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  • Hamlet and Poppea:Musicking Benjamin's Trauerspiel
  • Gary Tomlinson (bio)

For Louise George Clubb

"Every natural occurrence in this world could be the effect or materialization of a cosmic reverberation or sound, even of the movement of the stars." These are words of the seventeenth-century playwright and poetic theorist Sigmund von Birken. Walter Benjamin quotes them, near the end of his Habilitationsschrift of 1923–25, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, to cinch an important argument: for Benjamin they "finally establish . . . the unity . . . between the verbal and the visual manifestations of the baroque."1 If Birken's assertion establishes this much—what Benjamin means will become clearer later on—it intimates a good deal more. It has for us the peculiar, liminal feel of so much in seventeenth-century discourse, the sense of a borderline positioning between a distant past and a familiar modernity. Its cosmos seems to take on a palpable solidity, not only in its mundane materializations but also in its movements and reverberations, entirely in keeping with the post-Galilean assimilation of earthly and celestial mechanics. At the same time, an earlier cosmos resounds in it, one shot through with sympathies, correspondences, and harmony extending from immaterial to material realms, scrawled from top to bottom with signatures by which one phenomenon might be read in another, however distant.

For all this mélange of old and new, however, Birken's words do not lack a confidence also characteristic of the seventeenth century, a certain stability of world conception that cannot be rightly apprehended either as the waning of an earlier view or as the laborious birth of a modern one. Like so many others of his era, Birken's view sits secure in its liminal place, inviting us to savor an apprehension of reality that neither yearns for a past nor fades before the future. This in-between habitation might be called baroque, as Benjamin called it, following Heinrich Wölfflin, but with an associative catchment for his history richer than his one-time teacher's. It could be called early modern, though we need to worry over the teleology implied in that hard-to-avoid phrase. It could be called, following with Foucault an earlier French historiography, l'age classique or, digging a bit [End Page 152] more deeply, the age of representation. Whatever we call it, however perplexing it is to modern sensibilities, and however much we have tended in our puzzlement to marginalize it as way station, this habitation is a place with a volume of its own. It is a place, I will suggest here, ample and secure enough to harbor Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea, Shakespeare's Hamlet, and the mourning play or Trauerspiel diagnosed by Benjamin.

Caliban's Music

Birken's words suggest something else as well: the large role that still remained in the late seventeenth century for harmony, and by extension song and music, in mediating between the divine and the mundane. Sound and reverberation, even the old harmony of the spheres, is the stuff of his materialization. Music connects material and immaterial worlds.

Shakespeare portrayed a music with similar powers in the magic of Prospero's island in The Tempest.2 It is not Prospero himself or even Ariel who gives it clearest expression, however, but Caliban. "Be not afeard," he begins his famous set piece,

. . . the isle is full of noisesSounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.Sometimes a thousand twangling instrumentsWill hum about mine ears; and sometimes voicesThat, if I then had waked after long sleep,Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,The clouds methought would open and show richesReady to drop upon me, that, when I waked,I cried to dream again.

(3.2.133–41)

Somewhere far behind Caliban's dream stands the archetype for all musical dreams through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Cicero's Somnium Scipionis, so well known from Macrobius's Commentaries that it became a touchstone for praises of music and its powers. If, however, Scipio's dream is a straightforward Neoplatonic anamnesis, leading the soul back through the musical spheres toward its heavenly origins, Shakespeare's...

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