Broken Harmony: Shakespeare and the Politics of Music

By Joseph M. Ortiz

Music was a subject of considerable debate during the Renaissance. The notion that music could be interpreted in a meaningful way clashed regularly with evidence that music was in fact profoundly promiscuous in its application and effects. Subsequently, much writing in the period reflects a desire to ward off music’s illegibility rather than come to terms with its actual effects. In Broken Harmony Joseph M. Ortiz revises our understanding of music’s relationship to language in Renaissance England. In the process he shows the degree to which discussions of music were ideologically and politically charged.

Offering a historically nuanced account of the early modern debate over music, along with close readings of several of Shakespeare’s plays (including Titus Andronicus, The Merchant of Venice, The Tempest, and The Winter’s Tale) and Milton’s A Maske, Ortiz challenges the consensus that music’s affinity with poetry was widely accepted, or even desired, by Renaissance poets. Shakespeare more than any other early modern poet exposed the fault lines in the debate about music’s function in art, repeatedly staging disruptive scenes of music that expose an underlying struggle between textual and sensuous authorities. Such musical interventions in textual experiences highlight the significance of sound as an aesthetic and sensory experience independent of any narrative function.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Feb 14, 2011
• ISBN: 9780801461408

Book preview

Introduction

Disciplining Music

Among Shakespeare’s critics of music, few are as prescient as Portia in The Merchant of Venice. At the climax of the play’s famous casket scene, as Bassanio is about to choose the casket that holds her portrait, Portia commands a musical performance while deftly deconstructing its effect on her audience:

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.

(3.2.43–50)¹

This is a remarkable moment, not least because it is one of the few instances in Shakespeare in which a description of music precedes a musical performance instead of following it. At the same time, the passage seems to strike a note of insincerity, suggesting as it does that swanlike music and royal flourishes are indistinguishable. After all, we might ask, who but the most foolish listener would confuse the meaning of a lilting, melancholic song with that of a trumpet fanfare? The question is rhetorical—until we ask, why should a trumpet fanfare signify royalty? Or, what exactly makes a song melancholic? Which aspect of music is responsible for its emotional import? What are we doing when we use particular words—swanlike, fading, lilting, dying, martial, merry—to describe music? When is music misunderstood? If dwelled on, these questions needle at our assumptions about music, just as they needle at the longer, more popular speech about music at the end of The Merchant of Venice. While there is no shortage of grand, unifying theories about music in the Renaissance that attempt to answer these questions, Portia instead chooses to point out music’s promiscuous ability to sustain an infinite number of verbal meanings. What is music then? The question denies the possibility of musical meaning even as it calls for it. For all its apparent simplicity, Portia’s speech puts forth the radical idea that music is always subject to the vagaries of its listeners, and that any legibility claimed for music ultimately derives from the context of its performance or from the discursive sense of its visual and verbal representations. Musical meaning, in this way, always comes from the outside.

This book aims to recover the multiplicity of ideas about music in Renaissance England, and to argue that Shakespeare is extremely skeptical about the claims to authority made on their behalf. To a modern set of ears that have been trained to hear music as inherently expressive, the early debates over music may seem strange or arcane. This sense of unfamiliarity is aided by the fact that the history of Western music has often been presented as a steady narrative of progression, either as a development from outmoded theories of cosmology to more enlightened ideas about rhetoric and acoustics, or as an evolution from labyrinthine polyphony to the expressive, emotionally nuanced forms of madrigal and opera.² Yet, as is often the case, the situation on the ground is much more complex. The older, scholastic theories about music continued to exert a powerful influence throughout the Renaissance, long after their scientific foundations had been debunked. One of the reasons for this is that mathematical and philosophical definitions of music are often a strong antidote to the nagging sense that music is unintelligible, especially in the face of evidence that music can accommodate an infinite number of meanings. In this respect, the hybridity of musical writing in Renaissance England does not reflect confusion over scientific facts so much as it constitutes an emphatic challenge to the radical promiscuity of musical experience. At the heart of this conflict is a deeply rooted concern over language’s ability to translate sensuous experience and render it meaningful. Shakespeare’s plays, with unusual frequency, exploit the gap between the logos of meaningful language and the materia of musical sound, and in doing so they frame the early modern debates over music as an ideological contest between textual and sensuous authorities. In his most skeptical moments, Shakespeare seems to suggest that music is nothing like a language.

The idea that Shakespeare drives a wedge between music and language has rarely been fashionable. When Richmond Noble commented in 1923 on the absolute dramatic propriety of music in Shakespeare’s plays, he set the tone for generations of later critics who found it perfectly reasonable that Shakespeare would put music in the service of drama and poetry, not the other way around.³ From this point of view, music is always cooperative and Shakespearean drama is exemplary because it deftly uses music to enhance the text of the play: Gertrude tells us that Ophelia is mad, and the wilting music that the audience hears a few lines later makes us think (or feel) that Ophelia is indeed mad. Somewhat differently, in what has become the most frequently cited work on English Renaissance music and poetry, John Hollander proposed that Shakespeare developed original ideas about music, worthy of inclusion in the history of Renaissance musical thought.⁴ Here as well, the experience of musical sound was considered extraneous: Shakespeare’s ideas about music were to be found in the plays’ poetry, not in their musical performances, which could largely be explained away in terms of theatrical convention. Poetic language, not the stage, was ideally suited to work out and articulate the complex set of issues and questions raised by theorists of music. Although there has been groundbreaking work on the cultural effects of sound in Renaissance England, most notably in books by Bruce Smith in 1999 and Wes Folkerth in 2002, Shakespeare criticism has been slow to relinquish a conventional, literary approach to music.⁵ Even a work like Ross Duffin’s impressive Shakespeare’s Songbook, which meticulously attempts to reconstruct what Shakespeare’s audiences might have actually heard, gives a nod in its opening paragraph to the idea that the relation between poetry and music is as old as poetry itself.⁶

Part of the reason that music’s kinship with poetry has so often been taken for granted is that Renaissance poets themselves had a tendency to overstate the point. When George Puttenham begins his Arte of English Poesie with the claim that poetry may be termed a musical speech or utterance, he puts forth a definition of music that is repeated several times over the course of the treatise, and which becomes a commonplace in almost every manual of poetry in the period.⁷ Yet even poets have their biases. Puttenham’s decision to treat music as though it were a form of rhetoric may partly stem from his belief that poetry can—and should—be learned through a systematic process. Likewise, when the poet and composer Thomas Campion writes that what Epigrams are in Poetrie, the same are Ayres in musicke, he may be alluding to his efforts (which he describes elsewhere) to apply prosodic theory to musical composition. Or he may be attempting to raise his musical status by aligning it with classical authorities, as he explicitly does a few sentences later: Ayres have both their Art and pleasure, and I will conclude of them as the Poet did in his censure, of Catullus the Lyricke, and Vergil the Heroicke writer.⁸ For all his deftness with analogies, even Campion knows that a musical effect in poetry is not the same thing as music. This is not to say that composers were not influenced by developments in poetry, and vice versa. There have been many fine studies of the generic interaction between music and poetry in Renaissance England, but this book does not aim to be one of them.⁹ Rather, I am interested in the rhetorical, textual, and theatrical methods by which music is made to seem like language (or, in some cases, seem alien from it), and the cultural and political work performed by such acts of translation. Part of the reason for this interest is the fact that Shakespeare and Milton, the two writers explored in this book, are themselves less inclined to accept unconditionally the premise that music can be translated into words. Ever conscious of the generic effects of their work, Shakespeare and Milton are keenly interested in the ideological or religious motives that underpin theories of art, including music. Shakespeare, in particular, instead of aspiring to a concent model of art in which dramatic unity is the terminus ad quem, repeatedly stages contradictory versions of music that highlight its resistance to verbal and visual forms. In doing so, he exposes a fault line in the conventional interpretations of music, which early modern writers are increasingly at pains to cover up.

In the following pages I document the ways in which Shakespeare denaturalizes his culture’s presumptions about music, both in the text of the plays and in their musical performances, and I will argue that the plays reveal connections between theories of music and specific ideological ends. In this respect, the word politics in my book’s title has a double sense. First, the discursive and textual methods that are applied to music in order to make it yield particular meanings constitute a recognizable system of interpretation that is continually in need of authorization and legitimization. This is a politics of interpretation that is enforced both by texts and individuals and that is observable whenever a particular idea is felt to be orthodox or unorthodox.¹⁰ Second, arguments about music often demarcate political and cultural standpoints, particularly in the case of institutions whose power is invested in linguistic and textual systems. This idea that theories of music are driven by ideology may seem odd given the commonplace nature of musical definitions in the Renaissance, many of which are echoed in Shakespeare’s plays. However, a sign of power is often its ability to work undetected. Hence, the true subject imagined by Shakespeare’s Portia may be expressing her deeply felt sense of loyalty when she bows before the monarch, or she may be acting carefully to avoid recrimination from an untested, new-crowned leader. In a similar way, the trumpet flourish that accompanies the same event may be recognized as a natural sign of royal authority, but this understanding is just as likely to be the product of convention, education, or—depending on how broadly one considers the term—coercion. An effective politics of government sometimes requires not looking too deeply into the hearts of its subjects. And a stable politics of music may require not attending too deeply to what listeners actually hear.

Two examples will serve as a preliminary illustration of the way in which political ends can instruct a model of musical interpretation. The first is from Henry Peacham’s Minerva Brittana (1612), in which England’s conquest of Ireland is figured through the image of an Orphic harp (figure 1). The text below the emblem reads as follows:

While I lay bathed in my native blood,

And yeelded nought save harsh, & hellish soundes:

And save from Heaven, I had no hope of good,

Thou pittiedst (Dread Soveraigne) my woundes,

Repair’dst my ruine, and with Ivorie key,

Didst tune my stringes, that slackt or broken lay.

Now since I breathed by thy Roiall hand,

And found my concord, by so smooth a tuch,

I give the world abroade to understand,

Ne’re was the musick of old Orpheus such,

As that I make, by meane (Deare Lord) of thee,

From discord drawne, to sweetest unitie.¹¹

The dedication at the top of the page is addressed to King James, and the imagined speaker of the emblem text is Ireland herself (Hibernica respublica). Thus, as an allegory for royal power, the narrative meaning of the emblem is straightforward: the monarch, in the person of James, transforms the violence of civil strife in Ireland into political harmony. Because the scene of rebellion is so devastating, the peace that ensues (whether voluntary or not) is interpreted as a sign of James’s unique status in history: Ne’re was the musick of old Orpheus such. The emblem makes convenient use of the image of the harp, which is both the national symbol for Ireland and a symbol of musical concord.

Less obvious is the way in which Peacham’s emblem negotiates the distinction between musical sound and an allegorical, visual conception of music. The first three lines of the text evoke a sense of intense corporeal and acoustic experience: the native blood and the harsh and hellish soundes are both produced and experienced by the poem’s speaker. While these phrases admit a symbolic reading, their direct indexing to somatic experience reminds the reader that political rebellion can be literally noisy and that its effects can (and will) be felt on the body. In the next several lines, however, the experience of actual sound is displaced by a model of music that is more metaphorical and that makes heavy use of verbal puns. For example, the stringes that the king tunes at line 6 at first suggest harp strings, but the implied, more relevant meaning is heartstrings, as a metonymy for the Irish political subject who is brought back under the protective arm of English rule. The other terms in the poem—key, slackt, broken, concord, meane, discord, sweet, unitie—have specific meanings for musical composition, but their practical sense has little bearing on the emblem’s political meaning. They call for an allegorical reading, not an acoustic one. In this respect, Peacham’s emblem instructs its audience on two points. First, James orders the political state in a way that resembles musical consonance. Second, for musical consonance to be understood correctly, it must be read through the metaphors of its verbal description rather than simply heard or recalled in the ear. To become embroiled in the experience of musical sound, the emblem suggests, is to return to the noisy, bloody battlefield, where individual desires run amok until they are struck down (tuned) by an uncompromising sovereign.

Figure 1. Poenitentia, from Henry Peacham, Minerva Britanna (1612). By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

In effect, the emblem teaches its reader to read the image of the harp as an image, as well as a representation of Jacobean power. Once educated, the reader might then notice that the harp has exactly ten strings, corresponding neatly to the Pythagorean decad with its relevant musical symbolism. In this way the emblem employs the conventional rhetoric of Renaissance musica speculativa, the large body of writing that seeks to explain music’s place in the cosmos and that dominates most academic writing about music through the seventeenth century. Peacham’s emblem shares with speculative music many of its rhetorical strategies, such as the appeal to literal puns, the repeated emphasis on unity, the idealization of a kind of music that has never been heard before, and the subtle displacement of actual sound. It is this last tactic—the suppression of sound—that I will draw special attention to in chapter 3, but it is useful here as a reminder of the stakes involved in distinguishing performed music from music in poetry. When the subject of music in literature is brought up, the question is often asked: Are we talking about actual music or musical metaphors? By answering this question definitively from the outset, we overlook the rhetorical advantage gained by eliding the difference between the two. In fact, a careful bait-and-switch game between musical sound and visual allegory can often help illustrate a philosophical or political point, while making that point seem grounded in the real, observable workings of the physical world. The sight of music shapes our listening.

My second example also reflects the desire to ground music in the natural and visible world, but it does not sidestep the experience of sound. In The Feminine Monarchie (1609), one of the most imaginative pieces of natural philosophy to come out of Renaissance England, Charles Butler transcribes the sound of a beehive as a musical composition. Using systems of musical notation and solmization (the practice of using syllables to denote the notes of the scale) that were only recently becoming standardized, Butler carefully categorizes the various sounds made by bees and associates them with particular activities and meanings:

When the prime swarm is gon … the next Prince, when shee perceiveth a competent number to bee fledg and reddy, beginneth to tune, in hir treble voice, a moornful and begging note, as if shee did pray hir Queene-mother to let them goe. Unto which voice, if the Queene vouchsafe to reply, tuning hir Base to the yung Princes Treble … then doth shee consent…. And as the Queenes voice is a grant, so hir silence is a flat denyall; the Proverb heere hath noe place: (Qui tacet consentire videtur.) For without this Consent there is noe Consent.

This song being conteined within the compass of an Eighth (from C-sol-fa-ut to C-sol-fa) the Prince composeth hir part within the fowr upper Cliefs (G, A, B, & C) usually in triple mode, beginning with an od Minim in G-sol-re-ut, and tuning the rest of hir notes, whereof the first is a Semibrief, in A-la-mi-re. Sometime shee taketh a higher key, sounding the od Minim in A-la-mi-re, and the rest in B-fa-b-mi. Sometime, specially toward their coming forth, shee riseth yet higher, to C-sol-fa, holding the time of three or fowr Semibriefs, more or les. Nou and then shee beginneth in duple time, som two or three Semibriefs, but always endeth with Minims of the triple Mode.

The passage, which continues at length, is a remarkable display of technical specificity. Not only do the bees observe the voice structure of three- and four-part compositions (base, treble, mean); they also correctly hit on the various notes of the scale (C-sol-fa-ut) and observe regular time signatures and note values (semibreve, minim). Butler goes so far as to plot the various sounds made by the bees on a musical staff, and, lest anyone doubt that he intends this to be understood as actual music, in the later editions of the treatise he adds a melissomelos: a complete, four-part bees’ madrigal that incorporates the figures and rhythms of his earlier transcriptions.¹²

For all his inventiveness, Butler is not a musical hack. In his Principles of Musik (1636), a painstakingly researched compendium of rules governing musical theory and composition, he shows himself to be extremely well versed in both speculative and practical music. Butler’s peculiarity lies in the extreme lengths to which he goes to establish a natural foundation for musicological principles. The Western diatonic scale of seven notes, to which Butler devotes the entire second chapter of his Principles, is given an apiarian etymology in The Feminine Monarchie. Other music theorists had asserted the naturalness of the diatonic scale, and other philosophers had compared the buzzing of bees to music, but Butler proves the case with unusual specificity. His queen bee does not merely emit a sound like a musical tone: she sings G-sol-re-ut. Accordingly, sounds that do not correspond to a specific note are implied to be rude and meaningless noise, ready to be discarded by a human musician who can tell the difference. Equally important, Butler’s treatise asserts the idea that music can be transcribed, that it can be fully realized and preserved in a printed text. By identifying the music of bees and representing it on a musical staff, he gives a scientific demonstration of the point, stated explicitly in his Principles, that music is a form of writing.¹³

Other early modern writers had used the music of bees to paint a picture of the ideal political state, in which monarchs, senators, aldermen, soldiers, and sentries each carry out their assigned tasks in concert with the appropriate music.¹⁴ To the extent that Butler’s treatise does not pursue this line of thought, it is not political in the narrow sense. It is, however, ideological. The idea that music is meaningful—and fully capable of being translated into text—was not accepted by everyone, including many Reformist writers, who characterized certain types of music as meaningless noise comparable to the bleating of animals. Butler’s ability to find music in the animal world thus constitutes a direct challenge to contemporary attacks on music. At the same time, his obsession with systems of notation gives evidence of his belief that written language is fully capable of ordering and making sense of the natural world. Twenty-five years after The Feminine Monarchie, Butler published his English Grammar (1634), in which he developed an intricate system of phonetic spelling that attempted to document fully the sound of the English language. Seen from this perspective, sensuous experience is not to be rejected, but transcribed. And music, far from being meaningless sound, is very much like a language.

Throughout this book I will adduce similar examples that throw into relief the ideological and cultural presumptions behind theories of music. Doing so will often require looking beyond the canonical works of music theory and composition that frequently serve as the introduction to histories of Renaissance musical thought. Thus, in addition to treatises on bees, I look at emblem books, poetry manuals, Reformist attacks on the theater, personal accounts of theatergoing, handbooks on practical music, and classical mythographies for evidence of the rich heterogeneity of ideas about music in early modern England. What this book will seldom do is look at particular musical compositions for the purpose of performing a musicological analysis of them. The idea, for example, that discovering the original musical setting for a ballad in As You Like It may yield important clues to the play’s meaning may seem intuitive, but only because we live in a musical culture weaned (if sometimes indirectly) on Wagnerian opera and Beethoven symphonies, in which the difference between a leap of a minor third and a leap of a major third can sometimes mean the difference between redemption and the end of the world. Early modern listeners did not, on the whole, share this expectation of music.¹⁵ Thus, rather than approach music in Shakespeare’s plays as a code to be deciphered, I examine the ideological implications of musical codes themselves. This critical sensitivity to practices of musical interpretation is one that the plays demonstrate with unusual regularity, and it often reveals itself in the question that Shakespeare’s characters find themselves asking over and over again: What does this music mean?

This last question provides the starting point for chapter 1, which addresses the radical promiscuity of musical meaning in early modern England. While Renaissance theorists of poetry often sought to align music and language, Reformists tended to stress music’s incoherence. Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus speaks to both sides of the debate by constructing a system of musical signs for the theater, while exposing the arbitrariness of this system. Chapter 2 continues the exploration of music’s promiscuity, focusing on the convergence between attacks on music and early modern representations of women. Renaissance writers frequently associated music and women as producers of unintelligible sound, and this anxiety drives the attempt to transform music and women into speaking pictures. Hamlet and The Rape of Lucrece document the suppression of musical sound and the female voice, an aesthetic move that becomes a hallmark of Romantic versions of Shakespeare. If early modern Protestantism tends to stress music’s meaninglessness, then Neoplatonic theory presents itself as an antidote to music’s apparent inscrutability. Accordingly, in chapters 3 and 4 I analyze the tendency to allegorize music, noting the common ground occupied by Ovidian mythography and musica speculativa. Shakespeare frequently links the moralized Ovid and Renaissance musica speculativa in the plays in order to shed light on their shared political and ideological interests, although he also demonstrates the power of performed sound to disrupt Neoplatonic, moralizing representations of music. Finally, in the two closing chapters I explore the debates over music in the context of the seventeenth-century discourse of idolatry. The associations between music, magic, and superstitious belief reach a high pitch in Jacobean England, prompting ingenious defenses of music and theatricality in The Winter’s Tale and Milton’s A Maske.

The proximity of Ovidian allusion to musical rhetoric in the plays reveals a perhaps unexpected aspect of Shakespeare’s representation of the politics of music. With unusual regularity, Shakespeare turns to Ovid when he scrutinizes assumptions about music, and Ovidian poetry often provides the imaginative key to Shakespeare’s reorganization of the relationship between music and language. (Indeed, one of the earlier drafts of this book included Ovid in its title.) There are several reasons why Ovid would have been an attractive source for Shakespeare’s exploration of musical meaning. First, Ovidian poetry, like music, is at the center of many Renaissance debates over the validity of certain kinds of knowledge. As I mentioned above, the political and religious pressures that drive the allegorization of music in the Renaissance, thus curbing its sensuous appeal, also drive allegorizations of Ovid. For Shakespeare, music and Ovid uniquely challenge the authority of moralizing interpretations because they draw attention to their material and sensuous effects, independent of their representation in texts. Music resists language in ways that visual art does not, just as Ovid resists moralization in ways that Virgil does not. Shakespeare’s foregrounding of music’s sonorous texture and Ovidian polysemy can thus be seen as a strong challenge to ideological attempts to establish the primacy of textual knowledge. Second, and more important, Ovidian metamorphosis often has much to do with voice—or, more accurately, with the loss of voice. Several of Ovid’s tragic figures—Philomela, Io, Niobe, Orpheus, Actaeon, Echo, Hecuba—experience transformation in the Metamorphoses as a crisis of enunciation, and all of them are evoked at crucial moments in Shakespeare’s plays as examples of music’s uneasy relationship to language and noise. This is an aspect of the works that criticism has rarely identified, much less theorized. While much scholarship in the last twenty–five years has established the centrality of Ovid to a dizzying number of Shakespearean topics, from humanism to poetic subjectivity to imperialism, it remains for this book to demonstrate the significance of Ovid for Shakespeare’s musical thought.¹⁶ If the theater provided Shakespeare with an ideal laboratory to test conventional assumptions about music, then the Metamorphoses was surely his favorite theory book through which to articulate his findings.

Because the convergence of music and Ovid will be a common refrain in this book, a brief example at the outset will be worthwhile. In act 4 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hippolyta speaks for only the second time in the play, in a passage that is routinely cut from performance:

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.

(4.1.109–15)

Here, Hippolyta’s speech begins as a narrative account of what has happened (I was) and ends as a statement of what almost never happens (never did I hear, I never heard). As a description of music, Hippolyta’s narrative ultimately breaks down into a series of contradictions and oxymora that confound musical terminology itself (gallant chiding, so musical a discord, sweet thunder), as if to suggest the idea of something that cannot be represented in language. In this respect, her words attest to language’s inability to comprehend fully the memory of her previous experience, or even the experience of that experience. Thus, despite the extraordinary poetic appeal of Hippolyta’s speech (would anyone deny that it sounds beautiful?), it gives us the almost certain impression that we are not hearing what she is hearing.

As an example of Ovidian allusion, Hippolyta’s speech is not especially subtle. This is one of the few moments in the play in which Shakespeare gives his audience a glimpse of Theseus’s past life in Ovid’s poetry and Thomas North’s Plutarch, where he is most famous as a chronic deserter of women.¹⁷ In this respect, Hippolyta’s fleeting allusion to Hercules and Crete calls to mind a version of Theseus that is starkly at odds with his role as the play’s defender of marriage.¹⁸ More important, by playing fast and loose with definitions of music, Hippolyta returns to the Ovidian scene of linguistic failure, which more than once in the Metamorphoses is exemplified by the sound of barking dogs. By calling the loud peals of hunting dogs musical, Hippolyta inverts the idea of music as universal order and reminds us, as Ovid does, that the experience of music is fundamentally an acoustic event, dependent on the materiality of physical sound. This raises a number of difficult questions about the nature of music. For example, does the muffled sound of an orchestra heard from outside the concert hall count as music? Are the noisy echoes of a trumpet playing in a New York City subway station musical? Such questions are not intended to belie the metaphoricity of Hippolyta’s speech: she is not saying that barking dogs and church polyphony actually sound the same to her (even if some of Shakespeare’s fellow Londoners occasionally did). Nonetheless, her speech promotes the idea that the pleasure afforded by barking hounds, like the pleasure afforded by certain tonal intervals or harmonic progressions, is a supremely subjective and personal event. In this light, to call something musical is always to invite the charge of metaphor, if not outright repudiation. Hippolyta’s words are proof of the fact that, centuries before a parent ever yelled at his or her teenage child for blasting Pearl Jam, the distinction between music and noise was hardly settled. Her speech is a manifesto for hearing green, as Bruce Smith has put it—for listening to music as a purely sonorous event, independent of its legible, formal, or quantifiable aspects.¹⁹

Yet the impulse to quantify music is hard to shake. Arguing for the superiority of his hounds, Theseus appeals to a principle of intonation that portrays music as measurable and precise:

My hounds are bred out of the Spartan kind,

So flewed, so sanded; and their heads are hung

With ears that sweep away the morning dew,

Crook-kneed, and dewlapped like Thessalian bulls,

Slow in pursuit, but matched in mouth like bells,

Each under each. A cry more tuneable

Was never holla’d to nor cheered with horn

In Crete, in Sparta, nor in Thessaly.

Judge when you hear.

(4.1.116–24)

Theseus’s remark to Hippolyta to judge with her own ears indicates his confidence in his dogs and in the perceptibility of musical sound. (It is also a gentle command to refine her hearing in accordance with his.) Although Theseus misses the point of Hippolyta’s speech—she does not really care about the pedigrees of hunting dogs—his response represents music as an ordered, intelligible signifying system. Hence, when Theseus uses the term music itself, its physical and metaphorical meanings are almost impossible to distinguish: My love shall hear the music of my hounds…. We will, fair Queen, up to the mountain’s top,/And mark the musical confusion/Of hounds and echo in conjunction (103–8). Just as the cadences of his last two lines echo the sound he is describing (confusion … conjunction), Theseus implies that music is an aspect of poetry, capable of being represented and ordered in language. Like Butler’s bees, the natural world according to Theseus needs only a human auditor who can discriminate between its musical and nonmusical sounds. The vantage point that he chooses for himself and Hippolyta—up to the mountain’s top—indicates his tendency to abstract music and to observe it from afar, as well as his confidence in language’s ontological elevation over