Broken Harmony: Shakespeare and the Politics of Music

3. Teaching Music: the Rule of Allegory

77 q Chapter 3 Teaching Music The Rule of Allegory Meaning is an instrument used to exert force on the world as we find it, imposing on the intolerable, chaotic otherness of nature a hierarchical order in which objects will appear to have inherent “meanings .”. . . Anything that appears to escape or to resist the project of meaning—passion, body, irony—is interpreted as a further extension of meaning. The rift that slashes through the center of the field of allegorical expression, opening into chaos, cannot be shown for what it is except by the poets who have the courage, at brief moments, to do so. —Gordon Teskey, Allegory andViolence Few music lessons, real or fictional, go as badly as Hortensio’s attempt to teach Katherine the lute in The Taming of the Shrew. The lesson, which happens offstage, is presented as a smaller version of the larger campaign in the play to tame Katherine and make her conform to prescribed models of feminine behavior: Baptista’s question to Hortensio— “Canst not break her to the lute?” (2.1.145)—calls to mind the breaking of horses, an image frequently used in the play as a metaphor for Katherine ’s subjection in marriage. In Hortensio’s account of his spectacular failure, Katherine shows herself to be supremely capable of bending both musical terminology and musical instruments to her will: she hath broke the lute to me. I did but tell her she mistook her frets, And bowed her hand to teach her fingering, When, with a most impatient devilish spirit, “Frets, call you these?” quoth she, “I’ll fume with them,” And with that word she struck me on the head, And through the instrument my pate made way, And there I stood amazèd for a while, 78     Chapter 3 As on a pillory, looking through the lute, While she did call me rascal, fiddler, And twangling jack, with twenty such vile terms, As had she studied to misuse me so. (146–57) The idea that Katherine is a poor candidate for the lute—“Iron may hold with her, but never lutes” (144)—is particularly fitting in light of Renaissance iconographies of music. As Linda Phyllis Austern has shown,images of women playing the lute appeared frequently in Renaissance representations of music as a “sweetly nurturing woman” ideally suited for matrimony and motherhood.1 At the same time, by attempting to teach the lute, Hortensio requires Katherine to subject her body to his control—literally, to let him “bow” her fingers and place them on the correct places on the lute’s fingerboard . In this way,Katherine’s refusal to play the lute correctly both symbolizes and constitutes her resistance to traditional feminine role-playing. Shakespeare does not, however, present Katherine’s rejection of Hortensio ’s teaching simply as a chaotic rebellion against gender norms. Katherine’s response appears to Hortensio as though she “had studied” to undermine him, suggesting that she has pedagogical resources of her own. Taken together , Katherine’s willful interpretation of musical terms (“frets”), her contribution of “twenty such vile terms” of her own, and her inspired use of the lute as a pillory form a counterlesson to Hortensio’s utterly conventional approach to music teaching. If we take the implications of this counterlesson seriously, then Katherine’s noisy, unorthodox approach to music makes apparent the slipperiness of musical terminology,as well as the fact that music is a physically embodied activity. From this perspective,all music is—as the title of this book implies—“broken” music, insofar as it cannot shed its arbitrary relationship to language and the materiality of its sound. This is a lesson that Hortensio,finding himself on the wrong end of the schoolmaster’s rod,learns at considerable expense. In this chapter I examine pedagogical approaches to music in Renaissance England, paying special attention to the ways in which academic writing about music in the period systematically attempts to cordon off the physical, acoustic aspects of music from the serious discussion of its nature and effects . While this ritual displacement of musical sound is most apparent in the 1. Linda Phyllis Austern, “‘My Mother Musicke’: Music and Early Modern Fantasies of Embodiment ,” in Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period, ed. Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2001), 240. Teaching Music     79 large body of writing on musica speculativa (the philosophical study of music...