Chapter 1
Titus Andronicus and the Production of Musical Meaning
Such a lively song (now by this light)
Yet never hearde I such another note.
It was (thought me) so pleasant and so plaine,
OrphĂŚus harpe, was never halfe so sweete,
Tereu, Tereu, and thus she gan to plaine,
Most piteously, which made my hart to greeve.
âGeorge Gascoigne, The Complaint of Philomene
The debate over the meaning of music in the Renaissance begins not with bees, but with birds. Martin Luther, in commending musicâs ability to make nature comprehensible, cites birdsong as the best example of music that praises its divine Creator: âMusic is still more wonderful in living things, especially birds, so that David, most musical of all kings and minstrel of God, in deepest wonder and spiritual exultation praised the astounding art and ease of the song of birds when he said in Psalm 104, âBy them the birds of the heaven have their habitation; they sing among the branches.ââ1 In a very different context, Gascoigneâs Complaint of Philomene (1576) prefaces its adaptation of Ovidâs Philomela with a fantastic meeting between the poemâs speaker and the nightingale, whose musical warble (âTereuâ) inspires great sympathy despite the speakerâs ignorance of its verbal sense. In this way, the episode attests to musicâs supposed ability to evoke true sympathy in the absence of language. At the same time, in invoking the familiar trope of the nightingale as poetic eloquence, Gascoigne necessarily effaces the focus of Ovidâs story, which reads more as a map of communicative failures. As Lynn Enterline has shown, Ovidâs version of the mythâwhich ends abruptly at the moment of Philomelaâs transformation, thus cutting off the possibility of musical sublimationâdemonstrates the utter âunspeakabilityâ of the mutilated female, who can replicate the scene of sexual violence but not translate the experience of its horror.2 Thus the attempt to find meaning in birdsong, whether by Luther or Gascoigne, requires turning a deaf ear to the alienating effect of nonverbal soundâan effect that Ovid is so fond of re-creating.
In this chapter, I argue that Shakespeareâs Titus Andronicus returns to Ovidâs Philomela in order to explore the possibility of meaning in music. Like Gascoigne, whose poem the play frequently echoes, Shakespeare evokes music as a privileged model of nonverbal communication. Unlike The Complaint of Philomene, however, Titus raises serious doubts about musicâs ability to impart understandingâor, more generally, to mean anything at all. Through the figure of Lavinia, Titus confronts the problem of a resonant body that must translate itself into language, all the while implying that music, like the mutilated woman, is in a constant state of dismemberment and inarticulateness. Against this radical âdeconstructionâ of music, the play offers the familiar rhetoric of musica speculativa as an antidote to meaningless. Yet Shakespeare denies this rhetoric any real persuasive power, at once by juxtaposing it with the overwhelming theatrical effect of Laviniaâs bleeding body, but also by evoking several Ovidian models of voicelessness that undermine any sense of communal understanding. The Ovidian figures of Io, Actaeon, and Hecuba, memorable for their speechlessness in the Metamorphoses, might suggest possible ways of reading Lavinia after her mutilation, but Shakespeare reminds us that it is the utter untranslatability of their sound in Ovidâs poem that marks their distance from the reader and reveals the poetâs limits of representation. Thus, by producing a second Hecuba onstage, Shakespeare forecloses on a âsympatheticâ reading of Lavinia in favor of highlighting the ânoisinessâ of her grotesque, hyperphysicalized body.3 Counterintuitive as it may seem, music in Titus ultimately does not reveal itself as a compensatory voice for someone who has lost both hands and tongue; instead, it embodies the radical promiscuity that erupts when oneâs meaning is determined by another.
Reading Titus as a meditation on musicâs promiscuityâor, more unconventionally, as a kind of musical performance itselfâallows us to reexamine the signifying and affective economy of Shakespeareâs theater. In order to produce intelligible meaning and âmoveâ its audience, the theater relies on and validates a number of adjoining systems of aural and visual signification. In this respect, Susan McClaryâs observation that meaning in music is âkept afloat only because communities of people ⌠agree collectively that [its] signs serve as valid currencyâ accurately describes how Shakespeareâs stage participates in the construction of musical meaning even as it depends on a communally sanctioned system of musical signs to propel its own narrative.4 (A trumpet flourish denoting the monarch is a paradigmatic example.) At the same time, Shakespeareâs propensity to expose the seams of this system via Ovidian voicelessness puts him in dialogue with early modern critiques of music. In the next section, I discuss briefly the Renaissance debates over musicâs affective power, in order to show that Shakespeareâs skepticism about musical sympathy has its historical analogue not in the massive corpus of Renaissance poetics, where the idea of aesthetic unity prevails, but in a strand of Reformist polemic that strongly suspects musicâs independence from language. The rest of the chapter addresses Shakespeareâs deployment of music in Titus, showing how the play stages a series of increasingly ingenious and desperate acts of interpretation. In each case, the play reveals a nagging suspicion that will haunt the appearance of music in almost every Shakespearean play that follows: the suspicion that music is, in its most fundamental form, meaningless.5
âWhoryshe armonyeâ: Musical Meaning in Early Modern England
In The Praise of Music (1586), John Case begins his chapter on musicâs âsuavitieâ by asserting that âpoetrie ⌠is but a part of Musicke, as Plutarch doth testifie.â6 Although the remark is conventional, Caseâs assertion of musicâs likeness to poetry is itself a consciously crafted defense against contemporary attacks on musicâs sensuous illegibility. The problem of musical signification had already been raised in Stephen Gossonâs antitheatrical tract, The Schoole of Abuse (1579). After explaining the âright use of ancient Poetry,â Gosson argues that music should be
used in battaile, not to tickle the eare, but too teach every souldier when to strike and when to stay, when to flye, and when to followeâŚ. Homer with his Musicke cured the sick Souldiers in the Grecians campe, and purged every mans Tent of the Plague. Thinke you that those miracles coulde bee wrought with playing of Daunces, Dumpes, Pavins, Galiardes, Measures Fancyes, or new streynes: They never came wher this grewe, nor knew what it ment.7
Gossonâs reference to Homer likely pertains to the Greek theory of musical modes, by which certain tonal structures are said to correspond to specific psychological temperaments (for example, Mixolydian and sadness). In this scheme, music always means something. At its best, Gosson implies, music functions as suasive, instinctual language that is capable of being fully articulate and precise: when to strike, when to stay, when to fly. Yet the sheer proliferation of musical forms in Gossonâs England throws this simple system of signification into chaos. The fact that Gossonâs negative examples are mostly dance forms points his argument that musicâs semiotic capabilities have been subsumed by its bodily manifestations. As a result, English music has become as âmeaninglessâ to its modern audience as it would be baffling to its classical predecessors (âthey never came wher this grewe, nor knew what it mentâ).
Gossonâs critique of English music is typical of much antitheatrical writing in its premise of a golden age, when the forms of music were simple and finite. Even so, Gossonâs presentation of classical sources implies that music was always susceptible to innovation (and hence, degradation). Even the seven-stringed harp, which for other writers might represent the seven notes of the Pythagorean diapason, is shown by Gosson to be a distortion of an older, superior model: âHe that compareth our instruments, with those that were used in ancient times, shall see them agree like Dogges & Cattes, and meete as jump as Germans lippes. Terpandrus and Olimpus used instruments of 7.strings. And Plutarch is of opinion that the instruments of 3.strings, which were used before their time, passed al that have followed since.â8 Gossonâs subsequent example makes it clear that musicâs embodiment in physical materials is largely responsible for this tendency toward innovation: it is Phrynisâs âcuriosityâ about his fiddle that inspires him to add more strings, thus creating more possibilities for musical sound. The history of musical embodiment is thus for Gosson necessarily a history of decline, culminating in the grotesque vision of Musickâs actual body: âTo shew the abuses of these unthrifty scholers that despise the good rules of their ancient masters & run to the shop of their owne devises, defacing olde stampes, forging newe Printes, and coining strange precepts, Phaerecrates a Comicall Poet, bringeth in Musicke and Justice upon the stage: Musicke with her clothes tottered, her fleshe torne, her face deformed, her whole bodie mangled and dismembred.â9 Phillip Stubbes, whose attack on music copies faithfully entire portions of Gossonâs tract, likewise represents musicâs abuses as a problem of materiality: âTheir is no ship, so balanced with massie matter, as [musiciansâ] heads are fraught with all kind of bawdie songs, filt...