Broken Harmony: Shakespeare and the Politics of Music

2. “Her speech is nothing”: Mad speech and the Female Musician

45 q Chapter 2 “Her speech is nothing” Mad Speech and the Female Musician Frailty, thy name is woman— A little month, or ere those shoes were old With which she follow’d my poor father’s body, Like Niobe, all tears.... For Hecuba! What’s Hecuba to him, or he to her, That he should weep for her? —Hamlet Among Shakespeare’s works, Hamlet is not a particularly Ovidian play.1 Still,the allusions to Niobe and Hecuba in Hamlet point to powerful models of female grief, famous for their ability to evoke sympathy. Moreover, for both Niobe and Hecuba, grief is speechless . Ovid’s Niobe is transformed into a marble statue whose only signs of mourning are the streams of water that flow continually from her face,while Hecuba is transformed into a barking dog. In the Metamorphoses, Ovid draws connections between the two women by emphasizing their rhetorical virtuosity (both Niobe and Hecuba have long “set speeches”) and the ultimate “stoniness” of their grief. In fact, when Ovid recounts Hecuba’s reaction to the death of her son, he alludes to Niobe by describing Hecuba, now bereft of speech, as a hard stone (duroque simillima saxo, 13.540). In both cases, extreme grief transforms the speechful woman into a silent emblem. Ovid’s distinction between speech and emblem bears directly on Shakespeare ’s representation of mourning in Hamlet and The Rape of Lucrece. Mourning his father,Hamlet berates himself for being able to do nothing but speak: “[I] must,like a whore,unpack my heart with words/And fall a-cursing like a 1. One of the few studies that addresses Ovid’s relevance to the play is Yves Peyré, “Niobe and the Nemean Lion: Reading Hamlet in the Light of Ovid’s Metamorphoses,” in Shakespeare’s Ovid, ed. A. B. Taylor, 126–34 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 46     Chapter 2 very drab,/A scullion!”(2.2.563–65). Likewise,after being raped by Tarquin, Lucrece decries the ineffectiveness of her verbal complaint: “Out,idle words, servants to shallow fools,/Unprofitable sounds,weak arbitrators!”(1016–17). Hamlet’s and Lucrece’s disparagement of verbal mourning prompts them to craft visual demonstrations of the crimes committed against them: Hamlet’s staging of The Murder of Gonzago and Lucrece’s staging of her own bleeding body. For Hamlet, the recourse to theater stems from his desire for speech that is intensely audible and physical:imagining himself as the Player,Hamlet fantasizes that he will “drown the stage with tears,/And cleave the general ear with horrid speech”(2.2.539–40). Here,Hamlet imagines a type of sound that is masculine and penetrative, in stark contrast to the feminine, “whorish ” speech that he brands as excessive and ineffectual. It is this fear of the vacuity of the female voice, which Ovid sets against the stony image, that drives Hamlet toward an embrace of the visual. After witnessing a theatrical representation of Hecuba herself,Hamlet professes a desire for a performance that will “amaze indeed/The very faculties of eyes and ears” (2.2.542–43). As Hamlet makes clear,this spectacular model of language is in constant need of iteration, since speech is always subject to its reception as purely material sound. By accusing himself of “whorish”speech,Hamlet squarely locates the idea of language’s empty sonority—as we have seen writers like Gosson and Prynne do—in the female body. In this chapter I argue that Shakespeare’s use of music problematizes the models of feminine vocality and masculine visuality that Hamlet and Lucrece cite as their parameters for action. As in Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare foregrounds the promiscuity of musical meaning, but in ways that specifically identify this promiscuity with the female voice. In this respect, he rehearses a strand of early modern Reformist and misogynistic rhetoric that represents music’s meaninglessness and women’s unruliness as equivalent.2 Shakespeare is well aware of the negative association of music and women, but he is also critical of positive representations of music that ennoble the female musician 2. In a series of influential essays, Linda Phyllis Austern has traced the myriad ways in which music and femininity are associated in early modern England. See “‘Sing againe Syren’: The Female Musician and Sexual Enchantment in Elizabethan Life and Literature,” Renaissance Quarterly 42 (1989): 420–48; “‘Alluring the auditorie to effeminacie’: Music and the Idea of the Feminine in Early Modern England,” Music and Letters 74 (1993): 343–54...