The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

Professor Wilson Knight and others have pointed out the im­portant part played in Shakespeare's poetry hy images related to music, showing, for instance, how music occupies the place in the cluster of good symbols which is held in the bad cluster by the symbol of the Storm.

His fondness for musical images does not, of course, neces­sarily indicate that Shakespeare himself was musical—some very good poets have been musically tone deaf. Any poet of the period who used a musical imagery would have attached the same associations to it, for they were part of the current Renaissance theory of the nature of music and its effects.

Anyone at the time, if asked, "What is music?" would have given the answer stated by Lorenzo to Jessica in the last scene of The Merchant of Venice. Mr. James Hutton in an admirable article in the English Miscellany on "Some English Poems in praise of Music" has traced the history of this theory from Pythagoras to Ficino and shown the origin of most of Lorenzo's images. The theory may be summarized thus:

O Music is unique among the arts for it is the only art practiced in Heaven and by the unfallen crea­tures. Conversely, one of the most obvious character­istics of Hell is its discordant din.

2,) Human reason is able to infer that this heavenly music exists because it can recognize mathematical proportions. But the human ear cannot hear it, either because of man's Fall or simply because the ear is a bodily organ subject to change and death. What Campanella calls the molino vivo of the self drowns out the celestial sounds. In certain exceptional states of ecstasy, however, certain individuals have heard it.

Man-made music, though inferior to the music which cannot be heard, is a good for, in its mortal way, it re­calls or imitates the Divine order. In consequence, it has great powers. It can tame irrational and savage beasts, it can cure lunatics, it can relieve sorrow. A dislike of music is a sign of a perverse will that defiantly refuses to submit to the general harmony.

Not all music, however, is good. There is a bad kind of music which corrupts and weakens. "The Devil rides a fiddlestick." Good is commonly associated with old music, bad with new.

Nobody today, I imagine, holds such a theory, i.e., nobody now thinks that the aesthetics of music have anything to do with the science of acoustics. What theory of painting, one wonders, would have developed if Pythagoras had owned a spectroscope and learned that color relations can also be ex­pressed in mathematical proportions.

But if he has never heard of the theory, there are many things in Shakespeare which the playgoer will miss. For ex­ample, the dramatic effect of the recognition scene in Pericles.

pericles : But what music?

helicanus: My lord, I hear none.

pericles: None! The music of the

spheres! List, my Marina! LYSIMACHUS: It is not good to cross him: give

him way.

pericles: Rarest sounds! Do ye not hear? helicanus: My Lord, I hear.

(Act V, Scene i.)

or even such a simple little joke as this from Othello:

clowtnt: If you have any music that may

not be heard, to't again; but, as they say, to hear music the general does not greatly care. ist. mus.: We have none such, sir.

(Act III, Scene i.)

Music is not only an art with its own laws and values; it is also a social fact. Composing, performing, listening to music are things which human beings do under certain circum­stances just as they fight and make love. Moreover, in the Elizabethan age, music was regarded as an important social fact. A knowledge of music, an ability to read a madrigal part were expected of an educated person, and the extraordinary output of airs and madrigals between 1588 and 1620 testifies to both the quantity and quality of the music making that must have gone on. When Bottom says, "I have a reasonable good ear in music: let's have the tongs and the bones," it is not so much an expression of taste as a revelation of class, like dropping one's aitches; and when Benedick says, "Well, a horn for my money when all's done," he is being deliberately epatant.

Whether he personally cared for music or not, any drama­tist of the period could hardly have failed to notice the part played by music in human life, to observe, for instance, that the kind of music a person likes or dislikes, the kind of way in which he listens to it, the sort of occasion on which he wants to hear or make it, are revealing about his character.

A dramatist of a later age might notice the same facts, but it would be difficult for him to make dramatic use of them unless he were to write a play specifically about musi­cians.