and explain, and refuse to explain, his even more final silence—Iago hints at the inherent unspeakableness, in every sense, of everything that has happened: “Demand me nothing. What you know, you know. / From this time forth I never will speak word” (5.2.309–10). What has happened can be understood on some level (and Iago suggests that Othello is complicit in some kind of unspoken knowledge), but can be expressed only in and by absence and silence. For Desdemona and Emilia, on the other hand, the Willow Song is the “Nonesuch” standing in for something that can neither be heard nor uttered, standing in both for the horror of events, and for the possible alleviation and swan-like fading of this horror. The eerie and tantalizing promises of music in Othello—the ability of song to suggest an inward self both integral and hollow, and the suggestion of otherworldly presence in audible sounds—are given a still more extended and searching expression in Hamlet. King, 155n14.

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Chapter 3

“Re-speaking Earthly Thunder”: Hamlet’s Sonic Phantoms Written at a time when traditional theories of the cosmos were becoming increasingly discredited, Hamlet transforms the association between music and the divine into an association between the musical and the ghostly. The play originated in a world where the cosmos still consisted of harmonic ratios, where angels were accompanied in their song by the revolving heavenly spheres. The human soul was harmonically constructed; the healthy human body considered equally harmonious in its balance of humors. “When I made the firmament,” declares Nature in the 1586 treatise, The Praise of Musicke, “I established it by concent. When I made the elementes I qualified them with proportions. When I made man I gaue him a soule either harmony it selfe, or at least harmonicall.”1 To understand the fundamentals of music is to understand how the world works and how people work—or should work. When Claudius commits his crime, he disrupts not merely state and family, but the order of the universe itself—“The time is out of joint” (1.5.189).2 The usurper wrenches the kingdom of Denmark out of tune, and the country must be returned to harmony at whatever the cost in blood. This, at any rate, would be the traditional conception of the role of harmony in Shakespearean tragedy; and in recent decades, a number of critics have pointed out that such a conception ignores the subversive effects of the actual music in the play: the songs of Ophelia and the gravedigger.3 Understandably, Ophelia’s discordant music-making has received the largest share of attention. She arguably stands, like Banquo’s ghost, as the origin of an oppressive line of inarticulate madwomen. Ophelia and her progeny disturb the ordered, patriarchal world around them through a means of communication that replaces signs with 1 John Case, The Praise of Musicke (1586), facsim. edn (New York: G. Olms, 1980), 73. 2 The word “harmony” derives from the Greek “harmonia,” a complex term meaning, among other things, “joining, joint, agreement, concord of sounds, music” (OED). “Time,” of course, also has strong musical connotations. “Ha; ha; keep time!” says Richard II. “How sour sweet music is / When time is broke and no proportion kept” (5.5.42–3). 3 For discussions of the songs of Hamlet, see Ross W. Duffin, Shakespeare’s Songbook (New York: Norton, 2004); David Lindley, Shakespeare and Music (London: Thomson, 2006); John H. Long, Shakespeare’s Use of Music, Vol 3, Histories and Tragedies (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1971); Peter J. Seng, The Vocal Songs in the Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967); and F.W. Sternfeld, Music in Shakespearean Tragedy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963). With the exception of Duffin, these writers focus primarily on Ophelia and the gravedigger.

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sound, yet they simultaneously reinforce the binary dividing logical, spiritual man from emotional, sensual woman.4 Nevertheless, a focus on Ophelia can obscure a wider pattern. Unsettling music pervades the play as a whole, and songs cannot be separated from other noises that echo with particular resonance around the grave and the apparition of Hamlet’s father. In Hamlet, song itself is ghostly. If we see Ophelia as another iteration of the Ghost urging revenge,5 we begin to perceive her music not only as uncanny, but also as hinting at more than personal secrets. “Her speech is nothing,” we are told; but later Laertes exclaims, “This nothing’s more than matter” (4.5.7, 172). The original audience would likely have heard the pun on “noting,” given the mad Ophelia’s tendency to mingle speech with song. “Noting” might be more than matter indeed, considering the persistent belief that the soul was “harmony itselfe, or at least harmonicall.” But in what sense, the play asks, might the soul or the self be musical? The Praise of Musicke’s seemingly confident—and hardly original—statement about the harmonious nature of the soul conceals a fundamental uncertainty in the slide from “harmony” to “harmonical.” The distinction is ambiguous, but a shift from the literal to the figurative plane seems to be involved. The soul may be harmonical because it responds to harmony, because it consists of harmonious proportions, or because it in some way resembles harmony. Indeed, the very word “harmony” may be a synonym for music, or it may be merely a metaphor.6 In Hamlet, there is always something ghostly about the dead musical metaphor. The play takes metaphorical references to the music of cosmic and personal health and order, and makes them literal.7 These transformations of figurative music 4 See Leslie Dunn, “Ophelia’s Songs in Hamlet: Music, Madness, and the Feminine,” in Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 50–64; and Jacquelyn Fox-Good, “Ophelia’s Mad Songs: Music, Gender, Power,” in Subjects on the World’s Stage: Essays on British Literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. David Allen and Robert White (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995), 217–38. 5 See Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality (New York: Methuen, 1987): “the ghost of Ophelia, mad, appears before her brother Laertes and incites him to revenge for the death of their father Polonius” (129). 6 In the OED, the first English definition of “harmony” is “combination or adaptation of parts, elements, or related things, so as to form a consistent and orderly whole; agreement, accord, congruity” (1a). On the other hand, the earliest English use of the word is “the combination of musical notes, either simultaneous or successive, so as to produce a pleasing effect; melody; music, tuneful sound” (OED, 4a). Music and harmony are not the same thing, but they belong to the same knot of ideas and words and are impossible to separate from one another. See Leo Spitzer, Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony: Prolegomena to an Interpretation of the Word “Stimmung,” ed. Anna Granville Hatcher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963). 7 For a treatment of “dramatic literalization” in the wordplay of Hamlet, see Margaret W. Ferguson, “Hamlet: Letters and Spirits,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Routledge, 1985), 292–309.

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into actual sounds and actual songs do not lead, however, to manifestations of the divine. Music comes to life inverted, phantasmic, mad. “My pulse as yours,” Hamlet tells his mother, “Doth temperately keep time / And makes as healthful music. It is not madness / That I have uttered” (3.4.140–42). The sane, healthy pulse is musical; but when Ophelia utters madness, she sings. The rotten, out-of-frame state of Denmark similarly emerges as a weirdly musical place. The problem is not that Denmark’s audible music fails to correspond with divine harmony. Such a disjunction would be expected, even inevitable, given Neoplatonic commonplaces about the interdependency of microcosm and macrocosm, and traditional ways of representing such interdependency on stage. In a disorderly state, there can be no true harmony: only noisiness and dissonance.8 What if dissonance and noise, however, instead of subverting or conflicting with a higher cosmic order, simply reflect it? The near impossibility of distinguishing literal song from figurative dissonance and metaphorical harmony from literal noise—as in Othello—leads to an appealing perception of a harmony that terrifies, and an order that proves senseless. Shakespeare repeatedly raises the possibility that the time is not “out of joint”—that the world of Denmark is not “out of tune” with the cosmos, but in fact faithfully echoes and reproduces the structure of the universe and the soul. This structure, however, appears increasingly loose and unfixed, reverberating with eerie, forbidding, and sometimes alluring dissonance. Amanda Eubanks Winkler has written of the problems that arise when “harmonious sounds [are] deployed to represent discord” on the early seventeenthcentury stage.9 Ophelia seemingly presents just such a case, as Laertes marvels at her ability to turn “[t]hought and affliction, passion, hell itself … to favour and to prettiness” (4.5.183–4). Winkler reads Laertes’s comment as an accurate— and disturbing—reflection of Ophelia’s performance; it “suggests that women do not go mad to incite horror in the audience. They go mad to entertain, turning suffering and affliction into ‘prettiness.’ … Her music imbues her mad speech with a persuasive power that renders Ophelia dangerous, making her death an ideological necessity.”10 Not all critics take Laertes at his word, however. Leslie Dunn, for instance, argues that Laertes attempts to control Ophelia’s noisy and Ferguson explores the materialization of words and deeds in Hamlet, and argues that, in the terms of Saint Paul, the letter kills. Music might be added to the list of things that materialize in the play, but this materialization leads to a transformation of the entire fabric of the play, imbuing it with a new, if eerie, life. 8 See Amanda Eubanks Winkler, “O Let Us Howle Some Heavy Note”: Music for Witches, the Melancholic, and the Mad on the Seventeenth-Century English Stage (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), for an account of the connections between disorderly music and political disorder on the seventeenth-century stage. In Winkler’s reading, Ophelia is not only socially transgressive, but also politically dangerous, “as her madness could be seen as emblematic of all the evils afoot in Denmark—she has been infected by the madness of a kingdom ruled by a murderous usurper” (88). 9 Winkler, 182. 10 Winkler, 86.

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disruptive song by aestheticizing it.11 From this perspective, Ophelia’s music is dangerous precisely because it is not “pretty.” Winkler’s reading raises an excellent point: why would emphasizing the “prettiness” of Ophelia’s madness make it less unsettling? In a universe where rationality, order, and harmony are inseparable, “pretty” and “musical” are the very last things madness should be. It is true, however, that a number of Hamlet’s characters are deeply invested in understanding Ophelia’s music—and other, similarly disturbing sounds—as attractive. This investment stems from the need to find harmony in the sudden and frightening noises of the world. Hamlet continues to portray the microcosm and macrocosm, the relationship between the human world and the universe as a whole, as a system of musical correspondences. But the play half-assumes the existence of such correspondences as an unquestionable truth, and half-posits their existence as the necessary condition for launching an investigation into the nature of the world that lies beyond the senses. Hamlet pursues this investigation in the spirit of a nascent empiricism, still tangled in assumptions of a universe structured on harmonic principles. What is music like, in our everyday experience? the play asks. How does it work? But neither these questions, nor the answers that eventually present themselves, can be separated from the insistent belief that to know what music is like is to know what the world is like, what souls are like. Conversely, the method of investigation—observation, the perceptions of the senses—makes it impossible to posit an ideal “harmony” qualitatively unlike the noisy music experienced on earth. Consequently, Hamlet does considerably more than depict the horror that arises from the transgression of the correspondence between state and cosmos, cosmos and individual. More radically, it evokes the horror of the correspondence itself (traditionally imagined as harmony) and what it does or does not reveal. The “music” of the play hints at a cosmos that either is unimaginably implacable and alien or else emptied of everything but echoes.12 Some entirely incomprehensible higher power presides over this universe—or else such a power is a mere illusion, a projection of an equally incomprehensible and uncomprehending humanity. In this world, singing voices emerge from the grave rather than from the heavens. Music in Hamlet retains its otherworldly associations, but it no longer serves as a symbol of divine harmony; it becomes instead a ghostly manifestation. Welling up Dunn, 50. In “King Lear” and the Gods (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1966),

11

12

William R. Elton describes how strains of Reformed theology involved “the breakdown of the traditional analogy between Creation and creature, in the reawakened consciousness of fallen man’s rational incapacity. Beyond human reason, totaliter aliter, the transcendent, rather than immanent, Deity inscrutably hid himself” (29). In The Rest is Silence: Death as Annihilation in the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), Robert Watson suggests an association between the ideas of the implacable and the empty universe: “Both the inscrutable determinism and the systematic iconoclasm of Calvinist theology created a blank wall between the living and the dead, encouraging the ominous inference that all might be blankness or darkness beyond it” (5).

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from obscure points of origin and spreading like contamination, music ultimately infects the audience as well as the characters with its iterations. In this chapter, I deal with a number of things that might seem to have little in common: not only songs and the playing of musical instruments, but also cannon-blasts, thunder-claps—and poetry. Generally, critics have emphasized the differences between these various types of literal and figurative music.13 Nevertheless, the tangled interdependence of music, noise, and words emerges as both medium and theme in Hamlet. The sounds of the play do not merely punctuate language and action, but shift seamlessly from one realm to another: from the heard to the imagined, from the literal to the metaphorical. The characters attempt to make sense of ambiguous—and potentially meaningless—noises by describing them in words; but even as they do so, the metaphorical “music” of poetry becomes less and less metaphorical. Music, noise, and speech continually dissolve into one another, as the characters struggle to make the meaningless meaningful while the meaningful simultaneously slides back into meaninglessness. Ophelia’s songs are both an attempt to restore order and an expression of order’s collapse; and the play questions what it might mean to “re-speak” thunder, in Claudius’s suggestive phrase. Such speech may reform—but on the other hand, it may merely reiterate. In re-speaking the thunder, characters work to translate chaotic sound into harmonious speech, even as the thunder in their language begins to undo the nature of such utterance as language. There remains something irresistibly desirable about this mode of expression, however, this “re-speaking” of noise into music. Throughout the play, mysterious songs and sounds express or suggest things that did not happen, alternate realities. At such moments, music can stand in for what should have happened and yet did not—as Ophelia’s songs, for instance, stand in for her father’s funeral. These sonic substitutions may be mere fantasies, projections: on the other hand, they may allow a communion with a deeper reality, a truly ordered universe underlying the temporary aberrations of earthly life. The play hints, further, that speech modeling itself after harmony may—by its potential correspondence, its accordance with the true order of the world—become action and actuality. Hamlet ultimately presents two kinds of music that are desired and evoked but never heard directly. These two elusive musics are the blast of the Last Trump and a divine song associated with angels and the voice of Christ. In the absence of either, the characters inhabit a world that contains perhaps neither justice nor grace. Hence the desire to conjure the trump and the song into being … but only shadows and fictions emerge. Eerily, Hamlet suggests that a play brings a story to life not in the form of an imitation of nature but in the form of a phantom. Those dream-like “shadows” Long draws a distinction between the instrumental and vocal music in the play, associating the former with Claudius and his bombastic public appearance, and the latter with the inner truth of Hamlet and of Ophelia. Instrumental music is theatrical, while vocal music can “reflect a divinely supernatural view” (109). Dunn and Fox-Good insist on the difference between the “music” of poetry and the music of song. 13

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described by Puck in the epilogue of A Midsummer Night’s Dream become nightmarish shades in a tragic world. In the earlier comedy, as we have seen, this “dream” is not only a shadowy play, but also a ballad: “It shall be called ‘Bottom’s Dream’ because it hath no bottom; and I will sing it in the latter end of a play, before the Duke. Peradventure, to make it the more gracious, I shall sing it at her death” (4.1.204–11). Hamlet presents a dark expansion of the ideas intimated in Bottom’s vertiginously comical speech. In the tragedy of the Prince of Denmark, strange songs and noises cluster closely around two kinds of moments: the metatheatrical moments that place most pressure on the distinction between the real and the fictional; and the frequently overlapping metaphysical moments that address the distinction between the living and the dead, this world and the next. At such moments, Hamlet anxiously questions whether figures of music are poetic lies or a cosmic truth, and whether they reflect or merely imagine a cosmos of harmoniously corresponding parts and levels. “The Soldier’s Music”: Noise, Language, Music, and Metaphor Hamlet may not immediately strike us as an intensely musical play, but it is certainly a noisy one, punctuated by sudden blasts of sound: drums and trumpets, a roaring cannon, mad singing.14 In fact, the cannon—one of the loudest sounds that people in early modern England would experience—goes off more times in Hamlet than in any other play by Shakespeare.15 The play closes with Fortinbras’s call for the “soldiers’ music” (5.2.343) and the following cannon blast. Fortinbras inadvertently weights this sound with a significance it seems unable to bear: it is to “speak loudly for” the now silent Hamlet (344). In context, the reference to “soldier’s music” is more troubling and problematic than has been recognized. Fortinbras’s words crystallize questions raised implicitly by the sounds of the play, particularly those sounds surrounding the appearance of the ghost: the martial music of cannon, drums, and trumpets that Claudius appropriates to celebrate 14 In Shakespeare’s Noise (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), Kenneth Gross writes: “Consider … how noisy a play Hamlet is, how full of sounds, of oddly troubled hearings, overhearings, and mishearings” (12). Gross remarks that “a curious pattern, even a music, emerges from the noise” (2), but he seems to be speaking in a largely metaphorical sense. In The Inarticulate Renaissance: Language Trouble in an Age of Eloquence (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), Carla Mazzio points out that in phrases such as “buzz, buzz,” the Prince “reduces speech to so much annoying noise in the ear” (209). For an account of Ophelia’s songs as noise, in the sense of Jacques Attali, see Dunn, 58. In Dunn’s account, however, this “noisy” song is “opposed to speech” (52). 15 For Shakespeare’s use of the cannon as sound effect, see Frances Ann Shirley, Shakespeare’s Use of Off-Stage Sounds (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963), 39. Shirley also points out that Shakespeare “employed ordnance more frequently than any of his contemporaries whose work has survived” (87). For the loudness of the cannon, see Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 244.

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his drinking bouts; and the cock-crow, the trump that wakes the god of day and banishes the phantom. These noises and the final rites of war are closely linked with other funereal “rites” or substitutes for rites: the songs of Ophelia and the gravedigger. Ultimately, all these sounds and their inherent ontological ambiguity become indistinguishable from the “voice” of the play itself. This process depends upon, but renders increasingly problematic, the truth of the metaphor that noise can be music. Considered in itself, Fortinbras’s reference to the “soldier’s music” of the guns is unremarkable. The “music of war” was a common Renaissance trope. Nevertheless, this apparently simple and compact idea actually conceals two different and conflicting conceptions of what it means for war to be “music.” The trope was influenced both by the Renaissance “ideal of war as a harmoniously ordered institution in which armies move as in a dance,” and by “a classical convention that translated the fearful actualities of warfare into an elevated, sonorous discourse.”16 These two traditions seem ideologically at odds. If war is “musical” because it is inherently orderly and dance-like, then surely there is no need for rhetoric to “dignify with ‘music’ the ugliness and realistic disorder of war.”17 The symbolic conception and the rhetorical description seem to fit together neatly; but in fact, while both can be used as strategies to mask an ugly reality, a “fearful battle … rend’red in music” (Henry V 1.1.45) differs essentially from an ideal if bloody battle that is music in its fearful symmetry, its orderly chain of command, and its grouping of many men into the harmonious “body” of an army. From the symbolic perspective, Fortinbras’s words do not serve merely as an elegant turn of phrase: they suggest that the thunder of the guns gestures towards a true music, the harmony that Fortinbras restores to the state. Marc Berley argues that the gun salute is “music” in just this sense: “the ‘sweet prince’ could never bring ‘sweet’ harmony to the rude world; that takes the louder speech of warlike noise.”18 Finally, after the carnage, Fortinbras and his guns announce a return to order with the sound of the thunder traditionally associated with the voice of God and His justice, the simultaneous expression and enforcement of harmony and order.19 In the original staging, the cannon would have been located in the “heavens,”20 its position alone lending it a certain symbolic authority, particularly in a play like Hamlet, which underlines the metatheatrical parallels between the 16 Paul Jorgensen, Shakespeare’s Military World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956), 4. Jorgensen’s study does not note the potential ideological clash between the rhetorical and the symbolic perspectives. 17 Jorgensen, 6. “Once more into the breach” is his example. As Jorgensen points out, Henry V is an expert in this sort of rhetoric. 18 Marc Berley, After the Heavenly Tune: English Poetry and the Aspiration to Song (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2000), 136. 19 See Elton, 202–12. 20 See Andrew Gurr and Mariko Ichikawa, Staging in Shakespeare’s Theatres (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 156.

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globe and the Globe. But does the thunder of Fortinbras’s cannon symbolize his legitimate authority, in which case the metaphor of “music” would indicate an essential truth? Or does it simply express his superior—and quite literal—force, in which case the “music” of the guns is a mere verbal trick, half-concealing violence? In this context, Fortinbras’s “soldier’s music” may reveal the hollowness of the metaphor. His words do not point to a truth, but simply disguise reality beneath a pretense of what we, like Laertes, might call “prettiness.” The metaphor is not fully reduced to mere decoration, however, and therein lies the problem. In its very structure, the traditional cosmos originating in the ideas of Plato and Pythagoras allows no troubling disjunction between the literal and the metaphoric.21 When Hamlet says that his pulse makes healthful music, he is not speaking fancifully. Like vibrating strings on an instrument, levels of meaning and levels of being respond and correspond to one another. The system itself works musically, in this sense of harmonious correspondence; and all things that are ordered, proportional, temperate, and functioning as they should, are not just like music: they are music itself in its truest form. In Fortinbras’s final words, however, this correspondence is invaded by irony. The phrase “soldier’s music” may be a flimsy euphemism, or an admission—whether proud or wry—that soldiers know no harmony other than that enforced by battle. The audience is confronted with an uneasy conflation of the symbolic and the ironic; and it is just this conflation that is troubling, in its suggestion that “music” could be symbolic and ironic at the same time. For even if Fortinbras’s salute does announce a new, divinely sanctioned order in the state of Denmark, the contrast between this sound and the angelic music imagined by Horatio remains stark. Shakespeare presses this contrast onto the awareness of his audience in Horatio’s startled shift from contemplating heavenly music to hearing earthly clamor: “Good night, sweet prince, / And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. / Why does the drum come hither?” (5.2.302–4). If the sound of the guns is not “musical” in a purely symbolic way, then the idea of the musical in itself becomes terrible—it extends too far, encompassing confused rumblings along with angelic song. Maybe the sound of the guns is not merely symbolic of a higher and inaudible harmony: maybe this thunderous noise is an accurate and literal manifestation of the very nature of this cosmic “music.”22 21 As S.K. Heninger explains, “In Pythagorean cosmology, since the universe is a system of metaphors such as the microcosm-macrocosm analogy, the method of knowledge consists in the straightforward process of translating meaning from one level of being to another by use of these metaphors” (Touches of Sweet Harmony: Pythagorean Cosmology and Renaissance Poetics [San Marino: Huntington Library, 1974], 335). See also Gary Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993): “[Metaphors of harmony] were not mere tropes of imagined relationships where none existed in reality (for this is a post-Renaissance conception of metaphor) but [analogies] that instead discovered in their creation truths about the structure itself of the world” (50). See Chapter 1, 44–6. 22 In “‘Art to Enchant’: Musical Magic and Its Practitioners in English Renaissance Drama,” Journal of the Royal Music Association 115 (1990), Linda Austern points out that

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The positioning of the cannon in the “heavens” suggests, eerily, that the gunshots may be an audible manifestation of divine song, the music of some rather more militant angels than Horatio was expecting. The words of the play must define the music and separate the speculative from the practical, the divine from the earthly. And indeed the play’s cannon blasts and trumpet calls and songs are surrounded, described, and possibly determined by language. Pierre Iselin and David Lindley have argued that words often undercut the effects of music on the early modern stage.23 Ophelia’s singing may beautify discord and madness. On the other hand, Laertes may transform Ophelia’s disordered and disturbing singing into favor and prettiness through his pretty description of her behavior. His language interprets her wild song, presenting his sister and her music to the audience in the way that he wishes to see and understand her. According to this interpretation, his words frame and control—or attempt to control—her ambivalent sounds.24 Such an argument, however, depends upon a distinction between words and noises, language and music that the play repeatedly blurs in the process of questioning how all such sounds signify. Ophelia herself treats the “words, words, words” that Hamlet speaks in the nunnery scene just as other characters treat frightening and inexplicable noises— like discordant music that her own words must somehow retune and make meaningful. In a speech of almost excessive lyricism, she translates Hamlet’s abusive words into the jangling of sweet bells: And I, of ladies most deject and wretched, That sucked the honey of his music vows Now see that noble and most sovereign reason Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh. (3.1.154–7)

music on the early modern stage “often comes to represent the audible sound of arcane forces at work … [I]deas of superhuman power [are] paradoxically reduced to the limits of human expression” (191, 196). Catherine Belsey argues that the early modern English theater occupies an unsettling middle ground between emblematic and illusionist modes of drama, and that “the superimposition of one on the other, is capable of generating a radical uncertainty precisely by withholding from the spectator the single position from which a single and unified meaning is produced” (The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama [New York: Methuen, 1985], 29). 23 Iselin, “Music and Difference: Elizabethan Stage Music and Its Reception,” in French Essays on Shakespeare and His Contemporaries: “What would France with us?” ed. Jean-Marie Maguin and Michèle Willems (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995), 108, 101; Lindley, “Shakespeare’s Provoking Music,” 79–80. Iselin writes: “[Discourse] is the unfailing means to alienate the musical phenomenon. Too much is said about music for music to unfold as a signifying system” (101). These arguments have seemed especially relevant for Hamlet, where “musical harmony … seems to sing against the voices of characters who speak the language composed, as Hamlet says, of ‘words, words, words’” (Fox-Good, “Ophelia’s Mad Songs,” 234). 24 See Dunn, 50.

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Her measured and melodious response seems disproportionate to the horror of Hamlet’s treatment of her. This speech is remarkable for its complete erasure of everything that Hamlet has actually said. The association of music vows and sweet bells works to confuse voice and reason, and Hamlet’s words—once “of so sweet breath composed” (3.1.100)—regain a certain musicality through association. This “music” is discordant, but Ophelia describes discord as melodiously as possible. When she considers Hamlet’s words as the product of sweet bells (however out of tune), she elides the brutality of their content. Ophelia’s speech revives the sweet prince through sleight-of-hand, through the lyrical description of music that was never there to begin with. She struggles to assimilate and make sense of Hamlet’s whirling words by turning them to favor and to prettiness. Soon, Gertrude and Laertes will respond to Ophelia’s own incoherent songs in exactly the same way. How does this sleight-of-hand work? Two things are involved: lyrical and formal treatment of the jarring and incoherent, and the subtle blurring of two incompatible modes of musical figuration. By juxtaposing Hamlet’s “music vows” with his sweet and bell-like reason, Ophelia tries to conflate two very different metaphors. Hamlet’s vows were “music” in a rhetorical sense: they enthralled and possibly even seduced Ophelia with their honeyed promise. Hamlet’s reason, however, is also “musical”—when it is ordered, healthy, and “in tune.” Both vows and reason, however, are sweet, providing a direct and sensual pleasure. The sweet bells of reason seem less symbolic when jumbled together with the honey of the music vows. In turn, the relationship between truth and musicality—supposedly a simple correlation in the case of Hamlet’s reason—then becomes complicated when applied, retrospectively, to the vows. Music that is “false” is out of tune; but this conventional way of talking about tuning does not mean that all sweetly spoken vows are true, however musical they may sound. The play’s questions about the nature of music and noise thus are also questions about language. Not only does language, as a system of sounds, potentially convey meaning in a comparable way, it also may create, rather than reflect, the orderly world in which music is opposed to noise. Shakespeare’s contemporaries argued over whether music signified by means of a natural correspondence between things or by means of conventional associations—an argument paralleling strenuous debates about language.25 As we have seen, the “music of war” trope arose from classical rhetoric and Renaissance conceptions of the harmonious military dance; but the trope was also influenced by “the important functional role of military music in contemporary fighting.”26 Although Hamlet’s funeral honors involve only the discharging of guns, this sound is repeatedly accompanied by trumpets and drums over the course of the play. Like the guns themselves, these military instruments could transmit signals to armies, informing them when to attack and when to withdraw. This functional use of musical instruments in war, however, 25 For an account of some of these debates on language, see Richard Waswo, Language and Meaning in the Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987). 26 Jorgensen, 4.

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coincided with the prevalent idea that certain kinds of music, by directly stirring the soul or the affections, could make listeners respond in a warlike manner. Music was thus conceived as operating in two ways: affecting the soul “naturally” through the imitation of a passion, and operating through conventional codes. Some writers questioned the idea that certain sounds inevitably and naturally would evoke a certain response in listeners. Such responses might be elicited by conventional or idiosyncratic associations rather than by natural correspondence. “For I cannot imagine,” one writer remarked skeptically, “that if a man neuer had heard a trumpet or a drum in his life, that he would at the first hearing be mooued to warres.”27 This question proves highly relevant to Hamlet, where the meaning of the “soldier’s music”—what it says when it “speaks,” and how it says it—is subjected to intense scrutiny. Language itself creates some of the confusion between music and noise. For an early modern audience, “noise” and “music” were both synonyms and antonyms.28 The term “noise” often carries the suggestion of “loud music,”29 but it could be applied quite legitimately to both harmonious sounds and cacophonous din.30 Noise and music may be ontologically similar, or the imprecision of the word “noise” may simply make it appear that they are. For that matter, the associations between “music,” “measure,” “temperance,” and “harmony,” may be essential in nature— or they may be mere products of language. What is the relationship between the metaphor and a deeper truth or symbolic correspondence? Does a metaphor point to an essential relationship, or does the likeness exist only in the language? In the first case, language proves “musical” in the harmonious correspondence of words to things—in the second, random and hence potentially “noisy,” without meaning. Fortinbras’s reference to the “soldier’s music” provides the concluding twist to Hamlet’s complicated reciprocal­­—even porous—relationship between the words of the play and the startling songs and noises that break up the words. Kenneth Gross perceptively notes that “[the noises of the play], and what makes them, creep into the play’s metaphors, as when Claudius describes the rebellious murmurs that threaten his throne as ‘poison’d shot’ that he hopes will miss his name … or when [Hamlet] says in dying that ‘the potent poison quite o’ercrows my spirit.’”31 At such moments, the audience faces the interpenetration not only of noises and language, but also of literal and metaphoric sounds. The noises of the play invade its metaphors, but it would also be possible to perceive the metaphors as generating the noises. In a reciprocal movement, metaphors materialize in sounds—or Thomas Wright, Passions of the Minde in Generall (London, 1604), 171. See for instance Sternfeld on Hamlet’s contemptuous remark that the groundlings

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only want noise and dumbshows: “The term ‘noise’, besides referring to trumpet, drums and cannon, included a band of musicians” (Music in Shakespearean Tragedy, 219). 29 See Sternfeld, Music in Shakespearean Tragedy, 232. 30 In his Nativity Ode, John Milton describes angelic music as “Divinely-warbled voice / Answering the stringed noise” of heavenly harps (96–7). 31 Gross, 13.

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almost materialize. Such metaphoric noises are projected into the silences of the action, where they assume new, ghostly form. Death also is a gunner. “O proud Death,” says Fortinbras, entering on the heels of his own “warlike volley,” “what feast is toward in thine eternal cell / That thou so many princes at a shot / So bloodily hast struck?” (5.2.347–50). Death’s gun has either gone unheard, or its sound has mingled with the real gunshots that we have heard repeatedly throughout the course of the scene. Either way, the actual shots that the audience has experienced make Death’s seem less metaphoric. Maybe we have heard Death’s cannon. In the manner of its first appearance, the ghost is just such a projection of an unheard sound. It appears at an intersection of sound and language, setting in motion a complex series of interactions between words, music, the phantasmic, and the theatrical. In spite of its initial silence—or perhaps, paradoxically, because of it—the ghost is a sonic phenomenon, the silence of sound, noise turned inside out. It appears in sound, and vanishes in sound. Both sounds are markers of time— the ringing of the bell, the crowing of the cock—but the apparition breaks time down, collapsing the present and the past. As time falls apart at the entrance of the phantom, words themselves become musical and ghostly, endowed with new power and yet broken, doing both more and less than they should. BARNARDO. Last night of all, When yon same star that’s westward from the pole Had made his course t’ illume that part of heaven Where now it burns, Marcellus and myself, The bell then beating one— Enter Ghost MARCELLUS. Peace, break thee off. Look where it comes again. (1.1.33–8)

The apparition is a tear in the story and a tear in the fabric of time; it refuses to stay in the past. (In one sense, this is just what a ghost is: a piece of the past that refuses to remain there.) The time of night in narration and stage reality is supposedly the same, the star burns in the same place—and of course, the ghost always arrives “jump at this dead hour” (1.1.65). But as far as we can tell from the admittedly unreliable stage directions, the bell does not beat. (Barnardo must break off because Marcellus spots the phantom, not because the bell cuts into his words.) The striking of the clock is replaced by two things: by Barnardo’s reference to the sound, and by the entrance of the ghost. The apparition is a silent, visible manifestation of the beating of the bell, marking the “dead hour,” but it does not necessarily appear on the stroke of one—someone talking about the stroke of one is enough.32 In one unnerving jolt, Barnardo’s description becomes music and becomes dramatic reality. If the bell does ring, then the sound, Bernardo’s reference to the sound and the entrance of the silent ghost all overlap. I think the scene is more effective, however, if the bell does not ring, especially considering that the striking of the clock also goes unheard in the second ghost scene. Everyone talks about the clock striking, but no one ever hears it: 32

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In a list of the various noises of Hamlet, Gross adds in a parenthesis, “On the battlements, the sounds of the wind and sea are just audible as well, conjured up by the words of those who wait.”33 But surely a sound “conjured up by words” should be distinguished from a sound effect actually heard by the audience. Gross’s conflation of sound effects and sounds evoked by poetry is very suggestive— to some extent, the play itself generates the confusion, replacing the bell with Barnardo’s reference to the bell. As Barnardo’s tale conjures up a sound, it also conjures up the ghost; and Barnardo’s very words become phantom-like, as his narration is interrupted by itself come to life. At this first appearance, the ghost is a silent sound, the clock chime that no one hears, order and time themselves become phantasmic. The words that refer to the intersection of chime and ghost become like chime and ghost: silenced, but present in a new, spectral, and explicitly theatrical way. Narration becomes drama. The relationship between description and action here imitates the tricky relationship that the play establishes between metaphors and sounds. Throughout Hamlet, the figurative noises become literal in the same way that words here are confronted with their own dramatic embodiment. Death’s cannon is heard; the striking of the “dead hour” takes physical shape. Such embodiment, however, is always spectral—never complete. Speaking of the clock conjures—and becomes—the clock, in turn conjuring the old king. Yet the temporal order that emerges is out of order, out of sequence, the dead interrupting the living, a phantom. As I discussed in the previous chapter, Shakespeare frequently associates such temporal confusion with the workings of song. Hamlet similarly dramatizes the inherent tendency of old ballads to slip out of sequence. The play thus reveals certain formal resemblances between songs, ghostliness, and madness.34 Ophelia echoes the first words of the ghost—“Mark me” (1.5.2)—before launching into her enigmatic singing: “Say you? Nay, pray you, mark … Pray you mark” (4.5.28–34).35 Her incoherence and anxiety present a stark contrast with Lorenzo’s confident, even complacent directive in the final act of The Merchant of Venice: “Mark the music” (5.1.87). For Lorenzo, and for the Neoplatonic tradition he invokes, music on earth is an audible manifestation of heavenly order and harmony, a faint echo of the singing stars whose music may not be heard by fallen man. this seems appropriate in a play where time is out of joint. In Macbeth, Banquo and Fleance similarly cannot make out the time on the night of Duncan’s murder: “The moon is down, I have not heard the clock” (2.1.2). Soon after, we hear not the clock but the bell that Lady Macbeth strikes to summon Macbeth to murder. 33 Gross, 13. 34 Shakespeare may well have developed the association between madwomen and distracted song. See Lindley, Shakespeare and Music, 154; and Carol Thomas Neely, Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 50. 35 In “Remembrance and Revenge: Hamlet, Macbeth, and The Tempest,” in Jonson and Shakespeare, ed. Ian Donaldson (London: Macmillan, 1983), Michael Neill remarks that Ophelia “gives paradoxical substance to the annihilated past” (38).

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In Hamlet, the staging establishes parallels between the appearance of the ghost and the grave of Ophelia, suggesting that the singing voices in the play are ghostly voices, simultaneously living and dead. Hamlet’s songs rise insistently to the surface of the drama not only around the grave, but also around the entrances and exits of the players. The prince quotes “Jephthah, Judge of Israel,” just before their first entrance; “For O, for O the hobbyhorse is forgot,” just as the play-within-the play is about to begin, and “Let the stricken deer go weep,” when the play is broken off. In the last of these, Hamlet implicitly conflates playing with singing. Why, let the stricken deer go weep, The hart ungallèd play, For some must watch, while some must sleep, So runs the world away. Would not this, sir, and a forest of feathers, if the rest of my fortunes turn Turk with me … get me a fellowship in a cry of players, sir? (3.2.249–55)

David Wiles compares Hamlet with the clown in the public theaters, who typically sang and danced at the conclusion of the play, and notes, “The ‘this’ which could earn Hamlet a share in a company of players refers not only to his playwriting but also, more immediately, to his singing.”36 Hamlet’s cryptic “this” lumps his play and his antic song together—as Bottom’s “it” conflates ballad, play, and death. Wiles’s reading of the song posits an inextricable relationship between musical interlude and drama: “In Hamlet, symbolically, we see the jig being swallowed up and dissolved within the play.” I would disagree only with the qualification “symbolically.”37 Michael Neill has described the Gravediggers and the Players as “those antitypes of the Hamlet world … those who inter the dead and those who resurrect them.”38 In fact, both groups intermittently occupy one another’s roles, in disconcertingly musical moments: the Gravedigger sings as he tosses skulls out of the grave; and the actors play upon recorders rather than serving as dependable recorders of history. The players may resurrect the past, but only in a fictive form, and only temporarily. “Playing” may be associated with music, but this association does not imbue drama with truth or permanence. Reciprocally, the possibility that David Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 58. 37 Wiles, 60. Margreta de Grazia points out a structural similarity between Hamlet itself and “Jephthah, Judge of Israel,” the first song to which Hamlet alludes: “The ballad’s narrative follows the same structure as the play: beginning with a vow and ending with its satisfaction, the interim is taken up with the dilational filler not of clowning but of complaint” (“Hamlet” without Hamlet [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007], 199). Nevertheless, we are not looking simply at two parallel structures (ballad narrative and play). The song interrupts the logical course of the play, and is in turn interrupted by the entrance of the players. 38 Neill, “Remembrance and Revenge,” 44. 36

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music may serve as the expression of truth and justice is repeatedly raised, only to be denied—because after all, playing is playing. After The Mousetrap, the Prince cries: “Ah ha! Come, some music! Come, the recorders, / For if the King like not the comedy, / Why then, belike he likes it not, pardie. / Come, some music!” (3.2.268–71). A recorder is not only a musical instrument, but also a judge or magistrate, a witness, or “one who records or sets down in writing” (OED, n.1, 2, 3a). The criminal justice resonance is here both appropriate and ironic, as Hamlet suggests that the King’s response to the play is both evidence—and meaningless. Nothing can be inferred from the fact that the King didn’t like the play except that … he didn’t like it. The Prince’s calls for music thus bracket a jingling tautology that turns back upon itself, concluding nothing, like so much of the prince’s speech. (Even his final words work this way, if we see in them a musical pun: “The rest is silence.”) The tautological jingle is partly a device to put Rosencrantz and Guildenstern off the scent, and partly a dark joke for Hamlet’s own amusement— but a joke at whose expense? The king’s response to the open hostility of The Mousetrap does not necessarily provide more proof than the Ghost’s story. Hamlet’s whirling words infuse with irony the implicit connection between music, order, and justice. These “recorders” are the instruments of actors, entertainers, called upon to provide a festive conclusion to a play; they are not instruments of justice. A recorder, in this case, is not “one who sets down in writing”: the music of pipes is transitory; it can “set down” nothing. The otherworldly quality of Hamlet’s ballads gives them a kind of delusive authority, however: an authority that we gradually are encouraged to associate with the play itself. Characters refer to old songs as to the repositories of some transcendent truth, as if these ballads somehow held the answer to all the questions that wrack the play—although they patently do not. “Pray you,” says Ophelia, “let’s have no words of this, but when they ask you what it means, say you this” (4.5.45–6). Then she launches into her indecorous Saint Valentine’s Day song.39 Ophelia hints that the chaotic, inappropriate music is the meaning, the answer to the question. Interrupted in a rendition of an old ballad by the arrival of the Players, Hamlet tells Polonius that the first row of the pious chanson will show him further; in Q1, even more suggestively, he declares: “The first verse of the godly ballad will tell you all” (7.283; emphasis mine).40 This version anticipates Hamlet’s later exchange with Ophelia about the dumb-show, performed to the ominous music of hautboys.41 39 Dunn argues that Ophelia uses music as a means of resistance, and refuses to let Claudius fix the meaning of her song: “What she instructs Claudius to ‘say’ … is something that cannot be said, both literally (because it is a song) and figuratively (because its sexual content makes it indecorous, inappropriate)” (51). 40 The First Quarto of “Hamlet,” ed. Kathleen O. Irace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 41 On the early modern stage, oboes were frequently used to create an atmosphere of foreboding and unease: unlike the string consort, they would not evoke ideas of harmony and a well-tuned world. See Sternfeld, Music in Shakespearean Tragedy, 230.

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Reverberating Song in Shakespeare and Milton OPHELIA. What means this, my lord? HAMLET. Marry, this is miching mallecho; it means mischief. OPHELIA. Belike this show imports the argument of the play. Enter Prologue HAMLET. We shall know by this fellow. The players cannot keep counsel; they’ll tell all. (3.2.123–8; emphasis mine)

Hamlet’s answer bears a striking resemblance to his earlier, inappropriately flippant response to the voice of his dead father speaking beneath the stage: “You hear this fellow in the cellarage” (1.5.153). (The play-within-the-play goes on to stage the events described by the ghost—events that serve, in fact, as unstaged prologue to the action of Hamlet.) Dissatisfied with Hamlet’s obscure response, Ophelia answers her own question, “Belike this show imports the argument of the play,” in the very phrase that Gertrude will direct to her: “Alas, sweet lady, what imports this song?” (4.5.27). All these questions echo the words of Horatio on the battlements of the castle, waiting for the phantom: startled by the first iteration of the “soldier’s music,” a roar of trumpets, drums, and cannon, he demands, “What does this mean, my lord?” (1.4.8). “That Follows Not”: Ballads in the Mind It has proven notoriously difficult to get at the “meaning” not only of the play, but also of the Prince’s actions. T.S. Eliot’s complaints about the lack of an “objective correlative” in Hamlet have been answered and disputed by a number of critics, but his argument does suggest a lack of correspondence between motivation and action, cause and effect in the play that I find very valuable.42 Various explanations have been offered for the prince’s notorious “delay”—as well as arguments that this entire “problem” is an invention of scholarly criticism. The weirdness of the play’s sequence of events and the inadequacy of motivation are traditionally associated with, and attributed to, Hamlet’s excessive introspection.43 A number of critics, however, have cogently opposed the idea of Hamlet as a play heavy with secrets. Most recently, Margreta de Grazia has argued that the play does not even attempt to represent a sense of secret inwardness in its hero. “To early modern readers and audiences, the evasion that has mystified so many modern critics—‘I have that within which passes show’ (1.2.85)—might have been quite transparent. Transparent, too, for the characters within the play.”44 Hamlet has been dispossessed, and everyone knows it, but this obvious fact is much too dangerous to articulate. According to de Grazia’s argument, only in the last two centuries has Hamlet been endowed with mysterious inwardness, “an area of consciousness 42 T.S. Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems,” in Selected Essays, 1917–1932 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1932), 124–5. 43 For an account of this aspect of Hamlet’s critical history, see de Grazia, 1–22. 44 de Grazia, 2.

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which he cannot reveal even to himself.”45 Despite this welcome corrective to two hundred years of obsession with Hamlet’s possibly nonexistent secrets, I would argue that excess, secrets, and inaccessible inner spaces are written into the play. It is not so much that Hamlet’s mysterious motives generate a mysteriously nonsensical and exaggeratedly extended plot, but that the play evokes a world where neither thoughts nor events “follow” in a logical fashion. Hamlet famously asserts his personal “mystery” in explicitly musical terms. After singing a jig and calling for recorders, the Prince informs Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that they cannot manipulate him, or force him to reveal anything that he does not wish to reveal: You would play upon me, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. ’Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me. (3.2.335–40)

This speech has become the ground for a fierce and complex debate on interiority and subjectivity in Hamlet and in the early modern period in general.46 Francis Barker reads Hamlet’s challenge to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to “play upon this pipe” as revealing not only the impossibility of dramatizing subjectivity, but the impossibility of an interiority that remains anachronistic, belonging “to a historical order whose outline has so far only been sketched out.”47 In Barker’s analysis, The hollow pipe is the refutation of the metaphysic of soul which the play signals but cannot realize. For Hamlet, in a sense doubtless unknown to him, is truly this hollow reed which will “discourse most eloquent music” but is none the less vacuous for that. At the centre of Hamlet, in the interior of his mystery, there is, in short, nothing. The promised essence remains beyond the scope of the text’s signification: or rather, signals the limit of the signification of this world by marking out the site of an absence it cannot fill.48

A musician, however, would hardly perceive the hollow pipe as a “site of absence.” If compared to, say, a book, the pipe is indeed “empty.” But the function of the pipe lies not in what it contains, but in what it produces. Hamlet’s metaphor asks de Grazia, 164. For the critical debate on interiority and subjectivity in Hamlet—and in the early

45 46

modern era in general—see Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995); Belsey, Subject of Tragedy; de Grazia; and Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 47 Barker, 33. 48 Barker, 32–3. For another objection to Barker’s argument, see Wes Folkerth, The Sound of Shakespeare (New York: Routledge, 2002), 32.

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us to think of a mystery as neither revealed nor hidden, but as sounded—and only through the action of playing. A number of critics have recently suggested a special connection between sound and the representation and formation of inwardness in early modern theater and culture.49 As the previous chapter indicates, I would argue that the working of song in particular can provide a new understanding of the evocation of inwardness on the Shakespearean stage. If the heart of Hamlet’s mystery is nothing, it is also “noting”—the pun Shakespeare employs in Laertes’s response to Ophelia’s singing: “This nothing’s more than matter” (4.5.172). There is no “real” or hidden Hamlet, but there is a mysterious and excessive theatrical effect. This effect is also musical, in its opacity, its elusiveness, its suggestions of profound meaning both expressed and inaccessible. Even when “sounded,” the mystery of things does not become clear: though Hamlet insists that the pipe— “this little organ”—will “discourse” music, playing on the pipe will not, in fact, “make it speak” (3.2.338, 331, 339; emphasis mine). When Hamlet claims that he cannot be played upon, he has just finished literally “playing upon” Claudius in an attempt to discover the truth. In language that anticipates his words to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet has mused that “murder, though it have no tongue, will speak / With most miraculous organ” (2.2.570–71). The recorder is not merely a metaphorical tongue, but a little pipe organ; and this musical pun remains a latent possibility in Hamlet’s earlier thoughts about the vocalization of murder. The Mousetrap becomes the instrument (the “organ”) through which murder speaks. In other words, it speaks for the ghost. The players are also the ones to supply the pipes, and their art is similar to that musical art Hamlet describes to Guildenstern: “’Tis as easy as lying” (3.2.229). The unfolding of the drama is the playing of the Hamlet instrument, and its sounds create a musical rather than verbal effect: mysterious, excessive. Eliot found the play “full of some stuff that the writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate into art. And when we search for this feeling, we find it … very difficult to localize.”50 I would argue that the play locates this elusive raw material, the “stuff” that cannot be dragged to light, the “matter” that can never be ascertained, not in soliloquies, but in songs. In moments of intense crisis, Ophelia and Hamlet turn to song, as if to the only possible mode of expression for something that cannot be said. When Hamlet has proven Claudius’s guilt, he directs his rage and exultation into an improvised ballad. At this point, closest to the bare bones of the situation, no soliloquy is adequate or possible. The “stuff” 49 For the “inwardness” of the sense of hearing, and the connection between sound and subject formation, see Gina Bloom, Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 111–17; Folkerth; Gross, 39; and Smith, Acoustic World, 7–10. 50 Eliot, “Selected Essays,” 124. Mazzio also invokes Eliot to introduce her discussion of the “inexpressibility topos” in Hamlet (175–80, 208). She focuses, however, on the way that feeling and touch—“tact”—operate as extralinguistic “forms of affect” (180).

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cannot be shaped into a speech; it emerges in a form simultaneously transparent and opaque, seemingly thin in meaning, but dense with affect. Ballads can spin out indefinitely, and yet their material seems almost too tightly compressed or elided to be understood. They are the perfect vehicles for matter that cannot be dragged to light or contemplated. Even so, the ballad forms in the play are always on the verge of breaking apart under too much pressure, as the impersonality of the mode falters. Ophelia desperately adds a jarring extra word to express the truth of her father’s treatment: “Which bewept to the grave did—not—go”; and Hamlet’s jingle fails to rhyme: “For thou dost know, O Damon dear, / This realm dismantled was / Of Jove himself, and now reigns here / A very, very—pajock” (4.5.38; 3.2.257–61). On one level, this failure to rhyme is an elaborate way of calling Claudius an ass. On another level, Hamlet’s thought has to break out of the ballad, which cannot quite contain what it is supposed to contain.51 The formal unity of the songs is compromised; they break down, and their song-like logic, their musical opacity, spreads through the text around them. Hamlet is haunted by old songs. And here, “haunted” is exactly the right word. Theodore Reik described the compulsive repetition of musical phrases in the mind as “haunting melody,” but more recently, these phenomena have been given the charming label “earworms”—a creepily appropriate term in the context of Hamlet.52 In addition to Ophelia’s mad music and the gravedigger’s song, Hamlet himself quotes several snatches of old tunes.53 Critical accounts of the music of the play largely ignore Hamlet’s ballad fragments, probably because it is generally assumed that these phrases were meant to be spoken rather than sung.54 51 At this moment, Hamlet cannot be speaking wildly for the purpose of confusing other people; only Horatio is present. 52 Theodor Reik, The Haunting Melody: Psychoanalytic Experiences in Life and Music (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1953). “Earworm” comes from the German Ohrwurm. See Daniel Levitan, This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (New York: Dutton, 2006), 151. 53 “Jephthah Judge of Israel” survives, but without a tune. The hobbyhorse ballad must have been very popular, since it is alluded to in several plays of the time, but it is lost. The “stricken deer” song is either lost or an invention of Hamlet’s. See Duffin, 464–5. 54 See Lindley: “No editor seems ever to have suggested that he sing [the ballad quotations], although there is no obvious reason why he should not chant this ‘pious chanson’” (Shakespeare and Music, 199). Sternfeld assumes that “as befits his station [Hamlet] speaks rather than sings these lines” (Music in Shakespearean Tragedy, 129). Long, on the other hand, prefers a singing Hamlet, because this behavior would underline the Prince’s assumption of the traditional role of the fool (113). Sternfeld’s assumption is tacitly supported by Dunn and Fox-Good, who associate music with the feminine, and with Ophelia, and do not mention Hamlet’s frequent quotations from ballads. Lindley points out that Hamlet’s singing offers “one potential complication … to an exclusively gendered reading of Ophelia’s songs” (159), and suggests that both Hamlet and Ophelia may use song to “offer an indirect and often critical perspective” (159). In contrast, Neely emphasizes the difference between Hamlet and Ophelia, pointing out that Hamlet’s speech, though filled

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Yet Hamlet’s snatches of unsung song (if they are, in fact, unsung) prove in some ways more disconcerting than Ophelia’s singing, because the prince’s interlocutors find it difficult to separate the song from the speech, the ballad logic from the logic of conversation. If certain phrases in a conversation are song rather than discourse, how is it possible to distinguish song from discourse? Simultaneously, the music that goes with the words becomes increasingly ghostly, evoked but never allowed to take shape anywhere but in the minds of the audience. (Try to speak the words of a song you know very well without thinking of the tune. It is almost impossible. The words drag the music with them.) Furthermore, traditional ballads have their own peculiar logic, a logic that becomes madness in any other context. Events are narrated in a fragmentary and idiosyncratic way, accommodations are made for the tune, and the narrative is interrupted by a refrain that may become more emptied of meaning with every repetition. Such songs have a habit of catching in the mind in disjointed phrases, and repeating over and over—a “repetition compulsion” characteristic of Hamlet itself.55 When Ophelia abandons logical for musical sense, she is doing something that the play as a whole has already done; but she makes the shift literal and audible. In a world where time is out of joint, events and connections between events take on the irrational logic of an old ballad. Hamlet imitates this ballad logic in his outof-frame discourse, most directly in his exchange with Polonius after the latter’s announcement of the actors: HAMLET. O Jephthah, judge of Israel, what a treasure hadst thou! POLONIUS. What a treasure had he, my lord? HAMLET. Why, “One fair daughter and no more, The which he lovéd passing well.” POLONIUS [aside]. Still on my daughter. HAMLET. Am I not i’ th’ right, old Jephthah? POLONIUS. If you call me Jephthah, my lord, I have a daughter that I love passing well. HAMLET. Nay, that follows not. POLONIUS. What follows then, my lord? HAMLET. Why, “As by lot, God wot” and then, you know, “It came to pass, as most like it was” The first row of the pious chanson will show you more, for look where my abridgement comes. Enter the Players (2.2.385–404) with nonsequiturs, contains “calculated jibes” (54). Ophelia’s words, however, can be read similarly, particularly when she distributes appropriate flowers to the courtiers, sings that her father “did—not—go” to the grave with proper honors, and warns: “My brother shall know of it” (4.5.68). 55 See Garber, 129.

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Polonius assumes that Hamlet’s quotation from the “pious chanson” must be relevant to the situation at hand, but Hamlet implies that Polonius’s train of reasoning is flawed: “That follows not.” Polonius inevitably falls into the trap and asks what does follow, and Hamlet replies with the next lines of the song, cleverly replacing a train of thought with a musical sequence. And of course, as the song in question beautifully demonstrates, the order of events or words in a ballad is often without any apparent logic. In this case, “what follows” are two of the most inane lines in this—and, one is tempted to add, any—song: “As by lot, God wot, / It came to pass, as most like it was.” These lines purport to explain and give the background for a situation, while simultaneously refusing to do so. In this passage, Hamlet suggests that a world of orderly and logical causation has given way to a world where one event comes after another for no other reason than that it does. In the prince’s own discourse, logical progression from one thought to another is replaced by a seemingly illogical logic of association. This is the logic that Shakespeare discovers in the working of songs in the mind: we remember familiar songs not because of rational connections, but through seemingly random associations—a phrase that sounds similar to another phrase, a memory linked with another memory.56 Song verses themselves often obey a logic of sound rather than sense: the need to rhyme with “pass” generates “most like it was,” not any narrative pressure. The play poses the dangerous possibility that this may be the way that a musical cosmos actually operates. The associations of the songs of Hamlet, however, remain intensely suggestive: like the “nothing” of Ophelia’s scattered speech, they tease the listener to search for meaning. When Hamlet reminds Polonius “what follows” in the old ballad, he flippantly encourages the old man—and the audience—to continue the song mentally while he welcomes the players: “The first row of the pious chanson will show you more, for look where my abridgment comes.” Hamlet implies that he would have gone on with the ballad if the players had not interrupted. And though Hamlet’s performance is abridged, the audience may have recollected more of the familiar song, as the prince encourages them to do.57 The “first row” to which Hamlet refers Polonius is particularly suggestive:

56 Ancient mnemonic advice takes account of the “associational nature of memory,” and “[t]he most powerful associational connections are formed by habit … rather than by logic.” See Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 64, also 73, 233; and Lina Perkins Wilder, Shakespeare’s Memory Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 50, 136. 57 The tune for this particular ballad has been lost, unfortunately. Duffin sets it to Greensleeves, “which it seems to fit remarkably well” (229). Hamlet’s way of alluding to the song (“and then, you know …”) suggests that Shakespeare could assume familiarity on the part of the audience. The interchange with Polonius loses much of its humor—as I think it often does in performance today—if the audience doesn’t realize that Hamlet goes on quoting the song when Polonius asks “what follows?”

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I read that many years ago, when Jephthah, Judge of Israel, Had one fair daughter and no mo’, whom he beloved passing well and as by lot, God wot it came to pass, most like it was, great wars there should be, and who should be chief but he, but he.58

The last lines of this verse, which Hamlet stops short of repeating, recall the opening scene of the play, with its murmuring about past and potential wars, and also touch on Hamlet’s sense of dispossession by Claudius. The song even glances ahead to Hamlet’s envy of that consummate war-chieftain, Fortinbras. The following verses continue to suggest, in distorted fashion, future events in the plot. In the third verse of the song, Jephthah’s daughter comes running to meet her father, playing tabor and pipe with “notes full high, / for joy that he was so nigh, so nigh,” and when he sees her he tears his clothes and hair and shrieks. The musicmaking and distracted grief will be conflated in the single figure of Ophelia, and the song’s temporal scheme disjointed in the process: the singing Ophelia cannot meet her father, who is already dead. The song narrative becomes distorted and fragmented as it weaves into the narrative of Hamlet, just as Hamlet’s rendition of this verse is broken and intruded upon by the prose conversation with Polonius— which in its turn is twisted and disfigured by the intrusion of the song. The first line of the ballad (“I read that many years ago”) suggests a new response to Polonius’s unanswered question of nearly two hundred lines back—“What do you read, my lord?” (2.2.191). Words, words, words are almost equivalent to an old song in their repetition and “noncommunicating language.”59 Aside from demonstrating the dexterity and complexity of Hamlet’s wit and power of allusion, this echo creates the impression that the play is haunted by more than Hamlet Senior. Hamlet’s quotation of the Jephthah ballad generates the retrospective illusion that the familiar ballad has been going on somewhere in the depths before Hamlet brings it to the surface. The Prince may play on the song before he ever explicitly refers to it. The last word or phrase in each stanza of the ballad is repeated: “but he, but he;” “again, again;” “for the daughter of Jephthah still, still, still,” a device that recalls Hamlet’s repetition of his own words, particularly his response to Polonius’s “What do you read, my lord?” Words, words, words; except my life, my life, my life. Speech and song, ballad and play bleed into one another. Hamlet’s play on “follow” in his conversation with Polonius hints at the ambiguity created by two possible meanings of the word. Polonius inadvertently raises the same issue in his sententious advice: “This above all—to thine own self be true, / And it must follow as the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to Quoted in Duffin, 228. Edward Doughtie, English Renaissance Song (Boston: Twayne, 1986), 7. Doughtie

58 59

here refers to typical “nonsense” refrains like “fa la la,” and “hey nonny nonny.”

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any man” (1.3.78–80). The old counselor conflates logical causality with temporal progression; and indeed, Polonius’s own conclusion does not follow logically. Similarly, the narrative of the play, like the narrative in Ophelia’s ballads, never quite “follows” in this logical sense. Events occur without clear cause or motivation: “It came to pass, as most like it was.” The next bit comes next because it does. In addition, each item in the sequence might easily be confused with something else with a similar tune—or, for that matter, a similar rhythm. Consider Hamlet’s own struggle to remember the proper order of phrases in Aeneas’s speech. “If it live in your memory,” he requests the Player, “begin at this line—let me see, let me see … ‘The rugged Pyrrhus, like th’ Hyrcanian beast—’ / ’Tis not so; it begins with Pyrrhus: / ‘The rugged Pyrrhus, he whose sable arms …’” (2.2.428–32). Like Desdemona’s Willow Song and its series of interchangeable verses, the speech lives shapeless in the memory. Ironically, while ordering speech into meter makes it easier to remember, it also makes it easier for phrases to fall out of order. One half-line replaces another: the rhythmic “measure” and order of the speech makes it impossible to forget and impossible to fully remember. Such life in the memory is a haunting half-life.60 By repeatedly dramatizing the working of songs, melodic phrases, and rhythmic patterns in the memory, Shakespeare suggests that music and its effects on the mind serve as a model for the paradoxical way that forgetfulness and remembrance cling together and reinforce one another—a particularly pressing concern in Hamlet. The play’s songs are both transitory and lingering. Music continues beyond death—but not necessarily in the form of flights of angels singing. Ophelia’s grave, from which the grave-digger sings, is the trapdoor, the entrance-point of the dead King, one of these great men who “shall … suffer not thinking on, with the hobbyhorse, whose epitaph is, ‘For O, for O, the hobbyhorse is forgot!’” (3.2.128–30).61 This kind of ephemeral epitaph vanishes even as it is sung; and yet it lingers on, insistent in forgetfulness. (It is strangely fitting that “the hobbyhorse is forgot” is the only line of the song to have survived.) Songs in the play betray an obsession with obsequies. Unlike Ophelia, Jephthah’s daughter gets quite extensive—even perpetual— funeral rites: And, as some say, for aye the virgins there, three times a year like sorrow fulfill for the daughter of Jephthah still, still, still.

The memory dramatized here is also explicitly theatrical. As Wilder points out, Hamlet’s attempt to recollect the Hecuba speech “suggests the mnemonic function of theatrical language, produced from the player’s memory and performed as a series of associative cues and responses” (117). 61 Ophelia’s grave would have reminded the original audience of the appearance of the ghost. See Gurr and Ichikawa, 50; Wilder, 127. 60

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The funeral rites continue into perpetuity, and so does the song, lingering in the mind. One peculiar aspect of the strophic song is that it can go on ad infinitum;62 nevertheless, the singing of the ballad does not provide true eternity or immortality. The song serves as a memorial for events, for the death of a daughter; but as an epitaph, it is singularly elusive, easily broken into repeating bits and pieces. Hamlet replaces the harmonious soul with fragmented, eerily shifting memories of music. This altered harmony has social as well as personal consequences. Old and familiar songs might embody shared folk memory and wisdom, express collective fears, sorrows, and reconciliations. In the play, however, they utterly fail to perform these communal functions. Instead, the old songs serve as potential vehicles for intimate and personal secrets that cannot be expressed in any other way. These intimate disclosures, however, turn out to be frustratingly illusory. Ophelia’s songs seem to invite her listeners to share an almost painfully private experience; but in fact, they are simply a reiteration of ballads that everyone already knows. In consequence, the songs fail both as a means of personal expression and as a means of connection to a wider community. In the singing of Ophelia and, to a lesser extent, Hamlet himself, a shared, communal experience has been taken into an individual mind and fractured, resurfacing to audibility in fragments that unsettle and disturb communal order and assumptions. At the same time, the snatches of song reconstitute a sense of community, in distorted form, across the divide separating reality from fiction. The songs would be familiar to the play’s audience, too, and the fragments of familiar music open the possibility of a communal half-sharing of “that within which passeth show.”63 Carol Thomas Neely argues that Shakespeare “invented for [madness] a new italicized language.”64 Quoting Laertes’s comment on Ophelia in Hamlet, she describes this language as “something and ‘nothing.’” It is “both coherent and incoherent … located in characters and dislocated from them,” and “characterized by fragmentation, repetition, and most importantly by … ‘cultural quotation.’”65 I would argue that songs are not merely one aspect of this cultural quotation, as Neely suggests, but in fact both the dominant feature and the model for such echoic and fragmented repetition. (Ophelia’s speech is something and “noting.”) As the songs of Hamlet demonstrate, ballads blur the distinction between the quoted and the unquoted, the voice of the self and other voices. Doughtie writes: “Many strophic lyrics work against a strong sense of closure, because the repeated stanzas and music encourage paratactic structures, such as catalogs, or restatements of the central idea in different words with different images or examples. The manuscript histories of some poems show how they have been continued when they seemed to offer no good reason for ending” (9). 63 For a different account of the sense of community evoked by the performance of ballads on stage, see Smith, “Shakespeare’s Residuals: The Circulation of Ballads in Cultural Memory,” in Shakespeare and Elizabethan Popular Culture, ed. Stuart Gillespie and Neil Rhodes (London: Thomson, 2006), 196. See also Chapter 2, 58–9. 64 Neely, 65. 65 Neely, 50. 62

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If the singing of old songs occupies an ambiguous position between traditional, communal expression and a revelation of the secrets of the soul, such singing can also occupy a strange middle ground between performance as pretence and performance as truth. Part of the indecorum of Ophelia’s behavior, which signals her madness, is the fact that she is performing—no well-bred young lady makes music in public. On the other hand, her effect upon an audience is complicated by a seemingly contradictory problem: she is not performing—not pretending, not putting on a show to obtain a particular effect. There is a creepy authenticity in the mad Ophelia’s self-expression. Her words and songs seem spontaneous, unmediated, and unpremeditated: the raw contents of the mind, unshaped by rhetoric. Nevertheless, the words are not her own. The voice we hear is not her voice, and this fact becomes most apparent as she “plays” different roles automatically and inevitably in songs where voices respond to one another: “How should I your true love know / From another one?— / By his cockle hat and staff / And his sandal shoon” (4.4.23–5).66 In this song, as in many others, the singer must answer his or her own questions: And will a not come again, And will a not come again? No, no, he is dead, Go to thy death-bed, He never will come again. (4.5.185–9)

The longest and seemingly most complete song that Ophelia sings consists of three voices: the young man, the young woman, and the narrator. In a complicating twist, however, the narrator’s voice sometimes appears to overlap with the voice of the young woman and sometimes clearly does not. OPHELIA. Tomorrow is Saint Valentine’s day, All in the morning betime, And I a maid at your window To be your Valentine. Then up he rose, and donned his clothes, And dupped the chamber door; Let in the maid, that out a maid Never departed more. CLAUDIUS. Pretty Ophelia— OPHELIA. Indeed, la? Without an oath, I’ll make an end on’t. By Gis, and by Saint Charity, Alack, and fie for shame! Young men will do’t if they come to’t, By Cock, they are to blame.

66 As Smith points out, songs frequently allow the singer to take on different “subject positions” (Acoustic World, 200).

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Quoth she ‘Before you tumbled me, You promised me to wed.’ So would I ’a’ done, by yonder sun, An thou hadst not come to my bed. (4.5.47–64)67

The song opens in first person, then shifts almost imperceptibly into a third person narration as the “I” of the third line becomes “the maid” of the seventh. The disapproving exclamations of the second verse defy assignment to a specific speaker, and the moralizing lines about the behavior of young men present a weird combination of the impersonal and the deeply personal. The voice of communal wisdom—“Young men will do’t if they come to’t”—cannot be distinguished from the young girl’s self-exculpatory expression of betrayal: “they are to blame.” The following line, however, resolutely splits the girl’s voice from the narrator’s voice with the definite “Quoth she.” This confusion of subject within the song accompanies an equally confused time-frame. Is this happening “tomorrow” or now or in the past? To read these seeming inconsistencies as particularly meaningful, however, would be to consider too curiously. Many of the things that seem odd about the song are in fact entirely typical of the ballad genre. The interest lies not so much in the song itself, but rather in the qualities that it exemplifies: an uncertain sequence of events; separate voices that are not really separated; and expressive possibilities seemingly blunted and diluted by the repeating tune that binds stanza after stanza to the identical series of notes, a repetition that nevertheless makes the song difficult to forget. Expression becomes reiteration, the personal and the impersonal fusing together. Ophelia opens for the audience a vertiginous inner world that isn’t really inner, composed as it is of pieces of common songs. In the “cultural quotation” of Shakespeare’s mad characters, Neely finds an especially apparent instance of the era’s “reconstitution [of the sacred in the human],” as “the voices that speak through [the mad] are not … supernatural voices, but … cultural remnants.”68 This secular reconstitution is not fully complete, however. The pressure of the other world falls heavily on Ophelia’s snatches of song—and on Hamlet’s as well. Marjorie Garber describes Hamlet’s “uncanny reciprocity … created by the transference of death to the living and voice to the dead.”69 I would suggest that this transference tends to occur around and through song—precisely because of the way that song allows singers to shift so easily from one subject position to another. Ophelia is in some sense already dead when she sings; her wits have proved as “mortal” as her father’s life. Ophelia’s songs, No tune survives, “and no text aside from the stanzas sung by Ophelia, although a lost ballad of two lovers’ ‘pleasant meeting on St. Valentine’s Day’ was registered on May 16, 1591. The traditional theater tune for Ophelia’s song was documented in the eighteenth century and turns out to be a version of a melody that was apparently current at Shakespeare’s time: The Soldier’s Life or The Soldier’s Dance” (Duffin, 408). 68 Neely, 66, 50. 69 Garber, 147. See also Gross, 30. 67

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however, are haunted by more than her former self. They are haunted by the past in general, and by an entire communal tradition that becomes spectral as it sings with fragmented voices through this appallingly isolated individual. Similarly, the gravedigger may be quick, but the “I” of his song no longer seems to be so: “The sexton sings in the person of someone whose human form has already disappeared in earth.”70 The grave really belongs to Ophelia, and the gravedigger extends her singing beyond her death. Ultimately, the contrast between melodious lay and muddy death is not as sharp as Gertrude’s tale of Ophelia’s drowning implies. Nevertheless, characters repeatedly attempt to maintain this contrast in language that struggles to translate disturbing sounds—and equally disturbing absence of sound—into music. Such language struggles to reconstitute the harmonious world. What the Thunder Said: Re-speaking Sound and Silence “Good night, sweet prince,” says Horatio, “And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. / Why does the drum come hither?” (5.2.302–4). Hamlet’s characters struggle to fill silences with imagined song and to reinterpret strange or ominous noises in terms of music. Many of these strange noises, including the approaching drum and the “soldier’s music” of the cannon, accompany the manifestation of the Ghost. But just as Ophelia’s songs “point to unsettling confusions of identity,”71 so this military music is associated with the voices of both Claudius and Hamlet senior. And also like Ophelia’s songs, these noises promise but fail to deliver meaning. The meaning must be supplied by the characters’ re-speaking of sound. As Hamlet and Horatio wait for the phantom to appear, their ears are assaulted: HAMLET. What hour now? HORATIO. I think it lacks of twelve. MARCELLUS. No, it is struck. HORATIO. Indeed? I heard it not. Then it draws near the season Wherein the spirit held his wont to walk. A flourish of trumpets, and two pieces goes off. 70 de Grazia, 136. This effect is created by Shakespeare’s alteration to the song. The gravedigger sings a somewhat garbled version of “The Aged Lover Renounceth Love,” by Thomas, Lord Vaux, which appears in Tottel’s Miscellany. His “mistakes” transform the “I” of the song from an aged lover to a dead man. In the original, the lover sings: “For age with stealing steps / Hath clawed me with his clutch / And lusty life away she leaps / As there had been none such.” In contrast, the Gravedigger sings: “But age with his stealing steps / Hath clawed me in his clutch / And hath shipped me into the land / As if I had never been such” (5.1.66–9). See Duffin, 112–13. In “Shakespeare’s Residuals,” Smith reminds us that a large number of ballads were sung in the voice of a dead person who recounts the circumstances of his or her own death; ballads dramatizing scaffold confessions were also exceedingly popular (205). 71 Gross, 31.

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Reverberating Song in Shakespeare and Milton What does this mean, my lord? HAMLET. The King doth wake tonight and takes his rouse, Keeps wassail, and swagg’ring upspring reels, And as he drains his draughts of Rhenish down, The kettle-drum and trumpet thus bray out The triumph of his pledge. (1.4.3–13)

Time in Hamlet is audibly out of joint. In the dark, sound measures time, and if the stroke of the clock goes unheard, time stops or jumps erratically. The nervous exchange between the watchers is interrupted by a sound: not the orderly striking of the clock, but the raucous noise and music of Claudius’s drunken festivities. The trumpets and cannon replace the unheard striking of the hour. They also replace—or, for a moment, displace—the entrance of the ghost. Upon Horatio’s words, we expect the apparition’s imminent arrival, but instead of a silent phantom, we get a raucous burst of sound. “What does this mean, my lord?” demands the jumpy Horatio. His question is never fully answered, although the play frames it repeatedly, sometimes in these very words. The sound is as ghostly as the apparition that materializes immediately after Hamlet’s explanation of the sound’s meaning,72 and its origins and significance remain quite as ambiguous. What does this mean? The cannon, drum, and trumpet produce a military music, and seem a sonic manifestation of all the previous night’s murmurs of past and approaching wars, and the “daily cast of brazen cannon” (1.1.72). But as Hamlet explains, it is no such thing: the King is just having a party. Claudius exposes his degeneracy in this perversion of the music of war. The usurper is confident in his ability to control sounds, and to project through them a specific meaning of his own. To Hamlet’s agreement to remain at court, the king responds: This gentle and unforced accord of Hamlet Sits smiling to my heart; in grace whereof No jocund health that Denmark drinks today But the great cannon to the clouds shall tell, And the King’s rouse the heavens shall bruit again, Re-speaking earthly thunder. (1.2.123–8)

Claudius positions the noises of heaven as echoes: the reverberation of earthly sounds. It was traditional to conceive of thunder as the audible expression of divine justice.73 In The Tempest, the guilty Alonso raves, “the thunder, / That deep and dreadful organ pipe, pronounced / The name of Prosper; it did bass my trespass” (3.3.97–9). Claudius refuses to hear his own victim’s name in the thunder, but he does not figure the thunder in terms of meaningless noise. The word “re-speaking” suggests not merely noise but articulation. Claudius is saying something with the cannon, and heaven obediently repeats his message back to him. He reduces 72 In the Folio; in Q2 the Ghost’s arrival is delayed by Hamlet’s ruminations on the waning reputation of the Danes. 73 Elton, 202–5.

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ominous rumbling from the sky to an echo of earthly accord, and smiles, and the drinking of “jocund health[s].” The last word suggests a system functioning as it should—but these “health[s]” are in fact intemperance in action. The cannon “tells” health to the clouds, like a great clock, or like Hamlet’s supposedly sane pulse, which “Doth temperately keep time / And makes … healthful music” (3.4.131–2). This earthly thunder makes music in its affirmation of the “gentle and unforced accord” that now supposedly reigns between the king and his nephew. Claudius works to erase all impression of violence or “force” in the sound; he tries to remove the terror from the thunder by describing it as a signal of grace, rather than of justice. The speech insists on the meaning of the thunder; at the same time, Claudius’s own “re-speaking” attempts to translate noise into music. Claudius precludes the possibility that heavenly thunder—which after all, according to his scenario, does not originate in heaven—might threaten or accuse; but in the following ghost scene, Claudius’s “earthly thunder” provokes first Hamlet’s condemnation (so much for accord) and then, seemingly, the appearance of the ghost. When the phantom appears directly after the burst of noise, the sound assumes a new significance: it is his herald, announcing his armored presence; and in retrospect, it reassumes its old military significance. Upon the ghost’s appearance, Hamlet echoes Horatio’s question about the sound, demanding: “What may this mean?” (1.4.32). The noise and the apparition are intimately connected: Heaven or Hell “re-speaks” Claudius’s treacherous music in the appearance of the ghost, and ultimately demands the usurper’s death. This doubleness may be hinted at in Hamlet’s initial explanation of the sounds: “The King doth wake tonight.” Which King? Claudius’s obsessive desire to turn thunder and warlike noise into an extension of his own voice surfaces again in the final scene. Here, the “accord” is patently false: the king hides his aggression with gracious language. Give me the cups, And let the kettle to the trumpet speak, The trumpet to the cannoneer without, The cannons to the heavens, the heaven to earth, ‘Now the King drinks to Hamlet.’ (5.2.252–6)

Once again, Claudius insists that the sounds are speaking, and that they are conveying a very specific message. By means of an auditory illusion, Claudius’s “speech” will seem to come from heaven—and since the King plans to poison the cup, this “speech” will condemn the Prince, as if by the voice of divine justice. But the sound is separated from its intended referent and hangs in the air. As drum, trumpets, and cannon go off, Claudius commands: “Give him the cup”—and Hamlet, anticlimactically, answers: “I’ll play this bout first. Set it by a while” (5.2.226–7). Fortinbras fixes the “soldier’s music,” at last, into one appropriate meaning: a military honor for the dead, with all treacherous and debauched meanings purged away. But the “soldier’s music” carries an entire range of potential meanings that

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are quite beyond the soldier’s knowledge and control. Fortinbras assumes that the sound of a cannon is a sound of war, of battle on a proper battlefield, of military salutes; but throughout the play, the audience has associated cannon reports with Claudius and his power. The last time a gun went off, we were told that the noise meant: “Now the King drinks to Hamlet”; and, implicitly, “The King drinks to Hamlet’s death.” The play thus ends on a note of eeriness. Which King drinks to Hamlet? Is the “soldier’s music” an ironic salute from Claudius, from beyond the grave? Or a last, incomprehensible statement by the old warrior king, who may not have vanished completely from the world of the play?74 In contrast, the ghost disappears at an audible sound that seems friendly and innocuous: the crowing of the cock. But in spite of the positive valence assigned to this noise by the on-stage listeners, the crowing partakes in the eerie music of the play, and its meaning and nature remain uncertain. Horatio and Marcellus draw upon tradition to explain the interaction between sound and spirit, and are relieved to find that the encounter has proven the truth of this tradition: ghosts are banished by the crowing of the cock. Horatio’s later account to Hamlet, however, suggests a more problematic and intimate relationship between the apparition and the crowing: [Y]et once methought It lifted up it head and did address Itself to motion like as it would speak, But even then the morning cock crew loud, And at the sound it shrunk in haste away And vanished from our sight. (1.2.215–20)

If we initially get the ghost instead of a sound (the clock chime), now we are left with a sound instead of the ghost. The ghost lifts its head, perhaps even opens its mouth; the cock crows (loudly, like the soldier’s music and the rites of war); the ghost vanishes. It fades at and in the sound, and the sound takes the place of the speech that it does not get the chance to make. The music that apparently banishes the apparition is a weirdly appropriate voice for it: a “trumpet to the morn,” a warlike “warning,” awakening the “god of day” (1.1.131, 133). (Hamlet twice compares his father to Hyperion.) In retrospect, however, the sound can be connected with Claudius, the satyr who has usurped Hyperion, and in whose presence Hamlet feels “too much i’th’ sun” (1.2.140, 67). As soon as Horatio, Marcellus, and Barnardo exit the stage, an actual flourish of trumpets announces the entrance of Claudius; and at the end of the play, Hamlet, like his father, fades as the “potent poison … o’ercrows” his spirit, this metaphorical noise accompanied by the audible “war-like volley” of the gunner Death. The trumpet of the morn has Gurr and Ichikawa argue that the original audience would have expected the ghost to appear again at the end of the play, as in The Spanish Tragedy (161). And in a way, he does—but audibly, not visually. For the absence of the Ghost—“the central mnemonic image of the play”—at the conclusion, see Wilder, 137. 74

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become the voice of poison—perhaps it was so all along.75 The first scene of the play prefigures the last, and the final soldier’s music signifies the same thing that the crowing did, although initially we did not understand what it meant. Ophelia too fades quite literally in music. The audience does not witness her swan-like death, when she supposedly sinks, still singing, into the river, but Gertrude describes it in some detail. Several critics have interpreted this speech as another attempt to beautify and control Ophelia’s dangerous music. Leslie Dunn writes that “Gertrude’s verbal lyricism performs a crucial function: it re-appropriates Ophelia’s music by inscribing it in the containing verbal structures, the metaphorical ‘music’ of poetry …. In telling her ‘pretty’ story of Ophelia’s death, Gertrude is implicitly submitting it to patriarchal authority, representing Ophelia the way men want to see her.”76 Gertrude’s pretty story takes on new significance when we realize that it is one of several pretty stories, several crucial passages in Hamlet where characters describe music. Marvin Rosenberg remarks of Gertrude’s speech, “There is the sense almost of a mother shaping the content of a sad incident into a palatable fairy-tale-like form”77—but Marcellus’s story of roosters at Christmastime in the opening scene of the play is even more fairy-talelike than Gertrude’s narration. The sudden noises of Hamlet undergo a startling change as they pass into the language of the play. They behave as light does, entering water, bent and distorted by the new medium. The play refracts the sounds through its discourse, often through a lyricism that turns the noises into music through the music of the words themselves. The crowing of a cock is not an inherently pleasant noise. This sound effect was cut from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century productions, for fear it would strike the audience as absurd or grotesque.78 Producers preferred to let crowing be heard only through the more decorous and poetic descriptions of the characters. BARNARDO. It was about to speak when the cock crew. HORATIO. And then it started like a guilty thing Upon a fearful summons. I have heard The cock, that is the trumpet to the morn, Doth with his lofty and shrill-sounding throat Awake the god of day, and at his warning, Whether in sea or fire, in earth or air, Th’extravagant and erring spirit hies 75 Gross argues that the ghost’s speech, like “slanderous rumor,” poisons Hamlet’s ear (30). Mazzio notes that “in his partial or truncated expressions, Hamlet becomes a variant of the ghost ‘who was about to speak when the cock crew’” (210). 76 Dunn, 63. David Lindley makes a similar argument in “Shakespeare’s Provoking Music,” reading Gertrude’s speech as an attempt at romanticization and control (86–7). See also Neely, 52–3. 77 Marvin Rosenberg, The Masks of Hamlet (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992), 824. 78 Shirley, 9.

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Reverberating Song in Shakespeare and Milton To his confine; and of the truth herein This present object made probation. MARCELLUS. It faded on the crowing of the cock. Some say that ever ’gainst that season comes Wherein our saviour’s birth is celebrated The bird of dawning singeth all night long; And then, they say, no spirit can walk abroad, The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike, No fairy takes, nor witch hath power of charm, So hallowed and so gracious is the time. (1.1.128–45)

Barnardo begins by identifying the familiar sound that characters and audience have heard. His response is flat, frustrated, and in prose. Then, the long-drawnout process of description, definition, and poetic redefinition begins. Horatio first describes the crowing as a “fearful summons,” an apocalyptic phrase recalling his interrupted account of a time when “the moist star …. Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse” (118–20). This summons, however, as Horatio goes on to maintain, instead of drawing the sheeted dead from their graves, dispels spirits; it is the “trumpet of the morn,” and not the Last Trump. It does not announce the end of the world, but restores normality. Marcellus goes further, and transforms the sound yet again, in a lyrical restatement (and expansion) of Barnardo’s original stark observation. The frustrated, “It was about to speak when the cock crew,” becomes the meditative “It faded on the crowing of the cock,” as Marcellus launches into what can seem like an irrelevant lyrical set piece. Quickly, the cock becomes “the bird of dawning,” and the crowing, singing. (The actual sound of a rooster crowing incessantly all night would be a far less pleasant experience than the one Marcellus evokes.) This perpetual singing prefigures the end of time, but not in the same way that a fearful trumpet does. Time dissolves in the marker of time, as the bird’s song stretches the liminal moment of dawn through a whole night, and disjoints time in a beautiful, even holy way. The crowing neither marks the relentless passage of time, nor announces the apocalypse, but provides a pleasant foretaste of eternity. It is not a bell tolling the hours, or a trumpet announcing doomsday, but expansive song. Here, Marcellus respeaks not only the crowing of the cock, but the entrance of the ghost. His words describe a past event (the birth of Christ) come musically alive in the present, but in a way that is no longer ghostly. The other voice speaking from beyond the grave is, implicitly, that of Christ, precluding all other spirit voices. The audience has heard crowing, not singing; but by the time Marcellus has finished speaking, we have half-forgotten what we originally heard. The speech describes an ideal music, and simultaneously struggles to become this music, to replace crowing with lyrical verse. Marcellus transforms crowing into singing and translates Barnardo’s initial prose statement into poetry in the same action. The “music” of the crowing and the “music” of the play are created simultaneously, and the passage performs the function it ascribes to the bird of dawning: drawing

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out the time, changing the mood from anxious questioning to lyrical mediation. During the speech, night turns to morning. Marcellus’s holy music does not come to life theatrically, however, as Barnardo’s ghostly chime does; no visible embodiment of the sound appears and moves about the stage. The speech itself must perform the function of the music it describes. In the final scene, Horatio similarly refuses to accept that “the rest is silence,” and he fills this silence with imaginary melody, the singing of “flights of angels.” His imaginings are rudely interrupted by reality. The (inaudible) angelic choir is replaced by the warlike sound of the drum, which by the end of the play will become Hamlet’s funeral music. The shooting of Death has an auditory analogue in the sonic world of the play, but the angels do not. Such an analogue can come to life only in Horatio’s own lyrical phrase. This phrase must stand in for the singing of the angels, just as Laertes’s equally simple lyricism stands in for the mass denied to Ophelia when the priest refuses “to sing sage requiem and such rest to her / As to peace-parted souls” (5.1.220–21). “Lay her i’th’ earth,” her brother says, “And from her fair and unpolluted flesh / May violets spring” (221–3). The power of such moments is increased by the fact that verbal echoes of both heard and unheard music cannot be confined to specific moments. The “singing all night long” described by Marcellus does not stay neatly contained in one lyrical interlude; it stains the material around it, like ink soaking through paper or cloth, as Horatio continues with the elaborately lyrical “But look, the morn in russet mantle clad / Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastward hill” (1.1.166–7). These are the two very lines that T.S. Eliot picked out to demonstrate the unevenness of the play, referring to its “superfluous and inconsistent scenes” and concluding that “[b]oth workmanship and thought are in an unstable position.”79 Thirty-two years later, Eliot felt rather differently, praising the exchange between Marcellus and Horatio as “great poetry,” but also as involving an elusive “something more … a kind of musical design … which reinforces and is one with the dramatic movement.”80 The play encourages this musical reaction to its poetry. As Marcellus has just turned crowing into singing, the characters too have talked themselves into music, and their words are infused with new—almost, as Eliot’s first opinion suggests, excessive—lyricism. The transformation of noise to favor and to prettiness lingers in the surrounding words, in the awkward lyricism that clings stubbornly to the very idea of morning, touching even the Ghost’s strange and uncharacteristic announcement several scenes later: “The glowworm shows the matin to be near / And gins to pale his uneffectual fire” (1.5.89–90). In general, Hamlet senior could hardly be accused of excessive lyricism; but these lines might have come straight from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Eliot’s two seemingly contradictory opinions thus prove remarkably compatible. The language of his second account is surprisingly vague: “it is something more … a kind of musical design.” In his earlier language, “superfluous.” There is a certain Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems,” 123, 124. Eliot, Poetry and Drama (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951), 43.

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instability here, an excess, and the play registers this excess in terms of music. Music is an overflowing of the dawn, the grave, and the mind. As words become “musical,” however, they run the risk of becoming just as frightening and opaque as the sounds they attempt to transform. Gertrude and Laertes struggle to re-conceive Ophelia’s songs as “music,” and to imagine that in singing, Ophelia does what their own descriptions of her songs attempt to do: turn hell itself to favor and to prettiness. But songs are so deeply absorbed into the rest of the language, and so much a part of the words and the action of the play that no complete transformation is possible. Gertrude tries to erase the shockingly sexual content and affect of Ophelia’s singing by describing bawdy ballad as “melodious lay” (4.7.148, 153). In spite of all her efforts, though, the sexual aspect of the music that she attempts to transform through lyrical verse contaminates her own speech. Sexual allusions rise to the surface of Gertrude’s description of Ophelia’s melodious death, even as she seems to try to repress them. The singing Ophelia makes “fantastic garlands” of the “long purples / That liberal shepherds give a grosser name, / But our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them” (4.7.139–42).81 In a similar vein, if Horatio’s line about singing angels is intended to remind us of the singing Ophelia, as Joan Klein argues,82 the resulting image is highly disturbing. Angels are not supposed to sing the kind of music that Ophelia sings. Her ballads even retroactively taint Marcellus’s lyrical account of the cock as divine voice with a hint of obscenity: “All in the morning betime … Young men will do’t if they come to’t, / By Cock, they are to blame” (4.5.47, 59–60). In any case, the elusiveness of the sung epitaph, dramatized in Ophelia’s songs and epitomized in Hamlet’s line about the hobby-horse, casts an ironic light on the improvised requiems spoken by Gertrude, Laertes, and Horatio. If, in Leslie Dunn’s words, “[Ophelia’s] songs … become ghostly echoes of rituals that never took place, griefs that were never articulated,”83 the descriptions of music work all too similarly to the sounds that they struggle to reshape or replace. The characters project “harmony” onto the cosmos, in the form of fairy-tale narrations of music that hover poised on the verge of falling back into the eerie noise that generates them: the ghostly echoes without and within. If we understand the way music lies at the heart of the play’s treatment of haunting, then we can see the vividness, the almost-possibility of that other side of the ghostly: the transcendent, the wholeness of meaning, the singing all night long. The play derives part of its terror from the suggestion that all these things may be ghostly, fictive projections—along with the drama itself. In truth, there may be no angel choirs singing to rest; there may not even be a true Last Trump. Lindley writes: “In this account all the dangerous implications of [Ophelia’s] songs are leached away” (Shakespeare and Music, 159)—but he only quotes from the moment that Gertrude starts to describe Ophelia’s singing. 82 Joan Klein, “‘Angels and Ministers of Grace’: Hamlet, IV, v–vii,” Allegorica 1.2 (1976): 156–76. 83 Dunn, 61. 81

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Even the apocalyptic resonance of the rooster’s crow—the “fearful summons” of the final judgment—proves hollow. The action of Hamlet as a whole is overshadowed by apocalyptic intimations;84 but despite the possibilities of redress offered by the apocalyptic prospect, the play can never actually arrive at this moment of fulfillment. When told by his old school friends that the world has turned honest, Hamlet retorts: “Then is Doomsday near. But your news is not true” (2.2.234). The true Last Trump will truly raise the dead; the play raises the dead only as ghosts—and, finally, in the form of a theatrical illusion, as the “dead” actors arise to the sound of applause and dance a jig. The play expresses two incompatible but equally unsupportable fears. Either we do not inhabit a harmonious cosmos at all—or we do, and its “harmony” corresponds precisely to the music of the play, in all its noisiness, eeriness, and incomprehensibility. The heavens either emptily reverberate, or operate according to the impenetrable and seemingly senseless design of an inscrutable power. In the end, the play casts the audience as this power. Their applause inevitably comes as a response to Fortinbras’s final words: “Bid the soldiers shoot.”85 The clapping will mingle with the sound of the guns, calling the actors to their feet—and to the “judgment” of the audience. Now it is our turn to “re-speak” thunder, taking the place of the heavens in Claudius’s map of traveling sounds: “the cannons to the heavens, the heaven to earth.” But though the audience may judge Hamlet, their clapping ultimately does nothing but reverberate the play’s own sounds. In the comedic world of Twelfth Night, music is considerably more benign. It retains a constant suspicion of irony, and yet it repeatedly offers a way of escaping from irony, and from the context that would render it ironic. Music remains a haunting presence, imitating and inspiring the indirect operations of desire; but it also becomes an ameliorating influence, reducing pain and insult to harmless, but strangely genuine, “play.” In The Tempest, however, the eerie musical metaphysics of Hamlet return. When he rejects revenge in favor of forgiveness, Prospero arguably provides a revision of the action of Hamlet, averting tragedy through harmonious reconciliation.86 He calls for—and seemingly gets—the “heavenly music” (5.1.52) that characters like Horatio can only imagine. However, Hamlet and The Tempest both end with the thundering applause of the audience; and in both cases, the applause is elicited in an unsettling way. Prospero requests the audience to intercede for him in prayer, drawing attention to the way that The Tempest treats prayers and thunderous noise as inseparably as Hamlet treats Death’s gun and the music of the “heavens.” In general, The Tempest provides much more, and much more literally harmonious, music than the earlier tragedy; but its “marvelous sweet music” (3.3.19) may simply indicate a new level of success at turning affliction and hell itself to favor and to prettiness. See de Grazia, 202. Stephen Ratcliffe, “What Doesn’t Happen in Hamlet: The Ghost’s Speech,” Modern

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Language Studies 28.3–4 (1998): 130. See also Gurr and Ichikawa, 129. 86 Neill, “Remembrance and Revenge,” 45–6.

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Chapter 4

Playing Music: Twelfth Night and The Tempest In the early modern era, music held a special power over the affections. It could transfer the emotions of the singer to the listener with an efficacy and immediacy surpassing the power of words alone. It could “expresse and represent to the minde more inwardly then [sic] any other sensible meane the very standing rising and falling, the very steps and inflections euery way, the turnes and varieties of all passions whereunto the minde is subiect: yea so to imitate them.”1 Singing not only expressed and imitated passions: it could literally project them.2 In his commentary on Plato’s Timaeus, Marsilio Ficino expressed the influential conviction that “musical sound … conveys as if animated, the emotions and thoughts of the singer’s or player’s soul to the listeners’ souls.”3 Such transfers of emotion were often considered in terms of infection.4 The effective projection of passion depends—or ought to depend—upon the passion’s authenticity. As Debora Shuger explains, “Renaissance rhetorics repeatedly affirm that the speaker moves others by expressing his own emotions and that therefore he must be moved himself before attempting to stir up his auditors. Passionate discourse thus imitates the movement of thought and feeling, the contours of the speaker’s inner life.”5 Music similarly transmits emotion from performer to hearer, though in a manner that transcends words. “How dost thou 1 Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiasticall Politie: The Fift Booke (London, 1597), H2r; my emphasis. 2 Gretchen Finney, Musical Backgrounds for English Literature: 1580–1650 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1962), 92. See also John Stevens, “Shakespeare and the Music of the Elizabethan Stage,” in Shakespeare in Music, ed. Phyllis Hartnoll (London: Macmillan, 1964), 48. 3 Quoted in Finney, 87. In Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993), Gary Tomlinson disagrees with D.P. Walker’s conclusion that Ficino distinguished between “words that carried intellectual content, thus reaching the mind, and music that reached only the spirit,” arguing that for Ficino, “the meanings of words were a consequence of their place in the harmonies of the world” (121). Compare D.P. Walker, Spiritual & Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 9–10, 21. For more on Ficino’s influence, see Penelope Gouk, Music, Science and Natural Magic in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 70. 4 Finney, 87. 5 Debora Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 228.

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like this tune?” Orsino asks his supposed page, and Viola answers: “It gives a very echo to the seat / Where love is throned” (2.4.20–21). At this moment, however, no one is singing. Orsino has called for a song; but Feste, who should perform it, is absent. While his people search for the Fool, the Duke orders his musicians to “play the tune the while (13),” and his conversation with Viola unfolds against the playing of a repeated melody, a tune parted simultaneously from its words and from the physical presence of a singer. If the tune is the echo of the heart—the seat where love is throned—whose heart is it echoing? In this case, questions of authenticity or inauthenticity seem beside the point: no particular singer projects feeling through this disembodied melody. The mysteriousness of musical origins becomes quite literal in The Tempest: “Where should this music be?” (1.2.391). In the later play, the musician is an airy spirit: the singer—an air—is an air, the song itself.6 Russ McDonald has drawn attention to the “musical repetition of vowels and consonants, reduplication of words, echoing of metrical forms, and incantatory effect” in the “musical design” of The Tempest.7 Virginia Woolf once described Twelfth Night in similar terms, distinguishing the experience of reading from the experience of attending a performance: There is time [when reading] … to wonder at queer jingles like “that live in her; when liver, brain, and heart” … “and of a foolish knight that you brought in one night” and to ask oneself whether it was from them that was born the lovely, “And what should I do in Illyria? My brother he is in Elysium.” For Shakespeare is writing, it seems, not with the whole of his mind mobilized and under control but with feelers left flying that sport and play with words so that the trail of a chance word is caught and followed recklessly. From the echo of one word is born another word, for which reason, perhaps, the play seems as we read it to tremble perpetually on the brink of music. They are always calling for songs in Twelfth Night, “O fellow come, the song we had last night.”8

The play’s songs and musical interludes, in Woolf’s formulation, seem to spring from, or flow into, a particular quality of the language, a play of sound only tangentially entangled in meaning, a fascination with echoic association. 6 See Gina Bloom, Voice in Motion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), for an account of echoes as “disembodied and uncontrollable voice” (161). 7 Russ McDonald, “Reading The Tempest,” Shakespeare Survey 43 (1991): 19, 24. McDonald expands upon these observations in Shakespeare’s Late Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 211–12. See also Michael Neill, “‘Noises, / Sounds, and Sweet Airs’: The Burden of Shakespeare’s Tempest,” Shakespeare Quarterly 59 (2008): 37–8. 8 “Twelfth Night at the Old Vic (1933),” in Twelfth Night: Critical Essays, ed. Stanley Wells (New York: Garland, 1986), 79. In a similar vein—but without an explicit connection to music—see Geoffrey Hartman, “Shakespeare’s Poetical Character in Twelfth Night,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Methuen, 1985): “[W]hile everything vacillates, the language itself coins its metaphors and fertile exchanges beyond any calculus of loss and gain” (46).

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I would suggest that this perpetual trembling on the brink of music realizes itself in performance also, though there may not be time to notice consciously the effects that Woolf so wonderfully describes: the associative and playful movement of language beyond the requirements of sense; the meaningless yet insistent way that words generate similarly sounding words. McDonald suggests that in the late romances, a similar “musicality” of the style helps to “confirm … the triumph of artifice.”9 It is precisely this sort of “musical” language, however, that Shakespeare’s contemporaries believed to impede the arousal of emotion. Sonic repetitions, verbal echoes, wordplay: all were perceived as “sensuous and distracting ornament”; for “insofar as language calls attention to itself as art, it undercuts the possibility of emotional involvement, which depends on at least the illusion of sincerity and spontaneity.”10 Language that draws too much attention to how words sound sacrifices not only the illusion of sincerity but also the possibility of arousing passion, instead inducing a “playful, distanced appreciation at odds with the commitment and unselfconscious absorption of strong emotion.”11 Though music supposedly possesses overwhelming affective power, infecting the listener’s soul with the passion of the performer, a language too clearly obsessed with sounds cannot move its audience. This makes a certain sense: as humanist discourse repeatedly reminds us, music supports and serves the words in the most emotionally effective songs. Language perpetually trembling on the verge of music is a different matter: if listeners follow the way “from the echo of one word is born another word,” they cannot be caught up in the passion that those words express. I contend that Shakespeare’s language by rights ought to produce such a distancing effect, but does not. Paradoxically, playful distance and emotional intensity feed off one another in the language of Twelfth Night, in a manner that reproduces the effects of the play’s pervasive music. This music paradoxically reverses the inverse relation between authenticity and emotion. The more it is “played,” the more it moves. Even—perhaps, especially—when music does not present a direct expression of true feeling, it may draw listeners deep into emotional involvement—even in the very process of distancing them. In The Tempest, however, the relationship between sympathy and artful, musical distance becomes more troubling and problematic. I. Twelfth Night begins with one of the most familiar of all familiar Shakespearean lines: “If music be the food of love, play on.” Our very familiarity with this opening may prevent us from fully appreciating its strangeness and originality. McDonald, Late Style, 76. Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric, 127, 139. 11 Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric, 122. 9

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No other Shakespeare play begins with instrumental music. Such an opening was characteristic of the children’s plays, with their musical resources that far surpassed those of the public theatres.12 Several critics have suggested that the rising popularity of the children’s plays around the turn of the century (remarked upon in Hamlet), led Shakespeare to increase the music in his own plays in order to compete.13 Such a project would have been assisted by the addition of Robert Armin to the company. But this competition, if competition it is, takes place on Shakespeare’s terms. Armin or no Armin, Shakespeare’s company could hardly compete in sheer quantity and complexity of music with a group of choirboys and an indoor theater that possessed its own contingent of musicians. Shakespearean music is the music of language. Nevertheless, the verbal musicality of Twelfth Night originates in actual music, welling up from these sites of musical performance just as the play’s first words arise from and perpetuate—and eventually replace— instrumental playing. Twelfth Night begins not only with music, but with Orsino’s elaborate, self-consciously evocative description of that music: “that strain again, it had a dying fall; / O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound / That breathes upon a bank of violets, / Stealing and giving odor” (1.1.4–7). The strain that the Duke so lavishly describes has already come over his ear, but he clings to it and seeks to prolong its effects in his languorous description. Orsino simultaneously draws our attention to the music and away from the music into the cadences of his own speech: the repeating sounds of “that strain again,” the sweet that breathes and steals upon his ear. His first attempt to approach “that strain” in words is simply “O,” half response and half nonverbal sound where speech and music meet. The “O” then melts into the synaesthesia of the impressionistic simile of the breeze and the flowers. An unvoiced play on words produces “sweet sound”: a sweet air moves over the violets, and air means both a song and a breath of wind. The primary sense in this context ought to be the breath of wind; but for Orsino, the secondary sense is primary, and so the delicate pun “air” becomes the nonsensical but ravishing “sweet sound.” The workings of metaphor in language are compressed, elided, and inverted, as the music that Orsino hears invades the simile intended to express it. As a result, Orsino’s speech becomes more poetically evocative, but makes less logical sense.14 David Lindley, Shakespeare and Music (London: Thomson, 2006), 203. See F.W. Sternfeld, Music in Shakespearean Tragedy (London: Routledge and

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Kegan Paul, 1963), 108; Winifred Maynard, Elizabethan Lyric Poetry and Its Music (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), 190. For more on musical practice in the children’s theaters, see Linda Phyllis Austern, Music in English Children’s Drama of the Later Renaissance (Philadelphia: Gordon and Breach, 1992); and Mary Chan, Music in the Theatre of Ben Jonson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980). 14 See Stephen Booth, “Twelfth Night: 1.1: The Audience as Malvolio,” in Shakespeare’s “Rough Magic”: Renaissance Essays in Honor of C.L. Barber, ed. Peter Erickson and Coppélia Kahn (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), 149–67.

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When Orsino orders the musicians to cease their playing, he also ceases to speak about music; but his former subject matter lingers in his struggle to capture the inexpressible in wordless sounds, in the double meanings of the words that he finally manages to articulate, and in syntactic slippage between music and love. The music that plays at the beginning of the scene does not simply stop. It melts into Orsino’s words, and continues to work beneath the surface. As Stephen Booth has noted, the syntax of the Duke’s opening speech often confuses love and music;15 so inevitably, when the Duke changes his topic from music to love, “music” not only lingers metaphorically in his lyrical words, but resonates in his subject matter. O spirit of love, how quick and fresh art thou That notwithstanding thy capacity Receiveth as the sea, naught enters there, Of what validity and pitch so e’er, But falls into abatement and low price Even in a minute. So full of shapes is fancy That it alone is high fantastical. (1.1.9–15)

The Duke verbally re-enacts the dying fall of the strain that he had so admired. Things of high pitch fall into abatement, and the secondary musical senses of “pitch” and “fall” cling to the speech, like faint echoes of the earlier lines. The Duke plays on the double meaning of “fancy” as love and imagination—but the word can also refer to a piece of music without words.16 It seems unlikely that Orsino’s self-conscious musings on love and music will move an audience to any particularly passionate or compassionate response— understandably so, given that the Duke seems to be “performing” largely for himself in this solipsistic effusion. The sonic emphasis of the speech creates exactly the artful, distancing effect that contemporary theories of rhetoric would lead us to expect. On the other hand, within the speech, there are no distances at all: one object of thought dissolves into another. Moreover, in speaking about music, Orsino has started something that moves quickly beyond his control. The music does not truly stop when the Duke orders it to stop; and the emotional movements

Booth shows that Orsino’s opening speech gives an impression of sense that evaporates when one examines the syntax and language closely. 15 Stephen Booth, 151. See also Hartman, 49. For an account of the “grotesque circularity” of this speech, and the argument that “Orsino hears the sound, and then becomes transformed into the sound he hears,” see Wes Folkerth, The Sound of Shakespeare (New York: Routledge, 2002), 104. 16 Christopher D.S. Field, et al, “Fantasia,” in Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.proxy.wm.edu/subscriber/article/grove/music/ 40048 (accessed May 13, 2011). “An essential of the fantasia is its freedom from words .… [T]he sense of the ‘play of imaginative invention’ underlies the word’s use as a title in the sixteenth century …. Elsewhere it may signify actual improvisation on an instrument.”

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of the play become musical movements, which subtly, but persistently, draw the audience into the distinctive rhythms of the play’s emotional world. When Curio asks, rather desperately, if the Duke would care to hunt the hart, the subject of hunting (and the potential double meaning of “hart”) brings the Duke right back to his obsession. “O!” he declares, when mine eyes did see Olivia first, Methought she purged the air of pestilence. That instant was I turned into a hart, And my desires, like fell and cruel hounds, E’er since pursue me. (1.1.20–24)

The Duke’s Actaeon fantasy will later assume an explicitly musical quality as he compares Viola’s “smooth and rubious” lip to Diana’s and declares that his page’s “small pipe / Is as the maiden’s organ, shrill and sound” (1.5.30–32). These associations, however, do not belong solely to Orsino, and surface again in odd and unexpected places. The Duke’s meditations on pestilence and hunting reemerge in a comic register as Sirs Toby and Andrew respond to Feste’s singing of “O Mistress Mine.”17 Sir Andrew is eager to show an aristocratic appreciation for the finer points of music; and Sir Toby, as usual, is eager to mock Sir Andrew. SIR ANDREW. A mellifluous voice, as I am true knight. SIR TOBY. A contagious breath. SIR ANDREW. Very sweet and contagious, i’faith. SIR TOBY. To hear by the nose, it is dulcet in contagion. But shall we make the welkin dance indeed? Shall we rouse the night owl in a catch that will draw three souls out of one weaver? Shall we do that? SIR ANDREW. An you love me, let’s do it. I am dog at a catch. FESTE. By’r Lady, sir, and some dogs will catch well. (2.3.49–57)

Sir Toby’s comment on the fool’s “contagious breath” teeters between genuine compliment and malicious insinuation: the fool’s singing is catchy; his breath is diseased. Sir Andrew unconsciously brings out the second meaning in his response, where the clash of the sweet and the contagious gives the latter term its sense of communicable illness. Sir Toby then dryly notes, in his own moment of crazy synaesthesia: “To hear by the nose, it is dulcet in contagion.” Olivia herself, from Orsino’s perspective, is sweet and contagious, dulcet in contagion. Even as her marvelous presence seems to purge the air of pestilence, the hapless Duke, in Olivia’s words, “catch[es] the plague” of desire (1.5.284). In that instant, Orsino is drawn into an internal, circular, and never-ending “caccia,” a hunt and an Italian round song, the probable source of the English term “catch.”18 Like Olivia, music 17 Stephen Booth, 155. See also Yu Jin Ko, “The Comic Close of Twelfth Night and Viola’s Noli me tangere,” Shakespeare Quarterly 48 (1997): 397. 18 David Wulstan, Tudor Music (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986), 54.

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possesses both marvelous healing powers and the ability to plunge the listener into endless cycles of passionate struggle. These cycles are not only precipitated by music, but are musical in themselves. In the comic scene, Sir Andrew’s proud remark—“I am dog at a catch”—is snapped up by Feste, who gives both “dog” and “catch” their most literal meanings, returning us to Orsino’s elegant conceit of his desires as hounds, pursuing his “hart.” It is within this world of all-pervasive but only occasionally audible music that the indirect and fanciful operations of desire become apparent. It is not a direct and sincere avowal, but rather acknowledged artifice, playful insincerity, and above all, indirection, that are required for one person to move another to passionate feeling. Music is the medium that best imitates and conveys this kind of emotional movement. In the opening scene, Orsino begins by describing a music that we actually hear; but Shakespeare takes a step further with the figure of Viola, who describes and evokes a music that does not exist. At her first appearance, Viola claims that she can “sing / And speak … in many sorts of music” (1.2.53–4), and various critics have speculated that the Twelfth Night we know is a revision of an earlier version in which Viola sang.19 These critics point to the seeming awkwardness of 2.4, where the Duke asks Cesario for a verse of “that piece of song, / That old and antic song we heard last night (2–3),” only to be informed that Feste the jester, who ought to sing the song, is not present. The Duke may be requesting his page to procure rather than perform music; on the other hand, the command may be a remnant from an older version, clumsily altered to accommodate a singing jester and an unmusical page. If the play was revised to eliminate a singing Viola, however, it seems strange that her claim to “speak in many sorts of music” was retained. The text as it stands evokes an absence: in the midst of all this music, Viola does not sing. Arguably, the audience is meant to feel this absence, and then to notice that Viola repeatedly relocates music in speech. Indeed, many critics describe Viola’s “willow cabin” and “patience on a monument” speeches in terms of music.20 Peter Thomson presents the most expansive version of this tendency: “At its lyrical heights, the language of love moves through recitative to aria …. It is not adequate to say of this that Viola is ‘speaking blank verse’. Musical notation is almost as helpful as scansion in understanding its effect.”21 Recitative and aria are surely not terms available to Shakespeare; and how would we apply musical notation to this speech? If Viola’s speech to Olivia is truly “musical” in a way that other passages For a summary of the critical debate, see Peter J. Seng, The Vocal Songs in the Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 113–14. 20 See, for instance, Barbara Everett, “Or What You Will,” Essays in Criticism 35 (1985): 294–314. For a treatment of Viola’s “discursive music” and the castrati, see Keir Elam, “The Fertile Eunuch: Twelfth Night, Early Modern Intercourse, and the Fruits of Castration,” Shakespeare Quarterly 47 (1996): 1–36. 21 Peter Thomson, Shakespeare’s Theatre, 2nd edn (New York: Routledge, 1992), 96–7. 19

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of lyrical blank verse are not—and I am inclined, at least for the moment, to take this suggestion seriously—then what makes it so? “If I did love you in my master’s flame,” Viola tells Olivia, “In your denial I would find no sense, / I would not understand it.” “Why, what would you?” asks Olivia (1.5.233–7). Viola’s answer is devastating, because it trots forth the usual clichés of unrequited love, tongue-in-cheek, and simultaneously rings with lyrical sincerity. Her speech hints at a depth of emotion inappropriate to the situation and the speaker, and consequently generates excessive emotion in Olivia. Make me a willow cabin at your gate And call upon my soul within the house, Write loyal cantons of contemnèd love, And sing them loud even in the dead of night; Halloo your name to the reverberate hills, And make the babbling gossip of the air Cry out ‘Olivia!’ (1.5.238–43)

Viola describes the songs that she would sing, assuming that she loved, and the passage reaches its climax when she actually cries out the word that she claims she would—in this hypothetical situation—cry out: Olivia! The voices of the sardonic page and the imagined lover, the describing speaker and the described singer overlap in this one word, to devastating effect. “You might do much,” murmurs the dazed Olivia. The climax of the speech, however, is the sounding of an echo without an origin. Viola speaks as the “babbling gossip of the air,” crying out the countess’s name in imitation of a voice that never speaks. This silent and imaginary voice is the voice of the true lover; and in the manner of the disembodied tune repeated in Orsino’s house, Viola’s words give “a very echo to the seat / Where love is throned”—though the seat itself is empty.22 Viola’s hypothetical scenario engages Olivia’s imagination: she is inspired to love by the echo of fictional voice, not by a direct declaration. Olivia herself must participate in bringing the “fantasy” to life in her mind. This indirect but powerful manner of awaking passion works, Shakespeare suggests, in the way that music itself works on the listener, as the Countess responds to emotion that is simultaneously excessive and without clear origin or direction. The messenger’s emotional engagement extends beyond what is demanded in the circumstances— Viola’s love for Orsino emerges in the message of love that she must bear from the Duke to Olivia—and Olivia finds herself attracted to this unfocused excess. The affect of the meeting between Viola and Olivia closely resembles Mark Booth’s account of the effects of song.

22 The allusion to Echo haunts the numerous other “echoes” in this play, a drama full of people repeating the words of others. See D.J. Palmer, “Twelfth Night and the Myth of Echo and Narcissus,” Shakespeare Survey 32 (1979): 73–8.

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The attitude in which one indulges in a song is abstracted from real things it might be an attitude toward. Love, pity, or defiance of someone or something is replaced by the arrested posture of loving, pitying, or the like. The posture implies an object, but the real object of the ordinary, contingent feeling is not there. It is for this reason that it seems false to sing a song to a real person as communication. That person can tell there is a ghost, properly addressed by the song, intervening—and who is the message coming from?23

This description fits Viola’s speech to Olivia almost exactly. But because the “song” is literally speech, the “arrested posture” described by Booth is un-arrested, set free, and allowed to dissolve into the rhythms of ordinary communication— with powerful and unsettling results. The Duke seems to anticipate Olivia’s response to the young page in his much commented-upon account of “Cesario’s” feminine beauty. When Viola expresses doubt over Orsino’s confident assumption that Olivia will prove more receptive to a youthful messenger than to one of “grave aspect,” the Duke reasserts his position—with a strange twist. Dear lad, believe it; For they shall yet belie thy happy years That say thou art a man. Diana’s lip Is not more smooth and rubious; thy small pipe Is as the maiden’s organ, shrill and sound, And all is semblative a woman’s part. (1.5.28–33)

Dear lad, believe what? Viola has suggested that Olivia will not prove any more susceptible to a young messenger; the Duke responds by assuring “Cesario” that “he” is very youthful-looking indeed. The response, at the least, is a nonsequitur. Orsino’s initial confidence in the persuasive power of youth does make a certain sense. In The Merchant of Venice, Portia’s servants are much impressed by the “young Venetian” who announces Bassanio’s approach to Belmont; they have never seen “so likely an ambassador of love” (2.9.91). Portia jestingly refers to “quick Cupid’s post, that comes so mannerly” (99); nevertheless, she seems taken by the description. As Orsino continues to justify his choice, however, he reveals that “Cesario” reminds him of Diana rather than Cupid—surely a most inappropriate ambassador of love. The oddity can of course be explained in terms of Orsino’s own psychology: he is far more interested in his effeminate page than he ought to be, and so he lingers over “his” physical appearance more than strictly necessary. But the musical edge to Orsino’s interest in Viola also suggests a new way of understanding the Duke’s peculiar and persistent idea that Diana would prove an ideal conduit for his love to Olivia. At Orsino’s next appearance, his description of the song “Come Away Death” reiterates the idea of a man’s desperate love transmitted through a chaste, indifferent feminine figure. According to the Duke, the song is commonly—perhaps even 23 Mark Booth, The Experience of Songs (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 23.

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traditionally—sung by “the spinsters and the knitters in the sun, / And the free maids that weave their thread with bones” (2.4.43–4). These maids—explicitly carefree, and not in love—sing the song to make their work easy, not to express their feelings. Orsino draws upon a common trope that can be traced back to classical praises of music, which seek to prove the naturalness of music to man by providing examples of workers singing at their tasks.24 This tradition emphasizes song’s ability to ease labor: there is nothing amorous about such musical performances—if singing at one’s work can be called “performance” at all. Orsino’s fondness for “Come Away Death” nevertheless appears inextricably linked to its supposedly simple origins. The song somehow generates greater emotional energy when it is imagined as coming from an indifferent source. The maids sing cheerfully in the sun about coffins and graves, as they weave thread with bones. The Duke is irresistibly drawn towards this strangely “natural” performance, this expression of unfelt feeling that manages to remain simple and authentic. The singing spinners and knitters in the sun also slip easily, even unconsciously, into another gender role as they voice the frustrations of a male subject “slain by a fair cruel maid.” The effect of these care-free maids on Orsino, as he imagines them singing the words of a young man desperately in love, strongly resembles the effect of Viola / Cesario’s willow cabin speech on Olivia. The Duke fantasizes about indifferent maidens chanting the role of the languishing male lover, while Olivia finds herself inexplicably attracted by a passionate serenade described by a boy who is not only markedly indifferent to the countess’s beauty, but actually a woman in disguise. Viola understands how to use these indirect movements of desire to her own advantage. After Feste’s performance of “Come Away Death,” Viola “sings” her next musical speech by verbally reshaping the music of Orsino’s imaginary maids.25 She draws the Duke’s interest by replacing his account of indifferent maidens singing passionate words with her own account of her “sister,” a far-fromindifferent maiden who never expresses her passion and desire. In the process, Viola revises and respeaks the song we have just heard. The suffering lover of the song, who melodramatically demands a “black coffin” of “sad cypress,” becomes a silent woman who “pine[s] in thought,” sitting “like patience on a monument, / Smiling at grief” (2.5.59, 51, 111–14). The “I” of “Come Away Death” declares his 24 Lindley traces this trope back to St. John Chrysostom, who writes: “Women, too, weaving and parting the tangled threads with the shuttle, often sing a particular melody, sometimes individually and to themselves, sometimes all together in concert. This they do—the women, travelers, peasants, and sailors—striving to lighten with a chant the labor endured in working, for the mind suffers hardships and difficulties more easily when it hears songs and chants” (Shakespeare and Music, 26). 25 Critics have found this moment mysteriously “musical.” See for instance Harold Jenkins, “Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night,” in Twelfth Night: Critical Essays, ed. Stanley Wells (New York: Garland, 1986), 179. In Shakespeare and Music, Lindley remarks, “Viola may not have sung the song, but in this last movement of the scene the musical enunciation of a death-directed love is transferred into her poetic voice” (209).

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love and extravagantly refuses any memorial—“Lay me O where / Sad true lover never find my grave, / To weep there” (2.4.63–5)—but Viola raises an ambiguous “monument” out of the absence of declaration. All that is explicit in the song becomes implicit; all that was expressed becomes unexpressed. At the same time, Viola eloquently tells of how her imaginary sister “never told her love” (2.4.109): she tells her own story in circuitous lyricism that manages to be utterance and silence at the same time. The figurative monument is the “seat where love is throned,” and Viola’s indirect speech is the echo of a heart that remains silent. Orsino is fascinated by the story. Suddenly, those singing maidens of his imagination become not indifferent but opaque, some or all of them quite possibly possessed by hidden desire and threatened by the death that they so carelessly evoke in song. Like the willow cabin speech, Viola’s account of her “sister” is marked by a sudden increase of emotional pressure accompanied by a move to the conditional: “If I did love you,”—“were I a woman.” Whether or not the proposed condition accords with fact makes no difference in the effect produced on the on-stage listener; and in one sense, “were I a woman” is no less a fantasy than “If I did love you,” as the character of Viola is played by a boy actor. At the end of the play, the Duke seems almost to prefer this fantasy—if the boy were a woman—to the simple fact that the boy is a woman. The strangeness of the conclusion might indicate that the Duke really likes boys better than women, but it also could suggest a preference for the hypothetical over the actual. The central plot device of a woman playing a young man cannot be fully separated from the affect generated by women singing songs in the voice of a male subject. The situations are similar—and yet not the same at all. In a song, there is no deception; nothing is at stake. The Duke’s fantasy transports us into a world where there is no acting and no pretending—even while there is. The spinners and knitters make no attempt to disguise themselves, or to deceive. It would never occur to anyone that these maidens, singing at their work, may actually be young men, or that they mean what they sing. No one could think to accuse them of any sort of subterfuge; yet the song that they do not mean retains all the emotive force, the frustrated passion of its nonexistent subject. The maidens draw attention to the illusion without sacrificing any of its effect. The drama, however, inverts the scenario set forth by Orsino: the maidens are imaginary, and the “I” of the song (Orsino himself) appears onstage, listening to an indifferent and ironic clown ventriloquize his love-sick lament. Feste persistently draws attention to the division between the singer and the “I” of the song: “No pains, sir. I take pleasure in singing, sir” (2.4.66). Instead of making pretence inherently natural and truthful, the clown moves in the opposite direction, reminding the characters and audience of the artifice involved in seemingly simple and everyday actions. He draws attention to the lack of innocence in ordinary speech, in the reading of letters … and, most of all, in the singing of songs. For Orsino, “Come Away Death” “dallies with the innocence of love, / Like the old age” (2.4.46–7).

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But Feste, Olivia’s musician and self-proclaimed corrupter of words, dallies with words and makes them wanton (3.1.13–31). Both Viola and Feste call attention to the problem of speaking in another’s voice—one of the central obsessions of the play. What can make this kind of speech noticeable or unnoticeable, strange or seemingly natural? Feste repeatedly clouds the seeming transparency of familiar actions—reading a letter aloud, singing a song. Both kinds of utterance are acting, although we do not habitually think of them in this way. When Feste brings Malvolio’s letter to Olivia, she requests him to read it to the assembled company, but cuts him off after only a few words. OLIVIA. How now, art thou mad? FESTE. No, madam, I do but read madness. An your ladyship will have it as it ought to be you must allow vox. OLIVIA. Prithee, read i’thy right wits. FESTE. So I do, Madonna, but to read his right wits is to read thus. Therefore perpend, my princess, and give ear. OLIVIA [to Fabian]. Read it you, sirrah. (5.1.284–91)

Since he is reading the message of a madman, Feste argues, he ought to read in a madman’s voice, or else the meaning will not be transmitted properly. In the process, he reminds us that a person who reads another’s letter aloud performs that person, even though such an action is usually considered a simple transmission of meaning, not an impersonation. When one adds vox, the result is both more and less true to the original. Such a dramatized reading seeks to add the sound and timbre of the writer’s voice to his or her words, to make the writer present in the message. On the other hand, such a performance is, inevitably, a performance, and turns a message into a falsification. Malvolio, of course, is not mad at all, as Feste well knows. What Feste does here is a kind of parody of what Viola does when she delivers Orsino’s message of love by describing what she would do if she herself were in love, when she clarifies the distinction between the messenger’s performance and the message, only to express that message in a voice imbued with a fantasy of the sender’s passion. Viola’s vox is mysterious; Feste’s is pure vaudeville. Singing a song is a rather different matter from reading a letter, although here too Feste draws attention both to the nature of song as performance, and to the ease with which we forget that singing is always a kind of pretending, a speaking in the voice of another. Orsino’s ideal, wished-for fragment of the golden age is the performance that is not a performance. Feste’s own performance illuminates the nature of the ideal while refusing to enact it. “Come Away Death” presumably brings a certain amount of tonal vox in its tune; and the successful performer must pretend to sing from the heart. “When a singer performs a song,” writes David Lindley, “at one level he or she is adopting a dramatic persona for whom the song he or she sings makes sense as an outburst of feeling. The ‘I’ of the lyric is not the ‘I’ who is the singer, and it is the music which renders it possible for an audience to accept the transformation of Feste the ageing jester into the lovelorn

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persona of ‘Come away death.’”26 But would an audience once have accepted this transformation so easily? Our familiarity with the play makes it difficult to register the strangeness of Feste as a singer of serious love songs. In Castiglione’s The Courtier, one of the speakers maintains, “it were no meete matter, but an yll sight to see a man of eny estimation being olde, horeheaded and toothlesse, full of wrinckles with a lute in his armes playing upon it and singing in the middes of a company of women, although he could doe it reasonablye well. And that, because suche songes conteine in them woordes of loue, and in olde men loue is a thing to bee iested at.”27 Of course, these words refer to gentlemen, not to fools. Feste is hardly a man of estimation, and he is not singing for a company of ladies. Nevertheless, the passage indicates a fundamental conviction that an effective singer ought to look the part. An old, or possibly even an unattractive man singing a love song is “a thing to be jested at.” Feste is not necessarily an old man, but he can hardly be young, considering that he was a favorite of Olivia’s father. Furthermore, David Wiles argues that Robert Armin, likely the original Feste, was exceedingly short—possibly even a dwarf, and possibly deformed. Armin’s physique determines the particular character of his clowning. The pompous or parodic utterances of a man with total vocal control are counterpointed by a deformed body … As Jonson explains elsewhere, dwarves are popular ‘for pleasing imitation of greater men’s action, in a ridiculous fashion.’ … [Armin’s] lines are written on the assumption that body and voice are set in opposition and speak, as it were, different languages.28

These “different languages” would be further separated if the voice in the deformed body were singing beautifully—and particularly so if that voice were beautiful and high, suggesting the sound of a woman’s voice, or a boy’s voice in a short but hardly boyish figure. Armin refers to himself as a counter-tenor in the dedicatory epistle to Nest of Ninnies. The word had a number of different meanings at the time, and most commonly referred to the vocal line in a song moving “counter” to the tenor line. It could, however, refer to high-pitched singing, and Wiles takes the term in this sense, arguing: “The high singing voice adds to the anomaly, and to the sense of Armin’s multiple personae, at once elegant and ugly, at once boy and man.”29 An audience’s response to such a singer could not have been other Lindley, Shakespeare and Music, 208. The Courtyer of Count Baldessar Castilio diuided into foure bookes, trans. Thomas

26 27

Hoby (London, 1561), M4v. 28 David Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 150. These arguments about Armin’s physical appearance are accepted by Bruce R. Smith in his edition of the play, Twelfth Night: Texts and Contexts (Boston: St. Martin’s, 2001), 364. 29 Wiles, 159. For the use of “counter-tenor” in the sense of a high-pitched voice, see Pierre de la Primaudaye, The Second Part of the French Academie (London, 1594) on voice

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than complex. Critics have expressed uncertainty as to whether “Come Away Death,” with its swooning and self-pitying lyrics, should be considered a parody.30 The actual performance of the song may have introduced an element of mockery, a slight tinge of the ridiculous, into the paradox of intensity and indifference represented by the imaginary singing maids. The disjunction between song and singer that Viola makes erotic, Feste makes absurd. Nevertheless, for the scene to work, the song must function also as a moving lament; and if the performance embraces and overcomes its own inherent absurdity, then the power and pathos of the music become all the greater for the comic undertones. Pretence in singing is inevitable—“I take pleasure in singing,” Feste reminds us. Nevertheless, this taking pleasure in a performance of woe is not the same kind of pretence as that which occurs when Feste adopts the voice of “Sir Topas” to mock Malvolio. The “acting” in that instance is done solely with the voice (Malvolio cannot see Feste), and culminates in the bizarre moment when Feste’s two personas, the curate and the Fool, address one another: “Maintain no words with him, good fellow. – Who, I sir? Not I, sir. God b’ wi’ you, good Sir Topas.— Marry, amen.—I will, sir, I will” (4.2.88–94). This crazy bit of “dialogue” comes after Feste, temporarily putting aside “Sir Topas,” enters “in his own voice” in a song. “Hey, Robin” is itself a dialogue: “‘Tell me how thy lady does.’ … ‘My lady is unkind, pardie’ …. ‘Alas, why is she so?’” (4.2.66–9).31 Feste takes on two subject positions in both sung and spoken dialogues, but to very different effect. The sung exchange between Robin and his interlocutor seems natural and inevitable. It calls no notice to itself; it is not comic; it does not deceive: this is simply the way songs often go. Nevertheless, the situation is complicated as “jolly Robin” implicitly becomes Malvolio himself, distressed by the unkindness of his lady. Feste mocks him by singing in his voice—and by making his voice a singing voice. Nevertheless, the sad tune mixes the mockery with a strange, undeniable pathos.32 As we have seen, song is not a dependable vehicle for the communication of irony or parody. production: “as when [the vocal cords] are opened, they make the voice big and obscure, as it were the base in singing: so contrariwise when they are pressed, they make it small, cleere, and shrill, like to the countertenor” (95). 30 See Maynard: “The affected lyric invites a rendering that combines the answering of Orsino’s request with a tinge of mockery of his luxurious melancholy” (202). Lindley feels that this “is much more difficult to achieve in practice than [Maynard] implies” (Shakespeare and Music, 207). I think that a rendition poised between pathos and irony would be possible, if difficult. 31 The song seems to have been conceived as a round for several voices. See Ross Duffin, Shakespeare’s Songbook (New York: Norton, 2004), 48. Neither this version nor Feste’s version is at all concerned with presenting the dialogue as a dialogue. 32 See Marcus Cheng Chye Tan, “‘Here I am … Yet Cannot Hold This Visible Shape’: The Music of Gender in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night,” Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 32 (2001): 99–125. Tan suggests that “Feste’s solitary singing … heightens the isolation felt not only by Malvolio but perhaps by Feste too” (116).

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Feste’s final song, with its ominous iterance of wind and rain, returns the audience to quotidian reality; but it also extends the peculiarly musical enchantment of the play. In his analysis of Twelfth Night, Clifford Leech suggests that “the singing voice” can “soften the effect of a painful narrative.” Therefore, despite the gloominess of the song’s words, “the total effect is not harsh. We leave the theatre with a tune in our ears, and the harmony of Twelfth Night is after a fashion maintained.”33 Jacqueline Fox-Good accuses Leech of “equating music with ‘harmony’” in this passage,34 but in fact, the effect he describes does not evoke divine proportions and universal concord. The audience leaves the theater not attuned to the harmonies of human life or the music of spheres, but with a tune stuck in their heads. The meaning of the song dissolves; the negative images of the lyrics are forgotten and the melody remains. Music ameliorates, but not necessarily through its concord with cosmic order. Here again we see, as we see in Hamlet, the mental echoing of a song as a kind of forgetting through remembering. The ameliorating—even quasi-Utopian—potential of song emerges in Twelfth Night at one of the moments of greatest chaos: the drunken catch bellowed out in the night. Sir Andrew happily insists that the group sing his favorite catch, “Thou knave.” This is essentially a round in which all three participants repeatedly chant “Hold thy peace, thou knave!” to one another. From a utilitarian perspective, the catch is a perfectly pointless form of utterance—the point is not to do what the song says to do, or there would be no song in the first place. As Feste wittily observes, “I shall never begin if I hold my peace” (2.3.63). Beginning the song and continuing the song are actions that depend upon ignoring the words and assuming that one’s own words will be ignored. If the others were to hold their peace, the sole singer would be left looking and feeling foolish. This catch is the opposite of a speech act. Joining in the song allows the singers to abuse one another freely, without consequences, even without offense. The social degrees of the singers vanish as their voices chase one another around and around. “It is not the first time I have constrained one to call me knave,” pronounces Sir Andrew proudly, in response to Feste’s sly remark that he will be “constrained” by the song to address the knight as a knave (2.3.59–62). The freedom of the catch, however, hints at more than the general license allowed by Saturnalia. The insults are collaborative, rhythmic, pronounced in tune and time. Words that would ordinarily demand a response merely give birth to themselves, over and over again. The very nature of the song erases consequence, cause and effect, and the violent potential of language, as The assumption that the singing voice can be linked to the “I” is another fallacy; but on the other hand, as Sternfeld points out, “Robin” was Armin’s nickname (Music in Shakespearean Tragedy, 113). 33 Clifford Leech, “Twelfth Night” and Shakespearian Comedy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), 55. 34 Jacqueline Fox-Good, “Ophelia’s Mad Songs: Music, Gender, and Power,” in Subjects on the World’s Stage: Essays on British Literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. David G. Allen and Robert A. White (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995), 218.

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well as gradations of rank. If you said, “Hold thy peace, thou knave,” to someone in reality, either they would hold their peace, or they would respond angrily, depending on their social position relative to yours. In the catch, of course, neither reaction occurs. In song, one can take on another voice without impersonation, trickery, or mockery. This early moment of play points up the cruelty of Sir Toby’s final rejection of Sir Andrew: “Will you help—an ass-head, and a coxcomb, and a knave; a thin-faced knave, a gull?” (5.1.198–9). Here the repeated insult “knave” means something, where it meant nothing in the catch. In the song-like affect of Twelfth Night, the painful and melancholy elements of experience still linger—music, as so often in Shakespeare, allows for a seemingly impossible mingling of contradictory moods—but even these melancholy elements, the wind and the rain, are drawn up into the musical, repetitive movements of the repeating chorus, the unending catch. Even the fierce, circular chase of desire becomes absorbed into this playful round. Twelfth Night edges towards the dangerous, seductive, and intoxicating innocence of a strange golden age, where pretence becomes truth without ever ceasing to be pretence, where passion and indifference occupy the same space without struggle or deception, and voices are simultaneously mocking and heartbreakingly sincere. The play also dramatizes the irresistible attractiveness of this kind of musical expression. In The Tempest, such expression remains attractive, but becomes much more dangerous. Pain appears pleasurable; fear and horror make their presence felt even as they magically recede. Shakespeare’s late play takes the infiltration of speech by music to its furthest extreme: the singing of threats and the taking of pleasure in musical pain pervade the drama, conjuring a troubling golden world that can no longer be innocent. In The Tempest, the questions surrounding the affective powers of music are directly connected to metaphysical problems involving the nature of harmony, order, and justice. Music ameliorates: but does it do so by touching and reviving a deeper, hidden harmony—or is it simply a lulling, if intermittently haunting repetition, drifting further from sense and context with every iteration? II. The Tempest begins with sounds that could not provide a greater contrast to the strains of Orsino’s musicians. Andrew Gurr suggests that the opening of the play would have overturned the sonic expectations of its original audience: The Tempest is the first of Shakespeare’s plays definitely written for Blackfriars, and … [t]he opening storm scene with its uproar and confusions was a deliberate shock tactic. It threw an amphitheatre spectacle of noisy running-about at a Blackfriars audience that had just been lulled by the soft harmonies of a consort of musicians, who stayed at the playhouse when the boy company left.35 35 Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearian Playing Companies (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 367. See also Gurr, “The Tempest’s Tempest at Blackfriars,” Shakespeare Survey 41 (1989): 101.

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Of course, as we discover in the second scene, all is not as it appears to be. From Prospero’s perspective, the violence of the storm is perfectly ordered. The tempest restores a rightful ruler to his proper place, and so serves and expresses a larger harmony. This chaos of the opening scene is punctuated by the “th’ Master’s whistle” (1.1.16), a noise that embodies the interchangeability of order and disorder in the storm. In Henry V, the Chorus urges the audience to “hear the shrill whistle, which doth order give / To sounds confused” (3.0.7–10). In The Tempest, to the courtiers’ insistent inquiries about the whereabouts of the master, the boatswain demands, “Do you not hear him?” (1.1.12). At this point, however, the supposedly ordering sound of the whistle has become part of the general storm noise, or swallowed in the noise entirely, as in Pericles: “The seaman’s whistle / Is as a whisper in the ears of death / Unheard” (11.8–10). These lines creates a chilling impression of deafening roar and silence folded into one another. In The Tempest, the “master” of the entire scenario is Prospero, and the storm that “sing[s] i’ th’ wind” (2.2.19–20), as Trinculo puts it, is his whistle. The hidden “orderliness” of the storm may help to explain the strangeness of the cries of the sinking crew. According to the stage direction, they speak in a “confused noise” that is also a prayer: “Mercy on us! / We split, we split! Farewell, my wife and children! / Farewell, brother! We split, we split, we split!” (1.1.54–6). This is a strangely metrical confusion. Stephen Orgel comments, [E]ditors have decided with overwhelming unanimity that whatever the drowning sailors … will sound like on stage, they are nevertheless speaking blank verse. There is an aesthetic assumption here, with strong moral overtones, an editorial syllogism that goes: verse is better than prose, Shakespeare is the best poet, therefore anything that can be made to look like decent verse should be.36

The lines, however, do seem unnecessarily incantatory. The strange combination of confused noise and formal verse may be an indication of the orderly form underlying the chaos. Nevertheless, as symbolic harmony spills into the world of phenomena, it becomes less and less dependably symbolic. As the play continues, musical screams become still more unsettling and morally problematic. The Tempest explores the estrangement of emotional response to suffering, an estrangement it models in its characters, and works to induce in its audience. Counterintuitively, however, the audience’s engagement in the drama is ultimately generated by this very estrangement. Even as the play’s self-conscious acknowledgement of art and illusion sets us at arm’s length, it draws us in, obliquely, until the distinctions between selves and others, reality and illusion, collapse even as they are demarcated. These operations are the workings of wonder, and they erode and submerge pity and fear. This simultaneously distancing and absorbing wonder acts through music, and through language that begins to work as music does. 36 Stephen Orgel, “Acting Scripts, Performing Texts,” in The Authentic Shakespeare, and Other Problems of the Early Modern Stage (New York: Routledge, 2002), 38.

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The Tempest frequently invites a response of admiration and strange pleasure instead of sympathetic feeling; nevertheless, it also implies that there may be no other or no better way to arrive at a humane response to the pain of others, given the understanding that all this pain occurs through the workings of a “just” and harmonious system. The pain induced in such a system may rightly be considered illusory, from a perspective taking in the whole. (And indeed, no one is actually drowned or injured in the shipwreck, despite the victims’ subjective experiences of loss, despair, and fear.) When she sees the devastation wrought by the tempest, and cries “O, I have suffered / With those that I saw suffer” (1.2.5–6), Miranda becomes the ideal spectator for the age of sensibility. In the early seventeenth century, however, her response may have appeared less than ideal. Heather James has argued that Miranda’s passionate distress, which leads her to challenge her father, might have been perceived as dangerous and excessive.37 Prospero does refer, however, with seeming approval, to the “virtue of compassion” in his daughter (1.2.27). Her response to the shipwreck, as Stephen Orgel has pointed out, is the response of the Aristotelian spectator to tragedy: she is moved with fear and pity.38 Miranda thus, for a moment, potentially serves as a model for the audience: we, too, should be moved by the sufferings we witness. Yet as Prospero promptly reveals, surprising the audience as well as his daughter, this passionate sympathy—virtuous or not— is misdirected, indeed, unnecessary. No shipwreck has occurred. Prospero’s reassurances may indicate a shift from tragedy to tragicomedy, providing a corresponding hint as to the proper audience response to the staged events. Pity and fear are to be displaced with wonder and admiration.39 Marvelous power “so safely orders” chaos, that there betides “not so much perdition as a hair” (1.2.29–30). Yet this very invitation to wonder threatens to undo its own goal. Prospero’s powers may be wonderful, but his revelation of the workings of his “art” jars the audience’s suspension of disbelief, reminding us that we— like Miranda—were taken in by a theatrical illusion. If Miranda’s emotion at the fictional shipwreck is misplaced, then why should we become emotionally involved in any of the events passing before us on the stage? It would seem that the more we admire the “art” of the performance, the less the cries of fictive creatures will “knock / Against [our] very heart[s]” (1.2.8–9). The Tempest questions not only the affective power, but also the morality of the response it induces. As Robert Henke notes, tragic responses of weeping, fury, and passion in The Tempest are repeatedly and “curiously aestheticized” by music.40 Yet this most musical of Shakespeare’s plays is full of strange and terrible noises that at 37 Heather James, “Dido’s Ear: Tragedy and the Politics of Response,” Shakespeare Quarterly 52 (2001): 361. 38 The Tempest, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 102n14. 39 Robert Henke, “‘Gentleman-like Tears’: Affective Response in Italian Tragicomedy and Shakespeare’s Late Plays,” Comparative Literature Studies 33 (1996): 342–3. 40 Henke, 343.

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their most extreme resemble the cries of the damned. The sailors are awakened by “strange and several noises / Of roaring, shrieking, howling, jingling chains, / And more diversity of sounds, all horrible” (5.1.235–7). Prospero threatens Caliban: “I’ll … make thee roar / That beasts shall tremble at thy din” (1.2.370–71). It should be easy to distinguish between din and harmony; nevertheless, the music and the cries are inextricably connected. Ariel sings: “Hark, hark, / The watch-dogs bark,” and his fellow spirits respond: “Bow-wow!” (1.2.386–7). Animal noises are drawn into song; but later, these same sounds are, so to speak, let out. “Watch-dogs” actually appear near the end to chase Caliban and his companions.41 At the cries of the pursued, Ariel remarks, with seemingly detached interest, “Hark, they roar!” (4.1.257). He appears to perceive the hunt with the same aesthetic appreciation with which Theseus and Hippolyta anticipate the “musical confusion / of hounds and echo in conjunction” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 4.1.107–8)—but in this case, the noises are made by the hounds’ victims.42 In revisiting the enchanted world of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest returns not only to the “musical confusion / Of hounds and echo in conjunction,” but also to Bottom’s inarticulate ambition to roar as gently as a nightingale. The play struggles with the problem of pain and violence that can be presented and received as “harmonious” and “pleasing.” A “musical” presentation may reveal the true harmony in events; but on the other hand, it may be nothing but a palliative that turns “affliction, passion, hell itself … to favour and to prettiness” (Hamlet 4.5.183–4). Even if the play does reveal a true harmony, this revelation may prove less than comfortable in its intimations of the nature and cost of this underlying order. W.H. Auden commented, “The Tempest is full of music of all kinds, yet it is not one of the plays in which, in a symbolic sense, harmony and concord finally triumph over disorder.” In the end, “justice has triumphed over injustice, not because it is more harmonious, but because it commands superior force; one might even say because it is louder.”43 These words recall the thunder of the “soldier’s music” at the conclusion of Hamlet. Auden’s formulation suggests two possible conclusions: either justice and harmony are quite separate things, or else the justice of The Tempest—or any justice depending on force and terrifying noise—is not, in fact, justice. The play indirectly poses the very question implied by Auden’s See Howell Chickering, “Hearing Ariel’s Songs,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 24 (1994): 149, 155. 42 Neill notes that at a number of moments throughout the play, “the simple opposition between music and noise, concord and discord seems deliberately blurred, as though Shakespeare were elaborating a set of more profound variations on the paradox of ‘musical confusion’ with which he had played in A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (“Burden,” 53). As I hope the preceding chapters have shown, the relationship between music and noise absorbs Shakespeare throughout his career. For music and noise in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, see Chapter 2, 69–73. 43 W.H. Auden, “Music in Shakespeare,” in The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (New York: Random, 1962), 526. 41

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reading: can retributive thunder be harmonious—and if not, can it at least be made to appear harmonious? The play suggests several different ways of understanding the relationship between audible sound and symbolic harmony. In the most straightforward account, concord and discord mirror human events: the storm of the opening indicates the disturbances resulting from a rightful ruler’s usurpation, disturbances that resolve into the harmony of the “heavenly music” that Prospero summons to restore and reconcile his enemies.44 As the storm is not natural, however, but an illusion created by Prospero, it can be understood as a kind of anti-masque: carefully staged disorder intended to contrast with the celebratory orderliness of the masque proper.45 On the other hand, music may be hidden in the storm from the beginning, the thunder serving as an expression of the orderly if inscrutable workings of divine providence.46 Critics who question the equation of the play’s music with universal harmony have emphasized the way music serves not as a symbol of order, but as a particularly effective method of manipulation.47 The problematic relationship between harmony, manipulation, and deception comes across most clearly in the scene where Ariel provides the correct tune to the song that Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo are trying to sing. In a symbolic sense, he sets them in “right tune,” like divine grace. Then he lures them, with the sound of music, into a swamp. Even if we read this as an 44 See John P. Cutts, “Music and the Supernatural in The Tempest: A Study in Interpretation,” Music and Letters 39 (1958): 347, 355. 45 See Neill, “Burden,” 52–3. 46 See Neill, “Burden,” 54. 47 Lindley has described a conflict between “symbolic” and “political” readings of music in the play. Symbolic interpretations treat music as an emblem and expression of world harmony (music both sets people morally and emotionally “in tune” and serves as a symbol of their well-tuned state), while political interpretations emphasize Prospero’s use of music to manipulate those around him. The shift from “symbolic” to “political” readings of the play’s music thus reflects the larger shift in critical approaches to the play as a whole (Shakespeare and Music, 228). For a similar division, see Neill, “Burden,” 45. For examples of “symbolic” readings, see Cutts; Catherine Dunn, “The Function of Music in Shakespeare’s Romances,” Shakespeare Quarterly 20 (1969): 391–405; and Maynard, 221–2. For “political” readings, see Paul Brown, “‘This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine’: The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism” in Political Shakespeare, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, 2nd edn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985, 1994): 48–71; Pierre Iselin, “‘My Music for Nothing’: Musical Negotiations in The Tempest,” Shakespeare Survey 48 (1995): 135–45; Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975, repr. 1991), 45–8; and Robin Headlam Wells, Elizabethan Mythologies: Studies in Poetry, Drama, and Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Critics offer different accounts of the extent to which the play’s music is under the control of Prospero. See Lindley, Shakespeare and Music, 229; Iselin, “Musical Negotiations,” 137; Neill, “Burden,” 77; and Jacquelyn Fox-Good, “Other Voices: The Sweet, Dangerous Air(s) of Shakespeare’s Tempest,” Shakespeare Studies 24 (1996): 254, 257.

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appropriate—or even improving—punishment, the music plays a morally doubtful role. When Prospero summons “heavenly music” near the end of the play, this music may symbolize the deeper harmonies of forgiveness and reconciliation; on the other hand, music may simply be an effective prop in Prospero’s staging of harmony. In one possible reading of the play, music is at least partially demystified and revealed to be, not a symbol of order, but a means for rulers to impose a system of order that they then claim to be “natural” and “harmonious.” David Lindley suggests that the critical division between interpretations of music in The Tempest as symbolic or manipulative actually reflects the early modern shift from a metaphysical to a rhetorical understanding of the effects of music.48 The tension between music as a reflection of divine order and as a particularly potent means of moving listeners thus is written into the drama itself. Lindley ultimately suggests that the second notion proves dominant in the play— as it would prove historically. As we have seen, however, these different ways of thinking about music were both in tension and inextricably tangled.49 Music’s power to move and even control the listener reinforced its metaphysical claims, as the musical soul naturally responds to musical sounds. Furthermore, music could exercise its affective powers even in the absence of a specific musician, or against a musician’s intent—moving and seducing independent of any mover or seducer. The problem with music in The Tempest is not so much that its beautiful concords and affective power can be used to manipulative and even harmful purposes. A larger problem involves the positively weird way that music in the play moves people—and the tendency of music and cacophony to move similarly. I suggest that the play brings musica mundana—universal, philosophic harmony—to life in literal terms upon the stage. Such dramatic representation of the ineffable in audible terms was hardly unusual. In The Tempest, however, literal manifestations of cosmic music prove wonderful, haunting, and profoundly disturbing. Perhaps most unsettling is the way that these noises provide theatrical pleasure. The play communicates the persistent sense that the perspective from which noise appears musical, and pain and violence sound harmonious is, precisely, inhuman. The characters in The Tempest—and ultimately, the audience as well—experience human emotions and human reactions made alien. Music has a power to move affections—but it moves in a strangely indirect and estranging manner. In fact, it works very much as the play as a whole works. Music in The Tempest is often perceived directly by the audience, but it is also filtered through the words and perceptions of the characters. Shakespeare creates the illusion that the “musical repetition of vowels and consonants, reduplication Lindley, Shakespeare and Music, 228. See also Neill, “Burden,” 56. Theresa Coletti, however, sees music as “providential design” working together with the idea of music as the expression of “deep human feelings” (“Music and The Tempest,” in Shakespeare’s Late Plays: Essays in Honor of Charles Crow, ed. Richard C. Tobias and Paul G. Zolbrod [Athens: Ohio University Press, 1974], 186). 49 See Chapter 1, 38–9. 48

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of words, echoing of metrical forms, and incantatory effect”50 of the language arise from actual moments of music that overflow their context. The songs are not simply microcosms of the play; but nor do “the songs, as music, possess a substantive difference from the verbal text that surrounds them.”51 These songs never definitively begin or end. Even the strangest music is never heard for the first time. It is always returning. This is a crucial point, because the melting of songs into their surroundings makes it difficult for a hearer to stand outside of them or to consider them with an attitude of detachment. As Bruce R. Smith has pointed out, “[v]isualized objects stay ‘out there’; heard sounds penetrate the body of the listener. They are out there and in here at the same time.… Listening does not allow us the secure detachment that vision does.”52 Immersion in the music of The Tempest, however, paradoxically induces emotional detachment in the listener. By an unexpected process of mutual reinforcement, distance produces a strange intimacy, which in turn produces further distance. Ariel sings in people’s ears, but the listeners are frequently unsure whether the message is addressed to them—or whether there is a message at all, or merely, as Gonzalo thinks, a strange humming. Ferdinand finds that the music allays his passion with its strange air, but he also thinks at first that it has nothing to do with him: “sure it waits upon / Some god o’ th’ island” (1.2.392–3). In his second song, the spirit addresses the prince with an insinuating familiarity— “Full fathom five thy father lies”—that might be perceived as taunting, if it were not expressed with such distancing formality. The song gradually shifts from addressing Ferdinand to describing and imitating an impersonal tolling: “Ding-dong bell” (408). In Mark Booth’s words, “it seems false to sing a song to a real person as communication. That person can tell there is a ghost, properly addressed by the song, intervening—and who is the message coming from?”53 The situation in The Tempest is admittedly unusual, as we are dealing with magic and invisible spirits; but the moment still works very much as Booth describes. Ariel does sing to Ferdinand, but both the origin and direction of the song remain mysterious to the prince. Nevertheless, the moment does not seem “false,” because the questions raised by Booth are not nagging and implicit, but made apparent. When Ferdinand asks, “Where should this music be?” he poses one of the central questions of the play. The prince struggles to determine whether the music sounds “in the air or in the earth,” but The Tempest suggests many other possible locations and origins for the music that permeates the entire play. At the close, Alonso expresses a longing to hear the story of Prospero’s life, a narrative “which must / Take the ear strangely” (5.1.313–14). The Tempest itself seems designed to 50 Russ McDonald, “Reading The Tempest,” 19, 24. See also Late Style, 211–13; and Neill, “Burden,” 37–8. 51 Fox-Good, “Other Voices,” 254. 52 Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 7, 10. 53 Mark Booth, 23. See above, 133.

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take our own ears with equal strangeness. In his sleep, Gonzalo perceives Ariel’s singing voice as “a humming, / And that a strange one, too …” (2.1.313–14), and the mariners are troubled with “strange and several noises” (5.1.235). The stage directions describe “solemn and strange music” (3.1.17–18), and “a strange, hollow, and confused noise” (4.1.42–3). And in the play, “musick in it selfe most strangely works upon our humane affections.”54 Of course, many aspects of the island, and many of the events that unfold upon it, strike the characters as “strange”—but I would suggest that the noises of the isle do not merely provide one more example or demonstration of its general strangeness. They are strangeness in action. Ariel’s first song is both orienting and disorienting: ARIEL. Come unto these yellow sands, And then take hands; Curtsied when you have and kissed— The wild waves whist— Foot it featly here and there, And, sweet sprites, bear The burden. Hark, hark. SPIRITS [dispersedly]. Bow-wow! ARIEL. The watch-dogs bark. SPIRITS: Bow-wow! ARIEL. Hark, hark, I hear The strain of strutting Chanticleer Cry ‘cock-a-diddle-dow.’ (1.2.378–90)55

Such a performance might well provoke some perplexity in the listener. The song allays Ferdinand’s grief partly because it seems to refer to his situation—shipwrecked on yellow sands—while promising future pleasures of greeting and dance. Yet it is equally a nonsequitur, both in mood and meaning. Like Ophelia’s songs, it “follows not”—but here, the song works madly in the absence of any personal insanity. Various critics have offered detailed readings of the symbolism of this first song, in order to show its dramatic appropriateness. The words invite Ferdinand to a chaste meeting with Miranda, while both real and symbolic storms are calmed. The barking and crowing are often taken to suggest the dangerous aspects of sexuality, here incorporated into song and rendered harmless—or else lurking, barely repressed, beneath the surface.56 This reading works, but at the expense of obscuring 54 George Sandys, Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1632), quoted in John Hollander, The Untuning of the Sky (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), 172. 55 Reconstructing the song requires a certain amount of editorial conjecture: the Folio text is somewhat confused. For instance, is “the burthen” a stage direction or part of the song? See Lindley, Shakespeare and Music, 3–5. 56 See Lindley, Shakespeare and Music, 226; Neill, “Burden,” 55; and David Sundelson, “‘So Rare a Wonder’d Father’: Prospero’s Tempest,” in Representing Shakespeare, ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 46.

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some of the sheer randomness of the song: “Bow-wow, the watchdogs bark.” The line may indeed indicate Prospero’s jealous guardianship, or the incorporation of animal instinct in art, but it is also simply bizarre. Unfortunately, no musical setting survives, so we cannot know how the refrains of “Bow-wow” and “cock-a-diddle-dow” would have sounded in performance, or how closely the offstage spirits would imitate crowing and barking. These sounds might have “disturb[ed] the serenity of Ariel’s air”; alternatively, the barnyard noises might have been “transmuted into two- or three-part vocal harmony.”57 The musical treatment of the “ding dong bell” refrain in the next song, discussed below, suggests that the setting probably would not have been strictly imitative of barking.58 In addition, “bow-wow” is clearly intended to rhyme with “cock-adiddle-dow,” making a naturalistic rendition of animal noises still less likely. Though our understanding of the song is impoverished by the lack of a surviving musical setting, the exchange between Ariel and the sprites inevitably brings words, noises, and notes indissolubly together while questioning the nature of their relationship to one another. “Bow-wow” and “cock-a-diddle-dow” are not arbitrary signs; they are intended to reproduce, or at least to imitate, their referents. In the end, however, they do nothing but gesture, in a very stylized manner, to the actual noises made by dogs and roosters. No one seriously bent upon imitating a dog would say “bow-wow.” If harmoniously sung, such onomatopoeic words retreat still further from their imitative function, becoming mere melodious “filler,” like “tra la la.” Singing the barking thus negates the very basis upon which “bow-wow” exists as a word. Sung notes supposedly possess an order and meaningfulness, in their mathematical harmonies and rhythms, which cannot belong to chaotic noise. Ironically, however, the more the syllables of “bow-wow” succeed in attaining harmony, the less they mean. Conversely, the more imitative and “noisy” the syllables become—the closer the sound approaches its signification—the less it means as a word. The Tempest partly emphasizes the meaningfulness of music versus the chaos of noise by leading from the thunder of the storm to the sweet airs and heavenly music of reconciliation. Yet it repeatedly pulls in the other direction by questioning the distinction between music and noise—and, crucially, by demonstrating that words participate in creating this confusion even as they themselves are stretched into non-signifying sound. All of this happens—in a radically compressed form—in the singing of “bow-wow.”

Lindley, Shakespeare and Music, 226; Chickering, 156. As Chickering points out, the sounds of the ringing bells—seemingly more

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susceptible to sung treatment than barking and crowing—are estranged in the musical setting: “The lighter, shorter front vowel in ‘ding’ is elongated and the more gong-like sound in ‘dong’ is shortened. This musical reversal of the spoken onomatopoeia—‘dongding,’ instead of ‘ding-dong’—again suggests a reversal of the conventional meaning of a tolling bell” (161).

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In this song and elsewhere, Shakespeare makes it difficult for the audience to understand the noises of the island in terms of a purely abstract harmony, even— especially—when the experience of music seems to offer access to some state beyond worldly experience. Caliban’s famous speech provides the key example: Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices That if I then had waked after long sleep Will make me sleep again; and then in dreaming The clouds methought would open and show riches Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked I cried to dream again. (3.2.130–38)

The basic outlines of the experience suggest a Neoplatonic ascent to the ineffable through music; but Caliban’s individual words refuse to be assimilated to such ideas. The speech utterly lacks the typical encrustings, the usual tropes, the philosophical patina of centuries. There is no rapture, no piercing of the ear, no orbs choiring to the young-eyed cherubins. In this way, Caliban does speak a different language: even though we understand every word, we cannot know what the words mean to him. They do not gesture towards any familiar cultural or philosophical tradition. We have no way of knowing what Caliban means by “riches,” only that his riches seem both more and less substantial than Lorenzo’s “patens of bright gold.” It would be a mistake to say that Caliban is trying to describe something that he could describe better (and correspondingly, understand far better) if he had Lorenzo’s vocabulary. Caliban’s music, in its onomatopoeic twangling and humming, seemingly must be literally understood. All those other familiar words—“sings,” “accords,” “choirs” etc.—suffer a kind of figurative fading in comparison. Not recognizing the abstract ideas to which the words refer, the audience must pay more attention to the words themselves, and to their sounds. The onomatopoetic language suggests that Caliban’s speech struggles to evoke the elusive experience he remembers. This experience must be understood as temporal, with its frequent time markers: “sometimes … then … when.” Yet Caliban’s tenses are constantly shifting, making it nearly impossible for the listeners to situate his experience in time. At one moment, he seems to be describing something that occurs habitually; but in the final lines, imperfect shifts to preterite. Taken alone, “when I waked / I cried to dream again” suggests a singular experience of unusual power; in the context of the speech it is partly this, but also something that happens repeatedly. The dream is both recurrent, like Ariel’s music that “begins again,” and heartbreakingly past.59 59 See McDonald, Late Style, 212–13, on the “feeling of arrested time” in The Tempest. Chan argues that the confusion of verb tenses in Caliban’s account creates “the effect of a suspension in time which … stresses Caliban’s own lack of understanding of

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The temporality of Ariel’s second song to Ferdinand is similarly strange. It is also characterized by a peculiar disassociation of music and content. The lyric depicts the corpse of Ferdinand’s father lying at the bottom of the ocean. ARIEL. Full fathom five thy father lies, Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes; Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange. Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell: SPIRITS [within]. Ding dong. ARIEL. Hark, now I hear them. SPIRITS [within]. Ding-dong bell. [etc.] (1.2.400–409)

This song is one of the few whose original music may have survived. Howell Chickering closely analyzes the setting by Robert Johnson, demonstrating the composer’s sensitivity to the words of the song and to the dramatic situation.60 Paradoxically, however, in this song attentiveness to situation and words requires the music to work against the words. The gap between the song’s subject matter (a corpse and a funeral ceremony) and its treatment of its subject (an emphasis on wonder and strangeness rather than grief) is reproduced in a similar, eerily comforting gap between words and music. For instance, in the song’s seventh phrase (“Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell”), “the steady upward fourths deliberately contradict the sense of the poetic text. The melody works with the words to create the paradox of a rising knell.”61 Similarly, where the words indicate tolling, “the song imitates what it sings of, but not as a sequence of somber tolling church bells. Indeed, quite the contrary: we hear seen and unseen singers in a high sweet harmonizing of D–D7–G.” In “Full Fathom Five,” two transformations occur simultaneously, one in the words and the other working against the words, both producing a similar effect. The text of the song describes the transformation of bones to coral, death to art; the music transforms a knell to rising tones and sweet harmony. In the end, the music fits the words by not quite fitting them. The song casts this simultaneously transformative and disturbing lack of correspondence between content and presentation as an inherently musical effect. Nevertheless, such an effect can be created by language alone—and indeed, is created by language in the words of the song itself. The sea-change suffered by the significance of the music.” Caliban’s knowledge of the island “is useless to him because it is unordered” (324). I would argue that Caliban describes his experience of music in the only possible way. Compare Lindley: “[Caliban’s] narrative of fading dream is one which, as we will see, is reflected at every social level in the play … the desires that music induces and the plenitude it promises cannot be contained” (Shakespeare and Music, 223, 233). Coletti suggests that music reveals “both the extensions and limitations” of Prospero’s art (192). 60 Chickering, 161. 61 Chickering, 160.

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Alonso’s body is effected not only by time and immersion, but by a weird shift of focus, a distance that opens up between things that usually are kept together. The shipwreck has just happened, but the body is described as if it had lain on the bottom of the sea for hundreds of years. The temporal strangeness of the song is reproduced in its effects on listeners, for whom “Full Fathom Five” is never actually over. Ariel’s music gets into Ferdinand’s words and into the language of the play in general, and surfaces in odd forms at odd moments, as insistently as the persistent Willow Song in Othello. According to the fiction of the song, “Sea-nymphs hourly ring [Alonso’s] knell,” though it is only at this moment, through the medium of the song, that the knell enters hearing: “Hark, now I hear them: ding-dong bell.” The bell—a sound that supposedly exists outside the song—is absorbed into the song’s fabric when the singer comments on its tolling. In consequence, the bell is sung rather than rung. Ferdinand’s commentary on the song similarly absorbs the remoteness and disassociation connected with and enacted by its music. Ariel’s music, then, is finally spoken rather than sung. Ferdinand’s response to the spirit’s songs provides a new—and peculiar— affective model for the audience. When we meet the shipwrecked prince, we are not encouraged to respond with sympathetic pity to his plight—not so much because we know that his father actually lives, as because Ferdinand himself seems oddly “incapable of his own distress,” to apply Gertrude’s description of the drowning Ophelia. Ariel’s songs distance Ferdinand from his grief, and his words in response to the songs work similarly upon the audience. Where should this music be? I’th air or th’earth? It sounds no more; and sure it waits upon Some god o’th’ island. Sitting on a bank, Weeping again the King my father’s wrack, This music crept by me upon the waters, Allaying both their fury and my passion With its sweet air. Thence I have followed it— Or it hath drawn me rather. But ’tis gone. No, it begins again. (1.2.391–9)

Ferdinand’s words may strike us as particularly haunting because of their recurrence in Eliot and Joyce. Nevertheless, the haunting impression of recurrence is written into the speech itself, rising partly from the use of the simple word “again.” The line suggests that all this has happened before, that we have even heard this account before. Ariel’s songs contain similar echo effects. In Johnson’s setting of “Full Fathom Five,” the bass line’s “occasional early and late entries upon the treble phrases give a sense of the melody being twice heard,” while “‘sea-change’ has the same time value and note sequence as ‘those are pearls.’”62

62 Chickering, 155, 159. McDonald notes similarly, “The power of the play’s songs is at least partly attributable to various kinds of echo” (Late Style, 22).

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In their incantatory remoteness, Ferdinand’s words reproduce the effects of the music, just as his description of the elusive continuation of the song echoes his description of his own grief: “Weeping again … It begins again.” The song has allayed Ferdinand’s tears; but in his words, the weeping is drawn up into the music, and made similarly strange and distant. Frank Kermode notes, “The confusion of eyes into pearls has just that touch of inhuman perceptiveness one associates with Ariel, and the speech of Ferdinand is drawn into this remoteness.”63 In speaking as he does, Ferdinand performs the same action encouraged and performed by the song, in which a dead body becomes an object of detached interest, distant in depth and time though described in the present tense. Ferdinand listens to Ariel’s songs, and then internalizes them, re-creating their strange affect in his own words. In doing so, he draws the listening audience into the same spell that he himself is under. This spell, however, can easily be broken by a direct assertion of compassion or sympathetic understanding. Consider the following exchange: PROSPERO. What wert thou if the King of Naples heard thee? FERDINAND. A single thing, as I am now, that wonders To hear thee speak of Naples. He does hear me; And that he does I weep. Myself am Naples, Who with mine eyes, ne’er since at ebb, beheld The king my father wracked. MIRANDA. Alack, for mercy! FERDINAND. Yes, faith, and all his lords, the Duke of Milan And his brave son being twain. (1.2.432–9)

Miranda finds Ferdinand’s narrative intensely moving, though in this narrative the prince expresses a peculiar remoteness from his own predicament. In his response to Prospero’s question, the prince is “weeping again,” and as he does so, the affective response stirred by Ariel’s music returns into his verse. He would be a “single thing” if heard by the king, partly because the hypothetical is true: he is heard by the king. He approaches the fact of his situation only in the most roundabout way, negotiating the simultaneous separation and identity of “I” and “Naples” with strange, echoic lyricism. The Prince’s grief is distanced and intensified by wonder, which expresses itself in the winding, almost hypnotic movement of the verse: “He does hear me, and that he does I weep.” Hearing is both the cause of weeping, and disconnected from it. Although Ferdinand has described himself as “a single thing,” the weeper and hearer are distinct: I weep that he hears me. Ferdinand, as “Naples,” both replaces and becomes one with the drowned father—whom he himself is drowning with eyes “ne’er since at ebb.” He grieves self-consciously, watching himself grieve; yet this very distance both generates further tears and eases the speaker away from the situation, away from himself. 63 Frank Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000), 292; emphasis mine.

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When Ferdinand responds to Miranda’s exclamation of pity, however, the spell is broken. We are left with a young man, still grieving no doubt, but eager to impress a pretty girl with further details of the catastrophe: “Yes, faith, and all his lords, the Duke of Milan, / And his brave son being twain.” No longer halfcaught in his own mind, negotiating the distances within himself and the extent of his own loss, Ferdinand starts listing the most politically and socially important of the casualties. The bathetic shift in tone is exacerbated in that these details about the usurping Duke of Milan and his son are unlikely to impress this particular audience. Miranda’s direct sympathy has created an unexpectedly jarring effect. The dreamy and remote mood that Ariel has induced seems incompatible with simple compassion. Miranda’s response is not the response that it invites or will support. Ferdinand’s words do not knock urgently at our hearts, compelling sympathetic identification and momentary forgetfulness of illusion. In enacting remoteness, however, the words generate their own abstracting spell, a kind of hypnosis. The play pulls the audience still deeper into its illusion, deeper into its weird emotional terrain, by distancing us. The process works because the illusion is an illusion of distance and estrangement: the illusion that the father who died an hour ago is a coral-encrusted object of remote fascination. Ferdinand is beguiled of his grief, and his enchanted and enchanting language carries both him and us away from the thoughts of shipwreck and loss. Prospero arguably intends to lull Ferdinand’s grief, to transform his sorrow into admiration that will ultimately be focused on Miranda. But similar effects occur repeatedly throughout the play, with no clear sense of agency, translating the terrifying and the horrible into something soothing and entrancing. Such effects are implicitly musical. In grief and despair at the loss of his son, Alonso utters the weird cry of agony: “O thou mine heir / Of Naples and of Milan, what strange fish / Hath made his meal on thee?” (2.1.111–13). Alonso’s despondency cannot be questioned, but his words transmit a quality of eerie wonder to the listeners, directing attention not to the loss of his son, but to some new and exotic fish that cannot be adequately imagined. The lament seems shaped as much by the demands of sound as by the necessity of meaning: mine Milan made his meal; Naples strange made; Milan fish his. Alonso’s cry presents another version of the transformation described and enacted by Ariel’s song: the father becomes a coral skeleton with eyes of pearl, and the son is organically absorbed into a strange sea-creature. But while Ariel’s song is designed to distance the listener from grief, Alonso’s language acts all on its own, independent of the intention of the speaker. Prospero’s threats to Ferdinand work similarly: “I’ll manacle thy neck and feet together. / Sea-water shalt thou drink; thy food shall be / The fresh-brook mussels, withered roots, and husks / Wherein the acorn cradled” (1.2.465–8). The outraged father begins violently, but by the middle of the second line, the rhythm of his speech has begun to rock him out of himself. There is even something delicate and tender about the image of the husk as a cradle. Prospero’s attention shifts from inedible food to strange but compelling bits of the local landscape, drawing the

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listener further and further from the dramatic situation. This shift in attention is accompanied by an interest in sounds as sounds: sea and shall be, brook and root, mussels and husks, acorn and cradled, as if the different items occur to the speaker not so much because of their inedibility as because of the way the words sound.64 The threat becomes a weird lullaby. A number of the threats and fears voiced in the play prove equally distracting. Caliban warns his companions, “If he awake, / From toe to crown he’ll fill our skins with pinches, / Make us strange stuff” (4.1.230–32). The interesting sounds, the internal rhyme, the assonance, the appeal to the imagination of this “strange stuff”—all distract from the urgency of the moment and the sentiment. Prospero’s threats to Caliban can have a similar effect: “thou shalt be pinched / As thick as honeycomb, each pinch more stinging / Than bees that made ‘em” (1.2.331–3). The honeycomb is a strange image; the emphasis is supposed to be on texture and stinging, but if the bees and honeycomb are even slightly disassociated from pinched, misshapen skin, the connotations are attractive. On one level, the image is the more striking because unexpected; but its strangeness gets in the way of the meaning. We find again the weird mingling of the lyrical and the horrible that characterizes the play as a whole. Along with the strangeness comes opacity of meaning. The last lines of Prospero’s threat are difficult to parse. Did the bees make the pinches or the honeycomb? The first possibility results in tautology: each pinch stings more than bees that make bee-stings that sting like pinches. The line trails off into a mumble: “made ‘em.” In the next scene, Gonzalo will experience Ariel’s warning song as a strange and incomprehensible “humming,” and at the end of the play, Ariel will celebrate his freedom by singing, “Where the bee sucks, there suck I” (5.1.88). The stinging pain becomes the sweetness of the honeycomb, which is ultimately translated into mellifluous song. The association of music with such moments of distracted horror occurs with greater explicitness in one of the earliest: Prospero’s threatening reminder to Ariel of what the spirit owes his master. Thou best know’st What torment I did find thee in. Thy groans Did make wolves howl, and penetrate the breasts Of ever-angry bears; it was a torment To lay upon the damned, which Sycorax Could not again undo. (1.2.289–93)

At first glance, music hardly seems involved in this description: Ariel’s cries of pain are like the shrieks of the damned, a terrible sound that spreads out from its origin in rings of cacophony, causing wolves to howl. As Ariel’s own songs soon will begin to demonstrate, however, The Tempest refuses to clearly distinguish 64 For another reading, see Sundelson: “‘wither’d roots’ recall the withering Prospero himself expects and fears; ‘husks / Wherein the acorn cradled’ suggest what Prospero will be after he has lost the child he cradles now” (47).

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between animal noises and euphonious song. Prospero’s words imbue Ariel’s shrieks with a strangely musical quality when he claims that they could penetrate the breasts of bears. The word “penetrate” had powerful musical associations,65 and Ariel’s groans, like Orpheus’s songs, move wild animals to pity. Prospero also describes Ariel’s cries of agony in resonant and solemnly patterned verse. The phrase “penetrate the breasts / Of ever-angry bears” rings with assonance and alliteration. The tortured screams become as euphonious as the verse that describes them, and the Neoplatonic allusion to penetrating music corresponds with a weird lyricism that rises in the poetry itself. The word “torment” appears twice in three lines, and while on one level the repetition places further emphasis on Ariel’s suffering, repetition can also have the opposite effect, reducing the semantic impact of a reiterated sequence of sounds. Screams of pain and musical plaints should move listeners in very different ways—but here, the two kinds of sounds, and the two kinds of response, are confused. Ariel’s screams seem musical because they penetrate the breasts of the angry bears, moving them to pity like the songs of Orpheus; yet, paradoxically, the musicality attributed to these cries renders them less immediate and less horrifying, diffusing the emotions they supposedly arouse. Ariel’s cries are musical in their piteousness, in their capacity to move; simultaneously, the passage escapes from the pitiful situation it describes, and the groans are no longer groans. Prospero’s speech, in reminding of torments, slides away from torments, or makes them somehow attractive, just as the groans in the narrative affect the bears like music. This slide away from pity and fear is morally problematic at best: as creepy, in its way, as Ariel’s sweet lullaby about drowned corpses. In fact, the two moments work in a very similar manner. With the bizarre lyricism comes the quality of “remoteness” that Kermode associates with Ariel’s inhuman perspective. Such inhuman and entrancing distance, however, suffuses the entire play. According to one thread of critical opinion, The Tempest is a play in which “the lyrical element has almost supplanted the dramatic.”66 I would suggest instead that the drama is generated by its own lyrical usurpation. The Tempest is a drama about drifting away from the drama, about the end forgetting the beginning.67 65 Music was praised for its ability to penetrate the ears and enter the soul. See Hollander, Untuning of the Sky, 200; and James Hutton, “Some English Poems in Praise of Music,” English Miscellany 2 (1950): 22. Shakespeare enjoyed the inevitable sexual puns. In Cymbeline, Cloten gives Innogen “music o’ mornings; they say it will penetrate.” Then, in case anyone had missed the joke: “If you can penetrate her with your fingering, so; we’ll try with tongue, too” (2.3.11–13). Orpheus, of course, was famed for his ability to move wild animals with song. 66 John Major, “Comus and The Tempest,” Shakespeare Quarterly 10 (1959): 178. 67 See the noble conspirators’ mocking of Gonzalo: “The latter end of his commonwealth forgets the beginning” (2.1.157–8). In his enthusiasm for the ideal country that would need no rulers, Gonzalo forgets that he has already set himself up as King. Sebastian and Antonio sarcastically compare Gonzalo to Amphion, who raised the walls of Thebes with music: “His word is more than the miraculous harp (85).” As Harry Berger points out, Antonio’s

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This persistent forgetfulness, only with effort kept at bay, fuels Prospero’s obsessive need to remind those around him of the events of the past: “I must / Once in a month recount what thou has been, / Which thou forget’st” (1.2.263–5). Memory in the play, however, works much in the way of Ariel’s ditty that “remember[s]” Ferdinand’s supposedly drowned father.68 As we have seen repeatedly, songs do not work well as epitaphs, and the song’s remembering encourages Ferdinand to forget grief and father both. Prospero himself finds that he has forgotten Caliban’s plot while absorbed in the songs and dances of spirits he has summoned. Even Prospero, however, must acknowledge that memory can be harmful, and he reassures Alonso, “Let us not burden our remembrance with / A heaviness that’s gone” (5.1.202–3). Michael Neill explores the play’s repeated punning on “burden,” and suggests that Ariel’s songs serve as “an emotional unburdening— so that, by some mysterious transfiguration, the bearing of one ‘burden’ [in the sense of refrain or undersong] will assist in the lightening of the other.”69 This is one way that song can induce forgetfulness through memory—and notice how the illumination of this process works through the potential substitution of one word (“burden”) with another that sounds the same, but means something different. Through song, weight—of remembrance, of content—becomes a repeated and often meaningless refrain. “own plans are about to be foiled by something like a miraculous harp” (“Miraculous Harp: A Reading of Shakespeare’s Tempest,” in Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance Fiction-Making, ed. John Patrick Lynch [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988], 167). See also Iselin, “Musical Negotiations,” 138. Ariel is Prospero’s musical instrument: the miraculous harp by which the enchanter builds his illusions. For the convenience of forgetting for the colonial project, see Jonathan Baldo, “Exporting Oblivion in The Tempest,” Modern Language Quarterly 56 (1995): 111–44. In Shakespeare Without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage (New York: Routledge, 2000), Dympna Callaghan similarly describes the play’s “deliberately bad memory,” and its “attention to memory as the active process of constructing history” (100). 68 For the importance of memory—and forgetfulness—in The Tempest, see the postcolonial accounts of Baldo; Browne; and Callaghan, 97–138. In “‘The Dark Backward and Abysm of Time’: The Tempest and Memory,” College Literature 33, no. 1 (2006): 151–68, Evelyn B. Tribble offers a cognitive perspective. For the argument that “The Tempest seeks in the act of remembrance itself an alternative to the revenger’s apocalypse,” see Michael Neill, “Remembrance and Revenge: Hamlet, Macbeth, and The Tempest,” in Jonson and Shakespeare, ed. Ian Donaldson (London: Macmillan, 1983), 39. Callaghan associates the music of the play with Irish culture, suggesting that music “evok[es] the traces and fragments of a past that Prospero has endeavored either to suppress or appropriate” (112). In contrast, Baldo suggests that the play’s abundance of music—“in some sense the art of vanishing”—places emphasis on “the harmful and healthful effects of forgetting” (130). 69 Neill, “Burden,” 43. In the context of a song, a “burden” could mean the refrain or the gist—understandable, because the refrain so often articulates the gist or essential point (42). In “Full Fathom Five,” the “burden” is the tolling of the funeral knell: but as Chickering suggests, the harmonious chorus of “ding-dong bell” may in fact distance the funereal sentiments that the content would seem to demand.

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In The Tempest, however, music also explicitly works to waken the awareness of guilt. “Marvelous sweet music” (3.3.19) plays as spirits prepare a banquet for the shipwrecked lords; suddenly, in thunder and lightning, Ariel appears as a harpy, makes the feast disappear, and pronounces a long condemnation of the “three men of sin,” reminding them of their betrayal of Prospero: “But remember, / For that’s my business to you … The powers, delaying not forgetting …” (3.3.68–9, 73). The stage direction then informs us: “He vanishes in thunder; then, to soft music, enter the Shapes again, and dance with mocks and mows, and carrying out the table.” The marvelous sweet music, in its repetition, is clearly revealed to be a mockery: it allures and taunts in the same soft cadences. Alonso, driven mad, cries: O, it is monstrous, monstrous! Methought the billows spoke and told me of it, The winds did sing it to me, and the thunder, That deep and dreadful organ pipe, pronounced The name of Prosper; it did bass my trespass. Therefore my son i’ th’ ooze is bedded; and I’ll seek him deeper than e’er plummet sounded And with him there lie mudded. (3.3.95–102)

What is monstrous, specifically? The most obvious answer would be Alonso’s past crime, for which he now experiences remorse. The loose repetition of “it” in the passage, however, leaves other possibilities open: it may be the sound of the storm or the name of Prosper that is monstrous. It is also difficult to work out just what experience Alonso is describing. In his madness, did he hear the Harpy’s accusing speech as a storm? Or does he refer not to the speech at all, but to the actual storm of the opening scene? Alonso returns to the state of mind shared by all the travelers during the tempest, when “not a soul / But felt a fever of the mad and played / Some tricks of desperation” (1.2.208–10); only now he seems to understand that the storm was conveying a message to him. In one stroke, the clear words of the Harpy become the noises of a tempest, and a simple but devastating word emerges from the cacophony of the storm. In the process, time collapses: Alonso’s memories of thunder become one with the thunder of Ariel’s speech. In this speech, words, noise, and music also become one. Ariel-as-Harpy speaks to Alonso, but he hears the sounds of a storm; not only does he hear a storm, but he hears the storm as a concert of instruments; he hears thunder as an organ-pipe, but this organ-pipe speaks, pronouncing a word. Alonso himself describes this musical storm in language rich with alliteration, assonance, and strange internal rhymes: bass trespass, bedded and mudded. The king expresses his experience through puns, the double meanings in one sound linking the sonic and the moral. The deep organ-pipe basses a trespass that is base, like the ooze of the deep, which is in turn deeper than any sound yet sounded. Nevertheless, this seeming inextricability of sound and morality proves illusory. A bass sound may condemn a base action: but a pun in itself accentuates the disjunction between meaning and sound. In punning, sound generates meaning; but in this associative generation, meanings

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are revealed as arbitrary rather than inherent in a certain sequence of noises. In the word “burden,” we have seen how this gap between sound and meaning provides a place for memory to leak away: a physical or spiritual weight becomes the refrain of a song. Here, the sounds, and the puns through which Alonso understands them, force guilt to remembrance; but this is a memory that still may slip away in the moment of utterance, as Alonso seeks oblivion. A number of critics have seen a direct correlation between the musical and the moral, and have interpreted this moment as the king’s proleptic return to harmony. Alonso’s perceptions do recall accounts of musica mundana. Joshua Silvester’s translation of Du Bartas’s influential Semaines provides a particularly suggestive parallel: “For Melancholie, Winter, Earth below / Beare aye the Base; deepe, hollow, sad, and slow: / Pale Plegme, moist Autumne, Water moistly-cold / The Plommetlike-smooth-sliding Tennor hold.”70 Here, the musical part associated with water is actually compared to the “sounding” plummet that first Alonso and later Prospero will evoke in The Tempest (“And deeper than did ever plummet sound / I’ll drown my book” [5.1.55–6]). It seems far from clear, however, that Alonso’s perception of the tempest in musical terms indicates “chaos … being subdued to order, discord resolved to harmony.”71 This seems a strange way to describe what is, in effect, a suicidal resolution, articulated by a man in despair, and ending in the heavy thud of “mudded.” The music Alonso describes is simultaneously horrifying and beautiful. The winds sing harmoniously with the organ-pipe of the thunder, in a song that is almost as seductive as it is terrible. It becomes difficult to read the speech as simply a sign of Alonso’s restoration to the harmony of reason when we realize that his horrified and melodious response to words threatening damnation startlingly resembles Spenser’s description of the elemental music that accompanies the song of the Sirens as they tempt Guyon on his journey to the Bower of Bliss:72 With that the rolling sea resounding soft, In his big base them fitly answered, And on the rocke the waues breaking aloft, A solemn Meane unto them measured, The whiles sweet Zephyrus lowd whisteled His treble, a straunge kinde of harmony …. (II.xii.33)

Bartas: His Devine Weekes and Works (1605), trans. Joshua Sylvester, facsim. edn (Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1965), 494. 71 Maynard, 218. See also Cutts, 355; and Paul Stevens, Imagination and the Presence of Shakespeare in “Paradise Lost” (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 25, 54. Alonso does express repentance, and so demonstrates that his moral caliber is superior to that of Antonio and Sebastian, who hear the voices of demons­rather than musical and articulate thunder (3.3.103–4). But the music does not inevitably point towards his redemption: the sound awakes suicidal urges, not the desire to live a better life. 72 See Cutts: “Compare the stanza … in which Nature’s musical sounds are called upon to enhance the magical appeal of Acrasia’s island …. [T]he traditional usage for wantonness is being turned for lawful use” (355n13). 70

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The “straunge kinde of harmony” characteristic of The Tempest bears a number of important similarities to this little concert. The reminiscence of “Full Fathom Five” in Alonso’s speech is often used as evidence for the argument that he is already beginning to be “set in tune”; but Ariel himself is Siren-like, and has sung to Ferdinand in the guise of an (invisible) sea-nymph.73 Spenser’s mermaids dwell by a “calmy bay” shaped “like an halfe Theatre,” and they allure travelers with promises of rest: “Here may thy storm-bet vessel safely ride; / This is the Port of rest from troublous toyle, / The worlds sweet In, from paine & wearisome turmoyle” (II.xii.30, 32). Their song is particularly ominous in its echo of Despair’s similar temptations: “Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas, / Ease after warre, death after life does greatly please” (I.ix.40). Spenser’s scene is still more disturbing in that the harmony of the elements—often considered a sign of God’s ordered creation—here works as seductive allurement, perfectly in tune with Sirens. The fitness and the measured nature of this music do not lead to moral “temperance”— nor is the music of nature necessarily the sign of a well-tempered cosmos. The harmony that Shakespeare’s Alonso hears and reproduces in his words is stranger still: it remains seductive, although its message of despair and condemnation comes across with terrifying clarity. The song of the storm is intimate, even insinuating—“the winds did sing it to me”—providing an appropriate lullaby for one soon to be bedded in the ooze. How is the audience expected to respond to Alonso at this point? If he has been returned to harmony, then he requires no sympathy; and indeed, we are invited to understand his stormy speech as he understands Ariel’s—as music. The uncertain relation of the musical to the moral indicates the problem of such response. Here is a character driven mad with despair and guilt: but for his auditors, he produces a strange and wondrous music. Can the estrangement offered by the play, the perception of the world from a remote, inhuman perspective, eventually return us, by the most indirect of paths, to human sympathy? This is a question that The Tempest poses with some urgency, but never quite answers. The key moment, of course, is Prospero’s own embrace of the “virtue of compassion” (1.2.27) near the end. Unlike Miranda, Prospero does not suffer with those that he sees suffer. At the decisive moment, he famously responds not to the pitiful sight of his enemies, but to Ariel’s account of their plight: “Your charm so strongly works ’em / That if you now beheld them your affections / Would become tender … Mine would, sir, were I human.” “And mine shall,” declares Prospero, unwilling to be put to shame by a creature who is “but air” (5.1.17–20). It would be hard to think of a more indirect approach to compassion. Instead of having his pity aroused by another’s suffering, or In Shakespeare and Music, Lindley suggests: “One might … want to argue that the female dress [Ariel] adopts to entice Ferdinand invokes as its dark shadow the myth of the dangerous siren” (227). Cutts sees a positive inversion: “The sensual Sirens have given place to the ‘ayrie spirit’, the celestial spirit, Ariel, working obedient to the divine will as represented by Prospero” (348). 73

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responding to someone else’s pity for another’s suffering, Prospero is moved by the hypothetical emotion of a creature who himself remains unmoved. Like Olivia in Twelfth Night, he is stirred by the counterfactual: “If I did love you ….” Two acts of imagination are required: instead of imagining himself in the position of his enemies, Prospero must imagine himself into the inhuman Ariel’s position, and then imagine that Ariel can experience human emotion. It is not clear that Prospero succeeds in these acts of imagination. His resolution to forgive his enemies because this would be the “rarer action” (5.1.27) seems a deliberate decision to seize the high moral ground, rather than the result of newly tender affections. Nevertheless, his reaction to Ariel’s words is not only to forgive, but also to summon music—a “heavenly music” that has a suggestive effect on Prospero’s attitude towards his captives. This episode seems to present a clear instance of staged music serving a symbolic, even emblematic function, providing a background against which reconciliation and the restoration of order will unfold. The music, however, as far as the audience can tell, does not seem to fulfill its supposed purpose: to release the lords from the charm. Over the course of a long address to the unconscious Italians, in which he restates their sins and declares his forgiveness, Prospero repeatedly notes that his victims are recovering. “The charm dissolves apace,” says the magician; light and clarity return through music: “the best comforter / To an unsettled fancy” (5.1.64, 58–9). In fact, the charm does not dissolve “apace.” Prospero speaks for ten more lines, then observes, “Not one of them / That yet looks on me or would know me” (82–3). There is even time for a song and a quick costume change, while the charmed nobles stand staring into space like statues. This heavenly music, then, seems to have little effect save as a stage prop—and a rather ineffectively employed stage prop, at that. Somehow, the timing is off, and the magical awakening to the strains of music—as Hermione’s “statue” wakens in The Winter’s Tale—never occurs. The return to reason and understanding is repeatedly invoked, repeatedly anticipated, and then displaced by Ariel’s sung celebration of freedom. The nobles’ eventual return to consciousness is not only unmusical, but even anticlimactic. When Prospero is once again attired in his ducal garments, he gives Ariel some orders about the mariners, the master, and the boatswain: the prosaic business of tying up loose ends. Ariel hurries off, and then Gonzalo wakes suddenly, imploring “some heavenly power” to release him from “this fearful country” (5.1.106–7). The awakening of reason brings confused terror, not calm and relieved enlightenment. Prospero stages music for an audience that consists only of himself. If this music serves to manipulate the affections, it is only Prospero’s affections that it can be manipulating. To its strains, he movingly tells the oblivious Gonzalo, “Mine eyes, ev’n sociable to the show of thine, / Fall fellowly drops” (5.1.63–4). The moment would be still more fellowly and sociable were Gonzalo able to see or hear him; but Prospero is clearly embracing—or trying to embrace—his own part in a sympathetic community of fellows (always easier to manage when the

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community is purely notional). The “solemn air” (57) stirs and reinforces the magician’s compassion, continuing the process begun by Ariel’s intercession. Indeed, Prospero’s scene of reconciliation and forgiveness is far more powerful when he rehearses it to the sounds of music.74 As he expresses his forgiveness of his unconscious enemies, to swelling musical accompaniment, Prospero very nearly rises to the occasion. Certainly, his words to Antonio are considerably less grudging the first time around: “Flesh and blood, / You, brother mine, that entertained ambition … I do forgive thee, / Unnatural though thou art” (5.1.74–9). This is rather qualified forgiveness, but Prospero insists upon his relation to Antonio: flesh and blood, brother mine. There is an acceptance of interconnectedness, which is entirely absent in what Prospero says to the conscious Antonio: “most wicked sir, whom to call brother / Would even infect my mouth” (5.1.132–3). It is as if any approximation to true reconciliation can take place only in a charmed circle; harmony can be established only when literal, magical music plays. Nevertheless, Prospero does not seem to understand, despite all the evidence offered by the play, just how music actually works. The very last thing that music has done over the course of the drama is stir direct sympathetic response. This moment is no exception, as the magician’s emotion remains disconnected from its senseless objects. The musical element of The Tempest quite literally usurps the dramatic in this culminating moment, as the musical and dramatic climaxes fail to synchronize. In fact, the musical climax works its way in first, turning Prospero’s long-planned revelations into anticlimax, for his “heavenly music” builds not to a moment of reconciliation and recovery, but to Ariel’s final song. At this musical climax, rather than embracing his reconciled fellows to the sounds of harmony, Prospero is intimately attended by an insubstantial spirit, who seems already to have forgotten his master’s existence.75 ARIEL sings and helps to attire him Where the bee sucks, there suck I: In a cowslip’s bell I lie; There I couch when owls do cry, On the bat’s back I do fly After summer merrily. Merrily, merrily shall I live now Under the blossom that hangs on the bough. Merrily, merrily shall I live now Under the blossom that hangs on the bough. (5.1.88–96)

Once again, a song generates a paradoxical combination of intimacy and distance: Ariel dresses Prospero as he sings; but at the same time, in the song, the spirit is 74 See Berger’s insightful account of Prospero’s two speeches of forgiveness: “It is as if Prospero hesitates to put on the real scene without one more dress rehearsal” (180). See also Tribble, 164–5. 75 See Chickering, 170; Lindley, Shakespeare and Music, 230.

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already gone. As far as Ariel is concerned, the play is finished—and Prospero’s long-prepared reconciliation scene has not even occurred yet. The action builds to this one moment, which has nothing to do with the action, indicating that music cannot be satisfactorily harnessed for the purpose of drama—at least, not for Prospero’s drama. This disjunction between musical and dramatic movement, however, constitutes the drama of The Tempest—just as in “Full Fathom Five” the music fits and reinforces the words by not fitting them and undermining them. This final disjunction between musical movements and human emotion may stir pity in the audience for the total isolation of the cantankerous magician. The play still holds out the wistful, tenuous possibility that its own strange artfulness, its drift away from direct responsiveness and its eerie—and perhaps self-indulgent—translation of horror to beauty, can offer a way to renewed human compassion. In the end, though, despair can be averted only by the breaking of the spell, and Prospero must directly request the audience for their merciful applause. Unsettlingly, this applause may simply represent a return of the “confused noise” of the drowning mariners, the crazy chorus of prayer from the opening scene. And my ending is despair Unless I be relieved by prayer, Which pierces so, that it assaults Mercy itself, and frees all faults. As you from crimes would pardoned be, Let your indulgence set me free. (Epilogue 15–20)

The epilogue is far weightier than the context—a request for applause—would warrant. Prospero speaks for the play, suggesting a startling lack of balance between the ambitions of the theatrical project “which was to please,” and the problems it has created, whether within the fiction or without: “my ending is despair.” As the speaker simultaneously requests salvation and appreciation, we cannot tell if a deeply serious matter is being taken lightly, or if a trifling matter is being approached with comical weightiness. The speech, however, does not feel comical. The magician and his play are trapped, like Ariel in the pine before Prospero’s arrival, and both require outside intervention for their release. The enchanter’s own spells, ironically, have proven overly successful, like those of his predecessor: “it was a torment / To lay upon the damned, which Sycorax / Could not again undo.” This subtle association retrospectively casts the strange sounds of the play as those eerie groans that could “penetrate the breasts / Of everangry bears” and make wolves howl in an uncertain mixture of pity and terror. We perhaps have not understood the full horror of the musical pain and despair we have been enjoying. Dramatizing harmonia mundi creates tragicomedic wonder, a sense that nothing is really threatened in all this harmony and order. Nonetheless, bringing this harmony literally alive results in an unsettlingly attractive presentation of pain. Sympathy and compassion are inappropriate to musical sufferings that are illusory or deserved—but the resulting hypnotic drift away from pity and terror

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proves increasingly troubling. The remote and implicitly “musical” perspective of the inhuman Ariel may distance us only to bring us back to emotional connection; but it is hardly certain that this process will work. In the end, applause both dispels and extends the charm—the enchantment—as the audience fills in for Ariel, who cannot get “Prospero” off the island—i.e., the stage. Each sonic device intended to break the illusion merely causes it to expand, drawing more and more of the supposedly outside world into its embrace. This illusion is all the more alarming, as it is never possible for the audience to fully discern whether it works to suspend Hell or to offer a glimpse of a golden world—or, disturbingly, both.

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Chapter 5

Warbling Fancies: Milton, Shakespeare, and the Musical Imagination The names that arise in critical discussions of Milton and music are usually the names of musicians and composers: Henry Lawes, Monteverdi, Milton’s own father. Several critics have argued that Milton’s style was influenced by Italian music-drama or by English composers.1 Shakespeare’s name never arises in this connection; nevertheless, the questions surrounding Milton’s relation to music and the questions surrounding Milton’s relation to Shakespeare are intimately connected—even inextricable. In Shakespeare, Milton found not a musician or a composer, but a poet who provided a powerful model for thinking about music through language—a writer who suggested that to write about music could be to write musically. For Milton, Shakespeare is not only the poet of the imagination, but also the poet of music. Throughout his career, Milton associates the Shakespearean with an almost non-referential language that acts as instrumental music does, and with complex descriptions of music, as if in these descriptions Milton saw the verbal reaching towards the nonverbal. Milton associates nonverbal music with the dissolution of boundaries, the melting of distinct things into one another. In his poetry, this kind of music enables a collapse of temporality and causes past and future to run together into an endlessly suspended present. To recollect music, or even to anticipate it, is almost to experience it. Paradoxically, however, the music of the suspended moment does not represent stasis for him (though it may draw listeners into stasis). It is dynamic, a music of changes and variations. A number of these qualities of nonverbal music, unsurprisingly, alarm Milton. His world-view is profoundly teleological, and moral distinctions are of the utmost importance to him. On the other hand, he finds a melting of distinctions deeply desirable in some cases—particularly when the 1 In Musical Backgrounds for English Literature: 1580–1650 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1962), Gretchen Finney finds affinities of plot and thematic content as well as style between Lycidas and Monteverdi’s Orfeo, and between Comus and a drama per musica entitled La Catena d’Adone. In The Transcendental Masque (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1972), Angus Fletcher finds analogous effects and structures in music and poetry. Diane McColley compares Milton’s poetry with sacred English polyphonic music in Poetry and Music in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). In The Living Lyre in English Verse (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984), Louise Schleiner connects Milton’s “declamatory/ oratorical mode of lyric” and Italian dramatic song forms (102).

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distinction involved is the gap separating earth and heaven, or the temporal divide between Paradise and the fallen world.2 “The Miltonic text,” writes William Poole, “dangerously veers between the compromised and the divine,”3 struggling—in Paradise Lost in particular—to represent the heavenly and the unfallen from a perspective that can be nothing else but fallen. Music, however, in its eluding of specific reference and meaning, and in its power over the recollection, its ability to summon up a vanished past, offers a mode of approaching not only divine harmony, but lost time. The two Shakespeare plays that most engage—or haunt—Milton’s own imagination are, by common scholarly consensus, The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.4 These plays explore the power and workings of the imagination more deeply and explicitly than any others in Shakespeare’s output, but they also present worlds that echo with enchanting and often inarticulate music of uncertain origin, worlds where nature itself is literally, and sometimes eerily, harmonious. Milton perceives such inherently musical worlds as simultaneously fallen and unfallen, terrible and idyllic. In a number of his own early poems, including L’Allegro, Il Penseroso, and the Nativity Ode, Milton devotes significant passages to translating the sounds of wordless music into words, in contexts that recall these plays and their music. In the process, he suggests that such translations, if successful, will allow the described music to permeate the poem as a whole, dissolving the distinction between the representation and its elusive object. Nevertheless, he also expresses reservations about the possibility—and morality—of imitating such “unexpressive song,” reservations that continue to grow over the course of his career. 2 For the importance of the Fall to Milton throughout his career—not only in Paradise Lost—see, among others, William Poole, Milton and the Idea of the Fall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 189. For Milton’s commitment to a teleological understanding of history, see Ronald R. MacDonald, The Burial-Places of Memory: Epic Underworlds in Vergil, Dante, and Milton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), 167. In Remembering and Repeating: Biblical Creation in “Paradise Lost” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), Regina M. Schwartz contrasts “Satanic repetition” with “Adamic repetition,” noting that the latter “is built upon the difference implied by memory—the admission of the pastness of the past” (6). 3 Poole, 147. 4 Alwin Thaler, Shakespeare and Our World (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1966), finds more allusions in Milton’s poetry to these two plays than to any others. Although John Guillory, Poetic Authority (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), and Paul Stevens, Imagination and the Presence of Shakespeare in “Paradise Lost” (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), hold very different views of Milton’s treatment of these plays, they agree on their dominance. See also Jacques Blondel, “From The Tempest to Comus,” Revue de Littérature Comparée 49 (1975): 204–16; Felicity A. Hughes, “Milton, Shakespeare, Pindar and the Bees,” Review of English Studies 44 (1993): 220–30; Maggie Kilgour, “Comus’s Wood of Allusion,” University of Toronto Quarterly 61 (1992): 316–33; and John M. Major, “Comus and The Tempest,” Shakespeare Quarterly 10 (1959): 177–83.

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The critical debate over Milton’s attitude towards Shakespeare has centered on the issue of the Shakespearean imagination and the potential tension between this wide-ranging and generative “fancy” and Milton’s poetics of faith and inspiration.5 Milton’s description in L’Allegro of “sweetest Shakespeare, fancy’s child / Warbl[ing] his native woodnotes wild” (133–4) is the locus from which all discussions of Milton, Shakespeare, and fancy begin.6 Critics exploring this topic tend to ignore the second line of Milton’s description of Shakespeare, or else take it to express Shakespeare’s “natural” facility, his “easy numbers” as opposed to Milton’s own “slow-endeavouring art” (“On Shakespeare,” 9–10). But Milton’s treatment of Shakespearean music cannot be separated from his understanding of the Shakespearean imagination—or fancy. “Fancy” could mean both imagination and desire; but fancies, or fantasies, were also a particular type of music, music without words.7 In A Plain and Easy Introduction to Practical Music, Thomas Morley—patron of Milton’s father and composer of music associated with “It Was a Lover and His Lass” and “O Mistress Mine”—explains: The most principal and chiefest kind of music which is made without a ditty [i.e., without lyrics] is the Fantasy, that is when a musician taketh a point at his pleasure and wresteth and turneth it as he list, making either much or little of it according as shall seem best in his own conceit. In this may more art be shown than in any other music because the composer is tied to nothing, but that he may add, diminish, and alter at his pleasure … [T]his kind of music is, with them who practise instruments of parts, in greatest use, but for voices it is but seldom used.8

Morley’s phrasing resonates with the titles of certain Shakespearean comedies: As You Like It, What You Will. The use of “fancy” as a musical term in the sixteenth A number of critics have perceived an irresoluble conflict between Shakespeare’s inclusiveness and plenitude, springing from the playwright’s prolific and unrestrained imaginative powers, and the Miltonic emphasis on moral choice. In Poetic Authority, John Guillory argues that Milton thoroughly renounces Shakespeare, and through Shakespeare, the power of the imagination. Similar cases are made by Leslie Brisman in Milton’s Poetry of Choice and Its Romantic Heirs (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973); and Jonathan Goldberg in Voice Terminal Echo: Postmodernism and English Renaissance Texts (New York: Methuen, 1986). In Imagination and the Presence of Shakespeare, Paul Stevens opposes Guillory’s influential argument, and presents a case for a Milton friendly to the Shakespearean imagination. 6 Milton is cited parenthetically from John Milton: The Complete Poems, ed. John Leonard (New York: Penguin, 1998). Shakespeare is cited parenthetically from The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean Howard, and Katherine Eisaman Maus (New York: Norton, 1997). 7 For an account of the intersection of music, love, and imagination in the early modern period, see Linda Phyllis Austern, “‘For, Love’s a Good Musician’: Performance, Audition, and Erotic Disorders in Early Modern Europe,” Musical Quarterly 82 (1998): 614–53. 8 Thomas Morley, A Plain and Easy Introduction to Practical Music (1597), ed. R. Alec Harman (London: Dent, 1952), 296; emphasis mine. 5

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century seems to derive from a sense of inventive and imaginative play, and it also can suggest an improvisatory aspect to the music.9 The structure of the fantasy is essentially loose, open to expansion and alteration. Milton uses the word “fancy” in this musical sense in On Education, where he explains that students may profitably spend times of recreation hearing how “the skilful Organist plies his grave and fancied descant.”10 Here Milton suggests that no necessary tension exists between gravity and imaginative play. A number of his contemporaries, however, would have been startled by such an idea. The vocabulary of the fantastic repeatedly surfaces in Protestant polemics against elaborate music in the church. These polemics emphasize at some length the dangers of music that overwhelms or distracts from words. In The Reliques of Rome (1563)—much mined by William Prynne in his Histrio-mastix of 1633—Thomas Becon describes the music of his own time as “light, vayne, madde, fond, foolishe and fantastical.”11 Such music—polyphonic, combining voices and instruments to the detriment of holy words—by its very nature lacks gravity. Clearly unimpressed by any skilful organists or fancied descants, Becon views the history of church music in terms of horrific degeneration: “And bycause nothing should wante to delight the vayne, folysh and idle eares of fond and fantastical men, [Pope Vitalian] ioyned the Organs to the curious Musike. Thus was Paules preaching and Peters praying tourned into vaine singing and childishe playing, unto the great losse oftime, and unto the utter undoing of Christen mens soules, whiche liue not by syngynge and pipyng, but by euery worde that cometh out of the mouthe of God.”12 Such objections were widespread and familiar. “And in matters of religion also, to some [music] seemes offensiue,” wrote Richard Mulcaster in 1581, “bycause it carieth awaye the eare, with the sweetnesse of the melodie, and bewitcheth the minde with a Syrenes sounde, pulling it from that delite, wherin of duetie it ought to dwell, vnto harmonicall fantasies, and withdrawing it, from the best mediations, and most virtuous thoughtes to forreine conceites, and wandring deuises.”13 Christopher D.S. Field, et al, “Fantasia,” in Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.proxy.wm.edu/subscriber/article/grove/music/40048 (accessed May 13, 2011). 10 Quoted in Nan Cooke Carpenter, “The Place of Music in L’Allegro and Il Penseroso,” University of Toronto Quarterly 22 (1953): 361. 11 Thomas Becon, The Reliques of Rome (London, 1563), R5r. 12 Becon, R4r; emphasis mine. “Fantasies” are both nonsensical and morally suspect. See Miles Coverdale, Goostly Psalmes and spirituall songes drawen out of the holy scripture (ca. 1535): “And if women sitting at their rocks, or spinning at the wheels, had none other songs to pass their time withal, than such as Moses’ sister, Elchanas’s wife, Debora, and Mary the mother of Christ have sung before them, they should be better occupied, than with hey nony nony, hey troly loly, & such like fantasies” (quoted in Ramie Targoff, Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001], 69). Emphasis mine. For Coverdale, fantasies are inarticulate sounds or the chanting of nonsense words. 13 Richard Mulcaster, Positions (London, 1581), 38. 9

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These harmonical fantasies draw the mind away from the meaning—the words—that they are intended to reinforce and convey. Milton repeatedly locates Shakespeare’s descriptions of music as the site where the Shakespearean text begins to become this beautiful and disturbing fancy, this wordless music made up of words. Orpheus and the Woodland Warblers The description of “sweetest Shakespeare” as “Fancy’s child / Warbl[ing] his native woodnotes wild” forges a powerful connection between nature, imagination, and wordless music. This association resurfaces in Paradise Lost as the poet describes the abundance of Eden, where “Nature … / Wantoned as in her prime, and played at will / Her virgin fancies, pouring forth more sweet / Wild above rule or art; enormous bliss” (PL.V.294–7; emphasis mine). These lines also echo Shakespeare’s Sonnet 97, where autumn is described as “bearing the wanton burden of the prime” (7). Shakespeare’s phrase, like Milton’s, carries a musical double meaning: a “burden” could mean the bass line, accompaniment, or refrain of a song (OED n., 9, 10).14 (This musical meaning becomes explicit later in the sonnet, when the speaker declares, “For summer and his pleasures wait on thee, / And thou away, the very birds are mute” [11–12].) Because a refrain tends to repeat the central thought of a song, “burden” also came to mean the gist or main idea. The two different meanings potentially contradict one another, in a single word confounding the idea and purpose of a song with its nonsense refrains and wordless bass accompaniments. What, after all, is the gist of birdsong? Milton’s description of Shakespeare as a warbler of woodnotes does more than label the dramatist as a rather primitive, if delightful, poet of nature. Birdsong itself had long possessed contradictory literary and cultural connotations. Most crucially, it was often presented as remaining unchanged, the same in fallen and unfallen gardens. Throughout the romance tradition, birdsong proves delightful and dangerous for just this reason. The trope of ambiguous birdsong extends from Le Roman de la Rose through Chaucer’s The Parlement of Foules, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, and Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata to The Faerie Queene of Milton’s beloved Spenser, where such music frequently seems to “symbolize the seductive beauty of a fallen nature.”15 Nevertheless, Chaucer’s seductive birdsong in the Garden of Love recalls not only Le Roman de la Rose, but also the singing of the birds in Dante’s Earthly Paradise—a passage in Purgatorio that also owes

See Ariel’s first song in The Tempest: “Foot it featly here and there, / And, sweet sprites, bear / The burden” (1.2.384). For an account of Shakespeare’s use of the pun in The Tempest, see Michael Neill, “‘Noises, / Sounds, and Sweet Airs’: The Burden of Shakespeare’s Tempest,” Shakespeare Quarterly 59 (2008): 53. See also Chapter 4, 156, 158. 15 Robin Headlam Wells, Elizabethan Mythologies: Studies in Poetry, Drama, and Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 32–4. 14

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something to Le Roman de la Rose.16 In the latter, the Lover enters a garden that seems to him like the earthly paradise, and he delights in the wonderful music of the birds, who perform “biau servise,” like “ange espiritel.” But their song, of course, has no words, and may resemble “chanz de sereines de mere” rather than the angelic praise of God (661–74).17 The seductive song of fallen nature proves indistinguishable from the celebratory song of unfallen nature. You can only tell the difference by knowing where (or when) you are. Such music consequently proves both wonderful and dangerous: a praise of God more direct and simple than any human worship, and a seductive call to the pleasures of the flesh; clear rejoicing in God’s creation, and meaningless warbling. The author of The Praise of Musicke sets forth the positive view in an admonishment to the reader: “When thou seest, each fowl in his kind, the Linet, the Nightingale and the Lark, to mount aloft, and sing their notes unto the skies, show thy self docile in these two things, first in acknowledging the delight which both thou takest in them, and they in music: and secondly learn by their example, what thy duty is and ought to be in grateful singing of psalms and songs to him that made thee.”18 Shakespeare’s own description of how “the lark at break of day arising / From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate” (Sonnet 29, 11–12) builds on this conception of birdsong. Milton may recall these very lines in the morning hymn of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost, as the first couple proclaim, “Join voices all ye living souls, ye birds, / That singing up to heaven gate ascend, / Bear on your wings and in your notes his praise” (V.197–9). In the proem to Book III of Paradise Lost, the narrator describes himself as a nightingale, indicating that there is something very desirable about a songbird’s mode of expression.19 The central difficulty in interpreting birdsong, of course, is its lack of verbal content. In the Renaissance, songs in which music took precedence over words were often compared to the chirping of birds, lacking the rational component that 16 See Dante, Purgatorio, trans. Charles Singleton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), xxviii.13–21; and Chaucer, The Parlement of Foules, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), ll. 190–203. 17 Le Roman de la Rose, ed. Armand Strubel (Paris: Librarie Générale Française, 1992). “These birds that I describe to you performed a lovely service: they sang a song as though they were heavenly angels. Know well that I was filled with great joy when I heard it, for mortal man never heard so sweet a melody. It was so sweet and beautiful that it did not seem the song of a bird; one could compare it rather with the song of the sirens of the sea, who have the name siren on account of their pure, clear voices” (The Romance of the Rose, trans. Charles Dahlberg [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983], 39). 18 John Case [attributed], The Praise of Musicke (1586), facsim. edn (New York: G. Olms, 1980), 50. 19 Such positive connotations had a long history. In Sung Birds: Music, Nature, and Poetry in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), Elizabeth Eva Leach explains, “Birdsong can symbolize a singing that is close to the fact of God’s creation, that is natural as opposed to the unnatural excesses of human singers and may be morally neutral or even good” (53).

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should characterize all human endeavors. Lodowick Bryskett—friend of Edmund Spenser—put the problem in particularly suggestive if conventional terms, contrasting contemporary music with the Psalms: “But since our musike is growen now to the fulnes of wanton and lascivious passions, and the words so confusedly mingled with the notes, that a man can discerne nothing but the sound and tunes of the voices, but sense or sentence he can understand none at all; even as it were sundry birds chanting and chirping upon the boughs of trees: yong men are much better in the judgement of the wise, to abstaine from it altogether.”20 In a similar vein, Bryskett complains of “this [music] that by varietie of tunes, and warbling divisions, confounds the words and sentences, and yeeldeth onely a delight to the exterior sense, and no fruit to the mind.”21 Here “divisions” serves both as a musical term and as an ominous indication of the fissure that warbling music has opened between sound and sense. The connotations of “warble” suggested in Bryskett’s diatribe reinforce the musical meaning of “fancy” in Milton’s description of Shakespeare. As Joseph Ortiz points out, “In L’Allegro, ‘warbling’ comes to stand for a kind of utterance that calls attention to its own sonority, irrespective of the words that only partially structure it.”22 The term paradoxically suggests the extremes of both artlessness and artfulness, just as the loosely structured “fantasy” is a form of improvisatory play and allows the composer to show “more art” than any other music.23 The word “warble” was perhaps most commonly associated with birdsong, as it is in L’Allegro, and thus with flowing, natural, unpremeditated song. (Streams and fountains also have a tendency to warble.) On the other hand, the word could indicate an exceedingly artful human performance in its evocation of the trill, a sophisticated musical technique newly imported from Italy.24 James Brophy suggests that Milton found this technique metaphorically attractive, as it creates “a fascinating resolution of intervals that apart from the trill were considered out of tune.”25 The associations of the trill, however, were not always positive: critics complained that “too much shaking and quavering of the notes … deprive the 20 Lodowick Bryskett, A Discourse of Civill Life (1606), ed. Thomas E. Wright (Northridge, CA: San Fernando Valley State College, 1970), 111. 21 Bryskett, 113; emphasis mine. The deficiency of birdsong is set forth in comparable terms by Calvin, in the preface to the Geneva Psalter: “Then we must remember what Saint Paul says—that spiritual songs cannot be well sung save with the heart. Now the heart requires the intelligence, and therein, says Saint Augustine, lies the difference between the singing of men and of birds. For a linnet, a nightingale, a parrot will sing well, but it will be without understanding” (Oliver Strunk, ed., Source Readings in Music History, rev. ed., ed. Leo Treitler [New York: Norton, 1998], 367). 22 Joseph M. Ortiz, “‘The Reforming of Reformation’: Theatrical, Ovidian, and Musical Figuration in Milton’s Mask,” Milton Studies 44 (2005): 103. 23 Morley, 296. 24 James D. Brophy, “Milton’s ‘Warble’: The Trill as Metaphor of Concord,” Milton Quarterly 19.4 (1985): 105. 25 Brophy, 105.

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hearers of the sense and meaning.”26 Reformers similarly used the term “warble” to indicate seductive, dangerous, and decidedly fallen music.27 In the artful trill, we have rediscovered the essential ambiguity of birdsong. It either preserves a pure, perfect and archaic harmony, in which discords resolve into the original concord—or it is an empty, sensual chattering. Bryskett’s opposition of psalms and birdsong resembles Milton’s distinction between carmen and cithara in Ad Patrem, a poem that for some critics sets forth Milton’s deep love of music, and for others, reveals his complete lack of interest in, or even his dislike of, music.28 The poem is addressed to Milton’s father, and purports to defend the son’s choice of poetry as a vocation. According to the poem, this “best of fathers” had expressed some anxiety on the subject of his son’s career. The poet seeks to allay this anxiety, urging his father not to despise the sacred muses, and reminding him that his own powers of musical composition derive from the same source. It is by their gift that you yourself have the skill to match a thousand notes [mille sonos] to fit rhythms, and the expertise to vary the singer’s voice through a thousand modulations [millius et vocem modulis variare] … Now, since it has been my lot to be born a poet, why should you think it so strange that we, who are so closely joined by blood, should pursue sister arts and kindred interests? Phoebus himself, wishing to divide himself between us two, gave some gifts to me and others to my father; and, father and son, we share the divided god.29

This pleasant picture of father and son sharing the gifts of Phoebus in their pursuit of sister arts is somewhat qualified, however, by the passage that precedes it, in which Milton asks his father not to despise “divine song” (divinum carmen), “the work of the poet” (vatis opus). Throughout Ad Patrem, Milton refers to the best kind of poetry as carmen; but rather than bringing his art and his father’s art closer together, the word increasingly comes to suggest that the son has gotten a larger Charles Butler, The Principles of Music (1636), quoted in Brophy, 107. Ortiz, 102, 103. Ortiz provides a stimulating and insightful account of Milton’s

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use of the word, in the context of A Masque. His article does not take account, however, of changes in Milton’s attitude towards the idea of “warbling” over the course of his career. I believe he also underplays the differences that Milton perceives between inarticulate “warbling” and clearly worded song. 28 The view of Milton as music-lover is very common. For dissenting voices, see John Carey, “Milton’s Harmonious Sisters,” in The Well-Enchanting Skill: Music, Poetry, and Drama in the Culture of the Renaissance, ed. John Caldwell, Edward Olleson, and Susan Wollenberg (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 221; Finney, 74; and Harinder S. Marjara, “Milton’s ‘Chromatick jarres’ and ‘Tuscan Aire,’” Milton Quarterly 19 (1985): 11. 29 “quarum ipse peritus / Munere, mille sonos numeros componis ad aptos / Millibus et vocem modulis variare canoram / Doctus … Nunc tibi quid mirum, si me genuisse poetam / Contingerit, caro si tam prope sanguine iuncti / Cognatas artes, studiumque affine sequamur: / Ipse volens Phoebus se dispertire duobus, / Altera dona mihi, dedit altera dona parenti, / Dividuumque deum genitorque puerque tenemus” (56–66). All English translations of Milton’s Latin poems are taken from John Milton: The Complete Poems.

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share of the divided god than his father has—if, indeed, the god has been divided at all. “In short,” the poet proclaims, “what use is the inane modulation of the voice [vocis modulamen inane] without words, meaning, and rhythm of speech [verborum sensusque vacans, numerique loquacis]? That kind of song suits the woodland choristers, but not Orpheus, who held back rivers and gave ears to the oak trees by his song, not his lyre [carmine, non cithara]” (50–54). Milton moves smoothly from this pronouncement into the praise of his father’s art, as if the distinction between carmen and cithara were an unrelated point; but his expressed admiration for his father’s ability, “vocem modulis variare canoram / doctus,” echoes the “vocis modulamen inane” of the preceding lines. Without words, music is empty; but poetry is complete in itself and lacks nothing. It does not need to acquire any of the properties of the cithara, song appropriate to “woodland choristers,” warbling their native woodnotes wild.30 Gordon Campbell suggests that John Milton senior may have arranged for his son’s poem “On Shakespeare” to be printed in the Second Folio, and points out that there is evidence for a stronger connection between Milton senior and “the theatrical world of Shakespeare” than has been previously assumed. One John Milton, likely the poet’s father, was a trustee of the Blackfriars Playhouse. Thomas Morley, patron of Milton senior, and the first publisher of his music, provides another connection: the composer was Shakespeare’s neighbor, and had set versions of “It Was a Lover and His Lass,” and “O Mistress Mine.”31 The possibility of such a connection between Shakespeare’s world and Milton’s father is enough to delight all propounders of Miltonic Oedipal complexes; but it also hints, however undependably, at a biographical association between cithara and warbled woodnotes. An examination of Milton’s treatment of music throughout his career suggests that he is deeply concerned with different ways of representing music, as if the manner of musical representation in a given poem inevitably reflects on the musical workings of the poetry itself. In Ad patrem, Milton suggestively refers to his earlier poems not as carmina, but as tenues sonos.32 The phrase can be translated “trifling songs,” but soni are literally sounds, and Milton employs the same word to describe his father’s musical compositions. M.K. Mander finds 30 In “The Epistola Ad Patrem: Milton’s Apology for Poetry,” Milton Quarterly 23 (1989), M.K. Mander revealingly argues that interpretations taking carmen non cithara “to mean ‘text not setting,’ ‘words not music’ … would distort the message of these lines, which show that the words themselves contain the music … [C]armen … is the combination of meaningful words in a harmonious form, so that they contain both sense and music” (164). If words, in the form of poetry, contain their own music, then there is little need for a cithara or a musician—or a composer—at all. “Music” turns out to be what Milton does, and not what his father does. 31 Gordon Campbell, “Shakespeare and the Youth of Milton,” Milton Quarterly 33 (1999): 95–105. 32 The date of Ad Patrem is unknown and has been the subject of much debate. Scholars have suggested dates ranging from 1631 to 1645. For a summary of the various points of view, see Barbara Lewalski, The Life of John Milton (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 71–2.

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Milton’s reference to his earlier poems as soni “appropriate … for they belong to the two audible arts of music and poetry which, in the course of the poem, we shall recognize as one,”33 ignoring the poet’s expressed hope that his Muse will forget these soni and allow him to compose the more divine carmen. Milton refers to Ad Patrem itself as carmen, although he modestly modifies both noun and claim to Orphean song with the adjective exiguum (slender). Still, a slender song presumably represents a step up the ladder from tenuous sounds. In what way were Milton’s earlier poems soni? The word may simply imply that they were insubstantial trifles—but an examination of some of these “trifling sounds” suggests a way in which the term may be understood more literally. Milton represents music itself in terms of sound in many of his early poems. Suggestively, Milton’s portrayals of Orpheus in the companion poems L’Allegro and Il Penseroso differ greatly from his portrayal of Orpheus in Ad Patrem. Neither early poem clearly differentiates between Orpheus and the woodland choirs. The strangely passive musician of L’Allegro lifts his head to hear “such strains as would have quite set free / His half-regained Eurydice” (143–4); and in Il Penseroso, the speaker implores Melancholy to “bid the soul of Orpheus to sing / Such notes as warbled to the string, / Drew iron tears down Pluto’s check” (105–7; emphasis mine).34 By the time of Paradise Lost, however, only nightingales and wordless fountains “warble” in Milton’s poems—never rational creatures. The devil Mammon dismisses the songs of the angels as “warbled hymns” (PL.II.243), but the narrator never describes verbal music in such terms. Mammon’s word choice suggests that he finds no meaning in the angelic hymns; they are as senseless to him as birdsong—proof of the corruption of fallen senses.35 John Carey draws an important distinction between instrumental music and vocal song in Milton’s poetry: [Milton’s] doubts about the status and value of music, except as an accompaniment to song, seem to have been real, permanent, and connected to some of his deepest anxieties … [A] survey of Milton’s poetry, early and late, suggests that his elevation of words above music reflects a … basic judgment, which involved not just his authorial pride, but the nature of his intelligence. The idea of song, and of song as opposed to songless music, was vital to his creative impulse and can be traced in the choices his imagination made.36

Mander, “Milton’s Apology for Poetry,” 159. See Kester Svendsen, “Milton’s L’Allegro and Il Penseroso,” The Explicator

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8 (1950), item 49. In “The Place of Music in L’Allegro and Il Penseroso,” Nan Cooke Carpenter argues that while the Orpheus of L’Allegro is chiefly a musician, the Orpheus of Il Penseroso is “a gifted poet-singer” (357). Nevertheless, the descriptive focus in the latter poem is still on music, not poetry. 35 The last Miltonic warbler is the Circe-like Dalila of the “enchanting voice” (1065), whose “fair enchanted cup, and warbling charms” Samson rejects, along with all her serpent-like “trains … and toils” (932–4). 36 Carey, 224.

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Nevertheless, Milton often shows a powerful, if ambivalent, attraction to the idea of “songless music,” particularly in his earlier poems; and nowhere is this attraction more pronounced than in L’Allegro. As a number of critics have observed, L’Allegro is a celebration of fancy, here linked with dance in the invitation to “Come, and trip it as ye go / On the light fantastic toe” (33–4). Shakespeare, “fancy’s child,” makes his appearance towards the end of the poem, but numerous commentators have felt that his influence extends over L’Allegro as a whole. Readers generally locate this influence in specific verbal echoes, in allusions to Shakespeare’s comic world—particularly A Midsummer Night’s Dream—or in a general Elizabethan spirit.37 I would argue that this sense of Shakespearean pervasiveness rises from the poem’s depiction of Shakespeare as elusive and difficult to pin down, as well as its enactment of a similar elusiveness, a similar blurring of boundaries, in its account of the joys of mirth. The climax of these joys involves a “melting” into music. This elusiveness makes itself felt in a generalized grammatical haziness: Mirth, admit me of thy crew To live with her [Liberty], and live with thee In unreprovèd pleasures free; To hear the lark begin his flight, And singing startle the dull night, From his watchtower in the skies, Till the dappled dawn doth rise; Then to come in spite of sorrow, And at my window bid good morrow, Through the sweet-briar or the vine, Or the twisted eglantine. While the cock with lively din, Scatters the rear of darkness thin, And to the stack, or the barn door, Stoutly struts his dames before, Oft list’ning how the hounds and horn, Cheerly rouse the slumb’ring morn, From the side of some hoar hill, Through the high woods echoing shrill. Sometimes walking not unseen By hedge-row elms, on hillocks green, Right against the eastern gate, Where the great sun begins his state, Robed in flames, and amber light, The clouds in thousand liveries dight. (38–51; emphasis mine)

See Hughes, 220. Hughes ultimately argues that the composition of both the companion poems was inspired by Theseus’s contrast between mirth and melancholy in the opening scene of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. See also Louis Martz, Poet of Exile: A Study of Milton’s Poetry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), 46–9. 37

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As many readers of the poem have discovered, it is quite difficult to tell who is doing what throughout this passage. Who comes to the window: Mirth, the lark, or the speaker himself?38 Do the hounds rouse the morn from the side of the hill? Or are they heard from the side of the hill? Who is walking not unseen? Whoever is walking does not walk fully seen, either—at least not from the perspective of the reader. Similarly, the syntax makes it seem as if the cock, and not the speaker, listens to the hounds and horns, though this interpretation seems unlikely. The speaker positions himself as a listener; but the fluid syntax allows him to slip into the roles of the singing lark and the crowing rooster. To listen to a sound is to become the maker of the sound: noise mingles with response, sound with echo. In this context, the juxtaposition of hounds and horns with the walker at the “eastern gate” suggests the presence of yet another figure moving “not unseen” through the poem. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Oberon declares in very similar language that the fairies are not confined to night, and may walk the groves “Even till the eastern gate, all fiery red … / Turns into yellow gold” (3.2.390–94). Theseus and Hippolyta later greet the morning with “the musical confusion / Of hounds and echo in conjunction” (107–8). The allusions to Dream, and to Shakespeare in general, become more explicit as evening falls, and the villagers retire to the fire-side to tell stories of the pranks of “faery Mab” and the “drudging goblin” (100–114). The poem then seems to shift away from the countryside, but this shift is never quite complete: Thus done the tales, to bed they creep, By whispering winds soon lulled asleep. Towered cities please us then, And the busy hum of men, … There let Hymen oft appear In saffron robe, with taper clear, And pomp, and feast, and revelry, With masque and antique pageantry; Such sights as youthful poets dream On summer eves by haunted stream. Then to the well-trod stage anon, If Jonson’s learned sock be on, Or sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy’s child, Warble his native wood-notes wild. (115–34)

Milton subtly blurs the dream world and the waking world. As the country people are lulled to sleep by whispering winds, the scene moves to the city, to deeds of knights and ladies, and then to weddings; and then all of these sights dissolve back into dreams of youthful poets. The city visions seem to rise out of sleep, and 38 For a summary of the debate, see A Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes, vol. 2, pt. 1, The Minor English Poems, ed. A.S.P. Woodhouse and Douglas Bush (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), 281–4.

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then just as they have begun to assume stability and reality of their own, they melt back into the dream world, and drift away from their urban setting to a wilder world of haunted streams. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the marriage, pomp, and feasting all belong to the “real world” of Athens; in L’Allegro, this world is conjured up by dreamers in the countryside. The next lines, however, leap sharply back to the city, as the speaker heads to the theater to enjoy plays by Jonson and Shakespeare. There is a distinct and very significant difference in the presentation of these two dramatists. Jonson, of course, is learned while Shakespeare is musical, “natural.” But also, Jonson is located firmly on the stage, and Shakespeare is not. Jonson’s “sock” is a metonym for comedy, as “buskin” will stand in for tragedy in Il Penseroso; but the close proximity of “sock” and “well-trod stage” creates an impression of literal foot-wear, moving across real boards. With Shakespeare’s “wood-notes,” the poem runs back to the countryside, to the haunted streams and echoing woods. This fluidity of the Shakespearean presence (on the stage? in the wood?) recalls some of the distinctive metatheatrical effects of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, summed up most succinctly in Peter Quince’s announcement to the mechanicals: “And here’s a marvelous convenient place for our rehearsal. This green plot shall be our stage, this hawthorn brake our tiring-house” (3.1.2–4). Puck’s epilogue similarly confuses performance and dream. The blurring between stage and forest, forest and city, sleeping and waking, which generates much of the play’s power—all this Milton reproduces in L’Allegro. Such fluidity makes Shakespeare a much more pervasive presence in the poem than Jonson can be. The couplet about Shakespeare both closes this section of the poem and initiates L’Allegro’s climactic account of the pleasures of music. The speaker moves directly from Shakespeare’s woodnotes wild to a longing for “soft Lydian airs” (136), as if the singing of this “sweetest” poet were a catalyst, launching him into ecstatic evocation of the ultimate joys offered by mirth: Or sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy’s child, Warble his native wood-notes wild. And ever against eating cares, Lap me in soft Lydian airs, Married to immortal verse Such as the meeting soul may pierce In notes, with many a winding bout Of linkèd sweetness long drawn out, With wanton heed, and giddy cunning, The melting voice through mazes running; Untwisting all the chains that tie The hidden soul of harmony. (133–44)

The woodnotes of “sweetest Shakespeare” lead to the soul-piercing “notes … Of linkèd sweetness,” and to the speaker’s final, if conditional, declaration: “These delights, if thou canst give, / Mirth with thee, I mean to live” (150–51). This elaborate passage is the poem’s climax, and describes the experience that the speaker most desires, the experience that epitomizes and transcends all the

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others: so far he has moved restlessly from one pleasure to another—and then, and then—but he wishes music “ever” to protect him from cares. The dissolving of boundaries between city and countryside, wood and stage, day and night reaches an apotheosis in that “melting voice through mazes running.” Once again, the language obscures agency: does the voice melt the hearers, or is the voice itself in the process of melting? This confusion between transitive and intransitive, action and adjective, reproduces the increasingly intimate relationship between the verse that the passage describes and the verse of the describing passage. For Milton does insist on a verbal component to the music. The Lydian airs are “married to immortal verse.” Nevertheless, the speaker’s description focuses on the traditionally subservient partner in this marriage: the soft airs. The song’s power to pierce the soul appears to depend upon its notes, upon the sweetness of the “melting voice,” upon a winding melody.39 It is difficult to imagine phrases like “wanton heed,” “melting voice,” and “giddy cunning” being applied to the movements of immortal verse. In the preface to Paradise Lost, Milton will describe verse in a somewhat similar way, as he complains that rhyme lacks “true musical delight; which consists only in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another” (13–16; emphasis mine). But in L’Allegro, sweetness is drawn out, not sense, and the delight of the speaker seems little related to fitness or aptness. In this sensuous passage, Milton plays with the metaphor of “marriage” between notes and verse, a marriage accompanying and enabling the implicit union between “meeting soul” and “piercing notes.” The metaphor invokes the conventional idea of a perfect and indissoluble partnership, where music and words fit together and enhance one another. But as the passage winds on, it begins to hint at something more like a sexual encounter, in which the distinct identities of the verse and notes are lost in one another. Inevitably, the partner who stands to lose most in such ecstatic abandonment is the “masculine” logos. If the words “melt” too much into the music, they vanish altogether. In fact, the only immortal verse left unsubmerged by the imagined music is the describing verse of L’Allegro itself, and even these words are not immune to musical submersion. A second, shadow-marriage is taking place, not between imagined verse and imagined airs, but between described music and describing poetry. (Such a union is made all the more possible by the way that the poem has earlier confused the perspective and actions of the speaker with those of the lark.) The apparent purpose of the music— to drown “eating cares”—is introduced at the opening of the passage, and then almost forgotten as the description of the music twists on and on—appropriately, just as the cares themselves are to be forgotten. The poem here comes closest to doing what it describes than it does, or than it can, at any other point. This musical See Stephen M. Buhler, “‘Soft Lydian Airs’ Meet ‘Anthems Clear’: Intelligibility in Milton, Handel, and Mark Morris,” John Donne Journal 25 (2006): “L’Allegro’s musical preferences dictate the kinds of music practices that were criticized for obscuring the literal meanings of the words” (335). 39

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evocation thus serves as a most fitting climax: the point of closest contact with the presented ideal.40 The poem finds whatever consummation it can find in this musical description. The marriage almost takes place, as Orpheus and Eurydice are almost permanently united through its power; but of course, neither union proves quite possible. “Lydian airs” presumably represent a more sophisticated music than “woodnotes wild.” Still, a further association between the two is suggested by the combination of birdsong and Lydian music in Spenser’s Castle Joyeous in The Faerie Queene: And all the while sweet Musicke did diuide Her loose notes with Lydian harmony; And all the while sweet birdes thereto applied Their daintie layes and dulcet melody, Ay caroling of loue and jollity, That wonder was to hear their trim consort. (III.i.40)

As the word “loose” suggests, this music is dangerous and lascivious, just like the environment in which it plays. But in L’Allegro, the moral valence of the music proves difficult to determine. The term “Lydian” (linked with words like “wanton,” “giddy,” and “cunning”) arouses inevitable uncertainty, but these uncertainties are eased by the seeming innocence of the Mirthful Man’s delight, the ecstatic tone of the description, and the favorable comparison of the music with the song of Orpheus. No authoritative voice steps in to offer a judgment—though a number of critics have insisted that such a judgment must be implicit.41 Spenser’s term “loose” would apply quite well in another sense, though—not only to the music that the speaker describes, but also to the poem as a whole. The voice melts and untwists as it runs through mazes; and as we have seen, the poem itself shifts fluidly from one idea to another. Louis Martz links this structural characteristic with the presiding role of Shakespeare: “Such syntactical looseness is hardly a defect in the poem, any more than the striking variations in meter: these are all part of … the poem of ‘fancies child,’ warbling ‘his native Wood-notes wilde.’”42 But are we meant to embrace such “looseness” or to keep it at an ironic distance? The phrase “fancy’s child” is itself a Shakespearean echo—with an unexpected but suggestive context. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, “this child of Fancy” haunts the court of Navarre in the form of the absurd Don Armado, whose conversation will provide the king and his three friends with some “quick recreation” from their philosophical studies (1.1.168, 159). The allusion to Love’s Labour’s Lost has been noted by commentator after commentator, but to my knowledge none has examined the possible significance of the original context of this phrase. 40 For the poem itself as a “Lydian air,” see Christopher Grose, “The Lydian Airs of L’Allegro and Il Penseroso,” JEGP 83 (1984): 186–7. 41 For the critical debate on this subject, see Martz, Poet of Exile, 49. 42 Martz, Poet of Exile, 46.

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The lords call Armado “a man of fire-new words” (1.1.176), “[t]hat hath a mint of phrases in his brain. / One who the music of his own vain tongue / Doth ravish like enchanting harmony” (1.1.162–5). The King anticipates extravagant tales from Armado, and remarks, “I protest I love to hear him lie, / And I will use him for my minstrelsy” (1.1.173–4). We later discover that Armado is very fond of old ballads. “Warble, child,” he commands his page; “make passionate my sense of hearing … Sweet air!” (3.1.1–3). But of course, he is most fond of the music of his own fire-new words, the ravishing and enchanting harmony of his own vain tongue. When the King declares that he will use Armado for his “minstrelsy,” he means entertainment generally, but the word suggests a specifically musical kind of entertainment, and it is this connotation that Milton seems to seize upon in his association of Shakespeare and Armado in L’Allegro. Armado’s language is so very fantastical and elaborate that it often fails as a vehicle of expression. When Armado enters into an exchange with the equally magniloquent Holofernes, his page urges listeners, “Peace, the peal begins” (5.1.40). The more famous account of this conversation is that Armado and Holofernes have been “at a great feast of languages and stolen the scraps” (5.1.34–5); this insane conversation, patched together out of an astounding linguistic abundance, is also a kind of jangling babble, the ringing of bells. Onstage, Mote silences Costard so that both may appreciate the exchange as a peal. The audience is tacitly invited to do the same. Milton’s allusion to Love’s Labour’s Lost thus suggests a connection between Shakespeare’s rich, and sometimes fantastic, extravagant language, and musical warbling. The parallel between Shakespeare and Don Armado most likely has been ignored because the bragging Spaniard seems out of place in the pastoral world of L’Allegro. The association also implies a Miltonic aggression that jars with the genuinely complimentary, if somewhat condescending, picture of Shakespeare as a joyful song-bird. Yet Love’s Labour’s Lost does seem to stand somewhere behind Milton’s enigmatic companion poems. Shakespeare’s four noble protagonists begin the play resolved to devote themselves to study and contemplation, but soon fall in love and devote themselves instead to “revels, dances, masques, and merry hours” (4.3.353). At the end of the play, the wooers must take up an “austere, insociable life” for a year (5.2.781), and the drama concludes not with a marriage, but with two songs praising spring and winter, the cuckoo and the owl. In themselves, these songs bear little resemblance to L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, but they present a very similar balance, a refusal to conclude or to choose between seasons. Both songs take the same verse form, and were probably sung to the same tune.43 Birdsounds—“Cuckoo, cuckoo!” and “Tu-whit, tu-whoo!”—occupy the same place in both. These songs were drifting somewhere in Milton’s mind when he composed his praises of Mirth and Melancholy, as the “daisies pied” that appear in the first line of the Spring song reappear in L’Allegro (75). Suggestively, Shakespeare’s two songs are presented to the on-stage and off-stage audiences by Don Armado. 43 Ross Duffin, Shakespeare’s Songbook (New York: Norton, 2004), 447. See Chapter 2, 65n33.

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L’Allegro’s evocation of a warbling Shakespeare points towards another Shakespearean locus that is equally rich in implication. The first song of As You Like It describes and enacts an aspiration towards woodnotes wild: “Under the greenwood tree / Who loves to lie with me, / And turn his merry note / Unto the sweet bird’s throat …” (2.5.1–4). When Amiens finishes the first verse, the “melancholy Jacques” impatiently (but at the same time, dismissively) urges him to continue: “Come, warble, come” (2.5.30–31). Milton’s recollection of Amiens’s song becomes problematic when he incorporates Jacques’s voice into his description of that “sweet bird,” Shakespeare. To what extent do Milton’s lines erase the contemptuous tone of Jacques’s command, dissolving the melancholy observer’s distance from the woodnotes? And to what extent does a trace of the original ironic tone remain? The situation becomes further complicated when we realize that this is yet another one of those Shakespearean moments where two different (and completely opposing) sets of words are applied to the same tune. Jacques himself gives the company “a verse to this note that I made yesterday,” mocking the lords’ flight to the supposed golden world of the forest: “If it do come to pass / That any man turn ass ….”44 Jacques’s melancholy is of a very different order from the melancholy of Il Penseroso: cynical, corrosive. Yet much in the scenario suggests Milton’s companion poems: the two songs to the same note, one from the merry man and one from the melancholic; the two opposing worldviews that prove to be interdependent.45 Commentators have tended to downplay Shakespeare’s presence in Il Penseroso—particularly those who argue for a moral progression from Mirth to Melancholy.46 Music is also of somewhat lesser importance in the second poem. The passage corresponding to the “Lydian air” passage in L’Allegro is briefer, and leads into an account of religious contemplation rather than immediately concluding the poem. Il Penseroso gestures towards the future attainment of “something like prophetic strain” (174); Milton tentatively works through description of music to reach a conception of a poetic project that seeks to do more than conjure strangely ambiguous Lydian airs. The auditory leads to the visual: There let the pealing organ blow, To the full-voiced choir below, In service high, and anthems clear, As may with sweetness, through mine ear, Dissolve me into ecstasies And bring all Heav’n before mine eyes. (161–6; emphasis mine)

See Chapter 2, 65–6. For a treatment of the “constant flux in which one poem melts into the other,” see

44 45

Eric C. Brown, “‘The Melting Voice Through Mazes Running’: The Dissolution of Borders in L’Allegro and Il Penseroso,” Milton Studies 40 (2002): 1. 46 For an exception, see Stevens, Imagination, 43.

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Interestingly, although this church music seems polyphonic, the speaker does indicate the importance of the content: the music is a “service,” praising God, and the anthems are “clear”—suggesting both pleasing tone quality and verbal intelligibility.47 The organ music directs the listener towards heaven, and is not an end in itself; similarly, the description of the music yields after only a few lines to the statement of the true goal. Yet no glimpse of heaven is given to the reader, only an evocation of the pealing organ and the full-voiced choir. Throughout this poem, sounds reach beyond themselves, inducing mysterious dreams. “More is meant than meets the ear” (120); but what is meant remains elusive, and the speaker’s love of music and sounds remains comparable to the attitude of the Mirthful Man.48 In Il Penseroso, the youthful poet dreaming by a stream returns, only here he is not Shakespeare but the Melancholy Man himself. He hears the music of nature: the bee “that at her flow’ry work doth sing, / And the waters murmuring, / With such consort as they keep …” (143–5). These noises entice sleep and “some strange mysterious dream,” and the speaker wakes to “sweet music breath[ing] …. Above, about, or underneath, / Sent by some spirit to mortals good, / Or th’ unseen Genius of the wood” (147, 151–4). The description suggests an experience straight out of The Tempest, with all the dangers and frustrations purged away.49 In the light of L’Allegro’s treatment of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it does not seem overly fanciful to connect Shakespeare with the “Genius of the wood.” Some anxiety accompanies this experience of natural and supernatural music, for the speaker shifts subject abruptly: “But let my due feet never fail, / To walk the studious cloister’s pale” (115–16). Nevertheless, the music in the wood does not seem opposed to the dissolving sweetness of the church anthems. In spite of the comparative brevity of the culminating account of music in Il Penseroso, Stephen Buhler feels that in both poems, “music threatens to overwhelm language to such an extent that it no longer functions as such: the Word, as well as the speaker, faces dissolution.”50 He refers here to the music represented in the poems, not to the poems themselves. According to his reading, L’Allegro and Il Penseroso offer an implicit critique of their speakers’ attitudes towards music; but his observation about music overwhelming language is true on yet another level, making such critique difficult. After all, if Milton intended to demonstrate the dangers of any and all music that privileges sound over words, the two poems For a different view, see Buhler, “Intelligibility,” 336. The speaker seems to refer to allegory in the phrase “more is meant than meets the

47 48

ear”; he is reading Spenserian romances. Suggestively, this kind of poetry is represented as offering some quality or meaning that cannot be apprehended by the ear alone, a meaning that reaches beyond sound in a way that Shakespeare’s woodnotes do not. 49 Stevens suggests that this passage “invokes the creative fancy of The Tempest” (Imagination, 43). See Ferdinand’s response to Ariel’s music: “Where should this music be? I’ th’ air or th’ earth? …. This is no mortal business … I hear it now above me” (1.2.391–411). See also the more ominous passage in Antony and Cleopatra where the soldiers try to trace the origin of the mysterious music: “Hark!” “Music i’th’air.” “Under the earth” (4.3.11). 50 Buhler, “Intelligibility,” 337.

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communicate this message in a remarkably ineffective way, to judge by the history of response. The poems themselves face the dissolution that Buhler describes, becoming undependable carriers of meaning or message. They are, in this sense, tenuous sounds. As we have seen in previous chapters, Shakespeare frequently confounds lyricism and irony in passages where music is described and absorbed. In the companion poems—particularly L’Allegro—Milton alludes ironically to Shakespeare himself: the merry warbler, the player of Lydian airs, the figure whose absurd musical lies provided amusement for aristocratic patrons. But at the same time, he works to outdo Shakespeare at his own game, with paradoxically forgiving results. His mockery of the dramatist almost vanishes, as he allows the lyricism to overwhelm the irony to a greater extent than Shakespeare himself ever permits. In these poems, particularly L’Allegro, Milton also experiments with dissolving the irony that seems so inherent an aspect of the fallen world. (Only in a fallen world, after all, would birdsong or Lydian airs be problematic in the first place.) The high stakes of the experiment are much clearer, however, in the Nativity Ode, where Milton struggles to recall the golden age through the descriptive echoing of heavenly song. “Unexpressive Notes”: Recalling the Age of Gold At the beginning of the Ode, Milton famously urges his “Heavenly muse” to “join thy voice unto the angel choir” (27). Noam Reisner argues that the poem’s description of heavenly music implicitly indicates the defeat of this project: “Crucially, in describing what the angels’ song sounds like the poet effectively positions himself outside the angel choir to which he had hoped to be joined in the proem.”51 But in fact, over the course of the poem, Milton suggests that describing heavenly song may be a way of joining it. Much later, in Paradise Regained, Mary tells her son of this same song. The contrast with the earlier poem is striking. At thy nativity a glorious choir Of angels in the fields of Bethlehem sung To shepherds watching at their folds by night, And told them the Messiah now was born Where they might see him, and to thee they came. (242–6)

These angels are most informative and give precise directions. But in the Nativity Ode, the angels do not tell the shepherds anything—or at least, the singer of the hymn has no interest in telling us about the relation of the good news. The shepherds are abandoned altogether as the singer sweeps into an ecstatic description of the angelic song, and we never hear anything about them again. 51 Noam Reisner, “The Prophet’s Conundrum: Poetic Soaring in Milton’s ‘Nativity Ode’ and ‘The Passion,’” Philosophical Quarterly 83.4 (2004): 378.

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Nor does the hymn tell us anything about the content of the angels’ song. The emphasis is on the music, not the message: When such music sweet Their hearts and ears did greet, As never was by mortal finger strook, Divinely-warbled voice Answering the stringèd noise, As all their souls in blissful rapture took: The air such pleasure loath to lose, With thousand echoes still prolongs each Heav’nly close. (93–100)

The music initially seems to originate in the fingers of the angels. Only in the next line do we hear of the vocal component of the song; but once again, the poet focuses on the nature of the sound, not on the content. The angels warble divinely, “answering” the instrumental noise as if in its own language. The remaining lines maintain this sonic focus as the air resounds sensuously with the musical phrases. Surely, any words would lose their force and clarity when dispersed into a “thousand echoes”! The interest lies in the magnitude and richness of the sound. As Diane McColley points out, Milton describes an “instrumental music that reformers thought had no place in earthly Sabbaths.”52 Either Milton disagrees, or he finds such instrumental richness appropriate only in Heaven. Nevertheless, he himself, on earth, is trying to join the divine song by describing its sound.53 The stakes are high: Nature “that heard such sound” almost believes “her reign had here its last fulfilling; / She knew such harmony alone / Could hold all Heav’n and earth in happier union” (101, 106–8). The symphony of the angels is not, however, the first intimation of music in the poem. In an earlier stanza of the hymn, The winds with wonder whist, Smoothly the waters kissed, Whispering new joys to the mild Oceán, Who now hath quite forgot to rave, While birds of calm sit brooding on the charmèd wave. (64–8)

In the unusual rhyme of “kissed” and “whist,” Milton’s Hymn unmistakably rings the same sonic chime as Ariel’s first song in The Tempest, sung as the spirit leads Ferdinand towards Miranda. Milton translates the lines “curtsied when you have McColley, 185. Carey argues that Milton, throughout his career, praises vocal song—especially

52 53

in the form of poetry—and distrusts purely instrumental music, but his attempt to fit the Nativity Ode into this pattern is not fully convincing. According to Carey, “[t]he difficulty of reconciling the Nativity Ode’s sphere-music with what had seemed to be Milton’s preference elsewhere is only apparent. For the spheres are called on to ‘ring out’ in the ode only as an accompaniment to choral song” (225). Milton certainly portrays the spheres as accompaniment to the angel choir, but he spends a number of lines describing instrumental sounds; and he describes even the vocal aspect of the music in sonic terms.

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and kissed— / The wild waves whist” (1.2.380–81) into an evocation of universal peace. The original context is appropriate. Ariel’s music creeps by Ferdinand upon the waters, “allaying both their fury and [his] passion / With its sweet air” (1.2.395–7). Mistaking Miranda for “the goddess / On whom these airs attend,” he addresses her “O you wonder” (1.2.425–30). In Milton’s Hymn, the airs themselves are quiet—“whist”—with “wonder” at the presence on earth of a true God. The aerial spirit and the human actors vanish, melting into a Nature newly reconciled to heaven. Strikingly, the poet himself sings the airy spirit’s song, echoing Ariel’s rhyme. He suggests, though, that the winds may be “whispering” the same nativity song to the “charmèd wave,” just as in the play Ariel’s music quiets the fury of the waters. (Milton frequently uses the word “charm” to refer to music or its effects.54) The winds tell the waves of new joys, the subject of the poem itself. Milton thus suggests that his hymn is a more divine—and considerably expanded—version of Ariel’s song. In the later stanza describing heavenly song, Milton finally refigures a haunting music that is “no mortal business” (T.1.2.410) as the air prolonging heavenly music with a thousand echoes. For Milton, Ariel’s music is mortal business, but it may resonate with angelic song. Indeed, it provides a space in which such song can echo. The “air”—both atmosphere and song—that holds onto the music, prolonging it, is the medium that allows divine music to be heard on earth. Nevertheless, the medium of the air and the medium of the verse prove equally problematic. When the angels finally manifest themselves visibly, the hymnist can no longer express the wonder of their song, and instead of describing, he refers us to the account of creation in the Book of Job “when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy” (38.7).55 The helmèd Cherubim And sworded Seraphim, Are seen in glittering ranks with wings displayed, Harping in loud and solemn choir, With unexpressive notes to Heav’n’s new-born heir. Such music (as ’tis said) Before was never made, But when of old the sons of morning sung …. (112–19) 54 For a useful account of Milton’s use of the word “charm,” see Sigmund Spaeth, Milton’s Knowledge of Music (Princeton, NJ: University Library, 1913): “He is the only writer cited in the N.E.D. to give it the general meaning of ‘song’ or ‘melody’…. But he is unable to rid himself of the connotation of a subduing influence …. The natural development of this double significance is towards the idea of a song which has some mysterious power, a song which casts a spell over the hearer” (89). This association appears in The Tempest itself: the masque performed by Prospero’s spirits is “harmonious charmingly” (4.1.119). 55 See Randall Ingram, “The Writing Poet: The Descent from Song in The Poems of Mr. John Milton, Both English and Latin (1645),” Milton Studies 34 (1997): “The introduction of visual imagery actually forces the end of the poem …. Once the seeing starts, the singing stops” (186).

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The baroque extravagance of divinely warbled voice and stringèd noise yields to the stern simplicity of the “loud and solemn choir.” Nevertheless, it is the quality of the notes that the hymnist is intent upon conveying—not the content of the words. These notes prove impossible to capture, and the poet must appeal to Biblical authority to convey some impression of them: “as ’tis said.” The hymnist ultimately cannot join the angel choir: he reaches after their notes but must finally, as the singing angels appear in their full splendor, fall back from telling to referring. The furthest limit of musical description, announcing its own failure, is the word “unexpressive.” According to J.B. Leishman, “unexpressive” occurs only three times in the English language: once here, once in Lycidas—in reference to heaven’s “unexpressive nuptial song” (176)—and once in As You Like It.56 Milton touches one last Shakespearean note in abandoning the verbal evocation of music. Catherine Belsey finds Milton’s use of this word in the Nativity Ode revealing: It is the song of the angels, beyond all mortal music, divine, which effects the new-found harmony between heaven and earth, and which has the power to bring back the age of gold. This song is ‘unexpressive’ (line 116): inexpressible, perhaps, as all modern editors seem to insist, but also not expressive, not, that is, a sign of a presence which is elsewhere. The concord of the angels is not a substitute, an expression, existing in a relation of exteriority to the compact between the two realms. On the contrary, it is the bond itself: ‘such harmony alone / Could hold all heaven and earth in happier union.’ (lines 107–8)57

Nevertheless, the connotations of this sense of “unexpressive” would not have struck Milton’s contemporaries as entirely positive. The idea of angelic music as nonreferential—not a sign but the thing itself—is undeniably attractive; but this is also the very problem with music—a large part of the reason reformers objected to instrumental music in church services. Unexpressiveness is the central concern: music does not express; it does not mean; listeners will be drowned in sensuous delight without engaging their understanding; etc. Of course, this 56 See J.B. Leishman, Milton’s Minor Poems (London: Hutchinson, 1969), 62–3. This is a large claim, though Leishman is supported by the OED. It might be best to say that the word was uncommon, and leave it at that. In As You Like It, Orlando vows to “carve on every tree / The fair, the chaste, the unexpressive she” (3.2.9–10). In declaring Rosalind “unexpressive,” Orlando undercuts his poetic project before he begins, but he goes on trying to describe Rosalind anyway, with comically awful results. Orlando’s use of the word “unexpressive” suggests an ironic double meaning: he still conceives of Rosalind as the ideal Petrarchan lady: perfect, distant, indescribable—and the silent object of his own adoration. Leishman refers to the line in which the word occurs in Lycidas as “an interesting combination of Shakespearean diction and Biblical allusion” (343). The same might be said of the passage in the Nativity Ode, although the allusion is to the Book of Job rather than Revelation. 57 Catherine Belsey, John Milton: Language, Gender, Power (New York: Blackwell, 1988), 4. Similarly, Ingram sees Milton struggling with the medium of print, which lacks the “presence” and fullness of song (84–6).

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problem presumably would not arise with heavenly music—but it certainly would arise for an earthly poet hoping to “join the angel choir.” If the songs of angels are “unexpressive,” that’s all very well; but if Milton’s poetry is “unexpressive,” the poet is faced with a very serious problem. Milton cannot attain the kind of “presence” that Belsey describes, not only because of its impossibility, but also because of its dangers. In such unexpressive music, no more is “meant than meets the ear.” In Lycidas, Milton makes no attempt to give the reader any sense of the unexpressive song: it remains undescribed, unexpressed. “As ’tis said” thus suggests doubt in the poet’s project; but the phrase also represents a return to safety, to the firmer ground of Biblical allusion. Nevertheless, the poet returns to his evocative—and performative?—project after the very stanza in which he points towards Job and the song of the sons of morning: Such music (as ’tis said) Before was never made, But when of old the sons of morning sung, While the Creator great His constellations set, And the well-balanced world on hinges hung, And cast the dark foundations deep, And bid the welt’ring waves their oozy channel keep. Ring out ye crystal spheres, Once bless our human ears, (If ye have power to touch our senses so) And let your silver chime Move in melodious time; And let the base of heav’n’s deep organ blow, And with your ninefold harmony Make up full consort to th’ angelic symphony. (120–32)

The evocation of balance from the stars to the oozy deep seems to enable the poet to work his way back into the musically evocative mode. He may have given up describing the sounds of the angelic symphony, but he can describe the music of the spheres that accompanies them. (Necessarily so, since this concept is classical rather than Biblical—he cannot easily refer to an authoritative text.) The hymnist simultaneously invokes and describes the ringing and the chiming, the melodious rhythms and the polyphonic harmonies of the music of the spheres, even while expressing doubt that this music can be heard. The description of this possibly hypothetical sphere music echoes The Tempest again, as the poet moves from the “oozy channel” of the waves to the “base of heav’n’s deep organ” (128–30).58 Stevens notes the echo (Imagination, 25–6n21). In his examination of Milton’s early prolusion, “On the Music of the Spheres,” M.K. Mander notes a considerable ambiguity over whether the idea of audible sphere music ought to be taken literally. See “Milton and the Music of the Spheres,” Milton Quarterly 24 (1990): 63–71. This uncertainty reappears 58

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This time, the original context seems quite inappropriate. Alonso raves in madness after hearing the accusations of Ariel in the guise of a harpy: The winds did sing it to me, and the thunder, That deep and dreadful organ-pipe, pronounced The name of Prosper. It did base my trespass. Therefore my son in’th’ ooze is bedded and I’ll seek him deeper than e’er plummet sounded, And with him there lie mudded. (3.3.96–102)

As we have seen, a number of critics have interpreted this moment as the king’s proleptic return to harmony.59 The passage does describe the cacophony of a storm in terms of music, and it does so in remarkably lyrical diction, rich with alliteration, assonance, and strange internal rhymes. But the speech does not necessarily signify any return of harmony, however proleptic, to the speaker. The harmony that Alonso hears and reproduces in his words is strange and seductive in its message of despair. This music of accusation, particularly the bass part of the organ-like thunder, Milton translates to the skies. He turns it into the music of the spheres, singing with the harmony of a “well-balanced world” that includes even the oozy depths. The accusing voice vanishes in the process. In accounts of cosmic harmony, the bass is traditionally assigned to the earth—the “ground base” that played under the other instruments. This bass, of course, could also be considered “base,” worthless, fallen. Milton evades such connotations here by translating the deep, oozy foundations of the earth into “heaven’s deep organ.” In the end, this heavenly music is a product of the poet’s own imagining. Such imaginings themselves, however, may be transformative: “For if such holy song / Enwrap our fancy long, / Time will run back and fetch the age of gold” (133–5; emphasis mine). In these lines, does the hymnist declare that the sounds of heavenly music may redeem fallen humanity? Or does he indicate that the mere fantasizing of such song can produce the same results? He finally must admit that the return of the golden age is impossible. The holy song, as it turns out, cannot “enwrap our fancy long”—or perhaps, we must not let it enwrap our fancy long. Such “fancies” are not only wishful thinking—they may be dangerous. The depth of the speaker’s unease comes into focus when we turn to the passage from the Book of Job to which he earlier alluded:

in the Nativity Ode, as the speaker expresses doubt over whether the spheres really could touch our ears in any audible manner, even if our senses were not blocked by sin. Yet in spite of this doubt, he goes on triumphantly to describe the sounds that these spheres would make if they could. 59 Winifred Maynard, Elizabethan Lyric Poetry and Its Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 218; Stevens, Imagination, 54. See Chapter 4, 157–9.

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Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said, Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge? … Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth … Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it? Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who hath laid the corner stone thereof; When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy? (38.1–7)

This is an excellent question. The poet, like Job, was not present. God’s account of measuring the deep may have reminded Milton of Shakespeare’s Alonso, who plans to dive “deeper than e’er plummet sounded,” a phrase that returns later in the play as Prospero renounces his art and promises to drown his book “deeper than did ever plummet sound”—after one last charm to summon “some heavenly music” (5.1.56, 52). Prospero is an artist who has overreached, “rifted Jove’s stout oak / With his own bolt,” and caused the dead to rise from their graves in an imitation of the Last Judgment (5.1.45–50). In the context of God’s speech from the whirlwind, Alonso’s terrible music of accusation regains some of its original tone, and continues to bass trespasses as the poet admits that before any true reconciliation between heaven and earth can occur, “the wakeful trump of doom must thunder through the deep” (156). In The Tempest, the trump of doom and the harmonizing of earth with heaven—the winds that sing the message of justice—occur simultaneously. But for Milton, such simultaneity is impossible. The Last Judgment must come before earth and heaven can be reconciled. His insistence on the temporal separation of song filling heaven and earth from the blast of the divine trumpet threatens the disintegration of the hymn, which has struggled so hard to make all time present in the instant. In the end, the contradictory aspects of the Tempest music cannot be elided or trusted. The singing and the thunder are too closely intertwined. Singing winds and a harmonious cosmos cannot mingle sonically with the thunder of justice—but nor can they displace it. After all this work to translate the Tempest music to the skies, Milton engages in a ruthless, if slightly regretful, rejection of Shakespeare along with all the pagan deities … or even, possibly, Shakespeare as all the pagan deities. These deities turn out to be “unexpressive” in a purely negative way: “The descent of the divine logos into the world renders the pagan oracles ‘dumb,’ stripping their voices of any coherent expression.”60 But even before the Incarnation strikes them dumb, these oracles are capable of little more than a “hideous hum” that “runs through the arched roof in words deceiving” (174–5). This barely articulate, “running” sound recalls both the music of L’Allegro and the humming noises that fill The Tempest.61 In these closing stanzas, the sense of fullness—of all time present at once— gives way to a sense of haunting, of a lingering past that will not remain in the past. The pagan deities flee, but they leave traces of their strange and inarticulate voices behind: Reisner, 380. Gonzalo perceives Ariel’s singing as “a humming, / And that a strange one too”

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(2.1.313–14). According to Caliban, “The isle is full of noises, / Sounds and sweet airs … / Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments / Will hum about mine ears” (3.2.130–33).

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The reassertion of teleology is resisted by echoes as “prolonged” as those of the angelic song.62 After the long account of the flight of the old powers and “damnèd crew,” Milton compares their exodus at the birth of the Son to the flight of ghosts and fairies from the approach of day. In the process, he transforms Shakespearean natural spirits into phantoms.63 So when the sun in bed, Curtained with cloudy red, Pillows his chin upon an orient wave, The flocking shadows pale, Troop to th’ infernal jail, Each fettered ghost slips to his several grave, And the yellow-skirted fays, Fly after the Night-steeds, leaving their moon-loved maze. (229–36)

Shakespeare’s Midsummer fairies similarly inhabit a labyrinthine world bathed in moonlight, where they dance “the quaint mazes in the wanton green” (2.1.99); and at the approach of day, they “run / By the triple Hecate’s team / From the presence of the sun, / Following darkness like a dream” (5.2.13–16). Indeed, Milton’s stanza engages in a very complex way with Shakespeare’s play as it encapsulates and resolves the debate between Oberon and Puck over the nature of the fairies and their ability to endure sunlight. Puck seeks to avoid dawn, “[a]t whose approach ghosts, wand’ring here and there, / Troop home to churchyards; damnèd spirits all” (3.2.382–3). But Oberon—in the passage that resurfaces in L’Allegro— protests that the fairies “are spirits of another sort,” allowed to behold “the eastern gate, all fiery red, / Opening on Neptune with fair blessèd beams” (389–94). Milton enters the debate and comes down heavily on Puck’s side. In the world of the Nativity Ode, the fairies are not “spirits of another sort.” “Damnèd spirits all” is more the order of day. Still, this decision does not come without a sense of loss—and the loss may encompass more than the yellow-skirted fays.64 After this 62 See Joseph Loewenstein, Responsive Readings: Versions of Echo in Pastoral, Epic, and the Jonsonian Masque (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 20. 63 For the indeterminate status of the faeries in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and their similarity to ghosts, see Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 162–3. 64 For the sense of loss in the banishment of the pagan deities, see William Oram, “Nature, Poetry, and Milton’s Genii,” in Milton and the Art of Sacred Song, ed. J. Max Patrick and Roger Sundell (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), 51.

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passage, the poem is effectively over. The song has become “tedious” (239). And ultimately, the poet cannot “prolong each Heavenly close” through descriptions of sound. Such lingering echoes become a haunting rather than a presence. The final stanzas of the Nativity Ode enact the process that Marcellus describes in the first scene of Hamlet, when he speaks of that hallowed “season wherein our savior’s birth is celebrated.” At that time, “no spirit can walk abroad, / The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike, / No fairy takes, nor witch hath power of charm” (1.1.140, 142–4). Milton’s hymn operates on the same assumption that Marcellus articulates: every Christmas season brings with it the special aura of the first. The holiness of this season, by its very nature, cannot be attenuated, cannot operate as a faint, haunting trace of the original event. That is why Milton can offer his poem directly to the infant Christ, as if the Incarnation were occurring “now.” At this time of year, Marcellus informs us, “the bird of dawning singeth all night long” (141). A moment of transition from darkness to dawn expands to encompass a whole night, and the normal rules of time cease to apply. As we have seen, however, the cockcrow actually operates ominously in Hamlet: it is a “fearful summons,” a reminder of the guilt of Peter, a trumpeting harbinger of the Last Judgment.65 The play as a whole turns the transcendent into the ghostly, the songs of angels into ominous blasts and bangs and disjointed madness. The holiness of abrogated temporality—the bird of dawning singing all night long—can turn too easily into an invasion of the present by the past, into a time “out of joint.” Milton’s Nativity Ode implicitly acknowledges this possibility, which surfaces explicitly in Paradise Lost. Near the conclusion of the first book of his epic, Milton once again summons Shakespeare’s fairy world, again associating its charms with music. Here, Shakespearean music is translated, unequivocally, to Hell. The shrinking fallen angels resemble faery elves, Whose midnight revels, by a forest side Or fountain some belated peasant sees, Or dreams he sees, while overhead the moon Sits arbitress, and nearer to the earth Wheels her pale course: they on their mirth and dance Intent, with jocund music charm his ear; At once with joy and fear his heart rebounds. (1.781–8)

Milton increases the shadow hanging over these laughing and dancing elves by echoing Othello’s lines: “It is the very error of the moon, / She comes more nearer earth than she was wont, / And makes men mad” (5.2.118–20). Milton’s moon seems drawn into this “error”—for Milton, a heavily loaded word—by the mirth and music of the faeries. She “wheels” to join the dance. Again, this faerie music proves difficult to contain. The peasant’s heart “rebounds” with joy See Chapter 3, 119–23.

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and fear—a word that could also indicate echo, reverberation. The accelerated beating of his heart implicitly resonates with the charming music that he hears. Guillory finds Milton in this passage “acknowledging a deep sense of loss” at his renunciation of the Shakespearean imagination.66 In his reading, the simile fails to reduce the fallen angels and fails to demonize the Shakespearean world: “the stature of the devils is in some way aesthetically compensated even while they are being physically reduced. Neither do the fairies of Shakespeare’s play suffer from their sudden displacement into an infernal context … what we see is an allusion that establishes its own autonomous poetic law.”67 The establishment of such apparent autonomy, however, is the inevitable consequence of what Milton is describing. The charming elfin song, by its very nature, removes itself from its context, or alters that context altogether. Milton reveals the dangers of such music by representing it in this way, but such a revelation is inevitably subject to the charming forgetfulness it demonstrates. The passage also alludes to the moment in Virgil’s Aeneid where Aeneas encounters the shade of Dido in the underworld. The combination of allusions is suggestive. Dido embodies distraction and delay, the disruption of forward movement to a destined destination. Aeneas lingers with her in Carthage, almost ready to abandon his prophesied journey to Rome. But again, wisest Fate says no. In Paradise Lost, the veiled shadow of Dido and the charming music of Shakespearean elves occupy the same place. These fairies are also ghosts: they offer an illusion of present joy, an echo of the unfallen world that is now nothing but a revenant, a phantom.68 Music to the Eyes In another early poem, At a Solemn Musick, Milton explores an alternative way of representing heavenly song. The poem also gives a clearer glimpse of the project suggested in Il Penseroso of bringing heaven before the eyes. Here Milton eschews the descriptions of music that delight him elsewhere; here there are no chimes or deep organ-pipes or divinely warbled voice answering stringed noise, none of the lush, elaborate sonic descriptions that we get in L’Allegro or Il Penseroso.69 Milton invokes the “Blest pair of Sirens … Sphere-borne harmonious sisters, Voice and Guillory, 143. Guillory, 140. 68 Loewenstein argues that Milton thinks of echoing as “graceless”: “Milton’s 66 67

associations with echo have an odd morbidity, as if he recognized only the lamenting strain in the traditions of echo” (142). I think Loewenstein downplays Milton’s attraction to the idea of the echo—especially in the context of earthly music as an echo of the divine—but agree with the position that Milton ultimately associates earthly echoing with death. 69 The respective dates of these poems are impossible to definitively determine. Milton places At a Solemn Musick before L’Allegro and Il Penseroso in his 1645 Poems. The difference between the presentations of music in the Nativity Ode and the companion

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Verse” and asks them to wed their “divine sounds,” but he makes no move to describe such a marriage as he does in L’Allegro.70 Instead, he moves immediately to the exalted effects that Voice and Verse can bring about. And to our high-raised fantasy present, That undisturbèd song of pure concent, Ay sung before the sapphire-coloured throne To him that sits thereon With saintly shout, and solemn jubilee, Where the bright Seraphim in burning row Their loud uplifted angel trumpets blow, And the Cherubic host in thousand choirs Touch their immortal harps of golden wires, With those just spirits that wear victorious palms, Hymns devout and holy psalms Singing everlastingly. (5–17)

The scene is anchored in Biblical allusion: God’s throne is like a sapphire stone in Ezekiel 1.26; and the singing souls bearing victorious palms appear in Revelation, where they stand “before the throne, and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands” (7.9). Moreover, unlike the descriptions of music in the Nativity Ode, L’Allegro, and Il Penseroso, this passage lends itself easily to pictorial representation: the angels standing before the sapphire-colored throne, the bright Seraphim blowing uplifted trumpets, the Cherubim touching golden harps, the spirits crowned with palms. A painting could easily suggest that these angels are singing devout hymns and holy psalms (after all, what else would they be singing?), and a harmonious relation between figures, as well as the subject matter itself, could convey the “undisturbèd song of pure concent” that the heavenly hosts are singing. The Solemn Musick of the title still appeals to our “fantasy,” but it brings all heaven before our eyes, as the music of Il Penseroso promises to do. The poem provides a strangely emblematic representation of song: The imagining of music gives way to the imaging of music-making. As the poem continues, the pictorial aspect vanishes, but the “music” discussed becomes increasingly metaphorical. The poet prays That we on earth with undiscording voice May rightly answer that melodious noise; As once we did, till disproportioned sin Jarred against Nature’s chime, and with harsh din Broke the fair music that all creatures made To their great Lord, whose love their motion swayed In perfect diapason, whilst they stood …. (17–23) poems and the presentation in Solemn Musick is not a matter of progression: even at this early stage, Milton is playing with two different possibilities. 70 As Carey points out, Milton is careful to include only “verse” and “voice” in this marriage—there is no instrumental, wordless component (226).

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The rhymes of “voice” and “noise” once again answer one another, as in the Nativity Ode. Here, however, Milton is not describing the rich sounds of Heavenly music, but trying to work out how “we on earth” can join such music. How exactly are we to respond to the heavenly song? In song or in “harmonious” behavior? When sin jars against “Nature’s chime,” does it do so literally or figuratively?71 Milton uses the musical term “diapason”—the concord of the octave—in a context that discourages us from taking the word literally. Although, as John Hollander beautifully suggests, “it is almost as if all created life were being figured forth as moving, singing spheres themselves,”72 the diapason dispels all possibility of literal interpretation. The eight spheres may well create an octave with their sounds, but the term cannot be applied so to “all creatures” save in a figurative sense. In the Nativity Ode, in contrast, Milton portrays Nature’s chime as audibly musical at this special moment in history; and he also represents the jar of sin in sonic terms, meant to be taken literally: the “hideous hum” of the deceiving Delphic oracle, the “timbrelled anthems dark” sung to Osiris, and the ringing of cymbals that calls Moloch. In “Solemn Music,” the heavenly music seems audible and literal, but the response of the earth is only metaphorically “harmonious.” Men cannot rejoin the heavenly tune by singing, but by behaving obediently and rightly. Moreover, the poet avoids dwelling on the sonic richness or complexity of the heavenly music. Nothing in the divine song is time-dependent: it may be depicted visually as one eternal moment. The music is saintly and solemn and everlasting and perfectly harmonious: that is all we know on earth and all we need to know. Milton’s account of Shakespeare as a warbling songbird can seem dismissive, exposing a complete misunderstanding—deliberate or no—of the playwright’s artfulness, philosophical questioning, and political complexity. But Milton actually understands something very important about Shakespeare: he perceives Milton’s revisions to the poem suggest a movement from the literal to the metaphoric. In MS. 1, man would answer the melodious noise of heaven “by leaving out those harsh chromatick jarres / Of sin that all our musick marres / & in our lives & in our song.” In MS. 2, “chromatick” becomes “ill sounding,” and “clamorous” precedes “sin.” In the printed version, the speaker prays that we may answer the song “as once we did, till disproportioned sin / Jarred against Nature’s chime.” (See Variorum Commentary, 2.1: 189–90.) Even if our response to heaven is intended to be only metaphorically musical, the word “chromatic” gives a very concrete sense of exactly what the jarring of sin would sound like. Milton deliberately avoids this effect by replacing “chromatick” with the more general (and morally suggestive) “disproportioned.” Poole suggests that the revisions reflect a shift in Milton’s thought about the Fall, and his increasing sense that true harmony is a thing of the past, not to be regained without God’s intervention (127–8). For other critical responses to the revisions, see Mortimer H. Frank, “Milton’s Knowledge of Music: Some Speculations,” in Milton and the Art of Sacred Song, ed. J. Max Patrick and Roger H. Sundell (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), 94; John Hollander, The Untuning of the Sky: Ideas of Music in English Poetry, 1500–1700 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), 325–6; Marjara, 11; and McColley, 93. 72 Hollander, Untuning of the Sky, 329. 71

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the way that his memories of music come to life and refuse to remain in the past, and the way that Shakespeare figures these musical memories and imaginings as resonating in the words used to recall them. Milton finds haunted paradises in the two Shakespeare plays that most haunt his own work: A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest. He comes to view them as plays haunted by paradise, by musical echoes of harmony lingering in a fallen world. In Milton’s A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, these musical “shadows of Elysium” (Cymbeline, 5.5.191) take on a darker and more troubling form. The Masque still clings, nonetheless, to the idea of the musical echo as potentially regenerative.

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Chapter 6

“Serpit Agens”: The Song of the Blest Siren There are no references to music in Milton’s first published poem, his rather ambivalent epitaph for Shakespeare. Yet this absence is itself highly suggestive. In the epitaph, Milton declares that Shakespeare needs no tomb or memorial: the poet’s “easy numbers” transform his readers into “marble with too much conceiving,” and so he lies “sepulchered” in this monument of wonder-struck admirers (10, 14, 15). John Guillory underlines the ominous turn to this conceit: “[T]he condition of paralysis is everywhere morally suspect in Milton’s poetry. This Shakespeare possesses the paralyzing magic of the enchanter, Comus.”1 Paul Stevens opposes this line of argument, showing that Milton’s language in the epitaph echoes the “rhetoric of wonder” in Shakespeare’s late romances, particularly The Winter’s Tale, in which the marvelous “statue” of Hermione strikes viewers into wondering stillness.2 Milton’s description of Shakespeare’s lines as “Delphic” (12) also points towards the astonishing fulfillment of the oracle’s prophecy in The Winter’s Tale. “Far from subverting his own act of homage,” Stevens argues, “Milton is … actually affirming it in a peculiarly Shakespearean way.”3 Yet Milton’s evocation of The Winter’s Tale raises new problems. In Shakespeare’s play, Hermione’s supposed statue certainly begins to have a petrifying effect on those around it—“From thy admiring daughter took the spirits,” says Leontes, “Standing like stone with thee” (5.3.41–2). But this stillness is only the beginning of a much greater marvel. When the viewers “awake [their] faith” (29), and strains of music play, the statue comes to life. Milton’s poem not only elides this miracle, but reverses it. Whereas in Shakespeare’s play the sound of music appears to transform a marble statue into a living woman, in Milton’s poem the flowing of Shakespeare’s easy numbers transforms living readers into marble. As Guillory suggests, the discomfort hinted at in the epitaph returns in the Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, where the Lady is frozen into a statue. 1 John Guillory, Poetic Authority (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 19. For similar readings, see Leslie Brisman, Milton’s Poetry of Choice and Its Romantic Heirs (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973), 52; Jonathan Goldberg, Voice Terminal Echo: Postmodernism and English Renaissance Texts (New York: Methuen, 1986), 127–38; and Ronald R. MacDonald, The Burial-Places of Memory: Epic Underworlds in Vergil, Dante, and Milton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), 157. 2 Paul Stevens, “Subversion and Wonder in Milton’s Epitaph ‘On Shakespeare,’” English Literary Renaissance 19 (1989): 383, 382. 3 Stevens, “Subversion and Wonder,” 386.

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I would suggest that The Winter’s Tale presents to Milton a potentially disturbing resolution in its near-complete regeneration of a golden world. In Shakespeare’s play, the Delphic prophecy is fulfilled when “that which is lost”— Perdita—is found. She reappears at the center of a pastoral paradise, where she is explicitly associated with Flora and implicitly with Proserpina (4.4.2, 116). Her return ultimately leads to the awakening of the frozen statue. This moment of redemptive wonder, however, may be nothing but theatrical sleight-of-hand on Paulina’s part. Hermione can only return from the dead because she was never dead to begin with. Milton’s reference to Shakespeare’s “Delphic lines” seems less complimentary in the context of the Nativity Ode, where the voice of the Delphic oracle is described as a “hideous hum” that “runs through the archèd roof in words deceiving” (174–5). As we have seen, Milton’s poetry—and the early poetry in particular— struggles with a tension between apocalyptic movement forward and a mode of musical recollection that brings the past alive in the present—a possibility that he must ultimately dismiss as a kind of dangerous nostalgia.4 In its harmonious and terrible music, The Tempest presents a disconcerting conflation of an equivocal golden world with the final judgment; similarly, The Winter’s Tale confuses the order of regained paradise and wakeful trump of doom. Hermione’s “awakening” resonates with apocalyptic intimations: “Music; awake her; strike! / ’Tis time … Come, / I’ll fill your grave up” (5.3.99–101). Music and the solemn striking of a clock become one; the resurrection of the flesh and the restoration of the lost occur without sudden trauma or judgment, but the ultimate restoration is not perfect, and not all the dead are restored. Ultimately, the music casts an aura of supernatural power and solemnity over a theatrical trick. The music that wakes the statue returns in A Masque, however, and it turns out to be a decidedly Shakespearean music—though with certain alterations. Furthermore, the masque raises but dismisses apocalyptic possibilities: the renewal of nature seems possible—or at least partially possible—without the “wakeful trump of doom.” A Masque represents the nearest possible compromise between the two impulses I describe above: the return to a singing golden age of harmony and the necessary wait for Judgment. Oddly enough, this compromise is mediated by the unlikely figure of the Siren. For Milton, Sirens are closely associated with the problem of the relationship of heavenly and earthly music—and with the kind of prelapsarian song that, if For accounts of the dangers of nostalgia in Milton, see Nigel Alderman, “‘Rememb’ring Mercy’: Monuments, Memory, and Remembering in Paradise Lost,” Milton Quarterly 42, no. 3 (2008): 183–96; and MacDonald. The latter describes demonic defiance and nostalgia as “intimately linked,” both “arising from the compulsion to repeat, to repossess in all its fullness a lost state of bliss” (172). Regina M. Schwartz, Remembering and Repeating: Biblical Creation in “Paradise Lost” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) contrasts ritual remembrance with compulsive repetition in Paradise Lost. For the importance of the proper use of memory, see Patricia M. Howison, “Memory and Will: Selective Amnesia in Paradise Lost,” University of Toronto Quarterly 56 (1987): 523–39. 4

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heard on earth, might erase the Fall itself. He shows particular interest in Plato’s account of the music of the spheres as the singing of divine Sirens, apostrophizing Voice and Verse as “Blest pair of Sirens … Sphere-borne harmonious sisters” in At a Solemn Musick. In the pastoral entertainment Arcades, the Genius of the wood listens to the “celestial Sirens’ harmony / That sit upon the nine enfolded spheres” (63–4). In its juxtaposition of these celestial Sirens with the Genius, Arcades raises a number of the same questions posed by the Nativity Ode. What is the relationship between earthly music and heavenly music? Is nature as fallen as Man, or does it participate on some level in the music of the spheres that must remain inaudible to him?5 The combination of nature deities with golden age music audible in a fallen world seems to automatically summon Shakespearean echoes. The Genius of Arcades spends his days “curl[ing] the grove / With ringlets quaint, and wanton windings wove” (46–7) by means of “puissant words, and murmurs made to bless” (60). This description recalls the wanton windings of L’Allegro’s Lydian airs, as well as the “quaint mazes in the wanton green” (2.1.99) where the fairies love to dance in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. At night, however, the Genius turns his attention to the spheres, and listens to “the heavenly tune, which none can hear / Of human mould with gross unpurgèd ear” (72–3). His wording directly recalls Lorenzo’s speech in The Merchant of Venice: “Such harmony is in immortal souls, / But whilst this muddy vesture of decay / Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it” (5.1.53–64). In Arcades, the winding ringlets of the grove and the songs of the “enfolded spheres” (64) seem interrelated; even though no humans can hear the heavenly music, it seems that Nature can. The benevolent representative of Nature is himself a musical being: the words of the Genius may be “puissant,” but the still more mysterious “murmurs made to bless” hint at a grace that operates obscurely, just below the threshold of understanding. The Genius not only can hear the heavenly music denied to humans, he can describe it, giving his human hearers access to the divine through a verbal echo, however faint. Lorenzo’s description similarly works to evoke and enact the music he describes—the music that, according to his claims, must be inaudible. The song of celestial Sirens murmurs faintly through the fanciful language of the Shakespearean Genius. For Milton, it is the Fall that has closed human ears to the music of the spheres; and thus to attain an echo of celestial music is to undo—for a moment—the effects of the Fall. Plato’s celestial Sirens—variously understood over the centuries as muses, angels, or simply poetic allegories—were generally agreed to be of a different 5 See William Poole, Milton and the Idea of the Fall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) for an account of contemporary debates over the implications and extent of the Fall and the ambiguity over the fallen state of Nature itself (49, 137). See also William Oram, “Nature, Poetry, and Milton’s Genii,” in Milton and the Art of Sacred Song, ed. J. Max Patrick and Roger Sundell (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979): “[Milton] uses this figure [of the Genius] repeatedly because it raises a problem that is at once poetic and theological. To what degree is the created world itself holy?” (47).

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order from Homer’s destructive temptresses.6 The music of the spheres, whether produced by Sirens, ensouled planets, or mechanical whirling motions, is a music of mathematical perfection, sweet in its inherent and impersonal proportions, not in its seductive allurement. Milton’s cosmic Sirens, however, lull with persuasive force. In Plato, the Sirens and the Fates sing together; but in Milton’s version, the Sirens sing to the listening Fates:7 Such sweet compulsion doth in music lie, To lull the daughters of Necessity And keep unsteady Nature to her law, And the low world in measured motion draw After the heavenly tune, which none can hear Of human mould with gross unpurgèd ear. (68–73)

The heavenly Sirens’ tune produces paradoxical effects. Their music lulls the Fates, but keeps Nature in measured order. The tune seduces and soothes while imposing law. This sphere music is clearly benevolent and holy; but it retains a measure of ambiguity, and in this ambiguity performs not entirely explicable wonders. What it means to “lull the daughters of Necessity” remains unclear; and at this moment the poet seems content to leave it so.8 The Fates in Arcades may serve as a classical stand-in for the Old Law, ameliorated and transcended by Christianity. On the other hand, the suspension of Necessity seems potentially dangerous. After all, in the Nativity Ode, “wisest Fate” will not allow the music of the spheres to “enwrap our fancy long” and bring back the age of gold. The words of the Genius, in contrast, direct our fancy towards this inaudible sound. There is, moreover, an uncomfortable similarity between these heavenly Sirens who lull necessity and the earthly Sirens described by Milton’s wicked enchanter Comus, who “in pleasing slumber lulled the sense” (261). Milton’s Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle has long been recognized as awash with allusions to the two Shakespeare plays that most interweave nature, imagination, and music: The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.9 6 See Leofranc Holford-Strevens, “Sirens in Antiquity and the Middle Ages,” in Music of the Sirens, ed. Linda Phyllis Austern and Inna Naroditskaya (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 22–3. 7 John Carey, “Milton’s Harmonious Sisters,” in The Well-Enchanting Skill: Music, Poetry, and Drama in the Culture of the Renaissance, ed. John Caldwell, Edward Olleson, and Susan Wollenberg (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 236. 8 Carey notes this paradox, but does not pursue it, simply remarking, “On a subject over which Milton was so deeply torn, we should not expect consistency” (236). 9 For accounts of the presence of Shakespeare in the masque, see Jacques Blondel, “From The Tempest to Comus,” Revue de Litterature Comparée 49 (1975): 204–16; Guillory; Maggie Kilgour, “Comus’s Wood of Allusion,” University of Toronto Quarterly 61 (1992): 316–33; Maurice Hunt, “Managing Spenser, Managing Shakespeare in Comus,” Neophilogus 88 (2004): 315–33; John M. Major, “Comus and The Tempest,” Shakespeare Quarterly 10 (1959): 177–83; Ethel Seaton, “Comus and Shakespeare,” Essays and Studies 31

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What has not been noticed is the particular density of the Shakespearean allusions permeating the descriptions of music in the masque. These descriptions are repeatedly positioned as verbal echoes of musical sounds. The Masque presents a special case for discussion of the relationship between music and words. Milton collaborated with Henry Lawes, who wrote the music for the songs and played the role of the Attendant Spirit—or “Daemon,” as the character is called in the Bridgewater manuscript. Nevertheless, Milton also included the Masque in the 1645 publication of his poems. His title page refers to the original context of the piece, and to the music written by Lawes, but this music is not reproduced in the text, nor would it have been widely known. Milton also took some care in revising the Masque for an “audience” that would never experience it as a performance, but only as a poem, printed alongside other poems without any theatrical origin. It would be easy to see Milton’s publication of the masque as an act of freeing his work from the unruly elements of performance—including music.10 In the printed text, there can be no competition for attention: the only “music” is provided by the poet’s words. Alternatively, Milton’s printed reference to the masque’s theatrical origins might suggest his sense of a sad division, a “fall” from orality into print.11 Neither possibility, however, accounts for the masque’s treatment of the boundary between words and music as dangerously and excitingly blurry—even when the words in question appear printed on a page, and the music is purely imaginary. The action of A Masque revolves around two pivotal moments of music. Near the beginning of the narrative, the lost Lady invokes Echo in a song, requesting the nymph’s help in finding her brothers. Near the end, the Attendant Spirit invokes the water nymph Sabrina in a song, requesting her help in freeing the Lady from the charms of Comus. The symmetry of these two episodes is only apparent. While Echo neither answers nor appears, Sabrina responds to the Spirit’s song

(1945): 68–80; Paul Stevens, Imagination and the Presence of Shakespeare in “Paradise Lost” (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985); Alwin Thaler, Shakespeare and Our World (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1966); and Michael Wilding, “Milton’s ‘A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634’: Theatre and Politics on the Border,” Milton Quarterly 21 (1987): 35–51. See also F.R. Leavis on the “Shakespearian life” of Comus’s account of nature in Revaluation: Tradition & Development in English Poetry (London: Chatto & Windus, 1969), 48. Guillory, Kilgour, Hunt, and Wilding associate the voice of Comus with the voice of Shakespeare, based on the enchanter’s conception of the fecundity of nature and on his deceptive use of imagination, fancy. Stevens offers a dissenting voice. 10 See for example Joseph Loewenstein, Responsive Readings: Versions of Echo in Pastoral, Epic, and the Jonsonian Masque (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984): “Milton reserves his most sage and serious doctrines for print, where he trims away the antic diffusions of performance” (140). 11 See Randall Ingram, “The Writing Poet: The Descent from Song in The Poems of Mr. John Milton, Both English and Latin (1645),” Milton Studies 34 (1997): 184.

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with a song of her own as she rises from the water.12 Nevertheless, the Lady’s song is not entirely without echoic response. These “echoes” simply take the rather unusual form of rapt descriptions of the music. While Sabrina hears the Spirit’s song and answers him, the speakers who describe the Lady’s song do not answer her directly—indeed, she never hears their words. They do not initiate dialogue or communicate a message. Instead, these speakers work to re-create and to prolong the original musical moment—for themselves and for the audience. The trope of the responding echo has a long and rich poetic history. It is closely associated with the pastoral, and so makes a very apt appearance in a masque dominated by good and evil figures disguised as shepherds. The echoing landscape also figures prominently in Spenser’s lyric poetry. In contrast, Echo makes relatively few explicit appearances in Shakespeare. Nevertheless, Shakespeare allusions cluster around the Lady’s song, especially in two long speeches where characters recall their response to her music. Milton here associates Shakespeare with the musical echo of memory. The Lady’s song to Echo has no real impact on the plot of the masque. Comus is aware of the Lady’s presence and plans to entrap her before he ever hears her sing; and though her song fills him with unfamiliar presentiments of holiness, it has little effect on his behavior. The Attendant Spirit, in the guise of a shepherd, tells the Lady’s brothers that her song alerted him to her danger, but the audience knows better: the Spirit has been aware of the situation from the outset. In a masque, of course, a song or dance does not need to justify its existence by advancing the plot. Nevertheless, the song cannot be dismissed as a pleasant interlude, nor does it serve a static symbolic function. The drama cannot let go of it. When Comus hears the Lady sing, he launches into an ecstatic 20-line response, extolling the music and its effects. A good 300 lines later, the disguised Spirit describes the song yet again—in remarkably similar terms. The Lady’s song, we are led to understand, is remarkable in its beauty and in the impression of goodness it bestows upon its listeners. At the same time, it retards forward movement, threatening to bend the linear path of the story into a circle as it instills a desire for repetition. This problem within the story is reproduced in a problem of representation. The song, paradoxically, cannot fully express itself, neither in performance nor on the page. While the characters describe the song in order to relive it and prolong its presence, the poet must describe the song in order to make it present, because what is described is too wondrous and transcendent to be realized in performance or reading of the song itself. The enchantment of “Sweet Echo” can exist for the audience only through an illusion in which the verbal echo stands in for and acts as the music. This illusion replicates the confusion the song itself creates between sound and echo, origin and response. The poet’s method of capturing the song is See Angus Fletcher, The Transcendental Masque (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1972): “the Lady’s song to Echo is redeemed by its benign double, the echo song to Sabrina” (101); Loewenstein describes Sabrina’s ascent as “the supreme example of postponed response” (146). 12

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as wonderful and dangerous as the song itself—and for similar reasons. For the hearers in the masque, the song brings “sober certainty of waking bliss” (263) and undoes the power of death. Such certainty and such undoing, in the mortal world, can only be illusory. Similarly, the attempt to make this blissful song present in language can succeed only as a very dangerous illusion. Nevertheless, both the song and the mode of representation project a wonder and holiness that remain highly desirable, promising the possibility of union between heaven and earth. In his opening exhortation to “a light fantastic round” (144), Comus depicts a world where he and his creatures are part of a perfect harmony between heaven and sublunary nature. The dancers “imitate the starry choir / Who in their nightly watchful spheres, / Lead in swift round the months and years” (112–14). Implicitly, this dance is also imitated by the natural world: The sounds, and seas with all their finny drove, Now to the moon in wavering morris move, And on the tawny sands and shelves, Trip the pert fairies and the dapper elves …. (115–18)

Sounds as noises and sounds as bodies of water move together, proving almost indistinguishable from one another. This sublunary natural world is the world of A Midsummer Night’s Dream: watery, moonlit, magical.13 The implicit problem, of course, is that this world moves “to the moon,” but its dance does not necessarily follow higher movements. How does this “wavering morris” match with the “swift round” of the starry choir? Perhaps as well—or as poorly—as the shifting meter of Comus’s speech matches the Spirit’s neat tetrameter couplets at the conclusion of the masque.14 Comus’s claim to imitate the spheres is soon debunked: we learn that he prefers “Stygian darkness … thickest gloom” (132) to starlight. The moral position of the dapper elves and their companions—and the natural world that they inhabit—remains ambiguous. Comus’s claim that the wavering sublunary world moves in harmony with the starry choir may ring hollow; but the virtuous Lady’s song opens the possibility of just such a harmony when she prays that Echo be “translated to the skies” (242). The song attempts a similar “translation” of the eerie noises of the wood, which fill the Lady’s mind with distinctly Shakespearean fancies. Lost in the forest, the Lady both confronts and creates a Shakespearean soundscape. When the music of Comus’s revels unaccountably ceases, her imagination conjures up the supernatural whisperings that fill Shakespeare’s enchanted worlds, and she articulates these fantasies in words that recall Shakespeare’s own. Comus’s speech half-echoes Titania’s “nine-men’s-morris” in “the drowned field” (2.1.96–8). 14 In Poet of Exile: A Study of Milton’s Poetry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), Louis Martz notes that these “entering words of Comus are written mainly in the same, swift tetrameter that is elsewhere set to or associated with music,” but that the enchanter’s shifts to pentameter are “in keeping with the loss of rigor and scrupulosity here urged” (24). 13

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When the elusive half-rhyme of “fantasies” and “memory” jolts the Lady’s sober blank verse, Shakespearean echoes “throng” into the speech. These largely auditory “fantasies” belong to the worlds of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, where Ariel’s mysterious music entrances the shipwrecked Ferdinand on the yellow sands.15 There also may be a reminiscence of Hamlet faced by a “beckon[ing]” ghost and wondering, “What may this mean?” (1.4.39, 32).16 A number of readers have found an allusion to Romeo and Juliet in the Lady’s reference to “airy tongues,” especially in the context of her subsequent resolution to attract her brothers’ attention despite her inability to “hallo” (226), and her appeal to Echo in her “cave” (239).17 Juliet experiences similar difficulties: Bondage is hoarse, and may not speak aloud, Else would I tear the cave where Echo lies, And make her airy tongue more hoarse than mine With repetition of my Romeo’s name. Romeo! (2.1.205–8)

Juliet can only whisper hoarsely; but she longs to shout herself hoarse and make Echo hoarse in the process. Her stifled impulse expresses itself in poetry that comes to life only through intense frustration. Instead of simply screaming “Romeo!” for four lines, as she would like to do, Juliet must say what she would do if she could shout out her lover’s name. Juliet’s imagined, endlessly repeated cry is forced to resolve itself into a patterned sequence of soft words. The lyricism of these lines springs from this intense pressure, the suppressed desire to cry out. The frustration is implicitly sexual, and the lyricism of Milton’s chaste Lady must spring from a different source. She determines to evoke Echo through a song, but only after

15 Similarities to The Tempest are noted in A Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes, vol. 2, pt. 3, The Minor Poems, ed. A.S.P. Woodhouse and Douglas Bush (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), 888. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Puck’s mysterious voice draws Lysander and Demetrius into “dark uneven way[s]” (3.3.5), and he habitually “mislead[s] night-wanderers, laughing at their harm” (2.1.39). The Trinity manuscript shows that Milton originally wrote: “ayrie toungs that lure night wanderers,” a more direct allusion. Similarly, Comus’s fairies and elves originally danced on “yellow sands” instead of “tawny sands.” Examining Milton’s revisions of these and other passages, Maurice Hunt suggests that Milton frequently dampened Shakespearean echoes in revision (“Managing Spenser,” 316–18). 16 Horatio believes that the Prince “waxes desperate with imagination” (1.3.64)— even though the ghost has turned out to be “something more than fantasy” (1.1.52). 17 Seaton, “Comus and Shakespeare,” 68–80; Stevens, Imagination, 34.

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her spirits have been “new-enlivened” by the contemplation of Faith, Hope, and Chastity, a trio that she claims to “see … visibly” (228, 214). In singing, the Lady hopes to attract the attention of her brothers; but in positioning herself as the source of the echoes in the forest, she also attempts to assert a measure of control over her environment, making it reflect—or, literally, resound to—her “virtuous mind” (211). Over the course of the Lady’s song, the “courteous Echo” becomes less and less like Juliet’s Echo, and less and less like the disembodied voices that had earlier alarmed the Lady. Her song removes the threat of Juliet’s passionate impulse to poetry along with the threat of strange whisperings in the night, demonstrating that poetry may come from some source other than sexual frustration and sensual captivation. The Lady does not appeal to the echoes of the dark and tangled wood in which she finds herself, but instead addresses a resonant green world: Sweet Echo, sweetest nymph that liv’st unseen Within thy airy shell By slow Meander’s margent green; And in the violet-embroidered vale Where the love-lorn nightingale Nightly to thee her sad song mourneth well. Canst thou not tell me of a gentle pair That likest thy Narcissus are? (230–37)

The Lady delicately refers to Echo’s frustrated passion for Narcissus, but promises translation to the sky instead of new embodiment. Similarly, her song both contains and distances the sad, erotic song of Philomela. The nightingale nightly sings to Echo, and tonight the Lady does the same thing, but the two songs are not to be confused with one another. Though the Lady mentions Philomela, her own song is communicative rather than purely emotive. She is requesting specific information, not engaged in perpetual mourning. The stakes are raised at the song’s conclusion, when the Lady suggests that Echo may receive a reward for returning the brothers: “So mayst thou be translated to the skies, / And give resounding grace to all heav’n’s harmonies” (243–4). It may be useful to remember, at this point, the two contrasting Echo traditions: Echo as the bride of Pan, an allegorical symbol for the unseen music of the spheres; and Echo as the frustrated lover of Narcissus, whose broken responses deconstruct language. It is difficult to tell which Echo the Lady thinks she is addressing.18 She calls Echo the “daughter of the sphere,” suggesting a being produced by planetary motions: but if Echo is indeed “the daughter of the divine voice,”19 then See John Hollander, The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981): “The presence invoked by the lost girl is a remarkable composite of the figures of echo associated with Narcissus and with Pan” (17). 19 Henry Reynolds, Mythomystes (1632), quoted in Hollander, Figure of Echo, 16. Paul Stevens also cites this passage, and reads the Lady’s song as addressed to this Echo, 18

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why would she need to be translated to the skies? To further complicate matters, Echo was also “a favorite metaphor for the relationship of actual human music to the heavenly harmony.”20 If this Echo were translated to the sky, the metaphor— and the distance between human and heavenly harmony—would be undone. The Lady’s song is unavoidably self-referential, as her own singing becomes one with resonant space of the wood that she is trying to make holy through singing. Her song hints that it can translate itself to the sky.21 Its self-reflexivity is expressed and figured through internal echoes: a complicated web of alliteration, internal rhymes, and assonance, entwining braids of sound. (“Sweet … sweetest … unseen; nymph that liv’st … / Within …”; “love-lorn … mourneth well / Canst thou not tell ….”) In the Bridgewater performance, the Lady sang, “And hold a counterpoint to all heav’n’s harmonies.” Milton’s revision of “counterpoint” to “resounding grace” brings out the spiritual and theological implications of the Lady’s promise while de-emphasizing the musical conceit. As a form of polyphony, counterpoint may remain suspect, even when translated to the skies.22 Nevertheless, the revised version plays on the musical meaning of “grace” as “an embellishment consisting of additional notes … not essential to the harmony or melody” (OED, n. 3). Milton thus beautifully combines the musical and spiritual meanings, the literal and the symbolic. But how well, ultimately, do these two meanings of “grace” correspond?23 In one sense, perfectly: God is not obligated to extend grace; it is something extra, who in this context symbolizes the operations of prevenient grace (Imagination, 33). For an account of the eerie and unsettling effects of the echo as disembodied voice, see Gina Bloom, Voice in Motion (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 160–68. Bloom also describes different mythological traditions involving the Echo story (178–81). 20 Hollander, Untuning of the Sky (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), 320. 21 See Paul Stevens: “[The Lady] herself for a moment becomes Echo, the “Daughter of the Sphear” (Imagination, 34). Critical opinion remains somewhat divided on the morality of the Lady’s song. While the majority of commentators find in the song the holiness that Comus ascribes to it, others question the Lady’s choice of subject matter (and by extension, her mode of expression, since by addressing her song to Echo, she is on some level singing to herself). This latter position is taken by Loewenstein, 145. For a similar argument, see Hilda Hollis, “Without Charity: An Intertextual Study of Milton’s Comus,” Milton Studies 34 (1997): 159–78. Fletcher suggests that if the Lady were to hear a response, it would be only her own voice; but her song is ultimately efficacious in that she is answered by providence rather than Echo (200). Hollander notes the self-reflexive nature of the Lady’s song, but does not perceive it as a moral problem; rather, he reads the song as a “hymn in praise of music itself” (Untuning of the Sky, 320). 22 See Stephen Buhler, “Counterpoint and Controversy: Milton and the Critiques of Polyphonic Music,” Milton Studies 36 (1998): 26. 23 See Loewenstein: “The pun that binds musical to theological grace is … dangerously casuistical …. The wit of the song confirms the fullness of the Lady’s error, and the silence of Echo prophesies her punishment” (145). In contrast, Hollander argues that the revision to “grace” suggests that the powers of music and rhetoric, symbolized by Echo, “are manifestations not of natural skill merely but of something higher” (Untuning of the Sky, 323).

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in excess of what the Law demands, and in this way is perfectly embodied in those unnecessary musical flourishes. On the other hand, in sacred music such excessive notes, melismatic, drawing out syllables and sounds, can endanger the meaning, the words through which grace is transmitted. And surely an Echo of heaven’s music might transmit grace (in the theological sense)—but give grace to the heavenly harmonies? The literal and the symbolic meanings begin to drift apart. The purpose of the song further complicates the issue. The Lady’s invocation is a carefully worded request to Echo, a verbal plea. She even addresses Echo as “sweet queen of parley” (241), associating her with speech rather than simple sound.24 Yet in purely practical terms, there can be no point in asking Echo for news of the Lady’s lost brothers. Echo cannot tell anyone anything; she can only repeat the singer’s own words. It does not matter what the Lady says to Echo, it matters only that Echo carry the sound of her voice to her brothers. The song’s purpose is to generate and amplify sound, not to communicate—a purpose suggested by its imagery. In The Purple Island (1633), Phineas Fletcher describes the ears as the “double cave” of Auditus, and speaks of the “winding entrance, like Meanders erring wave.”25 The sound of the Lady’s song errs, like the waves of the river she evokes, and in its wandering, it loses meaning. The ear, after all, “is a deceitfull [organ], full of winding and uncertaine doores, and often carries false messages to the Sence … [W]ords passe (for the most part) by our eares like tunes in a double consort, which we may heare, not distinguish.”26 Milton and Lawes break a masque convention by not having Echo respond to the Lady.27 As if to emphasize the dangerous quality of her music, the Lady’s song stirs up an immediate echo only in the response of Comus.28 The magician echoes See Hollander, Untuning of the Sky, 322. Phineas Fletcher, The Purple Island (Cambridge, 1633), 56. He continues, “The

24 25

caves third part in twentie by-wayes bending, / Is call’d the Labyrinth, in hundred crooks ascending” (57). 26 Humphrey Sydenham, Five Sermons Preached upon Severall Occasions (London, 1637), E3r. 27 See Hollander, Figure of Echo, 57; and Buhler, “Counterpoint and Controversy,” 26. Loewenstein and Hollander note that Milton pointedly contrasts the Lady’s song with similar moments in various sources and analogues. For instance, in Peele’s Old Wive’s Tale, two brothers are led to their kidnapped sister by the helpful responses of Echo. Hollander argues that Milton replaces sonic repetition with a complex web of textual allusion (60). Loewenstein reads the silence of Echo as revealing both the unavailability of a transcendental Echo in a fallen world and the dangers of trust in self-sufficiency (145). Loewenstein’s chapter on Comus in Responsive Readings focuses on Echo’s silence, though he comes to different conclusions than I do, deemphasizing the aspects of the song that are good and holy, as well as the intensity of the desire for such song. 28 Martz suggests that Comus himself provides a counterpoint to the Lady’s song, as he “receives the song within himself and responds, adding another melody” (Poet of Exile, 24). Such a “melody” of course, can only be metaphoric; but Milton places considerable pressure on such metaphors.

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the Lady’s song by attempting to reproduce its effects in words. Ironically, if the Lady’s song shapes and transforms Echo, Comus’s own echoing retroactively transforms and shapes her song. Comus seems to apprehend the Lady’s performance as sound rather than sung words. Can any mortal mixture of earth’s mould Breathe such divine enchanting ravishment? Sure something holy lodges in that breast, And with these raptures moves the vocal air To testify his hidden residence; How sweetly did they float upon the wings Of silence, through the empty-vaulted night, At every fall smoothing the raven down Of darkness till it smiled. (244–52)

The magician’s account confuses temporality. The music is over: the sounds did float. Nevertheless, Comus refers to “these raptures” as if to something present and continuing. In moving the “vocal air,” the Lady’s voice itself sets “airy tongues” in motion. Comus’s spoken echo of her song promptly revives the erotic Romeo and Juliet scenario that the Lady had so carefully distanced.29 The enchanter’s sensuous description of the Lady’s music recalls Juliet’s speech on the eve of her wedding night: Come night, come Romeo; come, thou day in night, For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night Whiter than new snow on a raven’s back. (3.2.17–19)

Comus takes these phrases and draws them out, lingering over each image. His elaboration twists around and around Juliet’s words. The “wings of night” become the “wings / Of silence,” and the enchanter does not reach the anticipated word “night” until the very end of the line. Once he has reached “night,” Comus lingers lovingly over this idea, returning to it with “raven down” and “darkness.” The description floats slowly downward towards its destination, just like the notes described, “in linkèd sweetness long-drawn-out.” Inadvertently, Comus reminds his listeners of the double meaning of “fall.” Nevertheless, this ominous suggestion is muted, even negated by the way the speech refuses to distinguish between falling and floating. The Lady’s notes are simultaneously sustained by wings and falling—but falling without fear, suddenness, or violence. Comus’s descriptive speech, like the Lady’s song, possesses transformative powers. He tells the audience what they have heard, reshaping and even forming their experience. For readers of a text, who do not hear the music (and by publishing the masque with his poems, Milton clearly anticipated that it would reach many such readers), Comus’s response initially provides our only indication of what the See Seaton, 71.

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experience of the performed song might be. In retrospect, Comus’s description endows the Lady’s music with a power that in itself, either in performance to an audience or read upon the page, it could hardly possess. The Lady’s plea to Echo to restore her brothers is certainly lyrical, eloquent, and euphonious. It manifests the Lady’s powers of virtuous imagination in her desire to translate Echo to the skies. But the unprompted reader, or audience member, could hardly be depended upon to exclaim in response: “Such a sacred and home-felt delight, / Such sober certainty of waking bliss / I never heard till now!” (262–4). Nor, presumably, did Milton expect the addition of Lawes’s music to produce such a response; in his later sonnet to Lawes, he praises the composer for “span[ning] / Words with just note and accent” (Sonnet 13, 2–3), not for the ability to induce sober certainty of waking bliss (a tall order, even for the most inspired of composers).30 It is the poetry given to Comus that tells us what the song does, reflects back on the song a power generated partly by the enchanter’s admiring words. Here Milton places himself in a rather complicated position. For the Lady’s song to have its full effect upon us, we must believe that Comus’s description—or at least some of it—is absolutely accurate. Indeed, the fact that such a wicked and depraved creature can recognize and enjoy the virtuous beauty of the Lady’s song provides the best possible testimonial to its power. Nevertheless, in the process of amplifying the sacred wonder of the Lady’s song, Comus threatens to obliterate both the song’s human origin and its original purpose. Comus recognizes a holiness in the Lady’s voice, but his refusal to believe that she is mortal (it is unclear just how sincere he is about this), forces the Lady and her song back into the dark, uncertain background of shadows and strange voices. When he finally addresses the Lady, he speaks as if she and not he were the Genius of the forest, “in rural shrine … by blest song / Forbidding every bleak unkindly fog / To touch the prosperous growth of this tall wood” (267–70). In the process, he reshapes the forest around him into a beautiful but potentially fragile thing that must be carefully protected. (Comus enthusiastically adopts the project of transforming the dark forest of Error into a place of beauty.) He also addresses the Lady as Ferdinand addresses Miranda: “Hail foreign wonder … Unless the goddess …” (265–6), casting himself in the role of the virtuous prince and destined husband. This allusion, however, casts the Lady herself as more than his destined bride. Ferdinand has been led to Miranda by the mysterious music of Ariel: but by speaking like Ferdinand, Comus casts the Lady as Miranda and Ariel combined. She is the mysterious voice that her song attempted to banish—a benevolent voice, but part of the dangerous world of shadows and whispers that she had rejected. Comus’s speech in response to the song has already set the stage for this attempted transformation. As the enchanter lingers over his memory of the Peter le Huray, “The Fair Musick That All Creatures Made,” in The Age of Milton: Backgrounds to Seventeenth-Century Literature, ed. C.A. Patrides and Raymond B. Waddington (Manchester: Manchester UP; Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1980), describes the songs of the masque as “set competently, if somewhat stiffly, in [a] declamatory manner” by Lawes (262). 30

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immediate musical past, this recollection slides almost imperceptibly into an older recollection of a supposedly quite different music: I have oft heard My mother Circe with the Sirens three, Amidst the flow’ry-kirtled Naiades Culling their potent herbs, and baleful drugs, Who as they sung, would take the prisoned soul, And lap it in Elysium; Scylla wept, And chid her barking waves into attention, And fell Charybdis murmured soft applause: Yet they in pleasing slumber lulled the sense, And in sweet madness robbed it of itself, But such a sacred, and home-felt delight Such sober certainty of waking bliss I never heard till now. (252–9)

For eight lines, we are encouraged to think that Comus’s attraction to the Lady may spring from the resemblance of her song to the song of his mother. The Lady smoothes the darkness into smiling, just as Circe and the Sirens lull sea monsters. This interestingly incestuous possibility vanishes with the word “yet.” Nevertheless, the hypnotic rapture of Comus’s speech washes away at this all-important distinction between the Lady and the Sirens. As we have seen repeatedly in Shakespeare, musical memories cannot be relegated to the past. Something about the Lady’s song brings back the music of Comus’s childhood as clearly as if it were being experienced once again, even as it is displaced.31 Comus’s childhood reminiscences of songs that lap the listener in Elysium return us to the world of L’Allegro, where the speaker asks to be “lap[ped] … in soft Lydian airs” (136), and Orpheus drowsily heaves his head from a bed of Elysian flowers. Crucially, Milton also draws on Oberon’s account of the origins of the magic flower in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: OBERON. Thou rememb’rest Since once I sat upon a promontory, And heard a mermaid on a dolphin’s back Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath That the rude sea grew civil at her song And certain stars shot madly from their spheres To hear the sea-maid’s music? ROBIN. I remember. (2.1.148–54)

As Joseph Ortiz notes in “‘The Reforming of Reformation’: Theatrical, Ovidian, and Musical Figuration in Milton’s Mask,” Milton Studies 44 (2005), “even though Comus recognizes a ‘sacred delight’ in the Lady’s pastoral singing, such delight does not reform him. Instead, Comus’s memory of Circe and the Sirens contaminates that delight and refigures it as sensual” (92). 31

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At this rather remarkable moment, Cupid shot an arrow at a virgin queen, but hit a flower instead, providing the driving mechanism of the play’s plot. The passage thus touches the fulcrum of the delicate balance of order and disorder, chastity and passion in the play: opposites that will prove, if not interdependent, at least inextricably entangled with one another. Considering the centrality of these issues in the Masque, it is unsurprising that this Shakespearean moment would come to Milton’s mind, but the importance that he places on music in working out and representing such relationships is suggestive. Both passages recount memories of music, memories in which the songs of “sea-maids” both order and disrupt the surrounding world. The mermaid’s harmonious song creates miraculous sublunary concord while simultaneously disturbing the heavenly music of the ordered sky: the stars shoot “madly” from their spheres even as the waves grow calm. Milton’s Sirens similarly calm the seas while inducing “sweet madness” in higher realms— here the intellectual faculties, rather than the heavenly spheres. The song of Circe and the Sirens reproduces itself not through echoes per se, but through the response of the listeners: “and fell Charybdis murmured soft applause.” This monstrous murmuring of applause closely resembles what Comus is doing in this very passage, which serves as his own admiring response to the Lady’s music. The Attendant Spirit, in his pastoral disguise as the shepherd Thrysis, offers similar “applause,” re-creating the Echo song again as he tells his story to the Lady’s brothers. Startlingly, this speech does many of the same things that Comus’s does. The Spirit prepares the ground for the Echo song by yet another recollection of Juliet’s ecstatic anticipation of her wedding night—“Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds …. Spread thy close curtain, love-performing night” (3.2.1–5)—as he explains how silence “Gave respite to the drowsy frightened steeds / That draw the litter of close-curtained sleep” (552–4). These words, unlike Comus’s similar recollections, are not at all erotic; nevertheless, the echoes linger, persistent. Thyrsis’s account of the music itself works in a similar way—at least at first. At last a soft and solemn breathing sound Rose like a stream of rich distilled perfumes, And stole upon the air, that even Silence Was took ere she was ware, and wished she might Deny her nature, and be never more Still to be so displaced. I was all ear, And took in strains that might create a soul Under the ribs of Death. (555–62)

Thyrsis confirms that there is something divine and sensuous about the Lady’s song. Shakespearean echoes reverberate in and around this description as well. The Lady’s song turns out to resemble Ariel’s music after all, though it is slightly more elevated; the Spirit tells how it “stole upon the air,” while Ariel’s song “crept … upon the waters” (1.2.393–5). Echoing sounds similarly steal into the speech: air, ere, ware. The Spirit’s account too is haunted by Sirens, if less explicitly

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than Comus’s was. Silence’s wish to deny her nature recalls the description of Cleopatra’s appearance on her barge, attended by women “like the Nereides, / So many mermaids” (2.2.212–13): A strange invisible perfume hits the sense … … And Antony, Enthroned i’th’ marketplace, did sit alone, Whistling to the air, which but for vacancy Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too, And made a gap in nature. (218–24)

The breathing sound of the Lady’s music, rising like perfumes, also recalls Orsino’s evocation of “the sweet sound / That breathes upon a bank of violets / Stealing and giving odour” (TN1.1.5–6). The Lady’s song, however, rises, while Orsino speaks of the music’s “dying fall” (4). This is the main point in which Thyrsis’s account diverges from Comus’s: the former hears the music rising, while the false enchanter hears it falling through the night. The rising of the perfumes suggests the incense of a religious ritual: solemnity tempers sensuality. The tone shifts abruptly, however, in the middle of a line, seemingly precipitated by the word “Death.” … strains that might create a soul Under the ribs of Death. But O ere long Too well I did perceive it was the voice Of my most honoured Lady, your dear sister. Amazed I stood, harrowed with grief and fear, And O poor hapless nightingale thought I, How sweet thou sing’st, how near the deadly snare! (561–7; emphasis mine)

Death enters the picture even at the moment that the shepherd feels the music might undo it; and at this reminder of mortality, the song itself becomes ghostly, harrowing.32 Once he identifies the source of the song, Thyrsis responds to the voice as Horatio responds to the sight of old Hamlet’s ghost: “It harrows me with fear and wonder” (1.1.42). But the shepherd feels no wonder now, only fear and grief. The Spirit reminds us that the lady is not a goddess, but only a helpless victim. In his account, the Echo song no longer refers to the song of the nightingale—it is the song of the nightingale. The transformation provides a warning of the dangers involved when a reference to a thing becomes the thing itself. Too much presence and immediacy can be destructive. The erotic beauty of the Lady’s music places her in danger, and transforms her into the forlorn and ravished Philomela, even as her song attracts the potential ravisher. 32 Compare Buhler’s account of the implicit—and ultimately deceptive—association between music and immortality in L’Allegro (“‘Soft Lydian Airs’ Meet ‘Anthems Clear’: Intelligibility in Milton, Handel, and Mark Morris,” John Donne Journal 25 [2006]: 335–6).

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Samuel Johnson found this whole episode annoying. The Spirit’s “long narration,” he points out, is “of no use because it is false, and therefore unsuitable to a good Being.”33 Indeed, the story is an elaborate invention designed to explain the disguised Spirit’s opportune presence and knowledge to the brothers. The very length and intricacy of the narration, along with the knowledge that it is not strictly “true,” may suggest to audience or reader that “more is met than meets the ear.” At the end of the masque, the Spirit explicitly invites such allegorical interpretation, introducing his account of Adonis sleeping in a heavenly garden with the parenthetical hint, “List mortals, if your ears be true” (997). Nevertheless, in the earlier situation, allegory seems redundant. If we read Thyrsis’s narrative as a veiled account of a heavenly “shepherd” descending from a pastoral paradise to come to the aid of a virtuous soul, the speech adds little to our grasp of the situation—we have already understood as much from the Spirit’s far plainer opening address to the audience. On the other hand, Thyrsis’s tale may serve to redeem the pastoral mode from Comus, illuminating its goodness when rightly employed and understood (in other words, understood figuratively).34 The masque in general follows this pattern: in the Spirit’s opening speech, Heaven is unimaginably distant from “this sin-worn mould” (17), and cannot be described at all save as a place of purity and calm. By the end of the performance, however, Heaven has become a lush earthly paradise, filled with beds of flowers (976–98).35 At the conclusion of the masque, when the sky bursts into bloom, heaven “stoop[s]” (1024) to the audience, representing itself in a sensuous, tangible way so that it may be grasped by mortal comprehension. Similarly, perhaps, we first see the Spirit as a holy emissary from a remote realm; only later do we see him as a musical shepherd—in a context that emphasizes that this role is only an appearance, an accommodated version of the truth. Over the course of the masque, Milton similarly reworks his Shakespearean echoes, revealing how they too may be interpreted in a morally instructive way. Oberon’s narrative, after all, does not end with the stars shooting madly from their spheres. Cupid’s arrow is “Quench’d in the chaste beams of the watery moon; / And the imperial votress passed on, / In maiden meditation, fancy-free” (2.1.162–4). Several commentators call attention to the verbal echoes between this passage and the Elder Brother’s description of the immunity conferred by chastity.36 While the Elder Brother’s words turn out to be over-confident, the masque does uphold the immunity of the chaste mind to temptation, if not to physical violence. Not that Johnson liked the rest of the masque much better. See Variorum, 2.3: 786. For one version of this argument, see Martz, Poet of Exile, 11. 35 A number of critics have noticed the transformation. See Thomas M. Greene, 33 34

“Enchanting Ravishments: Magic and Counter-Magic in Comus,” in Opening the Borders: Inclusivity in Early Modern Studies, ed. Peter C. Herman (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999), 315–16; and Kilgour, 326. 36 See Thaler, 199; and Variorum Commentary, 2.3: 914. Compare “the imperial votress passed on” (2.1.163) and “she may pass on with unblenched majesty” (430). The Elder Brother also points out that Diana “set at nought / The frivolous bolt of Cupid” (444–5).

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In appropriating the imagery surrounding Shakespeare’s “fancy-free” vestal, Milton inhabits Oberon’s narration and reinterprets it. When the Spirit, in the persona of Thyrsis, tells a story in which the Lady’s song makes him aware of her need and sends him running “down the lawns … with headlong haste” (568), he reworks the ambivalent imagery surrounding the mermaid to create quite a different scenario. As the Spirit has already explained to the audience, [W]hen any favoured of high Jove Chances to pass through this advent’rous glade, Swift as the sparkle of a glancing star I shoot from Heav’n to give him safe convoy. (78–81)

Milton transforms the image of a Siren disturbing the cosmic order into the central scenario of the masque, where heaven “stoops” to the aid of a virtuous, singing Lady. The stars are no longer seduced by wonderful sounds: instead, the lady’s song works symbolically as the expression of her good soul—a goodness that she possesses, in fact, through the favor of “high Jove.” In the masque, heavenly beings act protectively and proactively instead of succumbing to seductive power. The shifting Shakespearean music, which calms the sea and disturbs the skies, thus becomes an emblem: a mermaid with stars shooting down around her. Milton then provides a new reading of this emblem. But in spite of this neat solution, the masque struggles with a larger problem: is music in fact susceptible to such symbolic interpretation? If we think of earthly music as an echo of divine music, does this imply an understanding of earthly music as a figuration of heavenly music? Joseph Ortiz makes this argument: “Just as the Bible represents divine truth elliptically or ‘darkly,’ music—as it is understood and experienced by a human audience—has a figural relation to cosmological and divine knowledge, not a literal one.”37 This comparison of figurative writing and earthly music makes sense on a number of levels—and it has a long and influential history.38 Nevertheless, there is a difference between the way verbal narratives point to hidden truths and the way earthly music points towards heavenly music. Music may be considered a transitory, material embodiment of the perfect mathematical Ortiz, 84. Ortiz questions the familiar interpretation of Comus as Milton’s “reformation” of the masque, arguing that Milton defends figuration, “defined as an indirect and imperfect way of presenting immutable concepts.” In the process, Milton responds to Puritan distrust of performance, classical poetry, and even polyphonic music, by emphasizing that “the Fall makes figured truth—and earthly music—necessary, rather than things to be rejected for their lack of plainness” (84, 102). 38 See James Anderson Winn, Unsuspected Eloquence: A History of the Relations Between Poetry and Music (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981) on Augustine’s treatment of music and figuration: “By consistently using the same set of metaphors to describe figurative language in the Bible and vocal music in the church, Augustine reveals a more fundamental similarity: sung music, like such sensual scriptural texts as the Song of Songs, has a potential for proper use if correctly understood, and a danger for earthly enjoyment if the senses are allowed to take over” (47). 37

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structure of the cosmos, but it is not a figurative or symbolic representation of such numbers: it embodies and expresses them, if only in a partial way. Furthermore, for Milton and many of his contemporaries, heavenly music was not simply a matter of abstract numbers. A soul newly arrived in Heaven will not really encounter Cupid and Psyche; in the Spirit’s closing speech, these mythological figures are meant to convey a truth about the relationship between heavenly and earthly love. On the other hand, it was widely assumed that the blessed soul would encounter some kind of music. We can test whether or not our ears be true by how we understand the allegory—but we cannot test our ears in the same way when confronted with a piece of music. The common analogy for allegory is the image of the veil: it is possible to peer through the veil of the story and get a hint of the truth that the story conceals and reveals. But if “something holy … moves the vocal air” with “raptures … to testify his hidden residence” (246–7), there is no way to separate the message from the vehicle: the vehicle is the message. Indeed, part of the attraction of music as a mode of expression is that it does not merely point towards something beyond itself. If we do not understand the Lady’s song and Thyrsis’s response in figural terms, the Spirit’s tale may work as a subtle critique of both singer and listener. The Lady’s music actually delays the rescue that she seeks. Thyrsis is so enchanted by the beauty of the song that he does not immediately recognize the source or realize that the singer needs help. Though the shepherd—“guided by [his] ear”—rushes to her aid as soon as he realizes her identity, he is moments too late (570). Henry Lawes played the role of the Spirit, and his positive response to the Lady’s song “would have registered as a charming joke in performance, since he composed it.”39 But beneath the joke lies another level of potentially dangerous reflexivity. The “shepherd” lingers, admiring an echo of his own voice, like the traditional depiction of the Siren staring into a mirror. The descriptions of the Echo song prolong the moment of arrested wonder and model a response of total absorption for audience or reader. Of course, the actual moment of the song has passed: only absorption in the recounting of the song is possible. The music serves no direct purpose; it has no explicit object. Both shepherd and enchanter perceive the song as something to be listened to. Still, ephemeral and tantalizing possibilities arise through listening: the song may bring the dead to life or bring present, certain bliss. The music is constantly tugging towards an abrogation of nature: it makes silence long to deny its own essence. Like the heavenly music in the Nativity Ode, the song makes future promises present—almost. Ultimately, the “sober certainty of waking bliss” that Comus claims to find in the Echo song must be as illusory as the Elysium in which the Siren songs enwrap listeners. The lady and her listeners are still on earth, after all. True “waking bliss” can be found only in heaven. On earth, such delight— inevitably and tragically—is inextricably tangled with danger. This interweaving of delight and dissonance is replicated in the way the different remembered musics are involved in Thrysis’ present speaking voice. Ortiz, 101.

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I sat me down to watch upon a bank With ivy canopied, and interwove With flaunting honeysuckle, and began Wrapped in a pleasing fit of melancholy To meditate my rural minstrelsy, Till fancy had her fill; but ere a close The wonted roar was up amidst the woods, And filled the air with barbarous dissonance, At which I ceased, and listened them awhile, Till an unusual stop of sudden silence Gave respite …. (543–53)

Here the musical meaning of “fancy” is quite explicit, reinforced by the play on “close.”40 Thyrsis’s “rural minstrelsy,” in fact, never does reach a “close,” but is interrupted by the sound of Comus’s revels. (It is not clear, indeed, whether he is singing or merely thinking about singing.) These revels in their turn are interrupted by the arrival of the Lady, and ultimately replaced by her song. If we read Thyrsis’s speech, with Martz, as a “verbal antidote” to the darkness of Comus’s wood— as a “great pastoral aria”—then we may begin to feel that the shepherd’s “rural minstrelsy” still has not come to a close. He continues the unfulfilled “fancy” in this very account of his own interrupted music-making and of the lady’s song. “Stop” also has a musical meaning, one that interestingly modifies the sense of the passage. The “dissonance” of Comus’s revels stops abruptly; but in musical terminology, a “stop” is “the closing of a finger-hole or ventage in the tube of a wind instrument so as to alter the pitch” or “the act of pressing with the finger on a string of the violin, lute, etc., so as to raise the pitch of its tone.” In an organ, the stops are the “graduated set of pipes producing tones of the same quality,” or the handle or knob controlling the set (OED n.2, 15a, b; 14a, b). Consequently, when Milton refers to “organs of sweet stop” (PL.VII.596), the “stop” does not refer to the cessation of sound but to the production and control of the sound. The term could also signify simply “note,” “key,” or “tune” (OED, n.2, 16a). The silence is an unusual “stop” to be played in Comus’s wild revels; but the term suggests continuation even as it indicates cessation. The Lady’s song then rises from the silence as further continuation. Commentators have frequently noted the similarity between Thyrsis’s bank “with ivy canopied, and interwove / With flaunting honeysuckle” and Titania’s bower, elaborately described by Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.41 Usually, however, the relevance of the rest of Oberon’s speech is overlooked. “The primary meaning is conclusion, but in the context the word strongly suggests its technical sense in music, the conclusion of a phrase, theme, or movement, a cadence” (Variorum, 2.3: 922–3). 41 Martz suggests that this passage may also evoke the “bank” in The Merchant of Venice, where the moonlight sleeps, and Lorenzo and Jessica discuss the power of music (Poet of Exile, 13). 40

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I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows, Quite overcanopied with luscious woodbine, With sweet muskroses, and with eglantine. There sleeps Titania sometime of the night, Lulled in these flowers with dances and delight; And there the snake throws her enameled skin, Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in; And with the juice of this I’ll streak her eyes, And make her full of hateful fantasies. (2.2.249–58; emphasis mine)

At what point does this speech turn nasty? The sudden introduction of the serpent amongst the flowers and dances seems ominous; but in the following line, it merely serves to give a charming indication of the diminutive size of the fairies. The snake is simultaneously a jarring note and an integral and innocent part of the charming forest scene, providing a useful, even delightful, material for the small inhabitants. But with the following lines, Oberon’s malicious purpose comes into focus; and the snake in this passage, like the “spotted snakes with double tongue” (2.2.9) that Titania’s attendants later attempt to banish from her resting place, becomes a figure for Oberon himself. When Oberon refers to Titania “lulled in these flowers with dances and delight” (emphasis mine), the phrase glances back at the lulling lines of the speech itself. The set-piece flower garden of a speech becomes a delightful space where hateful fantasies intrude. The language lulls the audience, and perhaps the speaker himself; the detail of the snake is lyrically expanded until its threat is nearly forgotten. The hateful fantasies are caught up in—and become, like the snake, inextricable from—the elaborately “luscious” language. Milton’s reworking of Oberon’s speech—the whole speech, I would argue— seemingly separates the lyricism from the disturbance. The shepherd’s idyll is interrupted by a “barbarous dissonance” that he represents as alien to his surroundings. Nevertheless, the different kinds of music that the shepherd describes are “interwove” like the ivy and “flaunting honeysuckle” of his retreat. As he describes the Lady’s song, he is newly enwrapped in it, returning to the moment when he heard it (as Comus returns to the moment when he heard the Sirens). He is brought back to the urgency of the situation only by the word “death,” which acts like the reference to the serpent in Oberon’s speech. The word initially seems to belong to the reverie (the song undoes death) but then breaks it. For Shakespeare, the uneasy co-existence is the point. Oberon and Titania emerge from the dark, but they are still creatures that—in the end—can bless. This power to bless and to harmonize mortal affairs cannot be separated from the general creepiness of the fairy world—indeed, the two qualities appear interdependent. Such indivisibility is embodied in the sounds that Theseus and Hipppolyta hear reverberating through the mountains: “the musical confusion / Of hounds and echo in conjunction” (4.1.107–8). For Milton, such haunting simultaneity—the conjunction of the present and the past, the musical and the

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discordant, the delightful and the terrifying—suggests the overlapping presence of the fallen and the unfallen: an impossibility, but a dangerous illusion. The other songs in the masque, sung or presided over by the Attendant Spirit, emphasize the importance of content over sound. The Spirit’s sung invocation of Sabrina has only the one, intended effect: the appearance of the nymph. Sabrina is called; Sabrina comes. She rises because the song exhorts her to rise, not because its beauty is sufficient to awaken the deepest sleeper or to create a soul beneath the ribs of death. In the final lines of his epilogue, after his allegorical account of Cupid and Psyche embracing far above the sleeping Adonis and the sad Venus, the Spirit exhorts his mortal listeners to learn from Virtue how to “climb / Higher than the sphery chime” (1020–21).42 Even the music of the spheres is a created thing and must be surmounted in the quest for heaven. Virtue is not learned through music. Nevertheless, this critical reading of the Lady’s song and all responses to it cannot fully account for the wonder it arouses, the repeated emphasis on its holiness and beauty. The desire for such music is not condemned or eliminated but rechanneled into the figure of Sabrina. As the conclusion of the masque reminds us, “If Virtue feeble were / Heav’n itself would stoop to her” (1022–3). These last lines continue to “chime” in tetrameter couplets. The Spirit “suck[s] the liquid air” in imitation of Ariel’s song, “Where the bee sucks”; Cupid and Psyche embrace in “spangled sheen,” a phrase that almost requires knowledge of Shakespeare’s “spangled starlight sheen” (MSND 2.1.29) to be understood. The Spirit finally prepares to soar “to the corners of the moon” (1017) in a strange echo of Hecate in Macbeth.43 For a number of critics, Sabrina is the Spenserian presence that banishes the Shakespearean shadow of Comus.44 As Paul Stevens points out, however, Sabrina The meaning of Milton’s introduction of Venus and Adonis has been much debated. For one influential reading, see A.S.P. Woodhouse, “The Argument of Milton’s Comus,” in A Maske at Ludlow: Essays on Milton’s Comus, ed. John S. Diekhoff (Cleveland, OH: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1968). Woodhouse associates “the image of Venus and Adonis” with “the powers and processes of nature” (40). Kilgour points out that these figures are associated not only with Spenser but with Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, an allusion that seems to her ominous, but while “Venus and Adonis’ love may appear a kind of dead end … it is in fact transformed by Milton into a stage leading above to a higher form of paradise” (326). Milton uses potentially negative Shakespearean allusions to point upward. 43 Compare “Upon the corner of the moon” (Macbeth 3.5.24). For a detailed account of the Shakespearean echoes in the epilogue, see Thaler, 196–201, 217. Commentators have accounted for the Shakespearean presence in the Epilogue in various ways: dismissing it as merely a “gentle haunting”; suggesting that Milton has managed to take over Shakespearean language for his own ends; even opening the possibility that the end of the masque represents a victory—unconscious on Milton’s part—for the values of Shakespeare and Comus. See Guillory, 91; Kilgour, 325. 44 See Guillory, 90; Hunt, “Managing Spenser,” 325–30; Kilgour, 325; Loewenstein, 146; and Wilding, 48. 42

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belongs to Shakespeare’s fairy world at least as much as Comus does.45 When Sabrina sets her “printless feet / O’er the cowslip’s velvet head” (897–9), she echoes Prospero’s farewell to elves who run with “printless foot,” and recalls the delicate, miniaturized fairy world of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where the fairies bestir themselves to “hang a pearl in every cowslip’s ear” (2.1.15). She protects the herds from the “ill-luck signs / That the shrewd meddling elf delights to make” (845–6); and she “must haste ere morning hour / To wait in Amphitrite’s bower” (920), recalling Oberon’s injunction to “haste, make no delay; / We may effect this business yet ere day” (3.2.395–6). Although Sabrina does not express fear of the sun, she too, like the fairies, is a creature of the night, and her pagan yet baptismal river waters recall the “field-dew consecrate” (5.2.45) with which the fairies emerge from the darkness to bless the palace of Theseus. Sabrina is not only the final echo of the Lady’s song, she is also the Lady as Comus first pretended to see her: a goddess and protector of nature, a musical creature whose song possesses great powers. In her, the magician’s fantasy comes true. Sabrina must be “right invoked in warbled song” (854)—does this mean that “warbled song” is the right way to call her, or that in calling her, warbled song must be used rightly—in a properly controlled manner? The answer is, presumably, both. Warbled song must be approached with wariness. “This will I try,” the Spirit announces, and quickly modifies the plan: “And add the power of some adjuring verse” (858). The Spirit’s song to Sabrina is shorter than the Lady’s Echo song— eight lines compared to fourteen. It exhorts Sabrina to specific action, while the Lady’s plea to Echo requested no more than the amplification and repetition of sound. Nevertheless, the songs share an emphasis on twisting, winding:46 Sabrina fair, Listen where thou art sitting Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave, In twisted braids of lilies knitting The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair; Listen for dear honour’s sake, Goddess of the silver lake, Listen and save. (859–66)

Like the Echo Song, the song to Sabrina has a self-reflexive element: it is full of internal rhymes, fragments of rhyme; assonance and alliteration. “Listen … twisted … lilies … Listen … Listen” is only one strand. Sabrina’s responding 45 Noting the “printless” echo, Stevens reads Sabrina as symbolizing good use of the imagination, replicating on a higher plane Ariel’s therapeutic songs to Ferdinand (Imagination, 42). 46 The songs may also have corresponded musically. See Fletcher: “Lawes composed his songs so that, without precise musical duplication, the song to Echo and the Spirit’s song to Sabrina are echoes of each other, since the falling interval of a fifth in the Lady’s ‘Sweet Echo’ is doubled by an identical falling fifth, more cadential to be sure, in the phrase ‘listen and save’” (101).

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song possesses a similar internal resonance and a similar insistence on wandering movements: her “sliding” chariot is “thick set with agate, and the azurn sheen” of gems that “in the channel stray” (893–5; emphasis mine). As William Oram notes, “sexuality … appears in the elaborately sensuous ‘loose train’ of Sabrina’s amber-dropping hair. But in fact the locks are not ‘loose’ at all: Sabrina is braiding them with the lilies usually associated with purity … while the potential for excess is present it is tempered, controlled, civilized.”47 Interestingly, however, the song presents this process in reverse order. First Sabrina’s hair is being knitted into braids; then this same hair is described as loose and amber-dropping, the temporal order of the verse unbraiding it. Time seems to move backwards as the spirit sings. The nymph’s braids, furthermore, are twisted: Sabrina’s hair seems simultaneously loose and labyrinthine. The song is monodic, composed by Lawes, whom Milton would later praise for fitting his music to words in such a way as to keep them perfectly intelligible. But the words of this song recall the winding— and unwinding—music in L’Allegro, a music where sound patterns seemed more important than the “immortal verse” to which they were wedded. The Spirit follows the song by conjuring, “Rise, rise, and heave thy rosy head / From thy coral-paven bed” (885–6), implying that his song is not unlike the Lydian airs which cause Orpheus to “heave his head / From golden slumber on a bed / Of heaped Elysian flow’rs” (145–7). The L’Allegro recollections lead us directly back to the songs of Comus’s Sirens and “flow’ry-kirtled Naiades,” which would “take the prisoned soul, / And lap it in Elysium” (356–7). The Spirit’s invocation rouses rather than lulls, but the music seems to belong to a very similar world. Initially, it is difficult to understand how Sabrina can be such an unambiguously positive figure, since the Spirit goes on to invoke her By the songs of Sirens sweet, By dead Parthenope’s dear tomb And fair Ligea’s golden comb, Wherewith she sits on diamond rocks Sleeking her soft alluring locks …. (878–82)

Why is it so necessary for a figure like Sabrina to take the form of a Siren?48 The reference to “dead Parthenope” initially suggests that Milton’s nymph may be a William Oram, “The Invocation of Sabrina,” Studies in English Literature 1500– 1900 24 (1984): 128. For a similar reading of Sabrina as a figure for the acceptance of the necessity of life in a fallen world, as a purification of Comus’s perversion of potentially good things in this world, see Ortiz’s argument that Milton “rechannels the musical and Ovidian elements of the antimasque in order to free the Lady, thus authorizing the modes of figuration and performativity—which Comus had abused—as necessary and valuable aspects of human experience … despite their moral ambivalence” (105). 48 In “The Invocation of Sabrina,” Oram attributes the startling appearance of the Sirens at this point to the “playfulness” of the invocation ceremony, and argues that these “potent, dangerous figures … are here domesticated” (130). Still, playfulness is not 47

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true, living version of a false myth; but as the line continues, “dead” becomes “dear,” and the tomb becomes something like a hallowed landmark. A living Siren appears in the next line, but this alluring creature does not seem “new” or “reborn” in any way. Parthenope and her tomb also appear in one of Milton’s Latin poems addressed to the Italian singer Leonora Baroni. Although these poems are often considered rather minor efforts, I would argue that they are essential to understanding the full significance that Milton attaches to the figure of the Siren. The matter involves more than a symbol that may be reinterpreted in a positive light: the Siren’s song transcends symbolism and signification altogether. Such transcendence can occur truly in one environment only, but it is an environment that resonant, sweet sound repeatedly begins to generate around itself: the unfallen “age of gold.” In the third and final poem on Leonora, Milton rhetorically asks why Naples (where Parthenope supposedly died) should boast of their Siren. From this opening gambit, the reader expects Milton to claim that Leonora’s voice far surpasses the voice of any Siren; but, in an unexpected turn, Milton chides the Neopolitans for claiming that Parthenope is dead, for “illa quidem vivitque, et amoena Tibridis unda / Mutavit rauci murmura Pausilipi” (5–6).49 Leonora turns out to be Parthenope herself, “atque homines cantu detinet atque deos” (8).50 In these poems, Milton exploits the ambiguity surrounding sweet, feminine song in a seemingly conventional way. A number of Italian poets, beginning with Petrarch, made use of the double Siren tradition to express ambivalent feelings about the object of their desire. If the lady is like Plato’s Sirens, she is something divine; if she is like Homer’s Sirens, she tempts the listener to his own destruction.51 Even within this tradition, however, Milton’s treatment of Leonora is unusual. For one thing, he never directly raises the issue. All three poems portray the singer positively, despite some ambivalent undertones. The second poem alludes to Tasso’s descent into madness for love of Leonora d’Este, and declares: “Ah miser ille tuo quanto felicius aevo / Perditus, et propter te Leonora foret!”52 But as the poem continues, Milton reveals that this Leonora’s voice in fact brings healing, not ruin. Suggestively—and surprisingly—Milton refers to Leonora’s performance as cantus in the second and third poems addressed to her, poems in which he lightly necessarily enough to eliminate danger; and a Siren who “sits on diamond rocks / Sleeking her soft alluring locks” hardly seems quite domesticated enough for comfort. 49 “In truth, she lives, and has exchanged the roar of hoarse Posillipo for the Tiber’s delightful waves” (trans. John Leonard in John Milton: The Complete Poems [London: Penguin, 1998]). 50 “And she holds gods and men spellbound with her song.” 51 See Elena Laura Calogero, “‘Sweet aluring harmony’: Heavenly and Earthly Sirens in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Literary and Visual Culture,” in Music of the Sirens, ed. Linda Phyllis Austern and Inna Naroditskaya (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 140. 52 “Ah, poor man, how much more blissfully might he have been brought to ruin in your time and for your sake, Leonora!”

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speaks of her as a Siren with a voice that can bring “blissful ruin.” In the first poem, however, as he explores the divine origins of her voice, he refers to her song only as sonus, focusing not on the singer’s clear presentation of words, but on the sound of her voice. “Nam tua praesentem vox sonat ispsa Deum,” Milton says: “For your very voice sounds in the presence of God [emphasis mine]” (4). Even more strangely, it is in this sound that God speaks (loquitur). Leonora’s voice possesses, quite independent of words or text, a kind of divine clarity, in which God is expressed as clearly and directly as in speech. What exactly God says in Leonora’s voice is not a subject that the poet takes up; it seems a matter of indifference. The reader is left to assume that God expresses Himself, just as the entire creation, silently, expresses the goodness and power of its creator. God has no specific command or warning to deliver through Leonora as he delivered through the prophets—he speaks in her voice in a very different way, teaching mortals how they may become accustomed to divine music. The message is, and must be, wordless; and yet it is spoken, because it is full of an audible meaning that is in no danger of being misunderstood. Aut Deus, aut vacui certe mens tertia coeli Per tua secreto guttura serpit agens; Serpit agens, facilisque docet mortalia corda Sensim immortali assuescere posse sono. Quod si cuncta quidem Deus est, per cunctaque fusus, In te loquitur, caetera mutus habet. (5–10)53

A secret, divine power moves in Leonora’s voice—serpit agens, serpit agens. The Latin verb “serpere” means “to move imperceptibly,” and this is the primary sense of Milton’s use of the word in this passage. But it may also mean “to creep, to crawl”; and the word serpens (a creeping thing, snake, serpent) is derived from the present participle of this verb.54 The divine power both speaks clearly 53 “Either God or at least the third mind, quitting heaven, moves imperceptibly through your throat with secret power; with power he moves, and graciously teaches mortal hearts how they can insensibly become accustomed to immortal sound. If God is all things, and poured through all things, in you alone he speaks, in silence holds all else.” Commentators are divided on the identity of this “third mind.” The obvious candidate would seem to be the Holy Spirit—but some critics have found this idea skirting too close to blasphemy, and have argued for other options, such as the spirit governing the third heaven—i.e., the heaven of Venus. See A Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes, vol. 1, The Latin and Greek Poems, ed. Douglas Bush, and The Italian Poems, ed. J.E. Shaw and A. Bartlett Giamatti (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), 148–9. 54 See Gerard Lukken, Original Sin in the Roman Liturgy: Research in the Theology of Original Sin in the Roman Sacramentaria and the Early Baptismal Liturgy (Leiden: Brill, 1973): “Among the Christians … the words ‘serpere’ and ‘serpens’ have undoubtedly acquired a very special and new significance; for them they evoke the entire background of the serpent’s cunning trick in Paradise which the devil still continues even after having been conquered by Christ” (47). Lukken quotes Zeno of Verona on the devil, “‘who creeps

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and moves imperceptibly (serpit) in Leonora’s song—the two actions are somehow the same, or the latter leads inevitably to the former.55 According to her panegyrist, Leonora’s voice is more than just a faint echo of divine music. The Word itself “sounds” imperceptibly—and yet perceptibly—in her. She makes listeners accustomed to a divine music that, with their gross unpurged ears, they should not be able to hear at all. Milton ultimately comes to the conclusion that what he wants to hear in Leonora’s voice is truly possible only before the Fall, when the serpent belongs in the pastoral setting, and all sounds express the Creator and His goodness. Yet this “sounding” music can promise, tantalizingly, to erase the Fall altogether, because its changed status cannot be clearly perceived. It dissolves “before” and “after” into the present moment. In Sabrina’s watery and musical appearance, we can sense Milton’s reluctance to fully reject the Siren’s song. Sabrina’s entrance and her song are controlled and directed by the specific purpose for which the Attendent Spirit has summoned her, and her associations with Spenser imply that in her actions, “more is meant than meets the ear.” Oram suggests that Sabrina provides “an answer to the central problem of the masque, that of how we are to value—and use—the God-created, fallen world we inherit.”56 We are to appreciate this world, and what it has to offer, but never forget to look through and beyond the creation to the Creator. According to this argument, Sabrina unites heaven and earth through a continuum—in her actions, we can see how earthly things are shadows of higher things. In contrast, the Lady’s earlier music creates a short circuit, as the angelic song in the Nativity Ode almost does: skipping death, the end of the world, the need to wait for true bliss. Moreover, this music refuses to end. It reverberates throughout the performance, throughout the text, in the echoing responses of the listeners, spreading outwards instead of pointing upwards.57 It does not work as figuration or as allegory: it is divine music made present or almost present, voice about unobserved and is therefore called serpent’ (qui quod sensim serpat, serpentis nomen accepit)” (47). See also Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, trans. Stephen A. Barney, W.J. Lewis, J.A. Beach, and Oliver Berghof (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006): “The snake (serpens) takes its name because it creeps (serpere) by secret approaches” (225). To my knowledge, only John Kerrigan comments on the implications of Milton’s use of this word: “With hindsight [i.e., from the perspective of Paradise Lost], Leonora’s ‘serpit agens …’ discloses a translingual snaky creepiness” (“Milton and the Nightingale,” Essays in Criticism 42.2 [1992]: 116). Even without such hindsight, the word may startle—but the poem insists that this imperceptible creeping is holy. 55 Suggestively, Shakespearean music, at certain memorable moments, creeps, whether by Ferdinand upon the waters, or into the ears of Jessica and Lorenzo as they watch the stars choiring inaudibly to the young-eyed cherubins. See Chapter 1, 49–50. 56 Oram, “Invocation of Sabrina,” 123. 57 For an account of the tension in the masque between vertical and horizontal movement, see Fletcher: “The verse is continually and in endless variety of form and texture subverting the metaphors of vertical movement upward to heaven, downward to hell. Verse is horizontal …. Echoes are an earthly phenomenon, like their nymph” (243).

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and echoes overlapping so that they are barely distinguishable. We have another almost-marriage of Voice and Verse, “Blest pair of Sirens, pledges of Heav’n’s joy, / Sphere-borne harmonious sisters” (1–2). This is not just a matter of the marriage of Milton’s verse with the music of Henry Lawes. The truly desired Voice (and Verse) is the one that sounds “praesentem … Deum”—the voice of a Siren. At the center of the masque, Milton reaches an impasse, figured in the lady’s frozen silence. Comus is not destroyed, but simply vanishes; and Sabrina must be produced to resolve the mess. Once again, Milton seems to have two options: an apocalyptic ending—a shattering destruction of demonic power—or a regenerative, and possibly illusory, return to an age of gold, where nature itself proves unproblematically holy and healing. The first option cannot be realized within the form of the masque, or at this point in Milton’s poetic development. (At least, such is the impression he self-consciously conveys.) Sabrina is a strange reworking of the second option. As a benevolent representative of a natural world vibrating with musical meaning, she does not quite belong in the dark wood of error that is the fallen world. She both invites and frustrates allegorical understanding, as the source of her power—her watery song—is resistant to allegory.58 We are encouraged to understand her intervention in figural terms (surely she represents something besides a drowned girl transformed into a water nymph), but her entourage of rollicking nymphs and alluring sirens—and Shakespearean echoes— makes it hard to definitively separate her from those warbling woodnotes that do not seem to signify anything beyond themselves. Indeed, Sabrina’s very history—a girl who throws herself into a river and then returns to life—ought to make her just that unsettling mixture of ghost and nature deity that Milton associates with Shakespeare. I would suggest that Milton himself could not quite make up his mind about her. She reveals his intense desire for a modified, acceptable version of the Lady’s song, along with a sneaking awareness that what is desirable about the song cannot be modified. In spite of a conclusion celebrating qualified regeneration, Milton does present a brief rehearsal of an apocalyptic music, a thundering through the deep. Several commentators refer to the lady’s last speech to Comus as a song.59 Certainly her words reinforce this idea. She declares that if she were to speak, her “rapt spirits” would proclaim the wonder of Chastity with such See Gordon Teskey, Allegory and Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996): “If it may be doubted whether the rhapsodes, the oral performers of the Homeric poems, initiated the practice of allegorical interpretation, it may certainly be asked whether the notion of an ‘undermeaning’ (hypernoia) concealed below the surface of a text could have developed out of anything in the epics themselves. Song has no surface” (41). 59 Fletcher suggests that here the Lady gains “the ecstatic Orphic momentum of the masque itself” (173); Paul Stevens argues that “the final antidote to Comus’s magic is the Lady’s Orphic, that is, prophetic song” (Imagination, 40); and Martz refers to the passage as an “operatic climax” (Poet of Exile, 28)—although for a climax, it is a bit anticlimactic, considering that the Lady’s words do not in fact deter Comus for more than a few moments. 58

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sacred vehemence, That dumb things would be moved to sympathize, And the brute earth would lend her nerves, and shake, Till all thy magic structures reared so high, Were shattered into heaps o’er thy false head. (794–9)

This passage was not part of the Ludlow performance; Milton added it in later publication, perhaps as a way of commenting upon the limits of his own poetic powers in A Masque. The speech that the Lady never makes would wield a power quite distinct from the power of her Echo song, a song which certainly moved Comus if not Echo, but ultimately only enflamed his lust. In this moment, the Lady might be Orpheus instead of Philomela, with the power of carmen instead of cithara.60 Her power would prove far more potent even than the power of Orpheus, because it would save her from the barbarous rout and bring Comus’s magic to nothing. His response to her words—in stark contrast to his response to her Echo song—suggests no less; he shivers “as when the wrath of Jove / Speaks thunder, and the chains of Erebus / To some of Saturn’s crew” (803–5). The Lady speaks with the thunder of heaven. In this speech, Milton introduces the possibility of a new poetics and a new kind of song—a spoken song with all the powers of the music of Orpheus and more. Yet the rapt, thunderous speech of the Lady is not, at this moment, possible; such an utterance is only shadowed forth in her description of this speech (a shadow which, nonetheless, produces some of the effects of the real thing, at least temporarily). She does not say what she says she might say, and instead she is frozen, unable to speak further. The Lady’s speech echoes Prospero’s explanation of the sudden dissolution of his own masque: And like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. (4.1.151–6)

Milton’s allusion seems an obvious gesture of renunciation of Shakespeare and all his works—yet the renunciation does not happen, not yet. If the Lady were to speak, not only would Comus (and possibly Shakespeare) be vanquished, but the masque would be over. There would be no need for the Lady’s brothers to find her, no need to summon Sabrina, no need for the Spirit to escort the children back to their parents. The masque form could not support such a speech, and the entire complex of magic structures would crumble, along with Comus’s palace. Milton sets himself up for a future rejection of Shakespeare in a manner that pays tribute to Shakespeare. 60 On the other hand, Ortiz hears an echo of Ovid’s Philomela after her rape by Tereus in the Lady’s claim that all things would sympathize with her speech (95).

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Prospero tears down his own masque in order to confront Caliban and hurry the whole play towards an ending. In the process, he gives up the elves that move with printless feet, make green ringlets in the moonshine, and love to hear “the solemn curfew” (5.1.33–40). He gives up magic, his musical spirits of the air, and even the ability to summon “some heavenly music.” Milton does not make such a renunciation—yet. His masque continues to a conclusion, and embraces Sabrina with her printless feet, her twilit world inhabited by meddling elves and nymphs and Sirens, and her own version of Oberon’s “field dew consecrate.” The poetic voice that speaks like divine thunder is put off for a time, and in the masque a new kind of poetic “song” makes its appearance only as its own echo, as a description that at this point can lead only to frozen silence.

Chapter 7

“Minims of Nature”: Describing Music in Paradise Lost Any reader of Paradise Lost will note the prevalence of music. Milton’s angels sing the praises of God; Adam and Eve sing or pronounce their own hymns. Startlingly, even the fallen angels practice music in Hell. Milton describes these various kinds of music in very different terms—and these descriptions are as important for what they imply about the poem itself as for what they tell us about music in Heaven, earth, and Hell. As in his earlier poetry, Milton repeatedly indicates a special relationship between the poem and its fictive music. In Paradise Lost, however, Milton abandons the possibility of joining the heavenly choir through the descriptive echoing of musical sounds. The narrator either downplays the sonic component of heavenly song or leaves it out of his descriptions altogether. When Raphael replaces the narrative voice, he is allowed more liberty; but even the archangel is careful to transmit the content of the angels’ songs. The musical episodes in Hell reveal the power and danger of music that works separately from and even transcends its verbal content. At these moments, Milton shows the dangers posed by a poetic representation that seeks to reproduce this kind of music. It is all too easy for the poem to join the infernal choir, the demonic song characterized by the separation of music and subject matter, sound and sense. The representation of unfallen earthly music presents a special dilemma, however, and ultimately stands in for the general problem of portraying Eden before the Fall. The books in Hell show how harmonious sounds remain “unfallen” and offer an illusion of redemption—or at least the suspension of Hell and of the fallen state. Moral meaning and temporality are interdependent in Paradise Lost. The historical and irreversible shift from the unfallen to the fallen state forces us to perceive the ironic doubleness of words like “lapse” and “error,” but this irony must not seem necessary or inevitable. Only our dubious vantage point in a fallen future imposes a darker meaning on these words. This vantage point does not indicate a newly attained wisdom or understanding of the past—earlier innocence was not a state of ignorance, and it would be dangerous (positively Satanic) for us to understand it so. If the temporal distinction of before and after were to collapse, the terrible irony of rivers winding with serpent error and the liquid lapse of falling water would no longer be extricable from the joyous celebration of God’s creation.1 See Anne Ferry, Milton’s Epic Voice: The Narrator in “Paradise Lost” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963): “The unified vision of unfallen beings cannot be ironic nor can the language of the narrator, in so far as he is inspired with a vision of the unfallen world, be itself ironic … Ironic effects in Milton’s epic are created by the 1

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We would be left with something like the music of The Tempest: deceptive, wonderful, and terrible. Paradise Lost generates tension and dramatic power by its tendency towards just such a temporal collapse, but the poem’s morality depends upon the essential difference between then and now. Anything that does remain the same before and after—or changes in ways that are impossible to measure or discover—is profoundly dangerous; yet such unchanging things, if any exist, also provide the only possible way of reviving Eden for a fallen audience. After all, unless that distance melts away, we cannot fully understand what we actually lost.2 Paradise Lost thus sets up temporal collapse as intensely desirable, even while the attempt is dangerous and the achievement impossible. The poem repeats, on a grand scale, the tension in the Nativity Ode between possible paths of regeneration. It returns repeatedly to the moment where we think that the music can bring back the age of gold—before “wisest fate” steps in, and explains that such a “return” can occur only at the end of time, after a violent Apocalypse. The Nativity Ode portrays the return to paradise as an illusory possibility suggested by music (or the imagination of music—we slip almost imperceptibly between the singing of the angels at the Nativity and the poet’s re-creation of their music on the anniversary of the Nativity). Similarly, a startling number of those troubling words with such innocent unfallen meanings and such ominous fallen resonances appear in musical contexts in Milton’s early poetry. Consider, for instance, the description of Lydian airs in L’Allegro: Notes, with many a winding bout Of linkéd sweetness long drawn out, With wanton heed, and giddy cunning, The melting voice through mazes running …. (139–42)

In retrospect, this morally ambiguous description summons up the “mazy error” of the rivers of Paradise (IV.239), the “wanton ringlets” and “sweet reluctant amorous delay” of Eve (IV.306, 311), and “the liquid lapse of murmuring streams” (VIII.263). In Eden, Nature “wantoned as in her prime, and played at will / Her virgin fancies,

alternations in points of view made inevitable by the great fact of the Fall” (146). For more on the double associations of key words and phrases, see Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in “Paradise Lost” (New York: St. Martin’s, 1967); Christopher Ricks, Milton’s Grand Style (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963); and Arnold Stein, Answerable Style (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1953). For an overview of the language question, and an account of Milton’s use of words with fallen and unfallen meanings, see John Leonard, Naming in Paradise: Milton and the Language of Adam and Eve (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 233–61. 2 For the dangers of nostalgia in Paradise Lost, however, see Nigel Alderman, “‘Rememb’ring Mercy’: Monuments, Memory, and Remembering in Paradise Lost,” Milton Quarterly 42.3 (2008): 183–96. Alderman points out that even Adam’s memories of Paradise after the Fall are tainted, “for he remembers them in his fallen state and with his fallen faculties. There is neither continuity of memory nor continuity of place” (186).

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pouring forth more sweet / Wild above rule or art; enormous bliss” (V.294–7).3 “Fall” itself has a musical meaning; and Milton carefully draws attention to this meaning when he refers to the sun “in western cadence low” (X.92). In descriptions of music throughout Paradise Lost, Milton forges a connection between the music he describes and the winding mazes of his own verse. When Satan enters the consciousness of the dreaming Eve, to work upon “the organs of her Fancy” (IV.802), he reshapes the world around her, beginning with the song of the nightingale. He describes this song, associates it implicitly but intimately with his own voice, and in so doing, he robs it of innocence. Why sleep’st thou Eve? Now is the pleasant time, The cool, the silent, save where silence yields To the night-warbling bird, that now awake Tunes sweetest his love-laboured song; now reigns Full orbed the moon, and with more pleasing light Shadowy sets off the face of things …. (V.38–47)

At first glance, Satan’s description of the nightingale’s song differs little from the narrator’s account: “she all night her amorous descant sung; / Silence was pleased” (IV.603–4).4 This amorous descant lulls Adam and Eve to sleep, and the narrator pointedly contrasts it with the modern “serenade, which the starved lover sings / To his proud fair, best quitted with disdain” (IV.769–71). Satan performs the firstever amorous serenade, but he does not contrast this mode of expression with the innocently amorous song of the nightingale. Rather, he reshapes the nightingale’s music through his serenade-description into the (soon-to-be) conventional, “lovelaboured” plaint. As John Kerrigan notes, Satan alters the sex of the nightingale.5 The “solemn bird” (IV.655) is now implicitly associated with the devil himself. The problem appears to lie in Satan’s account of the nightingale’s song rather than in the song itself; but the situation is not quite so straightforward. Satan’s act of description is partly an act of interpretation and partly an act of becoming: his speech aspires towards the love-labored song that he attributes to the bird. The nightingale’s music had never needed any interpretation before. Satan generates the first shadow of a doubt as to what the song means. In the fallen world, the song 3 Another one of these ambivalent words with musical resonances would be “rapture”—see Leonard for Milton’s use of the word to evoke both disturbing violence and ecstatic delight. Leonard compares Milton’s lines about the “barbarous dissonance” of “that wild Rout that tore the Thracian Bard / In Rhodope, where Woods and Rocks had ears / To rapture” (VII.32–6) with Hippolyta’s lines about the “mutual cry” of the hounds in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Naming in Paradise, 238). 4 These lines present a modified, and less startling, version of the reaction of Silence to the Lady’s song in A Masque: “Silence / Was took ere she was ware, and wished she might / Deny her nature, and be never more / Still to be so displaced” (557–60). 5 John Kerrigan, “Milton and the Nightingale,” Essays in Criticism 42 (1992): “Not by accident is it Satan who, in Eve’s account, renders Philomel ‘he’, putting Milton’s sensual music into the devil’s camp” (116).

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of the nightingale is constantly open to misinterpretation, but false interpretation is not the only issue. The song no longer means what it originally meant, now that there is more than one possibility of what it might mean. The problem of the nightingale is the problem of the whole poem. The narrator compares himself to the “wakeful bird” in the Proem to Book III as he tells of his own poetic ambitions: Smit with the love of sacred song … Thee Sion and the flow’ry brooks beneath That wash thy hallowed feet, and warbling flow, Nightly I visit: nor sometimes forget Those two equaled with me in fate, So were I equaled with them in renown, Blind Thamyris and blind Maenides, And Tiresias and Phineus prophets old. Then feed on thoughts, that voluntary move Harmonious numbers; as the wakeful bird Sings darkling, and in shadiest covert hid Tunes her nocturnal note. (III.29–40)

The very idea of epic birdsong appears incongruous. By venerable tradition, the nightingale’s song is the voice of the lyric. Milton’s reference to the nightingale might suggest the generic inclusiveness of his poem, but the song of the bird is not clearly distinguished from the epic poetry that the narrator mentions—nor, indeed, from the “sacred song” whose relationship to the music of the classical blind bards remains ambiguous as well. The narrator’s implicit and unusual association between epic song and the music of the nightingale defamiliarizes the metaphor of the epic as song, bringing it to new life. John Kerrigan describes the juxtaposition of the blind bards and the nightingale as “insidious.” According to Homer, Thamyris was blinded for challenging the muses to a contest; and in the final book of The Republic, Plato claims that Thamyris chose to return to life as a nightingale.6 In this context, “[t]he lines show Milton, now sure of his powers, wondering what emulous success amounts to in the sight of Urania and God.”7 The allusion to Thamyris has further implications: according to Pliny the Elder, he was the first to use the cithara as solo instrument without voice: “cithara sine voce cecinit Thamyris primus.” Pliny also attributes the invention of the sober Dorian mode to Thamyris.8 This would be a stronger endorsement if Milton had not previously shown the fallen angels marching to music in the Dorian mode (I.549–62). The narrator’s account of the bird that sings “darkling” also suggests something more than his blindness. The nightingale is hid from others; her listeners are “blind,” too. For the hearers, the nightingale’s song issues from obscurity and shadow. Plato, Republic, 620a. Kerrigan, “Milton and the Nightingale,” 116. 8 Pliny, Natural History, VII.56.204. 6 7

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As we have seen in A Masque, and in the poems on Leonora Baroni, Milton was profoundly attracted by the idea of meaningful musical sound; but such sound means either everything or nothing at all. When touched by even the possibility of evil, its holiness is forever lost; and the voice of evil speaks through it immediately, as Satan’s first heard speech in Eden is a ventriloquization of the nightingale. Yet this Leonora-like voice, this musical expression, is essential for the poetic recreation of Eden: lost, and from our retrospective view, inevitably shadowed by evil. The dangerous tendency of musical sound to remain the same before and after a Fall becomes very clear in the first two books of Paradise Lost. These opening books also illuminate the special and intimate relationship between the poem and the music it describes. The fallen angels’ song is so wonderfully musical that it can suspend Hell—and yet the music, by definition, cannot be musical, cannot be harmonious, in any but the most superficial sense. Suspending Hell: Celestial Notes in the Infernal Regions In Paradise Lost, the narrative voice presents the music of Hell to the reader in terms of sound. Indeed, most of this music is explicitly or implicitly nonverbal: flute music to the Dorian mode, the sounds that accompany the creation of Pandaemonium. The name of the capital of Hell—“the abode of all demons”—has since entered common usage, and it now signifies “utter confusion, uproar; wild and noisy disorder; a tumult; chaos” (OED, 2b). In short, the word has become—most appropriately— a synonym of “Babel.” The association of “pandemonium” with confused noise likely arose from the episode in Book 10 where the devils are transformed into hissing snakes. But the connection between the city of Pandaemonium and the Tower of Babel is built deep into the poem from the beginning. The narrator makes a direct comparison when he reminds those “who boast in mortal things, and wond’ring tell / Of Babel, and the works of Memphian kings” how these great buildings “are easily outdone / By Spirits reprobate” (I.693–7). But Pandemonium is not initially a place of cacophony. The city takes shape like the city of Thebes, which famously rose from the ground at the playing of Amphion’s harp. This myth is usually employed as an illustration of the positive—and literally constructive— power of music, and so the allusion in this Hellish context startles. Music is inextricably wound into the building materials of the demonic citadel, and can scarcely be distinguished from the “fabric huge” of the structure: A third [multitude] as soon had formed within the ground A various mould, and from the boiling cells By strange conveyance filled each hollow nook, As in an organ from one blast of wind To many a row of pipes the sound-board breathes. Anon out of the earth a fabric huge Rose like an exhalation, with the sound Of dulcet symphonies and voices sweet. (I.705–12)

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Initially, the organ provides the narrator with a simile to describe the mechanism by which the city rises—but immediately afterwards, the music of this figurative organ spills out from the simile into the actuality of the event described. A blast of wind breathes through the organ, and the city rises like an exhalation of sweet sound. The poet’s description seems somehow complicit in the creation of a sweet music inextricable from the material ore from which the infernal capital is built. This musical construction would seem to differentiate Pandaemonium from Babel, the tower of Confusion, except that the dulcet notes that accompany its rising do not signify. Milton emphasizes the sweetness of the sounds; if the voices are articulate, their content is of no importance in comparison with their sonic qualities. The image of air moving through an organ to rise in a tower of confusion reappears at a crucial moment later in the poem, when the Serpent addresses Eve “with serpent tongue / Organic, or impulse of vocal air” (IX.529–30). Milton’s hesitance over exactly how Satan makes the serpent speak, or appear to speak, can seem rather pedantic; but the language creates an interesting ambiguity between the two suggested possibilities. Satan either employs the serpent’s natural organs in a new way in order to make it talk, or else he produces verbal sound by artificial, even mechanical means, through an impulse of air. In other words, he either speaks with “organic” tongue, or plays the serpent as one would play an organ. Satan also continues the process that he began in the guise of the toad, seeking to play on Eve herself, “assaying by his devilish art to reach / The organs of her Fancy, and with them forge / Illusions as he list, phantasms and dreams” (IV.800–803). We have seen that as the devils shrink to enter the newly forged Pandaemonium, they are compared to Shakespearean elves, charming the ear with jocund music. Satan’s words to Eve are certainly articulate, but the poem repeatedly suggests that his speech, however logical it may seem, is essentially nonsense. Unsurprisingly, Milton associates Satan with Nimrod, the builder of Babel, an association that culminates in the moment where his speech becomes empty hissing. Satan’s punishment in Book X is reduction to incomprehensibility— a fitting punishment, since in the rest of the poem his speech bears only a semblance of sense. Satan’s early speeches are juxtaposed with the nobler—but still inarticulate—sound of trumpet blasts: [W]ith high words, that bore Semblance of worth, not substance, gently raised Their fainting courage and dispelled their fears. Then straight commands that at the warlike sound Of trumpets loud and clarions be upreared His mighty standard … … [A]ll the while Sonórous metal blowing martial sounds: At which the universal host upsent A shout that tore Hell’s concave, and beyond Frighted the reign of Chaos and old Night. (I.528–43)

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Satan’s rousing words sound noble and persuasive, but the narrator is careful to indicate their essential emptiness, both through explicit statement and through juxtaposition with nonverbal noise. The syntax of “sonórous metal blowing martial sounds” proves more than usually difficult to untangle. It takes the reader a moment to realize that “sounds” must be a verb rather than the direct object of “blowing,” unless the phrase is to be read as a sentence fragment, disconnected grammatically from everything around it. In consequence, “martial” must be an adverb rather than an adjective: “sonorous metal sounds [out], blowing martially.” This awkward solution, however, is not especially satisfactory. The line is all about noise, and shows a remarkable indifference to parts of speech. Music repeatedly suspends Hell, fixing the minds of the listeners upon itself rather than upon their surroundings. [A]non they move In perfect phalanx to the Dorian mood Of flutes and soft recorders; such as raised To height of noblest temper heroes old Arming to battle, and instead of rage Deliberate valour breathed, firm and unmoved With dread of death to flight or foul retreat, Nor wanting power to mitigate and swage With solemn touches, troubled thoughts, and chase Anguish and doubt and fear and sorrow and pain From mortal or immortal minds. Thus they Breathing united force with fixed thought Moved on in silence to soft pipes that charmed Their painful steps o’er the burnt soil; and now Advanced in view they stand …. (I.549–63)

This music mitigates the torments, both physical and mental, of the fallen angels. The passage presents a curious balance of motion and stasis: the fallen angels move, unmoved. The narration begins in present tense, but then shifts into the past, where the Satanic army seems to join the ranks of ancient, heroic warriors (who exist, in fact, in their future). First, they move; then, like the heroes old, they moved. The poem has to be yanked back to the present with the reminder that now the fallen angels advance over burnt soil. The syntax of the passage generates a certain amount of confusion not only between the fallen angels and the ancient heroes, but also between the moving troops and the music itself. For instance, “firm and unmoved / With dread of death” clearly refers to the heroes, but this clause is followed by “nor wanting power,” which just as clearly refers to the music. To whom or to what do the lines “instead of rage / Deliberate valour breathed” refer? Initially the phrase appears to modify the music; but a few lines later, the fallen angels themselves “breath[e] united force with fixed thought.” The music and those who move to the music become one. The passage itself proves strangely circular and unnecessarily repetitive: The fallen angels move to the sound of soft recorders, a sound like the music that played for ancient heroes and

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assuaged all trouble and pain; and just in this way, the fallen angels move to soft pipes that charm away pain. Raising and charming come to mean the same thing, and the marchers begin to seem enchanted, rather than simply inspired with new valor and calm. The facts of their situation are chased from their minds, and they cease to notice the nature of the environment through which they move. For the moment, of course, so do we, as we lose track of the distinction between fallen angels, heroes of the past, and noble music in the best and worthiest of the modes. The speeches of Satan repeatedly aspire towards this Dorian enchantment. He, “with high words, that b[ear] / Semblance of worth, not substance, gently raise[s] / Their fainting courage and dispel[s] their fears” (I.528–30), just as the music “raise[s] / To height of noblest temper heroes old,” and chases fear from immortal minds. The “fixed thought” instilled by the music recalls the “fixed mind” (I.97) that Satan claims to possess; he too rejoices in firm and unmoved thoughts, “not to be changed by place or time” (1.253). The music, for a moment, seems to accomplish exactly what Satan claims his mind can accomplish—and what, for his troops, his words do accomplish. The pipes make, if not a Heaven of Hell, at least a not-Hell of Hell. Milton here gives a specifically musical cast to the drift between sound and sense that critics have frequently noted in the Devil’s speeches.9 The music proves more powerful than the hollow rhetoric. Satan’s speeches, as the narrator informs us, conceal his pain and despair, but do not diminish them. Even without the narrator’s warning, a careful reader can discover that Satan’s speeches are lacking in substance; but the poem suggests that music cannot be judged in any comparable way. Music in itself cannot convey irony. The good angels march to similar if not identical music in Book 6, indicating that the notes of the infernal march are indeed heavenly: [T]he powers militant, That stood for Heav’n, in mighty quadrate joined Of union irresistible, moved on In silence their bright legions, to the sound Of instrumental harmony that breathed Heroic ardour to advent’rous deeds. (VI.61–6)10

9 See for instance Fish: “Satan’s fallacies are wrapped in serpentine trains of false beginnings, faulty pronoun references, missing verbs and verbal schemes which sacrifice sense to sound” (75). In Milton’s God (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961), William Empson declares: “I only maintain that our recent pious critics, eager to catch Satan out on a technicality all the time, must be unable to read his speeches aloud” (45). 10 In “Milton’s Harmonious Sisters,” in The Well-Enchanting Skill: Music, Poetry, and Drama in the Culture of the Renaissance, ed. John Caldwell, Edward Olleson, and Susan Wollenberg (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), John Carey suggests that the good angels are deluded in thinking that they can subdue Satan’s army with arms alone; therefore the echo of the Hellish music emphasizes the mistaken nature of their confidence (255). Still, this reading seems rather hard on the good angels.

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Only the context can make the music ironic; and in Hell, the music’s very operation is to suspend the context. The other passages about music in Hell work in a similar manner. I would suggest that these moments of music serve as models for the poem’s own intermittently lulling effects on the reader. The exception to the dominance of non-vocal music in Hell occurs when some of the fallen angels begin to sing their own heroic deeds—and it is a useful exception, proving the rule. The singing of epic poems is only one of the many occupations of the new inhabitants of Hell, and so song is no more characteristic of the fallen angels than their other classical and humanistic pursuits of philosophizing, exploring, racing, etc. Yet the singing stands in a unique relationship to Milton’s poem, a relationship shared by none of the rebels’ other past-times.11 The fallen angels are composing epic poems, absorbed in the same activity as the poet who tells us about their activities. Others more mild Retreated in a silent valley, sing With notes angelical to many a harp Their own heroic deeds and hapless fall By doom of battle; and complain that Fate Free virtue should enthrall to Force or Chance. Their song was partial, but the harmony (What could it less when Spirits immortal sing?) Suspended Hell, and took with ravishment The thronging audience. (II.546–55)

Even more surprising than the beauty of the song is the way the composition of epic poems becomes such an explicitly and overwhelmingly musical activity. Milton goes far beyond the traditional metaphor of poetry as song, and almost as far beyond the equally conventional image of the epic poet as a venerable bard chanting to a harp. These fallen angels sing together, to many a harp—and they sing polyphonically. “Their song was partial,” i.e., not only biased, but also sung “in parts.”12 In polyphonic music, the clear transmission of a text is often of necessity a secondary concern. Singing one’s own heroic deeds polyphonically, then, is quite a perverse thing to do, as surely the whole point of the exercise is to commemorate said deeds by presenting them in a clear narrative—not in a rich polyphonic setting where the words will become difficult to catch. The fallen angels commemorate

11 To a certain extent, the philosophizing occupies a similarly privileged position, particularly since the narrator explicitly compares this activity with the singing—and places it a rank above. Philosophy charms the soul, while song merely charms the sense. Philosophy is a higher activity than music—yet the fallen angels also pursue this activity in a manner that is more evidently flawed, omitting God from their discussions. The content of their songs is more difficult to grasp, and thus more elusive to criticism. 12 Stephen Buhler, “Counterpoint and Controversy: Milton and the Critiques of Polyphonic Music,” Milton Studies 36 (1998): 19.

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their deeds in opposition to God—their own fall—in a manner that allows these deeds and this fall to slip from memory even as they are sung. Milton’s treatment of the fallen angels’ epic song strikingly resembles Homer’s account of the Sirens in The Odyssey. The Sirens’ song does not explicitly oppose sensual pleasure to heroic action: in fact, it pretends to be epic song: “For we know,” sing the Sirens, “all the things that in broad Troy the Argives and Trojans endured by the will of the gods; and we know all things that happen on the many-nurturing earth.”13 As Leofranc Holford-Strevens points out, “In the original Greek, the verses are markedly euphonious, and also close to the Iliad in diction, as if they were a blasphemy upon it, a sinister parody of the epic praise inspired by the all-knowing Muses that perpetuates the hero’s memory.”14 Charles Segal notes that the song of the Sirens is not only “a ghostly imitation of epic but even becomes its own negation … [T]he song that should immortalize ironically brings oblivion.”15 Homer links the emptiness of the Sirens’ song with its sonority: “The verb that repeatedly describes the ‘hearing’ of their song is akouein (purely acoustic hearing, used eight times), never kluein, the social hearing of fame.”16 Milton takes this association of Sirenic sonority with oblivion even further by making his song polyphonic. The heroic narrative of the fallen angels, however, is wrong in a way that the story of Troy is not (or not for Homer, at any rate). If the fallen angels negate their own heroic deeds by drowning sense in sound, they simultaneously render them elusive to criticism: “Their song was partial, but the harmony / Suspended Hell.”17 The content of the song is partial, but this content vanishes in the formal implications of “partial.” In one word, the meaning of the song is both deplored and lost. Milton may criticize polyphonic music by giving it to the fallen angels; nevertheless, the song is morally improved by the loss of its words. With its partial content lost in partial singing, the song becomes angelic, unfallen.18 On another Quoted in Leofranc Holford-Strevens, “Sirens in Antiquity and the Middle Ages,” Music of the Sirens, ed. Linda Phyllis Austern and Inna Naroditskaya (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 17. 14 Holford-Strevens, “Sirens in Antiquity and the Middle Ages,” 17. See also Charles Segal, Singers, Heroes, and Gods in the Odyssey (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 100–106. For early modern English readers’ awareness of these “self-referential implications” in the episode, see Stephen M. Buhler, “The Sirens, the Epicurean Boat, and the Poetry of Praise,” in Music of the Sirens, 177–8. 15 Segal, 103–4. 16 Segal, 105. 17 See Buhler, “Counterpoint,” 19. 18 If polyphony itself is morally reprehensible, then of course the form of the song announces its lack of holiness. But at several moments, the angels in heaven also seem to be singing polyphonically. See Diane McColley, Poetry and Music in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 207. Buhler argues that angelic song is “most likely” homophonic (“Counterpoint,” 20), but there is no definitive proof for this claim, and Milton does say that in Heaven there was “no voice but well could join / 13

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level, of course, this heavenliness is just what makes the music so dangerous. The “but” seems directed towards the reader, an admission by the epic voice that however deplorable the content, the wonder of the music cannot be denied. The reader, however, hears no music. Save, of course, the “music” of the poem itself. Leslie Brisman claims that the poem validates the lingering goodness in the music by imitating what it describes. “To show us there is yet a vestige of godly activity,” he writes, “the Muse herself participates; the lines perform grammatically what they assert, suspending ‘Hell’ over the parenthetical line and using enjambment to hold still the attention of the audience.”19 This participation of the Muse, however, may cast doubt upon the poet’s own “song,” rather than proving the lingering presence of godliness in the infernal music. The very idea of lingering godliness is a problem, as a Fall from God is not a matter of degrees. Nevertheless, the lingering goodness of sonic harmony can create the illusion of an unfallen past revived. In celebrating their defiance, the fallen angels recapitulate and repeat their fall. When they make this celebration a polyphonic obscuration of words in notes, however, this fall vanishes—for the reader as for the listeners. The affect of the describing poem and the music described overlap in a similar way in the narrator’s description of the rites of Thammuz: Thammuz came next behind, Whose annual wound in Lebanon allured The Syrian damsels to lament his fate In amorous ditties all a summer’s day, While smooth Adonis from his native rock Ran purple to the sea, supposed with blood Of Thammuz yearly wounded …. (I.446–57)

The songs of the Syrian damsels are seductive rather than sad: their long laments cease to exert the affect of laments, as in the next line they become “amorous ditties” sung “all a summer’s day.” The damsels sing to commemorate the death of their god; but their music forgets. These supposed mourning songs are rather like the winding Lydian airs in L’Allegro, characterized by “linkèd sweetness long drawn out.” The narrator’s account momentarily disconnects the reader from the demonic context, just as the songs of the Syrian damsels divorce content and affect. The word “supposed” reminds the reader of the falsity of these pagan beliefs; but sonically, the warning reminder blends into the account of the rites, alliterating with “sea” and “smooth,” until its effect is half-lost. The verse imitates the cyclical nature of the cult, beginning with “Thammuz …. Whose annual wound,” and Melodious part” (III.370–71; emphasis mine). All the angels join in this hymn, and there is no rapt audience, as there is in Hell, which does make a considerable difference. 19 Leslie Brisman, Milton’s Poetry of Choice and Its Romantic Heirs (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973), 123–4. But cf. Ronald R. MacDonald, The Burial-Places of Memory: Epic Underworlds in Vergil, Dante, and Milton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), 163–4.

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returning to “Thammuz yearly wounded.” The narrator finally jerks the passage back into the teleological, Biblical narrative by a shift in perspective, and the endless, circular laments become one particular moment, prophetically—and visually—perceived from the outside: “whose wanton passions in the sacred porch / Ezekiel saw, when by the vision led / His eye surveyed the dark idolatries / Of alienated Judah” (554–7; emphasis mine). The poem repeatedly reminds us of the necessity of placing such alluring moments in context—but this contextualization is just what music makes difficult. Music suspends time, erases context, and casts a palliative, heroic glow over Satan and his crew. (And of course, for many readers, the poem itself has done just this.) Joining the Angel Choir Milton must work against demonic music in other ways than framing it. He later reminds the reader of what this music parodies: sound that is sense, as opposed to sound that fails to signify. In spite of the power of the music of Hell, the devils’ most seductive weapon turns out to be inextricably linked with their most crippling lack of perception—a development that makes perfect sense when one considers that Milton portrays demonic music, and its associated rhetoric, as first and foremost a means of self-deception. The fallen angels repeatedly attempt to rival the thunder of God, and they fail not simply because God is all-powerful, but also because they do not understand what such a rivalry entails. In the counsel scene, Mammon revealingly argues that Hell can become as glorious a dwelling as Heaven: How oft amidst Thick clouds and dark doth Heav’n’s all-ruling Sire Choose to reside, his glory unobscured, And with the majesty of darkness round Covers his throne; from whence deep thunders roar Must’ring their rage, and Heav’n resembles Hell? As he our darkness, cannot we his light Imitate when we please? (II.263–70)

Of course, Mammon is sadly mistaken in imagining that any light conjured by the fallen angels could bear more than the most superficial resemblance to the divine radiance. Heaven’s light illuminates in ways he is incapable of understanding. Yet Mammon also suggests that there is no qualitative difference between the thunder of Heaven and the thunder of Hell, and this matter requires a little more thought. Moloch expresses similar ideas when he sets forth his plan to storm Heaven and renew the war with God, who will hear “to meet the noise / Of his almighty engine … / Infernal thunder” (II.64–6). If the fallen angels are at this point incapable of understanding divine light, they have had recent and very personal experience with heavenly thunder, which they understand—and seem to rightly understand—as God’s weapon and instrument of punishment. Their inability to conceive of God as anything but Thunder is a sign of their fallen state; but the

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anger and power of God they are beginning to understand quite well. What they fail to grasp is that the Thunder is full of meaning, and not the vague meaning of threat and anger and danger that the fallen angels comprehend. The narrator refers contemptuously to those devils who “durst abide / Jehovah thund’ring out of Sion” (I.385–6), and the biblical passage to which these lines allude establishes that such thunder is in fact articulate speech: “The Lord roars from Zion, / And utters his voice from Jerusalem …. Thus says the Lord” (Amos 1. 2–3).20 For the fallen angels, however, the divine thunderbolt is simply far more effective than anything they can create—as they discover in Book 6, when they invent gunpowder: “eternal might / To match with their inventions they presumed / So easy, and of his thunder made a scorn” (630–32). This demonic mockery of divine thunder is accompanied by an explosion of bad puns on the part of Satan and his cohorts. These puns cluster around the idea of the cannon blast as a spoken message. Satan, very pleased at his own cleverness, refers to the blasts as “proposals” (VI.618), and orders his followers to “do as ye have in charge, and briefly touch / What we propound, and loud that all may hear” (566–7). Of course, the auditors hear no subject matter, only thunderous noise. Satan’s puns empty out all traces of the figurative from these words, making everything literal, and literally solid, for the rebels send not words but cannonballs—“terms of weight, / Of hard contents, and full of force urged home” (621–2). At the same time, Satan’s message is nothing but empty noise: a cannon blast without rational content. He uses force instead of words, failing to understand that words can be force. Satan’s irrational sound and irrational force are one—the blast of the cannon. In his invention, he unknowingly offers an ironic parody of the oneness of power and meaning in God’s Word. Belial, trying to outdo his commander in the awful word-play department, makes a pun out of the word “understand” itself: if their opponents do not “understand” their “terms,” they will “walk not upright” (VI.625–7). Of course, there is no conceptual content in the message to be understood—it will simply be difficult for the good angels to keep their feet when struck by the blast. The rebel angels do not understand thunder as a voice, an instrument of communication, nor do they understand this voice as exerting power through words (instead of cannonballs). This failure of understanding makes them think their puns witty; but it also makes them, well … incapable of standing upright. In God’s brand of irony, unlike Satan’s, all meanings converge. The parallels between thunder and Satanic language are not incidental. In punning, opening a gap between the sound and the meaning of a word, Satan draws attention to words as sounds that work only contingently as signs. Similarly, Satanic thunder is without meaning and has no “force” in itself. While Satan is See also Comus’s fear at the Lady’s speech: “She fables not, I feel that I do fear / … as when the wrath of Jove / Speaks thunder, and the chains of Erebus / To some of Saturn’s crew” (A Masque, 800–805). When he rallies, he immediately accuses the Lady of “mere moral babble” (807). 20

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relentlessly literal, God’s voice is literally “full of force” and rational. Satan simply cannot conceive of this unity of sound and sense, the concrete and the abstract, the literal and the metaphoric. The fallen angels similarly misconceive heavenly music. Mammon describes angelic song as “warbling,” incapable of understanding that hymns are serious and profoundly meaningful, not just pretty sounds. In contrast, the narrator places most of his emphasis on the words of angelic song. Good and evil angels can produce very similar noises; the fallen ones applaud “as the sound of waters deep,” and so Milton is careful to give words to the oceanic voices of the good angels, who “sang hallelujah, as the sound of seas, / Through multitude that sung: Just are thy ways …” (X.642–3). When the angels tell of God’s ultimate inaccessibility, they speak in terms of sight—“Dark with excessive bright thy skirts appear”—but never sound. God may be “invisible / Amidst the glorious brightness” (III.375–6), but his voice is always perfectly intelligible, as are the voices of his angels. From the Nativity Ode onwards, Milton’s poetry seeks a way to join the angel choir. In Paradise Lost, the poem half-achieves this goal—but not through the description of the sonorous properties of music. In Book III, the narrator’s description of the angels’ instrumental music provides a brief prelude to a weightier, far longer description of the song’s content. The narrator does describe a burst of celebratory sound before the hymn begins: The multitude of angels with a shout Loud as from numbers without number, sweet As from blest voices, uttering joy, Heav’n rung With jubilee, and loud hosannas filled Th’eternal regions …. (III.345–9)

Is “rung” transitive or intransitive? Does Heaven ring with the voices or do the voices “ring” Heaven as one might ring a bell? The angels and the eternal regions come together in an awesome surge of sound. Still, the content of this great “shout” is clear: the angels are crying “loud hosannas,” and they do so only in response to God’s command: “Adore the Son, and honour him as me” (344). Furthermore, these four and a half lines of sonic glory are followed by fifteen of visual splendor, describing the angels bowing and casting down “their crowns inwove with amarant and gold.” Finally, “in loose garlands thick thrown off, the bright / Pavement that like a sea of jasper shone / Impurpled with celestial roses smiled” (350, 362–4). After the rather stark opening speeches, heaven bursts into bloom, and the ringing hosannas are a part of this newly sensuous empyrean. As in At a Solemn Musick, however, Heaven is portrayed in predominantly visual terms, and this lush description is rooted in unimpeachable authority. Throughout the passage, Milton elaborates upon images and phrases drawn from the Book of Revelation: “the four and twenty elders … cast their crowns before the throne” (4.10); “and before the throne there was a sea of glass like unto crystal” (4.6). The reader is half-encouraged to imagine gem-like pavements and celestial roses, and half-encouraged to remember the text to which these words gesture. Similarly, the

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sonic aspects of heavenly music are mediated through the divine Word: “And they sung a new song, saying, Thou art worthy to take the book, and to open the seals thereof: for thou wast slain and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood. … And I heard the voice of many angels about the throne … and the number of them was ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands; Saying with a loud voice, Worthy is the Lamb” (5.9, 11). When we finally arrive at the hymn itself, the “new song” is not represented in terms of sound. As John Hollander notes, demonic voices resound and echo as heavenly voices—at least at first—do not.21 An echo is a sonic phenomenon, and this phenomenon is pointedly absent from the first angelic hymns. The verse does not repeat itself in refrains, and the narrator does not describe the sounds of the angelic voices beyond indicating that their song is “melodious.” The instrumental prelude is but an introduction to the sacred song, preparing the hearers for something far greater and more important. Then crowned again their golden harps they took, Harps ever tuned, that glittering by their side Like quivers hung, and with preamble sweet Of charming symphony they introduce Their sacred song, and waken raptures high; No voice exempt, no voice but well could join Melodious part, such concord is in Heav’n. Thee Father first they sung omnipotent, Immutable, immortal, infinite, Eternal King; thee Author of all being, Fountain of Light …. (III.365–75)

And so on. Milton makes no attempt to describe the form or sound of the angelic song. We are simply told: “they sang,” and we are told, at length, what they sang. In the poetic presentation of the hymn, the “charming symphony” of harp music is entirely subsumed into the words. Both the origin and nature of these words, however, remain tantalizingly unclear. Milton employs a device similar to the echoing of music in verbal description that I have been discussing—but with a twist. He describes the verbal content of a song, and in the process, the words become the hymn to God that they seem at first only to describe. As the hymn continues, the orientating reminders that we are reading description not transcription fall away. Finally, first person pronouns make a startling appearance in the final lines: “Hail Son of God, Saviour of men, thy name / Shall be the copious matter of my song / Henceforth, and never shall my harp thy praise / Forget, nor from thy Father’s praise disjoin” (412–15).22 The description of the song gradually becomes the song itself as the poet’s voice blends with the voices of the angels. 21 John Hollander, The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 41. 22 See Barbara Lewalski, “Paradise Lost” and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985): “[B]y mixing hymnic kinds and creating

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Nevertheless, this final phrase seems to drive a sudden wedge between poet and singing angels, even as it brings them together. If the pronouns refer to the angels, then the harp is a literal, solid object: golden, glittering, and ever-tuned. The narrator, however, has no harp at all save in a metaphorical sense. He neither needs nor desires literal accompaniment for his song: its music is verbal, internal, and requires no augmentation of “jingling sound” (whether of rhymes or of plucked strings). Like the songs of Adam and Eve, the poem does not need a “harp / To add more sweetness” (V.151–2). On the other hand, these angelic harps are very like the instruments in At a Solemn Musick. The narrative focuses more on the instrument itself than on the sounds it produces, again creating the effect of a painting by signaling the presence of music through the sight of harps and horns in the hands of angels. The harps and the “crowns inwove with amarant and gold” (III.352) serve almost identical decorative functions in the narrative.23 Here the true music is verbal, carmen, requiring little or no accompaniment of the cithara or the harp. The essential difference between words and music vanishes. By making verbal praise the central component of heavenly music, Milton hopes to aspire to sacred song without absorbing the more dubious and dangerous effects of practical music in the process. By the end of the passage, “my harp” has become almost the same for poet and for angels: a metonym for song, not an instrument producing charming symphonies. Describing song, the poem melts into the song it describes; but this song loses no music by being spoken rather than sung, just as it does not really matter whether Adam and Eve sing or “pronounce” their praises of the Creator (V.148). The angelic harps are the opposite of those to which, in “notes angelical,” Satan’s followers “sing … their own heroic deeds” (II. 547–9). The former first serve a pictorial, almost emblematic function, and then disappear easily into metaphor; the latter bring the metaphor of the epic poet as a singer to sharp and incongruous life, as we come to understand that the fallen angels are not chanting a story, but singing and playing a complex—and polyphonic—piece of music. There is, however, a distinct difference between the descriptions of angelic song offered by the fallen narrator and those offered in the voice of Raphael. The archangel dwells on sonic elements to a far greater degree, suggesting that, for unfallen hearers and an angelic speaker, there is no need to painstakingly emphasize

some deliberate ambiguity as to what is summary and what is quotation, [Milton] intimates that the hymns he presents are approximations only, and cannot be otherwise. We are certain of the shift to quotation only with the peroration of the second hymn, ‘Hail Son of God.’ At this point the Miltonic Bard suddenly and brilliantly exploits the ambiguity as he associates his own praises with those of the angelic choir, claiming their hymn as ‘my song’” (166). Leonard offers a modified reading of this passage, pointing out that the poet’s inclusion in the choir is only temporary (Naming in Paradise, 241–2). 23 They are also similarly allusive. See Revelation: “And I heard a voice from heaven, as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of a great thunder: and I heard the voice of harpers harping with their harps” (14.2).

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sense over sound.24 Though these descriptions still allude to Biblical passages, they elaborate freely and devote greater attention to instruments and sounds. The Creator returns to heaven to “the sound / Symphonious of ten thousand harps that tuned / Angelic harmonies: the earth, the air / Resounded” (VII.559–60; emphasis mine). On the seventh day, [T]he harp Had work and rested not, the solemn pipe, And dulcimer, and organs of sweet stop, All sounds on fret by string or golden wire Tempered soft tunings, intermixed with voice Choral or unison: of incense clouds Fuming from golden censers hid the Mount. Creation and the six days’ acts they sung, Great are thy works, Jehovah …. (596–602)25

The song continues for some time, as in Book III, although the leap from paraphrase to quotation occurs more quickly, directly, and obviously, between lines 601 and 602. Here, though, the instruments do not merely provide a charming prelude. Nor could this angelic celebration easily be painted. We are presented not with neat ranks of harp-holding seraphim, but with a complex sonic blend of various elements. Heaven rings with “all sounds” of numerous instruments—not merely harps, but dulcimers, organs, and pipes. And even though such instruments are authorized by the Psalms, Milton describes the angelic symphony as something more complex than voices and instruments praising in unison. The “tempered soft tunings, intermixed with voice” suggest sophisticated blending, even polyphony.26 For an account of the distinction between the narrative voice and the angelic voice, see Lewalski, Rhetoric of Literary Forms: “But whereas in Book Three the Miltonic Bard maintained some decorous ambiguity as to the exact language of the angelic hymns he reported, Raphael designates the creation hymns with clear markers and often quotes them at some length. Though still accommodated, these hymns derive authority from the Angel Bard and from the citation of biblical texts as themes” (166–7). Of course, the voice of Raphael still must be imagined by the poet. 25 The relevant section of Psalm 150 reads, “Praise him with the sound of the Trumpet: praise him with the psaltery and harp. Praise him with the timbrel and dance: praise him with stringed instruments, and organs. Praise him upon the loud cymbals: praise him upon the high sounding cymbals. Let every thing that hath breath praise the Lord” (3–6). See McColley, 214–15. 26 The distinction between “choral” and “unison” also indicates polyphony. Polyphony is suggested in the phrase “melodious part” in Book III—but merely suggested. See Regina M. Schwartz, Remembering and Repeating: Biblical Creation in “Paradise Lost” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) for a treatment of the conflict between the lushness of this angelic celebration as opposed to Milton’s condemnation of elaborate liturgical services in his prose. Schwartz ultimately finds the conflict “specious,” pointing out that before the Fall, there is no need to choose between “external and internal worship” (75–6). 24

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Folded into this description of music are the clouds of incense that conceal the mount. The soft tunings and the incense blend into one another through the synaesthesia appropriate to mortal apprehension of heavenly experience. The heavenly music, by implication, conceals even as it expresses, just as words are sometimes lost in earthly polyphony. Nevertheless, Raphael—or the poet—ensures that the essential message is not lost or omitted. Only once does Raphael describe angelic hymns in terms of sound only. This passage also reverses what John Carey describes (overall accurately) as Milton’s tendency to make sphere music vocal and verbal.27 As Raphael tells Adam and Eve of the origin of evil, a faint anxiety settles around the wonderful representation of the angelic song and dance celebrating the Father’s appointment of the Son as head of the angels: So spake th’ Omnipotent, and with his words All seemed well pleased; all seemed, but were not all. That day, as other solemn days, they spent In song and dance about the sacred hill, Mystical dance, which yonder starry sphere Of planets and of fixed in all her wheels Resembles nearest, mazes intricate, Eccentric, intervolved, yet regular Then most, when most irregular they seem, And in their motions harmony divine So smooths her charming tones, that God’s own ear Listens delighted. (V.616–27)

Instead of working by Biblical allusion, the passage recalls accounts of music from Milton’s earlier work. In the final lines, Raphael echoes Comus’s description of the Lady’s song, her notes “at every fall smoothing the raven down / Of darkness till it smiled” (251–2).28 This sensuous music is elevated to a previously unimaginable height—quite literally translated to the spheres—and makes God Himself smile. The angels’ elaborate movements—and, by association, their songs—resemble the motions of the musical spheres, and here the spheres do not make a verbal music; or if they do, Raphael sees no need to say so. He emphasizes sound: the harmony, the smooth and charming tones, the delighted response of the divine ear. In Raphael’s account, the perfect mathematical order and the sensuous loveliness of music are one, and both aspects are holy. Nevertheless, the joy of the passage is overshadowed by the terrible but incomplete division of “all” in line 617. The concept disintegrates further with each repetition of the word. This secret collapse of angelic unity—and possibly the first ever separation of semblance and reality—leads immediately into the cosmic dance, supposedly a demonstration of unity in variation. To all appearances, the angelic celebration is just as it has always been—but in truth, it is not the same. Carey, 248–9. See also the song of the nightingale in Il Penseroso, which “smooth[es] the rugged

27 28

brow of night” (58).

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One of those angels twisting and revolving in the dance, and singing in tones more beautiful than the music of the spheres, is Satan, his evil inextricably involved in these eccentric, angelic mazes. This first flaw in the music of Heaven, however, cannot be perceived by the senses—nor, indeed, by the intuition of the angels. When the Son prepares to cast the rebellious angels into Hell, he glances back at this earlier moment of dance and song as he promises future unity and concord in Heaven: Then shall thy saints unmixed, and from th’ impure Far separate, circling thy holy Mount Unfeignèd hallelujahs to thee sing, Hymns of high praise, and I among them chief. (VI.742–5)

These words point back to a moment when evil was mixed with good in the circling dance, and feigned hallelujahs were sung. “Soft tunings, intermixed with voice” (VII.600) will become a similar problem on earth after the fall. In the poem, these mixed and unmixed songs are represented differently. The language shifts to a more Biblical register. The “sacred hill” of the first passage becomes the “holy Mount”; the worshippers are pure “saints”; “mystical dance” and “charming tones” are replaced by “unfeigned hallelujahs … hymns of high praise.” The content of the hymns assumes a new importance. The angels were presumably singing hallelujahs and praises before—what else would they sing? But the fall of Satan and his crew creates a new need for specificity, as well as a need to distinguish between the feigned and the unfeigned. This close association between unfeigned expression and verbal clarity may strike us as peculiar. Clear words do not always express truth—far from it. Nevertheless, as we have seen, Reformed discourse insistently—if not entirely logically—associated music with surfaces and hypocrisy and words with inner truth and sincerity. In this connection, Protestant polemics drew on the early Christian association of music and theater. Quoting Jerome, William Prynne declared, 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.29

Arguments for heart rather than voice would seem to disallow audible prayer altogether—spoken or sung. For Prynne and his readers, however, the connection between music and the voice rested on a long-standing association between sound and surface and between word and inwardness. Such concerns undermined the 29 William Prynne, Histrio-mastix (London, 1633), 276. For “the separation between external and internal worship” after the fall as “one of the tragic signs of moral degeneration,” see Schwartz, 76. See also Chapter 1, 18–19, 33–4.

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medieval conception of the harmony of the universe as mathematics meaningful in itself, if inevitably degraded when expressed in the temporal form of sound. Milton shows us the very moment when a gap opened between harmony and meaning. When all songs are inevitably praises of God, their exact verbal content remains a matter of little importance. Raphael’s account glances back to a kind of primal song, hinting at both an original perfection and a dangerous impenetrability. The pure, mathematical clarity of the music can become complete opacity in an instant, once there is even a possibility of a division between surface and inner meaning. As we see in Satan’s speeches, the most dangerous deceptions arise from sounds that get in the way of sense, form that confuses content. Satan’s rhetoric is dangerous, but the evil in his words can be discovered through careful reasoning, and the memory of God’s commandment. The morality of the sounds of music, however, can only be judged from their context—a context that musical sounds infiltrate, blur, and even temporarily transcend. The content of the polyphonic epic sung in Hell is wrong, and the fact that the sound overwhelms the content does not redeem it. Nevertheless, the notes remain angelic. For Milton, the echoing of the unfallen world in musical sounds becomes an opportunity as well as a problem, given the goals of this particular poem. Mazes of Sound: Music in Fallen and Unfallen Gardens The movements of the spheres—“regular / Then most, when most irregular they seem”—are supposedly the opposite of the serpent’s movements towards the tree: “He leading swiftly rolled / In tangles, and made intricate seem straight” (IX.631–3). Nevertheless, Satan is “intervolved” in both the serpentine tangles and the angelic dance that the spheres resemble. The twisting of the dance and the twisting of the serpent hide, at least temporarily, the same problem. The movements of all creation “declare [God’s] goodness beyond thought, and power divine” (V.158–9), but for the first time in Heaven (in the angelic dance), and the first time on earth (in the rolling of the possessed serpent), these movements cease to make this declaration. Yet there is no way to tell that this is the case from the motions and music alone. The movements of the serpent are very like the movements of the stars. Both roll in labyrinths, in circling surging mazes. That word “rolled,” used of the “mazy error” of the rivers, and used repeatedly of the serpent, makes a triumphant appearance in Raphael’s description of the nearly completed creation, ready for God’s crowning achievement, man. The last creature Raphael describes before this moment is the serpent: to thee Not noxious, but obedient at thy call. Now heav’n in all her glory shone, and rolled Her motions, as the great First Mover’s hand First wheeled their course; earth in her rich attire Consummate lovely smiled …. (VII.497–512; emphasis mine)

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Before the fall, there was no distinction between spheres and snakes. All nature, simply in itself, sang hymns to God. After the fall, such musical movements become opaque and fail to transmit, with every breath, the old meaning as before. Something evil has become inextricably involved with the windings and wanderings. In Book X, the narrator firmly associates the movements of snakes not with the cosmic dance and harmony divine, but with harsh and inarticulate noise: “dreadful was the din / Of hissing through the hall, thick swarming now / With complicated monsters” (X.521–3). This hissing, on one level, is perfectly meaningful, although it conveys God’s meaning—mockery and scorn—and not the intended meaning of the devils. Lovely, harmonious sounds cannot convey irony in a similar fashion. Nevertheless, the poem itself is deeply implicated in such ambiguous sounds and movements. A number of critics have compared Milton’s own language to his description of the movements of the spheres, “Eccentric, intervolv’d, yet regular / Then most, when most irregular they seem.”30 This link extends almost inevitably to a comparison of the poem and the sounds of the spheres—and then, just as inevitably, to a comparison of the poem and the twisting movements of the serpent, the “long-drawn out” singing of the nightingale. There is, in fact, something implicitly musical about Satan’s serpentine disguise and the language used to describe it. When Raphael tells of the creation of the insects and worms, he refers to them as “not all / Minims of nature; some of serpent kind / Wondrous in length and corpulence involved” (VII.481–3). “Minim” indicates the smallest possible form of animal life; but the term can also refer to the value of a musical note—or the downstroke of a pen.31 If a worm is a minim, then a snake is a song (or piece of writing) “wondrous in length.” Music, serpentine, winds its way into the texture of the poem, in veins of beautiful sound opaque to analysis, irreducible in meaning, with the potential to melt and dissolve—or at least suspend—the narrative framework. The music must be contained by the narrative, but this project is placed in jeopardy by the extent to which the narrative itself operates on the musical level of sound, and the skill and power with which the poetry describes the music that it must contain. As the episode of the Dorian marching music reminds us, music—particularly intricate, rolling, winding music—casts a spell of forgetfulness. The association surfaces in the poet’s account of how “Lethe the river of oblivion rolls / Her wat’ry Labyrinth, whereof who drinks / Forwith his former state and being forgets / Forgets both joy and grief, pleasure and pain” (II.583–6). The fallen angels long “to reach / 30 Ricks, 31. McColley comes to a similar conclusion about the same passage: “The syntactical energy of the whole passage pours into ‘Listens,’ which is what not only God’s ear but also the reader’s does, not only to that day’s dance but to the whole poem” (208). See also G. Wilson Knight, The Burning Oracle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939), 97. 31 For an example of this usage, see Spenser, The Faerie Queene: “Pardon thy shepheard, mongst so many layes, / As he hath sung of thee in all his dayes, / To make one minime of thy poore handmayd” (VI.x.28).

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The tempting stream, with one small drop to lose / In sweet forgetfulness all pain and woe … But Fate withstands” (II.606–10). In the words of the Nativity Ode, wisest fate says no. This sweet forgetfulness and obliteration of past and future is temporarily experienced, however, in the Dorian mode of the march and in the polyphonic epic that suspends Hell. Ironically, the poet who makes such careful distinctions between carmen and cithara, verbal angelic hymns and nonverbal hellish music, has received considerable disapprobation for what a number of critics have perceived as an inveterate habit of sacrificing sense to sound. T.S. Eliot gave a particularly disapproving account of Milton’s “rhetorical style,” deprecating the “hypertrophy of the auditory imagination at the expense of the visual and tactile, so that the inner meaning is separated from the surface.” This separation requires anyone seeking a full experience of the poem to read it twice, “first solely for the sound, and second for the sense,” as the “full beauty of [Milton’s] long periods can hardly be enjoyed while we are wrestling with the meaning as well; and for the pleasure of the ear the meaning is hardly necessary.”32 In a similar vein, F.R. Leavis describes this language as “incantatory, remote from speech,” dominated by “a concern for mellifluousness— for liquid sequences and a pleasing opening and closing of the vowels.” He refers dismissively to “that sustained impressiveness, that booming swell, which becomes so intolerable.”33 In the words of Christopher Ricks, “[t]he basic point of the antiMiltonists … is simply that Milton’s poetry doesn’t mean very much, that the verbal music thrives at the expense of—instead of in harmony with—any precise relevance.”34 Ricks, and numerous other scholars, have convincingly responded to these criticisms long ago; but the reactions of Eliot, Leavis, et al. still contain a grain of truth. It is all too easy for the reader of Milton to be swept up in the rolling sounds of a passage, and to momentarily lose track of what is actually going on. How much of this effect does the poet implicitly acknowledge and use? Eliot complains that he “cannot feel that [his] appreciation of Milton leads anywhere outside of the mazes of sound.”35 Milton himself thinks of sound in terms of mazes: the winding of the melting voice in L’Allegro; the organ music of Jubal, whose “volant touch / Instinct through all proportions low and high / Fled and pursued transverse the resonant fugue” (XI.561–3). Milton anticipates these criticisms, but risks them nonetheless. The poet uses the effect described by Eliot as a technique to create semblance of worth not substance, impressive but illogical thundering on the part of Satan and his fellow devils. But according to Samuel Johnson, and to Eliot, who decidedly seconds his opinion, there is an element of Babel in the language of the entire poem—not just in Satan’s language: “Of [Milton] at last may be said what Jonson 32 T.S. Eliot, “Milton I,” in On Poetry and Poets (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1969), 163. 33 F.R. Leavis, Revaluation: Tradition & Development in English Poetry (London: Chatto and Windus, 1969), 57–8. 34 Ricks, 7. 35 Eliot, “Milton I,” 163.

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said of Spenser, that he wrote no language, but has formed what Butler called a Babylonish dialect.”36 In a more positive vein, Anne Ferry points out that the exotic names, “which occur in such profusion in the narrator’s similes, reflect the shattering of unity, like the proliferation of tongues in the story of Babel.” Nevertheless, “these particular names have their own beauty—Vallombrosa, Etruria, Fesole, Fontarabbia.”37 The poem delights in euphonious words emerging from the shattered primal language, words euphonious partly through their exoticism, their origin in a different world, a different language. The original, singular, pure language could hardly have been so rich with prismatic possibilities before being broken. Yet Milton’s epic repeatedly insists that the unfallen world was characterized by incomparable sonic richness. All this prelapsarian music sounds in the presence of God, like the voice of Leonora Baroni; and God, moving imperceptibly, speaks through it. Paradise is full of music, sometimes unheard, often mysterious. The first humans do not necessarily think of song solely in terms of words. Adam reminds Eve of the “[m]illions of spiritual Creatures … / Unseen” who raise Celestial voices to the midnight air, Sole, or responsive each to other’s note Singing their great Creator: oft in bands While they keep watch, or nightly rounding walk With Heav’nly touch of instrumental sounds In full harmonic number joined, their songs Divide the night, and lift our thoughts to Heaven. (IV.677–88)

These singers may be angels—or they may be something else. Once again, the description focuses on notes, on “Heav’nly touch of instrumental sounds” and the delicate musical puns of “rounding” and “divide.”38 (Both terms imply polyphony.) 36 Quoted in Eliot, “Milton II,” in On Poetry and Poets, 175. Eliot finds Johnson’s criticism “substantially true,” and adds that Milton’s style is not concerned with “direct communication of meaning.” See also A. Bartlett Giamatti, The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), on the indirect and subversive “satanic style” (298). Giamatti insists that his analysis of this aspect of Milton’s style is in no way meant to suggest that Milton was “of the devil’s party,” but the difference between what a poem describes and represents, and what it does, can be difficult to establish and maintain. 37 Ferry, 80. 38 See Leonard, Naming in Paradise, 259. Leonard goes on to argue that these lines “have something of the wonder and mystery” of the account of the “Faerie Elves,” and compares Adam’s words to Caliban’s speech in The Tempest (259–60). The association between mystery and the “description of sounds and voices” is suggestive. Voices are more wonderful when we do not know what they are saying. See also G. Wilson Knight, for whom these unseen singers “are of a different and more convincing order than Milton’s usual angels” (Burning Oracle, 102). Such difference seems to have something to do with Leonard’s “wonder and mystery.”

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The double meaning of “division” does not pull in two directions, since the only division known in the unfallen world is division in the musical sense of descant, counterpoint, and ornaments to melody, all of which contribute to a greater and more pleasing whole.39 Some of Milton’s contemporaries and predecessors found musical divisions objectionable for moral reasons.40 While Spenser’s Redcrosse Knight recovers in the House of Pride, “Most heauenly melody / About the bed sweet musicke did diuide” (1.v.16–17). The context marks the “heauenly” as clearly ironic, and the ominous connotations of “divide” predominate. In Milton’s Eden, heavenly music can “divide,” and no moral connotations are present in the word. Adam and Eve are quite certain that the mysterious voices are “singing their great Creator.” The humans’ ability to speak places them above the speechless creatures; but these mysterious midnight singers—perhaps even higher beings— can be perceived in terms of sound alone. In Adam and Eve’s morning hymn, and in the general representation of Paradise, Milton makes sense of Boethius’s problematic inclusion of both the literal music of the spheres and the metaphorical harmony of the elements in the category of world music, just as he implicitly corrects Boethius’ inclusion of the change of the four seasons. (The latter is a post-Fall development, and so cannot be “harmonious.”)41 All this music of creation is delicately suspended just between the literal and the metaphorical. After a rather laconic appeal to the planets “that move / In mystic dance not without song,” Adam and Eve address Air, and ye elements the eldest birth Of nature’s womb, that in quaternion run Perpetual circle multiform; and mix And nourish all things, let your ceaseless change Vary to our great Maker still new praise. (V.180–84)

Importantly, the musicality of the elements is implicit, just as the song of the planets is mentioned almost as an afterthought. A comparison with Du Bartas’s account of the musical cosmos in Divine Weeks and Works, an important influence on Milton’s account of the creation, proves illuminating. Du Bartas describes the elements and seasons as “Counter-Tunes” to “the heav’ns harmonious whirling wheeles”: 39 See OED, “Division,” 7a: “The execution of a rapid melodic passage, originally conceived as the dividing of each of a succession of long notes into several short ones; such a passage itself, a florid phrase or piece of melody; esp. as a variation on, or accompaniment to, a theme or ‘plain song.’” 40 In A Discourse of Civill Life (1606), ed. Thomas E. Wright (Northridge: San Fernando Valley State College, 1970), Lodowick Bryskett complains of “warbling divisions” (113). 41 James Hutton, “Some English Poems in Praise of Music,” English Miscellany 2 (1950): 53.

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For Melancholie, Winter, Earth below Beare aye the Base; deepe, hollow, sad, and slow: Pale Plegme, moist Autumne, Water moistly-cold The Plommet-like-smooth-sliding Tennor hold: Hot-humide Blood, the Spring, transparent Aire, The Maze-like Meane, that turns and wends so faire: Curst Choler, Sommer, and hot-thirsty Fire, Th’high warbling Treble, loudest in the Quire.42

Du Bartas makes the elements musical, but this music is clearly figurative. The figure is “true” in that nature is indeed harmonious; but Fire, for instance, does not literally warble. By downplaying the musicality of Eden, Milton blurs the literal and the figurative. The elements do vary in ceaseless change, so the reader is not primed to understand the phrase metaphorically. The other meaning of “change” as a variation or modulation in music (OED n., 4c) slips in almost unnoticed, reinforced by “vary.” In this context, “mix” takes on the musical connotations it frequently suggests in Milton.43 Similarly, the mists are urged to praise God “rising or falling” (191). Such language delicately renders the elements and exhalations little less literally musical than fountains “that warble … / Melodious murmurs” (V.195–6). Creation celebrates and praises simply in being what it is; and this celebration is inherently harmonious in a very concrete sense. There is no real distinction in this world between literal and metaphoric music. The reader is spared the impossible task of imagining a cosmos in which earth, air, water, and fire are ceaselessly engaged in a sort of barber-shop quartet. At the same time, the blurring of literal and figurative opens the possibility of a different kind of perception, another sense that can perceive the harmony of God’s creation in a direct and sensuous way. The potential dangers of this kind of musical world (as opposed to a static and abstractly “harmonious” one) are implicit in “change”—a heavily loaded word in Paradise Lost. Shortly after this hymn, God reminds Raphael of man’s mutable will (237). The humans in Eden live this ceaseless, nonverbal music, and exist in a harmony that is never purely figurative. Adam and Eve sing or pronounce—the latter mode of praise seems no less musical than the former—but the world around them is full of wordless music, voiced and voiceless. The humans themselves are part of this music in all their words, all their actions. One of the great achievements of Paradise Lost is to make this music more than metaphoric. Milton’s language breathes the “fair music that all creatures made” (Solemn Musick, 21) into life. The breezes in Paradise are musical airs; nature plays virgin fancies; and Adam and Eve live in wedded harmony that reaches beyond the figurative. As Adam reminds his Creator, “Among unequals what society / Can sort, what harmony or true delight? / Which must be mutual, in proportion due / Giv’n and received” (VIII.384–6). 42 Bartas: His Devine Weekes and Works (1605), trans. Joshua Sylvester, facsim. edn (Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1965), 494. 43 See At a Solemn Musick: “Wed your divine sounds, and mixed power employ” (3); and “soft tunings, intermixed with voice” (PL.VII.598).

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“Harmony” here means more than order, rightness, and a proper balance of affection and respect. This incursion of the literal on the figurative is the wonder and the danger of Paradise. Proper “harmony,” according to the ideology of the time, required the wife’s subordination to the husband; but Adam doesn’t quite see it this way—partly because the harmony that he experiences is not a philosophical abstraction. The harmony in which Adam and Eve live possesses all the sensuous sweetness and perfect proportions of literal music; but their relationship is also a harmony that unfolds in time, in “ceaseless change” as the two grow. There is always the danger that they may lose proportion, or that they may become too rapt in the sweetness of the harmony to pay proper attention to the rest of the world and to their place in it. This second danger is far more acute for Adam, as there is also an element in their marriage of the “wedding” of air and verse, melos and logos.44 Eve with her “wanton ringlets” waving “as the vine curls her tendrils” (IV.306–7) is repeatedly associated with the labyrinthine growth of nature, who “wantoned as in her prime, and played at will / Her virgin fancies.” Sound, particularly musical sound, was frequently imagined as “curlings of the ayre.”45 In humanist and religious contexts, music is regularly described as the adornment, the surface, the body—and, of course, the feminine.46 Adam feels that his “graceful” wife was given “too much of ornament, in outward show / Elaborate, of inward less exact” (VIII.600, 537–9).47 44 For a treatment of Adam as Logos and Eve as Melos, see Eleanor Cook, “Melos versus Logos, or Why Doesn’t God Sing: Some Thoughts on Milton’s Wisdom,” in Re-Membering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions, ed. Mary Nyquist and Margaret Ferguson (New York: Methuen, 1987), 204. 45 Referring to Thomas Wright’s earlier work on the passions, Humphrey Sydenham addresses the familiar question of how “dispositions of sounds and voices, the tremblings, vibrations, and artificiall curlings of the ayre … so strangely set passions aloft” (Sermons upon Solemne Occasions [London, 1637], 20; emphasis mine). Does this language refer to elaboration of the melodic line of the song (the air) or the operations of sound itself, which Sydenham, again quoting Wright, goes on to describe as “nothing else but an artificiall shaking and quavering of the ayre” (21)? In the latter account, the line between the “natural” and the “artificial” breaks down rather quickly. Wright, in fact, describes the “substance of music” as “the shaking or artificiall crispling of the aire” (The Passions of the Minde in Generall [London, 1604], 167). He later characterizes “sound itself” as “nothing else but a certaine artificiall shaking, crispling, or tickling of the ayre (like as we see in the water crispled, when it is calme, and a sweet gale of wind ruffleth it a little; or when we cast a stone into a calme water, we may perceiue diuers warbling naturall circles)” (170). 46 See Linda Phyllis Austern, “‘Alluring the Auditorie to Effeminacie’: Music and the Idea of the Feminine in Early Modern England,” Music and Letters 74 (1993): 343–54; and “‘Sing Againe Syren’: The Female Musician and Sexual Enchantment in Elizabethan Life and Literature,” Renaissance Quarterly 42 (1989): 420–48. 47 In the Masque, Echo will “give resounding grace to all heav’n’s harmonies” (243) as the Lady plays delicately on the spiritual and musical meanings of “grace.” In Adam’s speech, the possible musical meaning is almost if not entirely submerged; only the general atmosphere of Paradise, where graceful movement and graceful sounds are one—as in the trembling leaves attuned by airs—brings the musical meaning insistently to life.

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This account of Eve recalls common complaints about music “that by varietie of tunes, and warbling divisions, confounds the words and sentences, and yeeldeth onely a delight to the exterior sense, and no fruit to the mind.”48 Such polemics predictably reiterate Augustine’s warning in Confessions: “And yet, by the way let us take heed, whilst wee too much indulge this outward modulation, wee are not more transported with the melody of the Tune than the sense of the Psalme; the singing, than the matter that is sung.”49 Music characterized by “over-carving and mincing of the ayre either by ostentation or curiositie of Art, lulls too much the outward sense, and leaves the spirituall faculties untouch’d.”50 Eve, like accompanying music, should not be considered “in herself complete” (VIII.548). Milton draws upon these commonplaces about words and music in his depiction of Adam and Eve; but he complicates the issue. Adam’s reply to Raphael suggests that the problem lies not in what we might call Eve’s excessive musicality, but rather in the “harmony” between the two humans: it is this harmony that overcomes Adam. He insists that he is not conquered by sensuality in his contact with Eve. “Her outside formed so fair” does not delight him nearly so much as those graceful acts, Those thousand decencies that daily flow From all her words and actions, mixed with love And sweet compliance, which declare unfeigned Union of mind, or in us both one soul; Harmony to behold in wedded pair More grateful than harmonious sound to the ear. (VIII.596, 600–606)

Eve’s excessive attractiveness is a part of the harmony—indeed, due to the harmony, just as the best kind of song should transport and awaken rapture through its harmonious sound. Gretchen Finney quotes this passage to support her contention that by the time of Paradise Lost, music no longer holds such a prominent place or power in Milton’s thought, arguing, “Love is music of a higher order than audible sound.”51 I would say, rather, that in Paradise love is a living, modulating harmony that brings with it all the dangerous powers of audible harmonious sound, and this is what makes it worthy of Paradise, but also in danger of losing Paradise and itself in the process. The Fall irrevocably splits literal and figurative harmony apart. But first the catastrophic event becomes a “cadence” instead of a faltering measure. The discord falls back into the divine plan.

50 51 48 49

Bryskett, 113. Sydenham, Sermons upon Solemne Occasions, 25. Sydenham, Sermons upon Solemne Occasions, 23. Finney, 171.

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Now was the sun in western cadence low From noon, and gentle airs due at their hour To fan the earth now walked, and usher in The ev’ning cool when he from wrath more cool Came the mild Judge and Intercessor both To sentence man: the voice of God they heard Now walking in the garden, by soft winds Brought to their ears, while day declined …. (X.92–9)

In A Plain and Easy Introduction to Practical Music, Thomas Morley expresses the common wisdom of generations of musicians on the use of discord: “Discords mingled with concords not only are tolerable but make the descant more pleasing if they be well taken; moreover there is no coming to a close, specially with a cadence, without a discord.”52 The descent of the Son to judge mankind reintegrates the Fall into the harmony of God’s plan. But as the following violent separation of literal and metaphorical music makes clear, the sin of Adam and Eve cannot be viewed purely in the light of a fortunate fall. After the Fall, the music of the spheres ceases to exist. In the changed structure of creation, the heavenly bodies shed malignant influence instead of rolling in perfect harmony with the earth.53 As a replacement, the angels teach the thunder “when to roll / With terror through the dark aerial hall” (X.667–8). This terrible noise, however, is itself a kind of music: it is the true harmony of Justice, prefiguring the last trump and the day of judgment. The last heavenly music that we hear in the poem is the “trumpet, heard in Oreb since perhaps / When God descended, and perhaps once more / To sound at general doom” (XI.74–6). Before creation can be fully re-tuned, “the wakeful trump of doom must thunder through the deep” (Nativity Ode, 156). After the Fall, true harmony is hidden. In language which parodies the words of love between Adam and Eve, Sin says that she immediately felt Satan’s victory in her heart, “which by a secret harmony / Still moves with thine, joined in connection sweet” (358–9); and so she journeys with Death to their new kingdom.54 Thomas Morley, A Plain and Easy Introduction to Practical Music (1597), ed. R. Alec Harman (London: Dent, 1952), 145. 53 See William Poole, Milton and the Idea of the Fall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005): “For Milton … the Fall not only damaged our ability to describe [the world], but it cracked the frame of the cosmos. To this extent, no work embodies a more devastating, literally catastrophic vision of the Fall [than Paradise Lost]” (180). 54 In Dante and Milton: The “Commedia” and “Paradise Lost” (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966), Irene Samuel suggests the influence of Dante’s Siren in Purgatorio on Milton’s portrayal of Sin: both figures initially alarm, but then seduce (108). The attraction is narcissistic—implicitly so in Dante, explicitly so in Milton: “Thyself in me thy perfect image viewing / Becam’st enamoured” (PL.II. 764–5). Suggestively, the alarmed angels first perceive Sin as a “sign / Portentous,” but are then “with attractive graces won” (760–62). The problem seems to arrive when they cease to perceive Sin as a sign, and yield instead to her “graces.” 52

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After the transformation of the devils into snakes, however, God provides a different explanation for the prompt arrival of Sin and Death on the earthly scene: “I called and drew them thither / My Hell-hounds” (X.629–30). The “secret harmony” that calls Sin from Hell to Earth initially seems a horrible parody of music and order; but it turns out that Sin and Death and Discord, however unwillingly or unwittingly, are being drawn into God’s plan, and are part of another, still more secret harmony. This harmony, however, is purely figurative, unlike that before the Fall, when there was no clear distinction between figurative and literal harmony. Once the devils are transformed into speechless serpents, we understand that the sweet singing voices that accompanied the rise of the demonic citadel indicated a loss of meaning, soon to become an equally inarticulate hissing. The devils’ own intended meaning is taken away, but in a manner that makes the real meaning of everything clear. For God’s meaning to be upheld, the sweet voices in Hell must become hisses. But earthly music presents a continuing problem. Jubal’s organ possesses all the wonder of sound that was transformed into hissing in Hell. Adam is enthralled, and so are we. Michael shows him tents whence the sound Of instruments that made melodious chime Was heard, of harp and organ; and who moved Their stops and chords was seen: his volant touch Instinct through all proportions low and high Fled and pursued transverse the resonant fugue. In other part stood one who at the forge Labouring, two massy clods of iron and brass Had melted …. (XI.558–65)

This account recalls the sphere music imagined by the singer of the Nativity Ode—“And let your silver chime / Move in melodious time; / And let the base of heav’n’s deep organ blow” (128–30)—as well as the winding music of L’Allegro. Indeed, Jubal’s music combines the “pealing organ” of Il Penseroso with the maze-threading notes of L’Allegro. The epic narrator’s account of Jubal’s organ, however, contains no words like “soft” or “wanton” or “giddy” to set off alarm bells. To us, if not to Adam, the women “richly gay / In gems and wanton dress” (XI.582–3) are clearly bad news, but there is nothing in the description of the fugue to arouse a similar distrust. The language ceases to give us the hints that it should—and does, in the rest of the scene. Milton’s description of this tainted music has proved so powerfully attractive that some commentators have remained undeterred by Michael’s unequivocal condemnation. Nan Cooke Carpenter, blithely ignoring the information that the music proceeds from “the tents / Of wickedness” (607–8), suggests that the anachronism of the organ “makes all the more significant Milton’s praise of the organ and the fugue, and

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shows his use of the organ as a symbol of divine music in general.”55 In the fallen world of Paradise Lost, even this symbol of divine concord produces dangerous sounds. As in the polyphonic epic of the fallen angels, the problem of fallen music rises from the paradox that music cannot be fallen—or rather, one cannot possibly distinguish if it is fallen or not, save by context. This particular context emphasizes that music has lost any inherent meaning it may have formerly possessed. The musician plays near one who works at a forge, melting metals from the veins of earth, draining “liquid ore” into “fit moulds” (XI.564–73). As John Carey points out, “Jubal’s organ, together with his brother Tubalcain’s metal-smelting … aligns him with the devils in hell, whose contrivance for metal-smelting is compared to the pipes and soundboard of an organ.”56 These two episodes are two vertices of a triangle, and the third vertex is the tower of Babel, a structure built on a plain “wherein a black bituminous gurge / Boils out from underground, the mouth of Hell” (XII.41–4).57 On a symbolic level, this plain is the same place as the “spacious plain” where the “tents / Of wickedness” are situated (XI.556, 607–8). The proximity of the literal organ and the forge may recall Satan’s insidious assault on the dreaming Eve, “assaying by his devilish art to reach / The organs of her Fancy, and with them forge / Illusions as he list, phantasms and dreams” (IV.800–803). The implicitly musical art of forging illusions, dreams, and fantasies, is finally and irrevocably condemned. The wordless music accompanying the rise of Pandaemonium, when reenacted in human history, becomes a punishment like that imposed upon the devils: divine derision—a “hideous gabble,” “a jangling noise of words unknown” (XII.55–6). Out of tune with heaven, the language of the builders can be nothing else. But the sound of the organ remains unnerving—not clearly meaningless, not clearly out of tune, wondrous in proportionate and melodious sound. We know that the music, produced by the children of Cain, is figuratively discordant; but the literal and figurative aspects of the sound do not match. In response to the sound, we must close our ears and say, “These are the tents of wickedness.” Potentially, even the divine and wonderful music of the church-organ in Il Penseroso becomes retroactively dangerous. Moreover, the musical description that the poet uses to evoke the sounds of both these organs must be abandoned. It works too well; the poetry comes too close to echoing a series of wonderful and harmonious sounds in which the voice of God no longer moves imperceptibly or speaks.

Carpenter, “The Place of Music in L’Allegro and Il Penseroso,” University of Toronto Quarterly 22 (1953): 362. 56 Carey, 231. See also Fish, 296–8; Macdonald, 168. 57 Fish notices that the Babel episode involves the same images of digging for “materials crude” and “the application of fire” as in the Pandemonium, Tubal-Cain, and invention of gunpowder episodes (299), but does not extend this observation to the sounds associated with all these episodes. 55

Conclusion: Spirits of Another Sort; or, Hymning and Humming “Hell is empty,” cries Ferdinand, leaping from the storm-tossed ship, “and all the devils are here” (1.2.215–16). The prince is mistaken, deceived by Ariel’s demonic playacting, his magical stage tricks and sound effects of “fire and cracks / Of sulphurous roaring” (1.2.215–16). In Paradise Regained, however, the devils are here. Enabled by the Fall of man to roam the earth, these demonic spirits are also actors: but instead of benevolent aerial spirits pretending to be devils, they are devils pretending to be benevolent aerial spirits. They remain partly self-deceived as to their true nature. Nevertheless, even as Satan attempts to separate the demons from Hell, he links their present airy rule with their infernal origins: “O ancient Powers of air and this wide world, / For much more willingly I mention air, / This our old conquest, than remember Hell / Our hated habitation” (I.44–7). As the poem progresses, these creatures—whom Satan grandiloquently and shiftily addresses as “Princes, Heaven’s ancient sons, ethereal Thrones, / Demonian Spirits now, from the element / Each of his reign allotted, rightlier called, / Powers of fire, air, water, and earth beneath” (II.121–4)—cast darker and darker shadows upon Ariel. He too is able “to fly, / To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride / On the curled clouds” (1.2.190–93), and is finally set free “to the elements” (5.1.321–2). Is Ferdinand mistaken after all? “These our actors,” Prospero explains, “were all spirits, and / Are melted into air, into thin air” (4.1.148–50)—but Satan’s airy actors will not melt into the air, although they will be banished at the Last Judgment. The strength of the Lady of the Masque in the face of “calling shapes, and beck’ning shadows dire, / And airy tongues that syllable men’s names / On sands, and shores, and desert wildernesses” (207–9) anticipates Jesus’ similar resolution in his own “desert wilderness.” The mysterious “airy tongues,” however, become distinctly fiendish in Paradise Regained. In the brief epic, both the sonic aspects of music and the world of The Tempest appear in purely negative contexts. Seeking to tempt Jesus with food, Satan provides an elaborate banquet in the wilderness, much like that provided by Ariel for the shipwrecked nobles upon the desert isle. The feast appears to the sound of “harmonious airs …. Of chiming strings, or charming pipes, and winds / Of gentlest gale Arabian odours fanned” (II.362–4). Winds and musical airs blend together; and Satan introduces the servitors as “Spirits of air, and woods, and springs, / Thy gentle ministers” (II.374–5). These are demonic actors, playing elemental spirits acting out charming and musical masques. Satan has selected for his purpose a band “[o]f Spirits likest to himself in guile / To be at hand and at his beck appear, / If cause were to unfold some active scene / Of various persons each to know his part” (II.236–40). Nevertheless, these demons emerge

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as rather pathetic: they produce no effect on their intended audience. The ultimate disappearance of the tempting feast, “[w]ith sound of Harpies’ wings, and talons heard” (II.401–3), so gratifyingly effective in The Tempest, is a gesture of petty frustration on Satan’s part, and does not cause Jesus to so much as bat an eyelid. In a continuation of this pattern, Satan tries to frighten Jesus with a great tempest. A peaceful and musical morning “still[s] the roar / Of thunder,” and lays “the winds, / And grisly specters, which the Fiend had raised, / To tempt the Son of God with terrors dire” (IV.428–31); nevertheless, the Devil is just as present in this new calm as he was present in the storm: [T]he birds Who all things now behold more fresh and green, After a night of storm so ruinous, Cleared up their choicest notes in bush and spray To gratulate the sweet return of morn; Nor yet amidst this joy and brightest morn Was absent, after all his mischief done, The Prince of Darkness …. (IV.426–41)

Satan patronizingly assures the unperturbed Jesus, as Prospero assures the exceedingly perturbed Miranda, that “the rack / As earth and sky would mingle” was really “harmless” (IV.452, 458). (Although unlike Prospero, he does not admit to having caused the storm.) Satan then goes on to suggest darkly that the tempest may have been “a sure foregoing sign” threatening ill to the Son (IV.483). He seeks to manipulate Jesus as Ariel manipulates the shipwrecked lords—first terrifying them with the storm; then moving to reassure them with clear weather; and then convincing them that the storm, which had not in fact harmed them, was a terrible sign, indicating their crime and threatening horrors to come. After this announcement, the storm assumes new meaning, at least to Alonso: “Methought the billows spoke and told me of it, / The winds did sing it to me …” (3.3.96–9). Jesus remains unimpressed. Throughout the poem, Satan is implicitly associated with birdsong: he performs the temptation of the banquet in “a pleasant grove, / With chant of tuneful birds resounding loud” (II.289–90). Furthermore, only the Devil describes music in Paradise Regained. Praising the “arts / and eloquence” of the Classical world, Satan introduces Greek philosophy and poetry in terms of beguilingly lovely sounds: See there the olive grove of Academe, Plato’s retirement, where the Attic bird Trills her thick-warbled notes the summer long; There flow’ry hill Hymettus with the sound Of bees’ industrious murmuring oft invites To studious musing; there Ilissus rolls His whispering stream …. (IV.244–50; emphasis mine)

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The effects of the passage work subtly against the action it purports to be describing. While Satan insists that the industrious bees inspire the students to similar industry, the long summer, the murmuring bees, and the whispering stream seem soporific rather than invigorating. An earlier passage at the opening of Book 4 should prepare the reader for Satan’s strategy. The narrator compares the tempter’s behavior to the way “a swarm of flies in vintage-time, / About the wine-press where sweet must is poured, / Beat off, returns as oft with humming sound” (15–17). This “humming sound”—in the terms of the simile, Satan’s empty but persistent temptation—rises to the surface in the account of Athens, not as a vain buzzing but as a seductive, even inspiring murmuring. The simile should have reminded us, however, that Satan is Lord of the Flies, and that his words are as ineffectual as the small noises of insects. Jesus, in his turn, is not associated with “sweet music”—the common phrase that for an instant we seem about to read—but “sweet must,” wine-press and vine, images evoking miracles and sacrifice. Nevertheless, there is something dangerous about the humming insect simile—as we realize when Satan takes it up with such enthusiasm in the Athens passage, and so easily turns its language to his own purposes. For one indeterminate moment, as the passage moves from “sweet must” to humming sounds, “must” almost reads as “music,” and the distinction between this illusory music and the humming of the flies collapses. In Satan’s description of Athens, it is the word “musing” which, especially in this rich soundscape, almost becomes “music.” Philosophical thought imitates the murmur of the bees still more closely than in the industriousness of the actors involved. A slippage in sound creates this momentary effect: the sonic elements of the poem’s language half-refer to a music that is, in fact, not there. Here poetic “music” and the literal music referred to or described in the poetry fall into an intimate and reciprocal relationship. The sound of “musing” almost refers to music, even as the music actually described in the passage—nightingale, murmuring bees, whispering stream—has invited us to misread “music” for “musing” in the first place. This passage describes not only classical art but also, metonymically, all nonBiblical poetry—including, perhaps, some of Milton’s own. Satan’s account of Athens particularly recalls the section in Il Penseroso where the speaker imagines falling asleep to the singing of the bee and a consort of “waters murmuring,” and waking to mysterious sweet music (141–54). A glance at this passage illuminates Satan’s deception—such sounds as those he describes lead to sleep, not to rigorous mental activity. But is Satan simply misusing the language of Il Penseroso? Or is there something about the earlier poem that allows or even invites such mistreatment? The speaker in the early poem shifts gears after this very passage, adding, “But let my due feet never fail / To walk the studious cloister’s pale” (155–6). In Il Penseroso, religious devotion and studious industry do not seem entirely incompatible with sleepy natural murmurings and mysterious spirit music. In Paradise Regained, the situation has changed.

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Satan also provides sonic reasons for his own desire to speak with Jesus: Hard are the ways of truth, and rough to walk, Smooth on the tongue discoursed, pleasing to th’ear, And tuneable as sylvan pipe or song; What wonder then if I delight to hear Her dictates from thy mouth? Most men admire Virtue, who follow not her lore: permit me To hear thee when I come (since no man comes) And talk at least, though I despair to attain. (I.478–85)

Although Satan finds it impossible to be virtuous himself, he claims to find pleasure in the virtuous words and behavior of others. Virtuous words are not pleasing to his mind or soul, of course, only to his ears: he considers truth’s “dictates” a kind of delightful musical performance. (In a similar vein, he describes Socrates as one “from whose mouth issued forth / Mellifluous streams” [IV.276–7].) The Son, naturally, is unimpressed by this claim; but a focus on sound at the expense of sense is a device that Satan will continue to employ throughout the poem—far more explicitly than in Paradise Lost. Jesus repeatedly dismisses this strategy, finally turning the device against Satan by revealing that all the Devil’s words and actions are simply empty noise. In response to Satan’s tempest, the Son declares: Me worse than wet thou find’st not; other harm Those terrors which thou speak’st of, did me none; I never feared they could, though noising loud And threatening nigh; what they can do as signs Betok’ning, or ill boding, I contemn As false portents, not sent from God, but thee. (IV.486–91)

Like Prospero, Satan can send storms, but unlike Prospero, he cannot terrify his enemy into thinking that the storm is a sign of divine condemnation or future horror. The thunder and winds do not speak or sing any message to Christ. Satan’s noises are incapable of signifying: they cannot be read as signs, nor do they carry any freight of meaning. Paradise Regained consistently undermines Satan’s sonic temptations in this way, encapsulating the strategy in Satan’s own evocation of “Babylon the wonder of all tongues” (III.280). The association between Babylon and Babel makes this wonder a horror, a disintegration. The sonorous phrase is corrosive and eats itself away. The other model of music—and poem—in Paradise Regained is provided, unsurprisingly, by the angelic hymns of praise. The poem contains two such hymns, one in Book I, the other at the end of Book IV. In the first, the angels burst into song after the Father’s long speech predicting Satan’s failure. So spake the Eternal Father, and all Heaven Admiring stood a space, then into hymns Burst forth, and in celestial measures moved,

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Circling the throne and singing, while the hand Sung with the voice, and this the argument. Victory and triumph to the Son of God Now ent’ring his great duel, not of arms, But to vanquish by wisdom Hellish wiles. The Father knows the Son; therefore secure Ventures his filial virtue, though untried, Against whate’er may tempt, whate’er seduce, Allure, or terrify, or undermine. Be frustrate all ye stratagems of Hell, And devilish machinations come to nought. So they in Heav’n their odes and vigils tuned: Meanwhile the Son of God …. (I.168–83)

In many ways, this hymn follows the pattern of the hymns to the Father and Son in Book III of Paradise Lost: both songs respond to speeches of God and end with a turn away from the singing angels to events on earth. The hymn from Paradise Regained is shorter and simpler, and in this respect mirrors the poem to which it belongs. Furthermore, the poet emphasizes the verbal content of the angels’ song, not the accompanying music. In Paradise Lost, the angels did at least have harps—however emblematic—and introduced their song with “preamble sweet / Of charming symphony” (III.67–8). Here, the angels presumably play instruments, since “the hand / Sung with the voice,” but this phrase shifts attention away from instrumental music even in suggesting its presence. Dance and hymn are inextricable, as the movements of the celestial measures of the hymn become the movements of the circling angels as well. In this context, the singing of the hand becomes just another instance of the oneness of motion and hymn, and the instruments that the hands presumably hold and move across seem almost extraneous.1 There is no room for any music, even a “preamble sweet,” that is in any way separate—or separable—from the verbal content, the praise, the song. The songs of Paradise Lost are distilled in Paradise Regained, and in this distillation, it becomes incandescently clear that for angels, song and action, music and word, are one and the same. In contrast, Satan’s music and tempests are not only empty of meaning but completely ineffectual: they are ephemeral performances, not true actions. As in Paradise Lost, the narrator does not clarify whether he is reporting the very words of the angels or merely describing the content of their song; nevertheless, this device works somewhat differently in Paradise Regained. “Hand” may also be read symbolically. See Humphrey Sydenham, Sermons upon Solemne Occasions: Preached in Severall Auditories (London, 1637), on Augustine’s distinction between cantate and psallite: “[H]ee sings to God that barely professes him, he Psalmes it that obeys him; the one is but Religion voyc’d, the other done; and ’tis this doing in spirituall businesse that sets the crowne on Christianity … Againe, Ore Cantatur, Manibus Psallitur; he that Sings, makes use of the mouth; hee that Psalmes it, doth exercise the hand, so that the mouth (it seemes) onely expresseth our faith, the hand our good workes, the one doth but tattle Religion, the other communicates it” (29). 1

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The corresponding hymn from Book III of Paradise Lost begins as description, then appears to end as direct quote: “Thee Father first they sung omnipotent … and never shall my harp thy praise / Forget” (372–415). Through describing the angels’ song, the poet’s song becomes one with it. Something rather different occurs in Paradise Regained. What exactly does Milton mean by the introductory phrase, “this the argument”? The term suggests that the following passage of verse is not a transcription of the song the angels sang, but rather a summary, a concise condensation. The nine-line passage presenting the “argument” of the angels’ hymn may stand in the same relation to that hymn as the prose “arguments” set before each book in Paradise Lost to the elaborate verse narratives that they condense. Paradise Regained lacks these opening summaries, perhaps because its action is considerably less complicated. Suggestively, the “argument” of the first angelic song could quite easily stand in as the argument of the entire poem. The hymn neatly encapsulates the trajectory of the narrative: the victory of the Son over temptation, the frustration of Satan’s schemes. The argument of the poem is thus is embedded in the poem in the form of “the argument” of a heavenly hymn. In using this word, Milton places Paradise Regained and the complete version of the angelic song in a parallel relation to one another. In the brief epic, it is more important to properly transmit the basic content of the angelic song than to join in “melodious part” with the voices of the singing angels. If this transmission is properly carried out, then the poem, even if it does not join the angelic song, will exist in a permanent and stable relation to it. Nevertheless, in Paradise Regained, the poet finally does achieve the kind of speech that the Lady in the Masque ecstatically describes, the “song” that will defeat the tempter entirely. This utterance proves not to be a song at all: it is the Word; and the poem strives, not to become heavenly music, but to become, for an instant, what “is written.” At the climax of the narrative, Satan sets the Son of God on the highest pinnacle of the Temple, and jeeringly tells him to stand or cast himself down: For it is written, He will give command Concerning thee to his angels, in their hands They shall uplift thee, lest at any time Thou chance to dash thy foot against a stone. To whom thus Jesus: Also it is written, Tempt not the Lord thy God, he said and stood. (IV.556–61)

The power of the two simple lines recounting Jesus’ victory lies partly in the way that narrative and quotation blend, almost imperceptibly, into one. In Paradise Lost, Milton manages a similar feat in some forty-five lines of angelic hymn: here he needs only two. In this climactic moment, the fusion of divine speech and narration produces its full effect without drawing our attention to the devices that the poet uses to achieve the fusion. Jesus’ voice is very clearly demarcated; but in the second line, the demarcation begins to undo itself. The phrase “To whom thus Jesus” is perfectly sufficient

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to establish “Also it is written, / Tempt not the Lord thy God” as a direct quote— especially since Jesus makes this very statement in Matthew 4.6 and Luke 4.10: “It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.” Milton quotes not only Jesus-the-Miltonic-character, but also the Bible quoting Jesus. The Gospels tell the story of Jesus in the wilderness, and Milton retells the story; and so his text is at a third remove from the actual doings and voice of the historical Jesus. To further complicate the situation, the Jesus of the gospel is quoting Deuteronomy 6.16: “Ye shall not tempt the Lord your God.” The most authoritative voice that ever spoke refers back to an authoritative text. (In Deuteronomy, the speaker is Moses, delivering the commandments of God to the Israelites.) Where does Milton’s poem stand in relation to all these authoritative texts and authoritative voices? At this most crucial moment in the narrative of Paradise Regained, the distance between poem and event vanishes, as if Jesus’ voice were speaking directly from the page of Milton’s poem. The words “he said,” while they fill out the line to powerful effect, are completely unnecessary as an indication of speaker. They are positively redundant, since we have already been told: “Thus Jesus,” which is Milton’s usual way of identifying a speaker. “He said and stood” is an important formulation, revealing that the act of standing is the act of speaking these words. But the words have another effect, too. “Tempt not the Lord thy God, he said and stood” is very much a self-contained unit, a line set syntactically apart from the previous line, and ending in a decisive period. The reader can almost forget that this resonant line is divided between the words of Jesus (in the Bible) and the words of Milton, and that “he said and stood” is not merely a continuation of the authoritative quote. “Also it is written …”—written where, and where does the writing stop? In Paradise Regained it is written: “Tempt not the Lord thy God, he said and stood.” Jesus almost seems to refer to Milton as well as to Deuteronomy. (This idea is not as potentially blasphemous as it sounds: as the New Testament supersedes the old Testament, so Jesus’ voice, even as he quotes Moses, actually wields more authority than Moses’, and comes more directly from God. The same principle continues to operate in any parallel relationship between Jesus and Paradise Regained). When “he said and stood” is taken imperceptibly into the divine pronouncement, it becomes difficult to tell where the voice of Jesus ends and the voice of the poem begins. And finally, Milton’s poetry takes on the power that the Lady’s hypothetical words might have wielded: “Satan smitten with amazement fell.”

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Index “Ad Leonoram Romae Canentem” (Milton), 221–3, 231, 249 Ad Patrem (Milton), 172–4 Adam, 170, 227, 229, 242, 244, 249–55 affections, 12, 17, 34–8, 68, 99, 125–7, 145, 147, 159–61; see also sympathy Alighieri, Dante, 169, 254n54 allegory, 23, 44–7, 51, 182n48, 205, 213–15, 218, 223–4; see also harmony, metaphor, symbolism L’Allegro (Milton), 15, 166, 167, 171, 174–83, 189, 190, 192–3, 199, 210, 212n32, 220, 228, 237, 248, 255 Amphion, 155n67, 231 Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare), 50, 61n24, 182n49, 212 apocalypse, 3, 93, 120, 122–3, 156n68, 189–91, 198, 224–6, 228, 254, 257 applause, 123, 162–3, 211 Arcades (Milton), 199–200 Ariel, 49, 143, 144, 146­–8, 149, 150–53, 154–63, 169n14, 182n49, 184­–5, 188, 189n61, 204, 209, 211, 218, 219n45, 257–8 Ariosto, Ludovico, 169 Armin, Robert, 128, 137–8 artifice, 15, 31, 35, 127, 129, 131, 135–6, 162, 171–2 As You Like It (Shakespeare), 60, 65­–6, 167, 181, 186 At a Solemn Musick (Milton), 192–4, 199, 240, 242, 251 Auden, W.H., 143, 267 Augustine, Saint, 12n25, 24–5, 34, 40, 68, 171n21, 214n38, 253, 261n1, 265 Austern, Linda Phyllis, 3n3, 4n4, 20, 37n61, 38n66, 96n22, 128n13, 167n7, 252n46, 267

authenticity, 113, 125–7, 134; see also sincerity Babel, 61, 231–3, 248–9, 256, 260 Bacon, Francis, 37 Baldo, Jonathan, 11, 156n67, 156n68, 267 ballads, 5, 53–6, 58, 59–63, 67, 69, 73–6, 83, 86–7, 94, 101–3, 106–15, 122, 180 associated with theater, 55–6, 69, 73 and community, 58–9, 112­–15 familiarity of, 54–5, 58–9, 83, 86–7, 109–10 and heavenly music, 53–5 impersonality of, 107, 114 as intimate disclosure, 86, 112 logic of, 107–11 multiple versions of, 76 multiple voices in, 86, 112–15 and reuse of tunes, 60–63, 73 strophic form of, 57, 59–60, 64–5, 76, 112 subject positions in, 55, 112–14 Barber, C.L., 25, 267 Barish, Jonas, 19n6, 32, 267 Barker, Francis, 105, 268 Baroni, Leonora, 221–4, 231, 249 Du Bartas, Guillaume de Salluste, 158, 250–51, 265 Barton, Anne, 67–8, 82, 268 Becon, Thomas, 33, 168, 265 Belsey, Catherine, 30n37, 96n22, 186–7, 268 Berger, Harry, 155n67, 161n74, 268 Berley, Marc, 17n1, 18n4, 30, 95, 268 Bible, the, 193, 214, 238, 239, 243–5, 259, 262–3; see also Psalms Genesis, 49–50 Job, 185–9 Revelation, 186n56, 193, 240–41, 242n23

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birdsong, 61, 65n33, 66, 169–74, 176–81, 183, 229–31, 258–9; see also cock crow, nightingale, warbling Bloom, Gina, 5, 38, 106n49, 126n6, 205n19, 268 Boethius, 22, 70n45, 250, 265 Booth, Mark, 60n20, 67n35, 132–3, 146, 268 Booth, Stephen, 128n14, 129–30, 268 Bradley, A.C., 53, 268 Brisman, Leslie, 167n5, 197n1, 237, 268 Brophy, James, 171, 268 Browne, Thomas, 22–3, 54, 265 Bryskett, Lodowick, 171–2, 250n40, 253, 265 Buhler, Stephen, 13n28, 40n74, 178n39, 182–3, 212n32, 235–6, 269 Burckhardt, Sigurd, 43n91, 67n36, 269 burden, 63, 156, 158, 169; see also refrain Calvin, John, 25, 35, 50, 92n12, 171n21, 266 Campbell, Gordon, 173, 269 Campion, Thomas, 40–42, 265 cannon, 81, 83, 93, 94–7, 99–100, 101, 104, 115–18, 239–40 Carey, John, 13n28, 172n28, 174, 184n53, 193n70, 200, 234n10, 244, 256, 269 Carpenter, Nan Cooke, 174n34, 255–6, 269 Carruthers, Mary, 10, 57n14, 109n56, 269 Castiglione, Baldessare, 32, 137, 265 catches, 69, 130–31, 139–40 Chan, Mary, 6n7, 128n13, 149n59, 269 Chapman, George, 9, 265 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 169, 265 Chickering, Howell, 49, 148n58, 150–51, 156n69, 161n75, 269 children’s companies, 5, 128 Christ, 62, 93, 120, 183, 190­–91, 240–41, 245, 257–63 cock crow, 15, 95, 99, 100, 118–21, 122, 147–8, 175–6, 191 Coleman, Janet, 11n18, 269 Coletti, Theresa, 145n48, 149n59, 269 “Come Away Death” (Shakespeare), 133–6, 137, 138 “Come Unto These Yellow Sands” (Shakespeare), 147–8, 184–5, 204 Coriolanus (Shakespeare), 50

correspondence, 8, 22, 35, 44–7, 77, 91, 92, 93, 94, 96, 98–9, 123; see also harmony, metaphor Cutts, John, 144n44, 158n72, 159n73, 270 Cymbeline (Shakespeare), 155n65, 195 Daniel, Samuel, 40–41, 265 de Grazia, Margreta, 102n37, 104–5, 115, 123n84, 270 déjà vu, 13, 59 Desdemona, 53, 56–7, 60, 74–7, 79–80, 82, 83, 84–7, 111 discord, 26, 69–72, 77–8, 79, 85, 89–92, 97–8, 143n42, 144, 172, 253–5; see also disproportion, harmony, proportion disproportion, 78, 98, 193; see also discord, harmony, proportion divine justice, 80, 83, 93, 95–6, 103, 116–17, 140, 143–5, 189, 254 divisions, 149–50, 153, 171, 249–50 Donne, John, 45 Dorian mode, the, 230, 231, 233–4, 247–8 Doughtie, Edward, 60, 68, 110, 112n62, 270 Duffin, Ross, 54n3, 62n26, 64n31, 65n33, 76n50, 89n2, 107n53, 109n57, 110n58, 114n67, 115n70, 138n31, 180n43, 270 Dunn, Leslie, 4n4, 7n10, 8, 90n4, 91–2, 93n13, 94n14, 97n24, 103n39, 107n54, 119, 270 echo, 68–73; see also ghostliness, repetition as affective response, 126, 132, 135 descriptions of music as, 10, 16, 116–17, 121, 183–5, 199, 201, 202–3, 208, 223, 226, 227, 241, 256 earthly music as, 1, 12, 19, 20–21, 24, 51, 57, 80, 101, 185, 195, 205–6, 214, 223 as haunting, 58, 63, 68–9, 71, 90, 92, 110, 122, 190–92, 139, 246 as inherently musical, 69–71, 126–7, 146, 151–2 as mockery, 57, 68–9, 76 in pastoral, 202 as poetic device, 29–30, 42, 126–7, 129 as recollection, 29, 49, 57, 60, 139

Index and subjectivity, 53, 80, 112 Echo, mythological figure, 68–9, 132n22, 201–2, 204­–6, 207­–8 echo song, 69 Echo Song (Milton), 201–9, 211–12, 215, 219, 225 Eliot, T.S., 104, 106, 121–2, 151, 248–9, 270 Elton, William R., 92n12, 95n19, 116n73, 270 empiricism, 84, 92 Empson, William, 234n9, 270 epic, 230, 235–7, 242, 246, 248 epitaphs, 74–5, 111–12, 122, 156, 197 estrangement, 57, 86, 127, 129, 141–3, 145–8, 150–56, 159–63 Eve, 170, 227, 228, 229–30, 232, 242, 244, 249–53, 254, 256 excess, 39, 66, 97, 105–6, 121–2, 132–3, 207, 253 fairies, 70, 176, 190–92, 199, 203–4, 217, 219 Fall, the, 2, 12, 15–16, 92n12, 101, 166, 169–70, 172, 174, 183, 188–9, 191–2, 195, 199, 208, 212, 217–18, 221, 223–4, 227–9, 231, 236–7, 238–9, 245–56 fancy, 1, 15, 129, 167–9, 171–2, 175–80, 188, 193, 200, 216, 229, 232, 256; see also imagination fantasy see fancy Ferry, Anne, 249, 227n1, 270 Feste, 58, 63–5, 66–7, 126, 130–31, 134, 135–9 Ficino, Marsilio, 37n61, 38n70, 125 Fineman, Joel, 80, 84–6, 270 Finney, Gretchen, 78n53, 125, 165n1, 253, 270 Fish, Stanley, 228n1, 234n9, 256n57, 270 Fletcher, Angus, 165n1, 202n12, 206n21, 219n46, 223n57, 224n59, 270 Fletcher, John, 20–21, 23–4, 26, 46 Fletcher, Phineas, 8–9, 207, 265 Folkerth, Wes, 5, 37, 35n54, 105n48, 129n15, 270 forgetfulness, 11, 12, 111, 136, 139, 153, 155–6, 158, 174, 192; see also memory and demonic music, 16, 236, 247–8

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of illusion, 136, 153 of mortality, 24, 237, 136, 153 Fox-Good, Jacqueline, 7n10, 97n23, 139, 146, 270–71 “Full Fathom Five” (Shakespeare), 49, 146, 150–52, 156n69, 159, 162 Garber, Marjorie, 90n5, 108, 114, 271 ghostliness, 12, 15, 57n14, 62–3, 66, 89–91, 92–4, 100–102, 103–4, 106–12, 114–19, 120, 122–3, 133, 146, 190–92, 204, 212, 224, 236; see also echo God, 22–3, 32, 35, 45, 49–50, 95, 159, 168, 185, 189, 193, 206, 223, 230, 236, 237, 238–40, 254–5, 256, 262–3; see also divine justice, grace musical worship of, 18, 34, 50, 170, 182, 222, 227, 240–47, 249, 251, 261–2 golden age, the, 3, 9, 65, 135–6, 140, 163, 181, 183, 188–9, 198–200, 221, 224, 228–9; see also Fall Gombrich, E.H., 12n25, 23n17, 44n94, 45n96, 271 Gosson, Stephen, 18n5, 21–3, 27, 54, 265 Gouk, Penelope, 22n14, 23n18, 37n60, 38n69, 45, 125n3, 271 grace, 32, 51–52, 74, 93, 177, 144–5, 199, 205–7, 192n68, 252n47 Greenblatt, Stephen, 58n14, 78n54, 190n63, 271 Grennan, Eamon, 56, 79, 271 Gross, Kenneth, 5, 56, 77, 80–81, 94n14, 99, 101, 115, 119n75, 271 Guillory, John, 13n29, 166n4, 167n5, 192, 197, 271 gunshots see cannon Gurr, Andrew, 95n20, 111n61, 118n74, 140, 271 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 8, 15, 68, 87, 89–123, 128, 139, 143, 191, 204, 212; see also ghostliness, madness harmony; see also music, order, proportion abstract versus sensible, 5–7, 17–24, 57, 77–80, 84, 89–92, 95–8, 139, 141–5, 149, 161, 194, 231, 246, 250–56

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of the cosmos, 2–4, 9, 14, 15, 17, 38, 53–5, 70–71, 89–91, 94, 101, 123, 158–9, 162, 188–9, 203, 254 and irony, 25–6, 247 and metaphor, 44–5, 99 Hartman, Geoffrey, 126n8, 129n15, 272 Heninger, S.K., 23n17, 44n94, 70n44, 96n21, 272 Henry IV, Part 1 (Shakespeare), 50 Henry IV, Part 2 (Shakespeare), 58–9 Henry VIII (Shakespeare and Fletcher), 20–21, 23–4, 26, 46 Holford-Strevens, Leofranc, 236, 272 Hollander, John, 38, 69, 194, 206, 241, 36n59, 207n27, 272 Homer, 200, 221, 230, 236 Hooker, Richard, 34–5, 50, 125, 266 Hopkins, Lisa, 56, 272 Hutton, James, 12, 17n1, 28n32, 155n65, 250n41, 272 imagination, 1, 27, 51, 53–4, 55, 121–3, 129, 132–5, 154, 160, 165–7, 169, 178, 188, 192, 193, 200, 203–4, 209, 228; see also fancy incoherence, 72, 77, 83, 98, 101, 112 inexpressibility, 77–8, 106n50, 129, 186–7 Ingram, Randall, 185n55, 186n57, 201n11, 272 interiority see inwardness inwardness, 5, 6, 14, 15, 34–5, 37, 42, 51–2, 86–7, 104–6, 112–13, 125, 235–6; see also self, subjectivity irony, 25–6, 49, 58, 96, 103, 123, 138, 138n30, 227, 239, 247; see also satire lyricism and, 57, 76, 183 Iselin, Pierre, 7n7, 7n9, 10, 21, 29, 97, 156n67, 272 “It Was a Lover and His Lass” (Shakespeare), 60, 167, 173 James, Heather, 142, 273 Jerome, Saint, 18n5, 245 Jesus see Christ Johnson, Robert, 49, 60n23, 150–51 Johnson, Samuel, 77, 213, 248–9 Jonson, Ben, 1, 137, 176–7, 248–9

Jorgens, Elise Bickford, 7n7, 17, 27n27, 49, 273 Jorgensen, Paul, 81n63, 95n16, 95n17, 98, 273 Jubal, 248, 255–6 Kermode, Frank, 152, 155, 273 Kerrigan, John, 223n54, 229, 230, 273 King Lear (Shakespeare), 61–2, 67, 82 King, Rosalind, 56n11, 84n70, 87n81, 273 Klein, Joan, 122, 273 Knight, G. Wilson, 56, 78, 79, 80, 83, 85, 249n38, 273 La Primaudaye, Pierre de, 45, 137n29, 266 language infiltrated by music, 1, 9–10, 15, 59, 93, 151, 199 natural versus arbitrary, 40, 44–5, 77, 98–9 nonreferential, 14, 165, 186­–7 opposed to music, 6–8, 29, 40, 47, 56–7, 77–8, 97 truth of, 57, 85–6 working like music, 5, 12, 13–14, 17, 19, 26–30, 49, 57, 67–8, 71, 77–83, 126–8, 141, 146­–7, 150–51, 153–5, 180, 247–9 Last Trump see apocalypse Lawes, Henry, 165, 201, 207, 209, 215, 219n46, 220, 224 Leavis, F.R., 201n9, 248, 274 Leech, Clifford, 139, 273 Leishman, J.B., 186, 274 Leonard, John, 228n1, 229n3, 242n22, 249n38, 274 Lewalski, Barbara, 173n32, 241n22, 243n24, 274 Lindley, David, 4, 7n9, 28n31, 44, 58n15, 60n23, 65–6, 97, 107n54, 119n76, 122n81, 134n24–5, 136–7, 138n30, 144n47, 145, 149n59, 159n73, 274 Loewenstein, Joseph, 190n62, 192n68, 201n10, 202n12, 206n21, 206n23, 207n27, 274 Long, John H., 6n7, 93n13, 107n54, 274 Love’s Labour’s Lost (Shakespeare), 65n33, 179–80

Index Lycidas (Milton), 165n1, 186–7 Lydian mode, the, 177–9, 181, 183, 199, 210, 220, 228, 237 lyricism, 3, 56, 75, 83, 86, 129, 131–2, 135, 188, 204 concealing unpleasantness, 15, 30–31, 79–80, 119, 217 distancing effects of, 152, 154–5 and irony, 57, 76, 183 as transformation, 97–8, 119­–22 macrocosm see microcosm madness, 3, 56, 82, 89–90, 91–2, 97–8, 101, 108–10, 112–15, 157–8, 188, 191, 211, 221 Mander, M.K., 173–4, 187n58, 274 Marlowe, Christopher, 61 Martz, Louis, 12n25, 179, 203n14, 207n28, 213n34, 216, 216n41, 224n59, 274 A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle (Milton), 16, 195, 197–226, 229n4, 231, 239n20, 244, 252n47, 257, 262–3 Maus, Katharine Eisaman, 105n46, 275 Maynard, Winifred, 61, 67n35, 138n30, 158n71, 275 Mazzio, Carla, 94n14, 106n50, 119n75, 275 McColley, Diane, 12n4, 165n1, 184, 236n18, 247n30, 275 McDonald, Russ, 31, 42, 67n36, 126–7, 146n50, 149n59, 151n62, 275 meaninglessness, 12, 30, 62–3, 66–7, 103, 116, 127, 156, 170, 256; see also nonsense melancholy see mood, tonality memory; see also forgetfulness associative nature of, 10, 109 of community, 58–9, 112 compared with experience, 10, 68, 71, 81, 165 connection with music, 1, 3, 5, 9–11, 19, 59, 71, 79, 195, 202, 211 elusiveness of, 11, 59, 73, 149 and images, 10, 57 intertwined with forgetting, 111, 139, 156–8, 235–6, 237 of the music of the spheres, 53–4 and Neoplatonism, 11–12, 28–9, 59 and old songs, 56–60, 86

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refusing to remain in the past, 10, 12, 14–15, 68, 81, 166, 195, 198, 209–10, 215–16 and subjectivity, 9, 11, 15, 52, 53, 86–7 Merchant of Venice, The (Shakespeare), 6, 14, 17–52, 55, 74, 101, 133, 149, 199, 216n41, 223n55 Merry Wives of Windsor, The (Shakespeare), 30, 61 metaphor, 2, 4, 45­–7, 69, 78, 80, 90, 93, 94–100, 128, 193–4, 240, 242, 250­–51, 254; see also allegory, symbolism different conceptions of, 44­–6 literal manifestations of, 69, 90–91, 101, 230, 235 musical cosmos as, 2, 44 metatheatricality, 72–3, 93­–4, 95–6, 100–101, 102–4, 106, 111, 123, 177 microcosm, 2, 3, 6–8, 91–2, 96n21, 146 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (Shakespeare), 15, 69–73, 74, 94, 121, 143, 166, 195 Milton’s allusions to, 175­–7, 182, 190–91, 199, 200, 203–4, 210–11, 216–19, 229n3 Milton, John, see “Ad Leonoram Romae Canentem,” Ad Patrem, L’Allegro, Arcades, At a Solemn Musick, Lycidas, A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, Nativity Ode, On Education, “On Shakespeare,” Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Il Penseroso, Samson Agonistes Milton, John, Sr., 165, 175–6 Monteverdi, Claudio, 165 mood, 15, 29, 48–9, 64–5, 68, 69–71, 121, 140, 147, 153–5; see also tonality Morley, Thomas, 55, 60, 65n33, 69n43, 167, 171n23, 173, 254 Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare), 58, 66­–7 Mulcaster, Richard, 25n23, 39, 168 music affective power of, 2, 12, 15, 17–18, 23–5, 33, 35–9, 50, 59, 99, 125–7, 129–30, 131–5, 145, 147, 155, 159–61, 225

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Reverberating Song in Shakespeare and Milton affinity with the soul, 8, 11–12, 14, 18, 20, 24–5, 28, 33–9, 51, 89–91, 92, 99, 112–13, 125, 145 in church services, 18n5, 24–5, 33–4, 50, 168–9, 181–2, 186, 245, 256 compared to emblem, 6–8, 19, 20, 47, 51, 57, 65–6, 74–5, 84, 160, 193, 214–15, 242, 261, 144n47 descriptions of, 1, 4–5, 10, 12, 15–16, 19, 26–9, 81–2, 83, 93, 95, 97–8, 100–101, 116–17, 119–22, 128–9, 131–2, 149, 152, 154–5, 157–9, 165–6, 169, 177–9, 181–94, 199, 201–2, 208–12, 215, 225–6, 227, 229–30, 231–2, 237–8, 240–46, 247, 249, 255–6, 258–9 gender and, 41, 56, 84–5, 89–91, 101n34, 107n54, 133–5, 178, 221, 252–3 infectiousness of, 1, 3, 9, 10, 19, 50, 57, 59, 74, 93, 125 infiltrating language, 1, 4, 10, 19, 75, 81–2, 101, 140 as memorial, 24, 49, 74–5, 111–12, 122, 135, 156, 197, 235–6, 237 metaphysical versus rhetorical approach to, 17–18, 36n59, 38–42, 95, 98, 145, 200, 244­–6 nonverbal, 16, 57, 165–6, 129, 169, 222, 231–5, 248, 251, 256 as outward show or ornament, 14, 15, 18–19, 25­–6, 30–35, 38, 39–44, 46, 50–52, 67n36, 77, 224n58, 245–6, 248, 252–3 practical versus theoretical / speculative, 19–22, 30n37, 40, 54, 56n11, 78, 97, 242 in Protestant polemic, 18–19, 21–2, 24–5, 33–5, 168, 172–3, 245–6, 253 relation to poetry, 3–4, 7–8, 21, 22, 25, 30n37, 39–42, 55–7, 75, 77–9, 81–2, 93, 119–22, 155, 172–4, 205, 227, 230, 235–8, 240, 248–9, 256, 258, 259 relation to silence, 27, 84, 85, 87, 100–101, 115, 121, 135, 141, 215, 216, 224, 226, 229n4

relation to words, 17­–18, 24–25, 40, 60, 150, 178–9, 182–3, 201, 209, 220, 222, 235–7 seductiveness of, 4, 24–5, 29, 33–4, 39, 49, 78, 98, 145, 158–9, 169–70, 172, 178–9, 200, 214, 237, 259 of the spheres, 6, 8–9, 17, 26­–9, 44n92, 51, 53–5, 59, 60, 68, 71, 84, 89, 139, 184n53, 187–8, 194, 199–200, 203, 205, 211, 218, 244–7, 250, 254, 255 unfallen nature of, 12, 166, 169–70, 192, 195, 218, 221, 227, 235–7, 256 musica mundana, 22, 44, 145, 162; see also harmony, microcosm, order Nativity Ode (Milton), 15, 99n30, 166, 183–92, 193, 194, 198–200, 215, 223, 228, 240, 248, 254, 255 Neely, Carol Thomas, 107n54, 112, 114, 275 Neill, Michael, 101n35, 102, 123n86, 143n42, 144, 156, 169n14, 275 Neoplatonism, 11–12, 18, 23, 38n70, 44–6, 91, 101, 149, 155 nightingale, 72–3, 143, 170, 174, 205, 212, 229–31; see also Philomela noise of animals, 15, 72–3, 79, 83, 143, 148, 154–5 described as music, 81–2, 93, 116­–17, 119–21, 154­–5, 157, 188 as disruption of order, 78–9, 91, 116, 141, 148 indistinguishable from music, 77–84, 90–92, 93, 94–8, 141, 143–4, 145, 148, 154–5, 157, 254 language as, 57, 78, 80–83, 93, 99–101, 122, 148, 157, 239, 256, 259–60 as meaningless sound, 35, 80–81, 57, 74, 93, 123, 231, 233 as sign, 247, 260 as synonym of music, 5, 84, 99, 184, 193–4 of uncertain meaning, 80, 116, 118–19, 189, 240 nonsense, 5, 30, 56, 63, 66–8, 110, 110n59, 168n12, 169, 232

Index nostalgia, 198, 228n2 noting, 66–7, 74, 90, 106, 112 “O Mistress Mine” (Shakespeare), 60, 65n33, 130, 167, 173 On Education (Milton), 168 “On Shakespeare” (Milton), 167, 173, 197–8 onomatopoeia, 148, 149 Ophelia, 7n10, 8, 15, 67, 89–92, 93, 95, 97–8, 101, 102, 103–4, 106–8, 109, 110, 111, 112–15, 119, 121, 122, 147, 151 Oram, William, 190n64, 199n5, 220, 220n48, 223, 275 order; see also harmony, proportion, divine justice confused with disorder, 48, 80, 83–4, 93, 95–7, 98, 141, 142–5, 148, 158–9, 200, 211 of the cosmos, 2­–3, 19, 21–2, 38, 45, 70, 75–6, 84, 89–92, 101, 139, 140, 162, 214, 244, 255 of a temporal sequence, 10, 59–60, 64, 101, 109, 111, 198, 220 and war, 81–2, 95 Orgel, Stephen, 7n8, 141, 142, 275 Orpheus, 155, 173–4, 179, 210, 220, 225 Ortiz, Joseph, 4n4, 171–2, 210n31, 214, 215n39, 220n47, 225n60, 275 Othello (Shakespeare), 15, 53, 56–7, 60, 68, 74–87, 91, 151, 191; see also Willow Song pain see suffering Pandaemonium, 231–2, 256 Paradise Lost (Milton), 12, 14, 16, 166, 169, 170, 174, 178, 191–2, 227–56, 260, 261–2 Paradise Regained (Milton), 16, 183, 257–63 Il Penseroso (Milton), 15, 166, 174, 177, 180–83, 192–3, 244n28, 255–6, 259 Pericles (Shakespeare), 141 Philomela, 205, 212, 225; see also nightingale Plato, 12, 22, 96, 199–200, 125, 221, 230 Platonism, 18, 25, 28, 36, 59; see also Neoplatonism Pliny the Elder, 230

285

Plotinus, 45n97 polyphony, 35, 69, 165n1, 168, 182, 187, 206, 214n37, 235–7, 242, 243–4, 246, 248, 249, 256 Poole, William, 166, 194n71, 199n5, 254n53, 276 Praise of Musicke, The, 28, 34, 35, 48, 89–90, 170, 265 proportion, 2, 12, 18, 21–2, 35, 38–42, 44–5, 89–90, 96, 139, 200, 252, 256; see also harmony versus sound, 39–42 Prynne, William, 18n5, 168, 245, 266 Psalms, 34, 50, 61, 168n12, 170–71, 172, 193, 243, 253, 261n1 punning, 10, 27, 35, 43, 66–8, 77, 87, 90, 103, 106, 128, 155n65, 156–8, 169, 206–7, 239–40, 249; see also noting, wordplay Puttenham, George, 29, 41–2, 44, 266 Pythagoras, 21, 22, 96 quantitative verse, 40–41 recollection see memory reconciliation, 51, 70, 123, 144–5, 148, 160–62, 185, 189 refrain, 49, 61n24, 62–3, 67, 108, 110n59, 148, 156, 158, 169, 241; see also burden Reik, Theodor, 107, 276 Reisner, Noam, 183, 189, 276 repetition, 10, 12, 15, 29, 41, 58, 65n33, 67–8, 71, 74, 77–80, 81–2, 93, 107–8, 110, 112, 114, 126–7, 128, 139–40, 145, 149, 155–7, 166n2, 198n4, 202, 204, 207, 219, 233–4, 237, 241; see also echo, nostalgia, refrain, rhyme reverberation see echo rhetoric, 17–18, 30, 36n59, 38–9, 42, 45, 46, 56, 77, 95, 98, 113, 125–7, 129, 145, 234, 238, 246, 248 rhyme, 27, 29–30, 40–44, 67, 85, 107, 109, 148, 154, 157, 178, 184–5, 194, 204, 206, 219, 242 Ricks, Christopher, 228n1, 247n30, 248, 276 Le Roman de la Rose, 169–70, 266

286

Reverberating Song in Shakespeare and Milton

Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 204–5, 208, 211 Rosenberg, Marvin, 119, 276 Ross, Lawrence, 56n11, 84, 276 rounds see catches Rymer, Thomas, 74, 79, 82, 83, 266 Samson Agonistes (Milton), 174n35 Satan and corruption of primal music, 245–6 defeat of, 262–3 and empty sound, 232–3, 234, 239–40, 246, 248, 259–60 and musicality, 247, 256, 258 as nightingale, 229–31 and The Tempest, 257–8 satire, 63, 66; see also irony Segal, Charles, 236, 276 self, the, 11, 57, 85–7, 90, 112; see also inwardness, subjectivity serpent, 50, 174n35, 217, 222–3, 227, 232, 246–7, 255 Shakespeare, William see Antony and Cleopatra, As You Like It, “Come Away Death,” “Come Unto These Yellow Sands,” Coriolanus, Cymbeline, “Full Fathom Five,” Hamlet, Henry IV (Part 1), Henry IV (Part 2), Henry VIII, “It Was a Lover and His Lass,” King Lear, Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “O Mistress Mine,” Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Pericles, Romeo and Juliet, Sonnets, “Tell Me Where Is Fancy Bred,” The Tempest, Timon of Athens, Twelfth Night, “Under the Greenwood Tree,” The Winter’s Tale Shaw, George Bernard, 81–2, 27 Shuger, Debora, 42, 125–7, 276 Sidney, Sir Philip, 20–21, 24, 40, 57, 267 silence, 27, 84–5, 87, 100–101, 115, 121, 135, 141, 215, 216, 224, 226, 229n4 sincerity, 127­, 131, 132, 140, 245 singing see song

Sirens, 158–9, 170n17, 198–200, 210–12, 214, 215, 217, 220–24, 226, 236, 254n54 Smith, Bruce R., 5, 55, 58, 94n15, 112n63, 113n66, 115n70, 137n28, 146, 277 Son, the, 240–41, 244–5, 254; see also Christ, God song; see also ballads, music angelic, 16, 20, 24, 26–8, 57, 89, 93, 96–7, 111, 121, 122, 170, 174, 183–7, 190–91, 193–4, 223, 227, 228, 235–7, 240–46, 249–50, 260–62 as communication, 133, 146, 202, 205, 297 parodies, 61–3, 65 as performance, 113, 135–8, 140 poetry as, 172–4, 225, 230, 242 Sonnets (Shakespeare), 169, 170 sound inarticulate, 38, 51, 81, 170–73, 189–90, 232–3, 247, 255 patterns of, 40, 42, 44, 111, 204, 220 relation to sense, 25, 30, 31, 42–4, 77, 81, 109, 127, 128, 140, 150, 171–2, 178, 227, 234–6, 238, 240, 242–3, 246, 248, 260 versus sight, 10, 18, 27–8, 33, 37, 54, 146, 181–2, 185n55, 192–4, 238, 240, 242 speech see language Spenser, Edmund, 1, 158–9, 169, 171, 179, 182n48, 202, 218, 223, 247n31, 249, 250, 267 Spitzer, Leo, 27n29, 90n6, 277 Sternfeld, Frederick, 6n7, 62, 99n28, 103n41, 107n54, 128n13, 139n32, 277 Stevens, Paul, 13n29, 158n71, 166n4, 167n5, 181n46, 182n49, 187n58, 197, 201n9, 205n19, 206n21, 218–19, 224n59, 277 subjectivity, 5, 6, 11, 74, 84–7, 105–6; see also inwardness suffering, 14, 15, 91–2, 123, 140–43, 145, 153–5, 159–60, 162–3 Sydenham, Humphrey, 24, 33, 34, 50, 207, 252n45, 253, 261n1

Index

287

symbolism, 4, 15, 16, 19, 20–21, 46­–7, 49, 50–51, 74, 77, 79, 84, 92, 95–6, 98–9, 141, 143–5, 147, 160, 202, 206–7, 214­–15, 221, 256, 261n1; see also allegory, metaphor sympathy, 33, 45n97, 127, 129, 142–3, 152–3, 159–60, 162–3 synaesthesia, 26–8, 128, 130, 244

Tomlinson, Gary, 37n61, 38n67, 38n70, 44–5, 96n21, 125n3, 278 tonality, 5, 14–15, 23–4, 25–6, 30–31, 48–9, 58, 60, 65–8, 69­–73, 77, 132, 134–6, 139–40, 150–55, 181, 189, 212; see also mood Twelfth Night (Shakespeare), 15, 58, 59, 60, 62–5, 67, 123, 125–40, 160, 212

Tasso, Torquato, 169, 221 tautology, 27, 47, 78, 103, 154 teleology, 3, 165–6, 190, 238; see also time “Tell Me Where Is Fancy Bred?” (Shakespeare), 43–4, 48–9 Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 15, 16, 49, 58, 59, 116, 123, 125–7, 140–63, 166, 195, 198 Milton’s allusions to, 182, 184–5, 187–9, 200, 204, 228, 249n38, 257–8, 260 Teskey, Gordon, 224n58, 278 Thamyris, 230 theatricality, 14, 18–19, 33, 51–2, 74, 100–101, 106, 111n60, 123, 142, 198, 245; see also metatheatricality Thomson, Peter, 131, 278 thunder, 70, 72, 83, 93, 95–7, 116­–17, 123, 143–4, 148, 157–8, 188–9, 224–6, 238–9, 254, 258, 260; see also cannon, applause, divine justice time, 3, 9, 10, 12–13, 16, 19, 57­–59, 64, 69–71, 75–6, 100–101, 108, 110, 114, 116–­17, 120, 149–51, 157, 165–6, 189, 191–2, 194, 208, 220, 227­–8, 238, 252; see also echo, ghostliness, order, teleology Timon of Athens (Shakespeare), 50 Tomkis, Thomas, 53–5, 267

“Under the Greenwood Tree” (Shakespeare), 65–6, 181 Verdi, Giuseppe, 79, 82 Virgil, 192 Walker, D.P., 38n70, 125n3, 278 warbling, 1, 8, 167, 169–72, 174, 180–81, 184, 193, 219, 224, 229, 230, 240, 250n40, 258; see also birdsong Wilder, Lina Perkins, 10–11, 54n2, 58n16, 67n37, 109n57, 111n60, 118n74, 278 Wiles, David, 73n46, 102, 137, 278 Willow Song, 56–7, 60, 74–6, 83­–7, 111, 151 Winkler, Amanda Eubanks, 5n5, 91–2, 278 Winn, James, 2n2, 40n75, 41n82, 214n38, 278 Winter’s Tale, The (Shakespeare), 60, 67, 72, 160, 197–8 wonder, 141–2, 150, 152, 153, 162, 185, 197–8, 212, 215, 218, 228, 260 Woolf, Virginia, 126–7, 278 Word, the, 33, 50, 178, 182, 189, 223, 239, 241, 262, wordplay, 5, 10, 66–8, 90n7, 126–7, 129–30, 157, 169, 239 Wright, Thomas, 8, 34n50, 35–6, 99, 252n45, 267