Modes, Moods, and Musical Puns in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale

In the final scene of The Winter's Tale, when Paulina commands "Musick, awake her; strike" to "revive" the statue of Hermione, what might Shakespeare's first audiences have heard? The question, of course, is unanswerable, for the sound of that ephemeral, breath-like music has been wholly lost, and yet, music—aural music—is vital to the last, climactic scene of the play, so its replication is worth the admittedly speculative attempt. Indeed, in Music and Society in Early Modern England, Christopher Marsh dryly argues, "Surely, if any scholar were to publish an account of twentieth-century popular culture that set music to one side, eyebrows would be raised and questions would be asked" (Music 26). He adds some advice: "We must often guess at how music sounded, relying for clues upon contemporary commentary that was highly charged or upon mediated sources that recorded aural forms of music in written form" (30). To imagine the sound of the restorative music in The Winter's Tale, "contemporary commentary" on the Renaissance theory of modes and their effect on mood is particularly helpful, I shall argue. Moreover, speculation about the "mode" of the music in The Winter's Tale may reveal a clever and subversive pun of Paulina's in the final scene.

If any stage directions for the music in Act V, scene iii even exist in early editions of the play, they are woefully unhelpful. Neither the first, second, third, nor fourth folios have any stage directions at all, and Nicholas Rowe's 1709 edition contains the rather unhelpful stage direction "Musick," as do most subsequent editions (973). Yet conjectures about the original music need not be completely groundless, as recent scholarship on the play has demonstrated. John H. Long, for instance, argues that the verb "strike" could point to the appropriate instrument for the music: viols, for "strike" was usually used as a command for viols (90). John Pitcher, editor of the 2010 Arden Shakespeare edition of the play, also notes the pun on "vials" in Hermione's last speech: "You gods, look down, / And from your sacred vials pour your graces / Upon my daughter's head" (V.iii. 121-23). He compares this pun to a similar one in Pericles, in which Cerimon calls to his attendants, "The still and woeful music that we have, / Cause it to sound, beseech you. The vial once more. / How thou stirr'st, thou block! The music there! / I pray you give her air" (scene xii. 86-89), punning neatly on viol (stringed instrument) and vial (medicine) and on air and ayre (a musical composition). Shakespeare, of course, makes a similar pun in Twelfth Night with Viola, "a heroine who encloses the six-stringed instrument, the viol or 'viola-da-gamba' within her soubriquet" (Stern, "New Directions" 180).

The pun on viol and air may also further indict Leontes, I suggest. When Hermione faints in Act III, Leontes directs, "Take her hence. / Her heart is but o'ercharged; she will recover. / I have too much believed mine own suspicion. / Beseech you, tenderly apply to her / Some remedies of life" (III.ii. 147-51). The statue scene—carefully staged and blocked by Paulina—is reminiscent of the court scene of Act III, which was carefully staged and blocked by Leontes. In the court scene, Leontes's remedies of life are ineffectual, but the heavenly vials / viols of the final scene can awaken a statue.

Another critic, B.J. Sokol, briefly posits that "in accord with Hermione's inward as well as outward Majesty, the music that Paulina commands for Hermione's entry music would most appropriately be magnificent, perhaps a tucket or fanfare" (49). In his recent analysis of the sound of the music in V.iii., and in rather more detail than Sokol, Simon Smith traces the theory of "musical delight" in the play and in Renaissance music theory, and he notes the similarities between Hermione's resurrection and hermetic-alchemical texts containing "magical" music. Audiences would have recognized and accepted the alchemical magic of Paulina's song, he argues, for "[m]usic was...