Broken Harmony: Shakespeare and the Politics of Music (review)

Titles for monographs are a tricky business. Publishers, understandably exercised by the unpredictability of the marketplace, look for the stripped back and simplified title that is friendly to the search engine; their desire for the straightforward often stands in contrast to the fondness of the academic community for quasi-poetic titles, often fashioned from direct quotation. Any book that has ‘Shakespeare’ in the title is, of course, likely to improve the sales columns of a university press, and sometimes the significance of Shakespeare in the global marketplace can tend to mask the deeper and more varied contents of a book on early modern texts and ideas.

A first glance at Joseph Ortiz’s title for his study of the philosophies of music as they were represented and deconstructed by early modern playwrights and poets suggests that there was some compromise between him and his publisher: ‘Broken Harmony’ is a nicely suggestive title for a book that sets out to address radically discontinuous thoughts about music, philosophy, and practice in the early modern period, and the subtitle does the necessary work for those concerned with the world of internet searches. Something of the study’s range and focus is still lost in the process, however. While it would be a churlish critic who tried to deny the centrality of Shakespeare to this study (five of its six chapters are concerned with an impressive number of his plays and poems), there is nothing in the title that would tell an interested reader that the final chapter is a detailed discussion of John Milton’s 1634 Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle (or ‘A Maske’, as Ortiz prefers to refer to that text/event throughout). This is a subject to which I will return at the end, but for now it is intriguing to register the suppressed role that Milton plays in this study.

Equally absent as an intellectual signifier from the title is the sustained interest this book evidences in Ovid and Ovidianism as crucial filters and analogues for early modern musical debates. While these gaps, elisions, and evasions fascinate me as a reader, it is important that I stress that this book nevertheless represents a serious and highly articulate attempt to question comfortable neo-liberal readings of the relationship between music and language, not least in the work of Shakespeare. Challenging a number of existing studies, Ortiz admirably avoids petty point-scoring in his wish to ‘document the ways in which Shakespeare denaturalizes his culture’s assumptions about music’ (p. 5) while evidencing his awareness of the field. Ortiz emphasizes from the outset the ‘multiplicity of ideas about music in Renaissance England’ and the ‘hybridity’ of writing on the subject, not least in the Shakespearean canon (p. 2).

This is in large part, then, a book concerned with the ‘politics of interpretation’ and, for Ortiz, the difficulty of the act of interpreting music, and references and allusions to music, from the early modern period rests in the fact that music made meaning with a ‘radical promiscuity’ (p. 11). Ortiz explores that promiscuity through the joint lens of practical manuals on musical theory from the time and the ways in which the work of Shakespeare in particular confronts and engages with their often conflicted ideas.

Ovid is, as already noted, an important filter for much of this thinking. Ortiz begins his case studies with Titus Andronicus, a text drenched in Ovidian reference and one in which, in performance, a copy of the Metamorphoses is knowingly brought onstage. Titus is, Ortiz asserts, a ‘meditation’ on music and its affective powers (p. 19), as well as a staging of the very problem of meaning and interpretation constituted by music as an aesthetic form. This approach already indicates the highly philosophical approach that Ortiz adopts throughout, though it is not one that ignores performative contexts. For this reader at least, the more successful portions of the book are those where the...