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213 q Chapter 6 The Reforming of Reformation Milton’s A Maske Surely, if [Pythagoras] held any doctrine of the harmony of the spheres, or taught that the heavens revolve in unison with some sweet melody, it was only as a means of suggesting allegorically the close interrelation of the orbs and their uniform revolution in accordance with the laws of destiny for ever. In this he followed the example of the poets, or (what is almost the same thing) of the divine oracles, who never display before the eyes of the vulgar any holy or secret mystery unless it be in some way cloaked or veiled. —“On the Harmony of the Spheres” The Bible...answers dubiously and darkly to the common reader. —Areopagitica Unlike Shakespeare’s dismantling of moralized music,Milton’scommentsonmusicandScriptureintheProlusionsandAreopagitica constitute a defense of allegory, based on a careful understanding of figuration . Just as the Bible represents divine truth elliptically or “darkly,”music—as it is understood and experienced by a human audience—has a figural relation to cosmological and divine knowledge, not a literal one. And while Milton couches his defense with references to the “vulgar” or “common reader,” his other remarks in the same lecture on harmony suggest that this figural way of understanding truth is essential for almost any human reader or auditor: only Pythagoras, who was “worthy to hold converse with the gods themselves,” could hear the true music of the spheres directly.1 Thus,for Milton,figuration, defined as an indirect and imperfect way of presenting immutable concepts through poetic or musical forms, is necessary for the human attainment of 1. The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 1953), 1:238. All quotations of “On the Harmony” are from this edition. 214     Chapter 6 knowledge,which on earth must always be considered incomplete. In this way, Milton acknowledges the instability of musical meaning that Shakespeare had repeatedly demonstrated in plays from Titus Andronicus to The Winter’s Tale, but he finally deems this instability as the condition of knowledge itself. In this chapter I suggest that Milton’s conception of music and knowledge in his early writings elucidates a subtle, but ardent, defense of figuration in A Maske—one that powerfully answers the radically deconstructive approach to music taken by Shakespeare. Like “On the Harmony”and Areopagitica,A Maske represents earthly music both as a heavily mediated form and as an indispensable component of human understanding. Moreover, in some ways strikingly similar to Shakespeare, Milton expresses this complex attitude toward music and figuration through a concurrent exploration of theatricality and Ovidian typology. Like music, Ovidian poetry and theatricality are frequently characterized in Renaissance England (in both laudatory and proscriptive contexts) as opaque,indirect forms of representation;as we have seen in chapter 3,the representation of both music and the Metamorphoses as truth hidden under a fictive veil is a common rhetorical move in Renaissance England. As I will show in the following pages, Milton also emphasizes—though with considerably different goals than the allegorists’—the performative and dynamic aspects of theater,Ovid,and music in A Maske, thereby demonstrating their shared status as intensely sensuous and imperfect modes of apprehending truth. Much Milton criticism in the last twenty years has focused on the complex evolution of typology and iconology in his prose and poetry.2 Attention to Milton’s representation of music contributes to these studies by holding up for examination Milton’s own self-conscious evaluation of the usefulness of figural and iconological forms of representation. Equally important, as I will show, A Maske identifies figuration as a central concern of Reformist ideology. Ovid and music were themselves often politicized and moralized in early modern antitheatrical literature, a fact of which Milton was well aware. Stephen Gosson had included Ovid in his attack on plays and music, and Prynne had also cited Ovid as an example of an immoral poet in Histriomastix , published the year before A Maske. Critical work on early modern antitheatricalism has seldom explored in depth the inclusion of music and Ovid in the Puritan attacks on the theater, even though these sections of the tracts often sparked the most violent responses at the time of publication.3 2. See, for example, essays by Stella P. Revard, Kent R. Lehnhof, Raymond B. Waddington, and Lauren Shohet in Milton Studies 41 (2002). 3. See, for example, Stephen Buhler’s account of William Prynne’s trial in “Counterpoint and...

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