Reverberating Song in Shakespeare and Milton: Language, Memory, and Musical Representation

Music in Hamlet retains its otherworldly associations, but it no longer serves as a symbol of divine harmony; it becomes instead a ghostly manifestation. These structures, however, appear increasingly unfixed, alien, and incomprehensible, reverberating with eerie, forbidding, and sometimes alluring dissonance. 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. Milton perceives such inherently musical worlds as simultaneously fallen and unfallen, terrible and idyllic. In the musical collapse of time, the lingering past ultimately becomes a haunting rather than a living presence. The Song of the Blest Siren. 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: 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.

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.

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. These sentiments are traditional to the point of banality—but they are also deeply problematic. 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 two issues rarely collide in any overt way: Thomson, , In After the Heavenly Tune: 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. 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? Early Christian condemnations of music focus on its abuse in the theater— a theme enthusiastically adopted by Puritan polemicists. Cambridge University Press, , 3—5. That most enthusiastic of early modern polemicists, William Prynne, would quote Jerome to condemn simultaneously theater and the excesses of Anglican practice: 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: 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. 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: 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. University of California Press, , — Reverberating Song in Shakespeare and Milton 20 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. And so [the spirits] in their dancing vanish, carrying the garland with them. When Katherine awakens, however, she commands the musicians to cease: As audience members, how are we to understand the music that we hear?

If celestial harmony is to be presented on stage, it cannot be presented by any means save by earthly music. The episode undermines the possibility of understanding stage music in emblematic terms, as standing for something beyond itself. Partly as I conceive by the name to shew that the glory of mortal flesh was shaken in him: John Gouws New York: Oxford University Press, , 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: 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. It is not known if the words were written by Sidney himself. Rodopi, , — Routledge and Kegan Paul, , At the beginning of the sixth century C. 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.

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.

• Language, Memory, and Musical Representation, 1st Edition!
• Reverberating Song in Shakespeare and Milton?
• Oxford and Her Colleges.
• Bye-Bye Space-Time, or, For Whom the Brain Slimes (Pulp This! Adventure Serials Book 6);
• ;

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. De institutione musica was one of the first books on music to be printed — Palisca New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, , xiii—iv, xviii, xx, xxiv. Yale University Press, , Norman Endicott New York: Anchor, , 80— Creeping Music 23 While Gosson sees no connection between audible music and abstract harmony, Browne finds the intellectual in the sensible.

This resonant hieroglyph creates serious conceptual problems that become representational problems on stage. 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. Its very nature requires change, an evanescent movement through time. 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. We have no way of knowing exactly what kind of music was played in this scene. These associated problems of affect and meaning lead us back E. Studies in the Art of the Renaissance London: Phaidon, , — Heninger, Touches of Sweet Harmony: Huntington Library, , Toward a Historiography of Others Chicago: University of Chicago Press, , 87—8; and D.

Pennsylvania State University Press, , 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. Lyrics would seem to provide the simplest way of fixing the meaning and affect of a song. The dying knight requests song for two reasons: 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.

Startlingly, music and words work in the opposite way to the same end: 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. 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. Preached in Severall Auditories London, , Creeping Music 25 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.

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. Though recent scholars have tended to emphasize irony over harmony, the conflict is of long standing. And no other final scene is so completely without 21 Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick New York: Oxford University Press, , , See also Richard Mulcaster, Positions London, Moody, on the other hand, announced: 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: She perceives a knell in the celestial harmonies. Nevertheless, the episode is considerably complicated by the role that language plays in evoking and placing the music. 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. Look how the floor of heaven Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold.

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. In the sweetness of its sleep, the moonlight somehow 24 C. Princeton University Press, , Martin Coyle New York: Creeping Music 27 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. As the passage progresses, the sleeping of the sweet moonlight becomes the creeping of the sounds of music, the sweet harmony. Lorenzo requests the musicians to bring the music into the music, the air into the air. 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. 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. Anna Granville Hatcher Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, We cannot answer that question unless we can determine where the simile ends—and we cannot determine this with any certainty. 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. 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. 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: See Lindley, Shakespeare and Music, Olms, , 40— See also Hutton, Creeping Music 29 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. 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 …. In such a night ….

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. In the same way, Lorenzo will soon draw the potentially fictive music of the spheres towards audibility. Here is another unheard music: Nevertheless, once we do recognize this distinction, we can recognize how Shakespeare both acknowledges the distinction and explores ways of blurring it.

Cambridge University Press, , rpr. University of Delaware Press, , Removed from their context, the phrases jingle like nursery rhymes: What Pistol says is largely meaningless, but if one considers his lines singly they are magnificent rhetorical verse. 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.

Penguin, , 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 such a context, aural language does not necessarily signal a commitment to the value of surfaces. Antonio takes the first opportunity to project the dichotomy of appearance and essence onto Shylock, exclaiming selfrighteously: Reverberating Song in Shakespeare and Milton 32 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. 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. 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.

This makes a certain sense. In its common, nontheological meaning, the word suggests attractiveness, elegance, seemliness—even embellishment or outward flourish. For Castiglione, the grace of the courtier is of this kind, and such grace inevitably becomes involved with the suspicion of deception and pretense. Yet the conflation of the theological and ornamental meanings can create considerable dangers. The play is full of gracious voices. But are they voices imbued with grace? For the full discussion of ostentation and dissimulation, see pp. An Anthology of Criticism and Theory — , ed.

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. Instead, he allows Shylock to make a connection between music and theatricality, to suggest that music is merely another form of deceptive appearance. 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. An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies Accessed May 15, Routledge, , 48; and Ramie Targoff, Common Prayer: University of Chicago Press, , Praise of Musicke, —4. These different positions could be held simultaneously, 48 49 despite their seeming incompatibility.

The Fift Booke [London, ], H2r—v. Creeping Music 35 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: The first explanation is the oldest and the simplest: On the other hand, music may not work on the soul at all: For as the heart is most delicat and sensatiue, so it perceiueth the least motions and impressions that may be: Leo Treitler New York: Norton, , ; my emphasis. Iohn Caluins Commentaries, trans. Arthur Golding London, , Q2r. Reverberating Song in Shakespeare and Milton 36 favors the fourth and final possibility: These responses are idiosyncratic, irrational, and amoral: 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. Yet musick in it selfe most strangely works upon our humane affections. See Lindley, Shakespeare and Music, 29— 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 , ed. Tudor, , but does not choose between them: The ability of music to penetrate inward spaces even Shylock acknowledges: The music itself may be shallow, but it can invade the inner sanctum of sobriety.

In the mid-seventeenth century, George Wither would affirm: See also Bruce R. Attending to the O-Factor Chicago: Containing the Art of Singing, trans. John Dowland London, Reverberating Song in Shakespeare and Milton 38 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. 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.

Several studies have complicated this view, however, showing that the shift was not so quick or complete as had been thought. Rutgers University Press, , University of Pennsylvania Press, , Both conceptions originated in the classical era. In the very same sentence, however, Mulcaster admits that music may cause harm. Music may certainly be used to seduce or to uplift: 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.

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— See also Praise of Musicke, Reverberating Song in Shakespeare and Milton 40 perceived as encouraging attention to sound rather than meaning. 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.

The differing possible understandings of poetic musicality become explicit in debates over the virtues of English quantitative verse. Campion rejects the trivial chiming of rhymes and campaigns in favor of quantitative verse by appealing to the musical structure of the universe: Indiana University Press, , Song, Narrative, Dance and Drama, — Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, , John Stevens argues that the relationship between words and music occupied small place in medieval musical thought ; but more recently, in Sung Birds: Her book demonstrates the urgency with which many medieval thinkers debated what constitutes rationality in music.

What musick can there be where there is no proportion obserued? With a defence of ryme heretofore written, and now published by the author London, , G4r. Daniel does seem reluctant to deny a music of proportion and number to English verse, arguing that observation of accents yields harmony. 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.

Puttenham, —3; emphasis mine. Deborah Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric: In The Merchant of Venice, the aural echoes of a song prove very significant indeed. His choice, made to the accompaniment of music, supposedly reflects the value of inward truth over outward appearance. So may the outward shows be least themselves, The world is still deceived with ornament. His choice is, of course, correct. But how does he arrive at it?

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. Harvard University Press, , 36— Nevertheless, such semantic associations do not always exist. 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: The song implies an inextricable connection between sound and sense; but the two never quite line up.

Recommended For You

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. In general, the concept of metaphor could be understood in two very different ways in the premodern and early modern eras. Princeton University Press, ], Well into the seventeenth century, however, there were still people who took the idea of musical spheres absolutely literally.

University of Illinois Press, , 25—8. Creeping Music 45 structure itself of the world. 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. 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, See also Judith H. Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture Berkeley: University of California Press, , 50— The image first appears in Plotinus, Enneads, 4. 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. 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: The Merchant of Venice repeatedly gestures towards an allegorical understanding of its action, and just as consistently undermines any such understanding.

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: Early Modern to Millennium, ed. Let music sound while he doth make his choice. Then if he lose he makes a swanlike end, Fading in music. He may win, And what is music then?

It also distracts from the actual situation rather than clarifying its symbolic significance. 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: Nevertheless, the passage does more than present a series of elegant conceits prompted by the thought of music. On the one hand, music is seemingly irreducible: 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. 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.

What, after all, is the tone of the swan song? 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. The confusion expresses the proper love of the people for their prince, but love remains confusion and not order: University of Florida Press, ], As Chickering points out, the sounds of the mournful bells are to a certain extent estranged in the musical setting.

The ideal setting, perhaps, would combine tolling and rocking. 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. 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. Shakespeare will use the word again, unforgettably, in The Tempest: A Facsimile of the Edition Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, Creeping things are of the earth, mortal.

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 his commentary on Psalm 33, Calvin indicates that the dangers outweigh the benefits, in terms that might give Lorenzo pause. Psalmes of Dauid, Q2r. Creeping Music 51 rightness that almost imperceptibly becomes something more insidious: 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.

The difficulties created by the speech extend beyond the simple connection between theater and immoral pretence. 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: When the music stops, however, the illusion fades: 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. In this sick daylight, the remainder of the drama plays out. We have returned, in other words, to reality. After glimpses of the floor of heaven, thick inlaid Wither, A Preparation to the Psalter. 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. 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.

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. In other words, music gives Bassanio an unconscious mind. Nature plays such strange tricks, and Shakespeare almost alone among poets seems to create in somewhat the same manner as Nature. 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.

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. 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. O most excellent diapason, good, good, good. It plaies fortune my foe, as distinctly as may be. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy ; New York: Penguin, , n1. Bizarrely, he also imagines that the planets are playing a very familiar—and surprisingly lugubrious—tune: In fact, this celestial music is so very common and incessant—like street-cries and chanted broadsides—that no one notices it anymore.

AMS, , G3r—v. Cambridge University Press, , 13, 44—8. 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. Norton, , Ross Duffin cites this exchange as an illustration of the familiarity of the early modern audience with the ballad tunes 17— 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.

As we have seen, in a drama actual music could represent heavenly harmonies. University of Iowa Press, , In much printed partmusic, voices could be replaced by instruments and vice versa, depending on available resources.

Greenwood, , Stuart Gillespie and Neil Rhodes London: Thomson, , — Where do we find the music of this play, and how do we define it? Methuen, , Clarendon, ; Peter J. Harvard University Press, ; and F. Routledge and Kegan Paul, All five of these authors deal largely with the actual music of the play, with particular emphasis on the Willow Song. See also Grennan, 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. 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: His characters do not seem to hold images of music printed in their memories: Songs are never sung for the first time: Twelfth Night provides the classic example.

He wants music that is already familiar to him, music that he remembers. Twelfth Night takes the pervasiveness of music to an elaborate extreme—but very similar things occur in plays where music is less obviously central. 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.

The connections that he makes with song are not rational; they are automatic, associative. These connections remain when all others have been lost. The revelers are all old. I would argue that familiar songs can create a similar illusion of a separate consciousness in the character who sings or remembers singing. 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.

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

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. For Shakespeare, music tends to bubble up from some uncertain origin. 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 , ed. Twayne, , —3. See also 18 19 Simpson, British Broadside Ballad, ix. Dent, , A contemporary setting, possibly by Robert Johnson, survives, but seems inappropriately courtly and melancholy for the pastoral and humorous context Lindley, Shakespeare and Music, —8. Here Babylon and Babel seem to have the upper hand. The idea, of course, was to take advantage of the popularity of a catchy tune by giving it a new moral or spiritual text.

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. In providing new words for the song, the Fool is merely participating in a history of transformations. For a discussion of the possibility of the drinking song in Antony and Cleopatra being set to a hymn-tune, see Peter J. 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 — Berkeley: University of California Press, , Christopher Page quotes a thirteenth-century friar describing the travails of a contemporary: The burn is this world blind, And Bessy is mankind, So proper I can none find as she.

She dances and leapes And Christ stands and clepes. Does his version of the ballad mock love? 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. 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. Am I not of her blood? 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.

Download Reverberating Song In Shakespeare And Milton Language Memory And Musical Representation

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, Sternfeld dates the sacred parody to the early sixteenth century —8. The text of the Queen Elizabeth-as-Bessy version, from the broadside registered in , is printed in Duffin, —7. 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: 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? 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.

Nevertheless, song proves an uncomfortable weapon, and an undependable vehicle for mockery or satire. Feste joins in, and the two improvise a spontaneous parody of a fashionable lute song, very recently published. The original song represents the lament of a vacillating lover: Farewell, farewell, since this I find is true, I will not spend more time in wooing you: Shall I bid her goe and spare not? O no, no, no, no, I dare not.

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. Nay, good Sir Toby. This is much credit to you. The song ends in a rather Quoted in Duffin, —9. Art any more than a steward? 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.

Download Reverberating Song In Shakespeare And Milton Language Memory And Musical Representation

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. 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. The original and its See Lindley, Shakespeare and Music, 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.

• Account Options.
• John Browns Body.
• Tobacco: Growing, Curing, & Manufacturing (annotated w/study guide);
• Keiner hat was gesehen: Texte über Gewalt an der Schule (German Edition)!
• Latest News;
• The Power of NOW in Action: Practical Guide to Enlightenment: Living in the power of now, the power of now in action blueprint (Act To Success Series Volume Book 3).
• A Man Returns To Nothing.

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: 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.

Most of these verbal games depend upon words that take the same sonic form, but express different semantic content: 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. If the audience by this point has not noted the pun imbedded in the title of the play, they have little excuse. The Prince describes this wordplay with a musical term: In its most playful form, wordplay is the speaking of crotchets. Lindley, Shakespeare and Music, 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. See also Mark Booth, Cambridge University Press, 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.

So I can be far from glad in remembering myself to have been glad, and far from sad when I recall my past sadness. The music meant something once and something different now: 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 confusion is replicated in the language. Who is replying to the horn? The echo or the hounds? Indeed, two conflicting traditions, both familiar to the Renaissance, surround the mythological figure of Echo. 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. 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. This moment of musical reverberation occurs in a context that illuminates the complex relationship between echoing sound, ballads, and theater.

In this formulation, melancholy and mirth are mutually exclusive, and can never be combined without terrible discord. I was particularly drawn to Minear's analysis of music and memory in Shakespeare's poetic language and imagery, whether in snatches of old long-forgotten songs p. The later chapters on Milton's work were also a fascinating read. I was struck by Minear's analysis of the density of allusions to Shakespeare in the descriptions of music in the Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle see Chapter 6.

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

As Minear notes, in the Masque , Milton imitates a Shakespearean soundscape: Reverberating Song is incredibly well researched, and the variety and scope of critical materials cited is impressive. The footnotes are a fascinating accompaniment to Minear's analysis, although at times I found their frequency a distraction to my reading of the main text. A difficulty that seems too often associated with writing about music is the lack of actual examples, whether If you would like to authenticate using a different subscribed institution that supports Shibboleth authentication or have your own login and password to Project MUSE, click 'Authenticate'.

View freely available titles: Book titles OR Journal titles. Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide. Forged from a partnership between a university press and a library, Project MUSE is a trusted part of the academic and scholarly community it serves. Built on the Johns Hopkins University Campus.

This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Without cookies your experience may not be seamless.