Broken Harmony: Shakespeare and the Politics of Music

4. Impolitic Noise: Resisting Orpheus from Julius Caesar to The Tempest

142 q Chapter 4 Impolitic Noise Resisting Orpheus from Julius Caesar to The Tempest Make people believe. The entire history of tonal music, like that of classical political economy, amounts to an attempt to make people believe in a consensual representation of the world. In order to replace the lost ritualization of the channelization of violence with the spectacle of the absence of violence. In order to stamp upon the spectators the faith that there is a harmony in order. —Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music The political version of the theory of musical harmony is so ubiquitous in Renaissance England that it may be taken as a commonplace. In his archly conservative The Boke named The Governour (1531), for example, Sir Thomas Elyot firmly ties his program of political philosophy to the study of musica speculativa. Addressing the education of young boys destined to rule, Elyot instructs tutors to commende the perfecte understandinge of musike, declaringe howe necessary it is for the better attaynynge the knowlege of a publike weale: whiche, as I before haue saide, is made of an ordre of astates and degrees, and, by reason therof, conteineth in it a perfect harmony: whiche he shall afterwarde more perfectly onderstande, whan he shall happen to rede the bokes of Plato, and Aristotle, of publike weales: wherin be written diuers examples of musike and geometrye. In this fourme may a wise and circumspecte tutor adapte the pleasant science of musike to a necessary and laudable purpose.1 1. Sir Thomas Elyot, The Boke named The Governour (1531), ed. Ernest Rhys (London: J. M. Dent, 1937), 28. Impolitic Noise     143 About the mode of instruction, Elyot is absolutely clear: music is principally to be read, not heard. In this respect, his pedagogical approach to music is utterly orthodox. After warning his reader at length of the dangers of practical musical learning, Elyot directs his idealized tutor to the most abstract of philosophical texts. It is only “in this fourme,” Elyot concludes, that the true precepts of harmony will be understood. Moreover, once understood as abstract symbol, music reveals the natural order of government. In this chapter I consider Shakespeare’s exploration of musical harmony as a means of political representation. Elyot’s treatise illustrates how smoothly the allegorizing rhetoric of musica speculativa moves from the classroom to the public sphere, where it presumes to explain the “ordre of astates and degrees.”2 As we saw in the last chapter, this rhetoric functions by obscuring the distinction between words about music and musical sound, so that music is made to seem naturally representative of an authorized narrative—of mathematics , cosmology, government, or anything else. In Neoplatonic writings, in particular, the postulation of secret or hidden meanings in music works to mystify—and therefore facilitate—the connection between the physical (“natural”) world and universalizing ideologies of order. It is perhaps for this reason that, in Renaissance England, Neoplatonic formulations of music sometimes seem to be more prevalent in political contexts than in academic ones. Likewise,in Shakespeare’s plays, Neoplatonic ideas of harmony are frequently invoked during moments when political actors attempt to legitimize or mythologize their power, even more so than in the scenes of instruction discussed in the last chapter. In this way, Shakespeare suggests that the ideological work performed by the rhetoric of musica speculativa, while useful in the classroom, is indispensable in the political arena. In characteristic fashion,however,Shakespeare demonstrates the power of heard music to disrupt Neoplatonic models of harmony. Musical sound in the plays frequently grates against its rhetorical representation, exposing the political representation of harmony as a highly intricate shell game. Jacques Attali, the prolific French economist and former adviser to President Mitterand , famously claimed that “listening to music is listening to all noise, realizing that its appropriation and control is a reflection of power, that it 2. The idea of musical harmony as political order in the Renaissance is richly traced in Robin Headlam Wells, Elizabethan Mythologies: Studies in Poetry, Drama, and Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1994),esp. 1–8. In addition to the chapter by Elyot discussed above,Headlam Wells adduces similar passages from La Primaudaye, Sir Thomas Browne, Richard Hooker, and Stephen Gosson. 144     Chapter 4 is essentially political.”3 In plays from Julius Caesar to The Tempest, Shakespeare restores to music the “noisiness” that Attali sees as instrumental to its demystification. In this way...