In this chapter I consider Shakespeare’s exploration of musical harmony as a means of political representation. Elyot’s treatise illustrates how smoothly the allegorizing rhetoric of musica speculativa moves from the classroom to the public sphere, where it presumes to explain the “ordre of astates and degrees.” As we saw in the last chapter, this rhetoric functions by obscuring the distinction between words about music and musical sound, so that music is made to seem naturally representative of an authorized narrative—of mathematics, cosmology, government, or anything else. In Neoplatonic writings, in particular, the postulation of secret or hidden meanings in music works to mystify—and therefore facilitate—the connection between the physical (“natural”) world and universalizing ideologies of order. It is perhaps for this reason that, in Renaissance England, Neoplatonic formulations of music sometimes seem to be more prevalent in political contexts than in academic ones. Likewise, in Shakespeare’s plays, Neoplatonic ideas of harmony are frequently invoked during moments when political actors attempt to legitimize or mythologize their power, even more so than in the scenes of instruction discussed in the last chapter. In this way, Shakespeare suggests that the ideological work performed by the rhetoric of musica speculativa, while useful in the classroom, is indispensable in the political arena.
In characteristic fashion, however, Shakespeare demonstrates the power of heard music to disrupt Neoplatonic models of harmony. Musical sound in the plays frequently grates against its rhetorical representation, exposing the political representation of harmony as a highly intricate shell game. Jacques Attali, the prolific French economist and former adviser to President Mitterand, famously claimed that “listening to music is listening to all noise, realizing that its appropriation and control is a reflection of power, that it is essentially political.” In plays from Julius Caesar to The Tempest, Shakespeare restores to music the “noisiness” that Attali sees as instrumental to its demystification. In this way, Shakespeare allows his audience to witness the political appropriation of music and compare it to their own listening experience, even, as we will see, at the risk of exposing his own plays as artificial constructions. Rather than make use of music’s interpretive promiscuity to create a sense of dramatic unity, Shakespeare’s plays often highlight the incongruence between language and musical sound—an incongruence that is always a possibility when someone attempts to describe an actual musical performance. As the teaching of music in early modern England makes clear, universalizing ideas about music are most persuasive when they are seen and read. They are constantly in danger of being unraveled by acoustic experience, and Shakespeare’s political plays frequently exploit this vulnerability. In each case, the point is clear: we may all agree on the meaning of music, until we are forced to hear it.
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Perhaps the most explicit example in Shakespeare’s plays of musica speculativa being put into the service of political ideology occurs in Troilus and Cressida, when Ulysses famously scolds Agammemnon and the other Greek soldiers for their failure to observe political authority:
The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre
Observe degree, priority, and place,
Infixture, course, proportion, season, form,
Office and custom, in all line of order.
And therefore is the glorious planet Sol
In noble eminence enthroned and sphered
Amidst the other, whose med’cinable eye
Corrects the ill aspects of planets evil
And posts like the commandment of a king,
Sans check, to good and bad. But when the planets
In evil mixture to disorder wander,
What plagues and what portents, what mutiny?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And hark what discord follows.
(1.3.85–110)
In this rhetorical tour de force, Ulysses sets up perfectly the traditional argument for musical harmony by articulating a model of cosmology founded on universal principles of proportion and form. The idea of the “untuned string” is a fitting analogy for dysfunctional government, but it is also presented as a real, physical manifestation of the universal principles of order that Ulysses cites as his ultimate authority. This double sense of the musical example replays the slippage between metaphor and sound that we find so often in writings about speculative music. Ulysses’ appropriation of this rhetoric is also fitting insofar as his speech reflects a larger cultural project, in which Rome—and by extension, its imagined origins in Troy—is constantly mythologized as the antecedent of a nascent British empire. As Heather James has noted, literary representations of Troy in this period, such as Chapman’s translation of the Iliad, “revitalized and politicized the epic ethos, however neoplatonized, in the Elizabethan consciousness of Troy.” While Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida repeatedly discredits this project, as James persuasively argues, it does not do so in the scene with Ulysses. For one thing, Ovid is conspicuously absent here; in a play suffused with literary contamination, the ambivalent version of Ulysses in book 13 of the Metamorphoses notably does not encroach. (There is a reason why the passage is so easily excerpted.) Rather, the scene adheres faithfully, more or less, to a Neoplatonic ethos, and the traditional image of musical harmony, much like the image of the harp in Peacham’s Minerva Brittana, functions neatly as a sign and guarantor of the naturalness of political authority.
Like the early modern pedagogical works on music, Ulysses’ speech in Troilus and Cressida demonstrates how a “politics of interpretation” precedes and enables the politicization of music. If the “untuned string” that Ulysses invokes is a convenient emblem for his political ideology, part of the reason is that the experience of musical sound has become subordinate to its inscription in rhetoric. There is, after all, no music heard in this scene. Ulysses’ injunction to his audience to “hark” does not actually implore them to listen with their ears. Rather, it forms part of a familiar rhetorical formula in which the imagined sound is already interpreted and understood before it is played, if at all: “And hark what discord follows.” At the same time, the political appropriation of music is extremely simplifying, even more so than the allegorical representations of music in works on musica speculativa. In its political guise, “music” is reduced to “harmony” or “proportion,” the mathematical ratios that describe only the most consonant intervals on the musical scale. All other aspects of music—melody, chromaticism, dissonance—are relegated to the “evil mixture [that] to disorder wander[s].” Defined in this way, music is a powerfully conservative force, and in this context an encomium of music can sound much like its opposite. Ulysses’ speech on harmony, for example, follows nearly point for point Gosson’s critique of theatricality in Playes Confuted: “In a commonweale, if privat men be suffered to forsake theire calling because they desire to walke gentleman like in sattine & velvet, with a buckler at theire heeles, proportion is so broken, beutie dissolved, harmony confounded, & the whole body must be dismembred and the prince or the heade can not chuse but sicken.” Gosson’s image of a “dismembred” commonwealth recalls his image of Musicke’s “dismembered” body in his earlier tract, The Schoole of Abuse. In Playes Confuted, however, the abuses performed on music are now made to represent, not merely be a symptom of, the widespread decay of social order. Bad musicians are not just unruly subjects; they are bad leaders.
~~Broken Harmony: Shakespeare And The politics of Music -by- Joseph M. Ortiz
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