Musicking Shakespeare: A Conflict of Theatres (Eastman Studies in Music)

Musicking Shakespeare

Eastman Studies in Music Ralph P. Locke, Senior Editor Eastman School of Music Additional Titles on the Relationship between Music and Literature

Analyzing Wagner’s Operas: Alfred Lorenz and German Nationalist Ideology Stephen McClatchie Berlioz’s Semi-Operas: Roméo et Juliette and La damnation de Faust Daniel Albright CageTalk: Dialogues with and about John Cage Edited by Peter Dickinson Elliott Carter: Collected Essays and Lectures, 1937–1995 (paperback) Edited by Jonathan W. Bernard Mendelssohn, Goethe, and the Walpurgis Night: The Heathen Muse in European Culture, 1700–1850 John Michael Cooper The Music of Luigi Dallapiccola Raymond Fearn The Musical Madhouse (Les Grotesques de la musique) Hector Berlioz Translated and edited by Alastair Bruce Introduction by Hugh Macdonald

Music’s Modern Muse: A Life of Winnaretta Singer, Princesse de Polignac Sylvia Kahan The Poetic Debussy: A Collection of His Song Texts and Selected Letters (Revised Second Edition) Edited by Margaret G. Cobb Schubert in the European Imagination, volume 1: The Romantic and Victorian Eras Scott Messing Schubert in the European Imagination, Volume 2: Fin-de-Siècle Vienna Scott Messing Schumann’s Piano Cycles and the Novels of Jean Paul Erika Reiman The Sea on Fire: Jean Barraqué Paul Griffiths Substance of Things Heard: Writings about Music Paul Griffiths

A complete list of titles in the Eastman studies in Music Series, in order of publication, may be found at the end of this book.

Musicking Shakespeare A Conflict of Theatres DANIEL ALBRIGHT

UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER PRESS

Copyright © 2007 Daniel Albright All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. First published 2007

Chapters 1–9 appeared previously in Berlioz’s Semi-Operas, University of Rochester Press, 2001. Used by permission. University of Rochester Press 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA www.urpress.com and Boydell & Brewer Limited PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.boydellandbrewer.com ISBN-13: 978–1–58046–255–6 ISBN-10: 1–58046–255–3 ISSN: 1071–9989 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Albright, Daniel, 1945Musicking Shakespeare : a conflict of theatres / Daniel Albright. p. cm. — (Eastman studies in music, ISSN 1071-9989 ; v. 45) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-58046-255-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-58046-255-3 (alk. paper) 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616—Adaptations—History and criticism. 2. Berlioz, Hector, 1803-1869. Roméo et Juliette. 3. Verdi, Giuseppe, 1813-1901. Macbeth. 4. Britten, Benjamin, 1913-1976. Midsummer night's dream. 5. Music and literature. 6. Opera. I. Title. ML80.S5A43 2007 782.1—dc22 2007009858 A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. This publication is printed on acid-freeDisclaimer: paper. Printed in the States of America. Some images in United the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view these images please refer to the printed version of this book.

Contents List of Illustrations

vii

Introduction

1

Part 1: Romeo and Juliet 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Introduction to Part 1 The Veronese Social Code The Code of Love Love against Language The Afterlife of Romeo and Juliet La lance branlée: French Opinions of Shakespeare Berlioz in the Plural Roméo et Juliette: Introduction Roméo et Juliette: The Symphony Roméo et Juliette: The Opera Resumes

33 35 45 55 63 69 74 80 91 107

Part 2: Macbeth 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

Shakespeare’s Random Magic as Theft Prophesying Squinting at Consequences Macbeth’s Children Macbeth as an Actor Two Theatres Witches Amok Sortileges of Speech Lady Macbeth as Witch

117 121 123 126 129 133 137 142 161 167

vi

❧

contents

20. 21.

Time Slips La Sonnambula

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

Cosmicomedy The Picture of Cupid Depictorializing Cupid Cupid’s Wax The Tedious Brief Scene Other Dreams in Other Summers: The Aesthetic of the Masque Purcell’s The Fairy Queen Lampe’s Pyramus and Thisbe Experimenters: Mendelssohn and Korngold Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream

176 182

Part 3: A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Notes Bibliography Index

195 205 210 214 221 233 240 257 262 265 297 307 311

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view these images please refer to the printed version of this book.

Illustrations Figures 1. From Charles Sorel, The Extravagant Shepherd; Or the history of the Shepherd Lysis. An Anti-Romance; Written Originally in French, and Now Made English, 1654 66 2. Drawing of a witch. One of nine costume designs for Macbeth, copies of the Focosi figurini, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. From David Rosen and Andrew Porter, eds., Verdi’s Macbeth: A Sourcebook, 1984 153 Music Examples 1. Music for Full fathom five 2. Fugue-War (Berlioz, Roméo et Juliette, Part I, Introduction, mm. 1–6) 3. Prince Escalus intervenes (Berlioz, Roméo et Juliette, I, Introduction, mm. 78–83) 4. Confiding love to the night (Berlioz, Roméo et Juliette, I, Prologue, mm. 87–88) 5. Roméo in solitude (Berlioz, Roméo et Juliette, II, Roméo seul, mm. 1–8) 6. Ball music in treble clef, larghetto in accented notes in bass clef (Berlioz, Roméo et Juliette, II, Grande fête chez Capulet, mm. 226–33) 7. Night-birds (Berlioz, Roméo et Juliette, III, Scène d’amour, mm. 125–27) 8. Orgasm? (Berlioz, Roméo et Juliette, III, Scène d’amour, mm. 313–17) 9. Mab: diminished seventh in melodic form (Berlioz, Roméo et Juliette, IV, La Reine Mab, mm. 20–30) 10. Mab’s umbral regions (Berlioz, Roméo et Juliette, IV, La Reine Mab, mm. 615–18) 11. Berlioz’s notation of his own heartbeat 12. Delirium in the tomb (Berlioz, Roméo et Juliette, VI, Invocation, mm. 124–25)

18 85 86 88 91

94 98 102 104 105 110 111

viii

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

❧

list of illustrations

Canto appassionato assai from the love scene (Berlioz, Roméo et Juliette, III, Scène d’amour, mm. 172–75) Jurez donc (Berlioz, Roméo et Juliette, VII, Serment, mm. 370–76) Come away (Robert Johnson) Demons (Verdi, Giovanna d’Arco, Act 1, Finale, [60], mm. 3–4 after) Pledge (Verdi, Ernani, Act 2, Duetto-finale, mm. 72–79) Prophecy (Verdi, Attila, Act 1, scene 2, [66] to 6 mm. after) Obsessive figure (Verdi, Macbeth, Act 1, No. 5, mm. 232–39) Prophecy to Macbeth (Verdi, Macbeth, Act 1, No. 2, mm. 200–217) Prophecy to Banco (Verdi, Macbeth, Act 1, No. 2, mm. 227–32) Long live Macbeth and Banco! (Verdi, Macbeth, Act 1, No. 2, mm. 241–44) No tomorrow (Verdi, Macbeth, Act 1, No. 4, mm. 8–18) Unmoving earth (Verdi, Macbeth, Act 1, No. 4, mm. 55–59) Irreparable deed (Verdi, Macbeth, Act 2, No. 7, mm. 22–25) Other blood must flow (Verdi, Macbeth, Act 2, No. 7, mm. 50–54) Will you be unmoved? (Verdi, Macbeth, Act 2, No. 7, mm. 57–59) All done (Verdi, Macbeth, Act 1, No. 5, mm. 95–99) I hear this voice (Verdi, Macbeth, Act 1, No. 5, mm. 154–57) Open, hell’s mouth (Verdi, Macbeth, Act 1, No. 6, mm. 72–74) Femme fatale (Verdi, Macbeth, Act 1, No. 5, mm. 105–8) Only thorns for pillow (Verdi, Macbeth, Act 1, No. 5, mm. 154–64) Parody (Verdi, Macbeth, Act 1, No. 5, mm. 176–79) Light thickens (Verdi, Macbeth, Act 2, No. 7, mm. 79–82) Banco’s aria (Verdi, Macbeth, Act 2, No. 8½, mm. 21–24) It is necessary (Verdi, Macbeth, Act 2, No. 7, mm. 99–103) Brindisi (Verdi, Macbeth, Act 2, No. 9, mm. 80–85) Poisonous toad (Verdi, Macbeth, Act 3, no. 10, mm. 75–79) Cauldron (Verdi, Macbeth, Act 3, No. 11, mm. 133–38) Formication (Verdi, Macbeth, Act 4, No. 14, mm. 9–10) Sway (Verdi, Macbeth, Act 4, No. 14, mm. 17–19) Slither (Verdi, Macbeth, Act 4, No. 14, mm. 29–30) Hand wash (Verdi, Macbeth, Act 4, No. 14, mm. 56–59) A spot (Verdi, Macbeth, Act 4, No. 14, mm. 60–63) Victory (Verdi, Macbeth, Act 4, No. 15, mm. 295–98) Songsters (Purcell, The Fairy Queen, Act 2, No. 9, mm. 13–15)

111 113 144 151 155 155 157 158 159 159 161 162 162 163 163 165 165 165 168 169 169 172 172 173 174 176 178 185 185 185 186 188 190 243

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

Music for music’s sake (Purcell, The Fairy Queen, Act 3, No. 24, mm. 21–24) Coridon (Purcell, The Fairy Queen, Act 3, No. 25, mm. 12–14) Winter (Purcell, The Fairy Queen, Act 4, No. 39, mm. 24–31) Drunk (Purcell, The Fairy Queen, Act 1, No. 7, mm. 102–6) Snore (Britten, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 1, mm. 1–4) Lion’s roar (Britten, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 1 [65], 1 m. before to 2 mm. after) First hee-haw (Britten, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 2 [19], mm. 4–5 after) Woosel cock 1 (Britten, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 2 [30], 1m before to 6 after) Woosel cock 2 (Britten, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 2 [30], mm. 7–9 after) Rustic clots (Britten, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 1 [53], m. 5 after to [54]) Oberon’s celesta (Britten, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 1 [45], m. 7 after to [46]) Ill met (Britten, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 1 [11], 2 mm. before to 4 after) Mechanical dissension (Britten, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 1 [13], mm. 9–14 after) Oberon as harp (Britten, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 1 [47], mm. 6–7 after) Miles! (Britten, The Turn of the Screw, Act 1 [72], mm. 5–6 after) Fairy pandiatonism (Britten, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 1 [98], 1 m. before to 1 after) Wide weed (Britten, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 1 [49], m. 4 after to [50]) Act 2 prelude (Britten, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 2, mm. 1–5) I swear to thee (Britten, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 1 [31] to 5 mm. after) Lovers’ cells (Britten, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 1 [24]–[25]) One heart (Britten, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 1 [74], mm. 6–13 after) Pause button (Britten, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 1 [44], mm. 1–3 after) Wall (Britten, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 3 [64], mm. 5–7 after)

❧

list of illustrations

ix

246 247 250 254 268 270 270 271 271 274 274 276 277 277 279 280 280 283 285 286 288 290 292

x

70. 71. 72. 73.

❧

list of illustrations

O grim-look’d night (Britten, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 3 [65], mm. 3–6 after) Verdi-ism (Britten, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 3 [67], m. 1 before to m. 1 after) Thisby distraught (Britten, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 3 [83], m. 3 before to m. 3 after) Jolsonism (Britten, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 3 [84], mm. 6–8 after)

293 293 294 295

Introduction The Role of the Singer in Shakespeare’s Plays Shakespeare did not overvalue music. It is true that he sometimes wrote about music in his loftiest, most chryselephantine manner: How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank! Here will we sit, and let the sounds of music Creep in our ears. Soft stillness and the night Become the touches of sweet harmony. Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold. There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st But in his motion like an angel sings, Still quiring to the young-ey’d cherubins; Such harmony is in immortal souls, But whilst this muddy vesture of decay Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it. Come ho, and wake Diana with a hymn, With sweetest touches pierce your mistress’ ear, And draw her home with music. Jess. I am never merry when I hear sweet music. Play Music. (Merchant of Venice 5.1.54–69)1 Here Lorenzo, the second-string lover in The Merchant of Venice, instructs Jessica with a short course in music appreciation—and in Lorenzo appreciation. He is also coaching the audience: we hear this on stage, and are supposed to feel, ah young love! ah elation! ah music! But perhaps it would be good to regard this scene with a suspicious eye. The poetry itself is pretty thick-inlaid—slathered on in a self-consciously impressive fashion; and the tactile language (touches of sweet harmony; With sweetest touches pierce your mistress’ ear) may suggest that Lorenzo is less concerned with aesthetics and Plato’s philosophy of sirens on crystalline spheres than with sex—Jessica seems on the verge of an auricular insemination. Furthermore, the cue to an actual musician (the clown Stephano)

2

❧

introduction

shows us that the whole scene is a setup: in the Renaissance, music couldn’t be procured simply by turning on a radio, but required careful preparation. Lorenzo and Jessica are cuddling together according to the script of a scenario. Music is a delight, but a staged delight. Music meant many things to Shakespeare. It could cue moods—erotic or warlike or contemplative. It could be the source of high-flown metaphors: for example, the unanimity of soul mates could be expressed as sympathetic vibration: “Mark how each string, sweet husband to another, / Strikes each in each by mutual ordering” (Sonnet 8). But most of all, music meant money: Shakespeare, like any experienced man of the theatre, knew that musicians are expensive. It is perhaps no accident that Shakespeare’s most memorable hymn to music occurs in a play about buying and selling, in the context of a dialogue between a businessman and a usurer’s daughter. Yes, Lorenzo and Jessica swoon over music insinuating itself into the moonlit landscape; yes, the lovesick Duke Orsino commands, “If music be the food of love, play on” (Twelfth Night 1.1.1); but elsewhere musicians, with their ceaseless demands to be paid, are annoying. In Othello a clown compares the sound of wind instruments to the nasal diction of Neapolitans whose noses have been eaten away by syphilis: “Why, masters, have your instruments been in Naples, that they speak i’ th’ nose thus? . . . masters, here’s money for you; and the general so likes your music, that he desires you for love’s sake to make no more noise with it” (3.1.3–4, 11–13). Shakespeare’s generic musicians tend to be slightly doltish fellows—buffoons, but not such talented buffoons that they can be entrusted with really good comedy. Shakespeare’s idea of the sort of joke fit for a musician can be seen in a passage from Romeo and Juliet where a musician, not very impressed by the fact that the wedding to which he’s been summoned has suddenly turned into a funeral, notes, “I say, ‘silver sound,’ because musicians sound for silver” (4.5.134–35). Shakespeare’s elevated passages about music have often attracted serious composers of later generations: Henry Purcell composed three settings of a song (not by Shakespeare, but adapted from him) that begins If music be the food of love, play on; one of Stravinsky’s Three Songs from William Shakespeare is a setting of Sonnet 8; and in Serenade to Music, Ralph Vaughan Williams set, to music worthy of the text, Lorenzo’s speech—a self-consciously gorgeous delirium. But I suspect that Shakespeare liked his music lo-falutin; he might have agreed with Noël Coward, “Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.” A rough catalogue of Shakespeare’s singing characters might be organized into four categories: anonymous, clowns, villains, and madmen/madwomen.

Anonymous Many of Shakespeare’s most memorable songs are sung by nobody in particular. In Measure for Measure, Mariana, seduced and abandoned, enters with a Boy, who first sings a song appropriate to her condition (Take, O, take those lips away—4.1.1) and then promptly leaves the stage; in Henry VIII, Queen

❧

introduction

3

Katherine asks a stray wench to sing (Orpheus with his lute—3.1.3), and then turns her attention to weightier matters. This relegation of song to specialists reflects the well-known fact that, most commonly, actors can’t sing and singers can’t act; but it also may reflect a certain disjunction between drama and music in Shakespeare’s imagination. Drama pertains to the dramatis personae, but a song is somewhat impersonal, no one’s property; and so Mariana’s music is displaced onto an inconsequential figure on the lyric margins of the play. If Mariana were to grow too absorbed with her own song, she would turn into the rigid, nearly psychotic creature that Tennyson imagined in “Mariana”; but Shakespeare’s Mariana only lends half an ear, so to speak, to the sweetly forsworn lips and the vainly sealed kisses and the other beauties of the song— instead of engrossing herself in the melody of abandonment, she takes decisive action to get a husband. A song tends to freeze the singer into a single feelingstate; theatre, on the other hand, relieves feelings less by expressing them than by changing the circumstances that caused them. Shakespeare’s art is no sense a Gesamtkunstwerk, an integrated dramaturgy of words and music; the music is extrinsic to the play, or intrinsic only in that it offers tantalizing glimpses of an alternative construction of the whole feeling-situation that the play entails—a parallel universe in which the characters do nothing, just sit hypnotized in the general ravish of sound.

Clowns Some of Shakespeare’s songs were written for his star comedians—especially Robert Armin, who evidently created Touchstone in As You Like It, Feste in Twelfth Night, and the Fool in King Lear. Armin entered Shakespeare’s company in 1599 or 1600, replacing Will Kemp, a buffoon who liked pratfalls and comic jigs; by contrast, Armin—elegant, word-driven, ironic, musical—was one of the revolutionary comedians in the history of the drama. It wouldn’t be quite right to say that Woody Allen had replaced John Belushi or Benny Hill, since it’s hard to imagine Woody Allen as an accomplished and moving singer, but something along those lines had taken place. Shakespeare’s plays changed radically under Armin’s influence. To think of Twelfth Night is to remember the curtain, when Feste, delicately, touchingly, shivers away all artifice, dissolves the spectacle with the rain and tears and tosspotting of When that I was and a little tine boy. (Armin was to sing the same song again in a later play, King Lear [3.2.74], where the heigh ho the wind and the rain seem at once to embody the storm and to offer a hint of aesthetic relief from it.) I hear this song in my inner ear, its famous melody (ascribed to Joseph Vernon, first published in 1772) sung by Alfred Deller with an expressionless grave grace. Again the lyric and the dramatic jar against one another instead of cooperating to a single effect: here the lyric seems less the culmination of the drama than the antidote to it—a spell to disenchant all the brittle ludicrosities of cross-dressing love that the play set in motion. Perhaps even in When that I was and a little tine boy, the issue of paying

4

❧

introduction

the performer is close at hand: its last lines are “our play is done / And we’ll strive to please you every day” (Twelfth Night 5.1.407–8)—a blatant plea for applause, if not an actual passing around of the hat.

Villains Shakespeare may write of the music of the spheres, and may otherwise evoke refined timbres, such as those of the viol consort; but his imagination often seems more specifically engaged with the problems of music drama when music deals with earthier matters, muddier vestures. Shakespeare’s music is, if not itself vicious or crazy, often found in conjunction with vice and madness. At the end of Twelfth Night, Feste sings When that I was and a little tine boy, simple and wise and desolate and forgiving; but not long before, Feste sang this: I am gone, sir, And anon, sir, I’ll be with you again; In a trice, Like to the old Vice, Your need to sustain; Who with dagger of lath, In his rage and his wrath, Cries, ah, ha! To the devil; Like a mad lad, Pare thy nails, dad. Adieu, goodman devil. (4.2.120–31) Feste is playing Vice only to mock Malvolio, not as a sober announcement of his evil character. But it is nevertheless true that Iago himself quite likes to sing (“And let me the canakin clink, clink”; “King Stephen was and-a worthy peer”— Othello 2.3.70, 89); whereas Othello not only fails to sing, but can find no worse term of abuse to spit on Desdemona than “Admirable musician! O, she will sing the savageness out of a bear!” (4.1.188–89). Iago’s drinking songs are controlled, calculated: he wants to encourage Cassio to get drunk and to disgrace himself. But some of Shakespeare’s drunkards spew out songs as if music could be the equivalent of vomit: for example, the ironically named country justice, Silence, drowns out much of the dialogue with an endless string of leering songs and Robin Hood ballads, until at last Falstaff orders him carried off to bed (2 Henry IV 5.3.129). Falstaff himself, of course, is farced with old songs—“Let the sky rain potatoes; let it thunder to the tune of ‘Green-sleeves’ ” (Merry Wives of Windsor 5.5.18–19)—for flesh seems to organize its desires in the form of music.

❧

introduction

5

Madmen, madwomen In Shakespeare’s drama there is no surer symptom of insanity than compulsive and disjointed singing. When Edgar, in King Lear, wishes to feign madness, he starts to quote old rhymes (“Fie, foh, and fum, / I smell the blood of a British man”—3.4.183–84) and to lurch into unprovoked song (“Sleepest or wakest thou, jolly shepherd?”—3.6.41). A madman doesn’t have words of his own; he patches together a universe of discourse by means of quotation, just as he patches together his costume with scraps of old clothes. Here the impersonalness of music becomes a sign of the disintegration of personality. “Edgar I nothing am” (2.3.21), Edgar announces at the end of the soliloquy in which he resolves to assume the role of madman; and to enter this nihil, this absence of being, he needs to abandon (or to seem to abandon) all control of the vagrant words and tunes that run around in his head. “I think there must be a place in the soul / all made of tunes, of tunes of long ago,” the American composer Charles Ives wrote in his song The Things Our Fathers Loved; and a madman’s intelligence is like Ives’s The Fourth of July (1912), which evokes marching bands, placed at various distances, playing Columbia the Gem of the Ocean and Yankee Doodle and The Girl I Left Behind Me all at the same time—an incoherent polyphony of brain. A relevant example closer to Shakespeare’s time is Biber’s instrumental Battalia a 10 (written in the late seventeenth century) in which a gang of rowdy drunken soldiers is illustrated by a dissonant string consort in which each instrument bawls its own tune. A madman has a ten-part music battle continuously taking place in his head. The divisions between Fool (mentally handicapped), Madman (epistemologically handicapped), and Villain (morally handicapped) were not always perfectly clear in the Elizabethan theatre. What was clear was the distinction between the Jester and any of these three: Natural Fools are prone to self-conceit; Fools artificial with their wits lay wait To make themselves Fools, liking the disguise To feed their own minds and the gazer’s eyes.2 This is from Robert Armin’s jokebook, A Nest of Ninnies (1614)—Armin was an author and playwright in addition to being a professional clown. Armin’s tales about his favorite fools—often accompanied by a little biographical poem recounting the interesting physical defects of each fool (large asymmetrical ears, not many teeth)—suggest that the funniest follies are those involving various failures of recognition. For instance, one of Armin’s fools, overhearing a nobleman praising the virtues of a hunting hawk, misinterprets the word good as referring to good flavor, and so he gobbles up the hawk, feathers and all. A madman, by contrast, might behave identically, but only if he mistook the live hawk for, say, a juicy beef roast: the fool’s error pertains (in this case) to the verbal system,

6

❧

introduction

whereas the madman’s error pertains to the perceptual system. The (natural) fool knows that a hawk is a hawk; he simply doesn’t know what hawks are good for. Another difference between fool and madman is that natural folly is innate, whereas madness is often acquired: you can go mad, but you can’t go fool, except as a deliberate act of feigning. The fool and the madman are useful to the playwright for many reasons, not least for their capering on the knife-edge between recognition and misrecognition. Aristotle thought that the essence of theatre lay in anagnorisis and peripeteia, recognition and reversal; and a fool or madman is a whole living theatre comprised in a single character, in that his existence is a continual stumbling through misrecognitions. The mad Orlando, in Ariosto’s epic, Orlando Furioso (1532), is so befuddled that he fights empty air, thinking that his enemy is right before him; and nothing is more dramatic than a character who disagrees vehemently with other characters about the constitution of the space around him. If a number of characters were to gesture at the same vacant space as if it were occupied by a person, the audience would simply assume that someone was in fact there, though for some reason he or she wasn’t being shown (it might be someone difficult for an actor to impersonate, such as Paul Bunyan, or Tinker Bell, or the End-of-the-World Octopus). But if Macbeth points to a vacant space, crying to Banquo!, when nobody else can see anything, then the stage is starting to disarticulate excitingly into a dissonant set of competing theatrical spaces. If Hamlet’s father’s ghost is visible and audible to some characters, but not to others (such as his widow Gertrude), the audience is unable to resolve this duplex, duplicitous theatre-space into a “correct” and an “incorrect” version—is Hamlet insane? are Horatio and the others who see the ghost also insane, the victims of mass hysteria? or is the ghost really there, with Gertrude physically blind and deaf as a reflex of her moral deficiencies? The madness seems to lie in the theatre itself, not in any of the characters. Since the performing area of the Globe was itself a more or less vacant space, with few props and no painted scenery, the fool and the madman point to the ludic character of the theatre, in which there exists only a fragile agreement that the rod in the “king” ’s hand is in fact a scepter—since in the madman’s eye, the rod might become Aaron’s rod, queasily transforming itself into a snake. Such impermissible acts of imagination are difficult to distinguish from the permissible, indeed indispensable, acts of imagination on which the theatre itself is founded. The mad characters in Shakespeare, then, move through a poorly constituted space, full of endlessly deforming objects, and open to sudden novelties—is this a dagger that I see before me? (The same could be said of the sane characters, from the point of view of an audience that refuses to suspend disbelief.) But some of them do have a strategy for organizing their perplexed psychic worlds: music. Queen. How now, Ophelia? Oph. “How should I your true-love know

She sings.

Queen. Oph.

❧

introduction

7

From another one? By this cockle hat and staff, And his sandal shoon.” Alas, sweet lady, what imports this song? Say you? Nay, pray you mark. “He is dead and gone, lady . . . ” . . .

Song. How do you, pretty lady? Well, God dild you! They say the owl was a baker’s daughter. Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be. . . . “Tomorrow is Saint Valentine’s day. . . . Song. Let in the maid, that out a maid Never departed more.” . . . Laer. A document in madness, thoughts and remembrance fitted. Oph. [To Claudius.] There’s fennel for you, and columbines. There’s rue for you, and here’s some for me . . . I would give you some violets, but they wither’d all when my father died. They say’a made a good end— [Sings.] “For bonny sweet Robin is all my joy.” Laer. Thought and afflictions, passion, hell itself, She turns to favor and to prettiness. (Hamlet 4.5.22–29, 41–44, 48, 54–55, 178–82, 184–89) King. Oph.

Ophelia, unable to accept a reality in which her lover has murdered her father, retreats into music. She quotes from the Walsingham ballad and Bonny sweet Robin; scholars suspect that all her songs are derived from preexistent material familiar to the Elizabethan audience. She sings of the governing themes of her present life: true love, and a quiet grave, and a deflowered maiden—soon she will be literally deflowering herself, unburdening herself of pansies and daisies and violets. Madness plays everywhere through this scene. Ophelia places great stress on the word know: “How should I your true-love know?”; “we know what we are, but know not what we may be”—appropriate to an intelligence increasingly clouded with unknowing. The feigned madman Edgar announced that he was nothing Edgar, as if he were turning into nobody; and Ophelia, knowing not what she may become, seems headed in the same direction. Her music is everybody’s music and therefore nobody’s music: in the course of two or three minutes Ophelia sings music appropriate to a faithful lover, a desolated mourner, and some fellow in a tavern laughing at how easily women can be seduced and abandoned. The convention of musical madness lies exactly in this abrupt juxtaposing of contradictory moods—this squash of lovesong, lament, and bawdy ballad. (Purcell’s Bess of Bedlam, from the end of the seventeenth century, follows a similar recipe; and long afterward Richard Strauss, in his Three Ophelia Songs, still obeys the convention that madness is unmodulated abutment of conflicting

8

❧

introduction

musical material.) Ophelia’s head buzzes with snatches of familiar melodies, songs that seem to occupy all the room normally given to processes of perception, cognition, conation, memory; in a sense she’s committed suicide even before she drowns, in that she’s depersonalized herself, abdicated in favor of an incoherent bundle of lyrical masks. On the other hand, Ophelia is using music, using madness, to make a point. There’s a distinct aggressiveness to her behavior in this scene: she may be pretty, and frail, and pitiable, but she plays the role of a fury, stirring the conscience of those who have wronged her. By handing out columbines—symbolic of ingratitude in flower language—she is making an accusation; and her songs similarly speak of matters of which a young noblewoman would have difficulty speaking by other means. Shakespeare’s extravagantly musical madmen and madwomen anticipate the relations between music and madness developed in the twentieth century. The neurologist Oliver Sacks, in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985), tells the case history of Dr. P, a famous baritone, whose Alzheimer’s disease took the form of prosopagnosia, literally face-not-knowing, or radical misrecognition. To mistake your wife for a hat is a sort of limit-point of the recognition-errors that create terror or pity or amusement (or all three) among those who watch Shakespeare’s fools and madmen: Fool. Come hither, mistress. Is your name Goneril? Lear. She cannot deny it. Fool. Cry you mercy, I took you for a joint-stool. (King Lear 3.4.5–52) This is the professional folly of an artificial fool, but its likeness to Sacks’s case history is striking. Sacks noted that Dr. P ordered his day-to-day existence by means of musical cues: “Dr. P built for himself a system in which music acted as a substitute for his lost visual cognition—a musical map for locating himself in time, space, and social relationships. As Mrs. P relates, Dr. P evolved a “ ‘track’ for him to shave to, dress to, eat to, and so on.”3 When Michael Nyman turned this case history into his opera, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1986), he took skeletal harmonies from one of Dr. P’s track-songs, Schumann’s Ich grolle nicht, in order to embody the cybernetic musical force that impelled Dr. P’s physical actions. Perhaps we can imagine the deranged Ophelia as using her lutesinging to impart structure to her movements, to endow her feeling-states, her gestures, with a transitory focus and purpose, in the few moments before some other song comes along to pull different strings. The other famous singer among Shakespeare’s heroines is Desdemona. Desdemona is not a madwoman, but she is, after Othello’s public accusations and assaults, at her wit’s end. There is possibly a certain recalcitrance, a selfassertion, in her singing the Willow Song: if Othello has mocked her as an admirable musician, she will prove, even if only to herself, that the term is correct. But the flavor of the Willow Song is self-abandonment, a lapsing into a

❧

introduction

9

world of quoted feeling. The old song is instinct with death—not only did Desdemona’s seduced maid Barbary die while singing it (4.3.30), but in the full text (Desdemona sings only the beginning) the lover speaks of dying from love: “Write this on my tomb, / That in love I was true.” Desdemona sings of salt tears softening the stones (4.3.46), and indeed her whole life is trickling away in the song’s steady lachrymal flow; as so often in Shakespeare, music is a defunging, an undoing of character and of drama itself. Part of the effect of the Willow Song comes precisely from its inappropriateness. Desdemona is not a maid whose lover has proved false; she is a married woman accused of falseness by a faithful husband. It is commonly noticed that Shakespeare reversed the genders of the pronouns in the original song, which concerns a man abandoned by a false woman; Willow, willow is exactly the song that Othello should be singing, as he fantasizes about his presumed sexual betrayal. In her ecstasy of sorrow, Desdemona has weirdly usurped a male song pertaining to her husband’s state of mind and turned it against its singer. The strangest moment in the whole role of Desdemona comes at the end of the song: “I call’d my love false love; but what said he then? Sing willow, willow, willow; If I court moe women, you’ll couch with moe men.” (4.3.55–57) As far as I know, Shakespeare simply made up the last line: no old text of the Willow Song contains it. The timbre of Iago is insinuating itself into Desdemona’s voice: earlier in the play, Iago told Desdemona that an ideally fair and chaste woman was, in the end, fit only to suckle fools and chronicle small beer (2.1.160); and now Desdemona seems on the extreme verge of disillusionment, as she pushes Willow, willow toward a prosaic cruelty not in the original. Shakespeare wanted a song for Desdemona; but her revising, her misremembering, is more important than the song itself. The significance of Willow, willow has less to do with willows and soft stones than with the long chains of will ow will ow will ow will ow—I mean that the cantabile, the la la la, is the chief thing, the deliquescence of grief into descant. The power of the more famous of the two sixteenth-century melodies comes from the way in which the descending scales slink away from D minor, first to D Dorian, then to D major. Desdemona is herself a modally unstable being. Shakespeare’s singers range from anonymous specialists to major characters who render themselves anonymous by means of song. Yeats wrote powerfully of the selfsurrender of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, their enlargement of vision, their impinging on the storm-beaten threshold of sanctity, their tendency to generalize their personal circumstances into all men’s fate.4 I think Yeats was to some extent right in believing that at the catastrophe, Shakespeare’s characters tend to lose their speech-prefixes and to become interchangeable with one another: one may say “the readiness is all” (Hamlet 5.2.222), another may say “Ripeness is all” (King Lear

10

❧

introduction

5.2.11), but what matter who says which? Music can assist in this loss, this radical dilation of being. Mad Ophelia, maddened Desdemona, cast off the markers that individuate them, turn into favorite pages from the Elizabethan songbook.

The Tempest as a Virtual Opera At the end of his career, Shakespeare’s attitude toward the dramatic possibilities of music seemed to change. Shakespeare was a little too old, and perhaps a little too wedded to older models of the theatre, to embrace wholeheartedly the new dramaturgy of the court masque (made possible by the accession of James I, a monarch far less stingy than Elizabeth with respect to personal entertainment), with its rigidly scripted panegyrics, its proscenium arch, its extravagant and wandering stage machines, its spare-no-expense musical accompaniment. But although Shakespeare never wrote a masque—Ben Jonson was to be the great investigator of the possibilities of this genre—Shakespeare did include brief masque-like scenes in some of his later plays, especially The Tempest. Prospero stages two formal entertainments: one in which a banquet of shadow-food is spoiled by Harpy-Ariel in order to teach the conspirators a lesson; the other in which Ceres, Juno, and Iris come to offer a spectacular blessing on the marriage of Ferdinand and Miranda. These quasi-masques have a somewhat detached, diffident quality, a slight chill of the didactic and celebratory; they are rarely regarded as high points of Shakespeare’s art. The bucolic speeches, full of turfy mountains and nibbling sheep (4.1.62), seem to present masque writing as a placid, ovine sort of art, far from the thrashing and crashing, the severed limbs, mutilated tongues, snake-bitten breasts, the whole unpredictable ruckus of the theatre in which Shakespeare had grown up. (It is possible that the formalized overgentleness of the wedding masque is slightly barbed with satire against Jonson’s court masques.) The music for the little masques in The Tempest is lost, but the stage directions contain several cues for dances and soft music, as well as instructions to sing. The effect would not have been far from that of the Italian pastoral intermedii that had, in Florence and Mantua, just turned into the newfangled art of opera. But of course the whole of The Tempest is full of music; and the music for two of Ariel’s songs, both ascribed to Robert Johnson, survives from an early production, possibly from the first production: Full fadom5 five and Where the bee sucks. The first song, especially, has long been admired, for both the text and the music. It bears little resemblance to the other songs associated with Shakespeare’s plays: it is not based on quoted or alluded-to material, as is the Willow Song; it does not seem like a folksong or an original simulation of folksong, such as When that I was and a little tine boy; it does not exist for the sake of an artful keying a mood, as does Take, O, take those lips away. Far from being nostalgic or ancillary, Full fadom five is performative: it causes action, by completing the task (begun by Ariel’s first song,

❧

introduction

11

Come unto these yellow sands) of “Allaying both their [the waters’] fury and my [Ferdinand’s] passion” (1.2.393). Ariel uses music as a control resource, even an enslavement resource. He accompanies himself on a stringed instrument, and the instrument’s strings are in effect puppet strings, pulling the characters this way and that. This compulsion-by-music can be seen throughout the play, for example, when Ariel charms Caliban and his comrades into wading into a puddle of horse piss—Ariel reports that they “lifted up their noses / As they smelt music” (4.1.177–78), as if music appealed to all the sense organs. (Perhaps music engages the lower sense organs of lower men.) If the nose is susceptible to musical manipulation, the eye is even more so: the characters in The Tempest are like dolls with counterweighted eyelids, effortlessly put to sleep or awakened by means of Ariel’s lullabies (2.1.184sd) and rousing songs (2.1.308). Ariel, with his Orpheus- or Arion-like power to compel nature to dance to his tune, is an operatic character waiting for opera to come into existence. Just before Shakespeare wrote The Tempest in 1611, Claudio Monteverdi composed Orfeo (1607), the first great success of the embryonic genre of opera, begun in 1598; and, during the Restoration, a hybrid, much-altered version of The Tempest (1674; based on an earlier adaptation of 1667) would become one of the first English operas. Charm, incantation, magic spell—these had long been features of Shakespeare’s art. The fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream sing a charm to protect Titania from snakes and hedgehogs and spiders (2.2.9); the witches in Macbeth brew their famous soup while intoning a charm (4.1.1)—and then, in a probably spurious passage, Hecate and her private trio of singing witches sing a lyrical version of a similar spell (4.1.43sd). But no play before The Tempest was so plot-driven by music. Shakespeare’s brief career as a music dramatist is hard to study, because so little of the music survives—but the whole canon of Jacobean stage music, though it survives only in patches, permits some guesses about what The Tempest might have sounded like. Music drama is efficient to the degree that the dramatist can rely upon, or create, a code for interpreting music. Much of the musical accompaniment to Shakespeare’s plays depends on quite elementary codes, such as those for warfare (trumpet fanfares), hunting (horn calls), or lullabies (soft strings). But The Tempest, with its flarings of sound, its hypnoses, its eerie dances, calls for more sophisticated codes—and composers were indeed providing them. Such music needed the skills, not of Bob Dylan, not of Noël Coward, but of Wagner, Debussy, or Strauss—composers gifted with the power of semantic specificity by purely musical means; as it happened, Shakespeare’s time was an age of great resourcefulness in code development, and had its Wagner in the person of Monteverdi. Monteverdi, of course, had no direct influence on the music of Shakespeare’s theatre; but it might be good to begin with Monteverdi, in order to see how thinking about the art of dramatic music was developing during the age. Monteverdi (1567–1642) was an almost exact contemporary of Shakespeare, though he enjoyed a much longer creative life. In the preface to his fifth book

12

❧

introduction

of madrigals (1605), Monteverdi and his brother defended the new monody on the grounds that its deviations from accepted practice were inevitable, since it was a word-driven, rather than a harmony-driven, sort of music: in the work of the older composers, the prima prattica, the music was “not the servant, but the mistress of the words”; in the new style of music, the seconda prattica, harmony is “not commanding, but commanded”—the words are “the mistress of the harmony.”6 Near the end of his life, in the preface to the eighth book of madrigals (1638), Monteverdi justified his creative achievement in terms of codecreating—he had gone farther than all previous composers in discovering the proper musical rhetoric of feeling: I have reflected that the principal passions or affections of our mind are three, namely, anger, moderation, and humility or supplication; so the best philosophers declare. . . . The art of music also points clearly to these three in its terms “agitated,” “soft,” and “moderate” [concitato, molle, and temperato]. In all the works of former composers I have indeed found examples of the “soft” and the “moderate,” but never of the “agitated,” a genus nevertheless described by Plato in the third book of his Rhetoric [399A] in these words: “Take that harmony that would fittingly imitate the utterances and the accents of a brave man who is engaged in warfare.” And since I was aware that it is contraries which greatly move our mind, and that this is the purpose which all good music should have . . . I have applied myself with no small diligence and toil to rediscover this genus. After reflecting that in the pyrrhic measure the tempo is fast, and, according to all the best philosophers, used warlike, agitated leaps, and in the spondaic, the tempo slow and the opposite, I began, therefore, to consider the semibreve which . . . should correspond to one stroke of a spondaic measure; when this was divided into sixteen semicrome [sixteenth-notes] and restruck one after the other and combined with words expressing anger and disdain, I recognized in this brief sample a resemblance to the affect I sought.7

It is not clear what Monteverdi meant by stile molle, except that it seems to be the opposite of stile concitato and has something to do with humility and supplication. It is possible that he meant simply something like relaxed; but the argument makes more sense if we assume the words have to do with states of abjection and misery, the subject of the great lamentations, often chromatic and contorted, that were a specialty of Monteverdi and his contemporaries. (And for the rest of this book I will assume that this is the meaning of Monteverdi’s term stile molle.) If so, Monteverdi’s codebook is based on a simple tripartite scheme of the soul: mania elation inflicting pain

reflective sobriety neutrality calm

depression abjection suffering pain

He considered, quite justly, that he had written music that spanned the whole gamut of feeling, from the heights to the depths. The notions of high and low

❧

introduction

13

vary considerably from century to century: for Plato in the Phaedrus, high means upward to the divine, and low means downward to the clambering world of the senses; for Freud, high means obedient to the internalized father who demands virtuous behavior (the superego), and low means obedient to the foul unspeakable desires of the unconscious (the id); but across the span of Western culture a tripartite model of the psyche—high, middle, low—has often held sway. The preface to the eighth book goes on to say that the stile concitato, the angry style, was first created in Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda (1624), a staged setting of some stanzas from Tasso—a curious sort of narrated opera, in which most of the singing is done by a tenor testo (the text personified), with a few interjections in direct dialogue by the warrior protagonists themselves. The narrator describes the clashing of swords, the quick ring of mighty blows, in an ecstatic vocal drumming of sixteenth-note figures. Monteverdi may have thought that he had created the musical equivalent of virtus, maleness: a species of heroic manly rhetoric opposed to the endless series of pitiful women— Ariadne, Olympia, Queen Mary Stuart—found in the madrigals of d’India, Bertali, and many others, including Monteverdi himself, who in fact had started the vogue in 1608 with his Lamento di Arianna. This last piece was the climactic aria from an otherwise-lost opera; in his sixth book (1614), Monteverdi published it in the form of a five-voice madrigal. Madrigal and early opera bleed into each other in odd ways, and the codes of affect seem completely interchangeable between the two genres. Monteverdi describes the stile concitato purely in terms of rhythm, as a fast light distinct pulse, and indeed his concitato passages are sometimes sung on a single note: melodic and harmonic inflection grow faint so that rhythmic inflection may be felt strongly. He gives no firm definition for stile molle or stile temperato, but it is possible to infer from his practice what they are and how they operate: sometimes scholars point, as an example of stile molle, to Lasciatemi morire, Let me die, from the beginning of the Lamento di Arianna, a chromatically tortured melodic shape; the locus classicus of stile temperato is the placid beginning of the madrigal Hor che’l ciel e la terra (book 8), in which the calm surface of the sea is described in a few slow, almost immobile chords. It is important to note that the three stili seem to pertain to different aspects of the art of music, rhythm in one case, melody in another, prolongation of gesture in the third; because anger and dejection pertain to independent musical variables, Monteverdi could move quickly from one to another, could even make brief superpositions of one on another, a sort of dissonance in the realm of affect itself. As Monteverdi said in the passage quoted above, “it is contraries which greatly move our mind,” and he felt it a great advantage to have at hand a variety of musical materials interpretable as contrasted feeling-states. The great theme of the Renaissance madrigal is the rapid change from exultation to despair, fire to ice; in this it resembles the mad song, but instead of erratic abutment of contrary feeling-states, the madrigal depended on elegant, carefully pivoted swerves from one to its opposite.

14

❧

introduction

In a sense the motto of the whole of Monteverdi’s eighth book is given in the incipit to one of its most ambitious madrigals, Ogni amante è guerrier—every lover is a warrior. Many madrigals are musical elucidations of such Petrarchan oxymorons, and some of Shakespeare’s plays are dramatic elucidations of Petrarchan oxymorons. Romeo, contemplating the fact that he’s fallen in love with a girl from a family at war with his own, exclaims Here’s much to do with hate, but more with love. Why then, O brawling love! O loving hate! O any thing, of nothing first create! O heavy lightness, serious vanity, Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms, Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health. (Romeo and Juliet 1.1.175–80) Romeo would rather not fight Tybalt, but in the end every lover must be a warrior, both in metaphor and in real life. The three stili of the preface to Monteverdi’s eighth book are only the rudiments of the seventeenth-century musical code book. There is the obsessioncode of the ritornello: in Monteverdi’s last opera, L’incoronazione di Poppea (1643, shortly after the composer’s death), the first act begins with an aria by Ottone, so smitten with the faithless Poppea that he stands outside her palace before dawn, hoping that she will appear at her balcony and shine her sunlight on him: And still I keep coming back here, like a line to the center, like a fire to its sphere, like a stream to the ocean. Forces just as powerful compel Ottone to return to his standingplace, so the orchestra keeps returning to a single refrain, an emblem of the paralysis of Ottone’s emotional state. As Ezra Pound wrote of the villanelle form, “the refrains are an emotional fact, which the intellect, in the various gyrations of the poem, tries in vain and vain to escape.”8 And there are comic tropes as well, such as the freak-code that characterizes Demo in the most influential opera of the whole seventeenth century, Francesco Cavalli’s Giasone (1649). Early in the opera, Orestes, looking for Jason, comes across a hunchbacked zany, who boasts in a novelty song of his skill at war and seduction: I’m hunchbacked, I’m Demo, I’m handsome, I’m brave, the world is my slave . . . If I dance, if I sing, if I play on my lyre, the girls burn with fire, yes, yes, yes, they lang, lang, lang, lang . . . (1.6)

❧

introduction

15

Orestes supplies the missing word languish, and Demo at last gets it out of his mouth. The stutter characterizes Demo throughout the opera. I wonder if Cavalli might not be smirking here at Monteverdi’s stile concitato, which usually has a strong quality of stutter. By literalizing the rapid notes on a single pitch as a vocal defect, Cavalli deforms the gesture from the domain of the hero to the domain of the miles gloriosus.9 Now we come to something remarkable: most of the Italian codebook was implicitly in place in English theatre music, quite independently of Monteverdi. Monteverdi had one English pupil, Walter Porter, but English vocal music of the early seventeenth century was informed not by Monteverdi but by earlier Italian madrigalists, particularly Marenzio, and by various native traditions. No English theorist came along to give catchy names to the various styles, but in England it was well understood that chromaticism meant anguish—the basic premise of the stile molle: Come, woeful Orpheus, with thy charming lyre, And tune my voice unto thy skillful wire; Some strange chromatic notes do you devise, That best with mournful accents sympathize: Of sourest sharps and uncouth flats make choice, And I’ll thereto compassionate my voice.10 This is William Byrd’s madrigal, Come, woeful Orpheus (1611)—a late work by the grand old man of Elizabethan music. The same theme can be found in John Danyel’s Can doleful notes (1623): No, let chromatic notes, harsh without ground, Be sullen music for a tuneless heart. Chromatic tunes most like my passions sound, As if combined to bear their falling part. Where the text wants chromatic notes, the composer obliges. Of course, this use of chromaticism as a code for dark moods, for extreme torsion of soul—for wit’s end—had been a standard feature of European music since the Middle Ages; indeed there’s an Easter celebration (Diastematica, from a thirteenth-century English songbook) in which the text commands absit chromatica—let chromaticism be absent (during this time of harmonious rejoicing). Chromaticism was not the only method of attaining a stile molle : another method, the insistence on melodic phrases based on a descending minor tetrachord (for example, in A minor, the notes A–G–F–E) was something of an English specialty. John Dowland, born the year before Shakespeare, in 1563, composed in the 1590s a lute piece full of such phrase-droops, a piece that became stupendously

16

❧

introduction

popular all over Europe. In 1600 it appeared as a song, set to words by an anonymous author: Flow my tears, fall from your springs, Exil’d for ever let me mourn Where night’s black bird her sad infamy sings, There let me live forlorn. Dowland, of course, didn’t invent the descending tetrachord, but he fixed it in the form of a prolonged first note followed by a rapid decline, as a kind of code for a sob. In 1604 he published Lachrymae, or Seven Tears, consisting of seven pavans for lute consort. Each pavan starts with the falling minor tetrachord, as if the tetrachord were a direct translation of a tear into music—a figure so saturated in emotional humidity that it itself weeps, trickling down a fourth. Dowland struck his contemporaries as an extraordinarily crabby, gloomy fellow—indeed he never got a job worthy of his merits until late middle age, in 1612, when James I appointed him lutenist to the king, at which point he promptly stopped writing music. But Dowland’s fascination with deep melancholy—Semper Dowland, semper dolens, as one of Dowland’s titles has it—was another aspect of the age’s fascination with all expressive extremes. When Shakespeare’s characters seem stuck in unrelievable grief, grief that ceaselessly feeds on itself, grief that grieves all the more at the spectacle of its own grieving, they seem to enter a Dowlandesque state of being. With an abundance of gifted melancholics, England was ripe for stile molle. It is more surprising that Jacobean composers made use of something very like stile concitato, since Monteverdi claimed that he’d invented it in 1624. Robert Johnson, the most talented composer of Jacobean theatre music, wrote Arm, arm for John Fletcher’s The Mad Lover (1616—eight years before Monteverdi’s Il combattimento), in which an old soldier recalls an exciting battle:

Arm, arm! the scouts are all come in, Keep your ranks close, and now your honours win. Behold from yonder hill the foe appears; Bows, bills, glaves, arrows, shields and spears: Like a dark wood he comes, or a tempest pouring; Oh, view the wings of horse meadows scouring. The vanguard marches bravely. Hark, the drums! They meet, they meet; now the battalia comes. Dub-a-dub-a-dub! See how the arrows fly,

❧

introduction

17

That darken all the sky; Hark how the trumpets sound! Hark how the hills rebound! Tara-rara-rara! . . . Brave Diocles is dead, And all his soldiers fled, The battle’s won, and lost, That many a life hath cost. The singer impersonates a tattoo (Dub-a-dub-a-dub) and a fanfare (Tara-rararara) with rapid syllables on a single note, as if he himself were the drummer and the bugler, as well as the archer and the cavalryman—like Monteverdi’s testo, he assumes the imaginative burden of the whole battle. An especially Monteverdian touch occurs at the end, as the music switches from stile concitato to stile molle: mournful descending scales toll the passing bell for Diocles and the rest of the dead. Johnson was also sensitive to the special kind of stile molle, based on a descending tetrachord, that Dowland had developed: in Orpheus I am, another song from The Mad Lover, Orpheus’s lament drips with lachrymaefigures straight out of Dowland. But Johnson’s wit in molle and concitato is only the beginning of his expertise in the new codes of music-drama. In his Baboons’ Dance from Chapman’s Memorable Masque (1614), Johnson investigates the semantic possibilities of disruption: phrases begin strongly, then stop, dangle in midair; when the dance gains momentum, it gets interrupted by evasive chord progressions, like grimaces—mopping and mowing made audible. In the famous song from Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (1613), O let us howl, Johnson builds an astonishing vocal slide across a minor third into the syllable howl: the song is part of a conspiracy to drive the duchess insane, and presents itself as a sort of phonic lycanthropy: part music, part ululation. Johnson may have been especially attracted to the fantastic, the macabre, the grotesque: he wrote songs for Charon (Charon, O Charon), Orpheus (Orpheus I am), a corpse (’Tis late and cold), and, as we shall see in a later chapter, the witches from the Hecate scene spliced into Macbeth. All semantic codes in music arise through deviant behavior, for only deviance is salient enough for the ear to register as significant; and Johnson had the daring and composure to follow Shakespeare, Webster, and their comrades into the wilderness of much-meaning. We are now ready to imagine the nonexistent Tempest opera that might have been produced in James I’s or Charles I’s England. Two songs for The Tempest by Robert Johnson survive (the earliest surviving musical manuscripts, ca. 1660, ascribe them to John Wilson, Johnson’s successor as theatre-composer, but Wilson himself ascribed them to Johnson): they are Full fadom five and Where the bee sucks. The former (see ex. 1) is one of the finest English examples of stile temperato, as the music creeps by Ferdinand on the waters, allaying both their fury and his passion:

18

❧

introduction

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Example 1. Music for Full fathom five, ascribed here to John Wilson, though Wilson himself ascribed it to Robert Johnson. Robert Johnson, “Full fathom five,” from Folger MS V.a.411, fol. 11r. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Full fadom five thy father lies, Of his bones are coral made: Those are pearls that were his eyes: Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange: Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell: Burden. Ding-dong. Hark now I hear them—ding-dong bell. (1.2.397–405) La vague et la cloche. The melody of the stanza is a set of surges, rests, fall-backs, and resurges. This pattern of flow and ebb is itself wave-like: the often-stepwise motion of the vocal line, falling into crests and troughs, and the larger pattern of the long notes at the line-ends, both suggest that Johnson is tuning his song to the liquid rhythm of slow waves overlapping still slower waves. The final calming is accomplished by the ding-dong bell refrain: Johnson lengthens the basic pulse from quarter-notes to half-notes, as if the waves were halving their speed; and instead of surges and ebbs, Johnson eases the melody into smooth scales descending a

❧

introduction

19

fifth—the most amiable death knell possible. It is a lamentation unlamenting itself, turning into a lullaby, grave and impartial, unfeeling, a pure neuter in the semantic code. It is as if Ariel were singing not a particular song but Song itself. From this still point, this temperato, the music might diverge into all sorts of intemperate styles. There is a strong sense in The Tempest that no one except Ariel has mastered the art of music: when Stephano botches his “Flout ‘em and scout ‘em” song, Caliban remarks “That’s not the tune. Ariel plays the tune on a tabor and pipe” (3.2.124). Then Trinculo remarks, “This is the tune of our catch, play’d by the picture of Nobody.” Ariel is the play’s invisible tuning fork, continually trying to correct false music, to establish a tonic that will organize into harmony the grotesque dissonance all around him. Caliban, like Stephano, gets drunk and sings in a slurred, broken fashion: Cal. (Sings drunkenly) Farewell, master; farewell, farewell! . . . ‘Ban, ‘Ban, Ca-Caliban Has a new master, get a new man. (2.2.178, 184–85) There is a hint here of Demo’s fake-concitato stutter, four decades before Cavalli’s Giasone; and in the earliest setting of Caliban’s song that I know, J. C. Smith’s 1752 version, the composer supplies a peasanty galumphing song, with a nicely goatish bray in the stammered line. This song comes from long after Johnson’s time, but Johnson had plenty of comic tropes at his command. The splayed, spoofy, discombobulated hot-foot of Johnson’s baboon-dance might easily be adapted to Caliban; and the recitative-like authoritarian style that Johnson used for Hecate or Charon might easily be adapted to another spirit-master, Prospero—in fact, Johnson’s Where the bee sucks is just the sort of lithe tripping tune that Hecate’s witches sing as they ride in the air when the moon shines fair. Enough Jacobean music survives to allow a speculative outfitting of the two masques in The Tempest—the harpy-spoiled banquet and the wedding masque— with appropriate music.11 In the chapter on Purcell’s The Fairy Queen we’ll look more closely at the aesthetic of the masque, but for now it will be enough to note that at the time of The Tempest, the two basic modes of drama were the public play and the masque: the public play was still often performed outdoors on an almost bare platform surrounded with seats, as in the old Elizabethan days, although experiments with indoor, candlelit theatres were beginning; the masque was a court entertainment—far from being performed on a bare platform, the masque had expensive scenery and stage mechanisms, and was so designed that only one chair—the king’s—had full access to the lavish special effects. The greatest writer of masques was Ben Jonson, younger than Shakespeare and perhaps a cleverer panegyrist than he; as Jonson developed the genre, the masque started to separate into two halves (as in The Masque of Queens, 1609), in which the second part, the main action, was a formal display of the monarch’s prepotent generosity and wisdom, culminating in a dance by the court nobles in costume, while the first

20

❧

introduction

half—the antimasque, as Jonson called it—was a display of witches, satyrs, and other deformed sinister things, whose black revels would be put to flight before the glorious sun of majesty. Jonson and his set designer, Inigo Jones, used professional comedians in the antimasque, and the dancing may have been more virtuosic than that in the masque proper, performed by the nobles. In the light of this history, The Tempest looks like a meditation on the technical evolution of the stage. At the beginning, Prospero is in charge of an Elizabethan, quasi-improvisatory sort of stage, the island itself, a malleable, indeterminate place, a domain of suggestibility, compulsory suspension of disbelief, where all discourse is at least provisionally valid. It is a topological oxymoron, at once fresh and stale, fertile and withered: “fresh springs, brine-pits, barren places and fertile” (1.2.338); “fresh-brook mussels, wither’d roots and husks” (1.2.464); it is full of crab apples, jay’s nests, marmosets, filberts, young scamels (whatever scamels might be), nomers and misnomers of every sort (2.2.167–72)—it’s a universal prop-house. Speech keeps creating new realities, vertiginously, for the motto of the island is the motto of the Elizabethan stage, or Pirandello’s stage, It is so if you think so: Adr. “Widow Dido,” said you? You make me study of that. She was of Carthage, not of Tunis. Gon. This Tunis, sir, was Carthage. Adr. Carthage? Gon. I assure you, Carthage. Ant. His word is more than the miraculous harp. Seb. He hath rais’d the wall, and houses too. Ant. What impossible matter will he make easy next? Seb. I think he will carry this island home in his pocket, and give it his son for an apple. Ant. And sowing the kernels of it in the sea, bring forth more islands. (2.1.84–94) (The silly talk of widow Dido may come from a rhyme: according to John Hart’s phoneticized spelling guide of 1569, the long i was pronounced eh-i.) The island accommodates itself effortlessly to any scenario proposed—you can put it in your pocket, or make it sprout new islands through a kind of geographical mitosis. Its very appearance simply reflects the looker’s mood back at him: Adr. Seb. Ant. Gon.

The air breathes upon us here most sweetly. As if it had lungs, and rotten ones. Or, as ’twere perfum’d by a fen. . . . How lush and lusty the grass looks! (2.1.47–49, 53)

This is almost a parody of the incoherent ubiety of the platform stage. In the prologue to Henry V , we hear of that wooden O that can hold the vasty fields of

❧

introduction

21

France; but a platform stage is in desperate condition if some characters keep insisting, We’re in France, while others cry, No, we’re in Illyria . . . or, No, I think it’s the seacoast of Bohemia—You fools, we’re in a desert near New Orleans. The Tempest, then, starts in Globistan, the endlessly, effortlessly mutable stage of the Elizabethan theatre. In charge is a master wizard with his ingenuesoubrette daughter; their sidekicks are two extraordinarily versatile clowns, one an acrobat, quick-change artist, and drag queen specializing in harpy and seanymph roles, the other a comically angry hunchback who does barnyard animal impressions and excrement jokes. Until the shipwreck, Prospero and his troupe lived in a perpetual backstage, idly waiting for a script. But when the script arrives, it turns out to be more than Globistan can handle; it requires the services of another theatrical domain, Masqueland; and Prospero, bored but reasonably content in the role of Shakespeare, has to become Ben Jonson and master a new sort of art, a challenge for which he’s poorly prepared by temperament and by training. The Tempest begins with a storm that could be considered a sort of antimasque, but it feels more like something suitable for a platform stage: instead of a machine-tooled storm, in which the ship visibly splits into marvelous pieces and sinks below hand-cranked waves, we have a storm of human voices, barking, yelping, cursing. “Keep your cabins; you do assist the storm,” the Boatswain says (1.1.14), but perhaps the voices do more than assist the storm: they are the storm, in the absence of a mechanical storm-contrivance. Toward the end of the scene, a stage direction calls for A confused noise within (1.1.61), with some suggestions for cries—presumably other cries were ad-libbed by the cast backstage. Within, without, what matter?—the storm consists of whatever confusion the cast can produce. Shakespeare may well have imagined this scene as performed with little help from spectacular devices beyond the noisemaker (tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning) specified in the opening stage direction. On the other hand, this storm is a contrived thing, stage-managed by Ariel, and as such is parallel to the later masque scenes. From the point of view of those on the ship, it is confusion; from the point of view of Prospero and Ariel, it is a ceremony of confusion. Jonson’s antimasques provide methods for making confusion ceremonious; and one method was to play a special sort of music. In Robert Johnson’s antimasque music (as we’ve seen), disrupted textures stand for disorder; as Peter Holman has written, “the seventeenth century preferred to illustrate bizarre stage movement by dislocating rhythm rather than melody or harmony.”12 But despite Holman’s statement, the Jacobean playwrights contemplated the possibilities for a far more advanced kind of musical incoherence. Ben Jonson, in The Masque of Queens, devised an antimasque as a sort of negative inversion of the masque proper: instead of beautiful queens, ugly witches— “Joyn now our Hearts, we faithful Opposites / To Fame and Glory.” Anti-creatures, they dance an anti-dance:

22

❧

introduction

with a strange, and sudden Musick they fell into a magical Dance, full of preposterous change, and gesticulation, but most applying to their Property; who at their meetings, do all things contrary to the custom of Men, dancing back to back, and hip to hip, their hands joined, and making their circles backward, to the left hand, with strange phantastick motions of their heads, and bodies.

And, as Jonson specifies in a gloss to the text, the anti-dance should be accompanied by anti-music: Nor do they want Musick, and in strange manner given them by the Devil, if we credit their Confessions in Remig[ius]. Dæm[onolatria, 1595]. lib. 1. cap. 19. Such as the Syrbenæan Quires were, which Athenæus remembers out of Clearchus, Deipnos. lib. 15. where everyone sung what he would, without hearkning to his Fellow; like the noise of divers Oars, falling in the water.13

This is as close as the older world could get to the world of John Cage’s perfectly uncoordinated polyphony, imitating the general randomness of things—the noise of divers Oars, falling in the water. Cage has merely reversed the plus and minus signs, turning the music of hell into an image of the divine inconsequence of natural process. An interesting study might be written on pictures of chaos in the older music. The chaos-music at the opening of Haydn’s Creation (1799) is by far the most famous; but it is perhaps less radically chaotic than some of the experiments that preceded it. In Telemann’s oratorio Der Tag des Gerichts (1762), there is a passage in which the singer describes how the planets whirl out of their orbits on the Last Day—and the music also charges dizzyingly out of its proper tonal orbit. Still stranger is the percussive-aggressive cacophony, Le cahos, at the opening of JeanFery Rebel’s ballet Les élémens (1737): Nicholas McGegan and Simon Shaw quote from Rebel’s preface: “I dared to undertake to link the idea of the confusion of the elements with that of confusion in harmony.”14 But closest to Ben Jonson’s specification is an instrumental piece from the late seventeenth century, Heinrich von Biber’s Battalia a 10: one section describes eight drunken musketeers bawling their favorite songs all at the same time, with no regard for one another—hic dissonant ubique. Biber was writing some sixty years after The Masque of Queens, and in another land, but he at least provides evidence that the seventeenth century could conceive noise-music exactly along the lines that Jonson wished. If The Tempest had mutated into a quasi-opera during Shakespeare’s lifetime, it might have begun with dissonant music equivalent to the panicky cries of the voyagers—a Masque of Storm. From one point of view, The Tempest looks like a series of masque-scenes loosely connected by the patter of a master of ceremonies; from another point of view, The Tempest looks like a bulging, puzzled, quasi-improvisatory play that occasionally stiffens into set vaudeville numbers. Everywhere in the text, the masque-like and the un-masque-like aspects are in tension with one another: the action can be placed on an old platform stage, or

❧

introduction

23

on the proscenium stage of the court masque, but it doesn’t perfectly fit either model of theatre. As a director of masques, Prospero labors awkwardly to constrain the clowns and the villains to the script; if he succeeds, he succeeds only by building into the masque proper some of the anarchic energy of the antimasque. The harpy masque is in fact the retrograde of a Ben Jonson court masque: instead of an antimasque opening out into (and dismissed by) a masque proper, it is a masque proper eaten up by an antimasque—as Spirits, to Solemn and strange music (3.3.17sd), present to the false nobles a banquet of shadow fruit, a banquet that vanishes with one clap of Ariel’s wings. When they carried the table in, the Spirits looked like fitting attendants for a regal ceremony; when they carry the table out, they dance, with mocks and mows (3.3.82sd), exposing themselves as clown-antimasquers. In the court masques, the stage machinery—a globe, a fairy castle, a chariot dropping from the sky—opens out into some still more spectacular display; an adaptation of such practices for the public stage can be found in Cymbeline, where Jupiter descends in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle; he throws a thunderbolt (5.4.92sd). But in the harpy masque in The Tempest, the machinery simply fizzles into the void, like Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York (1960), an elaborate contrivance made of a bathtub, scraps of the American flag, bicycle wheels, a piano, a radio, a saw, and so forth—powered by fifteen engines, it shook itself to pieces in its unique moment of operation. The elaborate wedding masque for Ferdinand and Miranda also deflates, dispels, dislimns itself: Enter certain Reapers, properly habited: they join with the Nymphs in a graceful dance, towards the end whereof Prospero starts suddenly, and speaks; after which, to a strange, hollow, and confused noise, they heavily vanish (4.1.138sd). The disruption of the graceful dance sounds like the technique of Johnson’s antimasque music writ large: the whole masque is an effortfully stitched-together thing—at one point Juno and Ceres whisper (4.1.124sd), as if they have lost their place in the script, and Prospero worries that “our spell is marr’d” (4.1.126). The sober theme, the lofty language, the presence of Juno descending in a mechanical conveyance (4.1.74sd) all give the sense of a masque proper; but the texture is that of an antimasque, since the masque is falling apart before our eyes, even before the actors floomph down the trapdoor and the sets, if there are sets, fall flat. Since G. Wilson Knight identified the tempest vs. music polarity as a defining feature of Shakespeare’s dramatic architecture, The Tempest has often been read as a rainbow-arc, beginning with a storm and ending in reconciliation and harmony—music. But there is a countermovement at work too, in which music keeps unharmonizing itself, turning into noise. The wedding masque terminates in a hollow and confused noise; the harpy masque, it seems, also fails to end on a perfect cadence; the most musically intense scene in the play is not in the fifth act, but in the first; and in fact the very last thing we hear, if Prospero’s prayer to be set free (Epilogue 20) is a covert plea for applause, is the noise of clapping. It is not that noise resolves into music, but that music and noise are strangely

24

❧

introduction

inextricable; the graceful dance, the happy song, are always fringed with a tinny edge or scrape of sound. Even Ariel’s calm, magically elusive “Come unto these yellow sands” ends as follows: Hark! hark! Burthen, dispersedly. Bow-wow. The watch-dogs bark! Bow-wow. Hark, hark, I hear The strain of strutting chanticleer. Cry. Cock-a-diddle-dow. (1.2.381–87) This is a lot of woofing and crowing—what are these barnyard noises doing amid the supernatural soothe? Something similar happens later, when Ariel, singing “While you here do snoring lie,” suddenly rouses Gonzalo as the murderers are poised to kill him. Gonzalo wonders what’s going on, and Sebastian extemporizes: Whiles we stood here securing your repose, Even now, we heard a hollow burst of bellowing Like bulls, or rather lions. Did’t not wake you? It strook mine ear most terribly. (2.1.310–13) Sebastian just made this up, but this imaginary noise again provides an animal counterpoint to Ariel’s disembodied music. Everywhere music tends to unmusic itself. Similarly, noise, when noise appears, can be disturbingly beautiful. It is Caliban, Noise personified, who has the play’s prettiest speech on the gorgeousness of music, as he remembers waking from sleep to “a thousand twangling instruments” (3.2.137) humming in his ears, and phantom voices, and longs to dream again. Noise and music are hard to tell apart. W. H. Auden considered The Tempest a rather “overpessimistic and manichean” sort of play.15 Auden may be going too far, though Prospero does indeed say, “Every third thought shall be my grave” (5.1.312)—and it is true that the final concord has to swallow so much discord that it becomes fragile and insecure. Or, to put it in terms of theatrical models, the masque proper has had to assimilate so much of the japing, the fleering, the grinning, the grimacing, the licentiousness, the casual cruelties of the old platform stage that it has broken apart. When the wedding masque is over, Prospero declaims his famous speech on the cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, that dissolve and “Leave not a rack behind” (4.1.156). This speech can be taken as Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage. But I wonder if it might also be taken as Shakespeare’s critique of the masque. In the old Elizabethan stage, there were never any towers or palaces or temples in the first place; the spectator could imagine

❧

introduction

25

them or unimagine them without the least fret. It is the masque, not the platform stage, that creates a certain anxiety about the illusoriness of spectacle. Theodor Adorno notes that “Since the work, after all, cannot be reality, the elimination of all illusory features accentuates all the more glaringly the illusory character of its existence.”16 Just before the wedding masque began, Prospero pre-dismissed it as “Some vanity of mine art” (4.1.40): perhaps Shakespeare considered the masque an exceptionally vain species of art, in that by trying to realize the fantastical it demoted drama to the domain of the purely unreal. Shakespeare knew that it was impossible to go back to the simple Elizabethan stage—impossible for Prospero to stay on the island that is at once a foul fen and an idyllic refuge, whatever the spectator wills: Prospero must return to Milan, and his two clowns are relegated to the exciting world of unemployment. But fifty years later, after the English Civil War, and the closing of the theatres, and the Restoration of King Charles II, and the reopening of the theatre, Prospero was dragged from retirement and outfitted as the hero of a music drama. In 1667, John Dryden and William Davenant worked on an adaptation of The Tempest that would be suitable for the proscenium stage. John Banister composed a few songs for this version; and in 1674 Thomas Shadwell revised and expanded the Dryden-Davenant Tempest, in collaboration with the composers Matthew Locke, Pietro Reggio, Pelham Humfrey, James Hart, and Giovanni Battista Draghi, and turned it into a full-fledged opera, of the English sort, in which the lead actors don’t sing: spoken scenes (sometimes containing incidental songs) are interspersed with through-composed masque scenes and instrumental interludes. Draghi’s dance music hasn’t survived, but the rest of the music is known, and it is possible to imagine the 1674 Tempest with some clarity, especially with the help of Christopher Hogwood’s illuminating 1975 recording17 and Richard Luckett’s scholarly notes to the recording. In 1695, the Dryden-Davenant-Shadwell Tempest was outfitted with new music, ascribed to Henry Purcell, but more likely by his pupil John Weldon (except for one authentically Purcellian song); but I am concerned here with the earlier, more scattered and incoherent, more Shakespearean 1674 version. Revising Shakespeare, Dryden and Davenant had a mania for symmetry: The Tempest turns into a sex comedy set in a hall of mirrors. Miranda is outfitted with two antiselves: a sister, Dorinda, a flirtatious creature lacking Miranda’s instinctive chastity; and Hippolito—if Miranda is a woman who has never seen a man, Prospero must necessarily keep imprisoned, in a remote corner of the island, a man who has never seen a woman. Furthermore, Caliban is given a hideous sister (confusingly named Sycorax), a “Blobber-lips,” a “wanton,” who keeps asking Trincalo to give her his whistle. This multiplication of the characters into tidy pairs is partly a consequence of proscenium-thinking: the natural mode of the platform stage is flux, metamorphosis, let’s-pretend—girls can transform themselves into boys, sane men into madmen, fat clowns into kings—but the natural mode of the proscenium stage is architecture, a carefully balanced spectacle. As

26

❧

introduction

The Tempest stiffened, lost all traces of improvisation, it turned into the drama of Wilson Knight’s dreams, in which noise is systematically reduced to music. Of the composers who worked on the 1674 Tempest, the noise specialist was Matthew Locke. Even in the earlier version, the one with only a little singing (as performed in an expensive production in 1673), the opening tempest was a multimedia extravaganza, with lightning, thunder, St. Elmo’s fire, and “Spirits in horrid shapes” flying down among the floundering sailors; and in the operatic version Locke provided a curtain tune accompanying a ballet in which Two winds rise. Ten more enter and dance—as Luckett notes (p. 6), the careful notation of expressive dynamics (soft, Lowder by degrees, Violent, soft, Lowd, Soft and slow by degrees) is a novelty in seventeenth-century music. The orchestra embodies the tempest, moves as the winds move, erratically gathering strength. The 1674 Tempest comprises two masque scenes (each composed by Humfrey), the first a Masque of the Three Devils, full of glee over Alonzo’s and Antonio’s sins—this would have been called an antimasque sixty years before; the second a Masque of Neptune, in which Prospero conjures up Amphitrite and Neptune to calm Aeolus’s fury and smooth the ocean for the return voyage. Prospero never interrupts the masque, never drowns his book, remains a figure of mastery and power: the proscenium stage has conquered, and the mess, the slurp, the extraneity of the old platform stage have vanished for good. Prospero is now a proper denizen of Masqueland, a sovereign receiving tribute, not an evasive wizard haunting the liquid margins of things.

First Stirrings of Opera in England We have had to go to the Restoration to find a Shakespearean opera; but there is reason to suppose that, in the absence of civil war, English opera might have come into being much earlier. The composer and art collector Nicholas Lanier lived a long life: in the 1630s he was Charles I’s Master of the Musick, and in 1660, at the age of 72, he became Charles II’s Master of the Musick. During his earlier tenure he wrote a cantata, Hero’s complaint to Leander, which Roger North described as follows: Nicholas Laniere . . . composed a recitativo, which was a poem being the tragedy of Hero and Leander. . . . The King [Charles I] was exceedingly pleased with this pathetick song, and caused Lanneare often to sing it, to a consort attendance, while he stood next, with his hand upon his shoulder. This was the first of the recitativo kind that ever graced the English language. . . . I have mentioned so much of this piece, because circumstances considered, it is a non-pareil.18

Lanier was well traveled in Italy, and Hero’s complaint to Leander is an adaptation of the stile molle of Monteverdi’s Lamento di Arianna—a passage from an opera.

❧

introduction

27

During the seventeenth century, English recitative never turned into the full, flexible operatic medium that it became in Italy; and yet, despite North’s comments, there are recitative-like passages in Robert Johnson’s theatre music (particularly in Charon, O Charon, a fairly lengthy dialogue) that seem to have been moving in the direction of the scena. Shakespeare’s age was an amazingly rich period for English music, from the old masters such as William Byrd to the innovators such as Robert Johnson. But if I look for a musical composition that seems to possess something of Shakespeare’s amplitude, depth, and sheer plenty, there is one that stands out: Orlando Gibbons’ The Cry of London. Gibbons was an exact contemporary of Robert Johnson, but The Cry of London is not theatrical music; instead it is a whole theatre created within the compass of a viol consort with vocal accompaniment. Superimposed on the close-worked instrumental music are some eighty street cries, as if all London were on parade: have you any rats or mice to kill? I have ripe peascods, ripe oysters, oysters, oysters, threepence a peck at Bridewell dock, new Wallfleet oysters Oyez! If any man or woman can tell any tidings of a grey mare with a long mane and a lame leg or twain; she hath but one eye (Will you buy any fine tobacco?) And that is almost out, and a hole in her arse and there your snout. He that can tell any tidings of her, let him come to the cryer, and he shall have well for his hire . . . perfumed waistcoats, fine bone lace or edgings, sweet gloves, silk garters, very fine silk garters, fine combs and glasses and a potting stick with a dildo . . . poor naked bedlam, Tom’s a-cold, a small cut of thy bacon, or a piece of thy sow’s side, good Bess. God almighty bless thy wits19 The whole human comedy—chimney sweeps, beggars, mountebanks, convicts, men looking for runaway wives, versions of Autolycus, Edgar, Barnadine, Mrs. Quickly—presents itself helter-skelter; it is like The Canterbury Tales, or the complete works of William Shakespeare abridged. In this compact pageant of wealth, finesse, filth, and misery, the one thing missing seems to be religion; but religion too is present, though in an occult manner. While the singers are crying their urgent notices, the viol consort, unperturbed, is playing an In Nomine—one of the gravest, most intense forms of Jacobean music. An In Nomine is a piece based

28

❧

introduction

on the popular cantus firmus of a passage in an old mass, Gloria tibi Trinitas, by John Taverner (d. 1545); it became one of the major tests of compositional ingenuity and skill. So that while the street cries remind us of the panoply, the full giddy gamut, of human life, the viol consort speaks of other matters—it is as if it were saying, Be absolute for death: either death or life Shall thereby be the sweeter. Reason thus with life: If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing That none but fools would keep. A breath thou art, Servile to all the skyey influences, That dost this habitation where thou keep’st, Hourly afflict. Merely, thou art death’s fool, For him thou labor’st by thy flight to shun, And yet run’st toward him still. (Measure for Measure 3.1.5–13) The sharp clamor of buying and selling trails off into the tale of an idiot, signifying nothing, or signifying only a great hunger that will never be filled, back and side go bare go bare; and the idiot’s cry itself trails off into some instrumental harmony that might be consoling if it were not beyond human life.

The Plan of This Book: Clashing Theatres This book concerns the ways in which later composers adapted Shakespeare’s texts to make music drama. The candidates for such analysis are surprisingly few, given the larger number of operas that make use of Shakespearean plot lines. Most of them, however, were prepared by librettists and composers who seem to have had little interest in Shakespeare beyond the stories he tells. Therefore many of the “Shakespearean” operas—including Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi, Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet, Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette, even Wagner’s Das Liebesverbot (based on Measure for Measure)—do not easily offer insights into Shakespeare’s theatre craft, worthy efforts though they are. Bellini’s opera is usually included in the canon of Shakespearean opera, although neither Bellini nor his librettist, Felice Romani, knew Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: they based their opera on Shakespeare’s sources, not on Shakespeare. Thomas and his librettists, Barbier and Carré, were certainly acquainted with Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but they perform a remarkably effective job of antisepsis, removing most of Hamlet’s madness and mad ambiguities from the work, and building up the role of Ophelia so much that she becomes the most memorable character, and romantic love the opera’s most memorable theme. A female mad scene was congenial to opera; interminable drifting through the labyrinths of self-justification, self-excoriation, was not. The happy ending (in the opera’s original 1868 version), with Hamlet crowned king,

❧

introduction

29

is the least of the opera’s brightenings of Shakespeare’s shadows. There is less of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy in Thomas’s Hamlet than in his opera Le songe d’une nuit d’été, even though it has nothing to do with Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Shakespeare himself is the opera’s hero, reveling with Sir John Falstaff and other characters of his imagination—a conflation of theatre and theatre-withintheatre that has something of the Shakespearean transgressive excitement. Indeed one sometimes finds more Shakespeare in purely orchestral works than in opera—works that have something of the swiftness, the ranting, the irony, the contortion, the interpretive obscurity of the plays themselves, such as Liszt’s Hamlet, Arthur Sullivan’s Macbeth overture, Massenet’s Scènes dramatiques, Tchaikovsky’s Tempest concert fantasy, Strauss’s Macbeth, and Elgar’s Falstaff. I chose the works discussed here—Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette, Verdi’s Macbeth, Purcell’s The Fairy Queen, and Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream—because (1) I thought that there are certain insights into Shakespeare’s work that the canny dramatic intelligences of these four composers make possible; and because (2) these works are problematic in the way that Shakespeare’s plays are problematic. Shakespeare’s favorite dramatic device is to juxtapose two kinds of theatres within a single play: in The Tempest, the masque vs. the platform stage; in Romeo and Juliet, the Petrarchan scripts of the young lovers vs. the public feud; in Macbeth the grand Halloween guignol of Macbeth and the witches vs. the forensic theatre in which Macbeth is accused and convicted of treason. A Midsummer Night’s Dream differs only in that it contains four different kinds of theatres jostling with one another, each struggling to be the frame that contains the other three: the nature-theatre of the fairies, the wedding ceremony of Theseus and Hippolyta, the permutation-swaps of the four lovers, and the botched skit of Pyramus and Thisby. By abutting different drama-games, Shakespeare calls attention to the inadequacy of any one taken singly—and perhaps gestures at the world beyond the play, “real life,” which isn’t a game, or which is a game, but a game played by conflicting and semi-incomprehensible rules. The musical works discussed here are mostly problem-works. Each shows an uncomfortable straddling between genres, between theatrical modes. This is most conspicuous in Roméo et Juliette, which is neither a symphony nor an opera, but a mélange adultère de tout, fit neither for opera house nor concert hall; but the other works have similar vexations. In Purcell’s day the notion of opera-in-English was still floundering, incoherent; by Verdi’s time the genre of opera had developed all sorts of canons, but Verdi deliberately disobeyed many of them in writing Macbeth: it is an opera without a love duet, almost without a tenor—the dramatic rhythm and the operatic rhythm are strangely out-of-sync, with climaxes coming during recitatives, or moments of eerie quiet, or (as in the banquet scene) jarring incidents of disruption. In Verdi’s late Shakespearean operas, Otello and Falstaff, the librettist, Arrigo Boito, managed with great skill to rework Shakespeare’s text into a sound and effective operatic structure; but in the much earlier Macbeth Piave didn’t (or perhaps couldn’t) contain Shakespeare’s text within proper bounds of normal

30

❧

introduction

operatic patterns. And it is precisely in this spilling out of the mold that the truly Shakespearean character of Verdi’s Macbeth lies: whenever one feels, in an opera, that the operatic and dramatic elements are hostile to one another, or somehow not working together properly, the special complexity of Shakespeare is close by. Macbeth, perhaps more than any other play of Shakespeare’s, has challenged composers to question the syntax of opera itself; a book on Macbeth operas might be of use, with chapters on Ernest Bloch’s Macbeth (a work that follows from Debussy’s Pelléas and Mélisande) and Salvatore Sciarrino’s recent Macbeth, a work based on the endless permutation of a few simple recitation-figures, interspersed with a number of very strange things—Banquo’s ghost, for example, is introduced to the statue music from Don Giovanni. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, though always one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays, did not attract many gifted opera composers between 1692 and 1960. Why? Perhaps because it demands to be written as a sort of poly-opera, with disparate musical styles for the different theatres that constitute the play. Purcell’s The Fairy Queen—an English opera (or semi-opera) based loosely on A Midsummer Night’s Dream—solves the problem by reserving music for the entertainment scenes—the fairy’s tormenting of the drunken poet, the masque for Oberon’s birthday, the wedding masque; the rest of the play is spoken dialogue. This cleaving, this splay, gives a Shakespearean sense of unsettled and warring stage models. By Britten’s time, music had evolved into musics: I mean that instead of the fairly uniform musical language that had prevailed throughout Europe in previous centuries, composers were starting to speak incommensurable tongues: Serial, Chromatic, Aleatory, Advanced Tonal, Ye Olde Tonal, among others. Britten was expert in manipulating a variety of musical languages, using polystylism to shift different theatres in and out of focus. Just as Shakespeare risked the collapse of illusion by writing plays that were far too playful, or not nearly playful enough, so some of the composers drawn to Shakespeare liked to go beyond the comfort zone of the operatic medium.

Part 1

Romeo and Juliet

Introduction to Part 1 Every opera is a transgression against itself. Music always ends by both reinforcing and contradicting the verbal text that it tries to set; for music is far more rich in interrelations, far more semantically replete than spoken drama. The thrill is always a mixture of the right thrill and the wrong thrill. The best libretti leave a great deal of room for misunderstanding why a character is moved to sing. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet looks like the ideal play for an opera, full of all sorts of possibilities for transgression: the rebellion of love against authority, the rebellion of giddy poetry against the common prose of domestic arrangements, the rebellion of spontaneity against prefabricated social structure. But these rebellions are largely illusory: Romeo and Juliet become outlaws in one social system, only to become obedient servants of another social system. Romeo and Juliet is a profoundly hemmed-in play, in which every assertion of freedom is in fact a restriction, until finally the space that the lovers can occupy contracts to the size of a vault in a tomb. No completely successful Romantic opera was ever written on this play, partly because Romeo and Juliet, like their parents, are instinctive conformists. Their poetry bears only a superficial resemblance to Romantic poetry; in fact it is written strictly to rule. Still, the fact that the play’s theme is love—love grown huge and intense—has long made it attractive to opera composers. All-compulsive love is a rare premise in Shakespeare’s works; this feature of the canon, which tends to make Shakespeare dispiriting to musicians, drew the strong applause of Samuel Johnson in 1763: Upon every other stage [than Shakespeare’s] the universal agent is love, by whose power all good and evil are distributed, and every action quickened or retarded. To bring a lover, a lady and a rival into the fable; to entangle them in contradictory obligations, perplex them with oppositions of interest, and harass them with violence of desires inconsistent with each other; to make them meet in rapture and part in agony; to fill their mouths with hyperbolical joy and outrageous sorrow; to distress them as nothing human ever was distressed; to deliver them as nothing human ever was delivered, is the business of a modern dramatist. For this probability is violated, life is misrepresented, and language is depraved. But love is only one of many passions, and as it has no great influence upon the sum of life, it has little operation in the dramas of a poet, who caught his ideas from the living world, and exhibited only what he saw before

34

❧

romeo and juliet

him. He knew, that any other passion, as it was regular or exorbitant, was a cause of happiness or calamity.1

The elder Capulet could not have expressed the case against love so well. But the case against love is also the case against opera, for an opera libretto, from Monteverdi’s time to ours, has its chief purpose in filling the mouths of the characters with hyperbolical joy and outrageous sorrow, by distressing them as nothing human was ever distressed. In his Life of John Hughes, Johnson described opera—he was thinking particularly of opera performed in a language the audience didn’t understand—as an “exotic and irrational entertainment”; and he clearly liked a play to the exact extent that it didn’t resemble an opera. Johnson was a classicist, with little taste for the flamboyant and sensational; he inherited some of the old Greek or Roman feeling that extreme love was a useless and ignoble condition, preventing a warrior from fighting well, or an honorable man from behaving honorably. (A century before Johnson’s time, Racine spoke, in Phèdre, of love as a carnivore on the hunt, or a monstrous parasite: Vénus toute entière à sa proie attachée.) But was Shakespeare also a classicist in this sense? Did Shakespeare wish to scale down the role of love in human life? Romeo and Juliet is a laboratory designed to test this case: is love a curse, or a blessing, or a trivial aspect of human life that sometimes gets out of control? The answer to this question will determine whether Romeo and Juliet in some sense wants to be an opera. In an opera, love may be a curse or a blessing; but there are few operas where love is dismissed with a yawn or a sad shake of the head.

Chapter One

The Veronese Social Code The plot concerns three families and two codes of conduct. Everyone remembers the Capulets and the Montagues, but it is important to remember that there is another family as well, the family that comprises Prince Escalus, Mercutio, and Paris (3.1.145; 5.3.75, 295); we’ll see soon that the kinship of these three disparate men is significant. Similarly, everyone remembers that there is a code that governs the behavior of the elders of the play, but it is important to remember that there is another code, the code of Romeo and Juliet, which assaults the first code. The code of the young lovers is subversive, but the protocols of its subversion are wholly formalized and articulate. It is as if there were Ten Commandments for the ordinary folk, and ten more commandments—written in smaller print—for those who chose to disobey the first set of rules. The world of Verona has many possibilities for transgression, but all lawbreakers are caught up in some minuet or other, for transgression is itself a dance. First we’ll examine the social code, then the code of love. The tenets of the Veronese social code are many and complicated, regulating everything from table manners to the construction of rituals for marriage and burial; and the code is made still more complicated by the existence of subcodes, since the upper and the lower classes, the young and the old, the clergy and the laity, all live by slightly different rules, within a general field of agreement. The decorum of the older upper classes can be gathered from the speeches and behavior of Capulet and Lady Capulet. They are a pair of ceremonious tribalists, who believe that true intimacy is a direct function of the immediacy of family relation. Here the chief rule is: blood is thicker than water. Honor, therefore, is essentially familial, not personal, and an insult to one Capulet is an insult to all; as Mervyn James puts it, “a man’s very being as honourable had been transmitted to him with the blood of his ancestors, themselves honourable men. Honour therefore was not merely an individual possession, but that of a collectivity.”1 The law code of the Capulets (and here it diverges from the code of Prince Escalus) is vendetta: offenses are avenged by one’s kinsmen, not by jurisprudence. Honor is so exigent that even the old head-of-clan must wield his long sword when a brawl arises (1.1.75). And yet, though the code not only permits street brawling but commands it, the code also observes the punctilio of the rite of hospitium: after Romeo is recognized at the Capulets’ ball, Capulet refuses to permit his wife’s hotheaded nephew Tybalt to assault Romeo (1.5.65)—the household is sacrosanct,

36

❧

romeo and juliet

and even an uninvited enemy must be treated hospitably. It is all tribal warfare, but conducted under the marquess of Queenberry’s rules. Of course, the same principles govern the conduct of the Montagues. One of the strangest and most significant aspects of Shakespeare’s play is the absolute arbitrariness of the feud. Generally, warfare in literature exists between parties with distinguishable cultures or values: good versus evil (The Castle of Perseverance, Paradise Lost); those touched by God with a mission to conquer, versus the natives (the Israelites and the Canaanites in Exodus, Aeneas and Turnus in the Aeneid); the intelligible West versus the exotic East (Antony and Cleopatra, Lakmé); new competence versus archaic incompetence (Richard II, Prometheus Unbound). But Shakespeare was extraordinarily intrigued by the dramatic possibilities of warfare for warfare’s sake—between parties who, confronting one another on the battlefield, simply stare into a mirror. The House of Lancaster and the House of York in the Henry VI plays are disputants more easily discriminated by the colors of their badges than by culture or by values; and the warring parties in Romeo and Juliet are wholly interchangeable—well might Juliet ask, “What’s in a name?” (2.2.43), for there is nothing to discriminate Capulet from Montague except the sound of the word. There is no mythology for the source of the feud, as if everyone has long since forgotten why the Montagues and Capulets are in a state of discord; it is a pure given. As Arthur Brooke presented the background in Shakespeare’s principal source, The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, written first in Italian by Bandell, and now in Englishe (1562): There were two ancient stocks, which Fortune high did place Above the rest, indued with wealth, and nobler of their race, Loved of the common sort, loved of the prince alike, And like unhappy were they both, when Fortune list to strike; Whose praise, with equal blast, Fame in her trumpet blew; The one was clepéd Capulet, and th’ other Montague. A wonted use it is, that men of likely sort, (I wot not by what fury forced) envy each other’s port. So these, whose egall state bred envy pale of hue, And then, of grudging envy’s root, black hate and rancour grew. (ll. 25–34) According to Brooke, the Montagues and Capulets quarrel precisely because there is no other way to tell them apart. In a culture based on honor, exact equality is the most distressing and untenable of all conditions. Mervyn James notes that in the company of his equals a man was expected to assert his “pre-eminence,” a requirement which imparted a note of tension even to ordinary social intercourse and daily conversation. So much so that Guazzo [in The Civile Conversation of M. Steeven

❧

the veronese social code

37

Guazzo, trans. George Pettie, 1581] advised the gentleman to seek relaxation in the company of his inferiors. For with them “he shalbe the chief man . . . and rule the company as his list; neither shall he be forced to favor or do anything contrary to his mind; which libertie is seldom allowed him amongst his equals”; for they “will looke for as much prehemminence every way as himself.” . . . the persistent tension meant that violence was always liable to escalate from its latent to an actual state, when its expression was the armed conflict of a duel.2

But of course, among exact equals, preeminence by definition does not exist; and so two honorable men, trapped in an unhappy state of identicality, will continually seek out, by various useless challenges, some basis for establishing a relative rank. And, if all else fails, exact equals can create a kind of fetish around the one property that always retains a power to discriminate: the name. Capulet and Montague become charged, explosive terms. In this way, names become a kind of weapon against the named. The code demands an antagonist, if such concepts as honor, vendetta, hospitium, are to be put in play at all; therefore the code-driven Veronese will sink into a state of utter lethargy unless the play of signifiers can generate an enemy. In a sense, this aspect of Shakespeare’s thinking is deeply musical, for patterns of musical antithesis are mostly arbitrary; but the notion of interchangeable opponents nevertheless runs counter to the instincts of opera composers, who like warring tribes to have the maximum visual and audible distinguishability—as when Sondheim and Bernstein, in West Side Story, made one of the rival gangs Puerto Rican. And yet the point of Shakespeare’s feud is that Montagues and Capulets dress alike, think alike, talk alike (though with some subtle difference of intonation—1.5.54), agree on everything; their dispute is lexical, not cultural. They are enemies because the attribute noble (as they understand it) cannot display itself in a condition of peace. A culture predicated on dispute will, sooner rather than later, find a dispute to generate the culture. This line of argument follows from René Girard, who finds, in his book on envy in Shakespeare’s plays, that the wellspring of social antagonism is excessive likeness: friends (such as Valentine and Proteus in The Two Gentlemen of Verona) tend to imitate one another, and this assimilation is likely to terminate in a state of complete jealousy and hatred: “Tragic antagonists do not fight about ‘values’; they desire the same objects and think the same thoughts. . . . Deep in the human psyche, mimetic rivalry reaches the identical essence of concord and discord in human affairs.”3 In music, the most wrenching dissonances come from intervals that are almost unisons; and Romeo and Juliet is a study of the extremes of hate and love that arise from the unbearable tension of equality. In Romeo and Juliet, Veronese society has codified envy into a formal rule of behavior, a bad commandment. The play is a study of the essential inadequacy and incoherence of the social code that fosters feuding—indeed the feuding is itself a sign of the code’s intrinsically self-destructive character. The contradictoriness of the Veronese social code is most conspicuously exposed by the issue

38

❧

romeo and juliet

of marriage. Marriage is a matter of difficulty because it brings two of the code’s tenets into conflict: the rule of vendetta and the rule of exogamy. Marriage cannot take place between a boy and a girl in the same family; but a strange family is always the object of suspicion, if not of outright vendetta. Therefore the family is exposed, pried open, in dangerous ways by any child who seeks to marry; and parents will go to great trouble to ensure that this threat to the integrity of the family is kept as small as possible. The code insists that the love of husband and wife, since it arises from an extrafamilial bond, must be subordinate, inferior to, the love of parent and child—at least until the passage of years so fully assimilates the foreign mate into the family that all foreignness has vanished. According to the code, a parent has the duty to point and fasten his daughter’s affection to any object he thinks proper—as if the daughter’s affection were simply a limb or tentacle of his own wise and seasoned desire to shape a proper family. When it is time for Juliet to marry, her father’s code requires him to treat her with elaborate courtesy—these are not barbarians, but supersubtle Veronese. Capulet tells Paris, the man he’s chosen to be Juliet’s husband, Earth hath swallowed all my hopes but she; She’s the hopeful lady of my earth. But woo her, gentle Paris, get her heart, My will to her consent is but a part; And she agreed, within her scope of choice Lies my consent and fair according voice. (1.2.14–19) Capulet’s good will and devotedness to Juliet are clear; he hopes that the choice of a husband will be a kind of collaborative venture between father and daughter. On the other hand, “her scope of choice” is obviously narrow; and Capulet assumes that an obedient daughter will finally acquiesce in any choice her father makes: Sir Paris, I will make a desperate tender Of my child’s love. I think she will be rul’d In all respects by me; nay more, I doubt it not. (3.4.12–15) When it happens that Capulet’s choice and Juliet’s diverge overwhelmingly, Capulet tells her that she will marry Paris in St. Peter’s Church, “Or I will drag thee on a hurdle thither. / Out, you green-sickness carrion!” (3.5.155–56). The code demands that Capulet treat his chattel with courtesy and esteem, unless she asserts some independence from familial control. How does the code sort out and evaluate prospective suitors for the hand of the family daughter? Obviously, such factors as wealth and noble title are important, but in fact Juliet’s parents assume (perhaps with a canny understanding of the psychology of sheltered thirteen-year-old girls) that these aren’t the factors

❧

the veronese social code

39

to emphasize in order to increase Paris’s glamour in her mind. Instead Lady Capulet stresses his good looks: Read o’er the volume of young Paris’ face, And find delight writ there with beauty’s pen; Examine every married lineament, And see how one another lends content; And what obscur’d in this fair volume lies Find written in the margent of his eyes. This precious book of love, this unbound lover, To beautify him, only lacks a cover. (1.3.81–88) Lady Capulet seems chiefly concerned with the aesthetics, perhaps the eugenics, of the match: she wants for Juliet an ornamental husband, a prettily figured text, to be made still more handsome by Juliet’s hand-rubbed soft binding. Lady Capulet’s language is veiled, metaphorical, even lascivious, as if she were subverting Juliet’s own language in order to put thoughts into Juliet’s head. The rhymed couplets don’t fall into the pattern of a sonnet, but there is a world of love poetry behind Lady Capulet’s speech: it is not far from her “Examine every married lineament, / And see how one another lends content” to “Mark how each string, sweet husband to another, / Strikes each in each by mutual ordering” (Sonnet 8). But Lady Capulet’s speech is an affair of advertising, not an affair of literature: she’s only trying to cast an erotic halo around Paris for pragmatic reasons. For Lady Capulet, suitors tend to be interchangeable, except insofar as such factors as wealth and clan and beauty can provide means of differentiation; she isn’t concerned with the metaphysics of kissing. At the end of her speech, the Nurse interrupts with a pregnancy joke—exactly as Mercutio interrupts Romeo’s high-flown rhetoric with coarse puns. But Lady Capulet is herself a sort of ironist: when she tells Juliet that Paris “only lacks a cover,” she in effect cues the audience’s own inner Nurse or Mercutio to supply a line about women who cover men by lying on top of them. The social code assumes that love is sensible, that it is an amorphous sensation of pleasure that might fasten itself to a great many different objects but will finally fasten itself to the most socially advantageous suitor. From the code’s point of view, human beings are texts to be organized into the Dewey Decimal System of social life: Juliet, like Paris, is a book, onto whose pages paragraphs of propriety, quoted from the code itself, are to be inscribed. But, as we’ll see, some of Juliet’s pages are printed with shocking words, words rarely to be found in manuals of conduct for young girls. This is not to say that the Veronese social code is oblivious to sex: all matters pertaining to sex tend to trouble the code, to summon its exercise of power. The code has the strength to domesticate and formalize human sexuality, even among horny adolescents. The code clearly acknowledges that love is more than

40

❧

romeo and juliet

prudence, more than mutual respect, more than aesthetics: it’s also erotic. For the elderly Capulets, this aspect of love is long past: though the old man remembers the long-ago times when he “could tell / A whispering tale in a fair lady’s ear,” now, alas, his “dancing days” are over (1.5.22–23, 32). But there is also a special subcode that governs the talk and behavior of those who are powerless because of social class or youth; and this juvenile code demands that Romeo and Juliet hear about little else except sex. This lower code is every bit as demanding as the upper code: for instance, the lower code insists that, when a servant encounters a member of a rival family, he has to make childish offensive gestures at him in order to prove the superiority of his own family (“I do bite my thumb, sir”—1.1.45). But chiefly the lower social code requires that every conceivable sentence be reinterpreted as a dirty joke, as if human discourse consisted of nothing except obscene puns. Here, for example, is the joke made by the Nurse (who’s in the upper stratum of the lower classes) when she hears Lady Capulet’s effusions on the booklikeness of Paris: So shall you share all that he doth possess, By having him making yourself no less. Nurse. No less? Nay, bigger! Women grow by men. (1.3.93–95) Samuel Johnson thought that a central defect of Shakespeare’s art was his fondness for puns: “A quibble is to Shakespeare, what luminous vapours are to the traveller; he follows it at all adventures, it is sure to lead him out of his way, and sure to engulf him in the mire. It has some malignant power over his mind.”4 This is going far; but it’s true that Romeo and Juliet is a play without single entendres. The code of the young, like the code of the lower classes, entails compulsory punning: erotic haloes backlight the whole text, especially when Mercutio speaks. (Mercutio, of course, does not belong to the lower classes.) Just as the Nurse cannot think of a bump on a child’s forehead without thinking of a rooster’s testicle (1.3.52), so Mercutio lives in a Beavis and Butthead world where every banana is a penis, every fig a vagina (actually pears and medlars: “O that she were / An open-arse [a soft fruit eaten only at the point of rot], thou a pop’rin pear!”—2.1.37–38). According to this adolescent code, boys and girls, since they are forcibly restrained from sexual activity—Romeo is, like Juliet, a virgin (3.2.13)—must find a diffuse electric sexuality playing over the whole universe. Mouths that cannot kiss speak words that are simply deflections of kissing. But the adolescent code and the lower-class code and the upper-class code all agree, in important ways. To think that a young man is a good potential marriage partner because he will provide substantial sexual pleasure is a love-calculation not much different from such considerations as wealth and social position. It is all part of a utilitarian love-code, which measures a suitor according to his usefulness—even his presumed sexual adequacy. It is perhaps strange to think of the gleeful, volatile, boastful, foul-mouthed, rhetorically gifted, mercurial Mercutio

❧

the veronese social code

41

as a philistine, but Shakespeare had a reason for making him kin of the Prince. Mercutio is preeminently pragmatic, anti-metaphysical, even anti-poetical. Mercutio’s speech about Queen Mab is one of the high points of Shakespeare’s art, and yet it is a deconstruction of dreams into emptinesses. It is, by design, a synthesis of nothings, in order to prove the sheer vacuum that lies at the center of Romeo’s conception of love: O then I see Queen Mab hath been with you. She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes In shape no bigger than an agot-stone On the forefinger of an alderman, Drawn with a team of little atomi Over men’s noses as they lie asleep. Her chariot is an empty hazelnut, Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub, Time out a’ mind the fairies’ coachmakers. Her waggon-spokes made of long spinners’ legs, The cover of the wings of grasshoppers, Her traces of the smallest spider web, Her collars of the moonshine’s wat’ry beams, Her whip of cricket’s bone, the lash of film, Her waggoner a small grey-coated gnat, Not half so big as a round little worm Prick’d from the lazy finger of a maid. And in this state she gallops night by night Through lovers’ brains, and then they dream of love. (1.4.53–71) This is an ingenious fantasy designed to dispel fantasy, to mock Romeo with obvious blatant unrealities. Coleridge, in the thirteenth chapter of Biographia Literaria (1817), distinguished two image-making faculties in the human mind, which he called Imagination and Fancy: The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former coexisting with the conscious will. . . . It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create. . . . it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead. FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space; and blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word CHOICE. But equally with the ordinary memory it must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.5

42

❧

romeo and juliet

The Queen Mab speech is one of the most brilliant acts of Fancy in the English language: for it is a deliberate blasphemy against Imagination, a demonstration that highfalutin rhetoric is only a mechanical recombination of existing elements—cheeseparings, lint, discarded nutshells, and other bits of trash. Mercutio appears to be Romeo’s friend, but is actually his subtlest enemy: for to attend to Mercutio is to become self-conscious about the artificiality and brittleness of the rhetoric of love—and Romeo needs, above all, to be able to credit the authenticity of what he says to Juliet. Romeo must vehemently assert his sincerity against Mercutio’s scoffing precisely because Romeo’s own inner Mercutio privately assents to the notion that girls are the interchangeable objects of high rhetoric—in a sense Mercutio is Romeo, as Romeo would be if he didn’t happen to be in love. Mercutio and Romeo are intimate antagonists, of the sort that Girard relishes in A Theater of Envy, so similar to one another that they prove threatening. Romeo can’t proceed far with Juliet as long as Mercutio is leering in the background: the two lovers do not consummate their love until after the death of Mercutio. Mercutio’s derision is a greater obstacle to love than the wrath of the Capulets. Mab’s speech dismisses itself, and Mercutio, in a later scene, will also dismiss himself: he throws away his life for the sake of an empty game, his swordfight with Tybalt, which is all hip Italian fencing talk and fancy metaphors, as if dueling were a kind of ballet: Tyb. Mercutio, thou consortest with Romeo— Mer. Consort! what, dost thou make us minstrels? And thou make minstrels of us, look to hear nothing but discords. Here’s my fiddlestick; here’s that shall make you dance . . . Alla stoccato [at the thrust] carries it away. (3.1.45–49, 74) Earlier, Mercutio remarked that Tybalt “fights as you sing prick-song, keeps time, distance and proportion; he rests his minim rests, one, two, and the third in your bosom” (2.4.20–23). In a sense, Mercutio is a perfect formalist of human life, for whom all is sport, artifice, masque, wit-contest or body-contest. The duel is simply music carried out by other means. Long before Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet ballet, Mercutio understands fencing as a sort of choreography—almost in the manner of a Punch and Judy show, since Mercutio’s sword (he claims) enforces specific gestures in Tybalt, makes him dance like a puppet. Like any good man of the Renaissance, Mercutio has the graces of both warrior and musician. Baldesar Castiglione, whose Book of the Courtier (1528; translated into English 1561) was the chief Renaissance handbook of ideal conduct—the most refined statement of the code—thought that a nobleman’s stance toward the world should be sprezzatura, elegant scorn, nonchalance, an effortless mastery of all arts that shrugs off its own accomplishment; for Castiglione, the height of grace is self-dismissal. Mercutio is, in a somewhat debased form (since he’s a

❧

the veronese social code

43

compulsive show-off), just such an apprentice scorner. Content means little to him, until he realizes that he’s mortally wounded, and cries out in pain (“A plague a’ both houses!”—3.1.91, 99–100, 106). Except for that expostulation, Mercutio, like Mab, is all a beautiful, vacant inflection of surface. It is right that he should go joking to his grave (“Ask for me to-morrow, and you shall find me a grave man”—3.1.97–98), for Mercutio is a human jokebook, a thesaurus of puns, a textualized and paginated thing. In the second book of The Book of the Courtier, Castiglione provides a taxonomy of puns and quips, ranging from the labored to the wounding to the elegant, complete with warnings about those inadmissible for courtiers; but Mercutio ranges over the whole span, so nonchalant that good taste itself means nothing to him. We must consider two more variants of the social code before we look at Romeo and Juliet themselves: first, the religious code of Friar Lawrence, and second, the law code of the Prince. Both these codes offer certain mitigations or reliefs from the harshness of the code of the Capulets and the Montagues, the code of endless vendetta. The religious code is embodied by the tolerant, practical, accommodating Lawrence, and is expressed in fairly secular terms, such as Moderation in all things: “Love moderately: long love doth so; / Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow” (2.6.14–15). It is likely that Shakespeare did not want the Christian religion to appear in this play in any sort of harsh or austere form, since, by strict Christian accounts, Romeo and Juliet are guilty of grave sins, from breaking the commandment against honoring one’s parents to the mortal sin of suicide: if Shakespeare wished to retain the audience’s sympathy, he had to transpose the lovers’ crimes to the classical and pagan sin of immoderate behavior. In a play about “star-cross’d lovers” (Prologue 6), lovers who are “fortune’s fool[s]” (3.1.136), lovers who consider themselves brought to an unhappy end by blind luck, lovers whose most memorable prayer is “Be fickle, Fortune” (3.5.62), a Christian God has little role to play: the marriage ceremony, the play’s most Christian moment, seems a frail bulwark against the general willfulness and obstinacy of Fate. Lawrence is a Catholic friar, but he manifests some of the Protestant virtues, by siding with the lovers’ private and immediate theology, not with the social hierarchy; though Lawrence, like everyone else, is finally unable to provide meaningful assistance to them. When he tells Juliet, looking on Romeo’s dead body, that “I’ll dispose of thee / Among a sisterhood of holy nuns” (5.3.156–57), we see how obtuse Lawrence can be, how far removed from the real, interior drama, despite his desire to be helpful. He relies on prayers and drugs and histrionic tricks, but is equally ineffectual as physician to the soul, physician to the body, and stage manager of a daring flight from parental control. Still, Lawrence’s code completely lacks familial partisanship, and thus has offered a partial escape from the code of vendetta. Another escape from vendetta is found in Prince Escalus’s law code. One of the greatest of all dramas, the Oresteia of Aeschylus (it has been suggested that the Prince’s name dimly alludes to this), offers a mythic paradigm for the superseding

44

❧

romeo and juliet

of a barbarous code of vendetta by a true legal system, in which crime is punished by dispassionate authority, not by vengeful kinsman—the Furies turn Eumenides. But Romeo and Juliet does not present the legal system in anywhere near so positive a light. Escalus seems an enlightened, prudent, pragmatic ruler, inclined to mercy. Friar Lawrence is impressed by his forbearance in exiling Romeo, instead of killing him: Thy fault our law calls death, but the kind Prince, Taking thy part, hath rush’d aside the law, And turn’d that black word “death” to “banishment.” This is dear mercy, and thou seest it not. (3.3.25–28) The Prince, like the Friar, is inclined to mercy, instead of the asperities of strict justice; but he’s aware that mercy is by itself inadequate for dealing with human life: “Mercy but murders, pardoning those that kill” (3.1.197). By the end, the futility of both justice and mercy seems clear—the law code was unable to cope with the challenge presented by the love of Romeo and Juliet. Escalus’s kinsman Paris, legalistic to a fault, tries to perform a citizen’s arrest on the desperate Romeo (“Condemned villain, I do apprehend thee. / Obey and go with me, for thou must die”—5.3.56–57)—and for his trouble Paris gets instantly killed. And Escalus himself is at last helpless, able only to vituperate the Capulets and Montagues and to whip himself for not being a sterner judge: “I for winking at your discords too / Have lost a brace of kinsmen. All are punished” (5.3.294–95). But it’s hard to see that less mercy would have helped much. The law code and the vendetta code have both proved useless; Romeo and Juliet have managed to pass beyond the proper scope of either. The Veronese social code, finally, is strong and tenacious but strangely incoherent: its component subcodes can’t align themselves into a consistent set of rules for a stable society. Romeo and Juliet provide a comprehensive examination of the code, a test that the code fails to pass. It remains to be seen whether love can construct a viable alternative to govern human conduct.

Chapter Two

The Code of Love When we turn to the lovers themselves, we enter a different universe. Self-conscious civilizedness, nippy verbal precisions, continual deference or self-assertion based on hierarchies of control—the whole Veronese social code—must yield to the love code, according to which society exists only as a form of spatial extension into which the beloved can be removed and thus lost. The first account we have of the new rules by which lovers live can be found in Benvolio’s account of how Romeo has shunned all his friends in favor of solitary walks before dawn among the sycamores, and in Montague’s response: Many a morning hath he there been seen, With tears augmenting the fresh morning’s dew, Adding to clouds more clouds with his deep sighs, But all so soon as the all-cheering sun Should in the farthest East begin to draw The shady curtains from Aurora’s bed, Away from light steals home my heavy son, And private in his chamber pens himself, Shuts up his windows, locks fair daylight out, And makes himself an artificial night. (1.1.131–40) The lover locks himself inside himself, constitutes his private world, completely exclusive of nature and society alike: he even generates his own private weather, by exhaling clouds of sighs and weeping rivers of tears. Self-involved and melancholy, the lover is a pitiable thing indeed. This is the first tenet of the love code: that the lover dwells on his own planet, a state of emotional self-preoccupation remote from most of human life. Desire, always increasing since its outlets are blocked, carves out and occupies an enormous space inside the desirer, a whole cosmos of insufficiency, absence. A second tenet becomes clear soon afterward, as Romeo confesses that his beloved ignores him: She’ll not be hit With Cupid’s arrow. She hath Dian’s wit;

46

❧

romeo and juliet

And in strong proof of chastity well arm’d, From Love’s weak childish bow she lives uncharm’d. (1.1.208–11) Such references to Roman mythology are common in the play, for the planet of love is ruled by pagan deities, not by Christian; the code of love was inscribed not on Moses’ tablets or in the gospels but in Ovid’s Amores and other classical texts—its major commandment is not Love thy neighbor as thyself or Honor the sabbath day to keep it holy but Amor vincit omnia. We soon hear more of Cupid, when Mercutio urges Romeo to dance at the Capulets’ ball: You are a lover, borrow Cupid’s wings And soar with them above a common bound. Rom. I am too sore enpierced with his shaft To soar with his light feathers, and so bound I cannot bound a pitch above dull woe; Under love’s heavy burthen do I sink. (1.4.17–22) Mer.

Mercutio immediately makes a coarse pun, but Romeo refuses to smile: the lover’s universe of discourse is heavily sexualized but never obscene—it is a world of tropes that can’t easily be dismantled, reduced to some bit of gynecology. Such figures of speech as Cupid remain about halfway between the Eros of the ancients—so mighty that his arrows could compel even Apollo to do his will—and our modern sentimentalized Valentine’s day drawing of a cartoon cherub: for Mercutio, Cupid is only concupiscence, a slightly veiled way of talking about coitus, but for Romeo, Cupid is a semi-credible god, a name for something intensely significant, for urges that seem to have some dark referent beyond mere reproductive physiology. Mercutio makes up metaphors and fantasies only to tear them apart, as with Queen Mab; but Romeo is comfortable living in a domain of detached and stable metaphors, a tropo-sphere. But classical mythology is not the chief source for the love code of Romeo and Juliet: the chief source is named explicitly, by Mercutio: Ben. Here comes Romeo, here comes Romeo. Mer. Without his roe, like a dried herring: O flesh, flesh, how art thou fishified! Now is he for the numbers that Petrarch flow’d in. Laura to his lady was a kitchen wench (marry, she had a better love to berhyme her), Dido a dowdy, Cleopatra a gipsy . . . (2.4.36–41) Petrarch’s sonnets to Laura were, in Shakespeare’s age, the great verbal monument to love: they taught many generations of poets the basic conventions of writing love poetry. In a sense, by falling in love, Romeo has abandoned the decorous world ruled by his father and Prince Escalus, in favor of a spasmodic,

❧

the code of love

47

lethal world ruled by Francesco Petrarca, where lovers’ glances shoot blinding rays, where presence is paradise and absence is hell, where all that is not fire is ice. In this frantic domain of excluded middles, Romeo is so comfortably at home that he finds himself compulsively speaking sonnets: after Benvolio tells him that, at the Capulets’ ball, Romeo will see such beautiful women that they will make his swan seem a crow, Romeo fiercely avows his unshakable affection: When the devout religion of mine eye Maintains such falsehood, then turn tears to fires; And these, who, often drown’d, could never die, Transparent heretics, be burnt for liars! One fairer than my love! The all-seeing sun Ne’er saw her match since first the world begun. (1.2.88–93) This impressive oath, rhymed ababcc, forms the sestet of a Shakespearean sonnet. Indeed Romeo, throughout the opening scenes, seems to live inside the collection of Shakespeare’s sonnets (not published until 1609, but often thought to have been written earlier). This is true of Romeo’s themes as well as his rhymepatterns: for example, he complains that his cruel fair deprives not only himself, but the whole of mankind, by remaining chaste: O, she is rich in beauty, only poor That, when she dies, with beauty dies her store. Ben. Then she hath sworn that she will still live chaste? Rom. She hath, and in that sparing makes huge waste; For beauty, starv’d with her severity, Cuts beauty off from all posterity. (1.1.215–20) A number of Shakespeare’s sonnets urge their handsome object to get married and have children, for exactly this reason. But, of course, both these last quotations concern not Juliet, but Rosaline, Romeo’s first inamorata; and therefore they tend to call into question the sincerity of Petrarchan rhetoric, since it is just as usefully applicable to one girl as to another. Romeo’s eyes are “transparent heretics,” since he immediately decides that swan Rosaline is in fact a crow, as soon as he sees Juliet. Romeo must on some level know Mercutio was right about Rosaline, and therefore Romeo’s lovely speeches to Juliet are in a sense pre-desecrated, since they (or their like) have already been spoken to Rosaline. The deconstructionist Mercutio continually urges Romeo to understand Petrarchan conceits as a conventional, stylized, boring way of thinking and speaking: here is the disobliging formula by which Mercutio tries to conjure up the absent Romeo: Romeo! humors! madman! passion! lover! Appear thou in the likeness of a sigh!

48

❧

romeo and juliet

Speak but one rhyme, and I am satisfied; Cry but “Ay me!”, pronounce but “love” and “dove.” (2.1.7–10) For Mercutio, love sonnets are merely clichés. And yet, Romeo, now trying to speak to Juliet, does not repudiate Petrarchan conceits; instead he moves ever deeper into the world of Petrarch and the sonnet: Rom. If I profane with my unworthiest hand This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this: My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss. Jul. Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much, Which mannerly devotion shows in this: For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch, And palm to palm is holy palmers’ [pilgrims’] kiss. Rom. Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too? Jul. Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in pray’r. Rom. O then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do, They pray—grant thou, lest faith turn to despair. Jul. Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake. Rom. Then move not while my prayer’s effect I take. . . . [Kissing her] (1.5.93–107) The first words that Romeo and Juliet exchange in the play constitute a complete Shakespearean sonnet, artfully interwoven by two voices, as if the lovers have improvised a complicated stanza-form to bind themselves together in poetic form, long before their binding together in the form of a marriage ceremony. They even play a delicate literary game with the sonnet form: the usual Shakespearean sonnet is ababcdcdefefgg, but they collaborate on a slightly more intricate form (ababcbcbdedeff), in which the b-sequence is oddly transformed by no-rhymes (kiss rhymes with kiss; this rhymes with this)—as if Juliet wishes simply to echo Romeo, to swallow his words, to keep the concentration on the idea of kiss as fixed as possible, without slurring it into a related syllable. It is a pas d’action, an action sonnet, in that the bending-together of words is fulfilled by a bending-together of lips. The whole play began with a sonnet, spoken by the Prologue to set the scene of star-crossed love; and in a sense Romeo and Juliet, like Love’s Labours Lost, is a gigantic expansion of a sonnet, a sonnet that billows out and slowly deflates, unsonnets itself, and returns to the blank verse and prose of common life. In this sense, Shakespeare’s play is itself a kind of transgression against itself, in that it aspires to disable itself as a drama, to reconstitute itself as a sort of staged lyric. As far as the lovers are concerned, the dramatic aspects of the play—the feud between Montagues and Capulets, the intrigue to get Juliet married to Paris—are pointless inconveniences; they seek to wrap themselves in the paper of a book of lyric poems.

❧

the code of love

49

Romeo and Juliet could be called an opera without music, in that the drama is continually revised, intensified, betrayed, by the gorgeousness of lyrical metaphors. At the end of the dialogue-sonnet, Juliet tells Romeo, “You kiss by the book” (1.5.110), a resonant line: she means that he kisses methodically, but she also means that he kisses according to literary conventions. For the rest of the play, the lovers will try to live inside a sonnet, kissing, making love, isolating themselves from other systems of command, according to the well-known recipe of Italian love tropes. In Dante’s Inferno, the tourist Dante meets Paolo and Francesca, adulterers who fell into one another’s arms because they were spending an idle moment reading aloud stories about Sir Lancelot: Nessun maggior dolore Che ricordarsi del tempo felice ne la miseria . . . Quando leggemmo il disïato riso esser basciato da cotanto amante, questi, che mai da me non fia diviso, la bocca mi basciò tutto tremante. Galeotto fu’l libro e chi lo scrisse. No greater sadness is Than to remember our times of joy during our misery . . . As we read how he longed for her smile, how delighted she felt to be kissed by such lover as he, this man Paolo, from whom I never shall be divided, reached out and kissed my mouth all tremblingly. A Galahaut was the book, and he who wrote it. (5.121–23, 133–37)1 Similarly a book—Petrarch’s book of sonnets—is a kind of go-between for Romeo and Juliet, giving them access to a totally amorized universe, enabling them to play upon each other’s fantasies. They can fall in love instantaneously, can conspire to talk sonnets with one another, because they’ve been reading the same book. The bookishness of this drama can’t be exaggerated: if Juliet instantly notices that Romeo kisses by the book, Mercutio will soon note that Tybalt fights by the book (3.1.102; 2.4.21), since Tybalt is au courant with the best recent theories of fencing. Romeo and Juliet is a play about reading, and about trying to adapt the practice of life to literary conventions. To some extent, Shakespeare’s own book of sonnets acts as a surrogate for Petrarch’s, since the lovers continually seem to make allusions to Shakespeare’s (still unpublished) sequence of love poems: for example, Romeo, shortly before the catastrophe, remembers a happy dream in which his own corpse revives from death by means of Juliet’s kiss: “Ah me, how sweet is love itself possess’d, / When but love’s

50

❧

romeo and juliet

shadows are so rich in joy!” (5.1.10–11) These lines seem to point to the haunting couplet from Sonnet 98: “Yet seem’d it winter still, and, you away, / As with your shadow I with these did play.” It is as if Shakespeare turned the world of his sonnets inside out, exteriorized it into a drama. Most Elizabethan sonnet sequences—Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, Daniel’s Delia—form a kind of lyrico-psychiatric history of the spasms of unrequited (or frustratingly semi-requited) love for a woman. This sort of sonnet sequence has this odd property, that the rhetoric of seduction and sweet complaint, intended to bring the beloved into the lover’s arms, ultimately becomes a kind of wall separating the lover from the beloved: one sonnet is an invitation, but a hundred sonnets suggest that the sonneteer has become so engrossed in literature that the beloved is half-forgotten, no matter how loudly he cries out for her. He is addressing himself to his previous poems, not to a woman. But insofar as Romeo and Juliet is an everted sonnet sequence, a sonnet sequence with its insides pulled out and put on public display, the co-presence on stage of the two lovers becomes a sort of guarantee that there will be no immuring, no estrangement. Her voice is as intimate, as edgy, as compelling as his. In a sonnet sequence, the beloved is always outside the text—indeed her outsideness is the chief premise of the text; but in Romeo and Juliet the lover and the beloved are both figments of words, on the same plane of discourse, in a state of continuous phantasmagorical improvisation based on preexistent texts; the two lovers, naked textualities, take shelter together within the language, become exposed and vulnerable to one another’s speech. Of course, Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence differs from Spenser’s and Sidney’s in that most of the poems apostrophize not a woman but a boy—an object therefore still further outside any possibility of socially approved sexual engagement with the male author; but even that aspect is peculiarly apt to the stage conditions of Romeo and Juliet, where Juliet is unmistakably a boy playing the part of a barely adolescent girl. The love code, as Romeo and Juliet discover, conflicts so grossly with the social code that it requires a massive adjustment of being. Both lovers adapt to the new conventions fairly quickly, but with some difficulty. Rosaline, of course, has given Romeo a head start into the Petrarchan wallow, but even he has trouble in figuring out how to behave when the social code and the love code clash. For example, when Tybalt challenges him, Romeo exasperates and puzzles the irritable fellow by his bizarre meekness: Tyb. . . . thou art a villain. Rom. Tybalt, the reason that I have to love thee Doth much excuse the appertaining rage To such a greeting. Villain am I none. (3.1.61–64) However, since his refusal to fight leads immediately to Mercutio’s death, Romeo rethinks his position, qua lover, on dueling a prospective cousin by marriage,

❧

the code of love

51

and kills Tybalt. It seems that Romeo’s wavering between the love code and the code of honor leads to the worst possible result. Juliet, though she can, at the instant of meeting, follow and sing along with Romeo’s sonnet-music, has more difficulty in adapting to the exigencies of the love code. When we first see her, she is playing a role far different from Romeo’s: whereas Romeo is mooning over an unrequiting lover, Juliet is acting as an ideally submissive daughter: after Lady Capulet broaches the possibility of her marrying Paris, Juliet replies, “But no more deep will I endart mine eye / Than your consent gives strength to make it fly” (1.3.98–99). Here there is no hint of dissent from the social code. Even after Juliet has confessed her all-consuming love for Romeo, during the balcony scene, she grows abashed as she remembers how far she’s deviating from the prescriptions of the social code that governs the behavior of girls toward agreeable suitors: Fain would I dwell on form, fain, fain, deny What I have spoke, but farewell compliment! . . . O gentle Romeo, If thou dost love, pronounce it faithfully; Or if thou thinkest I am too quickly won, I’ll frown and be perverse, and say thee nay, So thou wilt woo, but else not for the world. In truth, fair Montague, I am too fond, And therefore thou mayest think my behavior light, But trust me, gentleman, I’ll prove more true Than those that have more coying to be strange. (2.2.88–89, 93–101) This is one of the oddest moments of the play: Juliet offers to behave in a manner that caricatures the etiquette book—to frown and play hard to get—if Romeo will agree in advance that it’s all an empty ploy to stimulate his desire for her. At this moment the love code starts to usurp the social code, to tear up its conventions and rebuild them according to its greater urgencies. Juliet’s great crisis in the cross-relation of the love code and the social code occurs when the Nurse tells her that Romeo has killed her cousin Tybalt: her first instinct is social and familial, and she curses Romeo: O nature, what hadst thou to do in hell When thou didst bower the spirit of a fiend In mortal paradise of such sweet flesh? (3.2.80–82) But soon she starts to interrogate her own emotional responses to the Nurse’s declaration, “Tybalt is gone, and Romeo banished” (3.2.69), and discovers a surprising truth:

52

❧

romeo and juliet

Some word there was, worser than Tybalt’s death, That murd’red me; I would forget it fain, But O, it presses to my memory Like damned guilty deeds to sinners’ minds: “Tybalt is dead, and Romeo banished.” That “banished,” that one word “banished,” Hath slain ten thousand Tybalts. (3.2.108–24) Romeo and Juliet are both poets, in the Petrarchan/Shakespearean school; but here Juliet is also a literary critic of sorts, carefully re-construing the Nurse’s sentence in order to interpret it according to the love code, instead of the social code. Soon she becomes adept at an equivocal discourse, which Lady Capulet interprets one way, according to the social code, and Juliet herself interprets in exactly the reverse fashion, according to the love code: Indeed I never shall be satisfied With Romeo, till I behold him—dead— Is my poor heart, so for a kinsman vex’d. (3.5.93–95) Here is language that punctuates itself in two mutually exclusive ways, according to two mutually exclusive codes: according to the grammar of the social code, the adjective dead modifies Romeo; according to the grammar of the love code, it modifies heart. But, of course, the love code provides a more convincing syntax for the sentence as a whole, and for Juliet’s entire emotional life. Lady Capulet is completely fooled; but other characters catch a glimpse of the weird abstractness of love, its orthogonality from the plane of common life. Romeo, as we have seen, has become his own planet: gravity is not a constant but a variable, changing according to the lover’s mood, imparting to Romeo before the Capulets’ ball “a soul of lead” (1.4.15), weighing him down as if he were on the planet Jupiter; but, later, gravity can vanish almost completely, as when Friar Lawrence notes that Juliet, about to be married, seems to float in air: Here comes the lady. O, so light a foot Will ne’er wear out the everlasting flint; A lover may bestride the gossamers That idles in the wanton summer air, And yet not fall; so light is vanity. (2.6.16–20) Just as the lover generates his own humidity, he generates a whole private biophysics. When Romeo and Juliet are alone, and can talk to each other without social disguise, completely according to the code of love, we see just how alien love’s

❧

the code of love

53

universe is to more sociable constructions of reality. Even as early as the balcony scene, Romeo tears up the chart of the sky and remaps it utterly: But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun. Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon . . . Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven, Having some business, do entreat her eyes To twinkle in their spheres till they return. What if her eyes were there, they in her head? The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars, As daylight doth a lamp; her eyes in heaven Would through the airy region stream so bright That birds would sing and think it were not night. (2.2.2–4, 15–22) Juliet is first the sun, then two more stars: the lovers constitute their own astronomy, utterly outshining the normal galaxy. Romeo’s rhetoric, with its complex interchanging of eyes and stars, works toward a maximum derangement of common notions of humankind’s place in the scheme of things: it is as if the universe were turned inside out, shoving the crystalline purity and radiance of the outermost sphere inward to the center, congealed in Juliet’s eyes, while the deadness and inertia of earth (the center, according to Ptolemy) have now become diffused outward, made the property of the heavens. Furthermore, the center and the circumference are now fluent and exchangeable, reversing places by whim. Again and again in this play, the lovers speak of themselves as if they were made of light: Juliet, delirious with sexual anticipation, declares that “Lovers can see to do their amorous rites / By their own beauties” (3.2.8–9); and at the end, in the tomb, Juliet shines like a lantern in the darkness: “here lies Juliet, and her beauty makes / This vault a feasting presence full of light” (5.3.85–86). The lovers’ bodies are a kind of phosphorus or radium, glowing eerily with an erotic charge. This swaddling-up of the lovers in their own luminosity, this wrapping of the lovers in their private sky, reaches its climax when the exultant Juliet cries out for night: come, loving, black-brow’d night, Give me my Romeo, and, when I shall die, Take him and cut him out in little stars, And he will make the face of heaven so fine That all the world will be in love with night, And pay no worship to the garish sun. (3.2.20–25)

54

❧

romeo and juliet

Romeo will become not just a star but a whole constellation, so brilliant that night and day will be reversed: the daytime code where women are coy and men valiant will be replaced by the nighttime code of love, as Cupid triumphs once and for all over Diana and Mars, the patrons of the social code. It is little wonder that Romeo and Juliet, not quite exhausted even after a night of sexual frenzy, cannot tell whether it is the lark of daylight singing, or the nightingale (3.5.2, 6): love has so confused time and space that the lovers seem to recline in their own interior continuum. Novalis’s hymns to night, the second act of Tristan und Isolde, the dismemberment of rational time and space achieved by Nietzsche’s Dionysus, all seem to lie on the distant horizons of these speeches.

Chapter Three

Love against Language To leave the conventions of Verona and enter the conventions of love entails many sorts of confusions, reversals, and definitions. Language itself must be reinvented: instead of a language suitable for condemning or challenging, the lovers need a language suitable for kissing. Arthur Brooke made this clear in a charming couplet—perhaps the only charming couplet—in Romeus and Juliet: “A thousand times she kissed, and him unkissed again, / Ne could she speak a word to him, though would she ne’er so fain” (ll. 843–44). But Shakespeare couldn’t think of presenting on stage a wedding night that consisted of a mute pantomime of two boys kissing; instead, he had to find a manner of speech that was the verbal equivalent of a pantomime of kissing—a protracted instantaneity of passion. (This deflection of a physical act into words is the same sort of problem that opera composers were later to face: the deflection of a physical act into music.) Normal language pertains to the world of clock time and yardstick space, but the love code enforces unmeasurabilities and immoderations. Love “is too like the lightning” (2.2.118), as Juliet puts it, to be comfortable in the world of normal speech—it is momentaneous, undiscursive, irrational. Of course Romeo and Juliet must die: they could not sustain such a vertigo of passion, such world-undoing spasms of metaphor, over the course of a month, let alone a lifetime. As Friar Lawrence notes, These violent delights have violent ends, And in their triumph die, like fire and powder, Which as they kiss consume. (2.6.9–11) Love that proclaims itself “infinite as the sea” (2.2.135) must be infinitesimal in duration: it is all poetry, having nothing to do with the prose of homemaking, taking out the garbage, or arguing about the dog that had an accident on the carpet. A chief manifestation of love’s assault on language is the instability of names: O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo? . . . What’s Montague? It is not hand nor foot, Nor arm nor face, nor any other part Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!

56

❧

romeo and juliet

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other word would smell as sweet. (2.2.33, 40–44) So Juliet laments, not knowing that Romeo hears her; and Romeo is all too willing to rename himself: “Call me but love, and I’ll be new baptiz’d; / Henceforth never will I be Romeo” (2.2.50–51). The code of love tends to scramble the dictionary, tends to re-referentialize language by making every precious word an attribute of one thing only, the beloved; in a sense, Love seems to admit the existence of only one name, one word: the word love. Romeo’s rebaptism as Love, however, is more easily said than done: though in their ecstasy Romeo and Juliet imagine that Romeo’s name is but a superfluous and arbitrary label stuck to him, it turns out that the name Romeo is deeply incorporated into Romeo’s flesh—as Romeo learns when he tries to commit an onomastectomy, sheer nomicide: O, tell me, friar, tell me In what vile part of this anatomy Doth my name lodge? . . . [He offers to stab himself ] (3.3.105–7) Romeo’s social identity is bound up with his name; and social identity is inevitable as long as one lives in society. Romeo cannot expunge his name from the Social Register merely by swearing allegiance to another vision of identity. Still, this is Romeo’s most violent attack on the code of honor: for honor is reputation, a field of force that plays about one’s name, and to try to gouge name out of flesh is to go as far as one can go toward breaking the iron fetter of the social code. It is interesting that, at this very moment, when the Nurse prevents Romeo from stabbing him in order to root out his name, Friar Lawrence reproaches him with effeminacy: Hold thy desperate hand! Art thou a man? Thy form cries out thou art; Thy tears are womanish, thy wild acts denote The unreasonable fury of a beast. Unseemly woman in a seeming man, And ill-beseeming beast in seeming both, Thou hast amazed me! (3.3.108–14) The code of honor makes the most strenuous discriminations between man and woman; between man and beast. But as Romeo tries to lose his Romeohood, in order to live by the code of love, he becomes an uncategorizable, androgynous being. According to the love-rhetoric, Juliet is Romeo’s soul (2.2.164); and so Romeo’s soul grows subtle, womanish. Sometimes Romeo wishes he had his old honorable masculinity back: after Mercutio’s death, for example, Romeo regrets

❧

love against language

57

that Juliet’s “beauty hath made me effeminate” (3.1.114); but for the most part he seems to accept his new ambisexuality. As Romeo becomes a woman, Juliet, of course, becomes a man: Friar Lawrence urges her to put aside “womanish fear” (4.1.119), and she does exactly that. (Here, as in many places, Shakespeare seems to confess the underlying maleness of the actors who play his female roles: the love code is closely related, one might say, to the acting code, in which all identity is flimsy and easily interchanged.) To lose the name of Romeo or Juliet is to lose the sexual identity that the name’s termination grammatically implies. The play continually experiments with small, local dissolutions of the name Romeo, as if Shakespeare kept toying with the question “What’s in a name?” Mercutio breaks Romeo down to its first syllable: “[Romeo] without his roe” (2.4.37); and the Nurse notes that Romeo and rosemary begin with the same letter, R, “that’s the dog’s name” (2.4.209). But whether the name Romeo diminishes to a fish’s egg or a mere rrrrruff, it’s still hard to lose. It’s possible that Juliet also puns on the first letter of her name, since in the Elizabethan alphabet I and J are the same letter: Hath Romeo slain himself? Say thou but ay, And that bare vowel I shall poison more Than the death-darting eye of cockatrice. I am not I, if there be such an ay. (3.2.45–48) Juliet’s I and Romeo’s are cling to them; and whenever they temporarily rejoin the orbit of human society, their names start to grow vivid. For example, when Romeo starts to make dirty jokes, bantering in the old accustomed way, Mercutio points out how Romeoid he’s acting: Why, is not this better now than groaning for love? Now art thou sociable, now art thou Romeo; now art thou what thou art, by art as well as by nature, for this drivelling love is like a great natural [fool] that runs lolling up and down to hide his bable [fool’s wand] in a hole. (2.4.88–93)

This is one of the most telling speeches in the play: for, from Mercutio’s worldly, ironic perspective, the code of love is simply a form of willed idiocy. The idiot and the lovesick man have this in common: they babble, for they have no articulate, sensible speech; in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Theseus, a somewhat Mercutio-like character, notes some other points of comparison between lunatic and lover. Love’s idiocy, love’s defeat of logic and language, can be seen most powerfully on the level of tropes. We’ve already seen how trope-driven love’s discourse is, how credulous of pagan gods, how unwilling to sink to commonplace referents. But there is one special trope characteristic of the love code: the oxymoron. Mercutio makes obscene puns; Romeo, by contrast, makes oxymorons, even

58

❧

romeo and juliet

during his very first speech in the play, when he expostulates over the stupidity of the Montague-Capulet street brawl (we must remember that Rosaline is, like Juliet, a Capulet—Romeo seems attracted to danger): Here’s much to do with hate, but more with love. Why then, O brawling love! O loving hate! O any thing, of nothing first create! O heavy lightness, serious vanity, Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms, Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health. (1.1.175–80) The social code tends to separate, to make distinctions, to create hierarchies; the love code crushes distinctions into paradox. Love’s universe is so eager to effect a convergence of extremes that love and hate themselves become undifferentiated intensities—this is why Juliet, after hearing of Tybalt’s death, can correctly call Romeo a “fiend angelical!” (3.2.75). Romeo and Juliet, with its flocks of swans and crows (1.2.87; 1.5.48; 3.2.19, 76), with its first glimpse of Juliet as a “rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear” (1.5.46), is a drama of extremely high contrasts in black and white; but all these polarities tend to collapse into a state of tense equivalence. Throughout the play, the characters comment on the uncanny intimacy of hate and love—these antonyms appear often in the closest proximity: “My only love sprung from my only hate!” (Juliet, 1.5.138); “thankful even for hate that is meant love” (Juliet, riddling her parents, 3.5.149—well might Capulet exclaim, “chopp’d logic!”). No wonder that the musicians, puzzling about what sort of music to play for a wedding that has turned into a funeral, are reluctant to play a “merry dump” (4.5.107). Romeo and Juliet seem to exert a field of force that distorts normal modes of thinking and forces all the characters, even the most obtuse, to enter a world of contradiction; they leave knots of paradox in the air around them. Even Friar Lawrence is caught up in the general oxymoronity, as he enters the orbit of the love code: when he gathers herbs, he reflects that every medicine is a poison, and that all virtue and vice are oddly commingled, inextricable: The earth that’s nature’s mother is her tomb; What is her burying grave, that is her womb. . . . O, mickle is the powerful grace that lies In plants, herbs, stones, and their true qualities; For nought so vile that on the earth doth live But to the earth some special good doth give. . . . Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied, And vice sometime by action dignified. (2.3.9–10, 15–18, 21–22)

❧

love against language

59

Plato made similar observations about the intimacy of poison and cure (for example, Laws 919b), which led Jacques Derrida, in “Plato’s Pharmacy” (in Derrida 1982), to remark on the fragility of all antithetical structures in written discourse; and the musings of Friar Lawrence, if carried a little further, might lead to a general effacement of all the clear distinctions of the religious code. The rhyme of tomb/womb is at the center of the love-poetics of the play. As we come closer and closer to the heart of the tragedy, we approach a condition of Liebestod, Love-Death, a condition of exchange, even transvestism, between Eros and Thanatos. In one of Aesop’s fables, later turned into a splendid masque by James Shirley (with operatically full music by Matthew Locke and Christopher Gibbons), Love and Death get their quivers mixed up, and so Love’s arrows result in a pile of handsome young corpses, while Death’s arrows result in a gang of old geezers running around the fields trying to hug one another. The language-derangements of Romeo and Juliet also culminate in a systematic confusion of Love and Death: “I’ll to my wedding-bed, / And death, not Romeo, take my maidenhead!” (3.2.136–37)—and soon Juliet tries to literalize this metaphor by pleading with Friar Lawrence to “bid me go into a new-made grave, / And hide with a dead man in his shroud” (4.1.84–85). The woman whose greatest joy was hugging Romeo now finds herself begging to hug some anonymous corpse. But this is only the beginning of a continual surrogation of love by death: as she approaches a real tomb she starts to thrill with fear at the thought of going mad, “And in this rage, with some great kinsman’s bone, / As with a club, dash out my desp’rate brains” (4.3.53–54)—the final revenge of the social code on the illicit lover. Here we see Juliet understanding that her repertoire of play-identities includes not only intensely erotic roles but Death itself, and Death’s victim. Later, when Juliet seems dead, Capulet is struck with horror at the thought of a daughter “deflowered” by Death, a villain pictured as a kind of serial rapist (4.5.37). Romeo, too, plays with the same skein of entangled death-love, lovedeath: when he hears of Juliet’s (false) death, he immediately seeks poison— ”Well, Juliet, I will lie with thee to-night” (5.1.34); as he pries open Juliet’s tomb, he calls it “Thou detestable maw, thou womb of death” (5.3.45); in the tomb, Romeo, jealous of Death itself, imagines Juliet as Persephone, a kind of loveslave or concubine in the underworld: Shall I believe That unsubstantial Death is amorous, And that the lean abhorred monster keeps Thee in dark to be his paramour? (5.3.102–5) By dying, Romeo can become Death, in a sense; can be Juliet’s last, most intently commingling lover. With death, as with love, one can reach the highest imaginable intensity of sensation—and Romeo and Juliet are, in a sense, connoisseurs of extreme feeling-states, craving the least safe kind of sex imaginable. If, in the

60

❧

romeo and juliet

language of the love code, all words tend to mean love, there is an inevitable slipping of reference, a sort of linguistic entropy, as love grows synonymous with death. The name Liebestod is associated with high Romantic art, for it is the name that Liszt gave to the final scene in Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde (1865), where Isolde, standing over the corpse of Tristan, liquidates herself in immoderate modulations of love. And as we explore the deeper mysteries of Shakespeare’s love-rhetoric, we seem to be in the domain of Romanticism. Coleridge delighted in the play’s oxymorons, and regarded Romeo’s lines about the feather of lead and the bright smoke as an example of the highest powers of literary imagination: in these lines we have an effort of the mind, when it would describe what it cannot satisfy itself with the description of, to reconcile opposites and qualify contradiction, leaving a middle state of mind more strictly appropriate to the imagination than any other, when it is, as it were, hovering between images. As soon as it is fixed on one image, it becomes understanding; but while it is unfixed and wavering between them, attaching itself permanently to none, it is imagination. . . . The grandest efforts of poetry are where the imagination is called forth, not to produce a distinct form, but a strong working of the mind, still offering what is repelled, and again creating what is again rejected; the result being what the poet wishes to impress, namely, the substitution of a sublime feeling of the unimaginable for a mere image.1

Coleridge, speaking as a great poet of the Romantic movement, was inclined to applaud (at least as long as Christian values remained safe) all dismantling of rational category, all smearing of the ink of old codes: the purity and force of love seemed to undo the whole stale antithesis-driven universe. But was Shakespeare a Romantic? Did Shakespeare in any sense recommend or seek to glorify the actions or the language of Romeo and Juliet? Or did Shakespeare agree with Arthur Brooke, who wrote in the brief preface to Romeus and Juliet: The glorious triumph of the continent man upon the lusts of wanton flesh, encourageth men to honest restraint of wild affections; the shameful and wretched ends of such as have yielded their liberty to foul desires teach men to withhold themselves from the headlong fall of loose dishonesty. . . . And to this end, good reader, is this tragical matter written, to describe unto thee a couple of unfortunate lovers, thralling themselves to unhonest desire; neglecting the authority and advice of parents and friends; conferring their principal counsels with drunken gossips and superstitious friars . . . attempting all adventures of peril for th’ attaining of their wished lust . . . abusing the honorable name of lawful marriage to cloak the shame of stolen contracts; finally by all means of unhonest life hasting to more unhappy death.

For the Romantics, the story of Romeo and Juliet recommends the code of love, full of confusions of fire and ice; but for Brooke, the story recommends a code of conduct that casts a cold eye on love.

❧

love against language

61

Shakespeare certainly put more effort into devising the speeches of Romeo and Juliet than, say, those of Capulet and his wife; but that doesn’t mean that he felt that the love code is a plausible way of organizing human relationships. We have seen the inadequacy of the old social code, its crudity, its faulty psychology and incoherent ethics. It is no surprise that Verona has fallen into an interminable state of civil war, governed by such a helpless code. But it’s doubtful that Petrarch can supply a reasonable alternative. The universe of Romeo and Juliet is, in its way, as heartless and brutal as that of the social code: it seeks to unrealize, to dismiss, most of human life. Note that when the Nurse decides, after Romeo has killed Tybalt, that the love code has failed to make Juliet happy, the Nurse retreats to the only other code she knows, the social code: I think it best you married with the County [Paris]. O he’s a lovely gentleman! Romeo’s a dishclout to him. (3.5.217–19) Juliet instantly considers the Nurse a traitor: “Ancient damnation! O most wicked fiend!” (3.5.235). This judgment is far harsher than any of Prince Escalus’s: the field on which the rules of Petrarch hold is exclusive, suspicious, small, and always getting smaller, as Romeo and Juliet push away everyone who could conceivably assist them, first the Nurse, then Friar Lawrence (4.3.24— Juliet wonders whether Lawrence has given her a real poison instead of the drug that will produce a simulation of death). It is impossible to imagine that Shakespeare hoped that we would all regulate our lives according to the governance of sonnets: a fully Petrarchized society would be in a state of continual warfare, just like Verona. And yet, if neither the love code nor the social code can alone suffice, it’s possible that the social code could improve itself by trying to understand and to embrace the formalized anarchy of young love; and possible that the love code could improve itself by trying to understand the general inertia, ignorant typology, and punctilious arrogance of the social code. One of the puzzles of Romeo and Juliet is, why did Shakespeare continue the last scene so long-windedly after the deaths of the lovers? As Dr. Johnson put it, “Narration in dramatic poetry is naturally tedious, as it is unanimated and inactive. . . . Shakespeare found it an encumbrance, and instead of lightening it by brevity, endeavoured to recommend it by dignity and splendour.”2 Almost every director who emends the play cuts out, or even rewrites, much of the last 150 lines; and yet Shakespeare often has a purpose in his tedium. Why would any spectator want to hear Friar Lawrence speak a long, long, dutiful plot summary of exactly those events that have been excitingly presented on stage? Perhaps the answer is that Shakespeare wanted Romeo and Juliet to move beyond drama into narrative, in order to suggest that their story could be integrated into the other stories that make up our lives; Prince Escalus leaves us with the hope that this extraordinary, irrational

62

❧

romeo and juliet

love-narrative might pass into an example, and that this example might help to rectify some of the errors of the social code. For most of its duration, Romeo and Juliet attempts to transgress itself by wrenching drama into an expansion of a sonnet; but as it concludes, the play attempts to transgress itself by smoothing the drama into the (slightly too mellifluous and pat) narrative cadences of Friar Lawrence’s voice. At the very end, we hear that Montague is going to build a “statue in pure gold” (5.3.299) of Capulet’s daughter, and that Capulet will do the same for Montague’s son. Juliet had hoped that Romeo would survive after death as a heavenly constellation (3.2.22), but instead they both survive only as a story, and as a pair of statues: entities in the world of human society, not in the world of Petrarchan fantasy, reminders of something precious to mankind that resists easy assimilation into books of law and codes of honor.

Chapter Four

The Afterlife of Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare’s theatres became bare ruined choirs in 1642, because of the English Civil War; and when the theatres reopened, in 1660, after an eighteenyear absence, Shakespeare’s plays began a long reassimilation into the cultural consciousness of England. Juliet, who died a boy in Shakespeare’s day, awoke and found herself transsexualized into a woman—for now actresses were permitted on stage, on a stage itself much changed, for the bare platform of the old theatre had been replaced by a stage with a proscenium arch and elaborate backdrops. And Shakespeare’s words also started to mutate in their Restoration afterlife, as they were reconfigured into a locus of multimedia spectacles. Shakespeare, along with Beaumont and Fletcher, slowly shifted, at times becoming a sort of opera librettist. John Dryden regarded the 1674 version of The Tempest as one of the first English operas; and Nahum Tate, the very fellow who wrote the libretto for the first English opera that is still frequently performed, Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (before 1689), also wrote a new ending for King Lear, in which Cordelia revives in Lear’s arms, and all concludes well—an ending that remained popular for decades to come. In the early 1660s, one James Howard devised a version (now lost) of Romeo and Juliet with a happy ending, but it was unsuccessful—evidently no one wanted such a thing. It is interesting to speculate on this version: perhaps Romeo lifts the poison to his lips, then notices Juliet faintly stirring, throws away the vial before drinking it, hugs her madly, and persuades old Capulet that the murderer of Tybalt and Paris would make a sober, reliable husband for his daughter. King Lear is a tragedy, whether or not a deus ex machina can impose a happy ending; but Romeo and Juliet becomes a pointless thing, a romantic comedy crammed with corpses, if the lovers are allowed to unite in the end. So we must posit further rewriting: the text must somehow show that Tybalt and Paris aren’t really dead, either, but only badly wounded, capable of seeing the error of their ways and blessing the marriage of Romeo and Juliet—Ah, Romeo, [coughs] I see it clear, thou art a better man than I. In fact (as many critics have noticed) the endpoint of the comic metamorphosis of Romeo and Juliet is simply

64

❧

romeo and juliet

the Pyramus and Thisby episode of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a farce in which the actors roar gently so as not to make the ladies in the audience a-feared, and the actors whisper aside that no one really gets hurt, even if stage blood is spilled everywhere. The history of adaptations of Romeo and Juliet shows an odd forking: on the one hand, the play evolves toward brutality (in Otway’s The History and Fall of Caius Marius, 1679); on the other hand, in the eighteenth century, Shakespeare’s text was somewhat macerated—it grew more refined, less extravagant and harsh. Posterity (beginning with Otway) decided that the death scene was the unsatisfactory, too-unhappy part of the play, and it could be improved simply by allowing the two lovers a final goodbye in the course of a spoken duet—another sort of operatization of the text. It seemed that Shakespeare muffed the ending by not seeing the choice dramatic possibilities for dialogue between the dying Romeo and the revived Juliet. In some ways, Shakespeare’s handling of the lovers’ deaths (5.3.120–70) really is odd, abrupt, almost brusque. The poison (unusually, for stage poisons) works instantly: Romeo drinks it and drops dead beside Juliet; by clockwork precision of contrivance, Romeo’s death is the cue for Friar Lawrence’s entry and Juliet’s rousing. She “dies,” then he dies; he dies, then she dies. The avoidance of any dialogue between the lovers in this scene was clearly a conscious choice: for example, in Othello—in a scene much derided by Voltaire—Shakespeare allowed Othello to smother Desdemona (a species of murder that one would expect to be immediately effective, unlike poison), but Desdemona lingers on for a few minutes, to chat with her husband. Why did Shakespeare deny his lovers the leniency of farewell? Again, it is possible to find an answer in the conventions of love sonnets. We’ve seen that Romeo and Juliet is a drama confected in order to invent an artificial venue in which the sonneteer and his beloved can coinhabit a world—as opposed to the usual conditions of sonnet-life, where the beloved is at a far remove, and usually getting, as the sequence evolves, still farther away. But by the end of the play, the normal conditions of love poetry are starting to reassert themselves, in a sinister way. To write a poem to a woman is to objectify her—to substitute for the living woman an artifice made purely of words, like the False Florimell of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, a gynoid synthesized out of various remote ingredients by a witch, in order to trick a noble lover:

The substance, whereof she the bodie made, Was purest snow in massie mould congeald . . . The same she tempred with fine Mercury, And virgin wex, that never yet was seald, And mingled them with perfect vermily, That like a lively sanguine it seem’d to the eye.

❧

the afterlife of romeo and juliet

65

In stead of eyes two burning lampes she set In silver sockets, shyning like the skyes, And a quicke moving Spirit did arret To stirre and roll them, like a womans eyes; In stead of yellow lockes she did devise, With golden wyre to weave her curled head; Yet golden wyre was not so yellow thrise As Florimells fair haire: and in the stead Of life, she put a Spright to rule the carkasse dead. (3.8.6–7) The snow is pure, the mercury is fine, the wax is virgin, and the creature derived from them is a blank, a zero—a nonentity put into a hectic simulation of life by the figures of speech of love poets. Spenser’s snow-woman is made by the same recipe as those famous engravings of women drawn as literalizations of amorous similes: for example, the picture in Charles Sorel’s The extravagant shepherd (1654), which shows a sort of gorgon with round tooth-balls to represent pearls, actual roses growing out of her cheeks, suns streaming darts from her eyesockets, a network of wires as a wig, and the globe’s eastern and western hemispheres clapped onto her chest for breasts (see fig. 1). Juliet, whose eyes flew into the heavens while two stars dawdled on each side of her nose, was always in danger of perishing into a grotesque, an unseemly compound of tropes. In this sense, Romeo himself was the potion that induced her to a mock death: the poetry he devised had a certain tendency to chill her, to abstract and alienate her, as the rhetoric of seduction grew self-engrossed. When Romeo and Juliet met, she seemed able to dwell with him inside a sonnet; by the end, she has come to obey the rule of distancing that sonnets tend to impose upon their objects. Why was Romeo not allowed to say goodbye to Juliet?—because insofar as she was the artifact of Romeo’s words, he never knew her in the first place, except as a latently moribund thing, a pseudocorpse. But the passage of time made Juliet less interesting as an extrapolation of the ideal beloved of sonnet writers, and more interesting as an erotic object on the stage. Shakespeare’s Juliet, derived from the conventions of the love lyric, is a thing of fire and ice, virginal yet hoarse from venery, a staged oxymoron; but the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century revisers imposed a moral clarity and aesthetic singleness of effect on Shakespeare’s paradoxicalities, his odd sort of dramatic aporia. As Norman Rabkin puts it, “The radical modifications . . . consist not so much of the neoclassic regularization one might expect as of attempts to focus the problematic qualities of the tragedies, to tame them and make them vehicles for providing comfort and reassurance and lucid understanding to their audience.”1 Rabkin goes on to cite Dryden’s definition of character: “A character . . . is a composition of qualities which are not contrary to one another in the same person2—a definition perhaps suggesting that (for Shakespeare’s regularizers) Shakespeare’s plays contained scarcely any characters, since contradictory

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Figure 1. From Charles Sorel, The Extravagant Shepherd; Or the history of the Shepherd Lysis. An Anti-Romance; Written Originally in French, and Now Made English. London: Printed by T. Newcomb for Thomas Heath, 1654. Photograph from the University of Michigan, University Library. Used by permission.

❧

the afterlife of romeo and juliet

67

traits are a feature of most of the dramatis personae we best remember. The masks needed to be ironed into straighter shapes. As Juliet simplified into an ingenue, Romeo bulked out, grew reliable and dutiful. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the celebrated actor David Garrick—wearing clothes of the sort we see in pictures of George Washington— played Romeo opposite a Juliet wearing a long flowing dress with a good deal of décolletage. Garrick cut the play in order to heighten the purity and noble sentiment of the two lovers: for one thing, he eliminated Rosaline, thereby rendering Romeo’s love-rhetoric to Juliet unimpeachably sincere. And he rewrote the death scene to include the warm sobbing farewell that Shakespeare refused to his lovers—a scene full of Dramatic Irony because Romeo forgets he’s swallowed poison, and Juliet confuses Romeo with Paris: Romeo. . . . Soft! soft! She breathes and stirs! [Juliet wakes.] Juliet. Where am I? Defend me, powers! Romeo. She speaks, she lives! And we shall still be blessed! My kind propitious stars o’erpay me now For all my sorrows past. Rise, rise, my Juliet, And from this cave of death, this house of horror, Quick let me snatch thee to thy Romeo’s arms, There breathe a vital spirit in thy lips And call thee back to life and love! [Takes her hand.] Juliet. Bless me! How cold it is! Who’s there? Romeo. Thy husband. It is thy Romeo, love; raised from despair To joys unutterable! Quit, quit this place, And let us fly together. [Brings her from the tomb.] Juliet. Why do you force me so? I’ll ne’er consent. My strength may fail me, but my will’s unmoved. I’ll not wed Paris: Romeo is my husband. Romeo. Her senses are unsettled. Restore ‘em, heav’n! Romeo is thy husband; I am that Romeo. Not all th’ opposing powers of earth or man Can break our bonds or tear thee from my heart. But soon this happy idyll ends, as the poison makes Romeo’s face grow pale, his eyes swim: Romeo. . . . Fate brought me to this place to take a last, Last farewell of my love and with thee die. Juliet. Die! Was the friar false?

68

❧

romeo and juliet

Romeo. I know not that. I thought thee dead. Distracted at the sight, Fatal speed! drank poison, kissed thy cold lips, And found with thy arms a precious grave. But in that moment—O— Juliet. And did I wake for this? Romeo. My powers are blasted. Twixt death and life I’m torn, I am distracted! But death’s strongest—and must I leave thee Juliet? O, cruel cursed fate! in sight of heaven—3 It is easy to sneer at Garrick’s blank verse, with its “Soft! soft!” and “Quit, quit” and “Rise, rise” and “last, last,” its drear tombs and joys unutterable—well indeed might Garrick say (in an ugly half-rhyme), “My powers are blasted! . . . I am distracted!” The whole scene could be put in the mouths of Pyramus and Thisby, with little impropriety. But it must be remembered that Garrick’s scene was often considered, for more than a century, not only an indispensable part of the play, but one of the highlights.

Chapter Five

La lance branlée: French Opinions of Shakespeare As Romeo and Juliet developed in time, changing from figments derived from lyric poetry into sentimental adolescents, they also migrated through space, returning to the Romance languages from which they came. Shakespeare had found the characters and plot in a long, edifying poem by Arthur Brooke, who in turn had inherited the story from a number of French and Italian sources; but when, in the eighteenth century, Romeo and Juliet returned to their native lands, they came speaking an English accent, at once familiar and strange. For the most influential Continental critic of the eighteenth century, Voltaire, Shakespeare was the enemy of dramatic art. Voltaire lived for a time in England, and had far more experience with Shakespeare than most of his European contemporaries. What he found in Shakespeare was simply chaos—a barbarous disregard for the unities of time and place, and a vulgar love for mixing the noble and the ignoble. Voltaire cringed to hear the jokes of Roman cobblers in a scene from Julius Caesar where Brutus and Cassius discoursed; and he was sickened by the gravediggers in Hamlet, singing ballads as they dug up old skulls. According to Voltaire’s Letters Concerning the English Nation (1734), Shakespeare was a genius of disgust: Shakespear boasted a strong, fruitful Genius: He was natural and sublime, but had not so much as a single Spark of good Taste, or knew one Rule of the Drama. . . . the great Merit of this Dramatic Poet has been the Ruin of the English Stage. There are such beautiful, such noble, such dreadful Scenes in this Writer’s monstrous Farces, to which the Name of Tragedy is given, that they have always been exhibited with great Success. Time, which only gives Reputation to Writers, at last makes their very Faults venerable. Most of the whimsical, gigantic Images of this Poet, have, thro’ Length of Time . . . acquir’d a Right of passing for sublime.1

But in a century’s time, these censures would start to sound like praise. When the Romantic movement began, Shakespeare’s neglect of the classical unities, his taste for the whimsical and monstrous, would seem like a heroic repudiation of stale Art in favor of abundant Nature.

70

❧

romeo and juliet

For our purposes, the key year for the French Romantic revaluation of Shakespeare is 1827. In October of that year, Victor Hugo published his play Cromwell together with its famous preface: a paean to Shakespeare and a manifesto of Romantic drama. The main thesis of the preface concerned the virtue of the mixed. Hugo recommended a mixture of verse and prose, the tragic and the comic, the sublime and the grotesque—since, according to the Christian religion, man is intrinsically a mixture of pure soul and transitory flesh. This leads Hugo to a ringing defense of the ugly as a necessary aspect of art—a defense that will be taken up again and again through the nineteenth century, by Flaubert, Chekhov, and many others, and will become a prime tenet of Expressionism in the twentieth century. And the locus classicus of the ugly is the canon of Shakespeare:

as a point of view with respect to the sublime, as a means of contrast, the grotesque is (according to us) the richest source that nature can open to art. Rubens doubtless understood this, when he was pleased to mix with his unfoldings of royal pomp, coronations, splendid ceremonies, some hideous figure of a court dwarf. This sort of universal beauty which antiquity solemnly spread out over everything wasn’t without monotony; the same impression, always repeated, can at length be fatiguing. The sublime on top of the sublime produces a poor contrast, and one needs to rest from everything, even from the beautiful. It seems, on the contrary, that the grotesque is a stopping-place, a term of comparison, a point of departure from which one is lifted toward the beautiful with a fresher and more excited perception. The salamander throws the undine into relief; the gnome makes the sylph beautiful. . . . . . . in [Christian] poetry, while the sublime will represent the soul just as it is, [the grotesque] will play the role of the human beast. The first type, disengaged from every impure bond, will carry with it every charm, every grace, every beauty: it must create Juliet, Desdemona, Ophelia. The second will take every ridiculous thing, every infirmity, every ugliness. To this division of humanity and creation will come passions, vices, crimes; there will be the lecher, the groveler, the glutton, the miser, the traitor, the bungler, the hypocrite; there will be by turns Iago, Tartufe, Basile; Polonius, Harpagon, Bartholo; Falstaff, Scapin, Figaro. There is only one type of the beautiful, but the ugly has a thousand types. The beautiful . . . is merely form considered in its simplest relation, in its most absolute symmetry, in the most intimate harmony. . . . It offers to us a finished ensemble, but circumscribed, as we ourselves are circumscribed. What we call the ugly, on the contrary, is a detail of a great ensemble that escapes our grasp, and which harmonizes itself, not with man, but with creation in its entirety. That is why it presents us ceaselessly with new aspects, but incomplete aspects.2

Beauty is narrow, exclusive, thin-lipped, thin-hipped, a little tedious, faintly repellent; ugliness is rich and diversified and evil and generous, life itself. It is little wonder that Hugo would come to write a drama in which the star player would be a hunchbacked jester (Rigoletto, as Verdi renamed him); or to write a

LANCE

BRANLÉE

❧

LA

71

novel in which gypsies mutilate children in order to make them more compelling objects of pity when begging for alms: for beauty is locked in itself, while ugliness is connected to the whole of mankind, and the whole of the inanimate universe as well. Through pondering the ugly, we know what it feels like to be a misshapen rock, or a sand dune, or a heap of logs, or the solar system. Though Hugo loosely equates the sublime with the beautiful, it is the ugly that is (as Burke or Kant would have understood the term) sublime. The ramifications of this aesthetic position on Romeo and Juliet are clear. The eighteenth century wanted more Juliet, and a more pathetic Juliet; the nineteenth century wanted more Nurse, more Mercutio, more Friar Lawrence—even more of the gargoyles that channel the dramatic flow around the central intrigue. As an advanced Romantic complained after hearing, in 1831, Bellini’s recent opera I Capuleti e i Montecchi: What a disappointment!!! in the libretto there is no ball at the Capulets’, no Mercutio, no chatterbox nurse, no grave, calm hermit, no balcony scene, no sublime monologue for Juliet as she receives the vial from the hermit, no duet in the cell between the exiled Romeo and the desolated hermit; no Shakespeare, nothing; a failed work.3

The writer of this passage was Hector Berlioz, who, eight years later, would compose the most searching musical work ever written on the Romeo and Juliet theme. This leads to one of my main arguments: the dramatic symphony Roméo et Juliette could be considered a revision of Shakespeare through the premises of Victor Hugo. Berlioz’s (somewhat unfair) complaints about the monotony of effeminate gorgeous melodies in Bellini’s opera recall Hugo on the ennui of unrelieved beauty; and Berlioz took care to shape his Roméo et Juliette as a dialectic of the beautiful and the grotesque, exactly as Hugo recommended. Berlioz, like Hugo’s Shakespeare, had a genius for the mixed mode. In addition to Hugo’s preface to Cromwell, the year 1827 also saw the visit to Paris of a troupe of British actors, playing Shakespeare, in English. This venture was surprisingly successful; and many of the best minds and subtlest temperaments in France, including Delacroix, Dumas, de Vigny, and Berlioz, were suddenly full of Shakespeare. The impresario did not consider his company especially talented, and tried to enrich it with visits from established actors, such as Edmund Kean and Charles Kemble. Kemble arrived, but was unwilling to play Romeo until a decent Juliet could be found; meanwhile, he agreed to play Hamlet, since he thought Ophelia a trifling role that anyone could handle. In this manner, Paris heard the Ophelia of a little-known actress, whose Irish accent had seemed, to British ears, deplorable: Harriet Smithson. But her accent was no impediment in Paris, where many in the audience, including Berlioz, didn’t know English in the first place: and her recklessness and mad grace, her beauty and control of gesture, made her a star overnight. As Berlioz wrote:

72

❧

romeo and juliet

I come now to the greatest drama of my life. I won’t tell all its sad peripeties. I will limit myself to saying this: an English troupe came to Paris to give some performances of the dramas of Shakespeare, then completely unknown to the French public. I attended the first performance of Hamlet at the Odéon. I saw in the role of Ophelia Henriette Smithson who, five years later, became my wife. The effect of her prodigious talent, or rather her dramatic genius, on my imagination and on my heart, is comparable only to the upheaval worked on me by Shakespeare himself—whose worthy interpreter she was. I can say nothing more. Shakespeare, falling unforeseen, struck me like lightning. His bolt, opening for me the heaven of art with a sublime riot, lit up the most distant depths. . . . at the same time I took the measure of the immense ridiculousness of the ideas concerning Shakespeare that Voltaire had popularized.4

Berlioz went on to say that he was prostrate from shock, in a condition of intense chagrin combined with a pathological state of nerves. But soon he collected himself and went to see Harriet Smithson’s Juliet—the management now had no qualms about allowing her to play the role: After the melancholy . . . after the dark clouds, the icy winds of Denmark, to be exposed to the ardent sun, the perfumed nights of Italy, to be present at the spectacle of this love quick as thought, burning as lava, imperious, irresistible, immense, and pure and beautiful as the smile of the angels, at these furious scenes of vengeance, at these distraught embraces, at these desperate struggles of love and death, it was too much. And so, by the third act, breathing with difficulty, and suffering as if an iron hand had squeezed my heart, I said to myself with utter conviction: Ah! I am lost. . . . An English critic said last winter in the Illustrated London News that after seeing Juliet played by Miss Smithson I cried out: “I will marry this woman! and out of this drama I will write my largest symphony!” I did these things, but I said nothing like that. . . . what my overwhelmed soul didn’t even permit itself to dream, has become a reality.5

Berlioz wrote his Mémoires many years after the events described, but his prose is remarkably vivid: indeed the act of writing seems almost a sort of autohypnosis, in which the acute physiological crisis of his response to Shakespeare, and to Smithson, is re-created. To fall in love with an actress is to fall in love, not just with one role, but with the whole range of roles that she has played, or might play. It is an unfocusable sort of affection, directed not at a particular set of personality traits, but at a field of possibility. (Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, a novel in which the chief female character is an actress, is especially good in portraying this histrionic nebulousness of desire.) It is the intimate psychic equivalent of the mixed mode recommended by Hugo: for to love an actress is to love the pure and the grotesque, the ingenue and the madwoman; to love a teasing and pregnant locus of selves; to love all women instead of any one woman; to love the universe. Off stage, Harriet Smithson turned out to be a fussy, mother-dominated creature, older than Berlioz, saddled with mountains of debt, somewhat lame after breaking her ankle,

LANCE

BRANLÉE

❧

LA

73

altogether a disappointing wife; but any contraction to a finite identity would have seemed a betrayal of the omnisentient incarnations of Shakespeare’s imagination that Berlioz glimpsed on stage. The Romantic poet Keats (born eight years before Berlioz) applauded Shakespeare for his negative capability, his indistinctness and motility of being—for Keats, Shakespeare was a chameleon who took equal delight in pretending to be the vile Iago and the virtuous Imogen; and Berlioz, as we’ll see, is the most negatively-capable of composers.

Chapter Six

Berlioz in the Plural One of the striking features of Berlioz’s Mémoires is the indiscriminateness of his literary imagination. In 1827, Romeo and Juliet infused in Berlioz a dream of Italy, an ideal domain where the heaviness of the commonplace fumes away into sheer volatility of voluptuousness; and four years later Berlioz was allowed to visit Italy—in fact, he was compelled to live there against his will, for winners of the Prix de Rome, the best route to success for a young French artist, were required to live in Rome. By 1831 Italy meant, to Berlioz, not amorous adventure but the absence of amorous adventure, for his beloved (at this moment not Harriet Smithson but a woman named Camille Moke, whom Berlioz would soon come to consider calculating and unreliable) had to stay in Paris. For this reason, and for many others, including the incompetence of Italian musicians, Berlioz found Italy an exasperation and a trial. And yet Italy provided Berlioz with a huge theatre through which he could swagger, experimenting with various transvestisms between himself and dead poets, or characters in literature. He reads Byron in St. Peter’s, and is suddenly overwhelmed with Byron envy: I devoured at leisure this burning poetry; I followed the bold paths of the Corsair on the waves; I profoundly adored this character at once inexorable and tender, pitiless and generous, a bizarre composite of two sentiments seemingly opposed, hatred of his kind and love of a woman. . . . Then my thoughts, lowering their flight, took pleasure in seeking, on the basilica’s pavement, the traces of the noble poet’s steps. . . . He must have seen this sculpture by Canova, I said to myself; his feet have walked on this marble, his hands have stroked the contours of this bronze; he has breathed this air, these echoes have repeated his words . . . words of tenderness and love, perhaps. . . . Eh! yes! couldn’t he have visited the monument with his friend Madame Guiccioli, that rare and admirable woman, who understood him so completely, who loved him so profoundly!!! . . . loved!!! . . . poet! . . . free! . . . rich! He was all that, himself! . . . and the grinding of my teeth, as it resounded in the confessional, would make the damned tremble with fear.1

❧

berlioz in the plural

75

In many other passages Berlioz wrapped himself in old fictitious identities: Sometimes, when instead of a gun I took my guitar . . . a canto of the Aeneid, which had been buried in my memory since childhood, awakened at the look of the places where I was wandering; improvising a strange recitative upon a still stranger harmony, I sang to myself the death of Pallas, the despair of the good Evander . . . I wept for this poor Turnus, whose land and mistress and life would be taken by the hypocrite Aeneas. . . . I felt the absence of this poetic age when the heroes, sons of gods, wore such beautiful armor. . . . Leaving the past for the present, I wept for my personal griefs, my doubtful future, my interrupted career; and, collapsing overwhelmed in the midst of this chaos of poetry, murmuring some verse by Shakespeare, Virgil, and Dante: Nessun maggior dolore . . . ô poor Ophelia . . . Good night, sweet ladies . . . sub umbras . . . I fell asleep.2 Covered (to the amusement of the Roman street urchins) with a sort of hooded cloak, similar to those that painters give to Petrarch, I accompany the cart-loads of corpses to the church across the Tiber. . . . Here’s a lonely village; empty except for an old woman washing her clothes in a little stream. She tells me that this silent retreat is called Isola Farnese. They say this is the modern name for the ancient Veii. This was the capital of the Volscans, those proud enemies of Rome! . . . This old woman, bent over the edge of the stream, is perhaps occupying the place where the sublime Veturia (whom Shakespeare calls Volumnia) knelt down in front of her son!3

The dead woman had been laid out on a table. A long dress of white percale, gathered around her neck and below her feet, covered her almost completely. Her black hair, half braided, flowed in waves around her shoulders, huge blue eyes half shut, little mouth, sad smile, neck of alabaster, noble and candid air . . . young! . . . young! . . . dead! The Italian man, always smiling, exclaimed: “E bella!” And, so that I could better admire her features, he lifted the head of the poor young beautiful dead girl, and, with his dirty hand, pulled apart the hair that seemed to insist, through modesty, on covering her brow and her cheeks, where there still reigned an ineffable grace. . . . I throw myself on my knees, I seize the hand of this profaned beauty, I cover her with expiatory kisses, in the throes of one of the most intense heart-anguishes of my life . . . But suddenly I came to think: what will the husband say, if he could see the chaste hand so dear to him, recently become cold, now warmed by the kisses of a young stranger? . . . would he not believe that I am the clandestine lover of his wife, who comes, more loving and more faithful than he, to breathe upon the adored body a Shakespearean despair?4

Berlioz in Italy lived on a stage set, in which the landscapes were painted on a scrim so transparent that interior scenes from history and poetry kept making themselves felt through the fabric. Wisps of old presences impinge: the Countess Guiccioli seems to brush the hand of Berlioz-Byron in St. Peter’s; Volumnia, disguised as a washerwoman, seems ready to bow down to Berlioz-Coriolanus; and County Paris threatens to interrupt a tender moment when Berlioz, feigning himself as the ghost of Romeo, kisses the hand of a stray Florentine Juliet. Berlioz was self-conscious in his role-playing—there are always street urchins to laugh at his

76

❧

romeo and juliet

Petrarch drag; but he understood his Italian sojourn as a Romantic epic improvised from scraps of old poems, hummed to a private music. Byron, Shakespeare, Virgil are all coopted, subsumed into an immense pan-literary effort. In his private life, Berlioz toyed with a number of ultra-Romantic roles: shortly after arriving in Rome, he became alarmed at Camille Moke’s unfaithfulness and hatched a scheme to return to Paris, visit Camille disguised as a lady’s maid, whip out a pistol, and shoot Camille, her lover, her mother, and finally himself— and, in case the weapon misfired, the provident assassin would have an emergency bottle of poison all ready. This scheme got as far as the purchase of the maid’s costume and a journey to the city of Nice, before Berlioz thought better of it and returned to Rome. Berlioz doubtlessly had many reasons for abandoning this scheme, but one reason may have been his reluctance to confine himself forever to one role, the Reckless Avenger, grotesquely appassionato, straight out of Byron’s bottom drawer, when he could fantasize so many different roles for himself, could enact in his music such plurality of identity. The heroes of Berlioz’s musical compositions include King Lear, Rob Roy, Faust, Childe Harold, Benvenuto Cellini the sculptor, that hypocrite Aeneas, Romeo, Benedick (from Much Ado about Nothing), and the nameless artist of the Symphonie fantastique (1830) who takes too much opium but, instead of dying, drifts off into curious dreams of a nameless woman, modeled on Harriet Smithson. This assortment of protagonists seems extremely varied, but in fact the range of types is somewhat narrow. They can be divided into two categories: statues and sculptors. The first category consists of rigid, stolid musical subjects (such as the monothematic Childe Harold in Harold en Italie and Énée in Les Troyens), monumentally determined characters who provide a sort of dramatic tonic-note to register and orient the wild abundance that dances around them; the second category consists of the spontaneous and the improvisatory (such as Roméo and the protagonist of the Symphonie fantastique), those plastic sensibilities who swallow up, who embody the wild abundance of the whole composition. For our purposes, the second species is the important one: a hero like Berlioz’s Roméo has no color or shape of his own, and only the ghost of a private voice; he is simply a sort of Aeolian harp, vibrating to various transcendental intensities of love and despair and irony. As in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (1859; 1865)— a work that owes much to Roméo et Juliette5—the hero is a loud but strangely passive thing, unable to separate himself con vincingly from the gorgeous web of feeling-music in which he’s tangled. We tend to think of music as an expression of a human subject’s states of mind; but if expression grows too big, too vehement, the human subject is drowned in the floods and becomes a dim hypothesis, a tentative construct inferred from the simple principle that expression presupposes an expresser. In high Romanticism, proper names tend to appear not singly but in effusive strings. We’ve seen that Hugo doesn’t speak of Juliet but of “Juliet, Desdemona, Ophelia”; and Berlioz has the same mania for whole decks of cards. In 1845, a

❧

berlioz in the plural

77

baritone named Pischek sang at one of Berlioz’s concerts in Vienna, to Berlioz’s excitement: “I felt myself growing red up to my eyeballs; my arteries beat to the point of breaking, and mad with joy, I cried out, ‘Voilà don Juan, voilà Roméo, voilà Cortez!’ ”6 As intensity of feeling increases, specificity declines: Don Juan and Romeo and Cortez, caught at moments of lower energy, are distinct creatures; but at a point of maximum rapture all men are one man, wild with surmise. Similarly, Berlioz’s women are all one woman. When the young Berlioz wrote a cantata on an assigned text, La mort de Cléopâtre (1829), in order to compete for the Prix de Rome, his first thought was of Juliet: The subject that they gave us was Cleopatra after the battle of Actium. The queen of Egypt caused herself to be bitten by an asp, and died in convulsions. Before committing suicide, she asked the ghosts of the pharaohs . . . if she, dissolute and criminal queen, could be admitted to one of the giant tombs raised to the shades of sovereigns illustrious for glory and virtue. In this scene there was a grandiose idea to be expressed. Many times I had made in my head a musical paraphrase of the immortal monologue of Shakespeare’s Juliet: But if when I am laid into the tomb . . . [4.3.30] The sentiment of this speech approaches, at least in its degree of terror, that of the apostrophe placed by our French rhymer in the mouth of Cleopatra. I even had the tactlessness to write as an epigraph on my score the English verse that I just quoted; and, for such Voltairean academicians as my judges, that was an unforgivable crime.7

(Berlioz was not given the prize, which he would receive the following year for a less challenging cantata, in which he condescended to the tastes of his judges.) The notion that music composed for a lovesick thirteen-year-old girl could be used to represent the death agony of a “dissolute and criminal queen” may suggest that Berlioz’s own aesthetic of drama has a somewhat formulaic nature. In the opere serie of, say, Handel, arias are a fungible commodity, easily exchanged between operas: one rage aria might be transposed with another, one love aria with another. In a work by Berlioz, the principle of interchange still exists, no longer on the level of Affekt but on the level of acoustic physiology. Juliet and Cleopatra approach the tomb with quite different feelings: Juliet anticipates a mock death as a hallucinatory ordeal—perhaps she’ll go mad and “with some great kinsman’s bone, / As with a club, dash out my desp’rate brain” (4.3.53–54)—an ordeal that she must undergo in order to embrace her husband; Cleopatra, by contrast, is overwhelmed by despair, for she knows that she’s betrayed her country and her gods, and she expects the harshest judgment from the grands Pharaons, her ancestors. For Juliet, the tomb is a cartoon house of horrors; for Cleopatra, a complete condemnation and crushing-out of being. But, although the emotional contents of the two scenes are quite distinct, the implied spatiality is the same. To imagine a hollow ghastly space, like the inside of

78

❧

romeo and juliet

a tomb, is to imagine a plangency, a plaint, equally valid for any voice that might occupy it—wicked queen or infatuated adolescent. To imagine a musical equivalent for a thready heartbeat is to imagine something appropriate for any large mammal whatsoever. At the moment of death, all differentiation falls away. Berlioz (on the evidence of his patterns of reusing melodic figures) thought that he had discovered a number of universal auditory symbols; and so a musical phrase that began in the vault of the Capulets resounded in the tomb of the Pharaohs; similarly Berlioz borrowed the broken, out-of-breath textures composed for Cleopatra’s death for the funeral pyre of Dido near the end of Les Troyens. The careful discriminations among characters that Shakespeare and Virgil enforced, Berlioz erases. In this way Berlioz undoes characterization in the service of ecstasy, the imaginary limit-point of feeling, where Juliet and Cleopatra and Dido all converge in one terror; later we’ll see how Berlioz dispenses with other aspects of drama, such as plot. Berlioz might be called a profoundly undramatic composer, in that he demands not the steady unfolding of a story but devastation and spasm. Berlioz found the issue of dramatic specificity quite vexing. He poured his scorn on those Italian composers who used “conventional and invariable” musical phrases as all-purpose melodies, suitable for any text: he noted that such a composer might write a quartet in which one character was singing “O thou whom I adore,” another character “What terror freezes me,” a third “My heart beats with pleasure,” and a fourth “Anger transports me,” but nevertheless “the four personages, animated by entirely opposite passions, sing successively the same melodic phrase.”8 On the other hand, Berlioz was skeptical of the referential power of music; he thought that Gluck had gone too far in instructing operatic composers to write overtures that “indicate the subject of the play”: Musical expression would not know how to go so far; it will indeed reproduce joy, sorrow, seriousness, playfulness; it will establish a striking difference between the joy of a race of shepherds and that of a nation of warriors, between the sorrow of a queen and the grief of a simple village girl, between a serious and calm meditation and the ardent reveries that precede the outbreak of passion. Moreover, by borrowing the appropriate musical style of different peoples, it will obviously be able to distinguish the serenade of a robber in the Abruzzi from that of a Tyrolean or Scottish hunter. . . . it can place extreme brutality, triviality, grotesquerie, in opposition to angelic purity, nobility, and candor. But if it wishes to escape from this large circle, music must necessarily resort to the word, sung, recited, or read, to fill the gaps that its means of expression leave. . . . Thus the overture to [Gluck’s] Alceste announces scenes of desolation and tenderness, but it does not know how to speak either the object of the tenderness or the causes of this desolation.9

Berlioz goes on to speculate that his readers may be surprised that he (the archexpressive) has such a narrow view of the possibilities of musical expression. A little later in his essay on Alceste, Berlioz returns to the problem of vagueness and particularity in music theatre; he rehearses a scene in which Gluck’s chorus, told “Your king is going to die!,” flees in panic:

❧

berlioz in the plural

79

J. J. Rousseau reproached this allegro agitato for expressing equally well the disorderliness of joy as that of terror. One can respond that the composer found himself, at that moment, at the limit or meeting-point of two passions, and that it was consequently almost impossible not to incur such a reproach. The proof lies in the fact that, hearing the vociferations of a crowd rushing from one place to another, the listener placed at a distance would not know how to discover whether the sentiment that agitates the crowd is fear or mad gaiety. . . . A composer can easily write a chorus whose joyous intention would never be misunderstood, but the reverse isn’t true; and the agitations of a[n unhappy] crowd translated into music, when those agitations are not caused by hate or the desire for vengeance, will greatly resemble . . . tumultuous joy.10

Berlioz thought that a skillful composer could take advantage of the frailty of musical semantics by writing music in which ambiguity of meaning could be a form of power. Coleridge liked oxymorons because they represented a potent state of hovering between images; Gluck (as Berlioz heard him) composed a musical oxymoron, equivocating tensely between disorderly joy and disorderly terror. Berlioz defended this on the grounds of realism (a far-off listener wouldn’t know the feeling that provoked the crowd’s noise), but he also is appealing to a theory of convergence—at the peak of intensity, all feelings meet. On the lower levels of sensation, a queen feels a quality of pain distinct from that of a shepherdess; a Scottish reel can be differentiated from a tarantella through characteristic habits of rhythm. But Berlioz seemed to find these discriminations slightly crude, and seemed somewhat impatient to rush into realms of musical expression where systems of signs first grow giddy, then collapse. Berlioz’s rule seems to be this: music sinks into recitation in order to make dramatic conflicts clear; then music soars into its private sky in order to supersede those conflicts.

Chapter Seven

Roméo et Juliette: Introduction When Berlioz came to write Roméo et Juliette, he therefore faced a twin problem: first, to tell an exciting story; second, to untell the story, to move into a region beyond narrative and drama. He read Shakespeare’s play (in French translation, and haltingly in the original) in order to seek clues for achieving the peculiar dramatic rhythm he sought; and he may have pondered a number of operas on the Romeo and Juliet theme, by Daniel Steibelt (1793), Nicolas-Marie Dalayrac (1792), Niccolò Zingarelli (1796), Nicola Vaccai (1825), and, of course, Bellini (1830). (We know that Berlioz had heard Bellini’s opera by 1831; he mentioned the other operas in a feuilleton of 1859, and it isn’t certain that he knew them before writing his own Roméo et Juliette.) He found little to please him in any of these works, grumbling at the general absence of Mercutio, the Nurse, and Rosaline—all the jejune or grotesque peripheral characters who were to Berlioz (as to Hugo) the hallmarks of Shakespeare’s art. Furthermore, he detested the decision, by all three Italian composers, to assign the role of Romeo to a female voice: It’s the result of a constant preoccupation with sensual infantilism. They wanted women to sing the role of male lovers, because in duet the two feminine voices more easily produce chains of thirds, dear to the Italian ear. . . . low voices horrified this public of sybarites, fond of sonorous sweetness as children are fond of candy.1

Berlioz preferred an explicit contrast of gender—though a partisan of Bellini might point out, first, that Shakespeare’s own theatre had a Romeo and Juliet of the same gender, and second, that the Romeo of Bellini and his librettist, Felice Romani, is a far more masculine and warlike character than Shakespeare’s— Romani’s Romeo is an experienced commander of troops who plans to snatch Juliet by force of arms from the bosom of the Capulets. In any case, when Berlioz came to write his own version of the tale, he dispensed with human voices entirely for the roles of Romeo and Juliet, and allowed them to be portrayed by orchestral instruments that could assume different registers or the same register, thereby heightening or flattening the contrast between the lovers at the composer’s pleasure. Sometimes Berlioz’s Romeo and Juliet are highly gendered creatures; at other times they slough off the signs of sexual identity, ascend into a bodiless elysium of love.

ET

JULIETTE

: introduction

❧

ROMÉO

81

There was one moment in Bellini’s opera that Berlioz found full of élan: a unison phrase for Romeo and Juliet in the finale to the first act: The two lovers were forcibly separated by their furious parents; the Montagues held Romeo, the Capulets Juliet; but at the last return of the beautiful phrase “We will meet in heaven!” they both escaped from the hands of their persecutors, and threw themselves into one another’s arms and embraced with a completely Shakespearean furor. At that moment one began to believe in their love.2

Berlioz complained that duets in unison became commonplace after Bellini’s example; but in 1831, when he saw the opera, such a procedure seemed original and salient. The unison phrase Se ogni speme è a noi rapita is indeed remarkable, a passage of rapid sinuous despair that seems to inhabit a different plane of music from the bellicose massed voices on either side; it is also, in its unexpected twists, an extraordinarily Berlioz-like melody. Perhaps here Berlioz found part of the central premise of Roméo et Juliette, the notion that love music could be embedded inside war music and yet remain inviolate, immiscible, speaking a private language in the midst of public conflict. Berlioz married his Juliet in 1833—“Henriette Smithson, being ruined and scarcely healed [from her broken leg], I married her, despite the violent opposition of her family.”3 The marriage turned out to be unhappy, and Berlioz’s decision to write Roméo and Juliette (1839), may be seen as his attempt to recover the only Juliet he could ever truly possess, the Juliet of his imagination. The obvious way of treating the Romeo and Juliet theme was to write an opera. There was a biographical reason that tended to inhibit Berlioz from doing so: his enemies could prevent him from producing a new work in the only theatre in France that could properly mount an opera. But there was also a technical reason for Berlioz’s decision to treat the theme in a non-operatic fashion: he wanted to transcend the limitations of operatic theatre, with its often fallible and coarse singers, its rigid body of absurdly predictable conventions. Late in his life, Berlioz met a fan of Roméo et Juliette, who demanded that Berlioz write an opera on the same theme. Berlioz replied, Alas, monsieur . . . where are two artists capable of singing and playing the two principal roles? They do not exist; and, if they did exist, thanks to the musical customs and usages that prevail in every lyric theatre, if I put such an opera into rehearsal, I would be sure to die before the first performance.4

The fan responded, “Let Berlioz die! but let him do it!” But Berlioz felt he had done the right thing by emancipating Roméo et Juliette from the vagaries and niaiseries of the opera house; as he wrote in the preface to the score, the duets of love and despair are entrusted to the orchestra . . . [since] duets of this nature have been treated vocally a thousand times by the greatest masters, it was prudent as well as novel [curieux] to attempt another mode of expression . . . [and] because

82

❧

romeo and juliet

the very sublimity of this love made its depiction so dangerous for the composer that he had to give to his fantasy a latitude that the definite meaning [sens positif] of sung words would never have allowed him.5

In order to be worthy of Shakespeare, Berlioz felt that he needed to write a work that undid opera, a sort of anti-opera. Roméo et Juliette became one of the most generically challenging works of the nineteenth century. What is the genre of a piece that begins with a choral exposition of the subject matter, complete with a tenor singing about Queen Mab; then embarks on a full-scale symphony, in which each movement has a Shakespearean gloss; and at last ends with an extensive and expensive operatic scene, in which Friar Lawrence confronts and cows the massed Capulets and Montagues? Berlioz decided to call it a Symphonie dramatique—the third of his four symphonies, titled in such a way as to recall the name of his first symphony, the Symphonie fantastique. The Symphonie dramatique is an adulterous mixture of many sorts of genres—symphony, cantata, oratorio, opera, operetta, even art song (the Strophes of Part One were originally composed for voice and guitar).6 The oratorio, in Berlioz’s time, had particular importance as a site for research into the blurring of genre. Berlioz’s teacher Le Sueur wrote four experimental “mass-oratorios” (1786–87) for Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, and the Assumption; and Roméo et Juliette can be understood as a secular equivalent of these, a hybrid between an abstract celebration of the god of love and a theatrical enactment of love’s ritual. Roméo et Juliette aspires to go beyond finite genres through the act of comprehending all at once. In this sense, its analogue in the domain of literature is the novel—for the Romantic imagination, the novel was a sort of Über-genre, breaking down the boundaries between various types of literature. Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, for example, is a novel that concerns (among many other things) a disreputable theatre company and a strolling harper—a novel that may be said to include dramas inside itself, as well as dramatic criticism, and some of the most haunting lyric poems in the German language, as if the text were an open field for any sort of discourse whatever. Similarly, Roméo et Juliette owes its bulging form to the fact that it is a symphony that has incompletely swallowed an opera—the opera keeps spilling out around the edges. For Berlioz as for Mahler, the symphony is cosmic in scale, incomplete if there’s any sort of music that it doesn’t contain; the symphony can only realize itself by trying to comprehend what is usually considered non-symphonic. There is, of course, a famous precedent for a symphony that ends with a big movement for chorus and soloists: the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven (1824), in which Schiller’s Ode to Joy becomes a basis for a sort of interplanetary rejoicing in music. Beethoven was the only musician known to Berlioz who seemed to have something of Shakespeare’s comprehensive grasp of human life; and Berlioz was one of the few musicians living in the years after Beethoven’s death

ET

JULIETTE

: introduction

❧

ROMÉO

83

in 1827 who was in a position to confront the Ninth Symphony and to attempt to compose an even more ambitious work along similar lines. Indeed the circumstances of the composition of Roméo et Juliette also seemed to invite a challenge to resurrect Beethoven: the work was funded by the wealthy violinist Paganini—after hearing a concert of Berlioz’s music in 1838, Paganini offered Berlioz 20,000 francs, together with a note saying that, “since Beethoven is dead, only Berlioz can make him live again.”7 (As David B. Levy has shown,8 even in Germany, some important music critics, such as Wolfgang Robert Griepenkerl, agreed with Paganini that Berlioz was the rightful heir to Beethoven.) There is no better introduction to Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette than Beethoven’s Ninth. But Berlioz was accustomed to hearing all of Beethoven’s symphonies—not just the Ninth—as musical embodiments of literary masterpieces, as if every movement in Beethoven had an occult programmatic content. To listen to the adagio of Beethoven’s Fourth is to sob as Virgil sobbed when hearing the “touching story of Francesca da Rimini” in Dante’s Inferno;9 as for the first movement of the Fifth Symphony, it is a depiction of disordered feelings that overwhelm a great soul prey to despair; not the concentrated, calm despair that has the look of resignation; not the black mute pain of Romeo learning of Juliet’s death, but indeed the terrible rage of Othello, receiving from Iago’s mouth the poisonous slanders that persuade him of Desdemona’s crime.10

The allegretto of Beethoven’s Seventh—the best-loved symphonic movement in France, in Berlioz’s time—contains a melody (as Berlioz described it) “sad and resigned like patience smiling at grief” (Twelfth Night 2.4.114–15) and ends with “the wind instruments exhaling a deep sigh on an indecisive harmony and . . . the rest is silence” (Hamlet 5.2.358).11 It is as if Beethoven’s music were not only rehearsing stories from Shakespeare and Dante, but even trying to utter certain particularly telling lines from these classic poets. The more Berlioz could become Beethoven, the more he would succeed in being Shakespeare: for Beethoven’s symphonies sounded like Shakespeare’s rhetoric, liberated from Shakespeare’s text. Beethoven had written an Othello symphony, but hadn’t made his theme explicit; Berlioz would write a Romeo and Juliet symphony, in such a way that everyone would know it. Berlioz went to considerable trouble to try to articulate as clearly as possible the structure of the work—no easy task, for it was composed in defiance of normal music structures. Berlioz’s plan of the work12 illustrates that Roméo et Juliette is, despite all its incrustations and complexifications, a genuine symphony: 1. Introduction: Combats—Tumulte—Intervention du Prince (Introduction: Combats—Tumult—Intervention by the Prince) Prologue Strophes Scherzetto (Queen Mab)

84

❧

romeo and juliet

2. Roméo seul—Tristesse—Bruits lointains de bal et de concert—Grande Fête chez Capulet (Romeo alone—Sadness—Faraway noises of the ball and the concert—Great festival at the Capulets’) 3. Nuit sereine—Le Jardin de Capulet silencieux et désert (Serene Night— Capulet’s garden, silent and deserted) Scène d’amour (Love Scene) 4. La Reine Mab ou la Fée des Songes: Scherzo (Queen Mab, or the fairy of dreams: Scherzo) 5. Convoi funèbre de Juliette (Juliet’s Funeral Procession) 6. Roméo au tombeau des Capulets (Romeo at the tomb of the Capulets) Invocation 7. Finale 8. Air 9. Serment At the first performance (but deleted afterward) there was also a second choral prologue, just before Juliet’s Funeral Procession, explaining that Juliet was dead (or seemed to be), and otherwise making audible the plot line of the final episodes; an intermission preceded the second prologue. This is a truly bizarre plan for a musical composition. Sections 2, 3, and 4 correspond pretty clearly to the first three movements of a standard symphony: a movement developing two themes (equivalent to a sonata movement), a slow movement, and a scherzo; but section 1 provides far too much prefatory material, and sections 5, 6, and 7 drift off into regions difficult to construe as appropriate to a symphony. The most obvious oddity is the amount of space occupied by Queen Mab; but the role of the chorus is even stranger. At the beginning, the small chorus is a talking program note, but by the final scene the chorus is joining the larger chorus that plays the crowd of Montagues and Capulets. The small chorus of the Prologue has to teach the large chorus of the finale the role it will play; we are uncomfortably close to the world of Peter Quince and the hempen homespuns in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, who first discuss and rehearse the Pyramus and Thisby skit and then play it. Berlioz’s chorus (unlike Peter Quince’s gang) will not break character in the midst of the finale to tell the audience not to get too upset by the general ickiness of the tragedy; but a chorus (if we consider it a single entity) that has first commented upon the Montagues and Capulets and then assumed the roles, will not go far toward suspending the audience’s disbelief. The finale is a walloping operatic scene, but a scene in quotation marks: the chorus has simply pursued the goal of explication by other means. The work ends—as Shakespeare’s own play ends—with a combination of tragedy and narrative: a huge, loud gloss on itself. Berlioz was a music critic, and his chorus has an essentially critical temperament, patiently analyzing the structure, highlighting the principal themes of the music in which it takes part. If Berlioz had incorporated his own analytical

ET

JULIETTE

: introduction

❧

ROMÉO

85

commentary into Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony—“and now, ladies and gentlemen, Iago whispers in Othello’s ear; hear Othello roar”—by means of choral interjections and then allowed the chorus to impersonate Lodovico and Montano and the other worthies at the end of the symphony, caught up in a blaze of revelation, Berlioz might have made Beethoven’s work a dramatic symphony. But the germ of the notion of a symphony that incorporates a kind of music criticism of itself may be derived from Beethoven, for the first words heard in the Ninth Symphony are “O friends, not these sounds”—as if the bass soloist were a stray music critic who interrupted the dissonant tumult in the finale in order to make a public gesture of clapping his hands over his ears, to encourage the musicians to play something more soothing.13 It is highly appropriate that Berlioz made his chorus so eager to provide plot summary, explanation, and description, for the chorus—indeed the whole operatic part of the work—represents the public, honor-driven world of Shakespeare’s Verona. What is the musical equivalent of the social code? A music that it is nice in its precisions, self-conscious, polished. The music of the social code is music that a critic would applaud: attentive to old formalities of composition. Disobedience is so central to Berlioz’s Romanticism that the operatic parts of Roméo et Juliette show a great many original and striking features; but whether conventional or unconventional, the operatic parts are about music, extremely self-conscious about technique and form. The symphony (sections 2, 3, and 4) yearns toward unconsciousness, toward direct incarnation of feeling; but the opera (sections 1, 5, 6, and 7) scrutinizes its own musical devices. What sort of music would have seemed, in France in the 1830s, an appropriate image of the social code—stiff, formal, legislated? Very possibly a fugue. Here perhaps, if anywhere, is music for music’s sake: a fugue may suggest an intellectual artifice that holds itself above the mess of human expression; it may suggest religious austerity, a clockwork precision of control. Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette begins with exactly this, a fugue—but a fugue so hectic and erratic, so hard to follow, that it becomes an image, not of calm obedience to a set of instructions, not of Friar Lawrence’s heavenward glance, but of the general havoc of the life of the Montagues and Capulets (see ex. 2). From the first bar of his dramatic symphony, Berlioz illustrates the untenability of the Veronese

Example 2. Fugue-War.

86

❧

romeo and juliet

Example 3. Prince Escalus intervenes.

social code: it has degenerated into an incomprehensible fury of bristling voices. We begin with a vendetta in music, the “new mutiny / Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean,” as Shakespeare puts it in his prologue. But soon the frenzy abates, and the texture thins to a single line, as the brass utters a slow incontrovertible theme, establishing a sort of authority over the orchestral chaos. This section of the score is marked Fieramente, un poco ritenuto, col carattere di Recitativo, misurato (Fiercely, a little held back, with the character of a recitative, measured): it is Prince Escalus quashing, almost squashing, the quarrel, as Berlioz performs an astonishing stunt of making instrumental music do the work of speaking words—the brass intones lines obviously corresponding to Shakespeare’s “Rebellious subjects, enemies to peace . . . If ever you disturb the streets again / Your lives shall pay the forfeit of the peace” (1.1.81, 96–97). Harmonically, Escalus inhabits a completely different plane from that of the disputants: whereas the fugue picked itself apart in B minor, the solemn warning begins in B
major, a very remote key; but melodically, Escalus is himself one of the Veronese, for he sings out the same tune as that of the fugue, immensely slowed down and clarified (see ex. 3). Berlioz’s extraordinary subtlety with systems of signs is already evident: Escalus is dramatically differentiated from the Capulets and Montagues, but in such a way that he is assimilated, in occult fashion, into the very feud above which he tries to stand. Escalus’s law code isn’t the same as the vendetta code of the Montagues and Capulets; and yet Escalus is part of the same domain of paternal governance as the Montagues and Capulets, the domain that Romeo and Juliet must learn to defy. After this brief orchestral Introduction comes the Prologue, for chorus and contralto and tenor soloists. (Berlioz wrote a prose version of the libretto—if such a brief, sketchy, and incoherent collection of synopsis, meta-poetic effusion, and

ET

JULIETTE

: introduction

❧

ROMÉO

87

grand-opera finale can be called a libretto—which was then versified by his friend Émile Deschamps.)14 The orchestral Introduction was bewilderingly eventful; but in the subsequent choral recitative the density of events slows down almost to zero. As the chorus explains what the listener has already heard—that two old families are at war, and that the prince has threatened them with death—it sings in a spare chordal texture, with little melodic or harmonic motion, in a manner only slightly more musical than plain spoken narrative. But as the chorus starts to anticipate the rest of the plot—Romeo stands outside the palace of the Capulets, weeping, for he loves the daughter of his family’s enemies, and he sees the shine of gold and hears the melodious sounds of the dance—suddenly the recitative is interrupted by the orchestra, playing the music of the Capulets’ ball, just as we will hear it in section 2, the first symphonic movement of Part Two. The Prologue is turning into a thematic catalogue, for Roméo et Juliette is a symphony that incorporates its own playbill. Berlioz is instructing us how to interpret the purely instrumental music to come—it is as if Roméo et Juliette begins with the Cliff’s Notes to itself, a set of cues to its semantic organization. (In the fine phrase of Jacques Chailley, the Prologue “constitutes a veritable musical analysis of the score, inserted into the score itself.”)15 This is how Berlioz avoids what might be called the Gluck problem: the inability of an overture to confess much about the drama to come. Berlioz writes a talking “overture,” a Prologue in which the composer stands at the blackboard, pointer in hand, and lectures to the audience. It is an audacious and curiously intimate strategy, as if the musician gives us a tour of his workshop before we begin the difficult task of hearing the work. In this way, Berlioz creates an evacuated musical space on which explication can be inscribed. But as the choral recitative continues, the impetuous professor starts to scribble his analysis more quickly. The chorus sings that the festival is over—and, at this very moment, the orchestra begins to reinforce the message of the chorus by pre-quoting material from later in the work. When the chorus sings that Romeo sighs, we hear an orchestral sigh from the very beginning of the Roméo seul movement (section 2), underscoring and imparting a sudden grace to the choral monotony; and when the chorus sings of Romeo’s leap over the garden wall, his throbs of anxious joy as he reveals himself to Juliet, one of the main love themes of the adagio (section 3) breaks out appassionato in the orchestra. Throughout this section, the lethargy of melodic and harmonic motion makes a background against which the statements of important future themes can be heard; but there is also one moment in the choral recitative in which a single chord progression acquires an uncanny distinctness and precision of gesture, simply because it is so isolated from ordinary musical discourse. This occurs when the chorus sings of white Juliet, thinking herself alone, confiding her love to the night air—Confie à la nuit son amour; at the last syllable of amour, Berlioz shifts, without preparation, from the D minor of the preceding bar to a quiet chord of C major—a small remote planet on a tilted ecliptic,

88

❧

romeo and juliet

Example 4. Confiding love to the night.

where the familiar note F is enharmonically transported to E (see ex. 4). This outrageous swerve from this section’s basic C major / A minor harmony opens a halo of iridescence around the word love, a brief glimpse of the warped regions where the love code operates. In a traditional symphony, harmony defines large articulations of form; Berlioz’s ultrafunctional harmony works not only to achieve this goal but also to illustrate many local nuances of specific dramatic moments. In the next section of the Prologue, the strophes, there is a little more melodic motion—even though the contralto, at the beginning, intones whole phrases on a single note—and much more harmonic motion, of a fairly conventional sort; Berlioz writes an oversimplified specimen song, with harp arpeggios and big cadences marking the ends of the verses, a song suitable for textbook analysis, as we slowly edge from speech to music. The talky choral recitative instructed the intellect through a plot summary; the Strophes, by contrast, provide instruction in how to respond emotionally—how to swoon: the contralto effuses over the raptures of first love, the transports that no one forgets. Again Berlioz, in the role of Prof. Pavlov, is conditioning our reflexes, by offering a fore-stimulus in which an ideal audience—the contralto—recalls how the delicacies and excesses of young love affected her. It is a serenade, wooing not Juliet but the listeners; Berlioz-Romeo tries to soften us, to inveigle us into sympathy with the challenging music we’re about to hear. The contralto is the Nurse, not Juliet’s nurse, but the audience’s nurse, patiently indicating to us the pressure points in the art of Shakespeare, the art of Berlioz. The nakedness of the composer’s presence is astonishing. At the end of the first stanza of the strophes, the contralto mentions Shakespeare himself, as she sings of “this poesy that was Shakespeare’s supreme secret, that Shakespeare took back with him into the heavens.” But Berlioz perhaps implies that he has rediscovered the key to Shakespeare’s supreme secret, or to even subtler and more ravishing secrets of love (such as the secret revealed in that shivery chord progression from D minor to C major, heard in the choral recitative). There is strong reason to think that Berlioz saw himself in competition with Shakespeare: he

ET

JULIETTE

: introduction

❧

ROMÉO

89

tried to write music that could provide a more intense frisson than Shakespeare’s words could. Late in life, in a fit of self-pity, Berlioz wrote, “Shakespeare! where are you? . . . It seems to me that, among intelligent beings, only you could understand me”; and Berlioz ended his memoirs by speculating that Shakespeare “could perhaps have loved me.”16 The strophes in Roméo et Juliette allude to a complex fantasy of companionship with Shakespeare—a dream scene that, in the best of possible resolutions, ends in heaven, when Shakespeare points to Berlioz and says, Here, friend Hector, you sit on a higher cloud. The last section of the Prologue is the Queen Mab scherzetto, in F major, the aria for the tenor. Many listeners have puzzled about the twin Mabs in Berlioz’s work, since there will be a wholly independent Queen Mab scherzo in section 4, for the orchestra alone. But this makes sense, insofar as Berlioz evidently interpreted Mercutio as a divided character, half belonging to the social world of the vendetta, and therefore part of the framing opera; and half belonging to the amorous world of Romeo and Juliet, and therefore part of the love symphony. So Mercutio appears in two guises, first as a public figure, full of aplomb, gently deriding the fantasies that distort Romeo’s brain, here in the scherzetto; later, in the scherzo, as we will see, the fantasy of Mab becomes far more serious. As we come to the end of the Prologue, the deadly ferocity of the beginning of Roméo et Juliette is giving way to playfulness, self-conscious absurdity; in preparation for the love symphony to come, opera is starting to give way to something tender, unstrenuous—in fact to give way to opéra comique, the domain of such tunesmiths as Grétry. Berlioz prepares us gradually, with infinite resources of cuing and cushioning, before casting us out into the semantically unmoored vastnesses of the symphony: he provides commentaries that first chant the program notes, then sing a very simple strophic song about ah, young love, then finally deliver a delectable drôlerie. The tenor cannot be identified too closely with Mercutio himself, since he sings the speech-prefix (dit l’élégant Mercutio) as well as the text of the speech. The tenor quotes the song; we are approximating the mode of drama, but not yet within it—the scherzetto, like everything else in the Prologue, is still in the critical-analytic mode. Note that Mercutio’s speech about “Mab, the light and slender messenger”—Mab, la messagère / Fluette et légère—is echoed by the chorus, in a way familiar to Anglophone audiences from such later roles as Captain Corcoran in Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore (And never, never sick at sea. Chorus: What, never?): the tenor who half-impersonates Mercutio is a patter-song specialist, a vaudevillean like Maurice Chevalier, tilting his hat and twinkling at the audience, delivering his star turn with practiced charm. This isn’t to say that the music is unsophisticated: far from it, for the accompaniment figure keeps overreaching, spanning a minor ninth, from C to D
—that D
, borrowed from the F minor scale, remains a sort of inassimilable eccentricity in the key of F major, as if to symbolize the fact that the settled pseudo-operatic world of the frame is yielding to the unstable, dazzlingly new musical universe of the love symphony.

90

❧

romeo and juliet

The scherzetto doesn’t cite music from the scherzo to come, but it anticipates its airy texture, its controlled simulation of loss of control: the Prologue concludes with music that lifts and lightens, dissolves; after the lecturer has written down all his messages, he erases the blackboard, for we are half to remember, half to forget, the instruction of the Introduction and Prologue. At the end of the scherzetto, a cock crows, and we wake up, only to fall under the spell of a different hypnosis. When the symphony proper begins, we listen with cleansed ears: we are left not with a dry musicological treatise but with a set of subliminal expectations, nudging the mind into the channels of interpretation that Berlioz intended. And the scherzetto also provides a good lead-in to what follows, in that its key is very remote from the B minor of the Introduction—in fact its F major will turn out to be the home key of the symphony. The harmonic evolution of section 1 has spanned a tritone. Queen Mab herself is diabola in musica, a succubus, a nightmare; and so she belongs out-of-phase, harmonically speaking, from the common life of Verona.

Chapter Eight

Roméo et Juliette: The Symphony Now we begin the symphony proper, with a long movement called Roméo seul that, like many first movements of symphonies in the tradition of Haydn and Mozart and Beethoven, starts with a slow introduction, Andante malinconico e sostenuto. But the theme of the introduction is untraditional: an immensely long line, sparsely accompanied, not so much an intelligible melody as a pitch-contour suitable for shading and expressive shaping—a sort of naked expressivity purged of easily interpreted expressive devices, a stile molle not quite certain exactly what form of melancholy it wants to take (see ex. 5). It is difficult to grasp the form of the whole line, difficult even to grasp the key: sometimes it seems to present itself in F major (appropriate to the single-flat signature), but it seems equally at home in C major and A minor, and has distinct sociopathic tendencies to the remote key of E major. It is a juvenile-delinquent melody, sullen, tentative, rebellious, unpredictable. Although its direction keeps wavering, the listener soon grows accustomed to a half-articulate pattern of a leap, a sustained note, and, trailing off the sustained note, an irregular chromatic droop. It is a tune without a Gestalt, persistently unsuitable to symphonic development. Or, to put it another way, it can’t be developed precisely because it keeps developing itself, as segments of itself keep looping back to other keys. Symphonic development is largely a matter of extracting pieces of a theme and subjecting those pieces to sequential treatment; but in a long, auto-sequencing theme, such as Berlioz’s introduction to Roméo seul (or the idée fixe of the Symphonie fantastique), it is impossible to distinguish exposition from development.1

Example 5. Roméo in solitude.

92

❧

romeo and juliet

Why would Berlioz want to begin the symphonic part of his Roméo et Juliette in such a state of musical obscurity? One reason is that it is evidently evening, and the thick dimness of the music, as it gropes for a theme, reflects the time of day. But another reason is that, for Berlioz, vagueness is power. In 1832, Berlioz wrote that Weber and Beethoven had invented a new sort of music, the genre instrumental expressif: In former times instrumental music seems to have had no other aim than to please the ear or to engage the intellect . . . but in Beethoven’s and Weber’s works, one cannot miss the poetic thought. . . . It is music which gives way to itself, needing no words to make its expression specific; its language then becomes quite indefinite, thanks to which it acquires still more power over beings endowed with imagination. Like objects half-perceived in darkness, its images develop, its forms become more unsettled, cloudier; the composer, no longer forcibly restricted to the limited range of the human voice, makes his melodies more active and varied; he can turn the most original, even bizarre, phrases.2

Just as Michelangelo left some of his sculptures half cut out of the raw rock, so Berlioz thought that music gained expressive force by emerging from an umbra of the inexpressible. We have seen that Coleridge thought that imagination, in its highest degree of excitement, simply hovers between images without coming to rest; similarly Berlioz thought that music that hovers between melodic shapes, hovers in unconstrued regions of feeling, is the most potent of all. A tune that clearly expresses joy, or suffering, or insouciance, might be beautiful; but a tune that floats in a state of tense indefiniteness might be sublime. This explains the prestige that Berlioz accorded to the word vague. This word, in the masculine, means vagueness or looseness or empty space; in the feminine, wave. Berlioz’s program for the Symphonie fantastique describes the protagonist, at the beginning of the symphony, as an artist in a state of extreme emotional diffusion, le vague des passions—a term from Chateaubriand. In the note that prefaces the score of Roméo and Juliette, the term le vague appears again: the very sublimity of this love made the depiction of it so dangerous for the composer, that he has had to give to his fantasy a latitude that the positive meaning of sung words would not have permitted him, and has had to have recourse to the language of musical instruments, a language richer, more varied, less resolved [arrêtée], and by its very vagueness, incomparably more powerful. (emphasis mine)

For the Romantic sensibility, it is desirable to mean a great many things at the same time, and such a state of semantic overburdening entails ambiguity: the sheer stress of feeling departicularizes it, makes it huge and amorphous. Just as Gluck, in Alceste, caught the liminal state between joy and terror, so Berlioz wanders in Roméo seul through emotional nebulae, not yet congealed into finite feelings. The introduction of Roméo seul continues for about five minutes of unprogressive though very intriguing noodling, sometimes in combination with a sighing

ET

JULIETTE

: the symphony

❧

ROMÉO

93

motive quoted in the choral recitative in section 1. But at last we come to the official First Theme of the symphony—which, by tradition, ought to be fast, an allegro. But it’s not—it’s a Larghetto espressivo, even slower than the slow introduction, but of an altogether more resolute, alert character: Romeo isn’t wandering aimlessly in the dark—he has perceived or imagined something that provokes a more decisive kind of yearning. With the plinking accompaniment and 3/4 meter, the oboe seems to be the voice of a serenade; on the other hand, the phrases come in odd lengths, and the cadences are weak, inconclusive—it is as if Romeo were humming to himself, improvising a theme that he might sing beneath Juliet’s balcony, if he were so fortunate as to get there. Soon we come to the official Second Theme of the symphonic first movement, and at last we have a melody at the proper speed, an allegro. This is the ball music, already anticipated in the thematic catalogue in the Prologue; this extraverted, kinesthetic music contrasts strongly with the solitude of the rest of the movement so far. Roméo seul deviates from sonata form because Berlioz was aware that the traditional symphonic first movement could not easily bend itself into the sort of story Berlioz wished to tell. The traditional symphonic first movement is an icon of conflict itself—a dialectic with a predictable form of resolution. Its scheme of exposition-development-recapitulation could be adapted to tell any number of different kinds of stories. But not all stories: its procedures of first opposing, then mollifying, necessarily excluded from its ambit certain plotlines. Sonata form is most easily felt as a mode of comedy, in which a dichotomy is stated, then overwhelmed by a central confusion, an influx of chaos, that reveals the untenability of any sort of insistent differentiation; the recapitulation genially waves away all rancor—even in the eighteenth-century opera seria, a happy ending is normal. The first and second theme-groups, opposing each other by a fifth or minor third, enter the greenworld of the development, get wholly disoriented, are restored, and at last embrace. For Roméo et Juliette, Berlioz had a story that didn’t easily fit the paradigm of sonata form; and so he devised another plan for a large-scale symphonic first movement. The form of Roméo seul is carefully designed not to resolve the tension between his two very distinct thematic groups, but to heighten it, to illustrate the sheer immiscibility between Romeo and the world of the Capulets’ ball. After his exposition of the two themes, Berlioz doesn’t develop them or recapitulate them; he doesn’t allow them to come to terms with each other in any way. Instead, after presenting first Romeo, then the ball, he presents Romeo and the ball at the same time, one theme plunked on top on the other (Réunion des deux Thèmes, du Larghetto et de l’Allegro—see ex. 6). The larghetto theme persists on the accented notes, pounded out by the wind instruments, strangely unaffected by the ball music, maintaining a sort of fierce distinctness—Romeo won’t allow himself to be coopted by High Society, the world of the elders, with their giddy vain dancing. The supple, psychologically intent theme of Romeo inhabits one plane of reality, refusing to subordinate itself to the public music of the ball. The ball music is

94

❧

romeo and juliet

Example 6. Ball music in treble clef, larghetto in accented notes in bass clef.

diegetic music, in that (if Roméo et Juliette were an opera) it would be an image of on-stage music, audible to the characters as well as to the customers in the theatre. And just as finite human voices are subsumed into regions of greater expressive intensity, the blaze of the orchestra, so any diegetic music must be subsumed into a larger frame of sonority. Just as joy and terror may be utterly conjoint and confounded in a single musical work, so Romeo’s solitude and the Capulets’ blatancy may be pulled together into one knot of dark thick expressivity. Roméo seul was not Berlioz’s first experiment with the A B A/B structure—his private alternative to sonata form. The rondo of the Witches’ Sabbath, the fifth movement of the Symphonie fantastique, is designed in the same way: two themes, the Dies irae and a ghastly dance tune, are first separately stated and finally superimposed. A similar, more casual phenomenon may be found in the Pilgrims’ March in Harold en Italie (1834), where the processional theme wends through the interstices of Harold’s inflexible theme, as if it filed its way, not through a mountain landscape, but through the inside of Harold’s brain. The precedent of Harold en Italie is important, for it suggested the psychologizing potential of the method: exterior, mimetic music could be audibly assimilated into the mind of the protagonist, simply by allowing the protagonist to keep a grip on the rhythm, the melos, of the inner workings of his consciousness, at the same time that his ears are hearing some foreign sound. Where might Berlioz have discovered a prototype for this odd sort of development by addition? One clue is found in the Mémoires, in Berlioz’s account of the rowdy behavior of his fellow-students in Rome: We had a type of concert that we called English concerts. . . . The drinkers, more or less capable of singing, each with his favorite song, prepared to sing as many different tunes

ET

JULIETTE

: the symphony

❧

ROMÉO

95

as possible; moreover, to get the greatest variety, each sang in a key different from that of the man next to him. Duc, the witty, wise architect, sang his song of La Colonne, Dantan that of Sultan Saladin, Monfort triumphed in the march of La Vestale . . . and I had some success with the air, so tender and naive, Il pleut bergère. At a given signal, the participants set out one after another, and this vast ensemble in twenty-four parts was performed in a crescendo, accompanied by the sad howls of frightened dogs.3

Probably Berlioz didn’t know Biber’s Battalia a 10, which generates a remarkable cacophony as the instrumentalists impersonate drunken soldiers, each playing a patriotic tune from a different land, all at the same time—a late-seventeenthcentury anticipation of Charles Ives. But of course the superimpository technique of Roméo seul isn’t comic, in the fashion of Biber or the students’ English concert. Besides the comic overlay of the English concert, there is also, in the musical world of Berlioz’s time, a species of tragic overlay. This is to be found, not in symphonic music, but in an advanced operatic technique. I’ll illustrate this with two examples, both from operas extremely familiar to Berlioz. Spontini’s La Vestale (1807) takes place in ancient Rome. A young noblewoman, Julia, loves Licinius, a commoner, who despairs of marrying her; he joins the army in order to win glory and become worthy. But during his absence Julia’s father dies, committing her to become a vestal virgin, forever sworn to chastity. Licinius returns from war, a victorious general, adored by the whole of Rome; but Julia is torn between her desperate desire to see him and her will to be faithful to her vow to Vesta. In the fifth scene of the first act, Julia hears the approach of Licinius in triumph—a light, sparky march (the very march mentioned in the quotation above) sung by a chorus of warriors; but she feels pain, not joy, and over the march soars her vocal line, Ô trouble . . . ô terreur . . . L’effroi . . . glace mon coeur! The fear that ices her heart is expressed by music that utterly contradicts the march tune beneath: the broken text is sung to a shattered, shrieky sort of melody. Julia and the chorus—psychology and publicity— inhabit separate musical spaces, forcibly conjoined by the overlay technique. Cherubini’s Médée (1797) concerns the notorious sorceress of Greek myth, who murdered her children in order to punish their father, the argonaut Jason, for his faithlessness. The finale of the second act provides one of the subtlest, most complex applications of overlay technique ever written: it is basically a long processional hymn to celebrate the wedding of Jason and Dircé; but the scene is dominated by a nonparticipant, Medea, who watches the festivities in a state of acute rage. The music for the ceremony is slightly scored, tripping, gay—in places drowned out by the superimposed voice (spoken, not sung) of Medea, cursing the happy pair, cackling over her wedding gift to Dircé, a poisoned diadem. What is remarkable is the role of the orchestra: at the beginning, it’s fully devoted to the joy of the procession and pays only brief attention to the exclamations of Medea. The chorus ignores her entirely—she’s out of their earshot,

96

❧

romeo and juliet

rapt in soliloquy—but from time to time Medea succeeds in destabilizing the orchestra, bending it to her fury: when she screams a curse during the choral invocation of Hymen, the orchestra sends up a dark ejaculation from its depths, full of chromatic tremoli, before remembering that its duty is to accompany the songs of love. Throughout the scene, Medea and the chorus compete for the orchestra’s attention: the orchestra keeps negotiating the divide between obedient support for a hymn, and psychotic expressivity. The depth of the musicaldramatic field is remarkable, as the orchestra continually adjusts its focus from foreground to background. In the final section, as the chorus reaches its climax, begging the son of Bacchus to fulfill the vows of the married couple, the tremoli associated with Medea’s rage start to infect the hymn tune, and Medea at last begins to sing: she makes a counter-address to Hymen, trying to deflect the choral plea for joy into a plea for vengeance; and she succeeds, insofar as the whole orchestral texture swerves into a depiction of her rage. The orchestra itself is like the god whom Medea and the chorus invoke, giving itself to the party whose emotional intensity is the greatest. Cherubini is one of the villains of Berlioz’s Mémoires, the director of the Conservatoire during the time of Berlioz’s study, a dragon of orthodoxy. But some of Berlioz’s greatest achievements draw strongly on the work of Cherubini—especially, I think, when Berlioz wanted to construct multi-planar musical entities. Cherubini had sophisticated lessons to offer, concerning the simultaneous presentation of public music and private music, tragically incommensurate. At the end of the first act of Les Troyens (1858), Berlioz followed the example of Cherubini’s Médée with extreme accuracy: the Trojans, impressed by the generosity of the Greeks, are bringing the enormous wooden horse through the city gates, to the festive strains of the Trojan march and hymn (eventually infected by a queasy lower counterpoint), while at the same time the overwrought Cassandre prophesies the ruin of Troy, to very different music. The chorus ignores the famously ignored seeress, but the orchestra turns toward her an anxious ear. A little less than twenty years earlier, in Roméo seul, Berlioz found a way of adapting this sort of operatic discourse to a symphonic discourse in which the orchestra assimilated all the voices, the public voice, the private voice, the accompanying commentary to these two voices, into its own plasticity. In the examples from Cherubini and Spontini and Les Troyens, the lower plane is public and choral; the solo vocal line is plunked on top of a ceremonious mass. But in Roméo seul, Berlioz turns this procedure upside down. Here the first music, the fundamental music, is the larghetto, the theme of Romeo’s solitude; the evocation of the ball in the allegro section is the intruder, the more extrinsic element. This is true even on the level of pitch: in the Réunion des deux Thèmes section, the larghetto theme is (relative to the ball music) a lower, more basic voice, conspicuous in the trombones, to which the ball music must accommodate itself—in the continuation, Berlioz even alters a few details of pitch in the allegro theme to adjust it to the larghetto theme. (These themes were clearly

ET

JULIETTE

: the symphony

❧

ROMÉO

97

devised to facilitate combination; but the ball music seems to respect the governing power of the larghetto theme.) The charged individual intelligence has primacy; as for the public world, the more deeply we enter into the symphonic portion of Roméo et Juliette, the more vain, the more wraith-like, it becomes. The mind of Romeo eats up the Capulets’ ball; and in the Réunion we hear what a festivity sounds like, after a listener has digested it. Romeo Romeizes the static cheer of the ballroom music, parcels it out into the interspaces of his own theme. His intense solitude triumphs. The formal procedures in Roméo seul are self-conscious, even willful: Berlioz makes the listener aware of scissors and glue-pot, as he pastes one theme on top of another and labels them to make his process explicit. Its cleverness of shape may even seem slightly distasteful, as if Berlioz were performing a stunt or proving a thesis, instead of allowing his music to develop in any easy manner. But when we come to the next movement, the adagio (in A major, the mediant of F), we abandon conscious contrivance and enter a simulation of unconscious desire, groping for expression. Berlioz agreed with the discerning critics who considered this movement his highest achievement as a composer,4 and it was certainly embedded in his erotic sensibility: in 1847, in St. Petersburg, Berlioz seduced a young corset-maker by crushing her arm to his breast and singing in her ear “the beautiful phrase of the adagio of Roméo et Juliette.”5 The adagio has also seduced a number of Berlioz’s critics, who have scrutinized it with the care it deserves. D. Kern Holoman has vividly described the essentially strophic nature of this huge movement,6 and it is indeed a song, around twenty minutes in length, emancipated from the constraint of words, the constraint of the singer’s breath supply, the constraint of any form beyond the organic form it generates through its own immense evolution. Near the beginning we hear the chorus, impersonating the happy and exhausted revelers from the Capulets’ festival, tra-la-la-ing their way home. This is the only appearance of actual human voices in the three symphonic movements of Roméo et Juliette; and I suspect that Berlioz added the choral part in order to make an audible image of vanishing: human voices are slowly extinguished, in order to make space for the superhuman voices of Romeo and Juliet, in a sealed, self-engrossed world. In Roméo seul, the festival is loudly incorporated into Romeo’s reverie; in the adagio, the festival tapers to nothingness, so that we may enter the nirvana of love. In the first movement the antithesis between the private and the public is strong; in the second movement, it is overcome, ravished away, at least for a while, by the simple means of deleting one of its terms. After the chorus dispells itself, and the adagio proper begins, the orchestra first plays, unmistakably, bird calls, cicada chirrups, serene twitters and cooings in the night (see ex. 7). These sounds are a source of vexation for critics. Where, in Shakespeare’s text, do we find birds?—not in the balcony scene (except for a

98

❧

romeo and juliet

Example 7. Night-birds.

simile involving falcons), but much later, in the postcoital scene, which is a meditation on the identity of bird calls: Wilt thou be gone? it is not yet near day, It was the nightingale, and not the lark, That pierc’d the fearful hollow of thine ear; Nightly she sings on yond pomegranate tree. Believe me, love, it was the nightingale. Rom. It was the lark, the herald of the morn, No nightingale. (3.5.1–7) Jul.

This is the most obviously operatic passage in the whole play—as we know from Gounod, and from Tchaikovsky, who set a Russian translation of this passage to the love music in his Romeo and Juliet fantasy-overture, in a sketch for an unwritten opera (Taneyev’s completion of this scene was first performed in 1894). But neither nightingale nor lark has any obvious business in the balcony scene; and Berlioz’s program is clear that the adagio represents first Romeo in the Capulets’ orchard, then Romeo and Juliet in the balcony scene. Now, it is certainly plausible that an orchard at night might be adorned with bird calls, even if Shakespeare didn’t have much to say about them; but Berlioz’s music has teased listeners, from the very first performances, into thinking of the nightingales and larks in Shakespeare’s third act. Julian Rushton, in his superbly detailed handbook on Roméo et Juliette, cites a newspaper critic from 1839 who referred to lark and nightingale in connection with the music at the end of the adagio;7 Rushton, eager to keep Berlioz’s adagio within the confines of the balcony scene, contradicts the critic, but perhaps there’s an argument to be made in favor of the ornithologist who wishes to hear, not just at the end but throughout the adagio, confused echoes of the nightingale that pierces the fearful hollow of the ear. Shakespeare’s play as it existed in Berlioz’s memory differs strongly from Shakespeare’s play as it exists on the page. Indeed, many aspects of Berlioz’s dramatic symphony may be described as creative misrememberings of Shakespeare. In his essay of 1859 on musical settings of Romeo and Juliet (not including his own), Berlioz summarizes Shakespeare’s balcony scene as follows:

ET

JULIETTE

: the symphony

❧

ROMÉO

99

And after the festival, wandering around Capulet’s house, prey to a divine anguish, beginning to feel the immense revolution going on inside him, he hears the avowal of the noble girl, he trembles with astonishment and joy; and then begins the immortal dialogue worthy of the angels of heaven: [Berlioz cites the passage beginning with Juliet’s “I gave thee mine before thou didst request it”]. But Romeo must leave, and his heart feels the grip of an intense pain, and he says to his beloved: “I cannot conceive that they can separate us, I can scarcely understand that I must leave you, even if for only a few hours. Listen, among these harmonies that burst out from afar, for this rising long cry of pain. . . . It seems to come out of my breast . . . Look at these splendors of heaven, look at all these brilliant lights, would you not say that the fairies have lit up their palaces to celebrate our love? . . .” And Juliet, trembling, answers only with tears. And a true great love is born, immense, inexplicable, armed with every power of the imagination, the heart, and the senses.8

Berlioz evidently wrote this passage with a French translation of Shakespeare on his desk, since he quotes accurately from the balcony scene. And yet the passage that appears in quotation marks, beginning “I cannot conceive,” is a pure hallucination, without basis in Shakespeare’s text. Garrick’s text has no such speech, either; and I find it difficult to believe that any adaptation of Shakespeare’s text would include such a thing, for there is no Shakespearean scene in which it would be appropriate—“harmonies that burst out from afar” seem appropriate only to the virtual theatre of Berlioz’s imagination. This speech is a vocalizing of Berlioz’s own subvocal music, in which the balcony scene is reconceived symphonically, in terms of sonorous spaces, distant harmonies of the revelers, a crescendo of pain from the solitary lover, even a faint sprinkle of Queen Mab’s fairy music descending from the sky. The whole play, as reimagined by Berlioz, is brought to bear on this strange literary paraphrase of the balcony scene. And I believe that, when Berlioz wrote the adagio, the whole play was also brought to bear on the love scene. This wordless duet is simultaneously the chaste avowal in the balcony scene and the carnal embrace in the third act; it is not any single love duet, but all the love duets in Shakespeare’s text rolled into one. It is a vague des passions, too preconscious, too lacking in explicit declaration of meaning, to be limited to only one scenario. A love duet in words necessarily makes the finite situation clear; but a love duet in music has this advantage, that it can serve indiscriminately for the first brushing-together of virgin hands and for the last spasm. In the symphonic center of Roméo et Juliette, Berlioz took advantage of certain freedoms permitted by his detextualized approach to drama. The absence of text also leaves the identity of the birds vague, as well—Berlioz didn’t have to answer the question, Lark or nightingale? The basic night-music figure at the beginning (measure 125) is a rapid five-note frill, a monotone except that the third note rises a half-step or whole-step above the rest. This doesn’t sound like a lark: we are audibly in the midst of a nocturne, a veiled

100

❧

romeo and juliet

musical discourse groping at melody. It is one of several night-aviaries in Berlioz’s music: other hypnotic examples include the song Au cimetière, from the Nuits d’été sequence (1841), with its roucoulement of a pale dove; and the duo-nocturne for Héro and Ursule in Béatrice et Bénédict (1862), with its bird-sobs, stridulations, chants of the nightingale: Philomèle Qui mèle Aux murmures du bois Les splendeurs de sa voix (Philomel who mingles with the murmurs of the wood the splendors of her voice). This last phrase is marked, like much of the duo-nocturne, with a warble of sixteenth notes sung in parallel sixths, rising and falling across a minor second, creating a tremulous effect somewhat similar to that of the five-note frill from Roméo et Juliette mentioned above. This suggests that when Berlioz was explicitly evoking a nightingale, he wrote music tinted identically to the night music in the Roméo et Juliette adagio. Therefore, in the balcony scene we seem to find ourselves in a nightingale-haunted orchard. On the other hand, Berlioz was uneasy about nightingales. In 1838—a year before the composition of Roméo et Juliet—Berlioz wrote an article on Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, which applauds the bird imitations in the adagio, except for the nightingale: I will say that Beethoven’s adversaries seem correct with respect to the nightingale, whose song is no better imitated here than in M. Lebrun’s famous flute solo; for the simple reason that the nightingale, making only indeterminate [inappréciables] or variable sounds, can’t be imitated by instruments with fixed sounds of settled pitch; but it seems to me that this isn’t the case for the quail and the cuckoo. . . . [Their] fixed notes have permitted an exact and complete imitation.9

Readers may easily confirm Berlioz’s point by listening to the recording of an actual nightingale’s song that Respighi wrote into the night scene in The Pines of Rome: the bird’s song avails itself of notes not in the chromatic scale. Of course the orchestra contains instruments, such as violins and trombones, that can vary their sounds continuously between fixed pitches; Berlioz, however, would have hated a more exact imitation of the nightingale’s microtones, as his essay on Chinese music suggests: What a violin! it’s a bamboo tube . . . Between its two strings, lightly twisted around each other, pass the hairs of a fantastic bow . . . These two strings are discordant . . . the Chinese Paganini . . . holding his instrument supported on his knee, uses the fingers of his left hand on the top of the double string in order to vary its intonation, as we do in playing a cello, but without heeding any division concerning whole-tones, half-tones, or any interval whatsoever. He thus produces a continuous series of gratings, weak meowings, which give the impression of the wailings of the new-born child of a ghoul and a vampire.10

Berlioz had little taste for indeterminate pitches. He did like, however, to write music in which “Like objects half-perceived in darkness, its images develop,” to

ET

JULIETTE

: the symphony

❧

ROMÉO

101

cite again the passage from Berlioz’s early essay on the genre instrumental expressif.11 So I believe that Berlioz’s imagination worked in the following manner: in composing the adagio of Roméo et Juliette, he borrowed the nightingales from the slow movement of Beethoven’s sixth symphony, not for the sake of quoting their uncertain song but for the sake of creating an evocation of uncertainty itself. In other words, Berlioz has promoted the concept of nightingale from the level of imitation to the level of structure, in his quest for a nocturnal sort of discourse. He wanted not vagueness of pitch but vagueness of text, a musical image of temporal disorientation. In certain Renaissance paintings of Christ’s nativity, the painter inserts reminders of the crucifixion—nails, thorns; similarly Berlioz inserts into the very beginning of the adagio proper—the nativity of love—a shadowy pre-audition of the nightingales in the desperate aubade from Shakespeare’s third act. Roméo and Juliette are swimming in the whole round of their love-tragedy, darkly co-present in the music. As our ears accustom themselves to the audible darkness, they begin to discern more human sounds. Always fluctuating, the tempo hesitantly picks up speed, until we reach a section marked canto appassionato assai (quite impassioned song); a little later, the passion of the song is momentarily spent, and the music thins to a section marked col carattere di Recit. (in the character of recitative)—where Romeo (cello) and Juliet (flute, oboe) lapse into an evocation of speech.12 Because of the large timescale of the movement, the music seems to ebb and surge according to biological rhythms, not according to the rigid demarcations of a preexisting musical template. The pseudo-recitative hints that if passion is too thoroughly exhausted, the adagio will sink back to opera; it can maintain its symphonic nature only through rousing itself with new vertigos of song. After this, the great melodic excursus begins, a series of swooning arcs, as if Romeo and Juliet were kissing, unkissing, kissing again. It is as if the whole opening part of the adagio—with its tra-las, its birdcalls, its first attempts at serenading, its shy talk—provides a sort of quarry of motives for the construction of an immense song. And here we come to understand how differently Berlioz and Shakespeare conceived young love. For Shakespeare, love is a conflagration, but a conflagration in which both parties have been carefully trained to burn. Romeo and Juliet have both been reading the same poetry books; they can, at the first moment they meet, complete one another’s lines, compose a sonnet together. Shakespeare’s lovers can understand one another instantly, devastatingly, for they are textually unison. They know each other’s words, before either speaks. But Berlioz’s lovers are more hesitant, and they need more time to adjust to one another before they can make their huge musical declaration. They begin with a short-breathed, slightly panting and quizzical musical language, as if they can’t quite believe in their own happiness; it is not until the middle of the adagio that they can synchronize themselves into a grand melodic span, with phrases

102

❧

romeo and juliet

longer than any human throat could sing. They don’t know their music in advance; it takes a long time before they can put it together, catch each other’s tune. Berlioz’s lovers are shyer, more awkward, more self-contained in their urgency. Possibly their abandon seems all the more abandoned for being less immediate, more achieved. Eventually the melody pours itself all out, and we reach a moment of tense expectancy, a prolonged instant of silence—a thirty-second note rest, with a fermata over it. Then there begins (at measure 304) one of Berlioz’s most astonishing passages, which starts as a great build-up of an E-major chord. Since the principal key of the adagio is A major, this passage represents a grand move to the dominant; and it feels like a breakthrough onto a higher plane of musical discourse, a sort of transfiguration. Harmonically it is decisive, brilliant; but rhythmically it is oddly indeterminate, since the rising chord is syncopated, and the accompaniment is also syncopated, oddly fluttering; it seems to represent both a hard clasp and some light shudder. The feathery urgency keeps increasing, as the E-major chord tries to attain a sort of transcendence: first by recasting itself in E minor, then by leaping to C major (as the E–G–B chord overreaches itself to E–G–C), then by sinking back to E minor, as if to extract the maximum intensity of pathos; then it recedes and begins a second spurtingupward, this time starting in E minor. One might expect this passage to land on a B chord, the dominant of the dominant, but, instead of finding a chord with a B on the bottom and an F on top, the top note moves up a notch further to produce a chord of B–D–F–G, as if G major could be an altered, red-shifted dominant for E minor. In this fashion the chord keeps overreaching itself,13 spiraling giddily through several startling mutations, until it dwindles to a few after-throbs on a diminished chord (see ex. 8). In the scenario of the balcony scene, this passage represents a confident concord in love. But in other scenar-

Example 8. Orgasm?

ET

JULIETTE

: the symphony

❧

ROMÉO

103

ios, this passage means something else—perhaps the first truly effective metaphor for orgasm in the history of music. Roméo et Juliette is constructed, dramatically and harmonically, as an enormous arch; and this erotically charged passage is the high point, the climax. From here on we will be revisiting, in altered form, materials and procedures that we’ve heard before. Having wound the tension as far as it will go, Berlioz proceeds, from here on, with a long unwinding. The adagio, as it comes to its conclusion, grows increasingly distracted, fragmentary, as if Romeo and Juliet were becoming unable to sustain their fury of concentration on one another. Near the end of the movement, Rushton hears the voice of the Nurse summoning Juliet back to a more prosaic world14—perhaps by analogy with the alba and the aubade, the old dawn songs that warned illicit lovers to end their revels. (A late example can be found in Wagner’s Brangaene, whose clarion song fails to persuade Tristan and Isolde that they must part; today it may be difficult to hear Berlioz’s love scene without thinking of Wagner.) But in any case, the movement that begins with vague birdcalls ends in wisps and afterthoughts of love. The hiatal textures of the end of the adagio prepare the listener for Queen Mab, the scherzo of Berlioz’s grand symphony. Of course, we’ve already heard a tenor quote Mercutio’s narrative, in the operatic first part of Roméo et Juliette; but now Mab has been promoted from a charming character in a silly story to a fiend in Romeo’s mind. In the tenor’s scherzetto, we were presented with the harmless, fairy-tale version of Mab; now Mab has become a kind of brain disease, a worm that has crawled into Romeo’s inner ear, eating away at normal possibilities for coherence in thinking. In the scherzetto, we heard what Mercutio said; in the scherzo, we hear what Romeo heard. Here Mab escapes from the confines of Mercutio’s vaudeville-turn speech and comes alive. The fantasy of Mab is now wordless, eerie, fully internalized into the instrumental discourse of the symphony—not a mere figment, but as valid and authentic as any other aspect of love’s delirium. In the orchestral sections, figures of speech are emancipated from the domain of tropes, and become wholly realized: Berlioz’s music becomes the surrogate for the poetry of Shakespeare, where two stars might wander out of the sky to change positions with Juliet’s eyes, where a fairy queen riding in a nutshell has as much dignity as any earthly queen. As much dignity, and much more speed and energy: for she gallops prestissimo, at such a lofty height that the bass line often appears in the treble clef; the commonplace prosaic world is almost entirely abandoned, in a fairy music of excluded middles. This sort of music wasn’t quite unprecedented: Mendelssohn’s fairy music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream has a similar deftness, shimmer, and lift. In fact the young Berlioz idly suggested to Mendelssohn in 1831 that it was surprising that no one had written a scherzo on the theme of Queen Mab—and then instantly

104

❧

romeo and juliet

Example 9. Mab: diminished seventh in melodic form.

regretted giving Mendelssohn an idea he wished to reserve for himself.15 But Berlioz’s fairy music is more frenzied, more erratic than Mendelssohn’s. Mendelssohn sought speed, delicacy, a sort of eerie propriety fit for a world of overtones; Berlioz sought, above all, a sense of elusiveness. The key of Berlioz’s scherzo is certainly F major, but the initial skittery melody for violins has strong tendencies to borrow notes from other keys; and its very first statement concludes in midair (C), via a melodic figure that seems be spun out of a diminished seventh chord (see ex. 9). This aerial chatter is regularly interrupted by chords, sometimes consisting of normal triads, but often consisting of a diminished seventh chord, moving bizarrely from one configuration of itself to another (before at last finding a resolution): a harmonically static experiment with shifts of timbre and color, as if Queen Mab were briefly poised, iridescing. On other occasions a note will suddenly sustain itself, while high notes dance from an octave to a major ninth to a minor ninth above. The unpredictability of this music continues to amaze, even after long acquaintance. The scherzo is one long dissolve. In the adagio, Romeo and Juliet found their tune; but in the scherzo, we enter an almost tuneless and figureless musical domain. It is as if Romeo remains aroused but can’t hang onto any clear shape of love; he dwells in Coleridge’s limbo, a state of intense imaginativeness that hovers between images without coming to rest. The music of Queen Mab becomes an alternate construction of the whole love scene, exhilarating but also disturbing. At the trio, marked Allegretto, the tiny rapid gallop slows down by a factor of three.16 The key moves from F to the relative minor, D; trills seem to represent cricket chirps and other insect noises, as Berlioz’s focus seems to shift to the grasshopper covers and cricket’s-bone whips that adorn the fairy carriage—but the galloping can’t be stopped long, and the prestissimo resumes. Soon we start to hear fairy horn calls; and then comes a remarkable passage that might be called a

ET

JULIETTE

: the symphony

❧

ROMÉO

105

Example 10. Mab’s umbral regions.

second trio, although there is no change of tempo or other sectional indication in the score. Here Berlioz extracts falling fifths from the F minor and D
major triads, and keeps equivocating between major and minor (see ex. 10). This bit of shadowy ambiguity was lifted from an early choral song, Ballet des ombres (1829): Formez vos rangs, entrez en danse! L’ombre descend, le jour s’enfuit. Hou! Ombres, votre règne commence Dans la sombre horreur da la nuit. Hou! Form your rows and start to dance! Shadow descends, and day takes flight. Hoo! Ghosts, now your reign begins In the black horror of the night. Hoo! When Berlioz re-orchestrated this passage for the scherzo, he called for antique cymbals, another way of exploring the far ranges of otherness in Western music. The adagio pertains to Juliet’s presence; the scherzo pertains to Juliet’s absence, a sort of distention of imagination, like gas released into a vacuum. This ghost-ballet, in which a funeral knell is accelerated into Halloween revels, is perfectly appropriate for Mab’s retinue; but the anxious possibility remains that Juliet herself has become a ghost, in anticipation of her actual burial. Unsubstantial death, that lean abhorrèd monster, has already turned Juliet into his paramour. Because circumstances prevented any just expectation of a long, secure marriage, the lovers were always somewhat unreal to each other; and in the scherzo Juliet has already started to dance out of Romeo’s grasp, to refigure herself as something amorphous, delirious. Ever since the operatic section 1 ended, Romeo has dwelt in a wordless, dangerously ungrounded

106

❧

romeo and juliet

domain, a continual shape-shifting of chimeras of love, chimeras of fear; and, as the symphonic sections 2, 3, and 4 end, this phantasmagorical state is becoming explicit. It is difficult for instrumental music to retain semantic clarity; and this precariousness of meaning finally overwhelms the whole implied sensibility of Romeo, our protagonist. Queen Mab, in the scherzetto at the end of section 1, inaugurated the mysteries of love; now Mab, at the end of section 4, dispels those same mysteries and leaves Romeo high-sorrowful and cloyed. What begins as inspiration must end as a hollow image. The symphony seems to confess that it needs something more, in order to make itself explicit. As we’ve seen, the purpose of the Mab speech, in Shakespeare, is to bring Romeo back to earth, to call attention to the silliness of the cherished figments of love, to wake him up. In L’île inconnue, the final song in Les nuits d’été (1841—not long after Roméo et Juliette), Berlioz set a charming Gautier poem in which a lover invites his jeune belle to sail with him to Java or Norway or anywhere at all, in a boat with an oar made of ivory, a rudder of gold, a sail spun from an angel’s wing—and, for ballast, a single orange. The whole vehicular form of this contraption seems a nautical re-imagining of the chariot of Queen Mab. At the end of the poem, the girl asks him to take her to the shores where love lasts forever; but the poet delicately declines, for no one seems to know the directions to that place. Extravagant tropes are put to flight by a canny, self-conscious mind; the poet’s dreams fume away, and the critic wakes up. By the end of the Queen Mab scherzo in Roméo et Juliette, the composer seems to have reached a similar impasse; and so we fall out of the reverie of symphony, and into the vigilance of opera.

Chapter Nine

Roméo et Juliette: The Opera Resumes At the end of Berlioz’s section 1, we had not yet come to the end of Shakespeare’s first act; Berlioz’s exposition of the plot corresponds to Shakespeare’s prologue sonnet, and is wholly anticipatory in character. As section 5 begins, we are already in the domain of the last act. The whole inner drama of Romeo and Juliet occurs in the symphonic sections 2, 3, and 4—another reason for believing that the adagio corresponds not just to the balcony scene, but to every intimate scene between the lovers. We are in the domain of the last act—but Garrick’s last act, not Shakespeare’s, as Berlioz explicitly noted: Without doubt Garrick found the right dénouement for Romeo and Juliet, containing the greatest degree of pathos that the theatre can provide; this ending has replaced Shakespeare’s, which has a less gripping effect; but by contrast, what sort of insolent clown devised the [happy] dénouement for King Lear, sometimes, even often, substituted for the scene that Shakespeare outlined for this masterwork?1

Berlioz preferred Garrick’s treatment of the last act of Romeo and Juliet, but thought that almost all other tamperings with the masters were wretched and reprehensible. It is possible to see why Berlioz would call attention to Garrick: Garrick demonstrated (according to Berlioz) that it was possible to improve Shakespeare, and therefore gave a kind of warrant for Berlioz’s own subliminal project of competing with Shakespeare. The opera of sections 5, 6, and 7 opens with a funeral procession—Convoi funèbre de Juliette—with the odd (though perfectly exact) subheading, “Fugal March, first for instruments, with a psalmody on just one note in the voices; then for voices, with the psalmody in the orchestra.” Berlioz derived the idea of the procession, complete with comparisons of Juliet to a flower cut before its time, not from Shakespeare but from Garrick, who wished to make Juliet’s death a more public and spectacular occasion for sentiment: in 1750 Garrick commissioned William Boyce to write (quite beautiful) music for his funeral procession scene, complete with the steady tolling of a bell.2

108

❧

romeo and juliet

Of course, it must be remembered that this cortège pertains only to the death simulated by the poison; Juliet is still alive, and will soon awake. In some sense, we’re still in the realm of Queen Mab, the ruler of fictitious and unreal affection, and Berlioz’s extraordinary ingenuity of form does impart a certain sense of contrivance; but the choral mourning seems sincere enough, as it should, since the Capulet mourners believe Juliet to be truly dead. Berlioz evidently considered the break between section 4 (Mab) and section 5 to be the strongest point of division in the score: at the first performance there was an intermission before the funeral procession (itself preceded by the deleted second choral prologue). And the lethargy and the solemnity of the funeral procession seem remote indeed from Mab’s scherzo; the force of gravity is increasing as we approach the world of opera, which is (for Berlioz’s purposes in this work) ceremonious, heavy-footed, the opposite of fantasy. We are on the verge of rejoining a more serious, more tedious, more legalistic universe. This effect was especially strong at the first performance, in which this movement ended with a chanted Requiem aeternam (later deleted), as if the church were gathering its strength to coopt love-fantasy, break it on the grid of preestablished ritual. In the field of instrumental music familiar in the early nineteenth century, a slow movement might seem amorous (as in Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony, as Berlioz heard it) or funereal (as in Beethoven’s Third); and it would be possible to construe the Convoi funèbre as a sort of alternate slow movement to the symphonic parts of Roméo et Juliette. The funeral procession equivocates nicely between the symphonic and the operatic. Even the texture of the piece, in which the chorus and the orchestral neatly trade places in the middle (first the chorus gives a pedal-point to the orchestra, then the orchestra gives a pedal-point to the chorus), proves that voices can easily do the work of instruments, and instruments can easily do the work of voices. The listener is in a border region between the vocal and the orchestral, between opera and symphony, an indistinct land between genres; but the order of the two halves suggests that instruments are waning in importance, and voices waxing, as symphony gives way to opera. In the adagio, we heard the sleepy voices of the revelers leaving the ball, vanishing in the distance, as a preparation for a world of voiceless intensities; now, the chorus starts to waken, in a gentle lament, as a preparation for a world of loud and insistent voices in the operatic finale. But what firmly places the Convoi funèbre in Part Three is its key. Section 1, if it has a distinct key at all, is in B minor; the symphony of sections 2, 3, and 4 is clearly in F major; and, as we’ll see, section 7 finishes strongly in B major. The first half of the Convoi funèbre is in E minor, and the second half in E major, the subdominant of B major; this choice of key firmly distances the Convoi funèbre from symphony and affiliates it with opera—a lower, less intense domain, in Berlioz’s scheme for this work. Harmonically, Berlioz has already begun the process of saying goodbye to Romeo and Juliet; the music is dissociating itself from love and affiliating itself with the society of Verona and its preestablished rites for mourning.

ET

JULIETTE

: the opera resumes

❧

ROMÉO

109

Section 6 is entitled Roméo au tombeau des Capulets, and is, by general consent, the most original part of the entire score. Berlioz himself seems to have considered it too challenging for many audiences, for he noted that it “should be cut in 99 out of 100 performances.”3 Its challenge lies chiefly in its disruptiveness of musical form: it is a bundle of clonic musical gestures, following Garrick’s scenario for the tomb scene: Invocation—Awakening of Juliet—Delirious joy, despair— Last agonies and death of the two lovers. (In Shakespeare’s text, Romeo and Juliet have no opportunity to talk with each other in the tomb.) It is the only moment in the score where Romeo and Juliet are “present,” not in a symphony but in an opera—but an opera without singers, for Berlioz strictly observes his premise that the lovers dwell on a plane beyond the singable. Its musical antecedents therefore can be found in incidental music to plays—except that musical instruments are not accompanying speech, not underscoring dumb show, but impersonating voices and embodying physiology. The movement is one of the most remarkable acts of transvestism between orchestra and human body ever devised. For this brief span the social opera of Verona is interrupted by a new kind of operatic experience, a somatic opera. I propose the term somatic opera along lines suggested by Roland Barthes, in his beautiful essay “Rasch”: Barthes speaks of the somathemes in Schumann, by which he means the music of pulse-throbs and biceps-contractions: In Schumann’s Kreisleriana (Opus 16; 1838), I actually hear no note, no theme, no contour, no grammar, no meaning, nothing which would permit me to reconstruct an intelligible structure of the work. No, what I hear are blows: I hear what beats in the body, what beats the body, or better: I hear this body that beats.4

Kreisleriana, of course, has notes, themes, and grammar—it is simply that the body implied by the music resounds more loudly in Barthes’ ears than the notes, the themes, the grammar. But in Roméo au tombeau there really is little in the way of theme, and almost nothing in the way of grammar—the music seems to be a string of disconnected harsh or pathetic gestures; and in the absence of theme and grammar, the bodies of Romeo and Juliet surge to the foreground. The movement is a kind of musical stethoscope. There was a strong aspect of corporeality in the sexually charged slow movement, but a corporeality different from that of Roméo au tombeau. In the adagio, the pulse’s acceleration, the heart’s tumescences, were bodied forth through an orchestral song; but in Roméo au tombeau, the physiology is not a complement to a musical structure, but a force opposing any musical structure. Love seems to invite music, but death seems to resist music, in any connected and melodious sense of the word. We have reached a place where musical expression and musical form are antithetical. On the frontiers of music, the orchestra becomes a sort of recording device for spastic contractions, for paroxysms of the brain. By the end of this movement, Berlioz is devising audible images for the death rattle,

110

❧

romeo and juliet

for the loosening of muscle tonus, for sickening things in the belly. Schoenberg’s Erwartung (1909), a madwoman’s monodrama, in which “atonal” music follows the exact contours of psychic pain, can be glimpsed on the horizon of Roméo au tombeau. But this sort of physiologically engorged music looks to the past as well as the future. Berlioz was not the first composer to write music constructed around heartbeat figures—perhaps in the overture and finale of Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1787) we can even hear the beat of a statue’s implacable heart. A more explicit heart-notation can be found in the operatic invention, at the end of the eighteenth century, of a sort of heartbeat-recitative—a heartbeat disengaged from other musical phenomena, a rhythmic figure promoted into a monotone in the foreground. For example, in the quartet of Méhul’s Stratonice (1792)—a number that Berlioz admired greatly5—there is a section where a doctor performs a physical exam: as he takes the pulse, iambic figures in the strings rise up against the (oddly cheerful) woodwind music of the general orchestral texture. It isn’t far from this rather gentle musical medicine to the physiological exactitude of Berlioz’s La mort de Cléopâtre (1829), where, as the poison takes effect, we hear the queen’s horribly loud pulse, first labored, then thready. Berlioz performed a full emancipation of the heartbeat: but perhaps every opera is, to some degree, a somatic opera. By 1847 Berlioz was so heartbeat-obsessed that he sent a letter to Liszt describing how, during a successful Russian performance of Roméo et Juliette, “I felt my heart clench itself [se serrer] in the middle of the adagio,” and further went to the trouble of notating the rhythm of the “nervous trembling” of his heart (see ex. 11), a series of irregular triplets.6 Of course, Roméo au tombeau engages not only an implied body but an implied mind: we hear Romeo experiencing his delirious joy and despair in terms of music heard previously in the dramatic symphony. And yet, a word such as reminiscence doesn’t seem right to describe the process of musical recall: a reminiscence is a savoring of temporality, a mellow awareness of the discrepancy between past and present, whereas Roméo au tombeau is immediate, sheer, bristling. I will mention two instances of Berlioz’s sinister thematic recalls. First, in the section marked Reveil de Juliette, an out-of-breath clarinet seems to be trying to play (and almost succeeding in playing) Juliet’s distinctively hesitant lovemelody (clarinet and cor anglais) from measure 127 of the love scene (this theme is also heard, in a varied form, in the shy flutes and oboes of the allegro agitato of the love scene; it is related to the call of the night-bird discussed earlier). In the

Example 11. Berlioz’s notation of his own heartbeat.

ET

JULIETTE

: the opera resumes

❧

ROMÉO

111

Example 12. Delirium in the tomb.

Example 13. Canto appassionato assai from the love scene.

adagio, Juliet seemed to be communing with the night; now she seems to be communing with the deepest night of all. As Chailley has noticed,7 this chromatic theme was originally heard in the Prologue, when the chorus sang Le jeune Roméo, plaignant sa destinée—the tune is first anticipated, then experienced, at last, effortfully, resuscitated. Second (this is the instance illustrated in the two quotations from the score—see exx. 12, 13), in the section marked Joie délirante, the orchestra plays an immensely speeded-up version of the canto appassionato assai from the adagio. In the first instance, the theme is eaten away by long pauses and by sinister runs in the strings, as Thanatos overcomes Eros; in the second example, as we can see, the theme attempts to escape from time by compressing itself into a single moment of peak intensity: if the canto appassionato assai theme were played any more rapidly, it would be the flicker of a chord, not a melody at all. In the large arch of Roméo et Juliette, Roméo au tombeau is thematically parallel to the adagio, in that it revisits and erases the great love themes; but it is structurally parallel to the catalogue section of the Prologue. There, we heard an anticipation of the symphonic themes, cuing us in mapping the symphony onto Shakespeare’s play; here, we hear the themes dismantling themselves, receding into themelessness. In the Symphonie fantastique, the concluding rondo of witches’ sabbath desecrated the beloved, reduced her, by means of thematic parody, to a whore. Romeo and Juliet aren’t caricatured; but the parody of their love themes breaks down the lovers, leaves them unable to sustain themselves in

112

❧

romeo and juliet

the midst of death’s stern musicological analysis. In his Prix de Rome cantata, La mort d’Orphée (1827), Berlioz wrote a graphic musical depiction of the dismemberment of Orpheus; and in Roméo au tombeau, Romeo is similarly torn limb from limb, in a sort of sparagma of the music of the adagio. The symphony of sections 2, 3, and 4 is broken up and dismissed, in preparation for the operatic finale, where Romeo and Juliet are dead, and none of their music is henceforth available to be heard. So we see that Roméo au tombeau says both farewell to the symphony and hello to the operatic finale. As an introduction to the finale, Roméo au tombeau clearly alludes to the introduction to the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, its most striking formal precedent, in that Beethoven begins his finale with harsh and peremptory gestures; then recalls themes from the preceding movements; then resumes the disruptive clamor; and at last settles into the concordia discors of the Ode to Joy, as chaos resolves into cosmos. In 1838—not long before the writing of Roméo et Juliette—Berlioz confessed that he was utterly unable to understand why Beethoven began his finale with sheer noise: “ALL THE NOTES OF THE MINOR DIATONIC SCALE are struck at the same time, producing a fearsome assemblage of sounds: F, A, C, E, G, B
, D.”8 Berlioz notes that, in Jean Paul Égide Martini’s opera Sapho, a similar auditory overload occurs to accompany the heroine’s suicidal plunge into the sea, in which case the expressive intent is unmistakable; but Beethoven’s discord leaves him puzzled. I believe that Roméo au tombeau is Berlioz’s attempt to understand the beginning of Beethoven’s finale by repeating its gestures in a clearly specified interpretive frame. Berlioz (like some other critics of his generation) tried to understand Beethoven’s symphonies as occluded expressions of Shakespeare or Dante; here, Berlioz in effect created a story for Beethoven’s incomprehensible music, then rewrote the music in order to make it better fit the story. He retained the structural essence of Beethoven’s opening for his finale, the combination of loud disruption and thematic recall; but Berlioz’s music is so semantically explicit that no one asks, What does this mean?—to hear it, especially with Berlioz’s minutely annotated score in hand, is to know what it means. The finale proper is both the most and the least Shakespearean part of Berlioz’s score—the most Shakespearean, in that Berlioz at last provides a vocal enactment of a full scene, with a bass who doesn’t quote Friar Lawrence (in the sense that the tenor previously quoted Mercutio), but actually plays Friar Lawrence, confronting the Capulets and Montagues; the least Shakespearean, in that Berlioz’s obedience to operatic conventions makes us more conscious of recent musical precedents (the oath scene in Rossini’s Guillaume Tell, 1829, and so forth) than of Shakespeare’s old play. Furthermore, Berlioz’s Lawrence, terrifying and authoritative, is scarcely to be recognized as Shakespeare’s distracted puttering klutz.

ET

JULIETTE

: the opera resumes

❧

ROMÉO

113

In the symmetrical form of the whole Roméo et Juliette, the end is like the beginning—and the finale indeed starts as a second version of the Introduction. The Capulets and Montagues are still brawling, as if nothing had happened at all. At first there is aimless confusion, as the bewildered chorus cries out for Lawrence to elucidate the deaths of the lovers; Lawrence calmly explains; then the chorus becomes decisive, and calls for blood, as the orchestra resumes the feud-fugue, first heard in the opening bars of the work. There, Prince Escalus, impersonated by the low brass, shouted down the mob; here, it is the church, in the form of Lawrence, that hurls down the thunderbolt of Jove: Silence, malheureux! Perhaps Berlioz, native to a Roman Catholic country, could find somewhat more gubernatorial force in the church than Shakespeare could easily imagine from the shattered monasteries of the Church of Rome or the very young institutions of the Church of England. Roméo et Juliette concludes with an assertion of law—the law of the church, made audible in a great hymn tune (see ex. 14): Jurez donc, par l’auguste symbole, Sur le corps de la fille et sur le corps du fils, Par ce bois douloureux qui console, Jurez tous, jurez par le saint crucifix. Swear then, by the high symbol of God, On the girl’s body and the body of the son, By this consoling sign, this holy rood, All swear, swear by this cross of pain.

Example 14. Jurez donc.

114

❧

romeo and juliet

This grand anthem is conclusive in two senses. First, it establishes an irrefutable key of B major, demonstrating that Roméo et Juliette consists of a symphony in F major embedded within an opera in B minor/major—just the sort of large-scale tritonal relationship not usually permitted in tonal music. The symphony is skewed on a harmonic plane orthogonal to that of the opera—a device for proving in harmony the theorem that Romeo and Juliet don’t belong to the same system as the rest of Verona. It is a procedure for demonstrating the starkly enforced separation between the love code, with its symphonic commingling of themes, and the social code, with its operatic divisions into selfcontained musical segments.9 Second, Jurez donc is a conspicuously steady, impregnable sort of melody, a melody on which Lawrence and the chorus can rely, conclude. Pursuing the analogy with Beethoven’s Ninth, we might say that Jurez donc plays the role of the Ode to Joy tune, summarizing and embracing. But this analogy is fragile. Freude, schöner Götterfunken is in some respects a less interesting tune than Jurez donc, but it is infinitely more flexible, more susceptible to variation; it can be made an image of the spinning universe precisely because it can be transmogrified into a sweet hymn, a Turkish march, an abyss of silence—anything at all. But there’s little that Berlioz (or perhaps anyone else) could do with Jurez donc except to make it louder. It belongs to the class of pompous, orotund Berlioz melodies, of the sort familiar from the Symphonie funèbre et triomphale and other musical ceremonies designed for political or ecclesiastical occasions. It is memorable, even fascinating, because of its swerves from B major to C minor (at le corps du fils) and G minor (at saint crucifix); but the unusualness of the harmonic pattern only increases its rigidity, for the melody has all its complexity built in; further complexifying would be an unwelcome interference with its oath-compelling solemnity. In this fashion Berlioz ends Roméo et Juliette with a general adoration of the Law. It is a little as if Wagner had ended Die Meistersinger by killing off the noble young Walther and awarding Eva’s hand to an overjoyed Beckmesser (the carping legalist). Nothing in Shakespeare’s play makes us confident that the Law, either of the church or of the state, is an efficacious instrument in dealing with human passion. But perhaps, for Berlioz, passion could triumph only in the world of symphony; and opera was such a recalcitrant, stiff, vexatious genre that it declares that Friar Lawrence and Prince Escalus are the true heroes of a Romeo and Juliet opera.

Part 2

Macbeth

Chapter Ten

Shakespeare’s Random Part of the power of Shakespeare’s tragedies lies in their goofiness. Shakespeare often seems to begin with some premise straight out of an actors’ workshop, some casual improvisatory game, and then to erect some magnificent structure of rhetoric upon a foundation of sand—or no foundation at all. When I was a boy, I often attended a comedy club in Chicago called Second City, in which the actors asked the audience to call out suggestions for a skit (“Peeling an apple with a chainsaw!” “An astronaut in a spacesuit peeling an apple with a chainsaw!”). The premise of Macbeth seems devised in just this manner (“The forest marches up to the castle!” “The forest marches up to the castle and kills the king!”). For their private amusement, the witches keep calling out new roles and new situations, and Macbeth struggles as best he can to comply: 1. Witch. All hail, Macbeth, hail to thee, Thane of Glamis! 2. Witch. All hail, Macbeth, hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor! 3. Witch. All hail, Macbeth, that shall be King hereafter! (1.3.48–50) In an improvised comedy, Macbeth would run around the stage, first making his own characteristic gesture, then scowling like the Thane of Cawdor, at last crowning himself with a horseshoe and holding up his riding-stick as a scepter. Of course, Macbeth is a comedy only from the witches’ point of view, and the tragic actors must maintain a certain decorum. But it is necessarily a short distance from Macbeth addressing a nonexistent dagger to Marlon Brando pretending to melt in Lee Strasberg’s studio. The cast of Shakespeare’s play is a gang of actors trying, with whatever technical virtuosity they can muster, to cope with the fiendish demands of a final examination in the witches’ drama school. Because Shakespeare so completely assimilated the absurdities of the plot into a pseudo-rational structure, and because the tone of the play is so dark, it is easy to forget just how outrageous, how hilarious it all is. But if the witches in Macbeth were continuously present at the margins of the stage, like Christopher Sly in many productions of The Taming of the Shrew, the director would have to show them growing more and more giddy with delight. We can’t entirely sympathize with their glee, for we’re human beings, too implicated in the drama of guilt and slaughter elaborated on the stage; but it’s possible to respect the witches as pure

118

❧

macbeth

aesthetes, connoisseurs of theatre, contriving a spectacle in which an actor has to play a brave and loyal nobleman, a henpecked husband, an assassin, a wicked king—roles that have nothing to do with one another, as if plucked from a deck of cards—before he’s made to confess, in his last soliloquy, that he’s just a “poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage” (5.5.24–25). This is improvisatory comedy for a nightclub in hell. The disorder within the character of Macbeth—if the term character can be applied to someone so fundamentally lacking in a fixed identity—is only one of the many disorders that Shakespeare examines in this play. Indeed, Macbeth is a study in randomness, as Shakespeare’s age understood it. It is generally thought that Shakespeare wrote Macbeth around 1606, to celebrate the accession, after the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, of King James VI of Scotland to the throne of England, as King James I. James—a slobbering, stuttering, weak-legged king, almost a changeling himself, but for all that a sort of intellectual—prided himself on his scholarship, particularly on witchcraft, the subject of his 1597 book, Daemonologie. He undertook this study as part of debate concerning the reality of witches—a debate in which he had the unusual advantage (as Stephen Greenblatt has noted)1 of being able to order the burning of books that doubted the existence of witches, such as Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft. Of course, on stage everything is real unless we are specifically told otherwise; but King James, at a performance of Macbeth, would have been a spectator quite inclined to accept that witches are real women working harm. In defining the word witchcraft, King James claimed that it was simply the English equivalent of the Latin word sorcery, “which is taken from the casting of the lot . . . The cause wherefore [sorcerers] were called sortiarij, proceeded of their practicques seeming to come of lot or chance: Such as the turning of the riddle.”2 (A riddle in this sense is a coarse sieve used for separating grain from chaff, or sand from gravel; turning the riddle is a method of divination, especially useful for identifying thieves.) The theory of sorcery, then, is that chance patterns, such as the distribution of small objects that have passed through a sieve, or the array of tea-leaves at the bottom of a cup, can be construed as manifestations of hidden wisdom. How can we know the future?—by studying the shapes that arise in shapeless things, plastic to the subtle pressures of foreknowledge. The more randomness, then, the greater the possibility of revelation. Shakespeare’s experiment in Macbeth is to test the theory of sorcery by constructing a whole theatrical world of ambiguity, equivocation, fog, and night, to see whether chance operations can generate shapes more meaningful, more portentous than the normal operations of reason and imagination. There is sorcery everywhere in Shakespeare’s mature tragedies; Macbeth is unusual only in that it makes explicit the general principle of divination by chance patterns. Hamlet, for example, plays sorcerer with Polonius, when he asks the old courtier, “Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in the shape of a

’S

RANDOM

❧

SHAKESPEARE

119

camel?” (3.2.376–77); the deferential Polonius sees that it indeed resembles a camel. But, when Hamlet proposes that the cloud might look more like a weasel, Polonius agrees—and further agrees that it is very like a whale. Polonius fails Hamlet’s test: for Polonius, a shapelessness is just a shapelessness, without any capacity to turn itself into an omen; for Hamlet, however, rough-hewn forms imply a shaping force (5.2.10). When Hamlet sees an inkblot, as in the players’ silly skit about Pyrrhus and Priam, he can read in it the outlines of his own hopes and terrors. Perhaps the most daring feature of Shakespeare’s art is his willingness to traffic with the bulging, the deformed, the ostentatiously trivial; every attempt to cut his plays by removing extraneous matter tends to hamstring their operation, for the mature tragedies operate by illustrating a mind trying to cope with the general extraneity of things. Furthermore, the mind that attempts to read inkblots is itself a sort of inkblot. When Antony, in Antony and Cleopatra, comes to the end of his resources, he speaks of himself as a cloud: Sometimes we see a cloud that’s dragonish, A vapor sometime like a bear or lion, A tower’d citadel . . . That which is now a horse, even with a thought The rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct, As water is in water. . . . Here I am Antony, Yet cannot hold this visible shape . . . (4.14.2–4, 9–11, 13–14) This passage gives a strong clue concerning the difficulty of acting roles such as Antony: the actor must be, in turns, a dragon, a bear, a citadel, a horse, but finally must simply dissolve into a sort of flamboyant unbeing, masklessness. From Coleridge to Auden, a remarkable rhetoric of negation and vacuity has developed around the character of Iago in Othello. But Shakespeare’s heroes are as frightening as his villains—they typically lose all sense of psychic coherence, distend into bizarre nebulosities of identity. With the possible exception of Hamlet, who seems qualified to give advice on acting to professional players, Shakespeare’s heroes feel they lack the histrionic skill to deal with the sinister theatre of improvisation that has been forced on them. When Macbeth says that life’s a poor player, he means that he’s a poor actor: he isn’t talented enough to perform the quick changes of role that the script mandates. The actor playing Macbeth, therefore, should not give the impression of being adequate to the script’s demands—a slightly incompetent bravura is required, a sense of being game but overparted. Thomas F. Van Laan has written memorably of Macbeth’s failures both at playing a single role and at trying to extemporize his way through the play3—he’s equally inept at Method Acting, memorized gesture, and improvisation. To insist on continuity of character is to risk undermining

120

❧

macbeth

the essential pluralness of Macbeth: he is a heap of jarring personae, incapable of attaining transcendence. Macbeth, like Antony, is a failed sorcerer, unable to find any design or purport in the vague teasing shapes that are thrust upon him. Antony dislimns, unpictures himself; Macbeth regards himself as the protagonist of a tale told by an idiot. The tragic hero complicit with sorcery may find that, instead of being a master of fate, he dwindles into a pile of chaff or gravel. The more Macbeth disintegrates, the more he becomes an image of sorcery itself, the art of reading false shapes in clouds. The witches are themselves character-clouds, personages that can be construed in any number of different ways. As Stephen Greenblatt points out, the witches “account for nothing . . . it is in fact extremely difficult to specify what, if anything, they do or even what, if anything, they are.”4 Their function is simply to open up areas of empty space, in which ugly, vagrant desires can manifest themselves, in which deeds without names (4.1.49) can take place. Theirs is not the moving finger that writes down all that will come to pass; they simply provide a blank tablet which the human characters figure with obscene scrawls.

Chapter Eleven

Magic as Theft Why does someone choose to follow the black arts? King James asks this very question, and answers it as follows: “Curiositie in great ingines: thrist of revenge, for some tortes deeply apprehended: or greedie appetite of geare, caused through great pouerty. As to the first of these, Curiosity, it is onelie the inticement of Magiciens, or Necromanciers: and the other two are the allureres of the Sorcerers, or Witches.”1 Greed and the thirst for revenge can be found in a scene of low comedy in Macbeth, when the first witch tells the story of how she asked a “rump-fed ronyon” (1.3.5), the wife of a sailor, to give her some chestnuts; when the fat munching woman refused, the witch sailed in a sieve to Aleppo, where she drained the woman’s husband dry, infected him with sleeplessness; finally, the first witch displays the treasure of her voyage, “a pilot’s thumb” (1.3.28). The tale of the rump-fed ronyon offers rich insight into the operation of magic, as Shakespeare understood it. First, it establishes the motivelessness of the witches’ malignity: they are happy to destroy a man because his wife was stingy with her snacks—or, in the case of Macbeth, for even less cause, it seems. Second, it establishes that the witches’ special expertise lies in the domain of insomnia: those whom they curse wither away from lack of sleep, from loss of the boundary between vigilance and dream; their lives become a waking hallucination. Third, this tale establishes the narrative tenor of witches’ stories: they sound like tales told by idiots. “They went to sea in a sieve, they did. . . . And they bought a pig, and some green jackdaws, / And a lovely monkey with lollypop paws,” Edward Lear wrote in “The Jumblies” (1871); similarly, the first witch goes to sea in a sieve, and assembles her tale out of nonsensically disconnected items, such as an eyelid, a chestnut, a compass card, and a stray thumb. As we’ve seen, the sieve is part of the sorcerer’s batterie de cuisine, generating random distributions for purposes of divination. Later, when the witches chant their recipe for brewing trouble, we find in the list of ingredients “Eye of newt and toe of frog, / Wool of bat and tongue of dog”—doubtless if the song had continued longer it would have come to jackdaws and monkey paws and other items fit for the Lear brothers, King and Edward. The witches in Macbeth are intimate with nonsense—here Shakespeare verges on the world of Dada, where cut-up words are mixed together and plucked from a hat. The witches offer lexical randomnesses comparable to the chance patterns generated by turning the riddle.

122

❧

macbeth

Fourth, and most importantly, the story of the first witch illustrates a crucial principle: magic is theft. King James is emphatic on this point: speaking of the power of Magiciens. . . . I say that they can suddenly cause to be brought into them, all kindes of daintie dishes, by their familiar spirit: Since as a thiefe he delightes to steal, and as a spirite, he can subtillie & suddenlie transport the same. . . . [Satan] will also make [his scholars] to please Princes, by faire banquets and daintie dishes, carryed in short space fra the farthest part of the world.2

The first witch performs a bizarre substitution rite: denied a chestnut, she pulls out a pilot’s thumb, to please her perverse sense of symmetry. But, in the universe of the witch’s narrative, this is neither a metamorphosis nor an optical illusion: it is a simple amputation performed at a great distance, with great speed. The career of Macbeth also shows the thieving nature of magic: he can become king of Scotland only by reappropriating or stealing someone else’s title; but the stolen robes never fit right, for they are cut for another: as Angus will note, “Now does he feel his title / Hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe / Upon a dwarfish thief” (5.2.20–22). Macbeth’s collusion with the witches only provides an acceleration of the banal procedures of tyranny, in which one person gathers all the wealth, leaving the many to starve.

Chapter Twelve

Prophesying King James claims that witches are driven by greed and envy, sorcerers by curiosity. The witches of Macbeth seem so knowing, so intimate with dark powers, that they have little curiosity; they seem less like crabby old women in Satan’s thrall than like avatars of Satan himself. But Macbeth is consumed by curiosity—after the witches provoke curiosity in him, by riddling him with oracles that seem to offer open predicates of identity. (Marjorie Garber has noted, quite correctly, that many of the traditional attributes of witches are “displaced onto the ‘real’ figure of Lady Macbeth”;1 I think it is also true that some of them are displaced onto her husband.) Shakespeare’s play, then, concerns three witches who tease a brave man into becoming a kind of sorcerer. How can sorcerers know the future? How can Satan himself know the future? James spent a good deal of hard thought in trying to answer those questions: And as to the diuelles foretelling of things to come, it is true that [Satan] knowes not all things future, but yet that he knows parte, the Tragicall event of this historie [Saul’s consultation with the Witch of Endor] declares it, (which the wit of woman could never haue fore-spoken) not that he hath any prescience, which is only proper to God: or yet knows anie thing by loking vpon God, as in a mirrour (as the good Angels doe) he being for euer debarred from the fauorable presence & countenance of his creator, but only by one of these meanes, either as being worldlie wise, and taught by an continuall experience, ever since the creation, judges by likelie-hood of things to come, according to the like that hath passed before, and the naturall causes, in respect of the vicissitude of all thinges worldly: Or else by Gods employing of him in a turne, and so foreseene thereof .2

Satan knows the future only derivatively, either as a good empiricist with a fund of thousands of years of experience to compute the probabilities of events, or as an instrument of God’s will in testing the virtue of mankind. God may provide him with a little genuine foreknowledge; but the Prince of Lies will dole it out to his sorcerers only scantily, confusingly: “Yea, he will make his schollers to creepe in credite with Princes, by fore-telling them manie greate thinges; parte true, parte false: For it all were false, he would tyne [lose] credite at all handes; but alwaies doubtsome, as his Oracles were.”3

124

❧

macbeth

But the prophecies in Macbeth seem to operate in a somewhat different fashion. For one thing, the witches are absolutely reliable—all their predictions come to pass. For another thing, the predictions come to pass only because they’ve been predicted: the act of prophesying itself alters the future. There is every reason to believe that, if the witches had never intervened in the drama, Macbeth would have remained a loyal soldier of King Duncan, and Birnam Wood would never have come to Dunce-inane. The witches’ declarations look like prophecies but are occult perlocutions, speech-acts realized as the characters struggle, sometimes intentionally, sometimes ignorantly, to make them come true. The witches erect a field of verbal force that bends events into conformity with the words. There is a pictorial as well as a verbal element to the witches’ manipulation of the future. King James was preoccupied with what we nowadays call voodoo dolls: They can be-witch and take the life of men or women, by rosting of the Pictures . . . which likewise is verie possible to their Master to performe, for although . . . that instrumente of waxe haue no vertue in that turne doing, yet may hee not verie well euen by that same measure that his conjured slaue meltes that waxe at the fire, may he not I say at these same times, subtilie as a spirite so weaken and scatter the spirites of life of the patient, as may make him on th’one part, for faintnesse to sweate out the humour of his bodie: And on the other parte . . . so debilitat his stomak, that . . . hee at last shall vanish away, euen as his picture will doe at the fire.4

Furthermore, in 1591, King James paid close attention to the trial of the notable sorcerer Doctor Fian, during which one Agnis Tompson was accused of trying to suborn one of the king’s attendants into procuring a piece of cloth worn by the king, in order to bewitch the king to death “and put him to such extraordinary paines, as if he had beene lying vpon sharp thornes and endes of Needles.”5 Similarly, in Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Queens (1609), the witches conspire against those whom they envy: The Ditch is made, and our Nails the Spade, With Pictures full, of Wax, and of Wooll; Their Lives I stick, with Needles quick; There lacks but the Blood, to make up the Flood. The witches in Macbeth don’t seem to make literal images of wax or cloth, but they are the impresarios of a peep show of the future kings of Scotland, in which images of Banquo’s children dissolve into the mirror (4.1.112sd); and in a sense the witches construct a kind of mental doll’s house, in which a hypothetical Macbeth is dressed in various costumes—Cawdor’s, King Duncan’s—in order to tempt the real Macbeth into trying on those clothes that fit him so ill. The witches first seduce Macbeth into wrapping himself in the king’s robes, then

❧

prophesying

125

torture him with various sorts of needles. They work with images; in a sense the ingredients they put in their cauldron—scale of dragon, tooth of wolf, maw of shark, nose of Turk, baboon’s blood—are the raw materials for synthesizing a new Macbeth according to the witches’ peculiar taste in human beings. Macbeth is made into a kind of miscarriage of himself. Because the witches traffic in toy kings and make prophecies that sound like anticipatory stage directions, they seem less like soothsayers than like the directors of a masque; Prospero, contriving his harpy-spoiled banquet in The Tempest, is their grim successor. From Macbeth’s point of view, the mise-en-abyme of the future kings of Scotland is a spectacle of terror; but from the point of view of King James, the ideal audience for Macbeth, the pageant is simply a piece of startling theatre designed to flatter the royal ancestors—since James traced his own lineage from Banquo. The witches are little Ben Jonsons, confecting an entertainment that enhaloes the king in glory; and King James is himself the ultimate future into which the characters of the play are peering.

Chapter Thirteen

Squinting at Consequences As soon as Macbeth colludes with sorcery, he is troubled by the difficulty of reading the future. As a loyal thane, Macbeth could let others worry about the scatter from the future’s riddle; but in a state of disobedience, Macbeth must learn to haruspicate or scry for himself, in order to ponder the means against the ends. Do the ends justify the means? If a German man had killed Hitler in 1933, could he have defended his act? The assassin might argue that Hitler’s policies would lead to the extermination of Europe’s Jews, the death of millions of soldiers, and the ruin of his own state. On the other hand, it is likely that such a defense would have availed nothing, since Hitler was a democratically elected head of government, personally guilty of few demonstrable crimes; and furthermore, no jury in 1933 would have been likely to credit the dire consequences of Hitler’s rule that the assassin foresaw. It is only in retrospect that we know the consequences of human acts; but we must make decisions in the present instant, when the future is simply a confusing heap of probabilities and possibilities. This is one reason why ethicists are always suspicious of the argument that the ends justify the means: we can weigh the virtues and vices of the means, but we can’t weigh the virtues and vices of the ends, since the ends lie in an indeterminate futurity. In 1933, it was possible to hope that Hitler might mature into a wise, prudent, responsible leader; only with the help of a time machine can we hope to ascertain the ends, and therefore to be able to measure their good and evil against the good and evil of the means. Only someone certain of future events can be certain that an end justifies the means that accomplish it. Macbeth is a play about the consequences of action; a play about squinting into the future to guess at the consequences of action. Macbeth is not like a 1933 assassin of Hitler, in that Macbeth is not trying to do the greatest good for the greatest number—he’s only trying to do the greatest good for number one. But insofar as he’s trying to master the chains of causality, rows of tumbling dominoes, that lead into a futurity far beyond what he can discern, he—like the imaginary assassin of Hitler—is engaged in a kind of assault against the future, a rending of its veil. To behave virtuously, Shakespeare seems to imply, is to let the future take care of itself; it is the bad man who must develop great skill in weather forecasting,

❧

squinting at consequences

127

clairvoyance. Macbeth, of course, never learns how to forecast future events very well. What prevents him from making out the consequences of his actions? It’s not that he’s a fool—he seems in many ways judicious and intelligent. It’s not that he is surrounded by unpredictable people—indeed, it’s one of the oddities of the play that Macbeth and his wife are almost the only evil human beings in the whole world: despite the play’s general fogginess, everyone is basically good, except the earlier thane of Cawdor (a traitor not lacking in nobility: 1.2.53, 1.4.7—“Nothing in his life / Became him like the leaving it”) and the sailor’s stingy wife (1.3.4). It’s as if Macbeth and his wife were the universe’s sole source of disease. Banquo, Macduff, Duncan, and Malcolm all act with exemplary courtesy and goodwill—if they are sometimes suspicious, they have good reason to be so. So generally virtuous are the non-Macbeth characters that Malcolm has trouble even feigning wickedness, in a scene (4.3) designed to test Macduff— Macduff long refuses to believe Malcolm capable of vice. Macbeth ought to be able to predict people’s behavior according to simple ethical tenets—they don’t behave with the slightest degree of caprice or irregularity. But, of course, Macbeth’s predictive schemes break down entirely. Why? To become preoccupied with the future is to fall into a kind of theatre of imaginary consequences—to toy with scenarios (if I do this, then that will happen, unless . . . in which case, then . . . unless). This is why Shakespeare provides witches: to put on stage the whole histrionic mechanism of self-disguise, self-excuse, self-extenuation that bedevils the man who is projecting the consequences of evil acts. Eventually the causal chain will return the foul deed upon the doer: the hand that strikes the murderous blow provokes a string of events that leads to perfect retribution. In his heart Macbeth knows this: we but teach Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return To plague th’ inventor. This even-handed justice Commends th’ ingredience of our poison’d chalice To our own lips. (1.7.8–12) —or, later, when Fleance has escaped, “We have scorch’d the snake, not kill’d it” (3.2.13). The serpent’s tail is always in its own mouth, and evil returns to him who does evil. (Such redounding is a continual theme in the last scene of Hamlet as well: Laertes feels that he is “a woodcock to mine own springe,” and Horatio announces that “purposes mistook [have] / Fall’n on th’ inventors’ heads”— Hamlet 5.2.305, 384–85.) But Macbeth does not choose to live according to this symmetrical moral law: the witches assist Macbeth in erecting a theatre of false outcomes, a delusive prosperity that will follow upon the murder of Duncan. The witches, like all oracles, invite a kind of literary criticism—and Macbeth, the great soldier, is a poor critic, who tends to construe ambiguous texts according to his own system of wishing, instead of the system of justice. He dreams of

128

❧

macbeth

becoming an exception to the rules, able to escape punishment for sin. Like all sorcerers, Macbeth performs daring experiments with the salvation of soul—as if clever manipulations of texts, explorations of paradox, will discover loopholes in divine laws. Auden claimed that Iago was a practical joker, a kind of demented sociologist performing experiments in the culture of jealousy. Macbeth’s witches also seem engaged in a kind of psychological experiment, in which they give Macbeth a thematic apperception test and ask him to find private meanings in loud vague statements: 2. Apparition. Be bloody, bold, and resolute: laugh to scorn The pow’r of man; for none of woman born Shall harm Macbeth. . . . 3. App. . . . Macbeth shall never vanquish’d be until Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill Shall come against him. (4.1.79–81, 92–94) A man not born of woman will pick up a sword, and a forest start to walk—these things seem to Macbeth’s logical mind mere impossibilities, deliria. Faced with these rhymed blotches, Macbeth says, in effect, there’s nothing at all depicted here, except my immunity from retribution. It is similar to Hamlet’s quiz to Polonius on the shapes of clouds, except that, in Macbeth, there exists a referent on stage—the drama will show that the wispy shapes of an unborn man and a strolling grove can harden into something potent. The witches are poets, confronting Macbeth with rebuses of the sublime. Lurking behind the riddle about Birnam wood is Orpheus’ song, which did compel trees to pick up their roots and dance; the witches are appealing to a hidden music in the cosmos, a music beyond Macbeth’s power to hear, but with the motor force to restore order to Scotland. The oracles that seem generated by a random assortment of subjects and predicates—texts scattered with a sieve—carry a design of terror that Macbeth can’t discern. To consort with witches is to enter the realm of the uninterpretable, which forces one to arbitrary interpretations. The witches in every way defy interpretation: they can’t be categorized as men or women: “You should be women, / And yet your beards forbid me to interpret / That you are so” (1.3.45–47); they can’t even be categorized as good or evil: “This supernatural soliciting / Cannot be ill; cannot be good” (1.3.130–31). The witches are ambiguous in the way that the future itself is ambiguous: they stand for the illegibility of what hasn’t yet happened. They seem generated from a random assortment of leftover stage props, old dresses, old beards, plucked from the back of the costume room; when they hail Macbeth as thane of Cawdor and king of Scotland, Macbeth must feel that the witches have come to the wrong playhouse, or have forgotten the script.

Chapter Fourteen

Macbeth’s Children Macbeth is a drama obsessed with children, in a peculiarly anguished, throttled manner. Launcelot Gobbo, in The Merchant of Venice, remarks that “it is a wise father that knows his own child” (2.2.76–77); and throughout Macbeth the characters in the play, and we in the audience, are frustrated in the attempt to make sense of paternal and filial relationships. In healthy families, kinship is clear—we know that Malcolm is the son of Duncan, and that Fleance is the son of Banquo. And in a healthy state, feudal obligations are clear, in that lord and vassal are defined, through metaphors of parent and child, as forms of love—as Macbeth tells Duncan: our duties Are to your throne and state children and servants; Which do but what they should, by doing every thing Safe toward your love and honor. (1.4.24–27) But in unhealthy families, such as Macbeth’s, children twist and recede, grow phantasmagorical. Macbeth understands his children as the consequences of his deeds; and as he becomes a bad child to Duncan, his own “children”—the results of his murderous acts—become monsters, turn against him. The stage starts to fill with various sorts of gruesome or dead children—emblems of the distortions and emptinesses that an evil present can inflict upon the future. The assassination of Duncan feels, to the assassins, exactly like patricide. Lady Macbeth is so sensitive to Duncan’s fatherlikeness that she can’t stab him: “Had he not resembled / My father as he slept, I had done’t” (2.2.12–13). As soon as Macbeth commits the crime, he enters an odd sort of familial limbo, where no one has any sense of who is parent and who is child. By unchilding themselves from the family of Duncan, Macbeth and his wife become monsters, and start to engender further monsters. King James, in the Daemonologie, was skeptical about the existence of changelings, freaks born from the intercourse of an incubus and a witch—James thought that the devil could take “intollerably cold” sperm from a corpse, and deposit it in a mortal woman, but that “it would bread no monster, but onely such a naturall of-spring, as would haue cummed betuixt that man or woman and that other abused person, in-case they both being aliue had had a doe with other.”1 But in Shakespeare’s theatre, where metaphors are alive,

130

❧

macbeth

a whole race of crooked children is spawned as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth displace themselves into sorcerer and succubus. This process of miscegenation between man and demon begins shortly before Duncan’s death, when Lady Macbeth improvises a new role for herself—the consort of the devil—in a great prayer to the spirits of murder: unsex me here, And fill me from the crown to the toe topful Of direst cruelty! . . . Come to my woman’s breasts, And take my milk for gall, you murth’ring ministers. (1.5.41–43, 47–48) Here Murder itself is personified as a kind of hell-child, at once curdling the milk in Lady Macbeth’s breasts and nursing itself from them—this twisted thing will soon start to grow, to crowd out of the play as many of the other children as it can, like a baby cuckoo shoving all the other chicks and eggs out of the nest. The natural world, in its proper state, is fecund—the “temple-haunting marlet . . . Hath made his pendant bed and procreant cradle” only where “The air is delicate” (1.6.4, 8, 10), namely, Macbeth’s castle! But in the unnatural world born of the unwoman’s schemes, there multiply first demon children, then dead children. Soon after Lady Macbeth proposes her vision of the child Murder, her husband proposes a counter-child, Pity: If it were done, when ’tis done, then ’twere well It were done quickly. If th’ assassination Could trammel up the consequence, and catch With his surcease, success; that but this blow Might be the be-all and the end-all—here, But here, upon this bank and shoal of time, We’ld jump the life to come . . . Besides, this Duncan Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been So clear in his great office, that his virtues Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongu’d, against The deep damnation of his taking-off; And pity, like a naked new-born babe, Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubin, hors’d Upon the sightless couriers of the air, Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye, That tears shall drown the wind. (1.7.1–7, 16–25) Macbeth’s speech proceeds from a meditation on stopping up consequences, short-circuiting divine retribution, to a meditation on a child, because he knows

❧

macbeth’s children

131

that events always have consequences—always have children. It is as if Macbeth would like to assault time itself, to freeze an instant of success into a permanent tableau of triumph, to translate himself into a stunted universe where causes have no effects; but, of course, he can’t improvise an entirely new temporal and ethical system. The consequence he most fears is a denouncing cherub, Pity, who will restore heaven’s justice by inspiring an investigation of the crime. Macbeth, it seems, must murder Pity, if the assassination of Duncan is to have a good outcome; to murder Pity is beyond his powers, but his attempt to stifle the consequences of evil will indeed lead him to kill real children. Lady Macbeth instantly hears the need for child-extermination implicit in her husband’s notion that Pity is a “new-born babe,” and she underscores her resolution that Duncan must die in a speech that strangely combines patricide and infanticide. First she conceived of Murder as her child; now she speaks of child-murder: I have given suck, and know How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me; I would, while it was smiling in my face, Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums, And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn as you Have done to this. (1.7.54–59) Behind this spooked discourse on the power of oaths is a truth that Lady Macbeth is unwilling to confront directly: to kill one’s metaphorical father—the king—is indeed equivalent to killing one’s child, because justice imposes symmetry, turns self-aggrandisement into a continual diminishing of self. Later, in Macbeth’s presence, the witches will pour into their pot “sow’s blood, that hath eaten / Her nine farrow” (4.3.64–65)—another sign that the Macbeths are selfextinguishing creatures, eating their own young. To stop up consequences is, literally, to kill one’s children. Macbeth shudders to hear his wife speak of dashing out her child’s brains, and cries “Bring forth men-children only!” (1.7.72). We seem to be on the verge of an unnatural, all-male world, in which an unsexed Lady Macbeth and an unmade Macbeth (“the fitness [of the time and place] now / Does unmake you”—1.7.53–54) somehow will breed male children. Since Shakespeare’s theatre really did consist entirely of men, the artificial conditions of the Jacobean theatre seem to be infecting the world that the theatre represents. Just as Macbeth will finally call attention to the fact that he’s an actor, so Lady Macbeth calls attention to the fact that she’s male: the theatre provides a shock of reality in the only way that theatre can, by dismantling its own illusoriness. It is worth pondering Lady Macbeth’s declaration that she has given suck. To whom? Where are the Macbeth children? This question has become a byword for futile speculation into the “biographies” of imaginary people, ever since L. C. Knights, in “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?”2 mocked A. C. Bradley

132

❧

macbeth

for attributing real lives to the phantoms that Shakespeare presented on stage. But the critic asks this question not out of naïveté but because the play presents the question in the form of a riddle without an answer. Macbeth’s role as father is one of the play’s many acts without a name. In the later parts of the play, Macbeth starts to fret increasingly that Banquo’s children will inherit the throne (“Upon my head they plac’d a fruitless crown, / And put a barren sceptre in my gripe”—3.1.60–61); it seems as if Macbeth’s evil will simply terminate into complete inconsequentiality—far from having good consequences, or even bad consequences, it may be an utter vanity. But this whole line of brooding makes little sense. If Macbeth has children, why doesn’t he take steps to ensure their safety, teach them the arts of rule, and strengthen their position with the Scottish people? Why is their presence never felt in his private musings, let alone the outer drama? Why does Macduff, in fury, cry out, “He has no children” (4.3.216)? And if Macbeth has no children, why should he worry about the inheritance of the crown? Conceivably he might sire some children in the future, but he is not young—soon he will be telling us that his life has “fall’n into the sear, the yellow leaf” (5.3.23)—and the erotic bond between the two murderers, one an unsexed woman, doesn’t seem procreative in character. Shakespeare seems bent on making Macbeth neither a bechilded nor a childless man, since to give him a son would suggest that his anxieties have some referent outside himself, as if he were still a rational, pragmatical sort of man, instead of a man caught up in tracing the unreal effects of real causes; and to give him no children would make his anxieties all too obviously ludicrous. These children exist as untested dramatic hypotheses, neither part of the play nor excluded from the play—the dramaturgical equivalent of abortions. Macbeth’s only real children are the consequences of his crimes—the hellchildren—which he must cherish, foster lovingly, bring to full stature. And soon his theatre starts mocking him with a variety of grisly literalizations of the dead babies that had decorated Lady Macbeth’s tropes in Act I. The third witch tosses into the cauldron a “Finger of birth-strangled babe” (4.1.30); and in the next scene Macbeth is reduced to such a wretched state that he sends murderers to kill Macduff’s brave little boy (4.2.83). Soon, hallucinatory images of children start to disturb Macbeth, first by showing him the emptiness of his crimes, then by tempting him to overconfidence in wickedness: a masque of Banquo’s progeny suggests the futility of Macbeth’s dynastic ambitions (4.1.112sd); on the other hand, the apparition of “a bloody Child” announces that “none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth” (4.1.80–81). This seems comforting, but of course Macbeth will be killed by Macduff, “untimely ripp’d” from his mother’s womb (5.7.16)—it is appropriate that a man who hoped to live as an exception to nature’s rules would die at the hand of a man born in such an exceptional manner. Homeostasis is built into the tragic theatre: nature has a self-corrective mechanism that rectifies any swerve into the unnatural. Macbeth deprives mothers of children; so, according to the law of symmetry, he is slain by an unmothered child.

Chapter Fifteen

Macbeth as an Actor Like many of Shakespeare’s unhappier characters, Macbeth is, in some respects, an incompetent actor—he perishes, in a sense, because he chooses to live his life according to a script that he’s underqualified to perform. With his reasonable, literal, dogged mind, he’s ill-equipped to live in a world of son et lumière—he’s quickly lost in the witches’ funhouse, in the realm of ambiguity conjured by his efforts to trace tangled chains of contingencies into the future. He is richly imaginative, but incapable of dissembling what he imagines. Again and again, Shakespeare emphasizes Macbeth’s overtness, his inability to conceal himself, his sheer legibility to all the other characters: when Macbeth hears the witches prophesy his future glory, he is visibly startled—as Banquo says, “Good sir, why do you start, and seem to fear / Things that do sound so fair?” (1.3.51–52). Similarly, during the banquet scene, after Macbeth makes faces at an empty stool, he apologizes for his “strange infirmity” (3.4.85)—or as Lady Macbeth calls it, his “thing of custom” (3.4.96)—as if no one should think it strange that Macbeth is seized by weird fits of shouting at ghosts. Images in Macbeth’s mind keep leaking out into the world around him and infecting his social behavior. Macbeth is perfectly aware of his compulsive-expressive character, and sometimes gives himself advice in stage-acting: “False face must hide what the false heart doth know” (1.7.82), he remarks after deciding to murder Duncan; and, just before the banquet, he further reminds himself that, at all costs, he mustn’t let his subjects see his guilt inscribed on his face: the guilty pair must “make our faces vizards to our hearts, / Disguising what they are”—not easy when, as Macbeth admits, “full of scorpions is my mind” (3.2.34–35, 36). Yet Macbeth’s histrionic efforts are largely in vain—he simply lacks the talent for acting. After the assassination, Macbeth does his best to seem shocked, shocked! by the discovery of the king’s corpse, but he fools none of the more discerning spectators: Malcolm instantly turns to Donalbain and says, “To show an unfelt sorrow is an office / Which the false man does easy. I’ll to England” (2.3.136–37). When Macbeth feigns sorrow, he looks like a man feigning sorrow. Macbeth is a self-conscious man. An actor can use his self-consciousness to control facial and bodily gestures, but Macbeth’s self-consciousness is entirely inhibiting and accusatory—far from helping him to dissemble his behavior, it induces him to make a spectacle of his guilt. Because Macbeth knows that he

134

❧

macbeth

behaves haltingly, ineptly, when his conscious mind is directing his action, he sometimes seeks to sink into a state of unconsciousness. Often he prays for a loss of rational understanding of his crime, as if by plunging into automatism, he won’t be responsible for his acts, subject to remorse or damnation. In Duncan’s very presence Macbeth mentions, aside, that he hopes to fall into a trance of evil: Stars, hide your fires; Let not light see my black and deep desires. The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see. (1.4.50–53) Macbeth needs to destroy his faculty of self-scrutiny, self-judgment; he needs to find a way of acting without watching himself acting. Later, as he contemplates the murder of Banquo and his children, Macbeth again hopes to contrive the deed in such a manner that all eyes are shut while it happens: Come, seeling night, Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day, And with thy bloody and invisible hand Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond Which keeps me pale!. Light thickens, and the crow Makes wing to the rooky wood . . . (3.2.46–51) Any murderer might hope for darkness to conceal his crime from others; but Macbeth seeks a darkness so deep that Banquo is un-Banquo’d into a featureless thing, without any bonds of friendship with the man who commands his death. To seel is to sew shut the eyelids of a bird of prey; and much of Macbeth’s career can be seen as a faltering attempt to blind himself to his own behavior—though in his private night his deeds reemerge, in hideous form, as crows and scorpions. After Banquo’s death, when Macbeth decides to go to the witches to learn new possibilities for bad deeds, he says: I am in blood Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o’er. Strange things I have in head that will to hand, Which must be acted ere they may be scann’d. (3.4.135–39) Macbeth wants to descend into a state of involuntary, instinctive action, like a shark or a wolf, remote from any scanning, any reading. Macbeth, so legible to others, wishes to be illegible to himself. If he can act with a pure purposivity, his thespian incompetence won’t stand in the way of his desires. The acting method that grew out of the teachings of Stanislavsky recommends a total immersion in

❧

macbeth as an actor

135

the role, so that gestures and inflections are spontaneous, unstudied. Macbeth would like to become a method assassin, but he can’t quite tear out the inner eye that watches himself performing. In order to defeat self-consciousness, Macbeth puppetizes himself, or pretends to, so that the responsibility for his actions will fall to those who pull his strings: the witches and, especially, Lady Macbeth. Sometimes Lady Macbeth seems eager to play the puppeteer for Macbeth-Punch, as when she offers, near the beginning, to become Macbeth’s private Vice, his evil angel whispering in his ear: Thou wouldst be great; Art not without ambition, but without The illness should attend it. What thou wouldst, That wouldst thou holily; wouldst not play false, And yet wouldst wrongly win. . . . Hie thee hither, That I may pour my spirits in thine ear, And chastise with the valor of my tongue All that impedes thee from the golden round. . . . (1.5.18–22, 25–28) And she goes on to unsex herself, as if she could dehumanize herself into a purely demonic state. And yet, Lady Macbeth is overparted in the role of Vice. Humanity clings to her: finally she, exactly like Macbeth, must try to hide her crime from her own gaze. Both Macbeths will themselves to sink into will-less oblivion—as Lady Macbeth remarks before instigating Duncan’s murder: Come, thick night, And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell That my keen knife see not the wound it makes Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark To cry, “Hold, hold!” (1.5.50–54) Both conspirators are auto-hypnotists, trying to program themselves to commit a deed that neither wishes to think about. It is as if murder is more innocent if it lies heaving in the depths, below the level of consciousness. In some respects, Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking is simply that self-hypnosis performed so thoroughly that it usurps the whole of life, as sleep and wakefulness, night and day, trade places. Macbeth is a play about sleep disorders. At times it seems as if the Macbeths can translate their private theatre of sin into a general derangement of nature. They are like squids that shoot out such quantities of moral ink that they promote a darkness that blots out the sun. As Ross tells the Old Man, Thou seest the heavens, as troubled with man’s act, Threaten his bloody stage. By the clock ’tis day, And yet dark night strangles the traveling lamp. (2.4.5–7)

136

❧

macbeth

As the world grows black, it becomes a vacancy, a tabula rasa, a theatre, like Prospero’s isle, on which any fantasy grows credible; but a theatre unlike Prospero’s isle in that no one can see others well enough to exert much control over their behavior. In a sense, all the characters might be played as squinters, groping, stumbling in the dark. In this theatrically plastic state, hallucinations start quickly to encroach. It starts to become impossible to distinguish the fictitious from the true. When Macbeth sees Banquo’s ghost, Lady Macbeth reproaches him for behaving like someone in an old wives’ tale—or like the old wife herself: This is the very painting of your fear; This is the air-drawn dagger which you said Led you to Duncan. O, these flaws and starts, Impostors to true fear, would well become A woman’s story at a winter’s fire, Authorized by her grandam. (3.4.60–65) When Lady Macbeth looks at her husband’s freaks, fits, gusts of terror, she sees someone pretending to be afraid, for histrionic effort; Macbeth’s inauthenticity vitiates even his most intimate expressions of fear. Theatre has corrupted Macbeth: when he dissembles his emotion, he looks like a stage actor; when he freely confesses his emotion, without dissembling, he looks like a stage actor. His whole sensibility has lost conviction. The ghost and the dagger are only two symptoms of a larger delirium. Macbeth hears voices—“ ‘Sleep no more! / Macbeth does murther sleep’ ” (2.2.32–33)—and these voices multiply alarmingly: Thou sure and firm-set earth, Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear Thy very stones prate of my whereabout. . . . (2.1.56–58) blood will have blood. Stones have been known to move and trees to speak; Augures and understood relations have By maggot pies and choughs and rooks brought forth The secret’st man of blood. (3.4.121–25) Macbeth may have succeeded in blinding every eye; but, as if by compensation, he has created a world that teems with throats, thousands of tongues that announce his guilt through every stone, tree, passing bird. The moving stones, the speaking trees, anticipate the Orphic theme in the prophecy about Birnam wood: nature is recasting itself into expressive shapes, shapes of accusation. Far from the unconsciousness of sin that Macbeth desired, he has achieved a general consciousness of sin in the very air. The blacker the stage, the more noisy it becomes.

Chapter Sixteen

Two Theatres Much of the play can be seen as the conflict between two theatres: (1) the Macbeths’ theatre of concealment and aggrandizement; and (2) the other character’s forensic theatre, the theatre of exposure and trial. Of course, the more the Macbeths struggle to seize the management of the stage, the more strongly do secret counterpressures compel the opposite result. Lady Macbeth has an extraordinarily sophisticated technique for assuming control of the action: she presents herself explicitly as a scenarist and a stage director, instead of a conspirator in murder. She has an aesthetic eye, and continually tries to demote terror into harmless images, tableaux morts—as if the whole crime consisted of the manipulation of prop daggers and fake blood. When Macbeth shrinks from incriminating the grooms in the murder of Duncan, Lady Macbeth impatiently exclaims, Infirm of purpose! Give me the daggers. The sleeping and the dead Are but as pictures; ’tis the eye of childhood That fears a painted devil. If he do bleed, I’ll gild the faces of the grooms withal, For it must seem their guilt. (2.2.49–54) Guilt is simply a matter of gilding: for Lady Macbeth, the drama of sin, remorse, damnation, is simply a stage spectacle of painted devils and clever puns—as if she understood that Macbeth is a play by William Shakespeare, instead of a historical event. She aspires toward a condition of perfect detachment, as if by such aesthetic operations as framing and composing she could desensitize herself to gore, turn blood into paint, in order to make spots of bright red that would enhance the picturesqueness of the scene. She approaches assassination in the spirit of an interior decorator. This is the reverse of the automatizing theme: sometimes the Macbeths strive to blind themselves, lose all self-consciousness, but here we see Lady Macbeth trying to cultivate her eye into such a rigorous instrument of aesthetic judgment that moral judgment will vanish entirely. Later, as we’ve seen, she tells Macbeth that Banquo’s ghost is but

138

❧

macbeth

the “very painting” (3.4.60) of his fear—as if Macbeth were a poor stagehand, shoving unnecessary props onto the carefully stage-managed scene of regal authority that she has contrived for the banquet. But her aesthetic dispassion is fragile and soon collapses. By the sleepwalking scene (5.1), Lady Macbeth—far from being able to aestheticize and dismiss human suffering—seems to dwell herself in a kind of perpetual theatre of remorse, a theatre in which she’s condemned to reside forever, with no possibility of going backstage and giving new instructions to the director. She continually washes her hands, but the blood turns out to be not prop blood but real, ineradicable by all the perfumes of Araby—as Macbeth, to his credit, realized much earlier, when he asked, despairingly, Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather The multitudinous seas incarnadine, Making the green one red. (2.2.57–60) Macbeth and his wife cannot flatten all inconvenient facts into two-dimensional images, subject to their control: the grisly horrors loom out at them, uncomfortably real. The final inability of the Macbeths to control the stage props occurs when Macbeth’s severed head is carried in triumph around the stage, as Macduff predicted: “We’ll have thee, as our rarer monsters are, / Painted upon a pole, and underwrit, / ‘Here may you see the tyrant’ ” (5.8.25–27). Macbeth, far from being the master director, has been reduced to a stock bit of halloween spookery: the imaginer has become an image. This bloody head is the end of a long process whereby a Christian theatre of sin and retribution has opposed and usurped the Macbeths’ attempts to demote the deaths of Duncan and Banquo into a harmless, inconsequential pantomime of political advancement. The theme of actual damnation first appears at the play’s comic fringes: the Porter likes to play a little game with himself, pretending that the castle is hell and he’s the gatekeeper: “Here’s a knocking indeed! If a man were porter of Hell Gate, he should have old turning the key. [Knocking within.] Knock, knock, knock! Who’s there, i’ the name of Belzebub? Here’s a farmer that hanged himself on th’ expectation of plenty” (2.3.1–5). But this improvised, almost accidental skit turns out to be the most valid theatre in the entire drama—one of many signs in Shakespeare’s work that child’s play, tomfoolery, is closer to wisdom than the moralizing of philosophers is. Satan is a central actor in Macbeth, capable of seizing the stage whenever conscious control totters, in moments of drunkenness or sleep. The more ostentatiously Macbeth erects his theatre of power, the more hollow it feels to him—he feels hell’s underdrama beneath him, as if the Porter were smiling at him from the trapdoor:

❧

two theatres

139

Upon my head they [the witches] placed a fruitless crown And put a barren sceptre in my gripe . . . If’t be so, For Banquo’s issue have I fil’d my mind, For them the gracious Duncan have I murther’d, Put rancors in the vessel of my peace Only for them, and mine eternal jewel Given to the common enemy of man. (3.1.60–61, 63–68) As the outer theatre, the theatre of Scottish authority, expands, the scope of Macbeth’s personal space oddly keeps shrinking: as Macbeth says when he hears of the escape of Banquo’s son Fleance, “But now I am cabin’d, cribb’d, confin’d, bound in / To saucy doubts and fears” (3.4.23–24)—he feels himself demoted to a theatre in which he is a small personage, instead of a great king. Later Angus will note, “Now does he feel his title / Hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe / Upon a dwarfish thief” (5.2.21–22): the forensic theatre of divine justice reduces Macbeth to a proper scale. And while Macbeth hunches himself in a room with contracting walls, his wife starts to contemplate suicide: “ ’Tis safer to be that which we destroy / Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy” (3.2.6; cf. 5.1.76, 5.9.37). Macbeth will not be a Brutus (5.8.1), will not commit suicide, but the collapse of his power-melodrama into a theatre of stark moral ultimates is no less overwhelming. A theatre built on the absurd premise that real murder is just a stage-illusion, like a lady sawn in half, can’t sustain itself. In the last act, the Macbeths, disoriented by too little sleep, enter a world of sheer nightmare, in which forests learn how to walk, and men not born of women loom out of the darkness. We’ve seen how both Macbeths wished to be automata, blind actors working unconsciously; and in the last act these wishes are granted. Macbeth becomes a wind-up fighting toy, unable to stop swinging his sword no matter how irrational this combat becomes; and Lady Macbeth becomes a sleepwalker, compulsively confessing her sins, as the Doctor notes: “infected minds / To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets. / More needs she the divine than the physician” (5.1.72–74). Discharge, of course, is a medical term, as if Lady Macbeth’s verbal confession were a kind of discharge of pus— her expertise in makeup isn’t enough to prevent the pox of sin from showing on her face and body. She once desired to smear blood on the faces of innocent men in order to incriminate them in murder; now guilt gilds her own hand— “Out, damn’d spot!” (5.1.35)—as the aesthetic and the ethical become one. In her delirium she remembers snatches of her earlier exhortations to Macbeth: “Fie, my lord, fie! A soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to accompt? . . . I tell you yet again, Banquo’s buried; he cannot come out on’s grave” (5.1.36–39, 63–64, restating 1.7.39, 77, and 3.4.60). In this convulsive, helpless state of memory, a kind of ongoing mentality beyond any possibility of forgetfulness, Lady Macbeth seems locked up in

140

❧

macbeth

a private prison without walls, where her crime perpetually reenacts itself, where Duncan’s blood keeps spilling uncontrollably before her eyes, where she is lost in hell’s caricature of purgatory, incapable of purging anything—as the futility of hand washing suggests. She, once so scornful of ghosts, has become a ghost; she, once eager to become a demon, suffers from a kind of demonic possession in which she is at once possessor and possessed. But while Lady Macbeth becomes a wraith muttering in a monodrama, Macbeth still inhabits the public world, ever more conscious of the unfitness of his ordained role. In Macbeth’s incomparable last soliloquy, Shakespeare seems to pun on two different meanings of the term bad actor: Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. (5.5.19–28) Macbeth, who squinted so keenly into the future to make out the consequences of his actions, at last sees only dust, only extinction, at the end of tomorrows; Macbeth, so often unable to act with discretion, circumspection, or self-control, now sees himself as a vain loud scene-chewer in a botched play. He hoped his eye would wink at his hand; but now his eye stares fixedly at himself, and he becomes a drama critic, harshly evaluating his own performance. First a dwarf wearing big robes, then the big noise mouthed by an idiot. But this speech is still a forensic ploy, a making of excuses: behind the self-excoriation is the desperate hope to attain the relief of nonentity—the ultimate evasion of punishment, of self-knowledge. In Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, written little more than ten years before Macbeth, the protagonist faces certain damnation, and cries out, All beasts are happy, for when they die, Their souls are soon dissolved in elements; But mine must live still to be plagued in hell. . . . The clock striketh twelve It strikes, it strikes! Now body turn to air, Or Lucifer will bear thee quick to hell. Thunder and lightning O soul, be changed into little water drops, And fall into the ocean, ne’er to be found. (5.2.175–77, 181–84)

❧

two theatres

141

Similarly, if Macbeth can demote himself to a fool’s fiction, something even less substantial than air or vapor, he can wriggle free from hell. The play ends, then, with the fragmentation and destruction of the stage. The Macbeths chose to become clowns, lunging at stray roles while trying to deflect attention from the big corpse of Duncan at the center of the stage—as if they were wizards shouting, Pay no attention to that great bleeding thing! But this circus of misrule couldn’t last: eventually the theatre of legal process overwhelms the skit of bad authority in which the Macbeths tried to dwell. But the Macbeths disintegrate in two quite distinct ways: Lady Macbeth embarks on a long diminuendo, as she first unsexes herself, then implodes into complete nonentity. She recedes, registers faintly, underacts, until she’s audible only to the Doctor and Gentlewoman, or herself, or no one. But Macbeth starts to overact: he ends with a kind of crescendo of blustering. Like Samson in the temple of Dagon, he tugs too violently at the illusions that prop up his theatre, and it comes crashing down on his head. If Lady Macbeth tends to catatonia, Macbeth tends to epilepsy. Neither acting style is appropriate to the focused, inclusive, ethical theatre in which Malcolm and Macduff prosecute the Macbeths for their crimes; but perhaps Shakespeare meant that a controlled and attractive way of behaving on life’s stage is difficult to achieve for those who refuse to observe propriety of conduct.

Chapter Seventeen

Witches Amok The stage history of Macbeth is a horror story in which the role of the witches keeps expanding, and frantic attempts are made to restrain their magic power. Even by the time of Macbeth’s first publication, in the First Folio of 1623 (seven years after Shakespeare’s death), someone seems to have spliced into Shakespeare’s text a new witch, or witchmaster, Hecate (3.5 and 4.1.39–43). In both her scenes, Hecate is associated with music: the stage directions instruct the witches to perform songs, Come away at the end of 3.5, and Black spirits at 4.1.43. The folio doesn’t give the text of either song, but each can be found both in Thomas Middleton’s The Witch (ca. 1609) and in the Davenant version of Macbeth (1663–64, publ. 1674). It is possible that the Hecate scenes and songs are the work of Middleton; in any case they greatly distend the spatial range of the witches. Hecate, above all, loves to fly: I am for th’ air; this night I’ll spend Unto a dismal and a fatal end. Great business must be wrought ere noon: Upon the corner of the moon There hangs a vap’rous drop profound, I’ll catch it ere it come to ground . . . (Davenant, Macbeth 3.5. 20–25) [Hecate] Hark, I am call’d, my little Spirit see, Sits in a foggy Cloud, and stays for me. [Machine descends. Sing within. . . . 3[rd spirit]. O what a dainty pleasure’s this, To sail i’th’ Air while the Moon shines fair; To sing, to Toy, to Dance and Kiss, Over Woods, high Rocks and Mountains; Over Hills, and misty Fountains: Over Steeples, Towers, and Turrets: We flye by night ‘mongst troops of Spirits. No Ring of Bells to our Ears sounds, No howles of Wolves, nor Yelps of Hounds; No, nor the noise of Waters breach, Nor Cannons Throats our Height can reach. (Davenant Macbeth, 3.8)1

❧

witches amok

143

The authentically Shakespearean witches were also capable of rapid movement to distant places—one of them sails in a sieve to Aleppo to waste a stingy woman’s husband. But Hecate and her minions seem more exhilarated by the flying itself than by any mischief to be done at the destination. There is a childlike erotic quality to these scenes, as the spirits dream of tumbling with one another, toying and kissing in a realm without gravity; they seem less to be witches than to be putti, exulting in their immunity from pain, their capacity for vertigo, their freedom of topsy-turvy, roll, pitch, yaw. These quotations illustrate how the witches evolve: Shakespeare’s witches are focused, task-oriented creatures, confecting spectacles for the sake of their effect on Macbeth; they are strictly local Parcae. Like the doorkeeper in Kafka’s parable “Before the Law” (1914), who guards a doorway into the Law devised for one man and one man only, the witches seem to be dedicated to Macbeth alone. When they succeed in destroying him, they vanish; their peculiar sort of evil seems no longer to exist as a factor in human affairs. They dispel themselves as they finish casting spells on Macbeth. Hecate, on the other hand, is a spirit of zigzag self-delight, with a short attention span, lavish with her prodigies; she’s selfconsciously impressive, but her malice is so theoretical that she seems innocuous, cartoonish. Shakespeare’s witches have a boniness, a deformity, a rancor—they aren’t far from the actual old crones who, in King James’s account, bartered with the devil for supernatural power. But Hecate and her crew are aerial images, the giddy components of a magic show. The poetry of Shakespeare’s witches is full of low, icky things, adder’s tongue and goat’s gall, charmed into incantation by the trochaic tetrameter of the verse—the final syllable is usually chopped off, like the finger of the birth-strangled babe. But the Hecate poetry is lyrical and lithe— such lines as “To sail i’th’ Air while the Moon shines fair” could be part of the popular music of any age. Robert Johnson (b. 1582), who evidently wrote the music for two Ariel songs in The Tempest, composed a setting for Come away—this very song; the passage from “To sail i’th’ Air while the Moon shines fair” to the end is lilting, jingly, a clear crowd-pleaser (see ex. 15). It seems that even in the 1610s, Macbeth was beginning to move toward opera. The witches not only want to fly but also want to sing; they need to push the play into the dimension of music theatre, just as they sail through the unroofed theatre building to the height of the moon. It is the witches who motivate the opera lurking near the surface of the drama. The performance history of Macbeth is marked by two themes: first, its rapid accumulation of a corpus of incidental music2—of all Shakespeare’s tragedies, Macbeth was the most musical, despite its lack of explicit singing in the manner of Ophelia or the gravediggers in Hamlet. In 1702, Richard Leveridge contributed much to this corpus: Leveridge had been one of the lead basses in Purcell’s company and seems to have had a special gift for the magical and the grotesque: he played the sorcerer Ismeron in Purcell’s The Indian Queen and, later, was known for playing the cyclops Polyphemus in Handel’s Acis and Galatea. Leveridge’s role in Macbeth was Hecate, since witches were often sung by

144

❧

macbeth

Example 15. Come away (Robert Johnson). men in those times; and he was to sing his own music in the role of Hecate for almost fifty years—the music was so popular that it persisted into nineteenthcentury productions. Leveridge’s Hecate, come away is every bit as cheerful, peppy, as Johnson’s setting, but far more earthbound: it chugs and jogs and jugs. Macbeth even generated a certain amount of meta-poetical music, for example Thomas Linley’s Lyric Ode on the Fairies, Aerial Beings and Witches of Shakespeare (1769), to a text by French Lawrence, performed at David Garrick’s Shakespeare Jubilee at Stratford. In Linley’s music we can hear the dismemberment of Handel’s rhetoric into a heap of isolated tropes: slow black unison melodies, high frills, furious dance-fragments, subterranean clongs: What howling whirlwinds rend the sky! Why shakes the ivy-mantled tow’r? The conscious sun turns back his eye, And nature, trembling, owns their power. For whom, at yonder livid flame, Do you the deed without a name? Ye secret hags, whence breathes this sound? Why sinks that cauldron in the ground? Why do these thunders roll? Tell me, what means that armed head? Why comes that bloody child? The hags are fled; They’re vanished into air. Amazement chills my soul! . . . The tempests cease: The charm’d deep sinks before the sound; A purer glory dawns around; Soft sigh the list’ning gales, And all is peace.

❧

witches amok

145

Linley’s discontinuities, his abrupt juxtaposition of slow, fast, high, low, his exclusion of the mid-range in tempo and pitch, his fingers of birth-strangled fugues, all anticipate the supernatural evocations of Weber and Mendelssohn. Linley seems to compress a whole play’s worth of terse musical cues and local atmospherics into the space of a few minutes. Here is made audible an example of how Shakespeare helped the Romantic movement to come into being: the witches of Macbeth seemed to peer into that hidden world to which the sun’s “conscious eye” is blind. The ode, closely modeled on the progress-of-poesy odes of Thomas Gray and William Collins, ends with a prayer to Fancy to “give another Shakespeare to our isle”; and yet the prosaic and enlightened world of the eighteenth century seems relieved that no second Shakespeare has appeared. For all its eerie gothicisms, the ode is a complacent piece of music, eager to confine the chaotic into a walled-off domain of the picturesque. Music can embody the witches’ charms; but music can also be a talisman of rationality to defend us against the witches. This is true not only of Linley’s ode but of all Macbeth music: music must ape both disorder and order, must be noise and sweet concord in turn. The second large theme in Macbeth’s evolution is the expansion of the witches’ authority, not only on stage (as more lines and more elaborate stage machinery were added to their parts), but also backstage (as the play became an object of actors’ superstitions, its very name so taboo that an actor who spoke the title out loud needed to perform certain rituals of pacing and throwing salt in order to avoid bad luck), and finally in the domain of literary criticism. Loosed among literary critics, the witches accomplished terrible things. The most vexing problem the witches presented was their destabilizing of such terms as realistic and fantastic, or fatal and trivial. They impinge on the most august realms of the moral universe and seem intimate with Necessity itself, and yet slime clings to them. The theatre traditionally represents a condition where human deviance is corrected by the imposition of some secret order; but Macbeth, like Job, presents a more disturbing picture of human rectitude ruined by some transcendental taste for the vicious. The play demonstrates, in good tragic fashion, that vice is self-limiting and self-terminating, but it seems clear that Scotland is the victim not of merely human depravity but of the depravity of histrionic gods (like those of Lucretius) who rejoice at the spectacle of our lives as a kind of snuff play. Macbeth is intolerable, not because it suggests that human life is a tragedy, but because it suggests that it is a tragedy of a peculiarly lowgrade, contemptible sort—a B-movie horror squealer, with cheap special effects. In Greek tragedy, fate sometimes shows a real refinement of sensibility; here, by contrast, fate seems bored and childish, capable of stimulating itself only through a brisk video game of Mortal Kombat. The mood of Macbeth is similar to that of Forster’s A Passage to India (1924): “Visions are supposed to entail profundity, but———Wait till you get one, dear reader! The abyss also may be petty, the serpent of eternity made of maggots.”3

146

❧

macbeth

The older literary critics were fascinated by the witches’ bizarre combination of the gross and the sublime. Joseph Addison wrote in The Spectator (1 July 1712), “There is something so wild and yet so solemn in the speeches of his Ghosts, Fairies, Witches, and the like Imaginary Persons, that we cannot forbear thinking them natural, tho’ we have no Rule by which to judge of them, and must confess, if there are such Beings in the World, it looks highly probable they should talk and act as he has represented them.” Yeats thought that William Blake was a too literal realist of imagination;4 Addison, more troublesomely, considered Shakespeare a particularly acute observer of nonexistent things, expert at a naturalistic representation of creatures that have no nature to be represented. Addison, then, found the witches convincing, without any criteria for conviction; but later critics would struggle to hold the witches’ natural and supernatural aspects in a single stereoscopic image, without headache. How could a witch manage to be a hag and an avatar of ultimate evil at the same time? Some critics thought consistency demanded that one aspect must be sacrificed; Coleridge, for example, insisted on deleting every Halloweenery from their appearance and elevating them to the stature of Parcae or Erinyes, as a report of an unpublished lecture of 1813 suggests: Mr. Coleridge began by commenting on the vulgar stage error which transformed the Weird Sisters into witches with broomsticks. They were awful beings, and blended in themselves the Fates and Furies of the ancients with the sorceresses of Gothic and popular superstitions. They were mysterious natures: fatherless, motherless, sexless: they come and disappear: they lead evil minds from evil to evil, and have the power of tempting those who have been the tempters of themselves. The exquisite judgment of Shakespeare is shown in nothing more than in the different language of the Witches with each other, and with those whom they address: the former displays a certain fierce familiarity, grotesqueness mingled with terror; the latter is always solemn, dark, mysterious.5

Though Coleridge would like to denature and metaphysicize the witches, dignify them, he is deeply conscious of their divided nature: part Gothic, part Greek-tragic; part ugly gossip, part will toward annihilation. But he refuses another possibility for understanding their twiformed character: the possibility that they might be at once vile and silly, a clown-show in Satan’s circus. Even Coleridge’s mind, finely tolerant of paradox, can’t quite embrace the notion of a purely frivolous sort of damnation. But perhaps Shakespeare could: he may have found congenial the notion of hell as a kind of theatre, in which complete inauthenticity, absence of valid being, represented itself as a continual exchange of masks, a retouching of facelessness with makeup. Possibly no preacher against the sinfulness of the stage possessed the anti-theatrical prejudice quite so fully as Shakespeare himself. It is intriguing that Coleridge emphasized the divided character of the witches’ discourse, their habit of using one tonality among themselves and

❧

witches amok

147

another in public, because it is just here where the witches’ staginess is most clearly felt. They have a backstage rhetoric (actors’ shoptalk and tale-telling) and an onstage rhetoric (the spiel of flesh-creep)—one reason why Hecate is a somewhat unwelcome addition to the text (in 3.5) in that she confuses these two areas, by suggesting that even backstage the witches are such compulsive showmen that they can’t stop conjuring impressive spectacles, even when there’s no Macbeth to impress. Shakespeare, on the other hand, knew that spectacles were expensive, and imagined a much more parsimonious sort of evil. Another critic of Macbeth, even subtler than Coleridge, also stressed the strange split between the private witches and the public witches. This was Shakespeare’s German translator, August Wilhelm Schlegel, who wrote in 1808: Whether the age of Elizabeth still believed in ghosts and witches, is a matter of perfect indifference for the justification of the use which in Hamlet and Macbeth Shakespeare has made of popular traditions. No superstition can be preserved and diffused through many centuries and among diverse people without having a foundation in human nature; and on this the poet builds. . . . If Shakespeare had ventured to make arbitrary changes in these popular traditions, he would have forfeited his right to use them, and his most ingenious inventions would have seemed mere idle fancies. His picture of the witches has a certain magical quality: he has created for them a particular language, which, although composed of the usual elements, still seems to be a collection of formulae of incantation. The accumulation of rhymes, and the rhythmus of the verse, form, as it were, the hollow music of the nocturnal dances of these tenebrous beings. He has been abused for using the names of disgusting objects; but who has ever imagined that the magic kettle of the witches was filled with agreeable aromatics? That would be kin, as the poet says, to desiring that hell should give good counsel. These repulsive things, from which the imagination shrinks, are here emblems of the hostile powers which ferment in nature’s breast; and the repugnance of our sense is outweighed by the mental horror. With one another the witches discourse like women of the very lowest class [aus dem Pöbel] . . . when, however, they address Macbeth they assume a loftier tone: their predictions . . . have all the obscure brevity, the majestic solemnity of oracles, such as have ever spread terror among mortals. . . . A monstrous crime is committed: Duncan, a venerable old man, and the best of kings, is, in defenseless sleep, under the hospitable roof, murdered by his subject, whom he has loaded with honors and rewards. Natural motives alone seem inadequate to explain such a deed, or the perpetrator must have been portrayed as the blackest and most hardened of villains. Shakespeare wished to exhibit a more sublime picture: he portrayed a noble but ambitious hero, yielding to a deep-laid hellish temptation, and in whom all the crimes to which, in order to secure the fruits of his first crime, he is impelled by necessity, cannot altogether eradicate the stamp of his native heroism. . . . The first idea comes from those beings whose whole activity is guided toward wickedness. . . . It seems that the Destiny [Verhängnis] of the ancients rules again in the tragedy.6

Schlegel felt acutely the incommensurability of the witches’ two styles of speech: that of the “women of the very lowest class” and that of the Delphic Oracle. But precisely in that discrepancy, he thought, there lay the power of the play:

148

❧

macbeth

Shakespeare combined the rudimentary terror of popular superstition (old women with the power of the evil eye, for example) with an intelligent, philosophical sort of terror, the “Destiny of the ancients.” But Schlegel does not say which role is fundamental. Are the witches Destiny itself in drag? Or are they normal old women, like the druids in Goethe’s poem “Die erste Walpurgisnacht,” who have mastered an effective charade of heebiejeebies for frightening the populace? Objections can be made to either argument: it is hard to get the witches in focus. Shakespeare seems to have placed them in a condition of such pure play that it is impossible to ascribe a fundamental role to them: they have their prop box of fake beards, funny-looking things to throw into a pot; they have their poem box of startling meters for magic charms; but beneath costume and spell they are abstract isolates of theatre, with not much extratheatrical reference. They are drama-blotches, which we choose to construe as gagging crones or as highfalutin hypotyposes of cosmic design, as it suits us. Shakespeare’s art is to make a representational sort of theatre into the frame around an actor’s workshop: the credible exterior drama continually encroaches on some obvious makeshift, a dumb show of auricular homicide, a pretend place-switching of a prince and a fat fool, a lesson for amputees in a method of writing in sand with the stumps of one’s arms, a game of reading the shapes in clouds, a recipe lecture from hell’s own Julia Child. Our insistence on endowing costume dummies with subtle facial expressions, on manufacturing deep meaning from loose skits in a self-dismantling play, is responsible for much of Shakespeare’s power. But all deep meaning in art is like this: the provision of rifty dysfunctional areas (the breakdown in the first movement of Beethoven’s Appassionata sonata, the gray blur at the center of Manet’s Music in the Tuileries Gardens, the raw rock in Michelangelo’s Rondanini Pietà) that become effective metaphors for our zones of ignorance, where great things seem to dwell. The witches are indeed the “weyward sisters” (1.3.32), at once weird and wayward—eerie and obstinate. They represent the perversity of fate itself, the waywardness of Wyrd. Schlegel’s criticism of Macbeth was to have important consequences in the history of opera, because an Italian translation was appended to Carlo Rusconi’s 1838 translation of the play—Verdi’s principal source. (Indeed, the English translation of Schlegel printed above has been revised to reflect what Verdi actually saw.) Verdi peered at Shakespeare’s witches through Schlegel’s optic; and Schegel is partly responsible for some of the disturbing features of Verdi’s treatment. For one thing, Verdi’s witches, like Schlegel’s, are compound creatures: “women of the very lowest class” and yet solemn oracles. Their moods shift quickly, as if they dwell in a continual mad scene, or enact the insanity of fate itself. This was not the only choice available to Verdi. For example, Andrea Maffei, Verdi’s sometime librettist, knew Friedrich Schiller’s German adaptation of Macbeth (Maffei even published a translation of it in 1863), in which the witches were played by men dressed in the fashion of classical antiquity, as if the

❧

witches amok

149

witches’ true nature was that of a Greek chorus. Schiller pushed every aspect of Macbeth away from the garish and toward the noble. For example, Schiller offered a remarkable expansion of Shakespeare’s very brief opening scene: Shakespeare’s witches make a mysterious summons to their familiars, but Schiller’s witches are full of high sentence and ethical advice: 2. Hexe.

Wenn er sein Herz nicht kann bewahren, Mag er des Teufels Macht erfahren.

3. Hexe.

Wir streuen in die Brust die böse Saat, Aber dem Menschen gehört die Tat. (1.1.16–19)

2. Witch. If he cannot defend his heart, He may feel the devil’s might. 3. Witch. We scatter in his breast the evil seed, But to the man alone belongs the deed. But if Verdi contemplated making his witches into such professors of theology, he resisted the temptation. Near the beginning of the Macbeth project, Verdi sent his own draft of a libretto to the official librettist, Francesco Piave, with the instruction to “adopt a sublime diction, except in the witches’ choruses, which must be vulgar, yet bizarre and original [triviali, ma stravaganti ed originali].”7 (The surviving correspondence of Verdi and Piave concerning Macbeth, along with much else of great interest, is translated in the indispensable Verdi’s Macbeth: A Sourcebook, edited by David Rosen and Andrew Porter.) One might have thought that selfconscious triviality was a twentieth-century phenomenon (as in Poulenc’s Banalités); but Verdi wanted his witches to sound at once fantastical and coarse— perhaps as close as the vocabulary of the age could come to the term camp. How trivial are Verdi’s witches? Historically, listeners have answered, Much too trivial. For example, in 1930, Verdi’s biographer Francis Toye wrote that the witches’ music must be “dismissed as another of Verdi’s failures in the domain of the fantastic.”8 In 1973, Julian Budden claimed that although the first witches’ chorus “does not add up to anything very terrifying . . . it at least captures the essentially childish malice of the witches in the play”; as for the second witches’ chorus (Le sorelle vagabonde), it “has all the deliberate vulgarity of its predecessor without any of the fantasy. It is just any chorus of gipsies or peasants.”9 By the standards of the finest Schauerromantik of Verdi’s age, such as the Wolf’s-Glen scene in Weber’s Der Freischütz (1821) or Emmy’s romance from Marschner’s Der Vampyr (1828), Verdi’s witches can seem comically underhorrified—peppy, freakishly high-spirited, but harmonically tame. On the other hand, Verdi’s contemporaries greatly enjoyed the witches; on the night of the première, 14 March 1847, the numbers for which the audience demanded an

150

❧

macbeth

encore were the first-act duet—by common consent one of the triumphs of the whole Verdi canon—and the witches’ choruses.10 Verdi approached the problem of witch music from an angle wholly different from that of Weber or Marschner—but it is arguable that Verdi’s imagination of the fantastic is equally successful. I don’t mean at all to belittle the critics of previous generations: they were responding to the fact that there is something wrong, uneasy-making, about Verdi’s depiction of witches—as indeed there is. By 1847, Verdi was an experienced hand at writing fantasy-music, and at writing just about everything else relevant to opera. In Verdi’s previous operas, the closest analogue to the witches of Macbeth is the chorus of demons in Giovanna d’Arco (1845). These demons, tempting Joan of Arc to open her heart to a tenor’s love, instead of pursuing her high mission to save France from the troops of England, are easy to ridicule, and the older critics did ridicule them: Toye comments, “they indulge in a 3/8 lilt, intended, as is so often the case with this rhythm, to be seductive, but actually suggesting comic-opera peasants and fishermen.”11 Budden finds this 3/8 section (Tu sei bella) “bland and tuneful . . . It has an innocent vulgarity which reeks of the Neapolitan café”; concerning the demons’ most remarkable music—the Vittoria chorus at the end of the first act, a paean to their success at forcing Joan to fall in love, to compromise herself— Budden remarks, “The entire episode is a tasteless and feeble excrescence.”12 But it’s possible that Verdi liked an altogether different sort of demon from those that conform to old-time standards of diabolic propriety. It is the business of a tempter to tempt; a seducer who accompanies his subtle coaxings and blandishments with loud string tremoli, diminished sevenths, trombone rumblings, and piccolo shrieks is not likely to succeed. There is an operatic convention that demons should wear a musical badge proclaiming DEMON at every instant of their time on stage. But Verdi was under no obligation to follow this convention by compelling the orchestra to ironize the seduction with heavy demon tropes. Perhaps Joan of Arc, or her Italian alter ego Giovanna d’Arco, might plausibly find the tinta of a Neapolitan café more conducive to sexual surrender than that of the Flying Dutchman’s zombie crew. When at last the demons reveal themselves as demons, they are transformed into figures of wholehearted evil: they sing a fanfare that is simply a buildup of a diminished seventh chord (see ex. 16). (Verdi was self-conscious about the stock effect of such chords: in 1871, he called them “that rock and refuge of all those of us who can’t compose four bars without half a dozen of those sevenths.”).13 There is no ambiguity, no tension in the demons’ ways of presenting themselves: first they were guitar-strumming café flatterers—a role they played so well that they even fooled the orchestra— and now they are obvious demons. The ambiguity and the tension belong entirely to Joan, who, during the first act finale, is audibly nervous: the music reproduces her gooseflesh, her irregular heartbeat, her panting. This is the Italian model of the supernatural: simple musical stimuli and a complex musical response—as opposed to the Franco-German model of building the listener’s

❧

witches amok

151

Example 16. Demons.

response (bristling hair, popping eyes, intake of breath to scream) into the stimulus itself. Berlioz’s or Gounod’s Méphistophélès is richer than his Faust; but Verdi’s Joan is richer than Verdi’s demons. Verdi, then, is a literalist of the supernatural, in that he presents the fantastic creature to the audience in way that simulates the creature’s appearance to the other characters on stage—Verdi always understands that terror pertains not to the creature (why would it be terrified of itself?) but to those onstage who behold it. Whether the creature represents a fraud or a genuine apparition from the beyond, Verdi is sensitive to the fact that a fantastic contrivance should be simple: the contriver, like most magicians, works toward a single supreme effect (it flies; or it is enormous; or it is transparent; or it breathes fire) without adducing too many complications. For Verdi, fantasies can be powerful, even overwhelming, but they are not subtle. Five days after the première of Macbeth, the poet Giuseppe Giusti sent Verdi a thoughtful critique, warning him against foreign influences, and noting, “The Fantastic is something that can challenge the intellect [provare l’ingegno]; truth challenges both the intellect and the soul”;14 Verdi was so impressed with this sentence that he copied it into an album. What interests Verdi is the soul that tries to cope with the fantastic, not the fantastic per se. Macbeth shows two souls that are challenged with more fantasy than they can bear. Joan of Arc had to cope with one, and only one, sort of fantastic deception; but the Macbeths have to deal with Houdini’s whole battery of tricks. I say tricks, but the witches are remarkable for their utter frankness about their prestidigitergiversations. In Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, as in many subsequent Faust plays, Mephostophilis is imperturbably open about the worthlessness of the gifts he offers: he replies, when Faustus asks him how it is that he can leave hell, “Why this is hell, nor am I out of it. . . . O Faustus, leave these frivolous demands, /

152

❧

macbeth

Which strike a terror to my fainting soul” (1.3. 76, 81–82). Verdi’s witches do everything they can to expose their triviality, their sheer facetiousness of being. They are far more like Robert Johnson’s Hecate than like Marschner’s vampire. The mid-twentieth-century critics are offended precisely because they don’t want witches to sound trivial. Budden can’t stop excoriating Verdi’s witch music: in the chorus at the end of the first scene, “the minor section is superior to the major which sounds all too like a Neapolitan street song”—Budden hears a lot of bad Naples in Verdi; as for the scene at the cauldron, “we are still in the realm of opera buffa: the Neapolitan café has given way to the Savoy Theatre [Gilbert and Sullivan]—that is all.”15 Where the modern ear wants something deviant and exciting, Verdi provides disgustingly normal-sounding music. But the disgust of the ordinary was exactly the sort of disgust Verdi meant. His witches gain a certain strength from having their coarseness so blatant. Here Verdi’s practice anticipates Freud on the uncanny, das unheimliche, a condition in which slight displacements of the familiar achieve a state of terror: the very commonplaceness of the witches makes them insidious. If Verdi’s demons and witches rarely stray from the cafés of Naples, it is because the scariest things happen there. Verdi’s witches seem most at home when singing nondescript music in major keys; when they sing in the minor, it is often part of a show put on in order to befool Macbeth, a piece of conscious hokiness—they veil themselves in the musical equivalent of robes painted with mysterious emblems. In this respect, Verdi’s music is exactly congruent with the witch-costumes designed for the first production. The Gazzetta Musicale di Milano (22 December 1847) described a lithograph of a witch from Macbeth (one of the bonus figurini sent by Giovanni Ricordi to opera subscribers) as follows: “A Bedouin mantle with a fire-red hood; a robe embroidered, at its lower extremity, with little monsters; a broad belt and buckle, and, hanging from it, the type of Imperial purse to which fashion writers of the time gave the name of ridicule [i.e., réticule]; the footgear of the Hottentots [i.e., none at all], a cane or magic wand in the right hand, and on her chin the pointed beard of the Arabs.”16 The newspaper writer saw in the witch’s costume a bizarre geographical mélange, with elements from Arabian, African, and contemporary women’s fashion; but this account neglects to mention that these near-random assemblages from the prop box are fastened to the plainest sort of dress: a belted shift, with raggy edges. It is as if a beggar-woman had stumbled into Ali Baba’s cave, and plucked out a few loose treasures. The costume is mysterious in its poverty as well as in its flair for incoherent details. In Paris, at the Bibliothèque de l’Opéra, there is a drawing for a Macbeth witch-costume, quite clearly based on the 1847 lithograph described above, but with one fascinating difference: the long sash, dangling down to the witch’s knee like a big phallus, is decorated not with snaky monsters but with vaguely Arabic letters, runes, as if the witch wore her incantations visibly imprinted on her clothing (see fig. 2).17 But she too wears a shift that ends in zigzags, as if the cloth had been torn, not cut. The witch’s spell, her virtus, her

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Figure 2. Drawing of a witch. One of nine costume designs for Macbeth, copies of the Focosi figurini, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, Département des arts du spectacle (Collection Rondel). From David Rosen and Andrew Porter, eds., Verdi’s Macbeth: A Sourcebook. New York: W. W. Norton, 1984, p. 193.

154

❧

macbeth

manhood, seem decorative in character; beneath all the fanciness she’s a vulgar old woman. King James emphasized that witches were nothing but old women who had gone astray—and Verdi’s witches seem to follow good Jacobean principles of sorcery. One of the defining moments in Verdi’s witch-music occurs early in the opera, when the witches hail Macbeth as thane of Glamis, thane of Cawdor, king of Scotland. By 1847, Verdi had developed a specific style for epigram: a way of thickening a terse melody into a sort of stage-object, something to be wielded, just as a character might wield a sword. Epigrams can be found in eighteenthcentury music, such as Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, where the priest sings, to Tamino the oracle, Sobald dich führt to a solemn laconic melody-unit, an expansion of a simple cadential formula; but in the nineteenth century they become a standard feature of music drama. A conspicuous example can be found in Ernani (1844), when Ernani makes a strange bargain with the man who is on the point of murdering him: in order to gain some temporary life, Ernani hands Silva a hunting horn (see ex. 17), and says: Ecco il pegno: nel momento in che Ernani vorrai spento se uno squillo intenderà tosto Ernani morirà. When the time comes—here is my pledge— when you want to see Ernani dead, if he hears the sound of this horn’s cry, that instant will Ernani die. This musical phrase becomes part of the furniture of the opera: the sound itself is a stab in the heart. A similar epigram can be found in Attila (1846), when Attila dreams of a huge old man who bars his path to Rome (see ex. 18), saying: Di flagellar l’incarco contro i mortali hai sol, t’arretra! Or chiuso è il varco; questo de’ numi è il suol! You have been given the one task to scourge the wicked race of men, turn back! You now face a closed path; this is the land of god alone! Soon Pope Leo will confront the army of the Huns, and speak those very words. The music acquires a cybernetic force, and Attila, for all his barbaric

Example 17. Pledge.

Example 18. Prophecy.

156

❧

macbeth

might, trembles before a minor scale with an augmented fourth. During the 1840s, Wagner was making similar experiments with musical epigrams, such as the Pope’s curse on Tannhäuser. Neither Wagner nor Verdi used these epigrams as Leitmotive: they are stiff, self-contained phrases, with none of the plasticity, the combinatorial ease, typical of the Leitmotiv; in most cases they are expanded cadences with a sharp melodic profile, not a continuation of the previous musical discourse but an interruption of it. An epigram is not an episode in a symphonic development but a unit of music theatre, in which music objectifies itself into something abrupt, hieroglyphic, legible. Often it follows the exact contours of words: but it is the meaning of the words, not the phonetic structure, that the epigram seeks to memorize, to freeze. Verdi’s fascination with epigram can be seen as a Shakespearean aspect of his art. The plays of Shakespeare, and of many other canonical playwrights, are full of soliloquies and formal speeches that lend themselves well to the format of nineteenth-century Italian opera; as Gary Schmidgall has pointed out, some of Shakespeare’s heroic speeches seem to have a cantabile-cabaletta structure avant la lettre.18 But it is also true that these plays are full of single flinty lines, sudden revelations, sharp bursts of meaning that are poorly suited to the format of nineteenth-century Italian opera. Absent thee from felicity awhile; she looks like sleep; cut him up in little stars; we are such stuff as dreams are made on; I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself king of infinite space— what can Italian opera do with such material? There was only one resource that came readily to Verdi’s hand for imitating the trajectory of Shakespeare’s quasiextemporized scenes leading toward or receding from riddle, proverb, painful wisdom, poetic insight: arioso or recitativo occasionally punctuated by epigram. The two great scenes in Verdi’s Macbeth—the grand duet and the sleepwalking scene—have a texture quite distinct from normal Italian operatic practice: they seem assembled out of musical pebbles and rocks, with a peculiar sort of continuity that’s more like the flow of gravel from a dump truck than the flow of a river. There’s a distinctly Stravinskyan feel to this sort of procedure: and it is no wonder than Stravinsky claimed that his two favorite operas were Rigoletto and Falstaff.19 An especially Stravinskyan moment occurs in Macbeth’s grand duet, when Lady tells her husband to smear blood on the sleeping guards (see ex. 19). The four-note figure D–C–D–F is as hard and immutable as Lady’s murderous will; it becomes a music-shard, an epigram in potentia, though it is never connected to a set of words; its energy is released not in further quotation but in the knocking on the door that it anticipates by a few seconds. I believe that terse figures of this sort, sometimes singable, sometimes not, are the ultimate basis of Verdi’s dramatic art. In Macbeth Verdi uses epigrammatic music-speech for all sorts of oracles and sentences of terror—just as the witches’ sashes are figured with runes, so their prophecies are conveyed through epigrams (see ex. 20):

❧

witches amok

157

Example 19. Obsessive figure.

Salve, o Macbetto, di Glamis sire! Salve, o Macbetto, di Caudor sire! Salve, o Macbetto, di Scozia re! Hail, O Macbeth, thane of Glamis! Hail, O Macbeth, thane of Cawdor! Hail, O Macbeth, king of Scotland! The rudiment of this epigram is a i–V half-cadence, with the tonic interrupted by a diminished chord; at each repetition it rises a third; finally it ends not with a chord but with a single note and an ff tremolo (Macbeth trema reads the stage direction). This is a very simple thing; in the construction manual of opera, it isn’t much more than a standard-issue brick; but Verdi shows great resourcefulness in promoting this little cadential chunk into the rawest element of horror, the Mark of Cain itself. Soon the witches turn from Macbeth to Banco, and utter another epigram (see ex. 21): Men sarai di Macbetto e pur maggiore! Non quanto lui, ma più di lui felice! Non re, ma di monarchi genitore!

158

❧

macbeth

Example 20. Prophecy to Macbeth.

You will be less than Macbeth, yet greater! Not so much as he, but happier than he! Not king, but father of monarchs! Here each phrase is chanted to a single note, rising a half-step on the last syllable, which becomes the chant-tone of the next line—first A, then B
, then B, rising to C at the end of genitore, with the final syllables of each phrase underlined by major triads. This sort of upward crawl had long been a useful formula for oracular speech: Purcell used it for conjuring pagan gods in The Indian Queen (1695). But at this point comes something unexpected and characteristically Verdian: the witches instantly abandon their mood of vatic trance and break out in a frivolous jingle, Macbetto e Banco vivano! (Long live Macbeth and Banco!— see ex. 22). It is as if the Cumean Sibyl, wreathed in incense, sitting on a throne

❧

witches amok

159

Example 21. Prophecy to Banco.

Example 22. Long live Macbeth and Banco!

hewn out of cave rock, muttering incomprehensible sentences with her eyes shut in ecstasy, suddenly rose, danced a little grinning jig, clicked her heels, and held out her arms to invite applause. Verdi has a similar effect in Falstaff, when Alice continues Quickly’s creepy-crawly story of the hunter at Herne’s Oak, full of strange string tremoli and brass blats, but then laughs it off as a mere fairy tale to entertain children before bedtime.

160

❧

macbeth

Why do the witches behave in such an undignified, even unwitchlike manner? One explanation is that they are deriding any human attempt to solve their riddles, to evade their power. But, in the light of Verdi’s comment on the mixture of the solemn and the coarse in Shakespeare’s witches, another possibility presents itself: the witches are deliberately undermining themselves, exposing the fatuity at the heart of their spectacles of terror. The sash with its mystifying alphabet is fastened loosely and tends to fall off, exposing the witches as silly raggedy old women with a gift for freak shows. They dismiss Macbeth, and the human race, and finally themselves. Beginning as instruments of tragedy, agents of a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will, the witches end as vehicles of a universal inconsequentiality. Here Verdi, and perhaps Shakespeare too, go beyond tragedy. Tragedy depends on some sense that Fate has dignity, even if human beings have none; but the witches of Macbeth impinge on a vision of the random. What if Fate itself is a threadbare woman putting on cheap theatrical tricks to tease us with the hope that disorder might be understood as malevolent order?

Chapter Eighteen

Sortileges of Speech The bite of a vampire can turn the victim into another vampire; and similarly Verdi’s witches exert a field of force that turns others into witches—especially (as we shall see) Lady Macbeth, who has no direct contact with them. Even the witches’ oracular rhetoric is strangely contagious: the great Act I scene and duet for Macbeth and his wife occurs not long after the scene with Macbeth and the witches, and it is remarkable how much both the protagonists start to sound like witches. They start to talk to one another in epigrams. Just as the witches could hardly keep a straight face as they delivered their prophecies, so the Macbeths’ epigrams retain their serious demeanor with a certain difficulty—they tend to decay into gestures of meaningless fuss. The Macbeths tend to get stuck on a single musical phrase, unable to proceed. For a first look at the operations of a repeated epigram, let us examine the Scena e Marcia (1.2). Macbeth enters—Lady asks him when the king will be leaving, and he replies,

Example 23. No tomorrow.

162

❧

macbeth

Domani, tomorrow; this news inspires her to devise a memorable omen, Mai non ci rechi il sole un tal domani (may the sun never bring us such a tomorrow), her vocal line inching up the first fifth of the C minor scale, then falling back from G to E
, with a plagal cadence in the orchestra (E
–A
–E
major—see ex. 23). The melody of this black prayer will often reappear, in blacker forms: later in this act, when Macbeth addresses a request to the immobil terra, a’ passi miei sta muta! (unmoving earth, be mute to my footsteps!—a harmonic movement from A
minor to E
)—see ex. 24); and at the very beginning of the second act, Macbeth and his wife (whom Verdi and Piave call simply Lady) mull over the consequences of the assassination in a short passage that is simply a tissue of this epigram, repeated over and over. First, Lady tells Macbeth, Why worry? Il fatto è irreparabile! (The deed is irreparable!—G
minor to D
major—see ex. 25); but Macbeth remains worried, and announces, to the same tune, Forza è che scorra un altro sangue, o donna! (It is fated that other blood [Banco’s and his children’s]

Example 24. Unmoving earth.

Example 25. Irreparable deed.

❧

sortileges of speech

163

Example 26. Other blood must flow.

Example 27. Will you be unmoved?

must flow, O lady!—F minor to C major—see ex. 26); Lady agrees that these secondary murders must happen quickly, and asks Macbeth, again to the same tune, Immoto sarai tu nel tuo disegno? (Will you be firm in your intention?— A minor to E major—see ex. 27). The Macbeths have become stuck on this little obsessive figure, a circumflex mark that rises through a fifth or a third, and finally drops a third, over (in its later appearances) a sin-colored i–V half-cadence, the insigne of terror. Immobile words such as immobil, immoto, and irreparabile tend to activate this figure; it is a musical exclamation point, a needle that gouges these sentences into the surface of the mind. Here we have the epigram of evil resolution, a musical image of the irreversibility, the unundoability, of acts. The music proclaims, What’s done is done.

164

❧

macbeth

In a remarkable essay, Marjorie Garber has found many traces of the Medusa legend in Macbeth—a severed head, a battery of mirrors, hair standing on end.1 I see evidence of petrification in Verdi’s handling of this epigram: the music has simply stopped, and Macbeth and his wife keep repeating the same little phrase together—they’re caught in a folie à deux, at least for a moment, prefiguring the monomania of Lady in the sleepwalking scene in the last act, when she is caged up in her handful of tiny musical phrases. Macbeth and his wife are gorgons to one another—both seem to turn to stone. The whole scene anticipates the strange little game that Iago and Otello play in the second act of Otello, a version of the game from Duck Soup in which Harpo and Groucho Marx face each other in an imaginary mirror: Otello notes that Cassio conveyed presents from Desdemona; Iago replies, Dassenno? (Indeed?); Otello says, Sì, dassenno. Nel credi onesto? (Do you think her honest?); and Iago repeats Onesto?; Otello says, Che ascondi nel tuo core? (What are you hiding in your heart?); Iago repeats, as if the sentence didn’t have any meaning, Che ascondo in cor, signore? (What am I hiding in my heart, lord?); and Otello reflects the same words back at him, to the same tune, like a parrot, “Che ascondo in cor, signore?” From onesto on, these phrases all begin with the same three notes—it is not easy to tell who is the singing coach and who the slow-witted pupil, but the audience knows that Iago, usurping Otello’s voice, is calling the tune. Temptation scenes play in Verdi’s head as a form of echolalia. Macbeth-music tends to be too static, as in the prison-of-echoes scene, or too mobile, chaotic. In Act I, Macbeth’s command to the immobile earth to be mute to his footsteps comes just after the apparition of the dagger, as if Macbeth were begging the far too active, disturbed, disorderly orchestra to stop making noise— for as Macbeth sees the apparition of the dagger (Mi si affaccia un pugnal?!), the orchestra is contributing a whole consort of aural hallucinations: ferocious but unsteady and fugitive rhythms; a chromatic cello line, insinuating, rising to light like a bad intention (A me precorri sul confuso cammin, You lead me on a confused road)—at last the twisty melodies gutter out into a shadowy intricacy of diminished chords (Sulla metà del mondo or morta è la natura, Over half the world nature now is dead). This passage is near Verdi’s limit of derangement in musical thought: the witches’ love of random spastic phrases, their habit of turning the riddle, seems to have infiltrated all speech, leaving only a heap of stray ominousnesses. In these hectic gestures Macbeth, like a witch, reads the future: he will be king. Macbeth leaves, intending to kill Duncan; when he reenters, “as if choking,” he announces Tutto è finito! (All done!—see ex. 28) to a simple minor-second ˆ 6– ˆ 5, ˆ but sometimes transposed to the tonic), at the figure (often scale degrees 5–
threshold of recognition as a epigram. As many critics (starting with Abramo Basevi in 1859)2 have noticed, Verdi will construct a number of important figures along identical lines: we can hear Tutto è finito in Macbeth’s description of the voice that says Macbeth doth murder sleep (Allor questa voce—see ex. 29); in the opening of the great choral lament in the finale to the first act (Schiudi, inferno—see ex. 30): in the first three bars

❧

sortileges of speech

165

Example 28. All done.

Example 29. I hear this voice.

Example 30. Open, hell’s mouth.

of the prelude to the second act, obviously recalling Tutto è finito, note for note; and even in the words Una macchia (a stain) in the sleepwalking scene, a subtle recollection. The accompaniment to the chorus of Scottish refugees, Patria oppressa, is full of intricate traceries of such figures. But Verdi wrote two versions of Macbeth: the original Italian in 1847, and a much-altered version in 1865 for Paris. The story

166

❧

macbeth

of the two Macbeths is a complicated one, and I will allude to alternative texts only when I need to; for the moment, let it suffice to say that the original is more streamlined, intent, and tragic; the revised version more operatic and spacious, complete with a ballet, a new concert display aria for Lady Macbeth (La luce langue), and a triumphant choral finale. Part of the concentration of the 1847 version can be seen in its extraordinary obsession with the Tutto è finito epigram: for example, in the earlier, quite different setting of Patria oppressa, the vocal line was itself based on a rhythmically charged figure, dripping the same sort of blood as the previous examples. The apotheosis of the Tutto è finito epigram occurs in the final scene of the 1847 version, Macbeth’s death solo, Mal per me, ˆ 6– ˆ 5ˆ figure into a hangman’s conin which the orchestra turns the scale-degree 5–
tinuous drumroll—I wish Verdi had not cut this aria from the 1865 version (though nowadays it is often spliced into performances of the 1865 edition), because the development of the epigram-figure, at once subtle and abrupt, anticipates certain procedures of Otello, written long afterward. This little figure is the music-icon of the stain that can’t be washed out—and since in a tragedy, falling minor seconds, the basic figure of desolation since the days of Monteverdi’s Arianna, are likely to be everywhere, Verdi teaches us to read them as an omnipresence of blood. Verdi spatters his score with incriminating spots.

Chapter Nineteen

Lady Macbeth as Witch In some ways the Grand scena e Duetto of Act I is far more of a black sabbath than anything found in the witches’ own music. At the beginning, Verdi notes in the score that the singers must sing in a hushed and dark voice, unless instructed otherwise. Verdi wanted something that was, as far as I know, unprecedented in the domain of nineteenth-century Italian opera, a set-piece that was melodically intense—not recitative—and yet took place in some boundary region between speech and song. A letter of Verdi’s to the baritone who created the role of Macbeth, Felice Varesi, makes this point clear: “I’d rather you served the poet better than you serve the composer. . . . In the grand duet . . . Note that it’s night; everyone is asleep, and this whole duet will have to be sung sotto voce, but in a hollow voice such as to arouse terror.”1 Verdi was often to repeat this advice. The word hollow (cupa) governed Verdi’s whole imagination of Macbeth; it is a subterranean sort of opera, as if the performance were constituted within a cave, or as if the singers each sang from within a private abyss. Indeed words such as cupo and gufo (owl) seem to brood over the text—perhaps the epigrams about immobility and irreparability, with their soft falls of a third, in some sense reproduce the sound-tint of these very words. In this opera, even more than Otello, Verdi comes closest to realizing the old dream of the inventors of opera, a tragedy in which speech rises effortlessly, imperceptibly, into song. When Verdi in 1875 compared his achievement to Wagner’s, he noted, “I, too, have attempted the fusion of music and drama . . . and that in Macbeth”;2 Verdi hadn’t yet written Otello or Falstaff, but in those late operas he approached Shakespeare through the highly wrought, semi-opaque medium of Boito’s poetry and dramaturgy, whereas Piave provided a fairly clear image of the original Jacobean text. Verdi’s great achievement in this liminal area far beneath bel canto, where singers make whispery harsh sounds, is the grand duet Fatal mia donna!—an astonishing psychological study of the tremors of spiritual remorse combined with the hilarity of gratified ambition (see ex. 31). The orchestral accompaniment of much of the first section of the duet consists of continual arpeggiations of F minor and C major; the i–V pattern, instead of organizing the harmony into intelligible paragraphs, simply continues compulsively, obsessively, unable to terminate in any satisfying resolution. Punctuation is supplied instead by irruptions of diminished chords—O vista, o vista orribile (horrible face). There; are;;; far

168

❧

macbeth

Example 31. Femme fatale.

t!o!o many brrks in the line, crammed in at odd moments. The grand duet is grand in its psychic trajectory, but hacked-up, choppy, in its local textures; it is a duet pasted together from epigrams, spasms of fear. The large-scale dramatic rhythm of the duet is terror followed by mockery of terror. When Macbeth, fresh from killing Duncan, tells his wife that he felt like saying Amen as the footmen were praying May God help us, Lady interjects Follie! (follies!), decorating her line with bright little grace notes, as if she were playing the role of his private Vice, an internal voice laughing at his scruples. When Macbeth tells her of the voice that accuses him of murdering sleep, avrai per guanciali sol vepri, o Macbetto (you will have only thorns for a pillow, O Macbeth—see ex. 32), Lady quotes the tune back to him, suggesting that the phantom voice was really saying Sei vano, o Macbetto, ma privo d’ardire (you are vain, O Macbeth, but not bold enough); Lady recasts Macbeth’s B
minor phrase in a garishly cheerful B
major—a parody that again suggests the effect of psychic intimacy that Lady is trying to achieve, as if she were a second point of view inside Macbeth’s skull, offering alternative interpretations of the same event (see ex. 33). Avrai per guanciali, the voice in Macbeth’s head, is set as a three-part epigram, using a variant of the harmonic pattern of the witches’ three-part epigram Salve, o Macbetto. Both Macbeths are starting to talk witch talk. Lady infects Macbeth’s imagination by echoing him. She attempts to regularize his musical discourse, to fetch him out of a traumatic realm of minor keys, diminished chords, black cadences, sudden silences and hesitations, fragmentary phrases, oracular ambiguities, into a straightforward, major-key domain of resolute action. But by quoting Macbeth she seems less to shake him out his madness than to join him in it—as if she were a psychiatrist beset by countertransference, following her patient a little too far into psychosis. By encouraging Macbeth to bring the witches’ prophecy to pass, she becomes in effect another witch—her very lack of a first name seems to abstract her from society, from the realm of

❧

lady macbeth as witch

169

Example 32. Only thorns for pillow.

Example 33. Parody.

nameable deeds. Near the climax of the duet, Lady, exasperated, decides to incriminate the footmen herself; she manages to exit the stage, smear blood, and return to the stage in a space of sixteen bars of quick music—she works in witch’s time, foreshortened and accelerated, not human time. Harold Powers has studied with great care and sensitivity the ratios of stage action to musical action in Verdi’s

170

❧

macbeth

operas; he points out that excited music, as in cabalettas, often implies stasis on stage, and that the actors were permitted to move only at specific points in an aria, duet, or finale.3 I think of Lady’s superfast exit and re-entrance as almost a parody of the tempo di mezzo, the kinetic interlude just before a cabaletta or stretta. Time is becoming unnatural; the clock is out of whack. Despite her recommendations of directness, forward thrust, Lady seems strangely shapeless and helpless, informe, as if she had no identity except what she could borrow from others. She is happiest when singing other people’s music, or preexisting public display pieces such as the brindisi; left to her own devices she tends to adopt the musical mannerisms of the witches—she has never heard the witches, but it seems that she can hear everything Macbeth hears, even hallucinatory voices. Near the beginning of the first act, the witches utter dark spells, then laugh at themselves; near the end of the first act, Macbeth utters dark spells, then Lady laughs at him. The Macbeths effortlessly fall into a sort of actors’-class exercise in playing witches—an exercise itself devised by witches. For Verdi, the supernatural tends to be a region of mockery. In Un ballo in maschera (1859), a witch advises a wife to visit a gallows at midnight, in order to find a magic herb that will rid her heart of adulterous passion; in this desolate place, however, the wife finds not the magic herb but her lover and surrenders to love; through an odd series of events she becomes a veiled anonymous figure, to be escorted back to town in the care of her husband; but her veil accidentally falls, and some townsmen are amused at the spectacle of a husband trysting outdoors in the dead of night with his own wife. Witches, then, open up a free space where desire may operate in an unusually unconstrained manner; but there is no true safety in the supernatural, for giving in to bad desire leads to extraordinary humiliation—and, with the possible exception of Shakespeare, the master of the candied smile, Verdi was more expert in derision than any artist I know. Detached ha-has that threaten to break out into an evil little dance, suppressed titters faintly registered by the orchestra, vocal trills gone giddy with malice— what composer can compete with Verdi in such effects? Most of Verdi’s witches are surrogates for Fate, deriding mankind; and when Lady derides her husband, she assumes the witch role without quite understanding that the only spectacle that delights a witch is the spectacle of ruin. Verdi provided a clue that he imagined Lady as a kind of witch, or witch manquée, or apprentice Vice, a woman attempting to reconceive herself along diabolical lines. In an 1865 letter to Léon Escudier, concerning the newly revised French version of Macbeth, Verdi wrote, The witches dominate the drama: everything derives from them—coarse and gossipy in the first act, sublime and prophetic in the third. They are truly a character, and a character of the utmost importance. . . . The important character, the dominating demon of this [banquet] scene is Lady Macbeth; and however much Macbeth can distinguish himself as an actor, Lady Macbeth dominates and controls everything.4

❧

lady macbeth as witch

171

The witches dominate the drama, but Lady dominates everything; Verdi never developed an articulate theory about Lady’s relation to the witches, but he evidently understood Lady as a character struggling to achieve the witches’ manipulative force, their uncanny authority. Like the witches, she devises impresses spectacles; and like the witches’, her spectacles turn out to be hollow. Hollowness opens beneath Lady at every turn; she is a most unsupported sort of soprano. She is full of sham excitement but exhausts herself quickly; a certain lacertine torpor always shows through her feats of brilliance. The grand duet ends in a cabaletta (Vien! vien altrove, also in F minor), in which Lady tries to rouse Macbeth, so that his lack of surprise at Duncan’s death doesn’t seem suspicious—but at last the feigned élan simply sputters out into lethargy; the duet ends in soft scattered cries of vien! vien! (come!, come!), and the orchestral accompaniment vanishes into ppp, insensibilmente morendo ed allargando. The duet ends as the crime itself will end, not with a bang but a whimper. In Lady’s solo music, the same inability to maintain force is felt. Near the beginning of the second act, she sings an aria, Trionfai! (I have triumphed!), full of wide leaps, cackles, and gloats. She notes that the murder of Duncan is meaningless unless the throne is secured by more crimes: the most salient line is la regal corona è nulla, se può in capo vacillar! (the royal crown is nothing if it totters on the head). Verdi went to some effort to illustrate this line as exactly as possible: the last syllable of vacillar vacillates wildly into staccato coloratura; and the word nulla is given astonishing stress, losing its balance over a minor second, or plunging down a fifth or seventh, or sustained for two and a half loud bars. Here the nullity at the heart of Lady’s triumph is graphic. In the 1865 revised version, Verdi replaced Trionfai! with an excellent aria, indeed a concert display piece, La luce langue, but there is a case to made for retaining Trionfai!: its very vulgarity aligns Lady with the “trivial” witches and suggests the coarseness of sin and the untenability of vicious success; and the drugged, effortful, queasy quality of La luce langue may suggest an elderly duchess with a hangover more than a medieval queen lusting for more blood. The singer of La luce langue is already baffled, almost sleepwalking through her own victory; the hollowness is too explicit here. Still, La luce langue has its dramatic as well as its musical virtues (see ex. 34). The text (much of it by Verdi himself) is based on Macbeth’s speech about the thickening light and the crows that fly to the rooky wood—now assigned to Macbeth’s wife by an act of textual transvestism. Oddly enough, Lady’s opening musical phrase seems a distorted pre-echo of the opening of Banco’s aria Come dal ciel, the next solo in the second act (see ex. 35); both arias are even in the same key, E minor. Once again, Lady seems to have little music of her own: she borrows Banco’s music and his spooked mood, for the murderer and the victim are part of a single action. She foresuffers the crime that she instigates: the ghosts that Banco will feel, thronging around him in the bloody wood, throng around her first. Banco will sense his assassins but not see them—the forest gloom is too thick;

172

❧

macbeth

Example 34. Light thickens.

Example 35. Banco’s aria. but before that happens, Lady pursues a path into a moral obscurity in which no consequences can be seen, no matter how hard she peers. If Lady is a hollow woman, without a coherent musical identity, without even a name, she nevertheless has some characteristic melodic tendencies: all her arias have a figure of a labored climb to a high note, followed by a fast fall; in this aria it occurs as she summons her murderous energy at nuovo delitto! È necessario! (a new crime! It is necessary!—see ex. 36). But the ground is giving way beneath her: at the end of this phrase the harmony slips to E
major, a long way from E minor, as if her harpy’s grip on the whole situation is becoming loose, precarious. At last she manages, through sheer willpower, to hoist herself back up to E major, to sing a gleeful requiem to her victims, and to shout her haggard delight at the acquisition of throne and scepter (O voluttà del soglio!). Trionfai!, on the other hand, is in B
major, and therefore associated with the key-complex centered around F. Verdi rarely bothered to develop a semantics of key relations, partly because of the Italian habit of ruthlessly transposing arias to fit the convenience of singers; but he may have felt that Macbeth might profit

❧

lady macbeth as witch

173

Example 36. It is necessary.

from such a scheme—it wasn’t intended to offer virtuoso vocal display; indeed it was more a work of brutto parlare than bel canto. Macbeth has two distinct harmonic areas, one centered around E and the other around F (and D
): the E-area concerns the witches, especially the self-consciously histrionic witches of the third act; the F-area concerns the terrors of the Macbeths, both public (most of the banquet scene is in F and B
major) and private (Lady’s first-act aria Vieni! t’affretta! is in D
, the grand duet in F minor, the main section of the interpolated third-act duet Ove son io? in F minor, the sleepwalking scene in F minor and D
major, Macbeth’s fourth-act aria Pietà, rispetto, amore in D
, and Macbeth’s death scene Mal per me—cut from the 1865 version—in F minor). The F-area of the opera is a sort of writing-large of the cadence of a number of terror-epigrams, F minor-C major; and the flat, indeed depressive keys of the F-area contrast with the bright, manic keys of the E-area. When Verdi discarded Trionfai! in favor of La luce langue, he removed Lady from the harmonic region associated with the grand mal seizures of the grand duet and remapped her into the region of Banco’s murder and the witches’ apparitions. This change had the virtue of emphasizing Lady’s role as an apprentice witch, but it had two defects as well. First, the continuity between the aria and the compulsive citations (at the beginning of the second act) of the grand duet’s epigrams became more tenuous; Trionfai! is a sort of sequel to the grand duet, whereas La luce langue looks forward, both to Banco’s murder and to the cloudy, cataracted quality of the sleepwalking scene. Second, Trionfai! was nicely linked to the banquet scene at the end of the second act, not only in key (B
) but in dramatic rhythm. The banquet scene exactly follows its pattern of triumph and nullity: Lady’s toast to the company is a more public and mannerly way of saying, I have triumphed!; and Macbeth’s weird seizures as he stares at Banco’s ghost represent the nulla that eats away at all glory.

174

❧

macbeth

Example 37. Brindisi.

The banquet begins with dance-music in F major—a scene of heavy gaiety and artificial glare, a masque of the damned, full of slightly off-center accents and those trills that are never far from mocking razzes in Verdi’s vocabulary of ornament. As Lady sings her brindisi (B
) she is determined to be impressive, but she seems slightly unsteady, wincing, as if she so strongly anticipates whispered criticism that she builds derision against herself, against Macbeth, into her own song (see ex. 37). Indeed, Lady’s brindisi belongs to the class of dismissal tunes, such scoffs at terror as the witches’ jingle Macbetto e Banco vivano! following the opening prophecies—or Lady’s own Sei vano, o Macbetto, ridiculing Macbeth for his dread of committing regicide; but there is now a difference, in that the brindisi repudiates a hair-raising thing that no one suspects will happen, the apparition of Banco’s ghost. The text is designed to cheer the guests, but the music seems designed to immunize Macbeth against ghosts—a task at which it fails. The brindisi is too unstable to sustain the ceremonious euphoria it tries to effect, and it quickly decays. After the assassin whispers of Banco’s murder, Macbeth starts to go mad, and he inspires a general madness in the whole musical-dramatic texture of the opera, which degenerates into abrupt abuttings of dissonant keys and dissonant moods. Extravert public celebration switches, without transition or modulation, to the psychodrama of Macbeth’s hallucinations, a slipped disc in the opera’s spine. Banco’s ghost appears; Macbeth reels; Lady tries to bring him to his senses, and, effortfully, the brindisi resumes; but finally Macbeth loses all self-control (Va! Spirto d’abisso!—Go! Spirit of the abyss!). During the dramatic and harmonic lurches of this wild scene, there are odd feints toward E major. E major was the key of the central section of Banco’s aria, and Banco’s presence has become profound and inexorable; the dead nobleman has managed to imbue the harmonic texture with his being. Banco’s E major is particularly conspicuous as Macbeth

❧

lady macbeth as witch

175

cries out that the ghost wants his blood (Sangue a me)—so seasick is the harmony that, during the six bars after Sangue a me, it spirals through dominants, secondary dominants, and so forth, until ten different (mostly major) triads are heard. The banquet at last sinks into a chorus of the nobles, so appalled at Macbeth’s behavior that the orchestra fibrillates into staccato sextuplets (Biechi arcani— Grim mysteries). This chorus is in E minor and major, far, far away from the F major of the opening: the banquet has fully rotated, from the Macbeths’ F-area to the E-area of Banco and, more fundamentally, of the witches, whose grim mysteries brood over the whole musical text. Lady tried to dominate the banquet; but ultimately a greater force seized control.

Chapter Twenty

Time Slips In the third act, Verdi intended to promote the witches from the first act’s gossipy coven of hags into sublime beings. But triviality stubbornly clings to the witches: they remain mixed creatures. Verdi so strongly emphasizes the contrivance, the artificiality of their magic show that they become charlatans; as often in Verdi (and in Shakespeare), those who manufacture spectacles tend to lose authority and authenticity. Indeed, self-consciously moral or immoral behavior often feels inauthentic, as if Verdi distrusted people who act except according to primary appetite. The central prop of this act is the cauldron, appropriately enough, for the whole opera has been starting to feel like a stewpot of farfetched ingredients. The banquet scene in the second act didn’t have its musical courses laid out according to protocol, but instead became a jumble; and a similar rhythm of spasm prevails in the third act—it is a series of disconnected marvels, in the true Romanticsupernatural fashion of, say, the Wolf’s-Glen scene of Weber’s Der Freischütz. It begins with choral incantation, the equivalent of Shakespeare’s “Double, double, toil and trouble” as the witches toss disgusting ingredients into the cauldron (Tu, rospo venefico—You, poisonous toad). This is in E minor, but turns to a cheerful cackly E major as the witches stir and stir. Even the initial E minor section is disturbingly good humored: despite its minor key it bears some points of comparison in melodic contour and in mood to Harold Arlen’s We’re off to see the wizard, the wonderful wizard of Oz (see ex. 38). Again we see that, in the absence of human

Example 38. Poisonous toad.

❧

time slips

177

spectators, the witches tend to be simple, full of glee; it is when they have an audience that they start to rumble and thunder, fulminate with faux-sublime. Parisian grand opera had to include a ballet, so for the 1865 version, Verdi inserted after the incantation a dance of the witches, with a pantomime for Hecate—oddly repeating the stage history of Shakespeare’s play, with its early interpolations of two Hecate scenes. During her dumb show, Hecate announces the arrival of Macbeth and orders the witches to answer his questions; she instructs the spirits of the air to revive him if he faints; she ordains that Macbeth’s destruction shall happen immediately. In short, she predicts exactly what will occur, and takes account of every contingency: whereas the Macbeths can anticipate nothing properly, clairvoyant Hecate can anticipate everything properly; there is no thickened light to befog her eyesight. The pantomime is a loose, interrupted series of variations on a tune; and this Hecate-tune begins with the same figure (a sustained tonic, then a fast flicker from leading-tone back to tonic; or the equivalent figure starting on the dominant) that begins Lady’s La luce langue and Banco’s Come dal ciel, as if Verdi were reinforcing the boundaries of the musical area that comprises the witches and Lady and Banco; the first appearance of the Hecate-tune is in E, the main witch-key; but her instructions concerning Macbeth are in B
, as she establishes her dominion over the (very remote) harmonic area associated with the Macbeths—Hecate’s mastery knows no limit. She exits to thunder and lightning; and the witches and spirits dance a vivacious waltz. During this ballet we are lifted out of the world of opera into some controlling, string-pulling upper domain of pure music; in performances that include the ballet, Macbeth suffers further diminishment, for he is reduced to rehearsing the action of a preexistent script, mouthing words that seem to have been devised before he speaks them. His reactions are as minutely choreographed as the apparitions themselves. Verdi wrote six ballets, not counting the dances carefully integrated into La forza del destino and Aida: for Jérusalem in 1847, for Les vêpres siciliennes in 1855, for Le trouvère in 1857, for Macbeth in 1865, for Don Carlos in 1867, and for Otello in 1894. Verdi composed these ballets rather grudgingly, sometimes with instructions to omit them everywhere but in Paris, where ballets were mandatory—even Wagner was compelled to write a ballet for the French première of Tannhäuser in 1861. Nevertheless, it is telling that three of Verdi’s ballets have scenarios pertaining to time: Les vêpres siciliennes displays dances on the theme of the four seasons; Le trouvère offers a fortune-telling pantomime in which a gypsy shuffles cards to predict the luck of soldiers; and, of course, the ballet in Macbeth pre-enacts the bad king’s ruin. For Verdi, what occupies the stage in the absence of singing? Abstract processes of determination of future events; fate’s gears and mainsprings; pure isolates of rhythm, driving forward all the more swiftly because they are liberated from any text. It is as if Verdi’s ideal ballet were the dumb show in Hamlet, Necessity’s rehearsal-sketch for the whole play.

178

❧

macbeth

After the ballet comes the Gran scena delle apparizioni. Macbeth enters, and demands answers; the witches offer to provide those answers by conjuring their masters, from the depths and from the heights (Dalle basse e dall’alte regioni, an ascending B
-minor triad leading into a great crash-flutter of a diminished chord). The apparitions, epigrammatical beings, chant above chords, often diminished, that terminate in simple cadential formulae (such as i–V): the helmeted head that warns against Macduff; the bloody child that promises protection against all born of women; the crowned child holding a little tree that guarantees security till Birnam wood come to Dunsinane. Macbeth, thinking himself immune from catastrophe, rejoices; but the witches aren’t yet finished with their spookery: the cauldron sinks, to a series of diminished chords descending chromatically through an octave (see ex. 39). And, to eerie bagpipelike music in D, there appears a procession of kings, the seed of Banco: the march (in the superior 1865 version) takes a tour of the harmonic horizon, through F minor and B major and C major and G minor and most of the other chords in the chromatic scale—perhaps this bizarre comprehensiveness of key suggests the sheer persistence and fullness of Banco’s line. By the time Banco himself appears, holding a mirror, Macbeth is overcome; and the scene ends in a faint, just as Hecate anticipated. This is perhaps the only scene in the Verdi canon governed by the rhythm of the circus: see if you can top this! It is not a drama but a series

Example 39. Cauldron.

❧

time slips

179

of eye-popping and ear-popping effects—fantasy in the sense that Giusti warned Verdi to avoid, fantasy that appeals only to the intellect, not the soul. Verdi attended carefully to the atmosphere and the staging of this scene. For the little band hidden beneath the stage to accompany the procession of the kings, he insisted on a contrabassoon, evidently not easy to find even in Paris— he liked its “strange, mysterious, and, at the same time, calm and quiet sonority.”1 He also tried to make use of the most advanced special effects of his day, the mid-nineteenth-century equivalent of George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic: he wrote that the three apparitions should be suggested by a fantasmagorìa—“it would be extremely beautiful and effective . . . the optician Duroni [will] have the machine built.”2 A fantasmagorìa was a magic lantern, an early sort of slide projector; it turned out to be impossible to use it in Macbeth, partly because the machine’s lens broke, partly because the authorities were afraid of indecent audience behavior during the total darkness required for its operation;3 but Verdi wanted this sort of hollow image. On one hand, such an apparition is supernatural, in that it is entirely made of light; but on the other hand, it is an obvious hoax, a feat of optical illusion—an expensive version of a cheap trick. It is sublime and trivial at the same time, just like the witches themselves. Similarly, Verdi told Escudier that he had just seen a production of the unrevised Macbeth in Genoa, in which the figures of the kings (played by actors) were mounted on a sort of Ferris wheel, partly below stage level, rotated in order to haul them into view, then haul them down again; Verdi was taken with this effect, and recommended it for the première of the revised version.4 Again, the simulation of the supernatural is achieved by laborious means; to see such a thing is to speculate on the stage carpentry that produced it. Perhaps the least frivolous aspect of the apparition-scene is its disturbance of the play’s clock. Time itself is growing increasingly deformed. The tempo of the procession of the kings is adagio; but the procession represents centuries of Scottish monarchs, as if time had accelerated into some state of high lethargy. Prophecies, pantomimes of the future, a glimpse of a dead man sitting at a table, a white theory of not-yet-born adults—all these events tend to disturb linear chronology and open up strange gashes into the continuity of things; the characters of Macbeth dwell increasingly in theatre-time, where the same scene can be played as a dumb show or a dialogue, can be speeded up or drawn out, can be read with swapped lines, according to the whim of the players; where all sense of causality is an artifice, and the default mode of action is the disconnected spectacle of the variety show. Schlegel was sensitive to the dysfunctional timescheme of the later parts of Shakespeare’s Macbeth when he wrote, in the essay appended to the Italian translation that Verdi pondered, “It is as if the drags were taken from the wheels [Uhrwerke, clockwork] of time, and they rolled along without interruption in their descent.”5 The play’s mainspring, wound too tight, discharges itself not in a steady tick-tick but in a helterskelter dash for the finale. Verdi attended carefully to the play’s mad combination of the too fast and the

180

❧

macbeth

too slow; and he took full advantage of music’s possibilities for specifying exactly time’s crawl, time’s swoop. The sense of life inside a magic show, where nothing is happening, but where these nothing-events are happening with tremendous speed and flair, continues even after the witches leave the stage. After the spirits revive Macbeth from his faint, Lady—of all people—appears. This was Verdi’s idea for the revised version of 1865; in 1847 the third act ended with a short solo for Macbeth, a kind of cabaletta to the whole act, but now Verdi argued that “It doesn’t seem illogical to me that Lady, always intent on watching over her husband, should have discovered where he is.”6 It is as if a final witch appears, in the form of Lady, to confound still further her confused husband—well might he ask Ove son io?, Where am I?, for he’s lost in a hall of mirrors, a hall of echoes. At the beginning of this duet, Macbeth quotes to her simplified versions of the three epigrams of the apparitions—these epigrams, like all the opera’s epigrams, seem to exist as freefloating bits of discourse, attached to no voice in particular, capable of appearing anywhere at any time. The opera’s videotape is rewound and played back, with some distortions: first the witches summoned apparitions to prophesy to Macbeth; now Macbeth repeats the same prophecies to his witchlike wife. In the main section of the duet, the Macbeths’ swearing vengeance against Macduff and Banco’s children (Ora di morte e di vendetta); the music is underpinned by F-minor–C-major convulsions, like the grand duet in the first act, but here there is much less harmonic room to maneuver—the Macbeths’ universe is increasingly narrow, increasingly restricted to a single fact, a single sin, a single cadence. The middle section is a pppp whisper, in B
, on the unerasability of Fate’s writing; after a return to the F minor section, the duet ends in F major, as if the criminals’ confidence in their schemes had momentarily allayed all anxiety. As Jane Bernstein perceptively notes,7 this duet is a male-bonding scene like the duet at the end of the second act of Otello: Lady is usurping many male prerogatives, such as the toast-proposal in the banquet scene, for as she grows more witchlike she grows more androgynous, though she doesn’t go so far as to grow a beard. The fourth and final act begins with a restoration of human time: instead of the frantic eventlessness of witches’ time, in which any occurrence can be done, undone, redone, made into a performance game, we are back in a world of real suffering, where the Scottish refugees lament with all the time-honored musical tropes of lamentation; and where Macduff can sing a resolute aria calling Macbeth to justice. But the opera has little use for human time, except as a sort of background to register the knotted, perverse time of most of the action. Verdi’s hilarious correspondence with Escudier, who exercised his considerable resources of politesse in trying to persuade Verdi to augment Macduff’s role by letting him (instead of Lady) sing a stanza of the brindisi, shows Verdi’s determination to relegate the sane Macduff to the edges of the opera.8 Escudier wanted an expensive tenor to have an opportunity to shine, by trying to convert Macbeth into an opera

❧

time slips

181

as he knew and understood opera. If Verdi had capitulated, the next step (as I try to imagine the Macbeth opera that Escudier really wanted) would have been to reconstruct the brindisi as a duet for Lady and Macduff, with a sketch of an embrace at the end; next, Lady and Macduff could exchange significant glances when Macbeth sees Banco’s ghost. The end of the Escudierization of Macbeth would require new music, a love duet in which soprano and tenor swear to be true to one another, after the crackpot husband—the normal inconvenient baritone—has been eliminated. Such a movement toward the rhythms of the erotic would demote the supernatural scenes to bad dreams; but in Macbeth the whole foreground is governed by the chronology of nightmare. Shakespeare gave a good deal of attention to responsible, conscientious folk such as Malcolm and Macduff and Macduff’s little son—characters who act from comprehensible motives, and who regard the stage as an arena for the prosecution of a crime, not as a vacuum for the improvisation of theatre-games. But Verdi regarded the humane episodes of his opera, such as the patriotic chorus at the beginning of the fourth act, as brief intermissions in the general plunge into excitingly defective organizations of time and space. By the Italian standards of the 1840s, Macbeth is nearly an anti-opera, since no one falls in love, the lead singers were carefully chosen for their unattractive voices, and the few pieces that invite vocal display often have an undertone of something hideous or stupid, as if vocal display were forced to confess its own meretriciousness.

Chapter Twenty-One

La Sonnambula The center of Macbeth is the Gran scena del sonnambulismo, a scena without an aria—perhaps it could be called an anti-aria, indeed an anti-mad-scene, in the way that Mary Ann Smart has spoken of Azucena’s music as an anti-mad-scene.1 As Verdi advised the first Lady, Marianna Barbieri-Nini, on 31 January 1847: the sleepwalking scene . . . so far as the dramatic situation is concerned, is one of the most sublime [più alte] theatrical creations. Bear in mind that every word has a meaning, and that it is absolutely essential to express it both with the voice and with the acting. Everything is to be said sotto voce and in such a way as to arouse terror and pity. Study it well and you will see that you can make an effect with it, even if it lacks one of those flowing, conventional melodies [canti filati, e soliti], which can be found everywhere and which are all alike.2

The Aristotelean words terror and pity show how far Verdi had gone in trying to force an Italian opera back into some pre-operatic, archaic model of tragedy. In the first three acts, terror predominates; but in the fourth act, terror is giving way to pity. The Scottish refugees are figures deserving pity; pity is the first word of Macbeth’s wheedling fourth-act aria Pietà, rispetto, amore; and the sleepwalking scene is a psychiatric case history of a mind so blasted by terror, so burnt out, so evacuated, that the spectator’s pity must be evoked to fill the empty space. Lacking “flowing, conventional melodies,” Lady must rely for expression on prettily arpeggiated accompaniment figures, filling the empty spaces between the ghosts of tunes. One of the main elements of the sleepwalking scene, the double-dotted, gently stumbling figure in F minor over which the Doctor says, “O, how her eyes gape wide,” appeared early in the opera—in fact it was the second theme in the prelude to the first act. The prelude’s first theme was that of the witches’ chorus at the beginning of the third act, Tre volte miagola la gatta (Thrice meowed the cat). This was Verdi’s way of mounting sound-placards, in the opera’s first minute, announcing TERROR and PITY: the witches provoke terror, and Lady begs for pity. The rapid switch reveals the co-presence, the interdependence of terror and pity; just as there is an intimacy between the witches and Lady, there is an intimacy between mania and depression, the brutal and the abject, concitato and molle. The opera investigates the peculiar simultaneity of operation of terror

❧

la sonnambula

183

and pity, and describes the rhythms by which terror grows larger and more hollow until it collapses into pity. Verdi spent a great deal of time coaching Barbieri-Nini, the first Lady, in operatic somnambulism. She claimed that she worked steadily for three months on the part—this was an exaggeration and may have been misreported, but time distortions and sleep deficits figure everywhere in the role of Lady, even in the life of the singer who enacted it: “for three months, morning and evening, I tried to imitate those who talk in their sleep, uttering words (as Verdi would say to me) while hardly moving their lips, leaving the rest of the face immobile, including the eyes. It was enough to drive one crazy.”3 On 11 March 1865, Verdi provided a similar recipe for the revised version, partly informed by his experience of watching the Italian actress Adelaide Ristori in Shakespeare’s play: we reach the sleepwalking scene, which is always the high point of the opera. Anyone who has seen Ristori knows that it should be done with only the most sparing gestures, even being limited to just about a single gesture, that of wiping out a bloodstain that she thinks she has on her hand. The movements should be slow, and one should not see her taking steps; her feet should drag over the ground as if she were a statue, or ghost, walking. The eyes fixed, the appearance corpse-like; she is in agony, and dies soon after. Ristori employed a rattle in her throat—the death rattle. In music, that must not and cannot be done; just as one shouldn’t cough in the last act of La traviata. . . . Here there is an English-horn lament that takes the place of the death-rattle perfectly well, and more poetically. The piece should be sung with the utmost simplicity and in voce cupa [a hollow voice] (she is a dying woman) but without ever letting the voice become ventriloquial. There are some moments in which the voice can open up, but they must be brief flashes.4

To Verdi, Ventriloquial seems to mean toneless (elsewhere he speaks of a voice “with tone in it, not ‘ventriloqu[i]al’ ”);5 the Garzanti Italian dictionary defines ventriloquo as a manner of speaking a labbra semichuise (with lips half closed). But according to another definition, in which ventriloquism refers to throwing one’s voice onto an inanimate object, Lady is quite ventriloquial: much of the burden of expression has been reassigned to the orchestra—the English horn performs a surrogate death rattle. Parts of her voice have been thrown into the distance: indeed, Lady has attained a state of far removal from herself, a sort of ecstasy of despair. She has contracted. Her single gesture, her brief flares of passion, are intermissions in a state of gesturelessness, paralysis, aphasia. If a corpse could sing, it would sound like this. Jonas Barish has argued that Verdi’s sleepwalking scene is not a mad scene: it is an organized, coherent piece, without the discontinuities that usually represent madness, and without the musical reminiscences to be found, for example, in the famous mad scene in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor—“here the music does not remember very much.”6 Barish has noticed a crucial feature of the scene: it turns the normal conventions for raving sopranos upside down, almost

184

❧

macbeth

as if Verdi had set out to write the exact opposite of a mad scene. But perhaps Verdi did this not to stress Lady’s sanity but to portray a different species of madness. The extraverted Lucia became a better singer as she went mad, more urgently expressive, more dizzyingly melodic. The introverted Lady, on the other hand, is moving not toward a fantastic rapture but toward catatonia: fining herself down to an almost musicless state, she is losing expressivity, losing any power to sing. Donizetti’s mad scene was full of pretty quotations from early scenes, as Lucia remembers how she and her lover met at the fountain in happier days; Lucia, so to speak, embraced her opera. But Lady relinquishes her opera, loses any connectedness to her own previous actions. With her words she helplessly returns to the past, but she can’t recall the right tunes any more. Verdi’s sleepwalking scene is a study in amnesia: the music illustrates the erasing of Lady’s mind, its blanching into a state of silent candor. The text shows that great gaps are opening in Lady’s intelligence; the music anticipates the final condition, pure extinction of faculty—“Out, out, brief candle!” says Macbeth (5.5.23), but his wife is the one holding the taper. Catatonia is a disease in which a general paralysis occurs because nerve signals are firing too rapidly to transmit feasible commands to muscles: and Verdi’s sleepwalking scene is an astonishing exercise in the kinesthetics of catatonia. The tempo is largo, slow: the dynamics hover around ppp; but we hear continual allusions to fast tremblings, thready pulses, aborted nerve-spasms, unscreamed screams. The scene begins in the fatal F minor of the grand duet Fatal mia donna and so much else in the opera. The important musical elements in this opening section, a nearly athematic delirium, are these: (1) a staccato tracery of a slightly altered F minor scale, anticipated in the first-act prelude—a bit of musical gooseflesh, a sort of petit pas for mice on tiptoe; (2) a double-dotted sway, an important theme in the first-act prelude, accompanied by arpeggios of an F minor triad and a C dominant chord, a slow-motion replay of the opera’s i–V motto-progression—here Lady seems to be falling into her private rhythm, a humming self-hypnosis, a state of acedia; (3) a reedy chromatic descent, recurring when the doctor notes that she keeps rubbing her hands—this may be one of Verdi’s musical equivalents to Lady’s ceaseless hand wringing, her vain attempt to wash away the blood; or an anticipation of the death rattle, for Lady is steeped in death, in the midst of death, throughout this scene (see exx. 40–43). Hand, voice, faculty of sight, seem to be growing displaced into orchestral gestures. Jane Bernstein, who has closely studied descriptions of the hand movements of actresses playing Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth from Sarah Siddons to Adelaide Ristori, notes that in Verdi’s sleepwalking scene “her hands take on a preternatural life of their own . . . [the opera] is centered not on the voice but on the body of the prima donna”7—a description that beautifully captures the way in which the disintegration of customary melody reflects the disintegration of the body. King James considered witches to be sortiari because their practices were determined by lot or chance; and here we see Verdi turning the riddle,

❧

la sonnambula

185

Example 40. Formication.

Example 41. Sway.

Example 42. Slither.

generating a scene out of music-bits abutting one another inconsequentially— or, better, with dramatic consequence, not musical. If the sleepwalking scene isn’t a mad scene in the Lucia manner, what is it? The emphasis on gesture and on the singer’s physical body, the fragmentary, tessellated quality of the musical discourse, the phantasmal aspect of the action all point to ballet-pantomime instead of opera. Marian Smith, in her remarkable book on nineteenth-century French opera and ballet, shows just how ballet-pantomime composers wrestled their music into shapes that embodied action and psychology—she quotes a number of Parisian critics from the 1830s and 1840s:

186

❧

macbeth

Example 43. Hand wash.

Ballet music has a particular character: it is more accented, more parlante, more expressive than opera music, because it is not destined only to accompany and enhance the words of the librettist, but to be itself the entire libretto. Generally, one does not ask for music from a ballet-pantomime composer, but for an orchestra that is the translation, the commentary of the text that one would not otherwise be able to understand.8

A ballet-pantomime score, then, isn’t music: it’s just a transposition of words and story into wordless sound. If a sylphide flaps her wings, the composer will oblige with a dainty flutter of thirty-second-notes.9 The disrupted gesticisms of Verdi’s sleepwalking scene seem to accord well with such experiments in translating pantomime into music. Smith notices that the old ballet-pantomime is a continual attempt to find surrogates for language: “composers, choreographers, and designers at the Opéra introduced words into ballet performances in every way but actually having performers intone them”10—including onstage placards and orchestral quotations of familiar tunes whose lyrics were relevant to the action. The sleepwalking scene is a sort of ballet-pantomime in which the performer does intone words—words that float in a semidisconnected way above the descriptively intent orchestral discourse. In the 1865 version of Macbeth, the Hecate ballet-pantomime uses some of the same gestic devices (strengthening the link between Lady and the witches), though the basic Hecate music is an infernal waltz, whereas Lady’s basic sleepwalk music is a lullaby—perhaps one might even call it a Sommeil. In the third act of Lully’s Atys (1676), there is an eerie scene presided over by the god Morpheus, who sends, first, Phantase to remind the sleeping Atys of the joys of Cybele’s love, and then a dance-chorus of Songes funestes to warn Atys

❧

la sonnambula

187

of the terrors that would beset a lover faithless to a goddess. Lully carefully separates the soothing dreams from the nightmare; but Verdi mixes them up, creating an effect of false, anxious calm. There is a similar effect in Vivaldi’s flute concerto La notte (RV 439), with its quick transitions between soft, too-heavy breathing (il sonno) and gasps, thrills (fantasmi). A dream world is an eminently suitable locale for a ballet-pantomime—as Gautier noted, “Fairyland is the place where the action of a ballet can be most easily developed”11—and the music of the sleepwalking scene is a conspectus of sleep. Barish is right to say that there are no direct quotations, here or elsewhere in the sleepwalking scene, from earlier melodies; but Lady’s opening phrase is full of the ghosts of quotations, quotations in the process of effacing themselves, losing salience (see ex. 44). In the first two bars of the D
major section, the orchestra plays, in combination, the falling semitone of the epigram Tutto è finito and the scalar rise and octave drop-off that marks Lady’s ambition in several places in the opera, notably (in the 1865 version) Lady’s cry of È necessario (from La luce langue). Verdi places great emphasis on the falling semitone by putting the first note in a position where it desperately needs to fall: this figure occupies ˆ 5; ˆ in some sense the whole scene is such positions as B

–A
(scale degrees
6– simply stating tutto è finito, IT’S ALL OVER, in huge letters. When Lady starts to sing, her vocal line doesn’t dissonate with the slow paroxysms in the orchestra, but it doesn’t pay much attention to the orchestra, either—the heavily emphatic voice, singing the sputtery vagrant line Chi poteva in quel vegliardo tanto sangue immaginar? (Who could have imagined so much blood in that old man?), seems disconnected from the accompaniment, disconnected from normal patterns of melodic development, disconnected from itself—a musical equivalent to the involution of Lady’s mind, its self-immural in foot-thick walls. She’s snatching at a tune that she can’t quite find; the witch is self-bewitched, lost in her own labyrinth. Sometimes it feels as if Lady is an extraneous figure in her own scena: the orchestral music provides a stunned accompaniment for a zombie ballet, which Lady helplessly figures with vocal graffiti. The sleepwalking scene offers no abrupt changes in mood—indeed, Lady seems to have fallen into some state almost beneath mood, a dead calm; but Verdi has managed to transfer the notion of mad discontinuity to other aspects of his musical discourse while retaining the sense of a single vast arc of drama. Verdi was a composer who noted that madness is not pretty. When the doctor, perceiving something like a confession of murder, interrupts (Che parlò?), the key shifts to D
minor, a turn to the tonic minor that seems to indicate how appalling her speech sounds to a public ear; the whole harmonic structure starts to get dangerously unstable, and by the time Lady is noticing Di sangue umano sa qui sempre (Here’s the smell of blood still), the broken and syncopated accompaniment is in F
, an unusual key generated as the relative major of D
minor. As Lady’s whole perceptual world is fracturing into spasms of hallucinations, the music follows her by a series of disturbing musical

188

❧

macbeth

Example 44. A spot.

gestures, patterns of harmonic progression that seem to be the musical equivalent of magical thinking. The schizoid detachment of the music from the text is demonstrated in a particularly harrowing fashion when Lady sings Batte alcuno! (Someone is knocking!), while the orchestra utterly refuses to knock. In the grand duet from act 1, the knocking—the knocking at Hell Gate, according to Shakespeare’s Porter—was clearly, obsessively imaged in the orchestra; the orchestra even played a sort of pre-audition of the knocking at the words Il pugnal là riportate. In the sleepwalking scene, the unknocked knocking is as striking as the loud knocking in the duet. The harmony does start to stabilize toward the end: Lady exclaims A letto (To bed) over chords in A
and D
major, as if her bed were the dominant of her emotional life, the only hope for relief and release. Lady’s voice fades out on a cadenza, Andiam, Macbetto, as if she were sinking into complete rhythmlessness, her private time outside all clock time. And the sleepwalking scene ends with the tiptoeing-mouse theme from the beginning, now in D
, not F minor, as if Verdi were imagining Lady stepping into Lethe, entering the tranquility of oblivion. If this theme were in F minor, the sleepwalking scene would be a segment of an endless purgatorial loop; but in D
we feel that Lady has reached The End. After the sleepwalking scene, we return to Macbeth, who sings a self-pitying aria, Pietà, rispetto, amore, in which he acknowledges that he will die, and fears

❧

la sonnambula

189

that curses and not mourning will sound at his burial. This is in the same key, D
, as Lady’s sleepwalking scene, and Verdi may have intended the arias to be complementary: the hypnotized Lady and the blustery Macbeth, one thinning into reverie, the other exclaiming against fate. The recitativo before the aria even begins with the same sort of double-dotted figure that we hear in the sleepwalking scene, but faster and more excited. Again we note, in this recitativo, how little Macbeth’s voice is his own voice, how much of what he sings is borrowed— as if he were a sort of amplification device for prompters inside his head: he quotes the apparition’s prophecy that no man born of woman can hurt him, in a vain attempt to shore up his failing self-confidence. The sinking of his courage, the faltering of his energy, can be heard through the aria: one might expect a certain vehemence as he anticipates the curses that will fall on him, but instead Macbeth seems droopy, listless (ahi lasso!)—and his aria, like the sleepwalking scene, dribbles out into a cadenza. Here he seems like Shakespeare’s dwarf, trying out a text a few sizes too big for his musical resources. Verdi found a good musical correlative to the way in which Shakespeare shows Macbeth, like Antony, dislimning, as water is in water. In the 1847 version, the drama remains focused on Macbeth until the end; but in 1865, Verdi rewrote the whole conclusion of the act, cutting Macbeth’s death solo and providing a new orchestral piece to represent the battle, as well as a new final chorus. In neither version does the great Shakespeare speech “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” count for more than a few lines of perfunctory recitativo; but by finding effective forms of deletion for both Lady and Macbeth, Verdi illustrates the speech’s themes: Verdi crushes, undoes his protagonists, reduces them to psychotics, or to tales told by an idiot. Lady retained a certain dignity in her inanition, but Macbeth becomes first a hateful fool and then a vacuum, as Macduff and other nobles rush in to reassert credible forms of moral action, a new wideawake sort of reality. The opera ends, in 1865, with dazzling feats of compositional craft. The battle interlude is a fugue, and Verdi delighted in its audacity: You will laugh when you hear that I wrote a Fugue for the battle!!!! A Fugue? . . . I, who detest everything that smells of school, and it has been nearly thirty years since I wrote one!!!! But I can tell you that in this case that musical form fit quite well. The subjects and countersubjects that follow each other, the dissonant clashes, the uproar, etc., etc., can express a battle quite well.12

What is the alternative to nightmare, to the hectic jerky music-speech of the witches and the Macbeths—fragmentary epigrams, stuck cadences, tempos too fast or too slow? A fugue—something at once rousing and erudite, a composition in which all elements may seem to fly apart in frenzy, but in fact fit together in an ostentatious state of control. (It is noteworthy that Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette begins with a battle-fugue, and Verdi’s Macbeth ends with one: to the nineteenth-century

190

❧

macbeth

musical imagination, the battle-fugue was a near-ideal trope for Shakespeare’s peculiar ability to coordinate, to organize, the most vast and varied conflictual aspects of human life.) The fugue announces a victory of intelligence over desperate fantasy. Terror is dependent on tacky special effects; the antidote to terror is a display of verifiable and authoritative voice-leading. Music finally asserts itself as a medium at once absolute and humanly expressive, solid, reliable, having little to do with the tenuities and hollownesses of the Macbeths. The fugue is Verdi’s metaphor for catharsis itself. The new (in 1865) final chorus, Macbeth, Macbeth ov’ è? (Macbeth, where is Macbeth?—see ex. 45) is the headiest, most exultant chorus Verdi was ever to write; rapid, double-dotted, springy, it has it something of the built-in political activism of Hanns Eisler’s marches from the 1930s. The people of Scotland delight that a thunderbolt from the God of victory has destroyed the usurper; then they honor their new king. The soldiers, the women, all eventually join in, but the hymn is first sung by a chorus of bardi—and bards seem appropriate, with the suggestions of inspiration, ecstasy, prophecy, that the name implies. The bards are the sequel to the witches, possessing an access to the transcendental but without any implication of malice; the witches have no further role to play in a post-Macbeth Scotland, so they transform themselves (so to speak) into an innocuous and public-spirited band of poets. The bards play the role of Eumenides to the witches’ Erinyes: furies tamed into spirits of justice. The key structure of the final chorus is of interest: it begins in C major, as if to confirm that the entire opera is a huge expansion of a cadence from F minor to C major. But the second half of the chorus is in A major, a key not often heard previously. It forms a satisfying span to an act that began with the Patria oppressa chorus in A minor. But it is also a key closely related (the subdominant) to the witches’ key of E. The witches’ eyes perhaps glimmer faintly from the joyous last bars of the opera, an ongoing force of destiny.

Example 45. Victory.

❧

la sonnambula

191

If the witches were demons, the play would end with their slinking back, defeated, into hell. But the witches of Macbeth nowhere gnash their teeth or rage at the triumph of justice; in fact their plan succeeds in every last detail, and the army of Macduff and Malcolm is as much an instrument for expediting their wishes as the magic cauldron is. This can be understood, in the orthodox Christian fashion, as the subsumption of partial evils into the universal good; but it can be understood less effortfully as an allegation of something distasteful— petty and deformed—in the action of Providence itself. Teleology colludes with the willful; the abyss is full of maggots.

Part 3

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Chapter Twenty-Two

Cosmicomedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a fairy play. But what, exactly, are fairies? According to one line of speculation, the fairies are pagan gods that have dwindled, after the triumph of Christianity, into furtive, mischievous nature-sprites; and vestiges of their ancient power cling to them. Shakespeare borrowed the name Oberon from the French romance Huon de Bordeaux, in which Oberon is a sort of glorified lubber fiend, a helpful elf king who makes impossible tasks possible for his human friends; but the German form of the name Oberon is Alberich, the dwarf king whose black greed troubles the human race in the Nibelungenlied and, much later, in Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen. Behind cute Mustardseed and adorable Peaseblossom there lurk demons. Indeed, there are moments in Shakespeare’s play when Christian orthodoxy enters slantwise into ancient Athens, and the fairies almost reveal themselves as devilish spirits hostile to a Christian regime. At one point Puck alludes to ghosts of the dead, especially the wretched wraiths of suicides, whom Christian Europe buried at crossroads since hallowed ground was forbidden them: ghosts, wand’ring here and there, Troop home to churchyards. Damned spirits all, That in crossways and floods have burial, Already to their wormy beds are gone. (3.2.381–84) Of course, in classical Greece such concepts as damnation and salvation had little meaning, and no one considered that the souls of suicides suffered any unusual torment. As if alarmed, Oberon forestalls this dangerous swerve into Christian values by a sleight of speech, instantly paganizing, eroticizing, the fairy world: “But we are spirits of another sort. / I with the Morning’s love have oft made sport” (3.2.388–89). In other words: all this talk of ghosts and damned spirits has nothing to do with us; we’re attractive, vivacious, fun-loving creatures. It is as if Puck, on the verge of leading the audience to identify Oberon as a sort of Antichrist, had been diverted into safe channels of discourse. There is a sense, however, in which Puck and some of the other fairies are only playing at being harmless silly creatures; their toy wings (in some productions) conceal resources of danger and malice, just as Mrs. Quickly, disguised as the Queen of the Fairies

196

❧

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

in the last act of The Merry Wives of Windsor, wants to make sure that actual physical injury—pinching and burning—is inflicted on Falstaff. The word fairy itself contains menace. It is derived from the Latin word for fate, fatum, itself the past participle of fari, to speak: a fated thing is decreed to be so. Fairies, then, are related to the power that ordains the outcome of events through speech; they are diminutive Parcae. On the other hand, Shakespeare’s fairies are confused and inept, slapstick Fates. Fate may terrify us by being indifferent and beyond appeal, but its inexorability has a certain comforting sense of fulfillment behind it: Necessity may be iron, but it follows intelligible principles of cause and effect. But in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the moving Finger, having writ, may, instead of moving on, go back and erase what it just wrote. The play’s zaniness derives from the idea that Fate’s decree is, essentially, Oops! or Never mind. The play is a dramatic hypertext, a garden of forking paths in which Fate tries out one plotline, and then, when it peters out, wipes out the whole branch and tries again. Amnesia is simply a convenient device for reformatting the play’s hard drive. The gloomiest view of Fate to be found in old theology was that of the gnostics. In Hans Jonas’s expert summary: The universe . . . is like a vast prison whose innermost dungeon is the earth, the scene of man’s life. Around and above it the cosmic spheres are ranged like concentric enclosing shells. Most frequently there are the seven spheres of the planets surrounded by the eighth, that of the fixed stars. There was, however, a tendency to multiply the structures and make the scheme more and more extensive: Basilides counted no fewer than 365 “heavens.” The religious significance of this cosmic architecture lies in the idea that everything which intervenes between here and the beyond serves to separate man from God, not merely by spatial distance but through active demonic force. Thus the vastness and multiplicity of the cosmic system express the degree to which man is removed from God.1

Every movement to subdivide Fate into a heap of little Fatekins, fairies, with independent and competing powers to decree the shape of things will bring closer a vision of a gnostic cosmos, understood as a bungle created by incompetent demiurges. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a cheerful, peppy play, but its hilarity is won effortfully from a black comedy in which the spindle of Necessity is spun, tilted, by childish caprice. Oberon is a near-omnipotent lord of misrule, as his wife Titania explains: hoary-headed frosts Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose, And on old Hiems’ thin and icy crown An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds Is, as in mockery, set; the spring, the summer, The childing autumn, angry winter, change

❧

cosmicomedy

197

Their wonted liveries; and the mazed world, By their increase, now knows not which is which. And this same progeny of evils comes From our debate, from our dissension; We are their parents and original. (2.1.107–17) Because of a quarrel between two fairies, jealous of one another’s love for mortals, the corn is rotting in the fields, the crows are eating the plaguey corpses of cattle, and snow is falling on the roses. Oberon is not quite the gnostics’ Ialdaboth, the idiot whose sound and fury govern the botched universe; but he seems somewhat more irresponsible, potent for disorder, than Zeus. The classical gods were beautiful monsters of appetite, but themselves in thrall to Fate, and (with one great exception) propitiable adults. In Shakespeare’s play, however, it seems that not only Cupid’s arrows but also Jupiter’s thunderbolts, Lachesis’s lots, Atropos’s scissors, have fallen into the hands of a gang of ten-year-olds and their distracted Fagin. A somewhat similar effect can be found in Goethe’s Der Zauberlehrling (The Apprentice in Magic), familiar from such varied contexts as Carl Loewe’s ballad, Paul Dukas’s orchestral scherzo, and the Mickey Mouse section of Disney’s Fantasia. A Midsummer Night’s Dream belongs to a class of comic literature that articulates cosmic mechanisms for random distribution—following Italo Calvino, I’ll refer to such literature as cosmicomedies. Of course, all comedies embrace disorder; but not all comedies posit some mechanism of science or theology that explicitly accounts for disorder—the poet can simply notice that the ways of God are unsearchable, or that Fate is beyond our ken; or the poet can neglect to speculate about such matters at all. In the Christian scheme of things (the only scheme directly pertinent to the study of Shakespeare), disorder can always be attributed to the devil. On the other hand, the devil isn’t necessarily funny, to spectators who believe in an active force for the destruction of their souls; and Shakespeare, like many authors, preferred to write comedies in which disorder was explained—if it needed to be explained at all—by non-diabolical means. Disorder can also be attributed to God, since what seems discord to us may sound like perfect harmony to a larger ear; but the God who numbers every sparrow that falls may seem farfetched when dragged in to account for the general imbroglio of human social life. And disorder, of course, can be attributed to human free will, a hopeless tangle of good and evil motives—but this is the sort of explanation that doesn’t require any appeal to a cosmic machine for generating messes. In the absence of the devil, and God, and human free will, what mechanisms exist for distributing desirable and undesirable things at random to the just and to the unjust? The most important mechanism is Fortuna, whose wheel lifts up and lets down without any regard to distinction or merit. The Christian God carefully discriminates, weighs every gram of virtue and vice, sin and repentance, before assigning us to heaven or hell or purgatory; Fortuna, by contrast, is a gross goddess, attentive to nothing except her wheel’s internal rotary process.

198

❧

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

Fortuna occupies a strange position in Medieval and Renaissance literature, neither opposed to God nor quite in conformity to theology. Boethius (De consolatione philosophiae) and Dante make Fortuna into a kind of demiurge, ruling the trivial things that are outside the scope of the drama of human salvation. As Dante puts it: “Master,” I said to him, “now tell me also What is this Fortune which thou speakest of, That has the world’s goods so within its clutches?” And he to me: “O creatures imbecile, What ignorance is this which doth beset you?” Now will I have thee learn my judgment of her. He whose omniscience everything transcends The heavens created, and gave who should guide them, That every part to every part may shine, Distributing the light in equal measure; He in like manner to the mundane splendours Ordained a general ministress and guide, That she might change at times the empty treasures From race to race, from one blood to another, Beyond resistance of all human wisdom. Therefore one people triumphs, and another Languishes, in pursuance of her judgment, Which hidden is, as in the grass a serpent. . . . And this is she who is so crucified Even by those who ought to give her praise, Giving her blame amiss, and bad repute. But she is blissful, and she hears it not; Among the other primal creatures gladsome She turns her sphere, and blissful she rejoices. (Inferno 7.67–84, 91–96, trans. Longfellow) Note especially Fortuna’s deafness, her joyous indifference to those she rewards and those she crushes. Contemporary with The Divine Comedy is one of the great cosmicomedies, Le roman de Fauvel (1310–16), a satirical poem by Gervais du Bus and others, in which a fallow (fauve) donkey decides that he could become lucky beyond all measure

❧

cosmicomedy

199

by a daring initiative. Fauvel personifies every sort of corruption; indeed his name is explained as an acronym for Flaterie, Avarice, Vilanie, Varieté (inconstancy), Envie, and Lascheté (cowardice). Despite his idleness and vanity, Fortuna raises Fauvel to the high point of her wheel, while worth and virtue lie in the dust. Dressed in cloth of gold, surrounded by Murder and Treachery and Sodomy and all his other henchmen, Fauvel decides to set out for Macrocosm, “Une cité de grant fantosme” (mirage city), where the goddess Fortuna sits in state, amusing herself by turning the wheel of the world, a wheel inset in a larger, counterspinning wheel. Fauvel begs her to marry him; Fortuna is wholly disgusted by the idea of marrying this useless ass, whom she calls “un sac tout plain de merde” (a sackful of shit) and a forerunner of the Antichrist; she warns him that when she wants she will make him fall. Rotational logic might suggest that Fauvel’s overthrow is imminent, but no—Fortuna decides to bestow on him a beautiful wife, Vainne Gloire. Fauvel and Vainne Gloire lead a triumphant procession of Fornication, Drunkenness, Homicide (and so forth) into Paris, where, after a grand charivari, the newlyweds beget a whole race of new Fauvels to oppress us all; and the poem ends with fervent prayers to the Virgin to remove Fauvel from power, all this while Fauvel enjoys rubdowns from the secular and church authorities who curry his favor. Indeed, whenever we speak of currying favor, we are dimly alluding to du Bus’s poem, since the term is derived from the ceaseless currying of Fauvel. It is hard to understand Fortuna’s role in this poem as anything except evil: the more foully Fauvel behaves, the more she condemns him with her words and rewards him with her treasures. In André Gide’s Le Prométhée mal enchaîné—one of the wittiest of Modernist cosmicomedies—the banker Zeus picks a person by chance, asks him to write an address on an envelope, puts a 500-franc note in the envelope, gives a hard slap to the address-writer, and mails the envelope; and similarly in Le roman de Fauvel, the bad luck that should follow the good luck seems to get deflected onto the wrong party. Fortuna’s speech in refusing Fauvel’s proposal of marriage includes the following lines: Entent, beste ou tout mal repose: Fortune si n’est autre chose Que la providence divine Qui dispose, mesure et termine Par compas de droite raison Le monde et toute sa seson, Si que j’abat dedens mes lices Riches, pouvres, sages, et nices. Hear, beast in whom all evil dwells: Fortune is nothing, nothing else but the great providence divine which disposes, measures most fine

200

❧

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

by means of the compass of right reason the whole world in its every season, so that I slaughter in my tourney the rich, the poor, the fools, the learned. (Translation mine) The indiscriminateness of the slaughter comports ill with the nice scruples of the compass of reason. Fortuna hovers in a strange limbo between the Christian God, forethinking the exact measures of justice, and a blind woman scattering lice and dollar bills in the wind. In 1316, a luxury volume of Le roman de Fauvel was produced, beautifully illustrated with miniatures, and containing 167 musical settings of homilies, Fauvel’s wooing songs, Fortuna’s rejection, and so forth; some of the music consisted of such old-fashioned genres as the sequence, the conductus, and the lai, but other numbers were written as polyphonic motets in the advanced idiom of the ars nova—the composers of these motets included the most celebrated of the age, Philippe de Vitry. In this way the poem became a virtual opera, a narrative Gesamtkunstwerk. Embedded songs were common in French medieval romances, and it is likely that the world of plays and other public entertainments influenced English and French literary traditions.2 A medieval poem can be a drama pursued by other means. It is difficult to know whether its influence could have lingered 275 years, to the time when Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream; but the spectacle of Titania embracing, cooing over Bottom the ass has an odd look of a requited version of Fauvel’s love for Fortuna—a thorough immerding of Fate. There is also an English tradition of cosmicomedies. In Chaucer’s The House of Fame (ca. 1380), an eagle snatches Chaucer and carries him to the hall of lady Fame, where he witnesses an astonishing spectacle of the arbitrary disposition of reputation. First Fame is approached by a band of those who have behaved virtuously and hope for good fame: For of this folk ful wel y wiste, They hadde good fame ech deserved Although they were dyversly served; Ryght as her suster, dame Fortune, Ys wont to serven in comune. (ll.1544–48) Fame tells this first band to go away: yes, they deserve good fame, but she’s decided that they will dwell in obscurity—no one will speak well of them or ill of them. Then Fame commands her messenger to fetch Eolus, the trumpeter, and his two trumpets: the first, Clere Laude, and the second, Sklaundre, a black brassy hideous thing. A second band of virtuous folk appears; this time Fame decides that, despite their merits, they will have “wikkyd loos, and worse name” (l. 1620), and bids Eolus blow the trumpet of Sklaundre, which blats out a foul

❧

cosmicomedy

201

noise and many-colored smoke—black, blue, greenish, swartish red. A third band of good-doers comes forward, and, of course, Fame grants them exactly what they want: Eolus blows his trumpet of gold to the four corners of the earth. It takes little skill in mathematics to guess what happens when the other two groups—those who have done neither good nor evil, and those guilty of every vice—approach Fame: their reputations are similarly governed not by justice but by whim. God does not play dice with the world, said Einstein, but poets in every age have been able to imagine a world ruled by random caprice. When the tourist Chaucer leaves Fame’s castle, he immediately comes upon a revolving labyrinth (l. 1921) in the form of a giant acoustic baffle, letting in news of every sort and emitting a confused jangly roar about war, peace, rest, labor, health, sickness, trust, dread—a smear of decomposed information, chaos’s white noise: And ever mo, as swyft as thought, This queynte hous aboute wente, That never mo hyt stille stente. And therout com so gret a noyse That, had hyt stonden upon Oyse, Men myghte hy han herd esely To Rome, y trowe sikerly. . . . And on the roof men may yet seen A thousand holes, and wel moo, To leten wel the soun out goo. And be day, in every tyde, Been al the dores opened wide, And by nyght, echon, unshette . . . Ne never rest is in that place That hit nys fild ful of tydynges, Other loude, or of whisprynges; And over all the houses angles Ys ful of rounynges and of jangles Of werres, of pes, of mariages, Of reste, of labour, of viages, Of abood, of deeth, of lyf, Of love, of hate, acord, of stryf, Of loos, of lore, and of wynnynges, Of hele, of seknesse, of bildynges, Of faire wyndes, and of tempestes, Of qwalm of folk, and eke of bestes . . . (ll. 1924–30, 1945–53, 1955–68) Ovid has a somewhat similar house of Fame in the twelfth book of Metamorphoses; but only Chaucer imagines it as spinning, caught up in its private tornado of untruth.

202

❧

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

This movement from a sort of clean transcendental arithmetic to a condition of complete jumble is quite characteristic of the cosmicomedy. First, three groups (the good, the indifferent, the evil) treated with three possible dispositions (good fame, oblivion, ill fame), leading to nine possible classes of events; then a fall into the labyrinth, a great meaningless babble of sound. A similar plot rhythm can be found in one of the finest twentieth-century cosmicomedies, Beckett’s Murphy (1938): Murphy receded a little way into the north and prepared to finish his lunch. He took the biscuits carefully out of the packet and laid them face upward on the grass, in order as he felt of edibility. They were the same as always, a Ginger, an Osborne, a Digestive, a Petit Beurre and one anonymous. He always ate the first-named last, because he liked it the best, and the anonymous first, because he thought it very likely the least palatable. The order in which he ate the remaining three was indifferent to him and varied irregularly from day to day. On his knees now before the five it struck him for the first time that these prepossessions reduced to a paltry six the number of ways in which he could make his meal. But this was to violate the very essence of assortment . . . Even if he conquered his prejudice against the anonymous, still there would be only twenty-four ways in which the biscuits could be eaten. But were he to take the final step and overcome his infatuation with the ginger, then the assortment would spring to life before him, dancing the radiant measure of its total permutability, edible in a hundred and twenty ways! Overcome by these perspectives Murphy fell forward on his face on the grass, beside those biscuits of which it could be said as truly as of the stars, that one differed from another, but of which he could not partake in their fullness until he had learnt not to prefer any one to any other.3

To love chaos—and Murphy is trying to perfect a love for chaos—one must find a way of dwelling in a fully devalued universe: if Murphy is to enjoy his five biscuits in every possible order, he must neither prefer the ginger nor sniff at the anonymous. Chaucer’s Fame and du Bus’s Fortuna also had to attack any concept of value in order to perform with perfect randomness: Fame had to ignore her own recognition of merit and demerit when assigning reputation, Fortuna had to conquer her own aversion to Fauvel in granting him a beautiful wife, riches, and such body servants as pope and king. Every chance operation is an attack on hierarchy, for value-distinctions always limit and frustrate chance’s perfect equanimity, instinct for the neuter. For this reason, satirists find cosmicomedy an attractive mode: when a system is hopelessly out of whack, it is convenient to imagine a transcendental desystematizer, designifier—Disorder personified. But chaos is most fun when restricted to a small group of elements. Murphy can delight in the arithmetical pleasure of investigating every eating order of his biscuits because his pack contains only five, and therefore only 120 permutations (5! ⫽ 5 ⭈ 4 ⭈ 3 ⭈ 2 ⭈ 1 ⫽ 120). But when the number of elements becomes large, chaos becomes a condition of terror. About to die, Murphy tries to conjure up in his memory clear images, the faces of his friends, his father, but

❧

cosmicomedy

203

He could not get a picture in his mind of any creature he had seen, animal or human. Scraps of bodies, of landscapes, hands, eyes, lines and colours evoking nothing, rose and climbed out of sight before him, as though reeled upward off a spool level with his throat.4

Just as Chaucer’s Fame moved from the arithmetical permutations of reputation to a fool’s buzz of noise, so Beckett’s Murphy moves from his biscuit arrangements to a condition of mental entropy, the heat-death of his whole visualperceptual system. The secret of keeping cosmicomedy well within the boundary of the amusing is to keep small the number of elements to be randomized. In a small set, a complete exfoliation of chaos will reveal all sorts of teasing symmetries, glimpses of (paradoxical) order. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare keeps chaos manageable, even amiable, by restricting the size of his set-domains. For example, the world of nubile Athenians shrinks to exactly four people; and Shakespeare becomes the Schoenberg of this little group, extracting every love-row he can find, investigating every retrograde and inversion. Lysander, Demetrius, Hermia, Helena—how many ordered pairs can be extracted from this set? The general rule is n(n - 1), and so the answer, in this case, is twelve; a complete table of permutations of pairs, under the relation chase, looks like this: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Lysander chases Demetrius Lysander chases Hermia Lysander chases Helena Demetrius chases Lysander Demetrius chases Hermia Demetrius chases Helena Hermia chases Lysander Hermia chases Demetrius Hermia chases Helena Helena chases Lysander Helena chases Demetrius Helena chases Hermia

This table is a complete elucidation of the chaos available to the system of pairs selected from a set of four elements. For the purposes of this chart, attraction and repulsion are interchangeable forces for pairing: the relation chase may be motivated by sexual desire (as it often is among opposite-sexed pairs) or by hatred of a rival (as it always is among like-sexed pairs)—indeed the old word venery, pertinent to the hunt for game or to more venereal pursuits, captures this ambiguity perfectly. Of the twelve possible plot-elements available on this chart, Shakespeare avails himself of ten:

204

❧

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

1. “Where is Demetrius? O, how fit a word / Is that vile name to perish on my [Lysander’s] sword!” (2.2.106–7) 2. “Lysander, thou hast given her [Hermia] rhymes. . . . Thou hast by moonlight at her window sung” (1.1.27, 29) 3. “And run through fire I [Lysander] will for thy sweet sake. / Transparent Helena” (2.2.103–4) 4. “Where is Lysander and fair Hermia? / The one I [Demetrius] ‘ll slay; the other slayeth me” (2.1.189–90) [NB: slay and slayeth are well-established conjectural emendations for stay and stayeth] 5. “Demetrius loves your [Hermia’s] fair, O happy fair! / Your eyes are lodestars, and your tongue’s sweet air” (1.1.182–83) 6. “For ere Demetrius look’d on Hermia’s eyne, / He hail’d down oaths that he was only mine [Helena’s]” (1.1.242-43); “O Helen, goddess, nymph, perfect, divine! / To what, my love, shall I [Demetrius] compare thine eyne? / Crystal is muddy” (3.2.137–39) 7. “My good Lysander, / I [Hermia] swear to thee, by Cupid’s strongest bow” (1.1.168–70) 8. ——— 9. “How low am I [Hermia], thou painted maypole [Helena]? . . . I am not yet so low / But that my nails can reach unto thine eyes” (3.2.296–98) 10. ——— 11. “I [Helena] am your spaniel; and, Demetrius, / The more you beat me, I will fawn on you. . . . Apollo flies, and Daphne holds the chase” (2.1.203–4, 231) 12. “Have you [Hermia] no modesty, no maiden shame, / No touch of bashfulness? . . . Fie, fie, you counterfeit, you puppet, you!” (3.2.285–86, 288) Two possibilities are absent because Puck squeezes his magic love-juice only into male human eyes, not into female; but the spectator can easily supply the missing scenes, if desired, by the rigorous logic of rotational symmetry that governs all aspects of the Athenian-lovers plot. Helena calls Hermia a counterfeit, a puppet, and there is a sense in which all four of the lovers are counterfeits and puppets, manipulated by an arithmetical operation of libido. The implacable spin of Fortuna’s wheel is felt everywhere. Shakespeare’s comedies are often, in one way or another, wheel shaped: sometimes through permutational exhaustion, as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or A Comedy of Errors (with its intersecting sets of identical twins); sometimes through a circle of unrequitedness, as in Twelfth Night—the sort of circle that Beckett caricatures in Murphy: “Of such was Neary’s love for Miss Dwyer, who loved a Flight-Lieutenant Elliman, who loved a Miss Farren of Ringsakiddy, who loved a Father Fitt of Ballinclashet, who in all sincerity was bound to acknowledge a certain vocation for a Mrs. West of Passage, who loved Neary.”5 But the circle of unrequitedness is an unstable, carefully contrived pattern of unhappiness; permutational exhaustion is far more intimately chaotic, intimate with chaos.

Chapter Twenty-Three

The Picture of Cupid A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a stratified play, a lamination of planes: from bottom to top, the plane of Bottom and the mechanicals; the plane of the Athenian lovers; the plane of Theseus and Hippolyta; and the plane of Oberon and the fairies. Above the top plane there lies a single manipulating presence, a cosmic mechanism for generating randomness: not Fortuna; not her sister Fame; but Cupid. Indeed, the whole fairy plane behaves as a complicated surface for inscribing and explaining the will of Cupid, whose vagrant cupidity plays everywhere. Cupid was a powerful literary presence in Shakespeare’s time, especially in the realm of comic gallantry. For example, in Ben Jonson’s “A Celebration of Charis in Ten Lyrick Peeces” (ca. 1623), the poet, pursuing the lovely Charis, begs Cupid’s assistance; the impatient poet even unclouds blind Cupid’s vision, in order to move matters along; but Cupid, appalled by the sight of the fifty-yearold poet—no very fine specimen of manhood—runs away. The poet then picks up the bow and arrows that Cupid left behind, hoping to shoot Charis himself; but one glance from Charis’s eyes strikes the poet like lightning, paralyzing him: I stood a stone, Mock’d of all: and call’d of one (Which with griefe and wrath I heard) Cupids Statue with a Beard, Or else one that plaid his Ape, In a Hercules -his shape.1 Beard, wrinkles, sweat, belly pooching over the belt—this creature is only a coarse simulacrum of the god. Shakespeare was also fond of this rhythm of surrogacy: Cupid makes few personal appearances in Shakespeare’s work, but instead operates through a complex gang of vicars. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the boyish, incompetent Puck is the most obvious of Cupid’s demiurges, but not the only one: almost any character, no matter how young or old or high or low or polished or rough or dignified or ridiculous, can find himself an erotic cynosure, a parody Cupid. Cupid cupidifies, makes flagrant, what he touches. Every act of falling in love becomes a universal promotion of sexuality.

206

❧

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

Shakespeare’s plays are full of references to Cupid; indeed, it would not be a great exaggeration to say that Shakespeare spent most of the 1590s composing a huge Cupidiad, in plays, sonnets, and narrative poems. Romeo and Juliet is congruent with A Midsummer Night’s Dream in many ways, not least of which is the ubiquity of Cupid, whose pictorial cues—the bow, the quiver, the blindfold, the little wings—are constantly, prayerfully, nervously, ironically cited throughout both plays. But the comic and the tragic versions of Cupid differ somewhat. Who is Cupid’s opponent in Romeo and Juliet? Paris and the elder Capulets certainly work against Cupid’s interests, but they seem far too feeble, too earthbound, to challenge Cupid in his own kingdom of affect. There never is a possibility that Capulet will be able to persuade Juliet, through patient appeals to reason, to stop loving Romeo. To some extent it can be said that Cupid’s opponent is Death; but the tomb seems so charged with erotic energy, Death so sexy— “unsubstantial Death is amorouss . . . keeps / Thee in dark to be his paramour” (5.3.103–5)—that Death may himself be under Cupid’s sway. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, however, Death has been demoted to the margins of the play, with poor crushed concluded quelled Pyramus, and Cupid must look elsewhere for an opposing force. Here the counter-Cupid is Diana, the goddess of chastity, whose tincture can clear the eyes confused by lascivious Cupid: as Oberon notes, when curing Titania’s vision, “Dian’s bud o’er Cupid’s flower / Hath such force and blessed power” (4.1.73). In the midst of the play’s erotic plenty, there sometimes arises a strange detumescent chill, as when Theseus swears he will either put Hermia to death or make her a nun, “Chaunting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon” (1.1.73). Shakespeare, rather more than his contemporaries, liked to dramatize the combat between the aphrodisiac and the anaphrodisiac: his imagination, like Salvador Dalí’s, was oddly empowered by saltpeter. His narrative poem Venus and Adonis (1593) is an account of a failed seduction: Venus strives to inflame the gorgeous lad Adonis with ardent pleas and kisses, but he remains sullen, obdurate, unexcited: “Well-painted idol, image dull and dead, / Statuë contenting but the eye alone, / Thing like a man” (ll. 212–14). Here Cupid’s mother is helpless before willful impotence, a man wholly disgusted by sex: “Call it not love, for Love to heaven is fled, / Since sweating Lust on earth usurp’d his name” (ll. 793–94). Elsewhere in Shakespeare’s work we can watch Cupid himself contending with the forces of chastity: in the last two sonnets from the 1609 sequence, Cupid laid by his brand and fell asleep; A maid of Dian’s this advantage found, And his love-kindling fire did quickly steep In a cold valley-fountain of that ground; Which borrow’d from this holy fire of Love A dateless lively heat, still to endure, And grew a lively bath . . . (Sonnet 153, ll. 1–7)

❧

the picture of cupid

207

As in Jonson’s “A Celebration of Charis,” or James Shirley’s 1653 masque, Cupid and Death (in which the two archers get their quivers mixed up), Cupid’s wonderworking tools fall into the wrong hands: Cupid is such a pixilated, incompetent god that he can’t keep control of his own magic. In Shakespeare’s sonnets, after the virgin tries to extinguish the sex-torch, Cupid relights it and presses it to the poet’s body, making him “a sad distemper’d guest”; the poet hurries to the bath hoping for a cure, but doesn’t find one: “Love’s fire heats water, water cools not love” (Sonnet 154, l. 14). The warmth, the bubbling of the spring seem to testify to the unquenchable fire of Cupid’s torch; and yet Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence seems to end sourly, glumly, as if all erotic adventure ended in a fizzle: neither Cupid nor the maid of Dian has much cause for cheer. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream—probably written around 1595 or 1596, not long after Venus and Adonis, and very possibly around the time of the composition of many of the sonnets as well—Cupid and Diana have a less stressful relationship, despite their seeming opposition. Here Cupid is such a potent force for chaos that he embraces in himself all sorts of divisions and contraries: as we’ll see, by the end of the play even Diana is understood simply as another modality of Cupid. Cupid is the god of desire, cupiditas, the nude august elated archer (as Auden calls him); and a god who moves beyond desire toward something like a shadow of Christian love. In the play we first see Cupid’s power expressed through elaborate meditations on his pictorial attributes: Cupid begins as the traditional cartoon cherub and slowly outgrows the confines of the picture, until at last he shows himself as the mightiest of the gods. Shakespeare presents the icon of Cupid as teasing, deceptive, in that monstrous force is dissembled under a babyish appearance; as Berowne says in a roughly contemporary play: This wimpled, whining, purblind, wayward boy, This senior-junior giant-dwarf, Dan Cupid, Regent of love-rhymes, lord of folded arms, Th’ anointed sovereign of sighs and groans, Liege of all loiterers and malecontents, Dread prince of plackets, king of codpieces . . . (Love’s Labor’s Lost 3.1.179–84) A placket is a slit in a petticoat. For Berowne, Cupid is a tiny male Muse fluttering near the crotch, the Janus of zippers; but such terms as Dread prince, liege, sovereign, lord, Regent, and giant, are both the stuff of an alliterative, languishing, précieux rhetoric and a testimony to a governing force beyond any irony. If you turn your back on the dwarf, he assumes a more than human stature, overshadowing all. A Midsummer Night’s Dream concerns the generative power of love—in particular, the image-generative power of erotic love, as if Eros were the dominant factor in human imagination. Put more strongly, one might say that it’s a play about

208

❧

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

love’s psychoses. Images generate one another so abundantly that all images tend to smear out into a general imagelessness: just as the image of Cupid as endearing putto is found inadequate, so every definition of the object of love, every definition of love itself, is thrown over almost as soon as it is established. So quick bright things come to confusion. The rhetorical doting over Cupid’s iconography begins in the play’s first scene. Cupid is blind, as Helena notes sadly: “Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind; / Therefore is wing’d Cupid painted blind” (1.1.234–35). It should be noted that Helena’s knowledge of Cupid seems gathered from frescoes, not from the god’s direct manifestations; a modern production in which the set resembled a huge Hallmark greeting card might be appropriate, for Shakespeare’s Cupid hovers between a sentimental picture and some ferocious mocking presence. He seems an ocular sort of god, or, more precisely, a god of optical illusions, trompe–l’oeil. Much of the deliciousness of A Midsummer Night’s Dream arises from the hallucinatory mismatch between the characters as they appear to the audience and the characters as they appear to one another: the audience is constantly teased by the discrepancy between Hermia and Helena as visible on stage (and in Shakespeare’s time played by adolescent boys), and Lysander’s and Demetrius’s descriptions of them, alternately beautiful beyond measure or sickening to behold. Blindest of all, of course, is Titania, embellishing, elaborating to herself a gorgeous mental image as she fondles the ass’s head of Bottom: the Elizabethan equivalent of virtual sex, except that the stiff repulsive hairy thing is also actually there. Cupid, in addition, is an archer: Hermia swears to love Lysander “by Cupid’s strongest bow” (1.1.169); and Oberon reports he saw Cupid shoot an arrow that got so confused by moonlight—“Quench’d in the chaste beams of the wat’ry moon” (2.1.162)—that it landed on a flower (love-in-idleness, that is, the pansy) instead of the fair vestal it was aimed at; and the tincture of that flower will twist, reorient the power of vision of any eye that it’s smeared on: Cupid is not only blind, but the maker of blindness in others. The flower juice is simply essence of arrow, Cupid’s dart translated into a more stage-practicable form: since arrows flying around a stage are unpredictable, even dangerous to the actors, Shakespeare had to find some moral equivalent to archery. Instead of a single process, in which Cupid aims but watches his arrows go astray, we have a double process, in which Oberon orders Puck to drop the juice into a certain lover’s eyes, but Puck—the very embodiment of astrayness—mistakes the lover. The more complex the process, the more possibility for error: A Midsummer Night’s Dream constructs the sexual interaction of human beings as a ludicrously complicated machine, in the manner of Rube Goldberg, unlikely to work right, or of Jean Tinguely, designed to work wrong. Cupid, Diana, Oberon, Puck, Theseus, and Hermia’s father Egeus all are engaged, with varying success, in manipulating erotic relations; little surprise that, with so many competing and inept agencies involved, the patterns of desire and aversion could be generated equally well by

❧

the picture of cupid

209

casting dice. Here blind Cupid stands at the center of Fortuna’s wheel, shooting his arrows randomly at every lover in turn. Startling reversals occur both locally, in the domain of the four lovers’ attractions and repulsions, and cosmically. Oberon remembers he heard, on the very night when the fully armed Cupid was “Flying between the cold moon and the earth,” a mermaid on a dolphin’s back Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath That the rude sea grew civil at her song, And certain stars shot madly from their spheres To hear the sea-maid’s music. (2.1.156, 150–54) In the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet, the stars leave their spheres to change place with Juliet’s eyes. Here too the earth seems penetrable, instinct with unearthly light; it lies all Danaë to the stars. The siren’s song makes the wild sea tame, and the tame stars wild: the whole field of order and disorder is reorganized under the spell of Cupid. As in other comedies, Shakespeare simultaneously intensifies both discord and concord, as if every increase of discord in one area of existence magnified the possibility of concord in another. The play seeks to hold concord and discord, cosmos and chaos, in a single structure of thought, as we see from the grand oxymorons that pop up at odd moments, when the play’s tension level grows low. Two of the least significant speeches in the play concern the baying of the Spartan hounds and the reading of the playbill for the Pyramus and Thisby skit. But it is precisely in these troughs of the drama that Shakespeare’s rhetoric reaches its crests: for the whole play, like the Theseus’s crooning dogs, is “So musical a discord, such sweet thunder” (4.1.118); and if Theseus ridicules the clumsy oxymoron of the “tedious brief scene” of Pyramus and Thisby by wondering “How shall we find the concord of this discord?” (5.1.56, 60), the joke is on him, for concordia discors and coincidentia oppositorum are the mottoes of the drama. A play that exhausts the permutations of love and hate in a small band of young Athenians has succeeded in investigating, at the same time, every possibility for order and every possibility for disorder. The subtlest role that Shakespeare assigns to Cupid is to become a force for destabilizing language: under his sway, in Romeo and Juliet, womb and tomb are not rhymes but synonyms, and in this play discord and concord are comprehended not as opposites but as a single cadence.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Depictorializing Cupid First, Shakespeare limns the traditional picture of Cupid, blindfolded, winged, dimpled, with bow in hand; then Shakespeare dislimns Cupid, turns him into a sort of gleam or libido that can flash from any eye, or into some high shapelessness. In Ibsen’s Peer Gynt (1867), Peer runs into the Bøyg, an insubstantial, incomprehensible presence that bars his way—“neither dead nor alive . . . mist . . . and slime. Shapeless, too . . . it’s like running into a nest of sleepy bears.” As Cupid loses his normal iconography, he begins to grow runny, gluey, shadowed, more mood than physical entity—a vague thickness, a vagrant arousal, a trauma within the dream, an engorgement heightened by a yawn and a shiver. On the highest level of the play, the fairy world, most of the characters can be understood as avatars of Cupid. Best conforming to the traditional picture is, of course, Puck, a boyish sprite, mischievousness personified. He even seems to identify himself with the character of Cupid: “Cupid is a knavish lad, / Thus to make poor females mad” (3.2.440–41), he says, as Hermione and Helena, at their wits’ end, fall asleep; but of course Puck himself is the knavish lad who drove Hermione and Helena to distraction by squirting his love potions in the wrong eyes. Puck, however, is in no way confined to the shape of a boy: he’s disconcertingly omniform. He can neigh in the likeness of a filly to beguile a bean-fed horse (2.1.45); he can assume the shape of a crab apple, to bob against a gossip’s lips and “on her withered dewlap pour the ale” (2.1.50); and he can pretend to be a stool on which the “wisest aunt” thinks to rest: “Then slip I from her bum, down topples she . . . and falls into a cough” (2.1.51–53). Puck is the god of dribble glasses, whoopee cushions, hand buzzers, rubber spiders, and plastic vomit; as the Proteus of the novelty item, he can transform himself into any device for provoking embarrassment and derision. If Puck were a character in Othello he would turn himself into a handkerchief. Auden thought that Iago was, fundamentally, a practical joker; and in this special sense Puck is an adolescent, uncankered Iago, manipulating jealous lovers not out of motiveless malignity but out of disinterested curiosity about the possibilities for vaudeville in human life. Among Puck’s possible mottoes are, I am not what I am; and, How many stooges these mortals be. Puck’s metamorphic powers extend far beyond fillies and crab apples. To torment the mechanicals, Puck transforms himself into a whole menagerie, including a headless bear: “And neigh, and bark, and grunt, and roar, and burn, / Like

❧

depictorializing cupid

211

horse, hound, hog, bear, fire, at every turn” (3.1.110–11). The rhythm of this astonishing couplet suggests the urgency of the play’s pressure toward chaos: first an outspew of a new nature noise on every stressed syllable (“And NEIGH and BARK . . . ”), then a declaration of an animal name on every syllable, whether in a stressed or in an unstressed position (“Like HORSE, HOUND, HOG, BEAR”). The verse structure dissolves into a bewilderment of spondees, disordered monosyllables—as if Puck were metamorphosing twice a second, and the description couldn’t follow quickly enough. As a representation of the rhythm of chaos, this couplet seems unsurpassable. Indeed Milton, seventy years later, made use of similar techniques when he described Satan painfully grappling through viscous Chaos: disjointed, overstressed iambs stumble over various spondee obstacles: So eagerly the fiend O’er bog or steep, through strait, rough, dense, or rare, With head, hands, wings, or feet pursues his way, And swims or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies. (Paradise Lost 2.947–50) Puck’s reconstitution of himself as a spook-zoo is one of those moments in A Midsummer Night’s Dream when the neat arithmetical disorder of the Athenianlovers plot seems ready to be overwhelmed, blurred by infinity; though the planned, anticipatory aspect of Puck’s speech—Puck is narrating the tricks that he intends to play—qualifies and limits the terror. Still, the eeriness of Puck’s shape-changing haunts not only the mechanicals but also the audience. Shapechanging is demonic: Milton’s Satan is sufficiently intimate with chaos that he can take the form of a toad if he chooses; and, a few years after A Midsummer Night’s Dream, John Donne wrote Metempsycosis (1601), a satirical poem about the transmigration of the soul of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil—we read how the soul inhabited by turns a mandrake, a sparrow, a fish, a wolf, an ape, as if some spirit of bad knowledge, of damnation itself, flitted omnipresent around us. Donne’s weird ascription of utter randomness to the animating force of the whole chain of being is perhaps as close as the Renaissance imagination could come to the views of Darwin: a Pythagorean delirium of skips from species to species, undoing, mis-runging, the great ladder. Eros keeps confusing all taxonomic boundaries: in its guise as an ape, the soul seduces Adam’s fifth daughter, Siphatecia: Sinnes against kinde They easily doe, that can let feed their minde With outward beauty, beauty they in boyes and beasts do find. . . . First she was silly and knew not what he ment, That vertue, by his touches, chaft and spent, Succeeds an itchie warmth, that melts her quite. (ll. 468–70, 481–83)

212

❧

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

Siphatecia, lusting after an ape, may remind us of Titania, overcome by the beauty of Bottom the ass. Donne’s unfinished poem breaks off just as the soul is first managing to incarnate itself as a human being; Puck, on the other hand, can assume human identities just as easily as animal ones. Puck is the soul of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of playacting: a pure spirit of role theft, iridescing from one creature to another, too exuberant to take satisfactory direction from stage manager Oberon. Bottom the weaver, who behaves everywhere as a low cloddish analogue of Puck, wants to perform every role in the Pyramus and Thisby skit, and indeed some roles that belong to other plays entirely: If I do it [play Pyramus], let the audience look to their eyes. I will move storms. . . . I could play Ercles [Hercules] rarely, or a part to tear a cat in. . . . And I may hide my face, let me play Thisby too. I’ll speak in a monstrous little voice . . . Let me play the lion too. . . . I will aggravate my voice so that I will roar you as gently as any sucking dove. (1.2.26–27, 29–30, 51–52, 70, 81–83)

Bottom’s actual skill as an actor seems much inferior to his desire: neither his falsetto nor his aggravated basso seems persuasive enough to tempt Peter Quince to assign him more, or other, roles. Puck, on the other hand, is an expert vocal impersonator: by ventriloquizing Lysander and Demetrius, Puck misleads the fighters and prevents harm (3.1.162sd). When Puck transforms Bottom into an ass (3.1.102), he’s deepening Bottom’s range as an actor, helping Bottom explore a role even more challenging than that of the lion in the Pyramus skit. If Puck can himself play a filly foal, he can assign a quite similar role to Bottom, the most eager but least gifted student in the whole acting school. Bottom at last attains the sheer nobodiness that is the actor’s ideal, and in a sense the lover’s ideal as well. In Shakespeare’s imagination, Adonis is often impotent, while the blatant, beast-like clown enjoys the most amazing erotic adventures: Falstaff, wearing the horns of a deer, or a cuckold, cries out, Now the hot-blooded gods assist me! Remember, Jove, thou wast a bull for thy Europa, love set on thy horns. O powerful love, that in some respects makes a beast a man; in some other, a man a beast. You were also, Jupiter, a swan for the love of Leda. O omnipotent love, how near the god drew to the complexion of a goose! (The Merry Wives of Windsor 5.5.2–8)

Love so completely destabilizes the lover and the object of love that the god and the goose, the fairy queen and the ass, grow commingled, consubstantial. Donne, pondering coitus, wrote that “to one neutrall thing both sexes fit” (“The Canonization,” l. 25); and for Shakespeare too there is a self-canceling aspect to sexuality—in the midst of embrace, all value markers erode away. Under Cupid’s deforming, defunging spell, lovers become neutral counters slowly tumbling in

❧

depictorializing cupid

213

Fortuna’s lottery. Shapelessness, or ugly shape, is a metaphor for loss of distinction, loss of social identity, loss of predicates of self. Amid this upheaval, Puck sometimes stands remote from the drama, cool and specular, analytical, almost a Lucretian god bemused by the aesthetics of human suffering (“Mislead night wanderers, laughing at their harm”—2.1.39), reveling in chaos (“these things do best please me / That befall prepost’rously”— 3.2.120–21). Puck’s favored rhythm is preposteriority, in which the effect precedes the cause and the cart comes before the horse. But Puck can only briefly constrain himself to the role of spectator: he has to invade the stage, put the right wrong and the wrong right. As he remarks, overhearing the rehearsals of the mechanicals, “What, a play toward? I’ll be an auditor, / An actor too perhaps, if I see cause” (3.1.79–80). Like Eros, like all forces of chaos, Puck seems utterly blind to determinations of value: the trivial and the lethal seem one to him. Much of the time, Puck operates on a puny level of catastrophe, skimming the housewife’s milk, and refusing to allow her cream to form butter, no matter how hard she works the churn (2.1.36–37); and on a puny level of charity: “I am sent with broom before, / To sweep the dust behind the door” (5.1.389–90). But in Puck’s amusingly asemiotic world, the janitor is no worse, no less dignified than the king. And if Puck dreams of a theatre in which he plays all the roles, he must play Cupid, and the lovers shot by Cupid’s arrows, and the janitor, and the milkmaid, and the milk. A stray fairy reminds Puck, “You do their work, and they shall have good luck” (2.1.41); and the human race seems liberated as Puck assumes more and more of the effort of being everyone, a universal dramatis persona.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Cupid’s Wax Where Cupid reigns, he creates his subjects in his own image: blind, juvenile, capricious, pricking, and unable to confine themselves to a single form, a single identity. The four Athenian lovers manifest the misshaping and transfiguring power of love in many ways. On one hand they hold to a fervent claim that love is stabilizing, fixative; they are eager to make eternal vows of fidelity. On the other hand, the actual texts of their oaths seem to mock the swearer: Hermia affirms to Lysander, “I swear to thee by Cupid’s strongest bow” (1.1.169), but to mention Cupid seems to introduce a certain childish frivolity into the contract; and, most bizarrely of all, Hermia winds up swearing (as she ponders the perfidy of Aeneas), “By all the vows that ever men have broke” (1.1.175). The strength of my vow of love is just as great as the weakness of most people’s vows of love— it’s hard to paraphrase this without making it sound as if the oath’s betrayal is built into the oath itself. The oath almost compels the event that it tries to avoid, by predicting that Lysander will treat Hermia as Aeneas treated Dido. An oath of eternal constancy in love seems most properly delivered with fingers crossed behind the back. Just as the sincerity of Romeo’s devotion to Juliet can in no way be demonstrated through a study of Romeo’s rhetoric—he said the same things to Rosaline—so there lurks equivocation, weaseliness, in all of love’s verbal artifices, from sweet nothings to solemn oaths. (Long before Cupid’s love juice officially meddled in human affairs, Demetrius behaved exactly like Romeo, losing interest in Helena and falling in love with Hermia.) Shakespeare often seems suspicious of any emotion that manifests itself through extravagant words: just as Cordelia’s affection for Lear is genuine because it is expressed simply, without show, so the mere act of displacing love into rhetorical flourishes seems a compromise, a contamination. If I say that I’ll love you until the oceans are folded and hung up to dry and the stars go squawking like geese about the sky, I’m not carefully attending to the particularities of any future that you and I might share. Still, the sort of love associated with Cupid isn’t a sober and prudent state of emotion; perhaps Cupid is most happily himself in hyperbole—freakish, tickly, giddy, teasing, faithless. At the center of Shakespeare’s love-rhetoric is always the oxymoron—even the aporetic vow, the vow that swears by broken vows, is a kind of complicated oxymoron; and the oxymoron is the least reliable, most confusing and promiscuous figure of speech. An oath of love should be

❧

cupid’s wax

215

sworn in a monstrous little voice, roared as gently as a sucking dove. Love tends to ordain its own fracture into grotesque discords; and an immersion into complete derangement, an infusion of chaos with more chaos, an entry into sheer phantasmagoria, will be necessary to put things right. Shakespeare’s love-metaphors tend to suggest the plasticity of the Athenian lovers: they are silly putty, constantly losing shape; or a pentimento of painted images, constantly revised and undone; or simply beasts, constantly degenerating, losing species. Peer Gynt refuses the eye operation that would allow him to see the hideous daughter of the troll-king as a gorgeous woman; but Shakespeare’s lovers lack this option and are condemned to suffer continual mutation of the images of their lovers, and often erosion of their self-images as well. They are themselves bøygs. At the beginning of the play, the old assume that the young are wax: Hermia’s father Egeus says that Lysander stole “the impression of her [Hermia’s] fantasy / With bracelets of thy hair, rings, gawds, conceits” (1.1.32–33); and Theseus understands that Hermia is to her father but as a form in wax By him imprinted, and within his power, To leave the figure, or disfigure it. (1.1.49–51) The lovers understandably resist this line, but discover that they are, in fact, wax reshapable by erotic contrivance, Cupid’s voodoo. Helena hopes to catch beauty, as if beauty were a contagious disease, from Hermia (1.1.186), and notes sadly that “Things base and vile . . . Love can transpose to form and dignity. . . . the boy Love is perjur’d everywhere” (1.1.232–33, 241). Love unrealizes its object, assigns whimsical values to it. Little wonder that Theseus compares the lover to the lunatic, whose photo-negative gaze turns black into white: “The lover, all as frantic, / Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt” (5.1.10–11); similarly, Oberon relishes the fact that Titania, juiced, might fall in love with “lion, bear, or wolf, or bull” (2.1.180). Just as the object of love turns blurred and halated under the influence of love’s glaucoma, so the lover himself softens, distends. There is a tendency toward phylogenetic regression— a zoophilia, a zoophobia—hidden in the heart of every lover, as we can see in Helena’s figures of speech about herself, when she loses shape and quality under the pressure of Demetrius’s contemptuous gaze: “I am your spaniel. . . . The more you beat me, I will fawn on you” (2.1.203–4); “I am as ugly as a bear. . . . What wicked and dissembling glass of mine / Made me compare with Hermia’s sphery eyne!” (2.2.94, 98–99). It is an unusual mirror that distorts an ugly shape into a beautiful one; but love seems to specialize in real objects that behave like mirror images, and in mirrors that interact in subtle, uncanny, knowing ways with real objects.

216

❧

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

In Vladimir Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading, the heroine remembers the favorite toy of her childhood: there were objects called “nonnons” that were popular . . . you see, a special mirror came with them, not just crooked, but completely distorted. You couldn’t make out anything of it, it was all gaps and jumble, and made no sense to the eye—yet the crookedness was no ordinary one, but calculated in just such a way as to . . . Or rather, to match its crookedness they had made . . . No, wait a minute, I am explaining badly. Well, you would have a crazy mirror like that and a whole collection of different “nonnons,” absolutely absurd objects, shapeless, mottled, pockmarked, knobby things, like some kind of fossils—but the mirror, which completely distorted ordinary objects, now, you see, got real food, that is, when you placed one of these incomprehensible, monstrous objects so that it was reflected in the incomprehensible, monstrous mirror, a marvelous thing happened; minus by minus equaled plus, everything was restored, everything was fine, and the shapeless speckledness became in the mirror a wonderful, sensible image; flowers, a ship, a person, a landscape. You could have your own portrait custom made, that is, you received some nightmarish jumble, and this thing was you, only the key to you was held by the mirror.1

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a collection of talking nonnons, each of whom is also a talking corrective-mirror. None of the lovers can display the right shape unless another character can turn the right corrective-mirror upon him or her; but the nonnons and the dedicated mirrors have become mixed up, and so the mirrors multiply the monstrosities instead of correcting them. The concept of the nonnon, of course, wasn’t part of the Tudor intellectual world; but Shakespeare would perhaps have known anamorphic images in paintings such as Holbein’s The French Ambassadors (1533), in which a long ugly diagonal streak of paint rising from the carpet makes no visual sense unless you stand at the far side of the painting with your eye near the wall—then the smear resolves into a skull. Helena, a tall girl painfully pulled in various directions on love’s rack, warps into such anamorphs as spaniel or bear. Indeed she so fully internalizes her optical deformity that she refuses to believe her good luck when both Lysander and Demetrius try to behave as corrective-mirrors: “O spite! O hell! I see you all are bent / To set against me for your merriment” (3.2.145–46). Having remade herself as a custom nonnon-portrait, she is stuck in a gnarl. Shakespeare’s anamorphs operate both figuratively and literally—as might be predicted, since Cupid everywhere undoes the boundary between the literal and the figurative. In the realm of metaphor, Helena is demoted to a spaniel or bear; in the realm of stage truth, Bottom is demoted into a literal ass. The happiest instance of nonnon-rhythm in the play occurs when Bottom’s huge twisted head finds in Titania’s eye a corrective-mirror so perfectly adjusted to it that it becomes a shape of delight: “So is mine eye enthralled to thy shape. . . . I will purge thy mortal grossness so, / That thou shalt like an aery spirit go” (3.1.139, 160–61). Love posits a uniform field in which no lasting distinction of gross or subtle obtains, and in which all value has been abolished except that of fleeting erotic excitement.

❧

cupid’s wax

217

Where all is wax, no image has any more importance than any other, since all images are latent in each. And where appetite is sufficiently great, the lover’s eye will find a way to rectify any shape whatsoever into the shape of heart’s desire. There is a passage in Love’s Labor’s Lost in which Shakespeare goes far toward developing an imagistic theory of love. Here Berowne and his friends have betrayed their vow of celibate studiousness by falling in love, but to little avail: Your beauty, ladies, Hath much deformed us, fashioning our humors Even to the opposed end of our intents; And what in us hath seem’d ridiculous— As love is full of unbefitting strains, All wanton as a child, skipping and vain, Form’d by the eye and therefore like the eye, Full of straying shapes, of habits, and of forms, Varying in subjects as the eye doth roll To every varied object in his glance. (Love’s Labor’s Lost 5.2.756–65) Love is like the eye—this sentence suggests that love is informed by complicated intra-ocular effects, astigmatism, muscae volitantes, knuckled starbursts, every sort of chromatic aberration. Seeing seems a queasy, incoherent mode of perception, rolling and pitching from one object to the next, and love too seems a sort of seasickness. One of the mottoes of William Blake’s Jerusalem (1804) is “they became what they beheld” (pl. 30 [34], l. 54): and Berowne obeys this motto in that he seems a helpless victim of his whole visual field, as his whole being bulges, distorts, grows capricious with every new caprice that falls before his eye. Love’s eyeball seems to have no lid, no focal power of its own: this extraordinary, compulsive infection of the seer by the things seen is simply another version of Cupid’s famous blindness, that is, his refusal to distinguish the targets of his arrows by any normal criteria of what is fitting. Your beauty hath much deformed us—retinal images continually wreak havoc on the eye and the brain that strains to assimilate them. Berowne feels morally deformed because he has broken his promise to pay no attention to women; but in A Midsummer Night’s Dream this deformity reifies itself in the person of Bottom, deformed by Titania’s beauty, by the mad pupil-dilations of Oberon and Puck. The whole play happens inside love’s eye. Love not only refigures the lovers’ bodies in crazy ways but also refigures social roles. Helena not only has trouble holding onto a human likeness but also— perhaps still more disturbingly to her—finds herself transformed from wooed to wooer, as if she were a man and Demetrius a fleeing woman: “Apollo flies, and Daphne holds the chase” (2.1.231). This is an example of what Puck calls the preposterousness of mortal life: the myth is turned backwards, so that Shakespeare’s play becomes a study in fractured fairy tales, decadent reconstructions of Ovid’s

218

❧

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

Metamorphoses. Ovid’s book (translated by Arthur Golding in 1567) so haunted the Elizabethan imagination that it came to seem almost oppressive: when John Donne died in 1631, Thomas Carew wrote an elegy in which he specifically praised Donne for rescuing English literature from its habitual reliance on Ovid: since Donne’s refining influence is gone, “libertines in poetry” now, with these The silenc’d tales of the Metamorphoses Shall stuff their lines, and swell the windy page. (ll. 62, 65–67) But of course Donne was as susceptible to Ovid’s influence as any other poet of his age: his Metempsycosis, for example, is a profoundly Ovidian poem, difficult to imagine without the example of Ovid’s account (in the last book of Metamorphoses) of Pythagoras, grown vegetarian from fear of eating the body of some beloved friend whose soul had regressed into animal form. A Midsummer Night’s Dream never strays far from Ovid—in fact, Shakespeare again alludes to stories of tree-metamorphosis (such as Daphne’s, or Baucis’s and Philemon’s) in Titania’s account of her vegetable love for Bottom: “the female ivy so / Enrings the barky fingers of the elm” (4.1.43–44). Indeed in Shakespeare’s play, metamorphosis can be felt simultaneously on so many planes of discourse and action, and the speed of metamorphosis is so accelerated, that there is a danger that the metamorphosed thing will be lost amid the dazzle of its shape-changes; that the theme will be forgotten after many ingenious variations. Who cares whom the “real” Lysander loves, or who the “real” Lysander is?—Lysander is simply a proper name for orienting a set of reversals of affection, Petrarch’s dupe, capable of inscribing his Laura on any passing blank face. In dog Greek, the name Lysander might be translated as “dissolved man.” The characters in the play suffer everywhere from ontological queasiness. They cannot keep straight who is chasing whom; sometimes they cannot even keep a grip on their own gender. Man-chaser Helena, a Daphne pursuing an Apollo, notices that she is playing the wrong sex role; and the uncomfortableness of gender reversal makes itself felt in many odd corners in the play: for example, when Lysander says, “You have her father’s love, Demetrius, / Let me have Hermia’s; do you marry him” (1.1.93–94); or when Flute says, “let me not play a woman; I have a beard coming” (1.2.47–48). Hermia, screaming “you juggler, you canker-blossom, / You thief of love!” impresses Helena as someone lacking in “maiden shame” (3.2.282–83, 285); and Hermia’s extraordinary aggressiveness—“my nails can reach unto thine eyes” (3.2.298)—could itself be interpreted as male, especially in contrast to the timorous Helena, appealing to the gentlemen for rescue. One of Ovid’s key metamorphoses (in the fourth book) is that of Hermaphroditus, grown so intimate, twiformed with the nymph Salmacis that he was neither man nor woman, both man and woman—as if love promotes such confusion that it can’t keep the sexes differentiated. In A Midsummer

❧

cupid’s wax

219

Night’s Dream, all the characters tend to return to their “natural” gender roles— just as the changeling avoids becoming feminized by Titania and instead will be taught to “trace the forests wild” like a proper boy (2.1.25; also see 4.1.62)—but on the way to this outcome many sorts of gender labels dissolve by means of role reversals and costume swaps. There are even more serious confusions than those of gender. In Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes, Sweeney tells us about a man who murders a girl and dumps her in a bathtub with a gallon of Lysol: but peculiar things happen to his mind: He didn’t know if he was alive and the girl was dead He didn’t know if the girl was alive and he was dead He didn’t know if they both were alive or both were dead If he was alive then the milkman wasn’t.2 Dead vs. living should be an even more rigid distinction than male vs. female; but in the Lysol of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, even this crucial binary gets loosened, puddled out. Demetrius and Hermia argue about whether he’s a murderer or a victim of murder: . . . It cannot be but thou hast murd’red him [Lysander]; So should a murtherer look—so dead, so grim. Dem. So should the murthered look, and so should I. (3.2.56–58) Her.

In the previous act, Demetrius asserted that “The one [Lysander] I’ll slay, the other [Hermia] slayeth me” (2.1.190); and now his facial expression seems to confirm that he is at once killer and corpse, or wavering in some limbo between the two conditions. If death and life have lost their oppositional force, have eased into co-presence, so, it turns out, have other grand contraries, such as night and day; anarch Cupid starts to uncreate the heavens. In the course of Hermia’s accusation of Demetrius—she believes he must have killed Lysander because Lysander wouldn’t voluntarily have left her alone in the forest—she asks, would he have stolen away From sleeping Hermia? I’ll believe as soon The whole earth may be bor’d, and that the moon May through the centre creep. (3.2.52–54) In this remarkable simile, the earth itself has become wax, bizarrely reshapable, permeable to light from both sides at once. Shakespeare’s play investigates limits

220

❧

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

of chaos in various domains. Puck’s impersonations of men and animals suggest a limit of chaos in the domain of identity; here we have a limit of chaos in the domain of astronomy, as Cupid commingles sunlight and moonlight, thins out the earth with turpentine, turns back the calendar to the first week of creation, to the primal tohu-bohu before God fixed the lights in the sky. First roses in midwinter, then a still more general wobble of cosmos. The result of all these deliria is a loss of the concept of authenticity of being. The personages in A Midsummer Night’s Dream start to have inklings that they are stage characters, not real people. Helena becomes so uncertain about the border between real life and theatrical illusion that she suspects that Demetrius and Lysander, both desperately in love with her, “counterfeit sad looks, / Make mouths upon me when I turn my back” (3.2.237–38). Soon afterward, Helena denounces Hermia as an actress: “Fie, fie, you counterfeit, you puppet” (3.2.288), for she is convinced that she is the gull of some carefully scripted practical joke, shared by the entire cast. She does not quite make the final leap to discover that she herself is a counterfeit, a truly artificial god (3.2.203)—that all the characters are puppets of Love the Magician. All the scenes with the four Athenian lovers feel like outtakes from a poorly coordinated game in which actors improvise a love scene through rapid exchange of parts. Instead of abandoning themselves to the new roles, some of the actors persist in keeping roles from previous versions of the game: sulky lethargic Helena, for example, is slow to remember that she can afford to bask in the adoration of Lysander and Demetrius, and instead insists that the cast is still playing the game in which both men despise her. Every change in the game’s rules leaves the actors increasingly desperate, increasingly hard pressed to behave appropriately; but every change in the game’s rules also anesthetizes and devalues the experience, removes any possibility of real sting. Tragedy is predicated on irreversibility; comedy, like mercy, is predicated on the notion of the second chance. The four Athenian lovers, like Bill Murray in the movie Groundhog Day, are stuck in a loop of tape where they can replay the same scene over and over under varying premises of conduct. Time itself is wax: everything that is done can effortlessly be undone, until we at last come to the one indefeasible thing, the marriage that terminates the comedy.

Chapter Twenty-Six

The Tedious Brief Scene The arithmetical chaos of the four Athenian lovers ends happily. After they explore most of the permutations possible within their little system, Fate allows them to save-to-disc the one that affords the most general satisfaction. The happy end seems deserved in that it happens after a thorough examination of the possibilities for unhappiness. But this local rectitude appears to be won at the expense of some larger messiness. One of the tasks of twentieth-century science was to reconcile biology with entropy: how is it possible that living things seem to violate the second law of thermodynamics by constantly increasing the intensity of design within a system? The answer, of course, is that there’s always a larger system that grows still more disordered even as the amoeba manages to convert free-floating chemicals into new amoebas.1 Shakespeare, like many earlier writers, had the intuition that happy endings are precarious affairs, islands of pleasure surrounded on all sides by desperate turbulence. As a marriage comedy, A Midsummer Night’s Dream discovers its goal in the eugenic spell that Oberon casts at the weddings—of Theseus and Hippolyta, of Lysander and Hermia, of Demetrius and Helena: And the blots of Nature’s hand Shall not in their issue stand; Never mole, hare-lip, nor scar, Nor mark prodigious, such as are Despised in nativity, Shall upon their children be. (5.1.409–14) It seems that it takes all the concentration, all the resources of Oberon, of Fate itself, to insure that sound children will result from the marriages. And there is some hope that the seasons will readjust to a more normal pattern and that fewer cows will die of the pox, since those aberrations sprang from the dissension of Oberon and Titania, which ended when Titania agreed to award to Oberon her changeling boy (4.1.60). Still, the cowpox has not been eliminated, and children with moles and harelips and clubfeet will continue to fill the world; Oberon’s white magic seems able to operate only within a charmed circle, even though his

222

❧

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

black magic can infect the universe. The last scene of A Midsummer Night’s Dream provides the audience with a charm to bear unblemished offspring—but also with the Pyramus and Thisby skit, which is blemish writ large, one of the most spectacular displays of wrongness in the history of literature, discourse that swells, withers, palsies, contorts, trembles, gasps for breath, Shakespeare’s most misbegotten child. The children of Hippolyta and Hermia and Helena may be as smooth and shapely as you wish; but the human race will still consist basically of half-wits with horny hands and scraggly beards. Just as Theseus’s palace is a refuge within a forest of nightmares, so eugenic order is contained and qualified within the disorder that surrounds it. The most memorable event at the play’s end isn’t the courtly bergamasque or the marriage song; instead it is an affirmation of chaos, it is a tale told by an idiot, by a whole gang of idiots. Theseus has magnanimously allowed the nightmare into his palace to entertain his wedding guests, but it is far from clear that he manages to tame it or to neutralize it. When the four Athenian lovers behold the Pyramus skit, they behold something like Hamlet’s The Mouse-trap: a play that elucidates to the spectators their own experience. There is a moment when the skit almost confesses that it is addressed to the Athenian lovers: when Pyramus claims to be as trusty as “Limander” (5.1.196), this blunder for “Leander” almost manages to say the name “Lysander.” The skit offers them a glimpse of how they’ve playacted their way through their tribulations, groped and improvised toward the right outcome. In the skit there are only two lovers, not four, so the system on which chaos can operate is reduced to the least possible number of terms (barring a monodrama). The permutations in the skit involve not switchovers of love (Pyramus’ love for Thisby, and Thisby’s for Pyramus, are given) but presence and absence. In a system of two elements in which presence is denoted by 1 and absence by 0, there are four possibilities: 11; 01; 10; and 00. First, Pyramus and Thisby are both present, though separated by a wall; then (at Ninny’s tomb) Thisby is present and Pyramus is absent; then (after Thisby is frightened by a lion) Thisby is absent and Pyramus is present; at last, Thisby and Pyramus are both absent, because each has committed suicide. Of course, if the progress were reversed (00; 10; 01; 11) the skit would be a comedy, the merry tale of Lysander and Hermia. A play on the theme of love—any play—must contain obstacles, not just because the course of true love never runs smooth but also because if it did run smooth it would be boring to watch. These obstacles are typically of two kinds: obstacles of speech and obstacles of presence. By an obstacle of speech I mean a vexation in the communication system between the two lovers: mixed-up letters, or a bundling board, or interrupted telephone lines, or the glass partition that screens visitors to the penitentiary, or simple misinterpretation of a spoken comment—any sort of phatic disorder in the speech code, or anything that impedes kissing and other forms of physical speech even if talking is easy. By an obstacle of presence I mean anything that controls the stage entrances and exits of the lovers in a manner that tends to defeat their goal of remaining in the

❧

the tedious brief scene

223

same place at the same time. The Pyramus skit is the severest possible simplification of a love play, because it contains exactly one obstacle of speech—the wall—and one obstacle of presence—the lion. Much of the fun of the skit results from the fact that these obstacles are impersonated by actors; indeed, every element of the staging, even the set lighting, has been turned into a star turn for a member of Peter Quince’s company. (If the Pyramus skit went any further in this direction, Thisby would have to sing a mournful song while strumming the belly of Mr. Prop Lute.) Hoary plot devices from the remedial section of Playwriting 101A have, mysteriously, come to life. Pyramus and Thisby wander through an action in which the plot and the setting are just as human as they are. And the Athenian lovers, watching such a play, might come to understand the sheer contrivedness of the summer night’s dream they’ve just lived through, a dream in which the forest shimmered with fairy intelligence, twining the threads of various provisional plotlines. The forest itself was, like Wall and Moonshine, alive: Moth, Cobweb, Peaseblossom—the ground and air were thick with suppressed laughter. One of Shakespeare’s most consistent themes, not just in As You Like It and The Tempest but also in Hamlet and Macbeth, is that there’s liberation, hilarity, in discovering that you’re a character in a play, even if that play is a tragedy; in discovering that the obstacles you face are histrionic devices; in discovering that the Fates are witty even in their most witless-seeming works. The play-within-a-play structure of A Midsummer Night’s Dream may suggest that Shakespeare means to convey this emotion not only to the local audience on stage but to the Global audience as well. Between Pyramus and Thisby there were interposed Wall and Lion. But between the actors and the audience there are other walls, other lions. Speechobstacles proliferate monstrously: we are separated from the two lovers by an opaque partition of rhetoric, through which we can catch no more than a glimpse of the pathos of their yearning and death. Through the little chink in Wall, the lovers could hear one another distinctly, though their lips couldn’t touch; but through the mushifying barrier of Peter Quince’s dialogue, the audience can hear only confused reports of a tragedy. Just as in an early cosmicomedy, Chaucer’s House of Fame, chaos first manifested itself as neat arithmetical permutation, then as utter confusion, a speech-destroying labyrinth of echoes, so A Midsummer Night’s Dream terminates in Babel, almost in aphasia. Swift imagined, at the very fool’s core of Gulliver’s Travels (1726), a number of devices for ruining language, including a machine for cranking out books by casting up random words. Shakespeare stops short of dada, but not far short. Lion assures us that we needn’t fear him—despite his terrible roar, he is only Snug the Joiner (5.1.223); and similarly Shakespeare presents us with language fangless and toothless, castrated, so deprived of its ordinary power of articulation that it is little more than vowels and glottal stops. Language finally suffers for our sins; where all else is put right, where Jack has his Jill, language nevertheless reveals itself as the huge system of disorder in which all our local rectitudes must situate themselves. We try

224

❧

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

to frame our lives in sturdy and elegant periods; but if we relax our vigil for a second we will find ourselves speaking the pap of Pyramus. Perhaps teratologies of speech are easier to bear than the devastation of the land that prevailed in the first act; but it is possible that the blunting of language, the fall from English into Pyramese, is an equal threat. Chaos keeps displacing itself from one domain to another, but its ruling force isn’t challenged. Even if no harelips will appear among Theseus’s children, the stream of miscarried metaphors, aborted apostrophes, give us some notion of what most human generation looks like. The first perversion of speech that comes to our attention in the skit concerns the misuse of oxymoron. Theseus reads a list of possible nuptial entertainments: “A tedious brief scene of young Pyramus And his love Thisby; very tragical mirth.” Merry and tragical? Tedious and brief? That is hot ice and wondrous strange snow. (5.1.56–59) In Romeo and Juliet, Romeo, crazed by the spectacle of Capulets and Montagues fighting in the street, cries out, “Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms, / Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health” (1.1.179–80)—lines that Coleridge took (as we’ve seen) as the basis for a whole theory of the highest operations of the literary imagination. For Romeo and Juliet, oxymorons provide a glimpse at some truth beyond the categories of rational thought, some dark identity of womb and tomb, breath and death, light and night. Oxymoron (sharp/dull in Greek) is a tool for achieving a massive deconstruction of the world’s stamina. For Jacques Derrida, “one could reconsider all the pairs of opposites on which philosophy is constructed and on which our discourse lives, not in order to see opposition erase itself but to see what indicates that each of the terms must appear as . . . the other different and deferred.”2 In other words: rational discourse organized by means of binary structures contains in itself the seeds of its own poetry. Romeo, like Derrida’s philosopher, lives in a paradoxical universe in which love and death operate as surrogates for one another: when he talks about death he is also talking about love. Indeed, in much Renaissance literature, orgasm is euphemized as the little death. But it seems to be a long way from Romeo’s cold fire to Theseus’s hot ice. When Peter Quince writes of a tedious brief scene full of tragical mirth, he isn’t trying to call attention to the fragility of binary structures, or to expose the abyss that underlies all organizations of reality; he’s only showing that he doesn’t know the meanings of the impressive words that he’s using. Once again, Shakespeare is calling attention to the fact that neither quality of thought nor quality of feeling can be proved through an examination of the rhetoric employed: the fool and the wise man use the same devices, say the same things. Perhaps the opposition fool/wise man is another binary that Shakespeare teaches us to regard skeptically. And if that is true, then perhaps it isn’t a long way at all from Romeo’s

❧

the tedious brief scene

225

cold fire to Theseus’s hot ice: Peter Quince the clown is just as entitled as Petrarch to his figures of speech. In the Pyramus skit, rhetoric liberates itself from meaning. This is the lesson that lovers must learn: the hyperboles and oxymorons and other tropes by which lovers declare themselves to one another fail to guarantee the validity of the feeling they purport to represent, and fail to constitute an intelligible communicative structure. Here we see (so to speak) figures of speech in the absence of speech: tropes that have floated away from normal patterns of syntax and logic and are trying to sustain themselves in a vacuum; highfalutin rhetoric vainly trying to do the work of rhetoric degree zero, plain talk. The great nonsense writers, such as Swift and Lewis Carroll and Beckett, are precisely those writers most concerned with sense: they seek to dismantle sensible discourse in order better to understand how it operates. Shakespeare was also, in his way, a logician; and the nonsense of the Pyramus skit teaches the spectators something about the use of persuasive, credible language through an immersion in the desperately unconvincing. Pyramese may be a language that lurches wildly from one inauthenticity to the next, but it is a planned language, a carefully calculated botch of meaning, showing the same attention to permutational logic that we saw in the Athenian-lovers plot, before all logic collapses in a heap. How can one construct an anti-language, a language that refuses the burden of reference to an outside world, and the burden of internal consistency as well? Swift imagined words written on the facets of cubes and cranked into sentences; Carroll imagined words composed of a fermenting mash of significant syllables (“’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves”); Beckett imagined sentences and words undone through various textures of retrogrades (“Say he’d, No, waistcoat the, vest the, trousers the . . . dress to ready things got had when”; “Lit yad mac, ot og. Ton taw, ton tonk. Ton dob, ton trips”3 [“Till day came, to go. Not Watt, not Knott. Not bod, not spirit”]). Shakespeare devised his anti-language by creating aporias—selfobjections—on every level of discourse, one after another. Just as the playbill creates audience expectation by means of an oxymoron (“A tedious brief scene”), so the basic principle of oxymoron comes to inform every component of the spectacle. One component of drama is impersonation, and in the Pyramus skit, Shakespeare toys with the limits of impersonation. Iago says, “I am not what I am”; Snug the joiner takes care to point out to the ladies that, even though he’s dressed in a lion’s skin, he is not really a lion—no reason to be afraid (5.1.223). Here we see a self-discrediting dramatis persona, an aporia rampant. An actor might represent a lion on stage; indeed, some years later, Shakespeare was to write the remarkable stage direction, Exit pursued by a bear (The Winter’s Tale 3.3.58). But he did not ask the bear to deliver a little prologue about the propriety of bears in the theatre. Every impersonation is a walking figure of speech, in which (for example) Marlon Brando becomes the vehicle for representing

226

❧

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

Stanley Kowalski; but by stepping out of character, or by introducing themselves as such uncharacterizable characters as Wall (“I, one Snout by name, present a wall”—5.1.156) and Moonshine (“Myself the man i’ th’ moon do seem to be”— 5.1.245), the actors call attention to the flimsiness of the theatre-game. The impersonational tropes fail to constitute themselves right, and leave the audience in an uncomfortable limbo between suspending disbelief and indulging in it. The discourse that ought to be confined to the prologue, swiftly erecting the stage set and identifying the characters (as in Henry V, where the Prologue tells us that the stage’s wooden O can hold the vasty fields of France), seeps out into the main action and discolors it; the whole spectacle is a mélange of prologue and play, which keep canceling one another out. (Well might Theseus decline to hear an epilogue [5.1.355], since the prologue hardly stopped.) This is aporia on the level of action. The theatre-game that requires actors to play the roles of inanimate objects creates strange perversions of rhetoric. One of the most common figures of speech in serious drama is the apostrophe, in which a character addresses a speech to someone absent, or to something not alive. Apostrophe is a sort of discourse that generally permits of no reply; but when Pyramus says, “I thank thee, Moon, for shining now so bright” (5.1.273), it is likely that Moonshine will nod a gracious gesture of You’re welcome! right back. The normal patterns of rhetorical stasis and movement are disoriented: soliloquy becomes dialogue, and dialogue sputters out into soliloquy, for Pyramus and Thisby never manage to be alive at the same place at the same time after they leave the frustrating precincts of Wall. This is aporia on the level of conversation. On more intimately linguistic levels, a systematic disabling is also apparent. The basis of love poetry consists, of course, of metaphor and simile: my mistress’s [body part] is as [colorful adjective] as the [impressive natural object]. Tinkering with the internal workings of love-similes is one of Shakespeare’s favorite games: “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; / Coral is far more red than her lips’ red,” he notes in Sonnet 130, leaving open the possibility that all compare is false compare, and that the least tropistic sort of love is most sincere. (The trope of tropelessness also has its conventions, of course.) Elsewhere Shakespeare fiddles with another form of negating the love-simile: “What! I love, I sue, I seek a wife . . . to love the worst of all, / A whitely wanton . . . With two pitch-balls stuck in her face for eyes” (Love’s Labor’s Lost 3.1.189, 195–97); here the blasphemy against Petrarch becomes a measure of Berowne’s consternation at himself, indeed a measure of the very intensity of his emotion. A certain nonchalance toward the proprieties of the love-simile, a certain willingness to put the simile awry for the sake of special effects, shows the lover’s boldness, valor. But in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Pyramus skit commits against the lovesimile every possible outrage, not for the sake of a sophisticated gambit but to illustrate the author’s incompetence and the poor memory of the actors. This is Pyramus and Thisby, the mnemonic quarto:

❧

the tedious brief scene

227

These lily lips, This cherry nose, These yellow cowslip cheeks Are gone, are gone! Lovers, make moan; His eyes were green as leeks. (5.1.330–35) Here we have another mutation of aporia, the exactly wrong descriptor: just as Berowne’s beloved had eyes in the form of balls of tar, so Pyramus has lily lips. But the lips are lily, not intentionally but because of deep disturbances in the text. The adjectives and the body parts have grown detached from one another and have reemerged randomly in a new permutation: lily might modify cheeks, and cherry should certainly modify lips. It is hard to know what the nose is doing in this passage at all: as far as I know, there is no color that can honorably be ascribed to a beloved’s nose; and since the word nose violates the rhyme scheme of the passage, it is possible that Shakespeare meant us to believe that Thisby should have said another word entirely (though no likely candidate comes to mind—hips?; does cowslip in the following line somehow represent a slippage of the rhyme word here?). In any case, Sir Pyramus’s unseemly nose juts out far too prominently from this text. The aesthetic of this speech verges on surrealism. André Breton, who developed the theory of surrealism in the 1920s and 1930s, considered that a twopart image (such as breast of crystal or bed of pith) was surreal insofar as the reeling mind failed to construe it as an intelligible whole. As Breton defined the word image in the Abridged Dictionary of Surrealism (1938): “The strongest surrealist image is that which presents the highest degree of arbitrariness . . . it may look feebly untied.”4 The matches of attribute and noun in Thisby’s speech aren’t quite arbitrary, in that Shakespeare deliberately sought amusing mismatches, and the will-to-joking tends to impede any sense of serious ontological vertigo. Still, we may feel that this somewhat confined and well-behaved chaos conduces toward glimpses of a more complete disassembly of language. “The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was,” the befuddled Bottom exclaimed earlier (4.1.211–14), in a thorough deconstruction of I Corinthians 2:9. Again, the permutation game—the mismatch of sense organ and sensory faculty—amuses; but beyond the conceptual anagrammatism there lies the synesthesia of Rimbaud, who assigned colors to vowels and taught that derangement of the senses led toward illumination. In the Pyramus skit we see through a glass darkly; perhaps somewhere else we shall see face to face (1 Cor. 13:12). The extreme loosening of the grip by which subject holds onto predicate prefigures the vanishing of all things temporal, just as surely as Prospero’s speech about the cloud-capped towers, the great globe itself, that “shall dissolve, / And . . . leave not a rack behind” (The Tempest 4.1.154–56). Language tends at

228

❧

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

last to thin into flitters of speech, wavering and weakening as it approaches love, or death, or judgment. Defects in language’s autoimmune system can be found not just in mismatches of adjective and noun but everywhere. Thisby’s simile, “His eyes were green as leeks,” suffers not from any error of correctness—leek-colored eyes are plausibly attractive—but from an error of diction: leek is too rank a word for a love-simile; emerald would be far preferable, even in cases where leek or algae would be more accurate. In the Pyramus skit, high diction (“Approach, ye Furies fell!”: 5.1.284) and low diction abut jarringly. The concept of diction, like the concept of propriety of description, starts to become meaningless. Meaninglessness spreads over so many areas of language that it seems a conscious sacrifice, almost sacred, a kenosis of the Word. Sound obliterates sense, as Shakespeare overuses such phonic devices as alliteration: “with bloody blameful blade, / He bravely broach’d his boiling bloody breast” (5.1.146–47); “Quail, crush, conclude, and quell!” (5.1.287). Not only do the juicy explosions of bl’s and br’s and c’s and qu’s tend to drown out any sense of what the words are saying, but the degree of redundancy is extreme. The blade is bloody and the breast is bloody; and the Fates might protest that, after having crushed, they might be spared the effort of concluding and quelling. These speeches are more like bronx cheers and stutters than like normal discourse. As language empties itself, its informational content dwindles to zero: “O grim-look’d night! O night with hue so black! / O night, which ever art when day is not” (5.1.170–71). And in this evacuated state, obscene meanings proliferate, without the check of counter-meaning provided by normal denotation: “I kiss the wall’s hole, not your lips at all” (5.1.201). Tonguing is all too audible, all too conspicuous, just as Theseus predicted (“tongue-tied simplicity”: 5.1.104): when Thisby finally apostrophizes her own tongue (“Tongue, not a word!”: 5.1.342), we feel just how tongue-conceived (“man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive”: 4.1.212–13) the whole skit is: an exercise in the operation of the organs of the mouth, trying to usurp the work of the brain. The lips, the tongue glow feverishly, as language unmoors itself from mind and world and relocates itself in the domain of noise. The major issue of the Pyramus skit is this: are its laughable defects of art confined to the small domain overseen by Peter Quince, or do they make themselves felt over a much wider area? I suspect that the latter is true: the mechanicals are spreading a virus; any play whatever, if heard with the canny, critical, Brechtian responses of Theseus and the rest of the audience would be an object of sarcasm. Indeed Shakespeare seems to be trying to teach us that the spread in quality between the proudest achievements of the Elizabethan theatre and Peter Quince’s travesty is small: as Theseus notes, in the finest drama criticism to be found in the play, “The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them” (5.1.211–12). If Theseus were watching Richard Burbage in Romeo and Juliet, nothing would prevent him from making his snippy remark

❧

the tedious brief scene

229

(concerning Pyramus’s expostulation to the Furies fell), “This passion, and the death of a dear friend, would go near to make a man look sad” (5.1.288–89). Perhaps the eeriest moment in the Pyramus skit occurs when Hippolyta stops making caustic comments and announces that she’s moved by this incompetent performance: “Beshrew my heart, but I pity the man” (5.1.290). The Pyramus skit can generate every high pathos of drama; it is not simply a burlesque of bad playwriting and bad acting, but a severely simplified model of the whole theatrical experience. There is not a single howler in the Pyramus skit that does not correspond to some device used seriously elsewhere in Shakespeare’s work. This last claim may seem extreme, but I believe it is defensible. We have already examined the relation between Thisby’s talk of lily lips and Shakespeare’s more sober miscolorings of the beloved face. Another grotesque figure of speech occurs when Pyramus, staring at Thisby’s bloody cloak, exclaims that “lion vild hath here deflow’r’d my dear” (5.1.292). Nothing seems more comically incongruous than to speak of a mauling lion as a deflowerer of virginity— and yet Capulet speaks of daughter Juliet’s death in identical language, when he tells Paris, O son, the night before thy wedding-day Hath Death lain with thy wife. There she lies, Flower as she was, deflowered by him. (Romeo and Juliet 4.5.37) Even Pyramus’s exclamation about the bloody blameful blade has a remarkable parallel in one of Hamlet’s self-excoriating speeches: “Bloody, bawdy villain! / Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain” (Hamlet 2.2.580–81)—a passage equally bombastic and redundant, and in some respects even easier to mock in that it adds a little rhyme-jingle to the rant. The art of tragic poetry lies in the ability to invest incongruity with a shudder instead of a smile; Eros and Thanatos can be understood as the gemini of the abyss, or as first and second bananas in a vaudeville. Another example of the extraordinary intimacy, on the level of rhetoric as well as plot, between Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream can be found in Peter Quince’s official prologue to the skit: We do not come, as minding to content you, Our true intent is. All for your delight We are not here. That you should here repent you, The actors are at hand. (5.1.113–16) This is aporia achieved through mispunctuation: because Peter Quince makes “periods in the midst of sentences” (5.1.96), he says the opposite of what he means. This may seem a strictly comical advice; but Juliet, determined to mislead her parents about her love of Romeo without technically forswearing herself, does the same thing:

230

❧

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

Indeed I never shall be satisfied With Romeo, till I behold him—dead— Is my poor heart, so for a kinsman vex’d. (Romeo and Juliet 3.5.93–95) She resorts to a sort of crosswise punctuation, through which she can tell her parents what they want to hear, while telling herself in secret what she wants to hear. It isn’t exactly aporia, for the two meanings don’t cancel one another out; instead, each remains tensely valid in one of two opposing domains of experience, public and private; still, it is a witty use of the same trick that Peter Quince uses witlessly. The difference between the Pyramus skit and the great tragedies is merely that, in the skit, the effortful rhetoric has liberated itself from psychological complexity and pullulates without the constraint of needing to mean anything. It is a tragedy of tropes, not a tragedy of people. Similes suffer; dead Pyramus, on the other hand, cheerfully leaps to his feet (5.1.351). All through A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream it seems that the poet is difficult to distinguish from the fool or gull. Theseus contemplates, in the list of possible entertainments for his wedding celebration, a skit about Orpheus, “The riot of the tipsy Bacchanals / Tearing the Thracian singer in their rage” (5.1.47–48); and this would in fact be a fine sequel to the Pyramus skit, in that the dismemberment of poetry would segue into the dismemberment of the poet. A little before reading this list, Theseus muses on the interchangeability of lunatics, lovers, and poets: The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to aery nothing A local habitation and a name. Such tricks hath strong imagination, That . . . in the night, imagining some fear, How easy is a bush suppos’d a bear! (5.1.12–19, 21–22) This passage has been compared with Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry, in which the poet is praised for ranging, not “within the narrow warrant of her [nature’s] gifts, but . . . within the zodiac of his own wit”;5 but there is a sting in it. Theseus is the Mercutio of this play, a clever debunker of imagination, turning the resources of poetry against poetry itself; for Theseus, imagination is the timorous faculty that finds a bear in every bush, that multiplies unrealities. This is the ideal introduction to the Pyramus skit, for the impetuous Pyramus finds in the aery nothing (or the very little) of a stained mantle the mangled carcase of his beloved, and commits suicide on the basis of this flimsy evidence; and Theseus nicely prepares us for the amazingly deferentialized nature of Peter Quince’s

❧

the tedious brief scene

231

poetic language—the whole skit consists of lost names floating in the sky, local habitations for general nowheres. Theseus’s speech is oddly poised between scoffing at the inspiration of poets and testifying to the prestige of poets’ ability to create ex nihilo—yet another of the equivocations on which the play rests. If the poet is a lunatic, then the poet is dominated by the moon. There are two tropes in the play that commingle moonlight and sunlight: the first is Hermia’s simile about the hole bored through the earth (3.2.54), and the second occurs when Pyramus thanks the Moon for his “sunny beams” (5.1.272). The first is a smart, spanking, Donne-ish conceit, while the second is a stupid blunder—again, the fool and the poet manage to do exactly the same work. Shakespeare seems to be calling attention to the existence of some whole that comprises at once waking and dreaming, the real and the imaginary. Instead of the binary structures that dominate our thought, there is some supersession or ablation of contraries, intuited by the reverie of the poet or else smacked together by mere carelessness of word usage. But the moon also has some quite specific meanings in this play. Shakespeare never lets us forget that the moon is the planet sacred to Diana, the goddess of virginity: Theseus swears he will make Hermia a nun, “Chaunting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon” (1.1.73); and the moon acts as an anaphrodisiac, wasting and chastening people throughout the play: the angry moon inflicts rheumatic diseases, contrary to fertility (2.1.105); the cold moon puts out Cupid’s flames (“young Cupid’s fiery shaft / Quench’d in the chaste beams of the wat’ry moon”—2.1.161–62), and, as Oberon notes when curing Titania’s vision, “Dian’s bud o’er Cupid’s flower / Hath such force and blessed power” (4.1.73–74). Indeed Diana’s antidote-juice dispels all false loves, not just those induced by the love-in-idleness potion: Demetrius’s love for Hermia is “Melted as the snow . . . the remembrance of an idle gaud” (4.1.165, 167), even though this love wasn’t the result (as far as we know) of any especial meddling by Cupid in human affairs. The erotic chaos of the play is chilled, tamed, and rectified by the moon, the gelid saltpeter moon. But Luna is not just Diana: she is also Lucina, goddess of childbirth, ruler of dews and tides and menstrual cycles and generation itself. The moon sometimes thins and dulls; but at other times she provokes, goads, drives lovers crazy. Titania remembers this waxing, goggly, sexier moon when, anticipating a night of love with Bottom, she tells her fairies, Come wait upon him; lead him to my bower. The moon methinks looks with a wat’ry eye; And when she weeps, weeps every little flower, Lamenting some enforced chastity. (3.1.197–200) This humid, tumid moon seems devoted to fertility—the exact of opposite of Diana. During the play’s final benediction, the moon makes her presence felt over the nuptial beds:

232

❧

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

Now the hungry lion roars, And the wolf beholds [?behowls] the moon . . . With this field-dew consecrate, Every fairy take his gait, And each several chamber bless, Through this palace, with sweet peace. (5.1.371–72, 415–18) The same moon that quenches Cupid’s arrow also seems to set it on fire. Cupid himself shows a double aspect: under his influence, both order and disorder intensify. Cupid is loathsome, responsible for every discord, as we see when Oberon willfully punishes Titania: “with the juice of this I’ll streak her eyes, / And make her full of hateful fantasies” (2.1.257–58). At the end of the play, Cupid has no explicit role at all; but if Oberon’s charm against harelips and moles is addressed to anyone in particular, it has to be addressed to some god of the erotic and progenerative, arguably to Eros himself, that is, Cupid, in a less capricious, more honorable and virtuous role. The play offers one tantalizing hint of a final mutation of Cupid: Theseus recalls that birds mate during the day consecrated to “St. Valentine” (4.1.139), a line that glances obliquely, anachronistically, at Cupid’s favorite day on the ecclesiastical calendar; it is as if Cupid departed from A Midsummer Night’s Dream by holding up two fingers in a Christian blessing—almost as if Cupid were helping to constitute a sacrament of marriage. The foremost Cupidologist of Western philosophy was Sigmund Freud; and, at the end of “In Memory of Sigmund Freud,” Auden imagined Cupid mourning at Freud’s grave: “Weeping is Eros, builder of cities, / And weeping anarchic Aphrodite.”6 Love inspires the nun to be chaste, love inspires Don Giovanni to compile his endless list of conquests. Love is Jesus Christ, love is Moloch.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Other Dreams in Other Summers: The Aesthetic of the Masque A Midsummer Night’s Dream was a popular play, published in quarto in 1600 and 1619, and revived when the theatres reopened during the restoration of the monarchy. But the revival required the most strenuous manhandling and rewriting, because Shakespeare’s oddly shaped play simply could not be shoved into the sort of theatre that existed at the end of the seventeenth century. In the whole Elizabethan repertoire there is no other play that illustrates so well the peculiar nature of the Elizabethan stage, because there is no other play that so exuberantly takes advantage of that stage’s possibilities. Shakespeare felt at home in a theatre of poverty, skimping on stage sets and costumes; his whole art depends on the quick shifts of scene that are possible only on a stage where there’s no scenery to shift—or in movies. The magniloquence of the text is a direct function of the miserliness of the props: The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne, Burnt on the water. The poop was beaten gold, Purple the sails, and so perfum’d that The winds were love-sick with them; the oars were silver, Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made The water which they beat to follow faster, As amorous of their strokes. (Antony and Cleopatra 2.2.191–97) This speech is best spoken on a bare floor. Either you have the Renaissance equivalent of Cecil B. DeMille, making the audience gasp at the gilded bargemachine moving forward on the crank-turned wave-rollers, or you have Enobarbus’s speech; only an annoying sort of interference would result by turning the speech into a commentary on a stage effect that the audience had previously witnessed. Many of Shakespeare’s plays take advantage of the quasi-improvisatory aspect of Elizabethan dramaturgy, but A Midsummer Night’s Dream is unique in that it keeps replaying the same scene over and over—Hermia awakes and finds Lysander

234

❧

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

absent/hating her/loving her; the play is about rehearsal, about replaying a scene until you get it right, or (in the case of the Pyramus skit) wrong beyond any possibility of being put right. But the sort of enclosed outdoor theatre with a platform stage represented by the Curtain and the Swan and the Globe was a brief moment in the history of drama: the first one was constructed in 1576, when Shakespeare was twelve, and by 1608, when Shakespeare’s career was winding down, such theatres were starting to yield to indoor theatres (such as Blackfriars) lit with candles—theatres that could lengthen the playgoing season considerably. During Shakespeare’s creative life, the supple, let’s-pretend dramaturgy of the Globe coexisted with other, more rigid models of the theatre. Entertainment for the nobility often entailed elaborate mythological spectacles; some scholars have wondered whether Oberon’s speech in which a mermaid’s song makes the rude sea grow civil (2.1.152) represents a memory of an entertainment that Robert Dudley provided for Queen Elizabeth when she visited Kenilworth, twelve miles from Stratford, in 1575, when Shakespeare was eleven: a water pageant displayed Arion on a dolphin’s back—the dolphin was represented by a boat whose oars simulated fins. But Elizabeth was famously stingy about paying for entertainment herself; and it was not until after her death in 1603 that the English court began to subsidize extravagant private shows, thereby creating a genre, the Jacobean masque, a carefully scripted panegyric designed to enhalo the king with all possible visual and narrative glory. Shakespeare himself never wrote an independent masque: it may be that he was slightly too old (the chief masque-poet was his younger colleague and rival, Ben Jonson); or it may be that Shakespeare never felt particularly comfortable with the genre. Certainly the masque-like scenes that decorate some of his plays, such as As You Like It and The Tempest, are rarely considered the high points of his art. Ceremonious, ostentatiously single-minded speeches seem to have provoked in Shakespeare a strong desire to ridicule them: Player. “But who, ah woe, had seen the mobled queen”— Hamlet. “The mobled queen”? Polonius. That’s good, “mobled queen” is good. (Hamlet 2.2.501–4) It is possible to imagine Hamlet and Polonius watching Iris’s invocation to Ceres in the little wedding masque in The Tempest: Thy turfy mountains, where live nibbling sheep, And flat meads thatch’d with stover, them to keep, Thy banks with pioned and twilled brims . . . (The Tempest 4.1.62–64) Hamlet. “Pioned and twilled”? Polonius. That’s good, “pioned and twilled” is good. Towards the end of Shakespeare’s career, in the early 1610s, he may have struck his contemporaries as a playwright adapting somewhat laboriously to the new

❧

other dreams in other summers

235

theatrical conditions. Like Charlie Chaplin in the 1930s, trying to hold onto to the visual delirium of the silent cinema amid the stiffening conventions of the talkies, Shakespeare may have felt that technological changes were impeding the development of the art he liked best. But unlike Chaplin, Shakespeare had little will to struggle; he left the stage as the stage was leaving him. The Jacobean masque was a multimedia extravaganza; the Caroline masque (King Charles succeeded King James in 1625) was so bankrupting that it became, in effect, the moral equivalent of war. As early as 1606, in the Masque of Hymen, a machina versatilis (turning machine) was constructed in the shape of a globe of the world that rotated to reveal the masquers within; and in a sense the Globe Theatre, sprawling and public, a variety show with something for everyone, had found its antiself in this ingenious artifice, a globe with gears and pulleys designed to dazzle aristocratic eyes. By 1633, Thomas Carew was writing, in the masque Coelum Britannicum, such stage directions as these: The Curtain . . . flying up on the sudden, discovered the Scaene, representing old Arches, old Palaces, decayed walls, parts of Temples, Theaters, Basilica’s and Therme, with confused heaps of broken Columnes . . . This strange prospect detain’d the eyes of the Spectator some time, when to loud Musicke Mercury descends . . . At this Scaene changeth, and in the heaven is discovered a Spheare, with Starres placed in their severall Images; borne up by . . . Atlas. Atlas, and the Sphaere vanisheth, and a new Scaene appeares of mountaines, whose eminent heigh exceed the Clouds which pass beneath them . . . At this the under-part of the Rocke opens . . . . . . there appears in the further part of the heaven comming downe a pleasant Cloud, bright and transparent, which comming softly downewards before the upper part of the mountaine, embraceth the Genius, but so as through it all his body is seene; and the rising againe with a gentle motion beares up the Genius of the three kingdomes, and being past the Airy Region, pierceth the heavens, and is no more seene: At that instant the Rocke with the three kingdomes on it sinkes, and is hidden in the earthe.1

This is the sort of stage direction one expects to find in a movie script for a special-effects wizard, or in a play not devised with actual staging in mind, such as Goethe’s Faust (A seven-league boot sidles up. Another quickly follows. Mephistopheles climbs down. The boots stride quickly away—l. 10066). And yet Carew could write this in the hope that it would be staged as written. Richard Strauss’s opera Capriccio (1942), derived in part from Casti’s and Salieri’s Prima la musica, poi le parole (1786), concerns a playwright and a composer who compete for the sexual favors of a countess by debating the question, Which is more important, words or music? The opera seems to provide an answer when a jovial, indeed Jupiter-like stage director, La Roche, enters and brushes aside the claims of both poet and composer: neither the text nor the music matters—what matters is the spectacle. La Roche—a character partly based on the impresario Max Reinhardt, whom we will meet again later—asserts

236

❧

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

his answer with the majesty of an outraged Wotan, but in the field of opera the question will always be unsettled, whereas in the field of masque, La Roche is certainly correct. The text of Jonson or Carew or Davenant contributes; the music of Ferrabosco or Robert Johnson contributes; but the spectacle is the great thing: O Showes! Showes! Mighty Showes! The Eloquence of Masques! What need of prose, Or verse, or sense, t’express Immortall you? You the Spectacles of State! T’is true Court Hiero-gly-phicks! & all Artes afford, In the mere perspective of an Inch board! You aske noe more then certeyne politique Eyes! Eyes, that can pierce into the Mysteryes Of many Coulours! Read them! & reveale Mythology, there, painted on slit-deale! Ô, to make Boardes to speake! There is a taske! Painting & Carpentry, are the Soule of Masque! Pack with your Pedling Poëtry to the Stage, This is the money-gett, Mechanick Age!2 This denunciation of the masque was written ca. 1631 by Ben Jonson, who knew whereof he spoke. The excess of exclamation points partly testifies to Jonson’s bitter fury, partly satirizes the rhythm of the masque itself, in which a two-exclamation-point spectacle must inevitably be followed by a three-exclamation-point spectacle. The La Roche or Stephen Spielberg of the masque was Inigo Jones, Jonson’s frequent collaborator—their quarrel, following the publication of the masque Love’s Triumph (1631), where Jonson put Jones’s name below his own on the title page, led Jonson to write “An Expostulation with Inigo Jones,” cited above. Inigo Jones, appointed Surveyor of Works by King James in 1615, was one of the most important men in England, so celebrated that an anonymous composer went to the trouble of writing an obscene catch, “In I go Jones, flesh of my flesh and bone of my bones.” It is not easy to reconstruct the experience of seeing a masque, even though texts were published and a number of Jones’s exuberant, sophisticated sketches for backdrops, machines, and costumes survive. One difficulty is that much of the music is lost; another is that, while some features of masque dramaturgy are familiar, such as the proscenium arch with a painted background, we are completely unacquainted with a theatre in which the spectacle is designed to make sense only from one seat, the seat where the king sits, exactly adjusted to the vanishing point of the perspective scenery. Furthermore, the proscenium arch, while providing a rigid frame, is designed to be permeable: His (or Her) Majesty

❧

other dreams in other summers

237

will ultimately step into the painting and become its chief point of interest, adored by the nymphs of the world’s rivers, or the British Worthies, or the stars in the sky, or the Olympian gods, or some other gang of marvels. In some ways, the masque is less like a Broadway play than like a television program in which someone from the audience is invited onto the stage and fussed over—new refrigerators and tickets to Hawaii float in from the wings, instead of Apollo and the Muses. The masques were often proceeded by antimasques, in which devils, witches, animals, hunchbacks, dwarves, and the like cavorted to garish, disruptive music—these exotic fauna of disorder illustrated the barbarities and grotesqueries that would be tamed, dispelled by the king’s all-compelling force for beauty, concinnity, good governance. In the television show, the masque and antimasque are often oddly combined, by requiring the queen for a day to make a fool of herself before the lavishing of the gifts. The differences between Shakespearean quasi-improvisatory theatre and the Jacobean masque can be understood by comparing A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Masque of Oberon (1611), by Jonson and Inigo Jones. Shakespeare’s Oberon is a fairy king who spasmodically meddles in human affairs; Jonson’s Oberon is a proper noun devised to invest Henry, Prince of Wales (the sixteenyear-old son of King James), with a little fairy dust—simply a pretext for a gorgeous costume, a form of set design on the level of speech prefixes instead of haberdashery. Shakespeare’s plot is intricate and full of suspense; Jonson’s plot is trivial—Oberon visits the English court to pay homage to the king—and the outcome grandly predictable. Shakespeare provided few opportunities for a composer (a little insecticidal charm, Bottom’s ditty about the woosel cock, a bergomask for the nuptial dance); Jonson and Jones arranged for seventy-five musicians, including shawm, cornett, sacbut (trombone), and recorder players, and gave them plenty to do—not only did they have to make loud noises to cover the noise of the machines (“The rock opened discovering a great throne with countless lights and colours all shifting”) but they also had to accompany the solo singers and the chorus in nine vocal numbers, and to play various almans, pavans, and corantos for the noble masquers and the professional dancers. The music for three of the vocal numbers survives; the rest of the music has been reconstructed imaginatively and sensitively by Peter Holman, whose performing edition has been recorded.3 Metamorphosis is central to the aesthetic of both the Shakespeare play and the masque. But Shakespearean metamorphosis is balky, provisional, palimpsestic, a tissue of changes and of erasures of change provoked by the vicissitudes of sexual desire; masque-metamorphosis, on the other hand, is simply a shifting fringe of gorgeous inconsequentialities playing around the king: Melt earth to sea, sea flow to air, And air fly into fire, Whilst we in tunes to Arthur’s chair

238

❧

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

Bear Oberon’s desire; Than which there nothing can higher be Save James, to whom it flies: But he the wonder is of tongues, of ears, of eyes. In Shakespeare’s play, the metamorphoses have a certain rude, even gross, aspect—Puck turns into a bear, Bottom into an ass—and help to establish a stagecraft that derives its energy from the way in which all elements of plot and character threaten to fly out of control. But a Jonsonian masque is about control: the mere fact that the scene changes and costume tricks obviously required endless thought and expense, the split-second timing of a fireworks show, becomes a metaphor for a state whose every detail is governed by the wise surveillance of the king. Jonson has a magician’s hat with ten false bottoms, and live rabbits and pigeons, and an endless stream of tied-together kerchiefs; Shakespeare has an old cap, and he begs the audience to pretend it’s a crown or a toad or a bouquet of flowers. Jonson’s Oberon is (a) an ideal prince caught up in a formal ceremony of alignment with an ideal king, and (b) a normal, easily bored teenaged boy who told his father he’d much prefer a tournament in his honor instead of a masque; Shakespeare’s Oberon is Fate in clown mode. Jonson had a remarkable gift for endowing allegorical cutouts with the faculty of locomotion: for example, his masque Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue (1618) starts with one of the great opening lines in the English theatre, as Comus enters crying, “Roome, roome, make roome for the bouncing belly / First father of sauce, & deviser of gelly.” But Jonson’s texts, engaging as they can be, pale before Inigo Jones’s stage pictures. In the case of the Masque of Oberon, Jones drew a rocky landscape on a pair of huge shutters, which opened to reveal a castle: Jones evidently hesitated between two versions of this castle, one a sturdy crusaders’ fortress fantastically overgrown with domes and pediments and balconies, the other—nestled in an arch of living rock—a gracile Renaissance palace of air, the sort of building more familiar from Italian paintings than from any actual Italy. In a sense, the task of masque is to construct an intelligible dwelling place, fit for the godhead that plays around the body of the king. We know several instances in which the nobles at the masque complained about the length of the text, and it seems clear that the main burden of making the experience enjoyable and meaningful fell not on Ben Jonson or the other poets but on Inigo Jones. Ben Jonson’s unfriendly couplet “Ô, to make Boardes to speake! There is a taske! / Painting & Carpentry, are the Soule of Masque!” is a burlesque of a serious statement of the aesthetic of the whole genre: in Inigo Jones’s own words, the masque is “nothing else but Pictures with Light and Motion.”4 Now, in old times, the Greek poet Simonides defined poetry itself as the art of making pictures speak; Jonson must have felt that Jones had tried to usurp the poet’s role by making pictures that could perform panegyrics more stunning than any verse. When Jonson ridicules Jones’s masques as “Court

❧

other dreams in other summers

239

Hiero-gly-phicks,” he is also broaching the possibility that Jones’s stage pictures really might be able to operate as hieroglyphics, that is, as vehicles of meaning not to be decoded linguistically but to be apprehended instantaneously, as pictograms. This theatre of speaking pictures is the exact opposite of the actors’workshop model that Shakespeare cultivated throughout his career; instead of rapid role changes and games of pretending, we have a theatre of frigid magnificence and rigid transforms, in which all the characters are gods from machines. Shakespeare was by no means an instinctive rebel—as Yeats pointed out, he was typically described as gentle, and for the most part he kept out of quarrels in a quarrelsome age. But he did not seem to relish a theatre of carefully prepared stage artifices, designed to dazzle and amaze, and to reinforce the political/theological order that could support and justify such epiphanies of power.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Purcell’s The Fairy Queen When the public theatres reopened after the Restoration, they inherited the dramaturgy of the court masque, not the dramaturgy of the Globe. Some of the folks who had assisted in producing Caroline court masques in the early 1630s were still around in the 1650s to help to devise a people’s entertainment—for example, Inigo Jones’s last chief assistant, John Webb, designed the set for Davenant’s The Siege of Rhodes (1656), by some accounts the first English opera and the first occasion when female actors appeared on the English public stage. On the other hand, the texts of court masques were obviously unsuitable for a popular theatre, so the producers needed either to commission new plays or to find old plays that looked good inside a proscenium arch and lent themselves to a coed stage equipped with scenic machinery. The Tempest, for example, with its embedded masque of Ceres and Juno (and its embedded antimasque of Ariel as Harpy), could fairly easily be adapted to the needs of such a theatre: it was a simple task, for example, to change the last act into a large masque in which classical gods calm the water preparatory to a sea voyage—indeed, this version has an attractive symmetry in that it begins with a spectacle of a storm and ends with the spectacle of a counter-storm, a tranquilizing of all weather. But The Tempest of the Restoration achieves this at the expense of making Prospero a sovereign who never drowns his book or breaks his staff, who retains his magical power to control the elements, as if the whole play were a masque designed to project the glory of authority. In other words, the parts of the play that modern audiences may enjoy the most—the valedictory, self-dismissive parts—were sacrificed to make the play more spectacular. A Midsummer Night’s Dream was infinitely more difficult to adapt to the new conditions. Elaborate stage machinery and cunningly painted backdrops are not an aid to A Midsummer Night’s Dream but a hindrance to it: as we have seen, it’s the ideal play for a minimalist stage, in which the characters seem to be making up the play as they go along. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is not a play about the triumph of calculation; it’s a play about fizzled effects and frustrated plans, not only in the famous botched play of Pyramus and Thisby but in the main action itself, in which Puck keeps ruining Oberon’s plans by instilling the eyedrops in the wrong eyes or by letting the right eyes imprint themselves with the wrong love-objects. The characters keep trying to set up the stage for impressive effects,

THE

FAIR Y

QUEEN

❧

purcell’s

241

so to speak, but the stage keeps crashing down around them; and this theatrical helter-skelter, this perpetual awry-ness, could only be clogged by an expensive, laborious, difficult-to-change stage apparatus, in which all surprises are obviously reckoned weeks in advance. Nevertheless, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, drastically rewritten, and retitled The Fairy Queen (1692–93), became the most impressive monument of the whole Restoration theatre, not least because of the music of Henry Purcell. The anonymous adapter of the text seems to have understood well the fact that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a play that resists set-piece masques—and, by the standards of 1692, to resist masques is to resist spectacle, to resist music, to resist two-thirds of the theatrical experience. Therefore he or she created masque-scenes using a wholly different set of characters (except possibly for the nameless fairies) performing actions wholly different from those of A Midsummer Night’s Dream itself. As we’ll see, subtle thematic continuities link the new masque-scenes to the old play; but there is a strong sense that The Fairy Queen is a bifurcated entertainment, in which the play and the opera inhabit separate worlds; a drama for specialists, in that the lead actors don’t sing and the lead singers don’t act. Purcell wrote the music for a number of these hybrid entertainments, which his contemporary Roger North called semi-operas: they “were called operas but had bin more properly styled semioperas, for they consisted of half musick, and half drama . . . some that would come to the play, hated the musick, and others that were very desirous of the musick, would not bear the interruption, that so much rehearsall [talk] gave, so that it is best to have either by it self intire.”1 Posterity has agreed with North’s judgment: Purcell’s music is rarely performed in conjunction with the spoken play; indeed, the scenes set to music—and Purcell wrote a great deal of music for The Fairy Queen, more than (say) Puccini wrote for La Bohème—are so utterly distinct from the main body of the play that it would be possible to listen to all of it without realizing that Shakespeare’s play had anything whatever to do with the entertainment. It is hard to imagine any sort of music-drama that more flagrantly flouts the Wagnerian principle of Gesamtkunstwerk, the total art work in which drama, music, and stage set are fused into unity. The Ed Sullivan show? an hour of stray music videos on MTV? Rameau’s Les indes galantes?—these are merely miscellanies, but The Fairy Queen, a most zerspaltetes Kunstwerk, is a conscious offense against the possibility of integrating drama and music. Purcell did not set a single line of Shakespeare’s text. And yet each of Purcell’s self-contained masques dangles precariously, but directly, from a spoken text concerning Oberon, Titania, Puck (usually called Robin-Good-Fellow), Bottom, the Duke (no longer Duke Theseus but just plain Duke), Lysander, and the other lovers—the characters and scenes we know so well from Shakespeare. And in some ways the anonymous adapter is actually fulfilling certain consequences implied in Shakespeare, or contradicting Shakespeare’s implications in revealing ways. Purcell’s semi-opera exists in two versions, the 1692 original and an expanded version (containing a scene with a drunken poet in the first act, a new song in

242

❧

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

the third act, Ye gentle spirits of the air, and the fifth-act Plaint) performed in 1693. In the 1692 version, there’s no vocal music for the first act; the first bit of musicdrama occurs near the end of the second. Before the music-drama starts, the actors play a condensed version of Shakespeare’s 2.1, the scene in which Puck describes his merry pranks, Oberon and Titania quarrel about the changeling, Oberon hatches his scheme to deprave Titania with the love-in-idleness flower, and Demetrius repels Helena, who’s chasing him. At the end of 2.1, as Shakespeare wrote the scene, Titania enters, for no purpose other than to fall asleep; but in the Restoration version Titania enters for the sake of preparing an elaborate stage spectacle of fairyland, and some big musical numbers: Tit. Take Hands, and trip it in a round, While I Consecrate the ground. All shall change at my Command, All shall turn to Fairy-land. The Scene changes [from a moonlit wood] to a Prospect of Grotto’s, Arbors, and delightful Walks: The Arbors are Adorn’d with all variety of Flowers, the Grotto’s supported by Terms, these lead to two Arbors on either side of the Scene, of a great length, whose prospect runs toward the two Angles of the House. Between these two Arbors is the great Grotto, which is continued by several Arches, to the farther end of the House.

Now Fairies search, search every where, Let no Unclean thing be near. Nothing Venomous, or Foul, No Raven, Bat, or hooting Owle, No toad, nor Elf, nor Blind-worm’s Sting. No Poisonous Herb in this place spring. Have you search’d? is no ill near? All. Nothing, nothing; all is clear. Tit. Let your Revels now begin, Some shall Dance, and some shall Sing . . . Let Eccho’s plac’d in every Grot, Catch, and repeat each Dying Note. (ll. 446–62, 467–78)2 In other words: cue the stagehands and the musicians to do something to make your jaw drop. Suddenly the black and white turns to color, and a perspective road leads the eye to distant wizardries. Fairyland in Shakespeare exists in the audience’s imagination, a name for an airy nothing; fairyland in Purcell is a sumptuous something, designed by high-priced craftsmen. Purcell’s music for this scene is special fairy music, a conscious deviation from his normal musical practice. The audience, long before the second act, has already heard plenty of familiar music, such as the stately, French-style dotted

THE

FAIR Y

QUEEN

❧

purcell’s

243

Example 46. Songsters.

rhythms of the D-major Overture. But the first song (in C, sung by an anonymous fairy—see ex. 46) instantly places us in the domain of special effects, the acoustic equivalent of the machina versatilis. Come all ye Songsters of the Sky, Wake, and Assemble in this Wood; But no ill-boding Bird be nigh, None but the Harmless and the Good. (ll. 471–74) This begins with skittish, fleeting rhythms, as if to suggest the elusiveness of fairies; and the fairy soloist has long vocal runs, as if the songsters of the sky had infiltrated his own breath—like many singers in The Fairy Queen, this fairy is so struck by the general hilarity that he can’t help laughing even as he sings. In the subsequent lines, the song discusses echoes (While Eccho shall in sounds remote, / Repeat each Note—ll. 479–80); and Purcell obligingly inserts a short instrumental piece that’s all echo, as if to suggest the uncanny dimensions in fairyland, a place both huge and hollow. This sound effect is exactly equivalent to the fake space of the perspective lines mentioned in the stage direction cited above (whose prospect runs toward the two Angles of the House): both the music and the stage set define bulges in the normal fabric of things. In the later musical scenes, Purcell will devise other striking techniques for intensifying the eeriness of the text. If this were Shakespeare, we’d expect, at this point, to go on to the beginning of 2.2, Titania’s sleep. And the 1692 scene does look as if it will follow Shakespeare at this point: Titania utters Shakespeare’s speech about fairy protectivity, oddly changed from prose to blank verse: Some to kill Kankers in the Musk-Rose-Buds; Some War with Rere-mice for their Leathern Wings, To make my small Elves Coats. And some keep back The clamarous Owl, that hoots, and wonders at us. (ll. 495–98) Titania lies down to sleep; if we were in Shakespeare’s play, the fairies would now sing their magic spell to defend the sleeping Titania:

244

❧

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

You spotted snakes with double tongue, Thorny hedgehogs, be not seen, Newts and blind-worms, do no wrong, Come not near our fairy queen. Philomele, with melody, Sing in our sweet lullaby . . . (2.2.9–13) But instead of this song, Purcell gives us an enormous nocturne in C minor, a masque for Night, Mystery, Secresie, and Sleep, a large, ambiguous, lethargic but erotically charged surrogate for Shakespeare’s brief charm and lullaby. “You spotted snakes” is perhaps the most masque-like (or, more properly, antimasque-like) moment in the whole of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in that the defense of a queen against monsters sounds exactly like the sort of material that might be appropriate in a court masque. If Ben Jonson had ever written a Masque of Titania, it might well have included a scene in which hedgehogs and spiders, played by costumed dancers, made threatening gestures at a sleeping queen. But the author of The Fairy Queen did not want a masque that fussed over the physical safety of the queen (of more concern in a court spectacle than in popular entertainment) but a masque that would titillate the public with the sexiness of dreams. Night (first soprano) opens the scene with a quiet, even, smooth-sliding melody harmonized in parallel thirds (See, even Night her self is here, / To favour your Design—ll. 504–5)— later, when she sings And all her Peaceful Train is near, / That men to Sleep incline (ll. 506–7) the music turns chromatic without turning anxious. The music for Mystery (second soprano) adds a running bass (I am come to lock all fast, / Love without me cannot last—ll. 519–20), but thins the texture to voice and bass, as if the harmony must be concealed to foster the mystery. Secresie (countertenor) adds a note of quiet jaunty insinuation of sexual pleasure: One charming Night Gives more delight, Than a hundred lucky Days. Night and I improve the tast, Make the pleasure longer last, A thousand thousand several ways. (ll. 526–31) Purcell’s setting makes all sorts of lascivious elongations of the words pleasure longer—I suspect with an intentional phallic joke, similar to those in Purcell’s tavern songs—and keeps maniacally repeating the numbers a hundred and a thousand as if pleasure were geometrically increasing in its own echoey fields of delight. Finally the whole spectacle is dismissed by Sleep (bass): Hush, no more, be silent all (l. 533), a song that is a tissue of silences and feathery harmonies, a music that is an extinction of sound. The whole of Titania’s slumber, from erotic dreams to dreamless sleep, is embodied in this nearly depictorialized

THE

FAIR Y

QUEEN

❧

purcell’s

245

masque (if we can judge by the paucity of stage directions), a masque on a darkened stage for music alone. This masque, then, epitomizes the whole rhythm of Shakespeare’s play, which embodies the self-dispelling procedures of dreams, the ways in which REM sleep—the darting of closed eyes, the disturbances of the inner ear—yields to deeper withdrawals, relaxations, renewals of damaged tissue. Purcell’s masque ends with A Dance for the Followers of Night (l. 540), as Oberon presses the juice into Titania’s eyes; then Lysander and Hermia fall asleep, as in Shakespeare’s 2.2, and the second act of The Fairy Queen ends as Puck squeezes the drops into Lysander’s eyes. The third act starts with a version of the end of Shakespeare’s 2.2: Helena enters (but not Demetrius); Lysander wakes, sees Helena, instantly falls in love, and follows her. Then we suddenly find ourselves in Shakespeare’s 5.1, at a rehearsal (which is the performance) of the Pyramus and Thisby play: by Restoration standards, the mechanicals’ drama is too humble, too incomplete a display of the scenic and musical resources of the theatre to be part of the final scene, so it is moved forward to the middle of the play, a less conspicuous and potent place. The gathering together of much of the Peter Quince material, scattered through Shakespeare’s play, into a big continuous scene is quite characteristic of The Fairy Queen: what Shakespeare disperses, the Restoration adapter, a poor connoisseur of chaos, makes linear and consecutive. Many of the smart-aleck comments from the audience are omitted, since there is no one to hear the play except Puck, who borrows some of the spectators’ responses from Shakespeare’s fifth act. When Pyramus is at last completely dead, Puck disperses the actors; Bottom returns with the ass’s head, and Titania falls in love with him. Titania asks Bottom, Shall we have Musick sweet? Bot. Yes, if you please. Tit. Away, my Elves; prepare a Fairy Mask To entertain my Love; and change this place To my enchanted lake. . . . Two great Dragons make a Bridge over the River; their Bodies form two Arches, through which two Swans are seen in the River at a great distance. (ll. 893–97; 901–3) —more cues for the painted backgrounds, the stage machinery, the music, Industrial Light and Magic. But this is a masque designed not to entertain Oberon or the Duke—characters with refined taste—but to entertain Bottom: and so it juxtaposes the rustic and the coarse with delicate music of the sort that would please Titania. In the second act, the dialectic of Purcell’s music was, first of all, daylight vs. nighttime, and, within the night, dreaming vs. dreamlessness; but in the third act the musical dialectic is high vs. low, a dialectic of social classes. Refinement and elevation find musical symbols in several ways: in the

246

❧

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

nuanced G-minor “symphony while the swans come forward” (the two swans turn into fairies and dance) and in the astonishing song (added in 1693), Ye Gentle Spirits of the Air, appear; / Prepare, and joyn your tender Voices here, in which the text is a continuous cue to the voice and the bass line: Catch, and repeat the Trembling Sounds anew, Soft as her sighs and sweet as pearly dew, Run new Divisions, and such Measures keep, As when you lull the God of Love asleep. (insertion after l. 929) The bass viol proposes a sturdy dotted figure as an ostinato, but the vocal line half accepts, half declines the offer; the bass is constantly stopped, stretched, sent into frenzies by the words that command it—as if Purcell here were simply displaying a pure agon of arbitrary words and arbitrary music, contesting one another or playing leapfrog, liberated from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, from spectacle, from drama (see ex. 47). Here we see music elating itself into its private dream, as if Purcell, looking back in 1693 at his major achievement of the previous year, had decided to declare more firmly that music constituted its own fairyland. But even more prominent in this masque than the music of elegance is the music of peasants—Bottom-music: for example, in the Dance for the Green Men who drive the swan fairies away, a piece in G major notable for its emphatic, slightly clodhopping rhythms, and its odd tendency to land on the wrong note, a mixolydian F; this is antimasque music, self-consciously eccentric, in the pre–Civil War tradition of Robert Johnson’s Baboons’ Dance. The star turn of the low-class music is the Dialogue between Coridon and Mopsa (also in G—see ex. 48), Now the maids and the men are making of hay, / We’ve left the dull fools, and are stolen away (ll. 930–1). This duet is made of galumphing anapests, a clunky 6/4 meter—you hear heavy shoes thump on the ground at the downbeat of each measure—and simple scalar melodies (No, no, no, no, no; no Kissing at all—l. 940). Purcell can’t resist a sophisticated joke by introducing a bit of chromatic despair when Coridon realizes that Mopsa won’t kiss him (not at all?); in a sense the Muse of the duet is the offspring of Bottom and Titania. Still, most of the duet is the sort

Example 47. Music for music’s sake.

THE

FAIR Y

QUEEN

❧

purcell’s

247

Example 48. Coridon.

of stuff designed to make an ass guffaw, especially if the alto role of Mopsa is played by a male (as it was in 1693, but not 1692).3 Indeed the duet is a deflection of the whole Titania-Bottom love affair into a harmless pastoral in which everything is backwards, bass-ack-wards, probably including the gender of the beloved Mopsa—this sort of drag spectacle makes itself felt strongly on a stage in which women are present. Michael Burden has suggested that the purpose of the “vulgar display by the yokels Coridon and Mopsa” is to embarrass Bottom and “reform his behaviour in line with the moral in the resolution of the masque.”4 This is a defensible thesis, but I think it more likely that Bottom’s weight is pulling down the masque, altering it to fit his taste—he is reforming it, not it him. The vulgarity is peculiarly innocent, free from malice. The malicious Oberon of Shakespeare hopes to make the sleeping Titania “full of hateful fantasies” (2.1.258); but the Restoration adapter omits this line, fills Titania’s sleep with dreams of sexual pleasure, and fills her waking in Bottom’s arms (itself still a dream of sorts) with a vaudeville of love in the country, love in the town. In the 1692 version of The Fairy Queen, there are few bad dreams. Both before and after the Dialogue between Coridon and Mopsa, there are songs (sung by no character in particular) sketching more complicated sorts of love relations. In the first, we enter a world of conventional contradictions: If love’s a Sweet Passion, why does it torment? / If a Bitter, oh tell me whence comes my content? (ll. 907–8)—one of Purcell’s hit tunes, with a long afterlife in The Beggar’s Opera of 1728. In the second, a flirtatious nymph vows to be false and inconstant—I’ll have the Pleasure, let him have the pain (l. 968). Bottom and Titania witness love in many forms, from bumptious innocence to cynical hedonism, as if love between queen and donkey spanned every conceivable sort of affection. Shakespeare’s Titania was, if not unfaithful herself, an assistant in the infidelities of others, according to Oberon: How canst thou thus for shame, Titania, Glance at my credit with Hippolyta, Knowing I know thy love to Theseus? Didst not thou lead him through the glimmering night From Perigenia, whom he ravished? (2.1.74–78)

248

❧

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

The Fairy Queen, however, omits these lines, instead deflecting any Titanian unchastity onto the anonymous nymph in the third-act masque. The main actors in the Restoration play have become less sexually active during the non-musical sections: Oberon, for another example, is no longer allowed to boast of his love affair with Morning (Shakespeare, 3.2.389). But in compensation they are allowed to witness the thousand twistings of love, sanitized, confined to the masque scenes, that serve both to allegorize certain themes from the main action and to drain away any charge of harm, anesthetize any too-pressing grief, deflect any seriousness, lighten any gravity. It is as if the characters in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof decided, whenever their situation became too tangled, their insight too close to the bone, to turn on a wide-screen television visible to the audience and watch Dallas reruns, or Siegfried and Roy with their huge white tigers, or even the Weather Channel: the show at once relieves the tension and displaces it onto another domain of action. The characters in The Fairy Queen have at their fingertips an expensive battery of hired entertainers to hug, shout, tranquilize, tickle—they need not go to any such bother themselves. This model tends to define the role of Purcell’s customers, who pay to see The Fairy Queen in order to undergo a passive excitation of a wide range of feelings; as for living, our servants will do it for us; few theatrical experiences are franker about the indolence, the idleness, the vanity of theatre itself. In the third-act masque, Titania and Bottom are spared the effort of caressing one another, let alone the strenuous exertions of the sexual act itself: they behold the whole imaginary course of their love, of any possible love, in the nonworld of the masque. Bottom’s bottomliness is transformed into the rusticity of lovers on a farm; Titania’s toying with an unworthy love-object is transformed into a declaration of the emancipated sexuality of women. Again, the Restoration adapter has created an epitome of A Midsummer Night’s Dream without having recourse to its characters or action: the third-act masque defines the boundaries of the domain (low and high; simple and complex; monogamous and promiscuous) over which Cupid presides. After a dance for haymakers and a chorus, the third act ends with some lines adapted from Shakespeare’s 4.1, as Titania moons over Bottom, and Bottom asks for oats. The fourth act of The Fairy Queen consists of the vexations of the four youthful lovers, roughly following Shakespeare’s 3.2, with a bit from 4.1 in which Puck takes the ass’s head off Bottom. And as Bottom blinks at the world through his own Fools Eyes, Oberon suddenly cries, Titania, call for Musick, and Titania replies, Let us have all Variety of Musick, / All that should welcome up the rising Sun (ll. 1242–46)—once again, the fairy rulers are the onstage impresarios of a masque. This seems a lame and abrupt introduction of an entertainment; but it is possible to see a certain logic. The dream of A Midsummer Night’s Dream occurs in midsummer; but everyone, even Bottom, is awake now, and it is time to greet the sun, and day. It is reasonable to greet the sun with a masque of the seasons,

THE

FAIR Y

QUEEN

❧

purcell’s

249

a masque about time itself—in which the stage is arranged with marble columns, stairs, and statues, with complicated fountains flowing everywhere, a visual symbol of the fertility of the summer season and the summer marriages. This masque reminds us how much of the chaos has been surgically removed from Shakespeare’s play, to suit a later age’s (not invariant) taste for the spruce, the well kempt: for in Shakespeare, the most powerful passage concerning the seasons is found in Titania’s description of the wobbling of earth’s axis caused by the fairy quarrel: The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose, And on old Hiems’ thin and icy crown An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds Is, as in mockery, set; the spring, the summer, The childing autumn, angry winter, change Their wonted liveries; and the mazed world, By their increase, now knows not which is which. (2.1.107–14) These lines were cut from Purcell’s version; and instead of seasonal derangement we get a masque in which the edges of the seasons are clear-cut, each represented by a distinct allegorical personage. It is Oberon’s birthday; we have all sorts of occasions to celebrate. In this masque, the musical dialectic is slightly different. In the third act we heard stomping vs. subtlety; in the second act we heard soft chromatic sleepiness as the implicit opposite of extravert frank celebration. The fourth-act dialectic is like that of the second act, though the meanings of diatonic vs. chromatic have changed. The fourth act is full of cheerful blatant music, as you’d expect in a hymn to the sun: the large symphony in D at the beginning immediately places us in Apollo’s domain. But the symphony is punctuated by odd passages— slow chromatic interruptions, as if something sluggish, thick, difficult to make explicit were concealed amid the gaiety. The basic festive mood continues in the spirited Let the Fifes, and the Clarions (still in D)—as if a little army were tootling away on parade—but when the sun god Phoebus appears (in C), his first thought is of the winter that thaws beneath his beams: When a cruel long Winter has frozen the Earth, And Nature Imprison’d seeks in vain to be free; I dart forth my Beams, to give all things a Birth. (ll. 1275–77) This suggests a meaning for chromatic music that we heard in the opening symphony: it is Winter, congealed and sullen, resisting the sun—a shriveling, a withdrawal, an enervation. Soon after Phoebus sings, a great summery chorus breaks out in D (Hail, great parent, hail!)—an anthem for the victor in triumph over the

250

❧

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

Example 49. Winter.

cold and the dark. Each season, personified, sings in turn: Spring and Summer are simple and gay; Autumn is calm, dignified, considered; but Winter (Now Winter comes Slowly, Pale, Meager, and Old) is a wilderness of chromaticism, with slow glassy textures in the string accompaniment, and vocal teeth-chatterings in a dotted rhythm (quiv’ring with cold—l. 1309—see ex. 49). The imaginative force of Winter is so great that it tends to vitiate the power of the sun itself. Purcell was an expert in winter: in a masque he composed for Dryden’s King Arthur (1691), the Cold Genius begs Cupid—in one of the most astonishing scenes in all dramatic music—to let me freeze again to death. The Winter of The Fairy Queen seems more a god than a season, Phoebus’s Antichrist; indeed the ascending scales in the seventh bar of Winter’s aria are typical of Purcell’s invocations of pagan godhead, as in Ismeron’s Ye twice ten hundred deities from the music for Dryden’s The Indian Queen (1695). Purcell gives Phoebus all due glory; but it’s possible to believe that Purcell tries to maintain a Shakespearean sense of the prestige of dreams, of disorder, simply by investing anarchy and darkness with such musical interest. In a sense, Winter is simply a more flamboyant and destitute version of Night, an equally chromatic character from the second-act masque—Winter is the whole world’s nightmare, a ghost that needs exorcizing. Exorcism is crucial to the both the fourth- and fifth-act masques, for as the play resolves itself, wakes up, all traces of the oneiric, the gargoylish, the imperfect, need to be dispelled. The masques operate as giant expression-devices and dissipation-devices for dreams. The benediction at the of A Midsummer Night’s Dream rids all future progeny of harelips and moles; the masques in The Fairy Queen are also, in a sense, spells against misshapenness. The fourth-act masque terminates in great shouts of Hail!, so conclusivesounding that one might think that the whole play were over. But the Athenian lovers still are not properly paired; and the fourth act ends with a short spoken scene in which Puck applies the antidote to Lysander’s eyes. In the fifth act, the Duke hears the lovers’ stories and agrees to the marriage (but he himself does not marry—Hippolyta does not exist in The Fairy Queen). Then the Duke renders, in a somewhat simplified version, Shakespeare’s lines about the lunatic, the lover, and the poet, and this speech cues the entrance of Oberon and Titania, who summon up one last grand masque. First Juno flies down through the air on her peacock-propelled chariot (an effect imported

THE

FAIR Y

QUEEN

❧

purcell’s

251

from the Dryden-Grabu Albion and Ascanius, 1685) to bless the nuptial beds; then Oberon calls for a sad song (added in 1693): Sing me the Plaint that did so Nobly move, / When Laura Mourn’d for her departed love. There is some consensus that this piece is an “over-indulgence.”5 And the Plaint indeed comes as a surprise—myself, I’ve never attended a wedding in which a formal lamentation was part of the program—but constancy in love can perhaps most easily be illustrated by postmortem steadfastness. The Plaint, O Let me ever, ever weep, is a piece of musical hypnosis built on a chromatic ground bass: the song seems to exorcize lovesickness, and chromaticism, and sadness itself, once and for all from The Fairy Queen. The stage is darkened, and suddenly lit—“Now let a new Transparent World be seen,” Oberon commands—with a scene that defies expectation: it is China, with the Architecture, the Trees, the Plants, the Fruits, the Birds, the Beasts quite different to what we have in this part of the World. . . . Over it is a hanging garden . . . numbers of strange Birds flying in the Air (ll. 1536–42). In short, this is science fiction, a purely imaginary and totally deviant world, constructed by the lunatic-loverpoet’s wildest flights of fancy—a realm of strangeness, a prefiguration of that complete concord that will prevail on the far side of all the world’s disorder. Its sheer fantasticality seems to place it in the same sort of universe we’ve hitherto associated with night and winter—but Purcell obviates this unwanted effect by writing music for the Chinese Man in his extraverted, Occidental, unfantastical, normal style:

Thus the gloomy World At first began to shine, And from the Power Divine A Glory round it hurl’d, Which made it bright, And gave it Birth in light. Then were all Minds as pure, As those Etherial Streams; In Innocence secure, Not Subject to Extreams. There was no Room for empty Fame, No cause for Pride, Ambition wanted aim. A Chinese Woman. . . . Thus wildly we live, Thus freely we give, What Heaven as freely bestows. We were not made For Labour and Trade, Which Fools on each other impose. (ll. 1549–60, 1570–76)

252

❧

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

This text bears some relation to Gonzalo’s dream of an ideal commonwealth, itself derived from Montaigne’s account of the savages of Brazil: . . . no kind of traffic Would I admit; no name of magistrate; Letters should not be known; riches, poverty, And use of service, none; contract, succession, Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none; No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil; No occupation, all men idle, all; And women too, but innocent and pure; No sovereignty—(The Tempest 2.1.149–57) China seems to be Eden (most vividly imaged by Purcell in the delicate middle section, Then were all Minds as pure), but an Eden that can look back on itself from the perspective of fallenness: the Chinese Man and Woman are quite aware of fame, ambition, labor, trade, even though they live in a state of such abundance that greed and sweat are unknown. Why did Purcell decline to use any of the tropes of musical Orientalism? Such tropes did exist in the seventeenth century: in Lully’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme (1670) M. Jourdain’s induction ceremony helped to set the conventions for all subsequent “Turkish” music; and Purcell seems so au fait with Lully’s dramatic music (the masque of Sleep, the chattering teeth of Winter, have immediate precedents in Lully’s operas Atys and Isis) that it might be thought that Purcell consciously avoided Orientalism.6 It is as if regular diatonic music, the music we hear every day, is already in some afterworld of bliss—music always challenges us, conduces us toward some state of eternal delight. After the Chinese duet, the masque prepares for a wedding. First, six monkeys dance, to music that might be called impudent but that has nothing of the eccentricity, mad self-interruption, of the pre–Civil War antimasque music— Purcell’s monkeys are models of propriety compared to Robert Johnson’s baboons. Then two women invoke Hymen (Sure the dull God of Marriage does not hear, / We’ll rouse him with a Charm. Hymen appear!—ll. 1593–94), to a series of delirious modulations (G minor, F major, C minor, and so forth)—the modulations themselves seem to kindle his torch, to goad him into erotic frenzy. (Sluggard Hymen tells us that his torch had been put out by the prevalence of loose dissembled Vows . . . Where hardly Love out-lives the Wedding-Night—ll. 1601–2: another of the glances at corrupt or grotesque love that faintly sour and thicken, curdle the glory of the masques in odd places, like bad dreams from which the masque must wake.) But the music soon turns decorous again; and just before the brief final chorus, we hear one of Purcell’s most impressive pieces, a Dance for the Chinese Man and Woman in the form of a chaconne in C, in which an imperturbable, or slightly perturbable, ground bass underlies all sorts of calm,

THE

FAIR Y

QUEEN

❧

purcell’s

253

vehement, heady, or decisive doings, both major and minor, in the upper voices—a perfect resolution of dialectic, for stability and instability, order and chaos, are tensely bound together in the dance. As a composer of ostinato structures, Purcell remains unsurpassed. He could construct an ostinato out of only two notes (in the tenor aria This does our fertile isle with glory crown, from the ode for the queen’s birthday, Now Does This Glorious Day Appear (1689), as if to illustrate the birthday of music itself, the egg from which an aria hatches; and he had a trick of psychologizing music by writing thready, contorting ground basses, as in Dido’s lament in Dido and Aeneas, a defective ostinato to manifest a deranged intelligence. But, unlike Dido’s lament, the ceremonious chaconne in The Fairy Queen keeps an equipoise between the immovable do and the volatilities of the upper parts. The twenty-four dancers of the chaconne make their way among six moving Pedestals of China-work supporting six large Vases of Porcelain containing six China-Orange-Trees (ll. 1604–6); the dance takes place in an afterworld or metaworld, China, New Jerusalem, some domain at once all artifice and all nature, where the forces that tear us apart in this life are joined in intimacy, made cooperant. By itself, the text of the final masque would sound insipid and ideal, as if to celebrate a marriage between two people who will remain virgins: Hymen’s torch seems all too uncombustible; and China seems characterized by what it isn’t (inhabitants without fame, without ambition, without any work; beasts and birds that look like—well, like beasts and birds that aren’t anywhere near here), not by what it is. But Purcell’s music attains a Shakespearean comprehensiveness: the chaconne’s sheer density of event precludes any sense of the rarefied or the precious. There remains to mention Purcell’s large addition to the 1693 revival, the scene in the first act for the drunken poet. This satirical and clownish scene has a certain antimasque-like aspect, but it is moving away from both masque and antimasque toward true music-drama, since it does not ostensibly involve a scripted entertainment prepared (and cued) by the characters in the play. Titania wants to organize some revels in the forest, evidently to please her changeling boy; she commands her fairies to stand sentry in case any intrusive mortals appear—if this happens, the fairies are to blindfold and torture them. Sure enough, after the fairies sing the delights of an idle life far from any town, there appear three drunken poets, one wearing a blindfold; the poor blindfolded poet is turned around and around, tormented (Pinch him, pinch him for his Crimes, / His Nonsense, and his Dogrel Rhymes—ll. 189–90), and forced to confess his sins (If you will know it, / I am a scu- scu- scu- scu- scurvy, scurvy, scurvy Poet— ll. 187–88). From the fairies’ point of view, this scene is an antimasque, since they’re following a preexisting recipe for behavior; but from the poet’s point of view, this scene is drama, since he has no idea what is happening or why. The drunken-poet scene is sometimes taken as a spoof of the obstreperous, stuttering poet (and sometime collaborator with Purcell) Thomas D’Urfey (other candidates, including Elkanah Settle, have also been proposed).7 But we

254

❧

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

needn’t look to in-jokes, for the drunkard’s presence follows easily from the logic of the Duke’s fifth-act speech about lunatic, lover, and poet: since The Fairy Queen contains plenty of lunatics and lovers, it might well contain a poet, and an incoherent poet is even better. Shakespeare’s Duke, reading from a list of possible wedding entertainments, comes across “The riot of the tipsy Bacchanals, / Tearing the Thracian singer in their rage” (5.1.48–49); but what Shakespeare’s Duke rejects, the Restoration adapter provides, in a funnier, less bloodthirsty version: not Orpheus dismembered by the Bacchantes, but a drunken poet vainly swatting at fairy mosquitoes. In the last act of The Merry Wives of Windsor, children dressed as fairies pinch and torment Falstaff; and something of the same mood (a slow slobbery coward beleaguered by sprites) clings to Purcell’s scene. If the fifth-act masque of The Fairy Queen suggests a reconciliation of all antinomies, high and low, this scene suggests a complete lack of reconciliation: there is a glaring contrast between the fast twinkly fairies and the sodden tottering poet, who seems to belong to the coarse world of Coridon and Mopsa and the Green Man: the poet’s huge declaration, I’m drunk, drunk, as I live, boys, as I live, boys, drunk, I’m drunk, drunk, as I live, boys, as I live, boys, drunk, as I live, boys, as I live, boys, drunk (l. 185, printed as Purcell sets it—see ex. 50) is a kind of seachanty sung by a sailor whose swaying ship is the whole earth. And yet, poet and fairies are, alike, creatures of imagination, whether spirits or simply spirituous; and in some ways this scene is Purcell’s most Shakespearean moment, for the earth’s unsteadiness, incompetence, lack of tenacity give license to that giddiness of fantasy that generates the whole of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, no matter how tightly the set-piece masques that were handed to Purcell try to constrict it. The drunken poet is the stuff that dreams are made on; and, in the second-act masque, our little lives will be rounded with a sleep. We have, then, a succession of masques in the 1693 version that progress fairly directly from dreams to waking, from stupor to a kind of redemption: I II III IV V

Intoxication Sleep Love Calendar Paradise

Example 50. Drunk.

THE

FAIR Y

QUEEN

❧

purcell’s

255

Purcell and his librettist contrive a spectacle that is wide awake about its own dreaming. Shakespeare’s play is solstitial, and takes place during a night so brief that all its dreams are fitful, extempore, half-awake; but Purcell’s opera takes place in a lighter, calmer, longer sleep, where lucid dreaming realizes the most intricate irrepressions of repressed desire. Each of the five dreams is a little more lucid than the previous one. Still, the play’s final word does not come during Hymen’s blessing, nor during Purcell’s chaconne, nor during the chorus (They shall be as happy as they’re fair) that ends the fifth act; it comes in the Epilogue, where the fairy rulers speculate on the audience’s own dreams. The Epilogue begins in Shakespearean fashion, with Oberon and Titania sprinkling eugenic dew on the bridal bed: We’ll drive the Fume about, about, To keep all Noxious Spirits out: That the Issue they create, May be ever fortunate. (ll. 1625–8) But the final words are nothing like a benediction: Obe. But here are Wits, and Criticks! and ’tis said, Their Adders Tongues can sting, or hit us dead. Tit. Away: Let not the Name of Wits alarm us; They are so very few, they cannot harm us. . . . Obe. Ladies in Dreams shall have their Fortunes told; The Young shall dream of Husbands, and the Old Their Youthful Pleasure shall each Night repeat. Tit. Green-Sickness Girls, who nautiate wholesom Meat, How they their Parents, and themselves may cheat. Obe. Widows, who were by former Husbands vex’d, Shall dream how they may over-reach the next. Tit. Each separate Lady, to supply her Want, Shall every Night dream of a new Gallant. Obe. Those Beau’s, who were, at Nurse, chang’d by my Elves. Tit. Shall dream of nothing, but their pretty selves. Obe. We’ll try a Thousand charming Ways to win ye. Tit. If all this will not do, the Devil’s in ye. (ll. 1636–39, 1655–67) In the Epilogue, many elements of The Fairy Queen are playfully recast as attributes of the spectators: if Titania has, in the play, a changeling boy, the audience is perhaps full of changeling narcissists, dreaming of themselves; if Puck makes snide comments as he watches the Pyramus skit, the paying customers will doubtless contain their fair share of drama critics. The cynicism is quite normal for a Restoration epilogue, but it is still startling to hear the fairy rulers at once

256

❧

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

blessing the newlyweds and throwing acid at the audience: they seem determined to inflict all those bad dreams that were so laboriously dispelled during the masques. It is as if the frivolous nymph in the third-act masque, who took armloads of lovers and laughed at their pains, turned out to be the presiding spirit of the whole drama. The Epilogue tends to undo all the refreshment, the cleansing, that the play worked to achieve. In its brittle, ungenerous way, the Epilogue reaffirms that Winter and nausea and false love are the truths in this life; and so the distorted elements from the masques, elements never quite effaced by all the consonant harmony and carefully arrayed musical structures, seem at last to triumph. Our last image of Cupid isn’t as a smiling baby but as a roué, smirking, winking over his loosening blindfold at our dreams of erotic revenge. The Tempest alarmed Auden, because Prospero’s final thought—“Every third thought shall be my grave” (5.1.312)—seemed grumpy, Manichean; and The Fairy Queen also repudiates its own magic, leaves us blinking in a harsh place. Possibly Purcell added the drunken poet in 1693 as a sort of response to the play’s Epilogue: after the curtain finally closes, you might well feel like buying a bottle of port.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Lampe’s Pyramus and Thisbe I wonder whether the development of an English opera was thwarted because the problem was approached backwards. In Italy, opera grew organically out of the recitative, which quickened into arioso or choral dance at moments of unusual tension or relaxation; but in seventeenth-century England, composers tended to restrict music-drama to undramatical or extradramatical sorts of situations: incidental divertissements, or static depictions of splendor, as if music were simply another machine from which the gods could dangle. It was not easy to find a way of bending these stiff spectacles into a fluent, sensitive medium for drama. The early history of recitative in England is an engrossing subject:1 Monteverdi’s one known English pupil, the madrigalist Walter Porter, did not write any surviving recitative, but there are some accomplished examples by other composers, such as Henry Lawes’s Orpheus Hymn and, especially, Nicholas Lanier’s imitation of the Monteverdian lamento, Hero’s Complaint to Leander, in which the syllabic vocal line breaks out, under pressure, into a rare melisma, in which fleeting patterns in the bass suggest Hero’s erotic obsession, and dissonant harmonic movement suggests the internal strife of her emotions. As I’ve noted before, Purcell’s contemporary Roger North presented a striking picture of Lanier singing Hero’s Complaint to King Charles I: After his returne he composed a recitativo, which was a poem being the tragedy of Hero and Leander . . . The King was exceedingly pleased with this pathetick song, and caused Lanneare often to sing it, to a consort attendance, while he stood next, with his hand upon his shoulder. This was the first of the recitativo kind that ever graced the English language.2

This very long scena—an all-night vigil in which Hero evolves from anger at Leander’s tardiness to hope as she imagines him swimming across the Hellespont, to despair at discovering his corpse—is almost a miniature opera, and might have been a more promising basis for constructing an English opera than the masque turned out to be. But Lanier’s and Lawes’s grafts of Italian speech-song onto English stock didn’t seem to take; it proved hard to integrate recitative, a form well suited to emotional flux, into the arresting, arrested spectacles of the masque-derived music-drama. Christopher Gibbons’s and Matthew

258

❧

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

Locke’s Cupid and Death (1653) and John Blow’s Venus and Adonis (1681?) were among the most ambitious Restoration experiments in devising an English opera, and neither found a smooth manner of transiting between musical scenes—though both manage to entertain (like much good Baroque art) partly through the sheer effortfulness of their dramaturgy, their dependence on coup de théâtre. In Venus and Adonis, there is a scene in which Venus is teaching Cupid how to read: Venus. . . . make some love, they know not why, And for the ugly and ill-humoured die; Such as scorn Love’s fire, Force them to admire. Cupid. The insolent, the arrogant, . . . The M.E.R.Mer: C.E.Ce: Merce: N.A.: Na: R.Y.: Ry: The mercenary, the vain and silly. The audience too may have trouble figuring how to spell out this skit, as it moves sharply from this comical scene to a grand lament for the dead Adonis. Without the developed protocols of an inconspicuous and sinuous recitative, Blow can only juxtapose pre-cut scene-blocks, more in the manner of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex than in that of the normal operatic practice of Lully or Cavalli. Blow’s pupil Purcell ran into the same difficulty, except in his highly experimental Dido and Aeneas (before 1689), which was little known to Purcell’s contemporaries. But even here it is possible to feel that a masque is struggling to thaw into a drama. Another reason for the peculiar character of seventeenth-century English music-drama lies in the monumentality of the achievement of English spoken drama. No other European country, not even Italy, had accumulated by 1650 such an impressive repertory; and it constituted something massive, tenacious, nearly unmusickable. One of the strangest of all experiments in recitative is To be or not to be, an anonymous setting of Hamlet’s soliloquy, copied by the famous diarist and melomane Samuel Pepys:3 it is tasteful, prosodically sensitive, detailed, but it is still ludicrous to hear a sudden exclamation of To be! followed after a brief pause by or not to be, inflected with rising pitches as a peremptory question; a tiny concitato seems about to break out at the phrase the whips and scorns of time; a movement toward arioso (And thus the native hue of resolution) miscarries completely. No better sample of the resistance of high Shakespearean blank verse to music could be found. A complete Hamlet opera written in such a style would be as curious as a rewriting of Leaves of Grass in tetrameter couplets. Fifteen years after Purcell’s death (in 1695, at the age of thirty-six), of course, Handel appeared in England, and the aftershocks of his long sojourn are still being felt. Handel was perfectly willing to write music for English dramas, even dramas from the age of King Charles I, such as Milton’s Comus (1634; music

PYRAMUS

AND

THISBE

❧

LAMPE’S

259

1745). But the English taste for Italian opera occupied most of Handel’s time until the early 1740s, for the English then seemed to feel that opera required one language and spoken drama another—a still further widening of the gap between music-drama and spoken drama, as if the internal fissure in the semiopera of Purcell’s day had at last fractured into two fully independent genres. Still, some of Handel’s contemporaries were determined to prove that “the English tongue is as fit for music as any foreign language of them all.” I take this quotation from a speech by Mr. Semibrief, in the introduction to Pyramus and Thisbe: A Mock Opera (1745), with music by John Frederick Lampe, text by Shakespeare, as revised by Richard Leveridge in 1716 and somebody else (Lampe?) in 1745. Leveridge had already written parodic music, most of which is lost—Roger Fiske notes that “Leveridge anticipated Benjamin Britten in presenting the mechanicals’ play as a skit on the Italian opera”4—but by 1745, the world seemed to need new music along these lines. Lampe was a bassoonist in Handel’s opera company, and the brother-in-law of the composer Thomas Arne; his Pyramus and Thisbe provides evidence to prove either the thesis that the English tongue is fit for music, or the counterthesis that it is fit only for derisive musical jokes. Mr. Semibrief, we learn, has ordered this spectacle to demonstrate to a gentleman well traveled in Italy, and to another gentleman, the virtues of opera in English; the two gentlemen make all the witty asides that Shakespeare gave to Theseus, Hippolyta, and others, while Mr. Semibrief sometimes tries to defend the performance, sometimes joins in the ridicule. It is revealing, of course, that in 1745—when the heyday of London’s Italian opera was already past—the notion of grand opera in English still seemed as comical as it had seemed in 1728, when Gay and Pepusch devised The Beggar’s Opera. The Pyramus skit, a tissue of error on every level of language and dramaturgy, seemed completely appropriate to the ludicrous, dog-walking-on-hind-legs quality of English music-drama. The seventeenth-century composer of To be or not to be hoped that a serious musical rhetoric could be found to match Shakespeare’s serious dramatic rhetoric; Lampe, a century later, hoped to make money from the incongruity of blunt stubby English words and the voluble melos of Italian opera. It was as if Shakespeare had missed a trick: the Pyramus skit could sound even stupider if it were sung. In Purcell’s age, the Pyramus skit seemed to resist musical setting, its deformities too gross and plentiful for presentation in a sustained scene; Purcell wrote many burlesque songs and ribald catches, but he never wrote a Masque of Idiocy (although the drunken-poet scene in The Fairy Queen comes close). But in Lampe’s age, the Pyramus skit seemed the perfect libretto to illustrate the wrongness of opera—not the defects of a particular opera, but of the medium itself. One way of turning the Pyramus skit into an opera would be to write musical solecisms comparable to the rhetorical and grammatical solecisms in Shakespeare: parallel fifths, incorrect modulations, off-key counterpoints, melodies with tritones or other bad intervals, and so forth. But Lampe did none of these; perhaps

260

❧

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

no one (except Biber?) even conceived of this sort of musical humor before Mozart’s A musical Joke (1787). Lampe’s comedy routines instead derive from either (1) the mismatch of a serious musical rhetoric to a text that proposes it but can’t sustain it; or (2) odd interpolations of foreign musical material at the ends of phrases. Examples of the first sort can be found in Pyramus’s air Approach, ye furies fell, which is a fairly straightforward Handelian rage aria, made amusing by the application of gestures of violin-violence to such lines as Quail, crush, conclude, and quell. Still wittier is Pyramus’s next air, Now I am dead, an expertly composed lamento based on a four-note ostinato, in ABB form: initially it seems deadpan, but as the B section emphatically concludes with I die, die, die, die, die, one might reasonably expect the aria to end—yet no, Pyramus returns to Tongue, lose thy light and his unextinguished tongue sings the second half of the aria all over again. Jokes about the Tenor Who Cannot Die seem part of the musical comedy of many ages; but Lampe is lampooning not only the hamminess of singers but also the inadequacy of eighteenth-century aria-form to certain dramatic situations. A musical template that tends to demand sectional repetition is useful for many sorts of psychological shadings, for second thoughts about decisions, for the reinforcement of steadfast character, but not for the presentation of irreversibilities. A singer who dies needs to remain dead, but Pyramus rises in order to savor once again the beautiful agony of dying. Lampe, studying the text of the Pyramus skit, saw something that looked like a libretto, an invitation to stock musical gestures that made their cliché aspect manifest. Examples of the second sort of musical joke—in which incongruous material is inserted at the end of a phrase—can be found in the earlier music, such as Lion’s air Ladies, don’t fright you (an innocuous ditty regularly interrupted by unconvincing roars) and Wall’s air, perhaps the zenith of Lampe’s satirical art: The wretched sighs and groans, The rueful sobs and moans, With pity I Have seen, and now condole. This latter piece is a rather jolly dance tune, as if the composer hadn’t understood what sort of music the text required—Handel occasionally amused himself in a similar fashion, as in Orlando (1733), where Orlando’s Già lo stringo ought to be a rage aria but is instead a sort of gavotte. Handel was trying to illustrate Orlando’s insanity by showing an Orlando so deranged that he had forgotten his place in the codebook of opera. But Lampe regards, or pretends to regard, the whole genre of opera as itself a sort of craziness. Instead of making Wall’s air sound wretched and rueful by the usual means of writing a slow drooping melody, Lampe instead tacks a curt groan in the cellos at the end of The wretched sighs and groans, and a little teary tremble in the violins at the end of The rueful sobs and moans, as if the strings were making pointed reference to the faults

PYRAMUS

AND

THISBE

❧

LAMPE’S

261

of melodic decorum. The orchestra behaves like the catty drama critics (in Lampe’s text, the first and second gentlemen) by interspersing cutting comments. Just as Shakespeare’s Pyramus skit testifies to both the fragility and the tenacity of the dramatic experience—the skit exposes the absurdity of the conventions on which all drama is built, and yet it shows that even the most fractured, goosy drama can move Hippolyta’s heart—so Lampe’s music testifies to both the flimsiness and the power of opera: Wall and Lion seem unable to discover the right sort of music to sing—they flip wildly through the pages of the operatic codebook; but Pyramus at last discovers rage aria and lamentation, and performs them well, even if he is too tattered and incredible to be worthy of them, and even if they are too tattered and incredible to be worthy of him. Part of the potency of A Midsummer Night’s Dream comes from Shakespeare’s inclusion of a critique of playwriting within a play, as if he had drawn a horizon line for the whole game of drama and then peered beyond it; and, in a smaller way, Lampe achieves something similar in the domain of music-drama. Not just opera in English but all opera manages to move us in the midst of its own inadequacy—such a mixture of in spite of its inadequacy and because of its inadequacy that we can never tell where one stops and the other begins.

Chapter Thirty

Experimenters: Mendelssohn and Korngold The great paradox of the performance history of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is that a play written to take full advantage of an empty stage has enticed producers into spending enormous sums of money to supply the most expensive forms of magic. Lampe’s Pyramus and Thisbe, a modest entertainment, is an exception; but Christopher Rich’s company spent £3,000 to produce Purcell’s The Fairy Queen; Felix Mendelssohn wrote his famous incidental music for Ein Sommernachtstraum for a production financed by the King of Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm IV (1843, partly based on his 1827 overture); and Erich Wolfgang Korngold provided about two hours of music, mostly arranged from Mendelssohn, for Max Reinhardt’s film extravaganza of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1934), starring Jimmy Cagney, Dick Powell, Mickey Rooney, and Olivia de Havilland, with choreography by Bronislava Nijinska of the Ballets Russes. This is an easy project to ridicule, with its heavyhanded strewing of sequins and fairy dust, its moonbeams coagulated into slides for little boys, its trees covered with aluminum paint, its thick neo-Biedermeier upholstery of orchestrations of Songs without Words, as well as plush versions of the familiar incidental music. But Korngold’s score contains some imaginative touches, especially a setting of Over hill, over dale to the tune of Mendelssohn’s song Neue Liebe; and the movie fascinates in that it represents a limit in the perverse evolution of A Midsummer Night’s Dream toward masque. The Fairy Queen interspersed Shakespeare’s text with masques; Reinhardt’s film converts the play itself into a masque to the glory of Jack Warner, a king fit for the new age. Every improvisatory element of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy is carefully expunged from the film. Reinhardt was one of the supreme technicians of the histrionic, and the project everywhere dramatizes its own high-budget, calculating intelligence. The actor who played Oberon, Victor Jory, remembered how Korngold beat the tempo of the speech “I know a bank where the wild thyme grows,” so that the melodrama would fit its musical underlay (an orchestration of Mendelssohn’s song An die Entfernte): When it came to the actual filming, Korngold lay on his stomach in the bushes, out of camera range and literally CONDUCTED my performance . . . as though I was singing

❧

experimenters: mendelssohn and korngold

263

the dialogue. Reinhardt and Dieterle [the assistant director] were in complete agreement with this—and it was the first and only time I ever recall that a composer’s wishes superseded those of either the director or the actor.1

Since the music is all but continuous (116 of the film’s original 140 minutes were scored), the project has a certain hallucinatory, Gesamtkunstwerk quality, as if Wagner, or better yet Humperdinck, had tried to taffy-pull or spatchcock Mendelssohn’s music into the semblance of an opera for very rich children. Mendelssohn himself, following his theory that music was a more precise medium than words, was careful to reserve his music for the intensification of a few chosen moments: a scherzo to represent the perplexities of lovers lost in the woods, a nocturne to represent lovers’ slumber, a wedding march, a toy funeral march for Pyramus—it is typical of Romantic comedy that Cupid would triumph in the most sumptuous wedding march imaginable, the march that has become almost the whole human race’s wedding music, while Death would dwindle to the feeble tinkle, the thin, fast amble of Pyramus’s funeral march. Mendelssohn used melodrama sparingly, for he sought not words to set but open textual spaces, where Shakespeare had left room for something unspoken, unspeakable except by means of music. (Purcell, by contrast, required closed, ancillary, music-dedicated text-spaces, in order to make his musical points.) In the only song he wrote for the play, Bunte Schlangen zweigezüngt (You spotted snakes), Mendelssohn concentrated the whole erotic charge of the fairy world: the melodic ravishment serves ostensibly as a lullaby to put Titania to sleep but also as a seduction of the audience, a sort of siren song or Erlkönig to charm us all into the quickgold eeriness of dreams. Mendelssohn, a well-educated man, may have known that Shakespeare borrowed the name Titania from an Ovidian epithet for Diana and Circe; and Circe’s dangerous metamorphic power may lurk in the sinuous Eiapopeias of the song’s refrain—hedgehog, salamander, nightingale may all be the shapes of enchanted men and women. To some extent, Mendelssohn’s incidental music functions as a (mostly) wordless Greek chorus, comparable to the elaborate choruses that Mendelssohn wrote for Friedrich Wilhelm’s productions of Antigone (1841) and Ödipus (1845): the music interprets the feeling-consequences of action. But Mendelssohn’s Greek choruses also seem to operate in the manner prescribed by Schiller in the preface to The Bride of Messina, as living walls that arrest and contain the drama within the domain of the artificial, the ideal; whereas the incidental music to Ein Sommernachtstraum works to break open the drama, to cause it to spill onto some larger and more vivid realm of sensation. Mendelssohn, then, sought thin places in Shakespeare’s text that seemed to demand completion through the ceremonies, enigmas, and ecstasies of music; Korngold, on the other hand, wanted to musicalize everything. Mendelssohn intended to provide occasional splashes of mercury; but Reinhardt’s film drips Mendelssohn, reeks of Mendelssohn, as if everything tasted better when wallowed

264

❧

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

in Mendelssohn sauce. What rescues the movie from its excess of construction, from its insistence on its own techne of music and cinematography, is its sheer goofiness. The modern spectator, seeing Cagney as Bottom and Mickey Rooney as Puck, overlays these images with many alien counterpoints: Cagney squishing a grapefruit into a woman’s face, Cagney as George M. Cohan, Rooney as Andy Hardy, Rooney as an especially juvenile juvenile delinquent in Boy’s Town; Mendelssohn’s Spinning Song and Venetian Gondola Song also have a preestablished body of meanings that dissonate with the Shakespearean images. In some ways these false associations create an effect more pixilated, more surreal, than the special-effects wizardry of the movie. The Shakespearean haphazard, carefully removed by the craft of director and composer, returns via the odd ricochets of meaning generated by the Hollywood star system.

Chapter Thirty-One

Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream Korngold achieved a pseudo-opera by force-feeding a soundtrack with Mendelssohn, in the manner of a Strasbourg goose. But Korngold wasn’t the only twentieth-century composer intrigued by the possibilities for recycling the older music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Benjamin Britten, the foremost Purcellian of the age, devised (with Peter Pears’s help) a version of The Fairy Queen for modern orchestra and voices, first performed in 1967. Whereas Korngold was diligent in relating all the music to Shakespeare’s play, Britten’s long, lean cantata dispenses with all Shakespeare, dispenses with a good deal of Purcell as well. It has four parts: the first part, Oberon’s Birthday, is Purcell’s fourth-act masque; the second part, Night and Silence, is a peculiar conflation of Purcell’s first- and second-act masques, in which the drunken poet segues into Night, Mystery, Secrecy, and Sleep; the third part, The Sweet Passion, is basically Purcell’s third-act masque (the one designed to entertain Bottom), with an interpolation of the Plaint from the fifth act; the fourth part, Epithalamium, is the second half of the fifth-act masque, with most of the Chinese material deleted in order to highlight the invocation to Hymen. This scheme tends to turn The Fairy Queen into a vast symphony, with a first movement full of almost military pomp, a slow second movement, a scherzo, and a dramatic finale; the Plaint works as a contrasting element in the scherzo, the drunken poet as a contrasting element in the slow movement. Britten’s friend Imogen Holst coedited The Fairy Queen with Britten; and the large-scale vocal-symphonic structure recalls that of her father Gustav Holst’s Choral Symphony (1924), based on poems by Keats. Britten respected Purcell’s key-relationships, except in the Dialogue of Coridon and Mopsa in the third part, where he transposed the piece so that it could be sung by mezzo-soprano and tenor instead of countertenor and bass—Britten (a fairly discreet homosexual) may have wished to avoid the imputation of a gay joke. (Of course Purcell himself had used a female Mopsa in the 1692 text.) What is most remarkable about Britten’s version is how successfully The Fairy Queen abstracts itself into something that feels almost like instrumental music: the vocal numbers, which now retain only the ghost of a connecting plot, have the quality of the merry gathering of peasants or the thanksgiving after the storm in Beethoven’s sixth

266

❧

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

symphony, mere pretexts for a grand musical argument. Only the drunken poet, and, to some extent, Coridon and Mopsa, obtrude as operatic elements; and even they have a clear role in the symphonic economy of the piece. Britten succeeds in heightening the already impressive musical logic of Purcell, by removing extraneous dances, act-tunes, and other material more pertinent to the visual than to the musical aspect of The Fairy Queen. Of course, when Britten arranged The Fairy Queen, he was an experienced hand at writing Shakespearean music, for some seven years previously, in 1959–60, Britten had written his own operatic version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As it turned out, every choice he made in arranging The Fairy Queen for singers and orchestra was exactly opposite to the choices he had made in writing his own opera. In arranging Purcell, Britten chose briskness, bright contrasts, clarity of musical design; in writing A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Britten chose to write musical numbers so wildly disparate in compositional method, in implied genre, in orchestral color, that they resisted assimilation into any lucid structure. Purcell and, in a sense, Korngold approached A Midsummer Night’s Dream through the presuppositions of the masque: an aesthetic that emphasized integrity of effect (in Purcell’s case this integrity applied to each individual masque more than to the whole drama), rigorous control, a strong sense of scriptedness, a conscious elimination of the inert, the grotesque, the recalcitrant, the uncue-able. But Britten deliberately built into his opera all sorts of feignings of unpredictable, random, zany things. It is fairy music in the gnostic sense, suggesting the sheer misdirectedness of fate. Something of Britten’s strategy can be seen in his article, “The Composer’s Dream,” a good starting point for any study of this opera: The opera is more relaxed than The Turn of the Screw; it has far more scenes, and is much less uniform. In form, it is more like Peter Grimes. I have felt it to be a more difficult task to write than these, partly because the work in hand is always the hardest, partly because of the tremendous challenge that one must not let through a single illconsidered phrase because it would be matched to such great poetry.1

Britten’s assertion that this is a relaxed opera seems oddly contradicted by the confessions of hard work, and by the intense self-scrutiny implied by the desire to let not “a single ill-considered [musical] phrase” sully the greatness of Shakespeare. Certainly A Midsummer Night’s Dream is an unrelaxed and unrelaxing opera in that the composer has taken extreme care with every detail—it is a polished work, not quite as polished as Wozzeck or The Rake’s Progress, but not falling far short. Still, when we compare A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Britten’s previous full-length opera, The Turn of the Screw, we can see what Britten means by using the word relaxed. The Turn of the Screw is one of the most stiffly governed operas ever written, a huge expansion of theme-and-variations form: the screw turns and turns and does not move even one degree from the perpendicular. But A Midsummer Night’s Dream can’t be reduced to variations on a theme; it is ostentatiously disjunct on

’S

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

❧

BRITTEN

267

many different levels, crammed with incompatibilities; as Britten says, it lacks any tendency toward the “uniform.” It is defiantly unmasque-like, in that Britten finds ways of translating the quasi-improvisatory aspects of Shakespeare’s theatre into articulate musical structures. He wrote a higglety-pigglety opera, a polystylistic opera that dumps out the entire contents of the composer’s bag of tricks, a musictext full of scumblings and erasures in the right Shakespearean fashion. Britten is the anti-Korngold, the anti-Mendelssohn. Korngold attempted to produce an extreme and anachronistic uniformity of style, as if Mendelssohn himself had been dragged from the grave, shown how to operate a few new toys (such as the xylophone), and compelled to score the movie. Mendelssohn himself showed certain polystylistic tendencies—the peasant rhythms and fallingninth hee-haws of the mechanicals’ music contrast strongly with the fairies’ flimmering violins—but took care to demonstrate, in the overture, that all these extremes could be wrapped up and bow-tied into a single symphonic allegro. But Britten’s musical semantics permit no such unification: the opera precludes any possibility for a summarizing overture. The smaller fairies and the fairy rulers and the mechanicals and the Athenian lovers all inhabit different musical spaces, different musical centuries; they scarcely speak the same tongue. Oberon, fluent in florid Purcellian, seems to have trouble making his wishes clearly known to Puck, an English speaker who can’t sing (or, more exactly, can only impersonate singing); and between Oberon and Lysander, who knows pidgin Italian Opera as taught by Wallace, Balfe, and Sullivan, there seems no possibility of communication at all. This Babel of musical languages mirrors the fundamental property of Shakespeare’s play: garbling. No one can properly execute Fate’s commands, no one can understand what anyone else is saying, no one can be confined to a consistent pattern of behavior; the misshapenness of Bottom’s head is simply a visual image of the play’s mush of language, the general bray of things. Traces of Britten’s method of abutting immiscible musics can be found in Purcell and Mendelssohn, but before the twentieth century it would have been difficult for a composer to know a large enough number of distinct musical languages, as opposed to distinct dialects of a single language, to be able to carry out such a plan for an operatic version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream— though from the evidence of that postmodernist-style spoof, The Magic Flute, it is possible to imagine that Mozart could have done it. Britten did devise procedures that tend to unify the amazingly diverse musical materials of his opera. One of them is Britten’s extraordinary fondness for a sort of triad-based dodecaphony—that is, a way of thinking through structures both large and small in terms of series of chords in which all twelve tones of the chromatic scale appear as roots. (I will have more to say later about Britten’s reasons for such construction.) Another unifying procedure is the ritornello structure of each of the first two acts, tying the opera together through a sort of orchestral physiology. The first act’s refrain is heard in the opening bars, where we hear a sketch of a very low G major triad; soon a lazy scale, swelling and sinking in

268

❧

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

volume, ascends through most of an octave to a first-inversion F-major triad; then the scale swells and sinks back down to G major (see ex. 51). We hear the rising scale as an intake of breath, the falling scale as an exhale: the opera begins with a musical snore, as unmistakable as the opening sneeze in Kodály’s Háry János. Sometimes the alternating triads draw closer together, harmonically speaking (A and C major), as if to indicate a new (shallower?) adjustment of the huge lungs. We commence, then, in the domain of the human body. This is a strategy that always has important consequences. Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration (1889) opens with an almost athematic passage that spells the rhythm of a faltering heartbeat; and so we learn to interpret the subsequent events of the Death section as tachycardia, fibrillation, arrest, and so forth. Michael Tippett’s fourth symphony (1977) begins with noises of breathing (produced, for example, by a wind machine or an amplified recording) in order to reinforce its birthto-death scenario; Tippett tells us that the symphony was inspired by a film of the cell division of a rabbit embryo, and so the listener seeks sound-images of undifferentiated material slowly articulating, sound-images of physiological processes starting to exercise themselves. (This is the sort of game that the listener always wins.) Britten too, by starting with a snore, teaches us to regard the disparate musical adventures that are to come as expressions of the body: even the most contrived and eccentric passages are somehow to be heard as corporeal, as representations of gooseflesh, blinking, sexual arousal, and so forth. The opera begins with a gigantic orchestral body, on which will be inscribed every sort of diatonic or atonal or purely rhythmic event. For Britten, the deepest intuitions of body’s truths come from dreaming; when one falls asleep, the carapace of self falls away and the kraken within emerges, with its great mouth-beak surrounded by mad waving palps. Britten’s giant squid (presented in the second episode of the 1958 song cycle Nocturne, a work closely connected to A Midsummer Night’s Dream) is one of the most striking presentations of the Freudian id in twentieth-century music. But the dreampsychology of Britten’s music seems better defined by D. H. Lawrence than by Freud:

Example 51. Snore.

’S

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

❧

BRITTEN

269

In living consciousness the primary affective centres control the great organs. But when sleep is on us, the reverse takes place. The great organs, being obstructed in their spontaneous-automatism, at last with violence arouse the active consciousnesscentres. And these flash images to the brain. These nightmare images are very frequently purely mechanical: as of falling terribly downwards, or being enclosed in vaults. And such images are pure physical transcripts. The image of falling, of flying, of trying to run and not being able to lift the feet, of having to creep through terribly small passages, these are direct transcripts from the physical phenomena of circulation and digestion. . . . dreams of imprisonment, or of creeping through narrow passages . . . are direct transfers from the squeezing of the blood through constricted arteries or heart chambers.2

All dream-images, then, are sublimated gaspings and heavings, the brain’s way of visualizing the body’s effort to relieve pressure, pressure in the blood vessels, the sinuses, the bladder, the intestines, the prostate, the womb. A dream is the chart of the body’s tangle of subway lines, its sewer system, with all points of clog clearly marked. Awake, we work our bodies; in sleep, our bodies work us. Who is the snorer, who is the dreamer? There was a period when directors of advanced taste liked to stage an opera as the gigantic dream of a peripheral dreamer: Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, for example, conceived The Flying Dutchman (San Francisco, 1975) as the hallucination of a sleeping Steersman visible on the margins of the stage. This relocation of the action into the mind of a unique subject may or may not be wise when dealing with Wagner; but it has a certain appropriateness in connection with A Midsummer Night’s Dream. To a roughly contemporary play, The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare provided an Induction in which a lord devises an elaborate practical joke: he persuades a drunken beggar, Christopher Sly, that he, Sly, is a lord who fell asleep and dreamed he was a beggar; then the real lord stages a spectacle to cure Sly of his fits of lunatic melancholy, which turns out to be the whole play of The Taming of the Shrew. The play, then, is not quite Sly’s Dream, but is nevertheless an episode in a cultivated mock reality. The whole premise looks like a burlesque of masque, in that the play, while ostensibly glorifying its chief spectator, is actually a complicated act of humiliation. If Sly were actually to join the actors on stage, he would become Bottom, his big ears delicately caressed by a beautiful queen, a falsified object of adoration and a real butt of a joke. It is, then, easy to answer the question, Who is dreaming A Midsummer Night’s Dream? “I will get Peter Quince to write a ballet of this dream. It shall be call’d ‘Bottom’s Dream,’ because it hath no bottom . . .” (4.1.214–16). The loud breathing that opens Britten’s opera and serves as scene-changing music throughout the first act pertains to the great warm dreaming body that underlies the whole action; and the character who will most closely resembles this master-body is, of course, Bottom. Bottom’s love of playacting is suggestive of his unconscious or preconscious manner of being: he has enormous energy but no ego, and so is glad to be Pyramus, glad to be Thisby, glad to be Lion—I

270

❧

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

could play Ercles rarely, or a part to tear a cat in. Nietzsche spoke of Dionysus as the dismembering of selves and the destroying of worlds; and something of that tornness, that tearingness, is audible in Bottom, especially in Britten’s music. Britten conceived Bottom as what his name implies to a modern audience: Mr. Fart. One of his characteristic musical gestures is a trombone glissando (see ex. 52), which can be variously interpreted as a lion’s roar (down a major third—[65], first act) or a yawn (down a minor third—four mm. before [55], second act). Britten also inherited from Mendelssohn the heehaw joke, which we hear just before Bottom is transformed into an ass (four mm. after [19], second act see ex. 53) and just after this (1 m. after [27]), now brayed as a falling octave in which the first note is more spoken than sung. Bottom is a megaphone for amplifying rude noises, a device for manifesting the ungulate Untermensch, the latent ape. He is one of the most corporeally vivid characters in all opera— this is why it is tempting to identify him with the snorer who, in the opening bars, seems to dream the comedy. But there is a sort of genius in Bottom’s very crudity. It is much clearer in Britten than in Shakespeare that Bottom in effect teaches the cast of the Pyramus skit their roles, in the course of trying to usurp them. He shows Snug how to roar; and the melody that Bottom invents while singing “ ‘Ah Pyramus, my lover dear, thy Thisby dear, and Lady dear’” in his monstrous little voice (4 mm. after [61], first act) is exactly the melody that Flute soon starts rehearsing.

Example 52. Lion’s roar.

Example 53. First hee-haw.

’S

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

❧

BRITTEN

271

When Bottom “entertains” the fairy queen with his preposterous, tuneless, indeed atonal song about the woosel-cock ([30], second act—see exx. 54 and 55), the horns and later the trombone keep proposing scales in accented notes, sometimes properly consecutive, sometimes lapsed, balled-up.

Example 54. Woosel cock 1.

Example 55. Woosel cock 2.

272

❧

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

First Stanza 1. The woosell cock, so black of hue, 2. With orange tawny bill, 3. The throstle with his note so true, 4. The wren with little quill.

F–G–B
–A–B–C–E–D–F–G F–G–A–A–B–C G–A
–B
–B–C–D D–E–F–G–A–B
–C–D–E


Second Stanza 5. The finch, the sparrow and the lark, 6. The plainsong cuckoo grey, 7. Whose note full many a man doth mark, 8. And dares not answer, nay.

G–A–B–C–D–E–F E–F–G–F–F–G G–G–A–B–C–D F–G–A–B–C–D–E
–E–F–G–B
–C–D–E


(I haven’t given every accented note here, only those that tend to fall in more or less scalar form.) Peter Evans has compared this song to Andres’s hunting song in Berg’s Wozzeck, a distorted version of a pop tune,3 but I hear it as something far beneath tunes-as-we-know-them of any sort. At the beginning (1), the gnarled melody starts repeating after its first eight notes, so it looks as if the woosel-cock song is going to be based on a tone-row of eight pitches, in the fashion of Britten’s Schoenberg spoofs (such as the 1959 Cantata Academica, or the 1956 ballet, The Prince of the Pagodas, where the addlebrained King of the West is characterized by a twelve-tone polka); but Bottom is no Boulez, and can’t keep the mathematics of serial organization straight for even a single bar. Some of these pseudo-scales resemble real scales, such as the octatonic (3) and the lydian (5), but most of them are hopelessly botched—random combinations of half steps and whole steps, sometimes slipping back in the wrong direction. Sometimes the pseudo-scales seem to be trying to gesture at something in the text: for example, the insistent minor thirds in (6) pertain to the unwelcome hoot of the cuckoo. But for the most part, the pseudo-scales are simply arbitrary aggregates of narrow intervals, just as the text is an arbitrary aggregate of the names of birds. The last scale (8), first sung by Bottom, then continued by the brass, seems to promise that some sort of order will finally be achieved: it moves upwards in strong, correct lydian fashion until it reaches D, at which point Bottom sings a sustained “wrong” note, E
, which oddly seems to encourage the brass to begin a whole-tone scale starting on E; but the whole-tone scale also winds up on a “wrong” E
, so that the scale winds up on the same four notes that conclude (4), from the end of the first stanza, a major tetrachord. It is as if the song (which earlier displayed certain gropings toward F minor) were struggling to finish in the key of E
, but making a complete mess of it. All this gives us pause in trying to evaluate Bottom’s repeated claim that he has “a reas’nable good ear

’S

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

❧

BRITTEN

273

in music.” Indeed, when he first makes this assertion, he sings la-la-la to a dorian scale beginning on D (9 mm. after [50], second act), which the orchestra instantly corrects by playing a D-major chord, as if to prove that Bottom can’t hear the difference between an F and an F. An ass’s ear may be big, but it is not fine. On the other hand, the bad scales that contaminate the woosel-cock song may suggest, in addition to Bottom’s incompetence, the bizarre fecundity of Bottom’s musical imagination. The feints at modal, octatonic, whole-tone, even serial style tease us with the possibility that all musical languages, from the most elementary to the most sophisticated, are latent inside Bottom—in other words, are expressions of the deep body. At the bottom, at Bottom, there is a point of convergence of the opera’s whole heteroglossia, its array of competing tongues. He is a yurodivy, a holy fool who speaks all languages without understanding any of them, who allows us a glimpse at a musical Pentecost. The literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin claimed that the novel was an essentially polyphonic genre, indeed the triumph of heteroglossia, since it consisted of discrepant voices speaking discrepant language codes, a tangle of interanimating, self-interrogating texts incapable of reaching closure. Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, along with a number of other twentieth-century operas, suggests that the opera as well as the novel has strong tendencies toward heteroglossia. Bakhtin’s analysis of the function of the literary grotesque may also help to explain the behavior of Britten’s Bottom: Not only parody in its narrow sense but all the other forms of grotesque realism degrade, bring down to earth, turn their subject into flesh. . . . To degrade is to bury, to sow, and to kill simultaneously, in order to bring forth something more and better. To degrade also means to concern oneself with the lower stratum of the body, the life of the belly and the reproductive organs; it therefore relates to acts of defecation and copulation, conception, pregnancy, and birth. Degradation digs a bodily grave for a new birth; it has not only a destructive, negative aspect, but also a regenerative one. To degrade an object does not imply merely hurling it into the void of nonexistence, into absolute destruction, but to hurl it down to the reproductive lower stratum. . . . Grotesque realism knows no other lower level; it is the fruitful earth and the womb.4

Bottom is so degraded that he is little more than a trombone belch; but in his belly all the world’s music is embryonically, chaotically present. His fondness for the church modes can be explained (a) as Britten’s smiling homage to the old methods of Elizabethan music; or (b) as an allusion to Bottom’s tone deafness; or (c) as the sign of an imagination so fertile that it can’t be constrained by normal tonal structures. All three explanations amount to the same thing: Bottom is at once pre-tonal and post-tonal, a big babbling baby and a connoisseur of advanced noise. If the King of the West in The Prince of the Pagodas mocks the dance-stylizations of early twelve-tone music, such as Schoenberg’s Piano Suite, Bottom is a kind of Edgard Varèse set loose in the domain of William Byrd.

274

❧

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

The language of rule breaking can be construed as either an ignorance or an oversophistication. In Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben (1898), the hero’s adversaries seem to be critics who attack from the left, not from the right, since they use a more advanced musical language than the hero himself; Bottom too can be considered a caricature of a music critic, of the sort that accused Britten of being old-fashioned—a Beckmesser too stupid to be malicious. Most of the opera’s other musical languages sound remote from Bottom’s world. But there are shivery hints of resemblance between Bottom’s music and that of Oberon and Tytania (as Britten, following one spelling in the inconsistent First Folio, always gives her name)—between the lowest depths and the highest heights. We first encounter Bottom and the other mechanicals just after Oberon has sung the aria I know a bank where the wild thyme blows: after the usual breathing-interlude, the horns and woodwinds start to play chunky clots of (mostly) major seconds (5 mm. after [53], first act—see ex. 56). Then Peter Quince assembles his crew. Now, I know a bank begins ([46], first act—see ex. 57) with Oberon’s signature-music, a spider-tracery of interweaving major seconds played by a celesta.

Example 56. Rustic clots.

Example 57. Oberon’s celesta.

’S

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

❧

BRITTEN

275

Both these passages begin identically: a tone-cluster moving up a fourth, then dropping back down. Of course, Oberon’s celesta is at the top of the treble clef, whereas the mechanicals’ winds lie low in the bass clef; and the soft even tinnitus of the celesta contrasts strongly with the abrupt clunks of the winds; but it is, in a sense, the same music. Oberon and Bottom are weird twins—as if Michael Jackson and Danny DeVito had the same mother. Oberon is one of Britten’s most compelling feats of characterization. As far as I know, he was the first countertenor lead in a twentieth-century opera—before Alfred Deller (the first Oberon) revived falsettism as a serious and viable form of voice production, it would have been hard for a composer to consider such a role. But earlier composers might well have used countertenors if they’d been available: Wagner, for example, toyed with the notion of casting Domenico Mustafa, a eunuch from the papal choir, as Klingsor in Parsifal. Deller himself, a bearded man with children, resisted those who assumed that a male alto must be effeminate; and the role of Oberon eerily combines sexlessness and sexuality, Deller’s blanched timbre and Deller’s stout insistence on his maleness. Klingsor was a magician whose self-castration failed to rid him of overwhelming preoccupation with sex; Oberon is a magician who feigns a eunuchoid detachment from organic life as a deliberate tactic of seduction. On one hand, he is a celestial being, given the musical tropes of an angel; on the other hand, he is a molester driving an ice-cream truck, constantly ringing its little bell, pretending to be childlike in order to ingratiate himself with children. Britten, erotically drawn to boys, implicitly claims to know exactly why Oberon wants a changeling boy to be his henchman. Of all Britten’s characters, Oberon and Tytania most closely approach the condition of instrumental music: they are almost refined out of opera into the realm of the viol consort. In their opening duet, Ill met by moonlight ([11], first act—see ex. 58), the introductory exclamation, over a striking I–
ii chord progression, sounds operatic enough, even ferocious in a Naples-rococo sort of way. But the duet quickly turns into energetic chamber music, as the I–
ii progresˆ 6– ˆ 5. ˆ 5 The duet sion gets absorbed in a ground bass, followed by scale degrees 7– concerns the confusion of the seasons, the progeny of evils that come from their marital dissension; Oberon’s and Tytania’s voices move together in almost mechanically rigid fashion, sometimes in unison, sometimes in canons at irregular intervals—peculiar canons that deviate unexpectedly into mirror canons (see ex. 59). At the end (2 mm. before [15]) a whiff of chaos may be felt, as the ˆ 6– ˆ 5ˆ and strikes out on other figure of three falling notes detaches itself from 7– scale degrees; but to a certain extent the carefully crafted musical texture mocks the dissension that the text sets forth. Even the key of the duet, A major, the sunniest of keys in Britten’s music—in fact, in Young Apollo (1939), the key of the sun itself—seems to counter the shadowy moonlit landscape. In their later scenes, Oberon and Tytania often retain this quality of voice impersonating instrument. In I know a bank, Oberon sometimes behaves more like a harp than

276

❧

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

Example 58. Ill met.

like a human being: his vocal runs (for example, 3 mm. before [48], first act— see ex. 60) imitate the harps in the orchestra, as if he were accompanying them, not they him. In Berlioz’s and Thomas Moore’s The Origin of the Harp, we are told that a harp is simply an enchanted woman, her hair turned strings; in I know a bank, we seem to witness a similar metamorphosis taking place, as the human voice drowns in its own arpeggios. And yet, the more Oberon denatures himself into a pure instrumentality of being, the more strongly we sense the nightmare that his cultivated inexpressiveness seems to dissemble. In the middle of I know a bank, Oberon turns his gaze on the sleeping Tytania ([48]), and the calmly virtuosic G-major music is troubled by an insistent A
—perhaps a memory of the Neapolitan aspect of the

Example 59. Mechanical dissension.

Example 60. Oberon as harp.

278

❧

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

Ill met by moonlight dissension-motive. The whole aria is harmonically unstable in the extreme, as if Oberon were too translucent-elusive, too extradimensional, to pin himself down to a single key; but not until he sings There sleeps Tytania does the unintelligible harmony start to feel sinister. Soon Oberon is singing of the hateful fantasies ([51]) that his juice will provoke; and beneath the vocal line we hear more of the celesta’s tone-clusters. This motive in the celesta often serves simply as an orchestral Leitmotiv to indicate the presence of Oberon; but sometimes it underlies the sung text: Be it on Lion, Bear or Wolf, or Bull ([20], first act); hateful, hateful fantasies ([51]); Be it ounce, or cat, or bear (4 mm. after [102]); Flower of this purple dye ([68], second act). In the last instance, Oberon is hoping to restore erotic order by compelling Demetrius to fall in love with the right woman; but in the other examples, Oberon’s celesta indicates the unfixing of right desire, the fixing of wrong desire. Bottom’s low tone-clusters pertain to his assiness; Oberon’s high tone-clusters make you fall in love with an ass. The celesta plays a zoophiliac spell. Bells reverberate often in Britten’s operatic music, and indicate regions of special semantic intensity. As many critics have noted, Oberon inherited his celesta and melismatic vocal line from Peter Quint in Variation 7 of The Turn of the Screw (1954; see ex. 61)—a ghost glimpsed on a tower, a muezzin’s call from the darkness: Miles! Miles! Miles! . . . I am all things strange and bold, The riderless horse Snorting, stamping on the hard sea sand, The hero-highwayman plundering the land. I am King Midas with gold in his hand. . . . I am the smooth world’s double face, Mercury’s heels Feathered with mischief and a God’s deceit. The brittle blandishment of counterfeit. In me secrets and half-formed desires meet. . . . I am the hidden life that stirs When the candle is out; Upstairs and down, the footsteps barely heard. The unknown gesture and the soft, persistent word, The long sighing flight of the night-winged bird.6 The little boy Miles interrupts this seduction-versicle with ecstatic responses: “Gold, O yes, gold! . . . Secrets, O secrets! . . . Bird!” Peter Quint’s “I am . . . I am” is the rhetoric of a god who can assume any identity Miles chooses, who can participate in any story Miles likes, who can insinuate himself into any sort of fantastic embrace. The music too is a tingle in the nerve endings, combined with

’S

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

❧

BRITTEN

279

Example 61. Miles!

a sort of occluded recitative that feints at a number of different blurry recitals. When we hear of the riderless horse, fanfares and hoofbeats in the orchestra hint at the universal adventure to which Peter Quint is inviting Miles; when we hear of the night-winged bird, we are borne along on the long-breathed sinuous melody as Ganymede was borne on Jupiter’s back. It is obviously not far from Mercury to Oberon, another deceitful god specializing in erotic misshapings. But Peter Quint’s aria contains the germ not only of Oberon’s music but also of the music of the whole fairy world of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The trumpet figures in the riderless-horse section clearly anticipate Puck; Peter Quint is an adult parody of a jaunty little boy, bold to embark on any quest. Oberon, Puck, Peaseblossom all belong to a musical region that is simply Peter Quint’s seduction-song writ large, a domain where the ludic discolors into the erotic. It seems proper to refer to such domains as fairy music, with all the shades of meaning that the word fairy implies. What are the characteristics of fairy music? (1) Delusive simplicity. Sometimes fairy music can sound like Orff Schulwerk for the limbo of unbaptized children, as in the music for the tongs and bones ([51], second act), the most rudimentary tootling and banging. Other times the banging has greater rhythmic interest, as in the minor fairies’ You spotted snakes ([97], first act), which alternates bars in 3/4 and 2/4: the strong beats of the vocal line fall on the second, third, and sixth eighth-notes of the 3/4 bars, and on the second and third eighth-notes of the 2/4 bars. This rhythm, though unusual, is perfectly clear—Britten never forgets that little boys like to clap in time, or to hit things with a stick. But harmonically the charm is ambiguous, refusing to declare itself as major or minor. In Mendelssohn’s version of You spotted snakes, the fairies seem to be teasing, coaxing the snakes into going somewhere else; Britten takes the more normal exterminator’s approach of frightening them away by making abrupt spooky sounds. The net effect of the song is fun disturbance, or disturbing fun—quite typical of Britten’s fairy music, in its more wideawake moments. When sleepy, fairy music tends toward a disguised, unobtrusive pandiatonicism, as when

280

❧

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

the fairies fill out the G major-F major snores from the opera’s prelude (Over hill, over dale, 6 mm. before [2], or Lullaby, [98], first act—see ex. 62) with a slow A-major scale in which each sung note is the root of a major triad. Oberon plays a more devious version of this same game in his I know a bank aria, when he sings (2 mm. before [50], first act, after Weed wide enough, weed wide enough to wrap a Fairy in—see ex. 63) a scale (at first in B major), starting with the note A: each sung note generates a new triad, but may be its root or its third or its fifth, so that the triads proceed (using lower case to mean minor): d–E–F–g–A–b–c–D–E–f–e–D–c–D

The bass line, mostly a descending D-major scale, frequently discolors the treble triads with major sevenths and minor ninths and the like. It seems that Oberon, a very knowing character, knows far too many triads, far too many scales. Bottom may dramatize the inconsequentiality of his musical language more loudly, but much of the fairy music is equally wrong—indeed, it is about wrongness. Fairy music may be elegant, or it may be childish, but for the most part it neither fits into earthly paradigms for the behavior of tonal music nor flouts them conspicuously. The music

Example 62. Fairy pandiatonism.

Example 63. Wide weed (this example lacks the initial low A in Oberon’s vocal line and its accompanying D minor triad).

’S

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

❧

BRITTEN

281

wears sheep’s clothing, though long teeth sometimes make themselves felt. As Britten said, in a notable understatement, “I have always been struck by a kind of sharpness in Shakespeare’s fairies. . . . Like the actual world, incidentally, the spirit world contains bad as well as good.”7 (2) Melisma. One of Britten’s great discoveries in A Midsummer Night’s Dream was to find a way of making dramatic use of the Janus-like aspect of coloratura: on one hand, it is a naturalistic method for coloring vocal lines with raw emotion, with howls, sobs, dizzy laughter; on the other hand, it is an artificial method for impressing an audience with a singer’s virtuosity. Nowadays we are so used to antiseptic and obedient operatic performances (a mode I quite like) that we tend to forget the emotive-mimetic aspect of coloratura, but on occasion a daring singer can remind us of its expressive potential: in my own experience, this happened most memorably during Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, when Edita Gruberová sang Zerbinetta’s aria in such a way that the coloratura turned into dazed giggling— an effect not audible in any of her recordings. Britten’s feat was to transform the equivocation between studiedness and feeling-overflow into a method for manifesting the essential equivocation in the fairy world itself. Tytania, a character with little erotic energy, remains a soprano-machine along the lines of the doll Olympia in Offenbach’s Les contes d’Hoffmann; but Oberon, a character with great erotic energy, only pretends to be an alto-machine, a harp that can play itself— beneath the quaint calculated evocations of Purcell, there is ululation. Peter Quint, by contrast, does nothing to conceal the urgency of his desire: his melisma on the name Miles is a pure cry of You must come. He is close to the naked root of expression, indeed to the naked root of music itself. Lord Harewood noticed that Peter Quint’s aria is related to a twelfth-century conductus, Beata viscera, which Peter Pears had sung just before Britten composed The Turn of the Screw.8 Britten was a composer with an acute sense of his placement in the whole canon of Western music, and several of his pieces are derived from meditations on Gregorian themes: in fact, A Midsummer Night’s Dream was composed during a long interruption of his work on a Noh opera, Curlew River, which begins with a plainchant, Te lucis ante terminum. But near the beginning of Western music, Britten found not only blanched chastities fit for sacred pieces but also some things with the potential to disturb, such as Perotinus’s Beata viscera: Beata viscera Marie virginis, cuius ad ubera rex magni nominis Blessed entrails of Virgin Mary, to whose womb the king of great name

282

❧

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

There is nothing profane in either the text or the music, but the text is almost gynecologically aware of the sticky inside of Mary’s body; and the liquid quivers of the music seem visceral enough. Britten’s taste for ambiguity may have been gratified by writing, for Peter Quint, a conductus of the damned, where the protocols of twelfth-century music were used to utter an arabesque of a shriek. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Oberon’s cries are sublimated in all sorts of artful ways, through archaisms, through vocal lines that pretend to be instrumental lines, and so forth; but behind all these dissimulations there is something raw— not far from Peter Quint’s Miles!, not even very far from Bottom’s hee-haw. Oberon’s music, despite the self-conscious strangenesses, its cerebral quality, is body music; if Bottom is the opera’s chief ass, Oberon is the opera’s chief penis. (3) Heavy metal, light metal. Britten, like Kurt Weill, like Carl Orff, like many composers, wanted to found his music-drama on primary acts, valid from the paleolithic to the present. For this reason he made use of the oldest and most remote music he could find: not only Perotinus and Gregorian chant, but also the Indonesian gamelan, an orchestra of drums, cymbals, tuned gongs, all sproing and bong and tinkle and intricate rhythmic overlay, the Western orchestra’s antiself. Though Britten’s fascination with the gamelan dated from about 1941, when Britten played second piano in a recording of Balinese Ceremonial Music by the ethnomusicologist Colin McPhee, it was not until 1956, after a sojourn in Bali, that Britten started to make regular use of gamelan effects. In the ballet The Prince of the Pagodas (1956), the heroine Belle Rose is borne off to Pagodaland, where she is wooed, to weird simulations of gamelan music, by a gigantic salamander, who eventually sloughs off his skin and turns into a handsome prince. To disguise the male lead as a salamander is about as close as decency allows to costuming a character as a huge phallus; and the metallic buzz, the amphibian slime, cooperate toward Britten’s basic fairyland effect of lubricious shimmer, in an exceptionally blatant form. (This effect is still stronger in the gamelan music for Tadzio in Britten’s 1973 opera Death in Venice, with an added frisson of rot.) The subtler fairyland of A Midsummer Night’s Dream relies not on xylophones or large bells but on the quietly extraterrestrial celesta; but the tone-clusters, the quartal harmonies (as at [68], second act), place fairyland in a pre-tonal or posttonal world; desires that are forbidden in the daylight of tonics and dominants can find expression here. The gamelan is one of several strategies that Britten used in the 1950s for finding some fundamental musical act that could provide an alternative to tonality as a basis for dramatic expression. When little Miles in Variation 13 of The Turn of the Screw practices his piano lesson, he plays something like a wrong-note version of Mozart’s Turkish rondo, as if to suggest that he’s learning basic harmony from the devil’s own Czerny method. The sheer abundance of styles representing Otherness, from the remotest times to the remotest places, from loud bangs to fringe-sonorities on the threshold of hearing, from pitchless rhythm to panchromaticism, the sheer span of Britten’s imagination makes the fairy music cosmicomical.

’S

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

❧

BRITTEN

283

The prelude to A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s second act (see ex. 64) serves as a positioning device to relate fairy music to normal music. The prelude is structured as a theme and variations around a theme that consists of four chords—a sort of rhythmless chaconne. Each chord puts into play a different choir in the orchestra (first strings, then brass, winds, percussion); and the harmonic movement also is a fairly comprehensive tour of the keys around C major (first D
major, then B minor 7, E
major, finally C). Just as the first-act prelude enacts a falling-asleep, so the second-act prelude enacts a dreaming, with its dreamlike combination of the unpredictable and the obsessive; it states how a dream seems to be groping toward some revelation (as the keys grope toward the tonic C), only to discover that the central thing fumes away at the moment when we try to grasp it. The fourth chord is in C, but an evasive, uncertain C, sketched by harp and sometimes vibraphone: the chord progression slowly slides out of the familiar world into some domain of spun glass. The pattern of
II–vii–
III–I becomes a fairy cadence, a sidle toward a vanishing tonic instead of a firm fall. It is evasive on a great many levels, since it was originally constructed as an evasion of Mendelssohn: Mervyn Cooke has noted that “Britten’s preliminary sketch for this chord sequence first arrayed the twelve pitches into a pattern of four triads in which the gentle parody of the opening of Mendelssohn’s famous overture to Shakespeare’s play . . . is much more explicit.”9 Just as the first-act prelude often reappeared as a scene-changing interlude, as if its heavy breathing represented a dreamless passage between dreams, so the theme of the second-act prelude also keeps recurring. When Tytania fondles Bottom, embracing him as the ivy embraces the elm, she exclaims Oh, how I love thee! (7 mm. after [56], second act), to these four chords; the second act ends as the minor fairies promise a remedy for all woes (On the ground, Sleep sound [102]) to an extensive reprise of the prelude; and in the third act, the disenchanted Bottom remembers Tytania to a quick rehearsal of the four chords: it shall be called Bottom’s Dream, Bottom’s Dream, because it hath no bottom (5 mm. before [34]). The faint swish of the fourth chord becomes, in this context, an

Example 64. Act 2 prelude.

284

❧

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

image of the bottomless: fairyland’s inability to provide a true tonic; the baselessness of dreams. A few bars earlier, Bottom was singing excitedly about what the eye of man hath not heard and the ear of man hath not seen; and the fourchord pattern of the prelude embodies a dérèglement des sens, a movement from the audible to a sort of extrasensory perception. Insofar as it could be called a Leitmotiv, its name would clearly be Bottom’s Dream. Of course, fairy music can establish itself as a special semantic domain only by contrast with some sort of designated non-fairy music—in the rigidly Saussurean world of musical semantics, almost all meaning is generated through patterns of antithesis. As we’ve seen, the music associated with the mechanicals provides only a partial contrast to fairy music: there are, in places, uncanny resemblances between the cloddish disorder of the mechanicals and the suave disorder of Oberon. For the most part, fairy music must establish its fairiness against something regularly organized, unchallenging, trouble-free. Britten assigns this role to the four Athenian lovers; but no one familiar with Britten’s music would be surprised to learn that there is a certain pathology in their very normalness. When we first meet Lysander and Hermia, we relax a bit. The first act begins with many sorts of musical disorientation: orchestral snoring, the OberonTytania Ill met by moonlight duet, the soft migraine-aura of tone-clusters as Oberon instructs Puck to fetch the love-in-idleness herb. When the lovers appear, the rate of harmonic change slows down, despite the Agitated tempo direction, and we enter a legibly operatic world. When we hear a diminished chord—and the Lysander-Hermia duet begins ([24]) with a sustained diminished chord—it means exactly what diminished chords always mean, emotional tension; and soon we are given a number of dominant-seventh chords, though these chords (E7, A
7, D7) don’t seem to be helpfully pointing to the tonic (E
). In other words, the lovers’ music is tonal, but dysfunctionally tonal. Britten gives us the appurtenances of tonality without the thing itself—as if tonality were simply a collection of local interpretive tricks instead of a system for imparting largescale design. Schoenberg used to complain that composers such as Richard Strauss had abandoned tonal structures without giving up the ear-cushioning pleasure of triads; Britten does exactly this, but deliberately, in order to illustrate the vanity of the normal within the enchanted wood. I suspect that in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and in certain other works, Britten tended to identify tonality with heterosexuality, and to insinuate that a certain falseness infected both. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is written from the fairies’ point of view: human desire is presented as a parody of itself; human life looks operatic in the spoiled sense of the word. Britten, then, amuses himself by strewing upon the lovers a whole bag of tonal ornaments within a musical texture so deskeletalized that it seems almost ostentatiously aimless. But on a few occasions, the musical tissue stiffens into a big operatic ensemble that announces Big Operatic Ensemble in italics and capital letters. The first occurs at the end of the opening duet, when Hermia sings by

’S

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

❧

BRITTEN

285

Example 65. I swear to thee.

Cupid’s strongest bow ([31]—see ex. 65), in a rousing, decisive A
major; then Lysander replies I swear to thee, By his best arrow, singing a similar phrase in D; then Hermia does some more swearing, in E
, to which Lysander can only answer with more swearing of his own, in F; at this point they start to swear in overlapping fashion, moving through a great number of keys before petering out in F and G, as the music sinks from swearing into snoring. This whole cabaletta is a grimace at opera composers (Gounod, for example) who rely heavily on the sequence (the repetition of a phrase starting on different notes) as a device to generate sham excitement. But whereas Gounod will shift his phrase and the harmony upward (in, say, the final trio of Faust) by exactly a whole step, Britten chooses odd, uncomfortable intervals for his harmony displacement—first a tritone, then a minor second—and indulges in far too many displacements, as if he were determined to make Lysander’s and

286

❧

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

Example 66. Lovers’ cells.

Hermia’s oath completely binding by forcing them to swear it in all twelve different major keys. In the third act, Britten plays a similar game in the lovers’ climactic quartet, And I have found Demetrius like a jewel (2 mm. after [19a]), consisting largely of ascending major scales, in which each new entry represents a change of key: F, A, G, A
, G
, B
, C, D, B, E
, E, C, F, A
. The continual change of key reinforces the majorness of the scales—I can scarcely think of any music as aggressively major-sounding as this—but it is difficult to discover the logic of the progressions: Britten makes his tour d’horizon of the major scale, but, as with Schoenberg and Berg, the governing structural principle seems to be saturation, not tonal resolution; and this quartet, like the earlier duet, dwindles away instead of achieving a firm terminus. By going everywhere, harmonically speaking, the lovers in effect go nowhere. As with the fairies, the lovers show a certain tendency toward the pandiatonic, a tendency that loosens the shape of their discourse and vitiates any sense of forward progress. They always behave as if they were obeying the traditional proprieties of operatic lovers, but the music they sing undercuts this pose. The crucial aspect of the lovers’ music, however, is found not in the grand ensembles but in small, almost fugitive, aspects of construction. When Lysander first enters ([24], first act), the orchestra plays, over a flutter of diminished chords, the four notes G–F–D–E; soon Lysander sings How now my love? (see ex. 66) to the notes D–C–A–B.

’S

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

❧

BRITTEN

287

The opening figure, G–F–D–E, is the cell for the lovers’ music: Lysander’s How now my love? is simply the same figure, transposed down a fourth; and soon we hear Lysander singing his memorable epigram, The course of true love never did run smooth (9 mm. after [26]) to a melody that begins, yes, G–F–D–E. Transpositions of this cell form a kind of universal watermark in the lovers’ music: it is heard at Demetrius’s first entry (3 mm. after [36], first act); at Lysander’s second entry ([73], first act); at Hermia’s virginal anxiety about Lysander’s sleeping too close, Nay, good Lysander ([75], first act); at Helena’s cajoling, Stay, tho’ thou kill me, sweet Demetrius (2 mm. after [82], first act); at Demetrius’s plea to Hermia, O why rebuke you him that loves you so? ([64], second act); at Demetrius’s dismissal of Lysander, Now go thy way ([96], second act); at Hermia’s exhausted cry, I can no further crawl ([100], second act); at Oberon’s blessing, There shall the pairs of faithful lovers be Wedded (2 mm. before [13], third act); at Lysander’s waking exclamation, Hermia! (5 mm. after [15a], third act); at Lysander’s dénouement to Theseus, My lord, I shall reply amazedly (8 mm. before [53], third act). The apotheosis of this cell occurs when it becomes the imitation-point for the lovers’ quartet, Let us recount our dreams ([24], third act). But this is only the beginning of Britten’s athletic play with the cell, with its rigid pairs of minor seconds and minor thirds. When Lysander sings One heart, one bed, two bosoms, and one troth (4 mm. before [75], first act), the references to Cupid’s unusual arithmetic inspire Britten to some arithmetical games of his own: the first four words are sung to G–A
–C
–B
, the exact inversion of the cell (see ex. 67). This inverse cell, in turn, becomes the basis for subsequent musical argument: transpositions appear, for example, at Lysander’s fatigued And here will I rest me ([94], second act) and, a little later, at Helena’s And sleep, that sometimes shuts up sorrow’s eye ([98]). What are we to make of this extreme concentration on four notes? The main cell is not treated in quite the fashion of a Leitmotiv: it does serve to announce presence, but the presence of any one of four characters in a completely indiscriminate fashion. Indeed, the very indiscriminateness tends to remove any sense of individuality: the four lovers are distinguished from the fairies and from the mechanicals, but nothing except the registers of their voices distinguishes them from one another: they are equally confused, equally grumpy, equally tired. Moreover, we expect a Leitmotiv to contain some sort of psychological information, to indicate a character’s habitual or specific emotional state: but the main cell occurs at moments of joy, at moments of sorrow, at moments of intense strain, at moments of somnolence. If it has a meaning, it means something like tangle: it is a short strand that keeps generating an intricate musical skein, a reference point for knots. Far from helping us better to understand the characters, the cellular construction tends to depyschologize them—to state a perplexity without giving the listener any access into the components of that perplexity. Just as Shakespeare played permutation games, by exploring ten of the twelve possibilities of relations among the four lovers, so Britten plays permutation

288

❧

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

Example 67. One heart.

games in the domain of his musical material, constructing all sorts of occult symmetries—rhythmic retrogrades, twelve-note rebuses, or four-note figures turned every which way. Britten occasionally makes feints toward endowing the four lovers with recognizably operatic personalities: Hermia’s Dream ([91], first act) is accompanied with heart-stopped flutters of sixteenth-note quintuplets; and Lysander’s impetuous Hermia? No, I do repent The tedious minutes ([88], first act) is emphasized by separate, poorly related major triads in the orchestra, each of which is falsified or made desperate by an added major seventh. But such psychologisms are only ornaments in an extraordinarily non-operatic sort of musical discourse: to find a proper analogue to Britten’s treatment of the four lovers, we should look to something like D’Indy’s second string quartet (1897), in which nearly every bar of the music is based on, instinct with, the four notes G-A-C–B—a figure very close to the inversion of Britten’s main cell. The kind of musical thinking behind Liszt’s Fantasy and Fugue on B–A–C–H or Shostakovich’s eighth string

’S

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

❧

BRITTEN

289

quartet, with its playing on the initials D–S–C–H (that is, D–E
–C–B) is everywhere in evidence in Britten’s Athenian-lovers scenes. Oberon’s arias and duets sound like chamber music but are in fact saturated in occult eroticism; the four lovers, by contrast, are given scenes full of grandly operatic gestures, but in fact they keep reverting to chamber music. Their love is more formal than sexual, a donnée, not a credible urgency. As we’ve seen, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream can be understood as an exercise in permutational logic, an acting exercise in which we investigate the same scene played out under ten of the twelve possible scenarios. Britten seems to have responded by writing music that is also an exercise in permutational logic: he plays out many possible scenarios for a four-note cell, in a dazzling variety of transpositions and transposed inversions, developing itself through many musical contexts. Furthermore, his refusal to endow the four lovers with distinct musical characters, through the apparatus of psychologizing-individualizing music-drama as developed by Mozart, Wagner, and Strauss, makes it clear that the lovers are only actors: Lysander is a generically effusive tenor, Demetrius a generically surly baritone, and both are caught up in various theatrical games; but they are merely imitations of human beings. Britten uses the artificiality of opera to intensify the histrionic-game quality of Shakespeare’s drama—to my mind, the most intimate, profound, even moving aspect of the play. Shakespeare used magical amnesia to undo one scenario so that he could investigate another. Britten, having the advantage of twentieth-century technology, could reconceive Shakespeare’s play under the premises of mechanical reproduction. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is about as close as the Elizabethan imagination could come to a videotape spectacle in which one scene (Demetrius hates Helena and loves Hermia) could be erased and redone according to a different plot (Demetrius hates Hermia and loves Helena). Britten, who spent his youth writing music for experimental film projects, instantly grasped the fact that Oberon is, implicitly, a cinema director. There is an extraordinary passage in the first act, when Demetrius is running away from Helena, leaving her to the mercy of wild beasts: Helena cries out, I’ll follow you ([44]), and is about to say more when Oberon suddenly stops the film, in effect, and interjects Fare thee well, Nymph (see ex. 68); then he hits the play-button again and Helena resumes her complaint exactly where she left off. The erasure-rhythm of the opera’s main action, the continual administration of poisons and antidotes, grows more pronounced in the third and final act. When Oberon pities Tytania and releases her from all hateful fantasy by squeezing the juice of Dian’s bud into her eyes (Be as thou wast wont to be, [7]), the celesta plays its familiar major-second figure, but upside down, as if an inversion could undo what the original form had done. Another game of defeasing occurs soon thereafter, as Tytania wakes up and greets her husband, all dreaming dispelled, all enmity gone: the orchestra plays successive chords in A major and B
minor ([9]), creating a strong local effect of I-
ii, recalling in cleansed form

290

❧

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

Example 68. Pause button.

the music of Ill met by moonlight, the first act dissension-duet. Well met by sunlight, the music says, without anyone uttering a word. In the play’s dream world, nothing has happened—in fact, several nothings have happened; and the music calls attention to the noneventfulness, the ludic aspect of the play, by marking the “action” with purely formal transformations. In Wozzeck (1925), with its passacaglia, rondo, fugue with three subjects, Berg had to find ways of transcending the formalities, lest the opera descend or ascend into an abstract suite with vocal obbligato; but Britten does not attempt to transcend his formal procedures, because the opera is a sort of anti-opera, an actor’s game with role switching, a musician’s game with cell development, inversion, counterpoint. Perhaps the inversions of the main cell in the lovers’ scene operate exactly as the inversion of the celesta-theme operates: the inversions and the original cell-statements cancel one another out, leave us in a domain of intricate but self-exhausting musical activities. But then comes the Pyramus and Thisby skit—the grownup version of Let’s Make an Opera!, the “entertainment for young people” that Eric Crozier and Britten devised in 1949, in which some children cobble together, rehearse, and teach the audience how to participate in, an opera-skit called The Little Sweep. Suddenly we are not in the realm of self-contained musical games—chamber music with voice—but in the realm of opera: instead of clever and formal discourse, we are plunged into something orotund, cheesy, full of sweat. Pyramus and Thisby are the first recognizable characters we’ve encountered: instead of fairies, instead of abstract lovers from seventeenth-century pastoral, we have meaty physical presences; instead of illegible musical abstractions, we hear music that we can instantly and correctly interpret as a reflex of human feeling. It is remarkable how ghostly and bloodless Lysander, Hermia, Oberon, and the rest of the characters appear by contrast to these overdrawn comedians; as soon

’S

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

❧

BRITTEN

291

as we have familiar operatic reference points, the semantics of Donizetti and Puccini, the disturbed and disturbing quality of the previous scenes manifests itself strongly. The skit, despite its monstrosities, ludicrosities, is terra firma, and tends to dismiss the “serious” parts as flimsy and contrived. The joke convinces, while the main drama disperses into stage smoke and cobweb-flitters. Britten took some risks in making the skit so vivid: the bulk of the action tends to turn into a huge prologue to Pyramus and Thisbe: A Mock Opera, in the manner of Lampe. The music for the main action of A Midsummer Night’s Dream mixes order and disorder—mechanically rigid melodies cohabit with unintelligible sequences of chords—in an original and puzzling manner; but the Pyramus skit mixes order and disorder in the most explicit manner possible. During the introductory chorus, If we offend, it is with our good will ([59], third act), the mechanicals chant monotonously above a blatant I–V–I cadence; at one point ([60]), they attempt a little canon, All for your delight, We are not here, with each entry rising by a fourth, but the fourth voice, Snug, messes up by joining at a major third, and the fifth voice, Flute—still unable to control his female-impersonating voice properly— enters at a major third above Snug, thereby creating a tessitura so high that he can’t sing the notes. Each of the five singers, so to speak, steps forward in turn and spreads his arms wide to embrace the audience; but Snug stumbles, and Flute falls on his face. This sort of exposed disorder grows even grosser and greasier at the end of this number (1 m. after [61]), where the members of the audience start making smart-aleck comments all at once, in what I believe to be the single most chaotic page in any Britten score: the bar-lines aren’t aligned, and Britten instructs the performers “The Recitative Ensemble is not to be sung in strict time. Each character sings his line at the natural speed of diction, repeating it until silenced by Theseus’ ‘Who’s next.’ ” Britten was generally a controlling sort of composer, and this page may be a spoof on aleatory composition styles; on the other hand, all permutational art tends toward chaos, and the page may be understood as a reductio ad absurdum of the same logic that drove Britten to the cell-play of the Athenian-lovers’ scenes. This is the moment in A Midsummer Night’s Dream that corresponds to the labyrinth of rumor in Chaucer’s House of Fame: the moment where clean arithmetic reaches its tipping point, and turns into a thick, unmeasured smear. All the elements of the opera’s main action come forward during the Pyramus skit and undergo a sort of cubist reconstruction. The basic musical premise of the whole body of Oberon-Tytania-mechanicals scenes is the contrast between low-pitched instruments, sometimes playing aggressively ordinary chords, and high percussion that teases the ear, eerily. Wall’s aria (sung by Snout, Lento lamentoso, [64]—see ex. 69) offers the severest simplification of the premise: a steady A
–E
chord in the cellos and basses is occasionally punctuated by a brief clink (harp, percussion), also playing A
and E
, but near the upper threshold of hearing. The steady chord seems to stand for all the stolid, earthbound world of the

292

❧

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

Example 69. Wall.

mechanicals; while all the vibrant splendor and menace of fairyland have dwindled into a tiny tink. We will hear reconstituted fairy music once again, during the recitative of Moonshine (Starveling, Andante placido, [74]), where the vibraphone plays a D
chord when Moonshine’s voice leaps up to the word moon— reinforcing his ferocious self-insistence; in the skit, Oberon’s realm of glamour is crammed into an aperture in a wall, or bottled up in a lantern, reduced to incidental stage illumination. But let us return to Wall’s aria. This piece contains other jokes as well, especially mimetic jokes: the sustained string chord looks on the page like a picture of a wall on the page, absolutely even, and quite high, since the A
is at the bottom of the bass clef, and the E
at the top of the treble: the hollow fifth (actually a hollow nineteenth) suggests the wall’s blankness and uniformity; and the clink images the chink, as small as the finger-twitch on the harp-string. Nothing could be more orderly than the invariant A
–E
chord; but Britten introduces extreme disorder in the form of the vocal line, notated as highly chromatic Sprechstimme, in a parody of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. Again we see that chaos and cosmos, so inextricably mingled in the main action, are precipitating into distinct layers in the skit. When we come to Pyramus’s aria O grim-look’d night (sung by Bottom, in ABA form, Moderato ma tenebroso, 4 mm. after [65]—see ex. 70), we are of course confronting a reconstruction of the Athenian-lovers’ music. The cellular construction of their music suggested that they were all tangled and getting nowhere: and the idea of getting nowhere dominates Pyramus’s music here. The A section has a melody that consists entirely of the note A, while the orchestra plays, over and over, a double-dotted, heavy cadential figure (i–v–II [V of v]–i), a hoohoohaha from a low-budget vampire movie, Since the key is D minor, this chord-pattern spells out d–a–E–d, that is, dEad in Bottom’s musical orthography—a cryptogram that anticipates his prolonged death agony. The repetitiousness of harmony and monotony of melody both

’S

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

❧

BRITTEN

293

Example 70. O grim-look’d night.

Example 71. Verdi-ism.

gesture at the redundancy of Shakespeare’s language: it is not only night, but it is also not day. The aria’s B section ([66]), on the other hand, is sequential, and imitates the sequence-construction of the duet I swear to thee and the quartet And I have found Demetrius like a jewel. Pyramus’s music here is, if anything, somewhat less awkward, comical, and erroneous than the earlier sequence-exercises; if we laugh at this, how should we behave when the lovers embrace, gravely reconciled in the quartet? The B section ends with a vehement brass figure (see ex. 71), right out of mid-period Verdi, to lead us back to the home key of D minor—thus Britten continues his conspectus of operatic languages, as he works backward from Cage the aleatorist and Schoenberg the atonalist to the standard repertory. By the time Thisby (Flute) and Pyramus sing their duet, O wall full often hast thou heard my moans (in cavatina-cabaletta form, [68]), we are in a fully

294

❧

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

nineteenth-century world. The accompaniment of the cavatina (Allegretto grazioso) consists of various clichés that denote rustling brooks and cheeping birds, along with arpeggios in E
and B
—the harmony scarcely deviates for an instant from its punishing alternation of tonics and dominants. If the cavatina is strictly obedient to the correspondence-course guidebook for opera composers, the frantic cabaletta (Allegro brilliante, [70]) quickly loses control, until at last Pyramus and Thisby kiss through the chink to a loud tremolo chord that superimposes A minor in the treble upon A major in the bass. After Lion (Snug) sings his proleptic and analeptic Quasi “Polka” ([73]), after Moonshine delivers his recitative ([74]), after Lion chases Thisby away, Pyramus exclaims Approach, ye furies fell (Allegro disperato, [79]), to emphatic broken triads, reminiscent of the stride-piano sections of Orff’s Carmina Burana; then he stabs himself and dies, dies, dies, dies, dies. Then Thisby enters: Asleep, my love? What, dead my dove? (Allegretto, [82]); the music takes no note of Pyramus’s death, for Thisby is now mad, and must sing a Mad Scene (see ex. 72). The Mad Scene in nineteenth-century opera often has a certain extra-operatic, recital-piece quality, for the singer, being mad, is oblivious of the dramatic situation and dwells in a psychotic world of harmony and delight, sealed (sometimes only partially sealed) from the intolerable truth that she has (in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, for example) murdered her unloved bridegroom. A Mad Scene tends to require a flute, in order to act as an external simulation of the internal echo in the soprano’s brain: she listens to herself singing, because her ear is

Example 72. Thisby distraught.

’S

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

❧

BRITTEN

295

Example 73. Jolsonism.

closed to every other sound. Flute, naturally, sings a duet with a flute, but it consists mostly of practice scales—Thisby, distracted, has abstracted herself from the opera, even from the recital hall, and has settled into her living room, where she is amusing herself with elementary voice exercises. But, in the latter part of the aria, These lily lips, this cherry nose (Adagio lamentoso, B major, [84]), she seems to revive, and the burden of Pyramus’s death falls on her; and yet it can’t be said that she stays in character, for she behaves like a crooner putting over a song— this is especially evident when she sings And farewell friends (5 mm. before [85]— see ex. 73), where the music evokes Al Jolson kneeling and gesticulating. Britten had a gift for parody of every sort, including parodies of pop music (most notably expressed in his night-club big-band number, The Spider and the Fly, from Johnson over Jordan, 1939). Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a series of tumbles: first it falls from occluded chamber music into opera; then it falls from opera into minstrel show. The balance between high art and low entertainment never comes right—it isn’t even supposed to come right. I suspect that Britten in the late 1950s was anxious about the direction that his operas were taking, perhaps anxious about the direction of twentieth-century opera as a whole. From 1945 to 1954, Britten enjoyed the most productive decade of any opera composer of the age, with the exception of Strauss from 1909 to 1918: Britten wrote Peter Grimes, The Rape of Lucretia, Albert Herring, The Little Sweep, Billy Budd, Gloriana, and The Turn of the Screw. One of Britten’s librettists for Billy Budd, E. M. Forster, had enjoyed a similar run of success in the novels he wrote at the beginning of the century, but he gave up novel-writing in 1924, partly because of the difficulty of presenting homosexual themes in public entertainment. Whether Britten’s gradual metamorphosis from an opera composer to a composer of mystery plays and church parables pertained to homosexuality or some aesthetic crisis is hard to know: but I believe that, in the Pyramus skit, Britten is not just making a joke about opera but declaring that opera is itself a joke. Opera is flamboyant and meretricious and slightly smelly, at once the grandest of arts and beneath art. The great opera

296

❧

A

MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S

DREAM

composers were for the most part not particularly fastidious people: Mozart with his cruel gags concerning the hornist Leutgeb, Wagner with his fulsome letters to King Ludwig, Strauss with his brewery money. Britten, though, was a fastidious man, and may have felt uneasy about the relation of real tears to extremely expensive simulations of emotion. What am I to Isolde, what is Isolde to me?— and yet I weep.

Notes Introduction 1. Quotations from Shakespeare are from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). Text references are to act, scene, and line. 2. Robert Armin, A Nest of Ninnies and Other English Jestbooks of the Seventeenth Century, ed. P. M. Zall. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), p. 26. 3. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, chamber opera by Michael Nyman, based on the case study by Oliver Sacks, CBS CD MK 44669, booklet, p. 11. 4. For example, W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (New York: Collier, 1968), p. 255. 5. “Fadom” is the spelling given in The Riverside Shakespeare. 6. See Oliver Strunk, ed., Source Readings in Music History, rev. Leo Treitler (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), p. 540. 7. See Strunk, Source Readings, pp. 665–66. 8. Poetical Works of Lionel Johnson (London: Elkin Mathews, 1915), p. xvii. 9. Those who would enjoy a good introduction to Cavalli and early Italian opera might want to look at Ellen Rosand’s Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Creation of a Genre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 10. William Byrd, Telarc CD 80328 (1993), booklet, p. 8. 11. A suggestion can be found in Ross W. Duffin’s Shakespeare’s Songbook (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), p. 203. 12. Oberon, The Faery Prince. A Masque of Prince Henries, Musicians of The Globe, Philip Pickett, Philips CD 446 217-2 (1997), essay by Peter Holman, p. 5. 13. In the early third century AD, Athenaeus of Naucratis wrote a garrulous, gossipy book called Deipnosophists, about the great banquets of antiquity; in book 15, section 54, he cites Clearchus’s treatise on education, which says “There remain the Syrbenaean chorus, in which every one is bound to sing whatever he pleases, without paying the least attention to the man who sits in the post of honour and leads the chorus. And indeed he is only a more noisy spectator”—trans. C. G. Yonge (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1849). The text of The Masque of Queens and Jonson’s notes is taken from the 1692 folio edition of Jonson’s works, as transcribed in 2003 by Clark J. Holloway on the website hollowaypages.com. 14. Oiseau-Lyre CD 421 656-2 (1989), essay written by Nicolas McGegan and Simon Shaw, p. 3. 15. W. H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (New York: Random House, 1962), p. 134.

298

❧

notes to pages 25–67

16. Theodor Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), p. 73. 17. Oiseau-Lyre CD 433 191-2 (1993). 18. Roger North on Music, ed. John Wilson (London: Novello and Company, 1959), p. 294. 19. As printed in Frances Baines’ notes to the excellent 1989 Red Byrd and Fretwork recording, Cries and Fancies, Virgin CD VC 7 90849-2.

Introduction to Part 1 1. See David H. Richter, ed., The Critical Tradition (New York: St. Martin’s, 1989), p. 231.

Chapter One 1. Mervyn James, English Politics and the Concept of Honour 1485–1642 (Oxford: Past and Present Society, 1978), p. 15. 2. Ibid., pp. 5–6. 3. René Girard, A Theater of Envy / William Shakespeare (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 17. 4. See Richter, The Critical Tradition, p. 235. 5. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 304–5.

Chapter Two 1. This translation is based on the Italian text of Petrocchi and Singleton. See Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, ed. Giorgio Petrocchi and Charles Singleton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977).

Chapter Three 1. See Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures upon Shakespeare and Other Dramatists (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1884). 2. See Richter, The Critical Tradition, p. 235.

Chapter Four 1. Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 81–82. 2. Ibid., p. 117. 3. The Plays of David Garrick, vol. 3, Garrick’s Adaptations of Shakespeare, 1744–1756, ed. Harry William Pedicord and Fredrick Louis Bergman (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981), pp. 143–44.

❧

notes to pages 69–83

299

Chapter Five 1. See Frank Kermode, ed., Four Centuries of Shakespearean Criticism (New York: Avon Library, 1965), p. 73. Translator uncredited. 2. Victor Hugo, La Préface de Cromwell, ed. Maurice Souriau (Paris: Boivin, n.d.), pp. 22–23. 3. Hector Berlioz, Mémoires, chronology and introduction by Pierre Citron (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1969), vol. 1, pp. 215–16. Translation mine. 4. Mémoires, 1, p. 124. 5. Mémoires, 1, pp. 127–28.

Chapter Six 1. Mémoires, 1, pp. 221–22. 2. Ibid., 1, pp. 229–30. 3. Ibid., 1, pp. 269–70. 4. Ibid., 1, pp. 274–75. 5. See, for example, John Warrack, in The Wagner Companion, ed. Burbidge and Sutton, p. 112. 6. Ibid., 2, p. 196. 7. Ibid., 1, pp. 163–64. 8. Ibid., 1, p. 278. 9. Hector Berlioz, À travers chants: Études musicales, adorations, boutades et critiques (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1862), pp. 151–52. Translation mine. 10. À travers chants, p. 160.

Chapter Seven 1. À travers chants, p. 323. 2. Ibid., p. 325. 3. Mémoires, 1, p. 291. 4. Mémoires, 2, p. 237. 5. From the Kalmus vocal score, K 06090. 6. Julian Rushton, Berlioz: Roméo et Juliette (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 24. 7. Mémoires, 2, p. 32. 8. David B. Levy, “ ‘Ritter Berlioz’ in Germany,” Berlioz Studies, ed. Peter Bloom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 144. 9. À travers chants, p. 29. 10. Ibid., p. 31. 11. Ibid., p. 44. 12. The outline is based on that in the Bärenreiter edition of the vocal score of Roméo et Juliette, BA 5458a, ed. Eike Wernhard (Kassel: Bärenreiter-Verlag, 1995). All musical examples are taken from this score, with the permission of Bärenreiter-Verlag.

300

❧

notes to pages 85–110

13. For a brilliant—indeed Berliozian—reading of the irony in the O Freunde section of the Ninth Symphony, see Stephen Hinton’s “Not Which Tones? The Crux of Beethoven’s Ninth,” 19th-Century Music 22/1 (Summer 1998), p. 61–77. 14. Mémoires, 2, p. 35. 15. Jacques Chailley, “Roméo et Juliette,” Revue de Musicologie 63 (1977): p. 117. 16. Mémoires, 2, pp. 307, 375.

Chapter Eight 1. I owe this explanation of the function of the idée fixe to Su Yin Mak. 2. Translated by Rushton, in Rushton’s Berlioz: Roméo et Juliette, p. 90. 3. Mémoires, 1, pp. 219–20. 4. Mémoires, 2, p. 36. 5. Hector Berlioz, Correspondance Générale, ed. under the direction of Pierre Citron, 3 vols. (Paris: Flammarion, 1978), #1135; in this letter Berlioz writes out the theme in musical notation, so that his correspondent can savor it too. 6. D. Kern Holoman, Berlioz (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 265. 7. Rushton, Berlioz: Roméo et Juliette, p. 107. 8. À travers chants, pp. 519–20. 9. Ibid., p. 36. 10. Hector Berlioz, Les soirées de l’orchestre (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1854), pp. 317–18. 11. Translated by Rushton, in his Berlioz: Roméo et Juliette, p. 90. 12. Rushton makes these identifications in Berlioz: Roméo et Juliette, pp. 37–38, and it is not easy to imagine a formalist severe enough to dispute them. 13. There is a curious sequel, in that Brahms evidently borrowed this passage in the first movement of his Double Concerto [1887], where it sounds like a gloomy memory of extinct triumph. 14. Rushton, Berlioz: Roméo et Juliette, p. 41. 15. Mémoires, 1, p. 224. 16. The new time signature looks like half the previous one, but the metronome mark requires each beat of 3/4 to equal the previous measure of 3/8, so that the triplet eighths come out the same as the eighths in 3/8. I owe this explanation to Julian Rushton.

Chapter Nine 1. Mémoires, 1, p. 121; the clown was Nahum Tate. 2. Garrick was not the first to add a musical funeral procession to the play: see Roger Fiske, English Theatre Music in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 217. 3. Bärenreiter score, p. 104. 4. Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985), p. 299. 5. Mémoires, 1, p. 63. 6. Correspondance Générale #1108 (to Franz Liszt, St. Petersburg, 27 April/9 May [1847]).

❧

notes to pages 111–143

301

7. Chailley, “Roméo et Juliette,” p. 118. 8. À travers chants, p. 55. 9. There is an odd sequel to this B vs. F harmonic schema in Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette (1867): the nocturne that begins the second act is in F, while Romeo’s Ah lèvetoi, soleil is in the startling key of B major—Gounod used the tritonally related keys to symbolize the opposition between night and day.

Chapter Ten 1. Stephen Greenblatt, “Shakespeare Bewitched,” in New Historical Literary Study, ed. Jeffrey N. Cox and Larry J. Reynolds (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 118. 2. King James I of England, Daemonologie (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966), p. 31. 3. Thomas F. Van Laan, Role-Playing in Shakespeare (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), p. 193. 4. Greenblatt, “Shakespeare Bewitched,” pp. 122–23.

Chapter Eleven 1. King James, Daemonologie, p. 8. 2. Ibid., pp. xiii, 22.

Chapter Twelve 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare after All (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004), p. 697. King James, Daemonologie, pp. 4–5. Ibid., p. 22. Ibid., p. 46. King James, News from Scotland, p. 16, reprinted with Daemonologie.

Chapter Fourteen 1. King James, Daemonologie, pp. 67–68. 2. L. C. Knights, How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth? An Essay in the Theory and Practice of Shakespeare Criticism (Cambridge: Gordon Fraser, 1933).

Chapter Seventeen 1. Quoted in The Riverside Shakespeare, p. 1341. 2. See Amanda Eubanks Winkler, ed., Music for Macbeth (Middleton, WI: A-R editions, ca. 2004).

302

❧

notes to pages 145–170

3. E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (New York: Harvest Books, 1952), p. 204. 4. Yeats, Essays and Introductions, p. 119. 5. Kermode, Four Centuries of Shakespearian Criticism, pp. 536–37. 6. See David Rosen and Andrew Porter, eds., Verdi’s Macbeth: A Sourcebook (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), pp. 346–48; August Wilhelm von Schlegel, Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 6, ed. Eduard Böcking (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1971), pp. 254–56. 7. Rosen and Porter, Verdi’s Macbeth, p. 8. 8. Francis Toye, Giuseppe Verdi (New York: Vintage Books, 1959). 9. Julian Budden, The Operas of Giuseppe Verdi (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), vol. 1, pp. 282–83. 10. Rosen and Porter, Verdi’s Macbeth, p. 54. 11. Toye, Giuseppe Verdi, pp. 250–51. 12. Budden, The Operas of Giuseppe Verdi, vol. 1, pp. 212, 217. 13. Budden, The Operas of Giuseppe Verdi, vol. 3, p. 505. 14. Rosen and Porter, Verdi’s Macbeth, p. 56. 15. Budden, The Operas of Giuseppe Verdi, vol. 1, pp. 284, 300. 16. Rosen and Porter, Verdi’s Macbeth, pp. 419–20. 17. Noted by H. Robert Cohen in ibid., p. 193. 18. Gary Schmidgall, Shakespeare and Opera (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 14. 19. Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Conversations with Igor Stravinsky (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 75.

Chapter Eighteen 1. Marjorie Garber, “Shakespeare’s ‘New Gorgon,’ ” in The Medusa Reader, ed. Marjorie Garber and Nancy J. Vickers (New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 249–57. 2. In Studio sulle opere di Giuseppe Verdi, cited in Gary Tomlinson, Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 96. Tomlinson offers an exceptionally full catalogue of the Tutto è finitos of the 1865 text on pp. 96–99 of this book. See also Pierluigi Petrobelli, Music in the Theater: Essays on Verdi and Other Composers, trans. Roger Parker (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 144–45. Daniel Sabbeth has made interesting connections between Tutto è finito and certain
VI–V harmonic motions: see “On the Tonal Organization of Macbeth II, in Rosen and Porter, Verdi’s Macbeth, pp. 261–69.

Chapter Nineteen 1. Letter of 7 January 1847, in Rosen and Porter, Verdi’s Macbeth, pp. 30–31. 2. Rosen and Porter, Verdi’s Macbeth, p. 125. 3. Harold Powers, Macbeth: Giuseppe Verdi, English National Opera Guide 41 (London: John Calder, 1990), p. 21. 4. Letter of 8 February 1985, in Rosen and Porter, Verdi’s Macbeth, p. 99.

❧

notes to pages 179–205

303

Chapter Twenty 1. Letter of 23 January 1865, in Rosen and Porter, Verdi’s Macbeth, p. 90. See also pp. 108–9. 2. Letter of 21 January 1847, in Rosen and Porter, Verdi’s Macbeth, p. 33. 3. Rosen and Porter, Verdi’s Macbeth, pp. 47, 234. 4. Letter of 11 March 1865, in Rosen and Porter, Verdi’s Macbeth, p. 112. 5. Rosen and Porter, Verdi’s Macbeth, p. 348; Schlegel, Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 6, p. 258. 6. Letter to Escudier of 23 January 1865, in Rosen and Porter, Verdi’s Macbeth, p. 89. 7. Jane Bernstein, “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,” Cambridge Opera Journal 14 (March 2002): p. 35. 8. Rosen and Porter, Verdi’s Macbeth, pp. 97, 101, 114–16.

Chapter Twenty-One 1. Mary Ann Smart, “Representations of Madness in Early Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera” (Ph.D. diss., Musicology, Cornell University, 1990). 2. Rosen and Porter, Verdi’s Macbeth, p. 40. 3. Ibid., p. 51. 4. Ibid., p. 110. 5. Ibid. p. 84. 6. Jonas Barish, “Madness, Hallucination, and Sleepwalking,” in ibid., p. 154. 7. Bernstein, “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,” pp. 36, 45. 8. Marian Smith, Ballet and Opera in the Age of Giselle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 5–6. 9. Ibid., p. 8. 10. Ibid., p. 97. 11. Ibid., p. 67. 12. Letter of 3 February 1865, in Rosen and Porter, Verdi’s Macbeth, p. 97.

Chapter Twenty-Two 1. Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), p. 43. 2. See Maureen Barry McCann Boulton’s The Song in the Story: Lyric Insertions in French Narrative Fiction, 1200–1400 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993). 3. Samuel Beckett, Murphy (New York: Grove Press, 1957), pp. 96–97. 4. Ibid., pp. 251–52. 5. Ibid., pp. 4–5.

Chapter Twenty-Three 1. The Complete Poetry of Ben Jonson, ed. William B. Hunter, Jr. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), p. 123.

304

❧

notes to pages 216–253

Chapter Twenty-Five 1. Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading (New York: Capricorn Books, 1965), pp. 135–36. 2. T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909–1962 (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1963), p. 123.

Chapter Twenty-Six 1. Ilya Prigogine won a Nobel Prize for helping to find the governing mechanisms. 2. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 17. 3. Samuel Beckett, Watt (New York: Grove Press, 1959), p. 167. 4. André Breton, Oeuvres completes, ed. Marguerite Bonnet (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1988), vol. 2, p. 816. 5. Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 216. 6. W. H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Random House, 1976), p. 218.

Chapter Twenty-Seven 1. Quoted by Roy Strong, Festival Designs by Inigo Jones (n.p.: International Exhibitions Foundations, 1968), no pagination. 2. The Complete Poetry of Ben Jonson, p. 393. 3. Phillips CD 446 2/7-2 (1997). 4. Strong, Festival Designs by Inigo Jones.

Chapter Twenty-Eight 1. Roger North’s The Musicall Grammarian 1728, ed. Mary Chan and Jamie Kassler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 266–67. 2. This and all subsequent quotations from The Fairy Queen are from Henry Purcell’s Operas: The Complete Texts, ed. Michael Burden (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 3. See Curtis Price, Henry Purcell and the London Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 333, 344. 4. Michael Burden, ed., Henry Purcell’s Operas: The Complete Texts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 16. 5. Price, Henry Purcell and the London Stage, pp. 353–54. 6. For some pictorial ideas of the Restoration version of a “Chinese” set, see Roger Savage, “The Shakespeare-Purcell Fairy Queen,” Early Music 1 (1973): 213, 217. Savage notes, though, that “China” may have been little different from “Peru” or “Java”—“Any green and golden world would do at a pinch” (p. 211). 7. See Price, Henry Purcell and the London Stage, p. 337.

❧

notes to pages 263–283

305

Chapter Twenty-Nine 1. Treated in Peter Walls, Music in the English Courtly Masque (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 86–103 Walls, like Ian Spink, doubts the veracity of North’s account of Lanier and King Charles. 2. Roger North on Music, p. 294. 3. Exquisite Consorts, Berlin Classics CD 0011552BC (1995). 4. Fiske, English Theatre Music in the Eighteenth Century, p. 59.

Chapter Thirty 1. Brendan G. Carroll, “The Making of Max Reinhardt’s Celebrated Film of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ ” cpo CD 999 449-2 (1999).

Chapter Thirty-One 1. Benjamin Britten, “The Composer’s Dream,” Observer, 5 June 1960, reprinted in Christopher Palmer, ed., The Britten Companion, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 178. 2. D. H. Lawrence, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious (New York: Viking Press, 1960), pp. 194–95. 3. Peter Evans, The Music of Benjamin Britten (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 245. 4. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 20–21. 5. Peter Evans has made the telling point that this passage shows “a technique that has an important role in much of the opera: with situations that explore the whole field of tonal resources (i.e. that demonstrate twelve potential centres, or otherwise pointedly relate all twelve pitch classes), structural emphasis is given to one centre and a semitonally adjacent one” (The Music of Benjamin Britten, p. 239). 6. Score of The Turn of the Screw, libretto by Myfanwy Piper, vocal score by Imogen Holst (London: Boosey & Hawkes, 1955), pp. 182–87. 7. Palmer, The Britten Companion, p. 179. 8. Humphrey Carpenter, Benjamin Britten: A Biography (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1992), p. 338. 9. In Mervyn Cooke, “Britten and Shakespeare,” from The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Britten, ed. Mervyn Cooke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 138.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor. Philosophy of Modern Music. Translated by Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster. New York: Seabury Press, 1973. Armin, Robert. A Nest of Ninnies and Other English Jestbooks of the Seventeenth Century. Edited by P. M. Zall. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970. Auden, W. H. Collected Poems. Edited by Edward Mendelson. New York: Random House, 1976. ———. The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays. New York: Random House, 1962. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Barthes, Roland. The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Arts, and Representation. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1985. Beckett, Samuel. Murphy. New York: Grove Press, 1957. ———. Watt. New York: Grove Press, 1959. Berlioz, Hector. À travers chants: Études musicales, adorations, boutades et critiques. Paris: Michel Lévy, 1862. ———. Correspondance Générale. Edited under the direction of Pierre Citron. Paris: Flammarion, 1972 (vol. 1, 1803–32) and 1978 (vol. 3, 1842–50). ———. Mémoires. Chronology and introduction by Pierre Citron. 2 vols. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1969. ———. Les soirées de l’orchestre. Paris: Michel Lévy, 1854. Bernstein, Jane. “ ‘Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered.’ ” Cambridge Opera Journal 14 (March 2002): 31–46. Bloom, Peter, ed. Berlioz Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Boulton, Maureen Barry McCann. The Song in the Story: Lyric Insertions in French Narrative Fiction, 1200–1400. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993. Breton, André. Oeuvres complètes. Edited by Marguerite Bonnet. 2 vols. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1988. Brooke, Arthur. Brooke’s “Romeus and Juliet,” Being the Original of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet.” New York: Duffield and Co., 1908. Budden, Julian. The Operas of Verdi. 3 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. Burden, Michael, ed. Henry Purcell’s Operas: The Complete Texts. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Cairns, David. Berlioz: The Making of an Artist. London: Deutsch, 1989. Carpenter, Humphrey. Benjamin Britten: A Biography. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1992.

308

❧

bibliography

Castiglione, Baldesar. The Book of the Courtier. Translated by George Bull. London: Penguin Books, 1976. Chailley, Jacques. “Roméo et Juliette.” Revue de Musicologie 63 (1977): 115–22. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. Edited by James Engell and W. Jackson Bate. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983. ———. Lectures upon Shakespeare and Other Dramatists. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1884. Cooke, Mervyn, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Britten. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Cox, Jeffrey N., and Larry J. Reynolds, eds. New Historical Literary Study. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. Dante Alighieri. The Divine Comedy. Edited by Giorgio Petrocchi and Charles Singleton. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977. Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Duffin, Ross W. Shakespeare’s Songbook. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004. Eliot, T. S. Collected Poems 1909–1962. New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1963. Evans, Peter. The Music of Benjamin Britten. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Fiske, Roger. English Theatre Music in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Forster, E. M. A Passage to India. New York: Harvest Books, 1952. Garber, Marjorie. Shakespeare after All. New York: Pantheon Books, 2004. ———. “Shakespeare’s ‘New Gorgon.’ ” In The Medusa Reader, ed. Marjorie Garber and Nancy J. Vickers. New York: Routledge, 2003. Garrick, David. The Plays of David Garrick. Vol. 3, Garrick’s Adaptations of Shakespeare, 1744–1756. Edited by Harry William Pedicord and Fredrick Louis Bergman. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981. Girard, René. A Theater of Envy / William Shakespeare. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Goethe, J. W. Faust: Der Tragödie zweiter Teil. Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam June, 1986. Greenblatt, Stephen. “Shakespeare Bewitched.” In New Historical Literary Study, edited by Jeffrey N. Cox and Larry J. Reynolds. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. Hart, John. An Orthographie. London, 1569. Holoman, D. Kern. Berlioz. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989. Hugo, Victor. La Préface de Cromwell: Introduction, texte, et notes. Edited by Maurice Souriau. Paris: Boivin, n.d. James I, King of England. Daemonologie. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966. James, Mervyn. English Politics and the Concept of Honour 1485–1642. Oxford: Past and Present Society, 1978. Johnson, Lionel. Poetical Works of Lionel Johnson. London: Elkin Mathews, 1915. Jonas, Hans. The Gnostic Religion. Boston: Beacon Press, 1963. Jonson, Ben. The Complete Poetry of Ben Jonson. Edited by William B. Hunter, Jr. New York: W. W. Norton, 1968. Kermode, Frank, ed. Four Centuries of Shakespearian Criticism. New York: Avon Library, 1965.

❧

bibliography

309

Knight, G. Wilson. The Crown of Life. London: Routledge, 1958. Knights, L. C. How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth? An Essay in the Theory and Practice of Shakespeare Criticism. Cambridge: Gordon Fraser, 1933. Lawrence, D. H. Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious. New York: Viking Press, 1960. Marlowe, Christopher. Doctor Faustus. Edited by Roma Gill. New York: Hill and Wang, 1966. Nabokov, Vladimir. Invitation to a Beheading. New York: Capricorn Books, 1965. North, Roger. Roger North on Music. Edited by John Wilson. London: Novello and Company, 1959. ———. Roger North’s The Musicall Grammarian 1728. Edited by Mary Chan and Jamie Kassler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Palmer, Christopher, ed. The Britten Companion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Pater, Walter. The Renaissance. 1893. Edited by Donald L. Hill. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Petrobelli, Pierluigi. Music in the Theater: Essays on Verdi and Other Composers. Translated by Roger Parker. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. Powers, Harold. Macbeth: Giuseppe Verdi. English National Opera Guide 41. London: John Calder, 1990. Price, Curtis. Henry Purcell and the London Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Rabkin, Norman. Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Richter, David H., ed. The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. Rosand, Ellen. Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Creation of a Genre. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Rosen, David, and Andrew Porter, eds. Verdi’s Macbeth: A Sourcebook. New York: W. W. Norton, 1984. Rushton, Julian. Berlioz: Roméo et Juliette. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. ———. The Musical Language of Berlioz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Savage, Roger. “The Shakespeare-Purcell Fairy Queen.” Early Music 1 (1973): 201–21. Schlegel, August Wilhelm von. Sämmtliche Werke. Vol. 6. Edited by Eduard Böcking. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1971. Schmidgall, Gary. Shakespeare and Opera. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. Edited by G. Blakemore Evans et al. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974. Sidney, Philip. Sir Philip Sidney. Edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Smart, Mary Ann. “Representations of Madness in Early Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera.” Ph.D. diss., Musicology, Cornell University, 1990. Smith, Marian. Ballet and Opera in the Age of Giselle. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.

310

❧

bibliography

Stravinsky, Igor, and Robert Craft., Conversations with Igor Stravinsky. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Strong, Roy. Festival Designs by Inigo Jones. N.p: International Exhibitions Foundations, 1968. Strunk, Oliver, ed. Source Readings in Music History. Revised by Leo Treitler. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998. Tomlinson, Gary. Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. Toye, Francis. Giuseppe Verdi. New York: Vintage Books, 1959. Van Laan, Thomas F. Role-Playing in Shakespeare. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978. Walls, Peter. Music in the English Courtly Masque. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Winkler, Amanda Eubanks, ed. Music for Macbeth. Middleton, WI: A-R editions, ca. 2004. Yeats, W. B. Essays and Introductions. New York: Collier, 1968.

Index Addison, Joseph, 146 Adorno, Theodor, 25, 298 Aeschylus, Oresteia, 43 Allen, Woody, 3 Ariosto, Ludovico, Orlando Furioso, 6 Arlen, Harold, 176 Armin, Robert, 3, 5, 297; A Nest of Ninnies, 5, 297 Arne, Thomas, 259 Athenaeus of Naucratis, 22, 297 Auden, W. H., 24, 119, 128, 207, 210, 232, 256, 297, 304 Baines, Frances, 298 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 273, 305 Balfe, Michael, 267 Barbier, Jules, 28 Barbieri-Nini, Marianna, 182–83 Barish, Jonas, 183, 187, 303 Barthes, Roland, 109, 300 Basevi, Abramo, 164 Bass, Alan, 304 Bate, W. Jackson, 298 Beaumont, Francis, 63 Beckett, Samuel, 202–4, 225, 303–4; Murphy, 303; Watt, 304 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 265, 82–83, 85, 91–92, 100–101, 108, 112, 114, 148, 265, 300; Appassionata Sonata, 148; Symphony No. 3, 108; Symphony No. 4, 83, 108; Symphony No. 5, 83, 91; Symphony No. 6, 100–101, 265; Symphony No. 7, 83; Symphony No. 9, 82–83, 112, 114, 300 Bellini, Vincenzo, I Capuleti e i Montecchi, 28, 71, 80–81

Belushi, John, 3 Berg, Alban, 272, 286, 290; Wozzeck, 272, 290 Bergman, Fredrick Louis, 298 Berlioz, Hector, 29, 71–114, 151, 189, 276; music by: Ballet des ombres, 105; Béatrice et Bénédict, 100; Harold en Italie, 76, 94; La damnation de Faust, 151; La mort de Cléopâtre, 77; La mort d’Orphée, 112; Les nuits d’été, 106; Les Troyens, 76, 78, 96; L’origine de la harpe, 276; Roméo et Juliette, 29, 71–114, 189; Symphony fantastique, 76, 82, 91–92, 94, 111; Symphonie funèbre et triomphale, 114; writings by: Correspondance générale, 300; Mémoires, 72, 74, 94, 96, 299–300; Les soirées de l’orchestre, 300; À travers chants, 299–301 Bernstein, Jane, 180, 184, 303 Bernstein, Leonard, West Side Story, 37 Biber, Heinrich von, 5, 22, 95, 260; Battalia a 10, 5, 22, 95 Blake, William, 146, 217; Jerusalem, 217 Bloch, Ernest, Macbeth, 30 Blomster, Wesly V., 298 Bloom, Peter, 299 Blow, John, Venus and Adonis, 258 Böcking, Eduard, 302 Boethius, 198 Boito, Arrigo, 29, 167 Bonnet, Marguerite, 304 Boulton, Maureen Barry McCann, 303 Boyce, William, 107 Brahms, Johannes, Double Concerto, 300

312

❧

index

Brando, Marlon, 117, 225 Brecht, Bertolt, 228 Breton, André, 227, 304 Britten, Benjamin, 27, 30, 259, 265–96, 305; Albert Herring, 295; Billy Budd, 295; Cantata Academica, 272; Curlew River, 282; Death in Venice, 282; The Fairy Queen (arrangement of Purcell), 265–66; Gloriana, 295; Johnson over Jordan, 295; The Little Sweep, 290, 295; A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 27, 265–96; Nocturne, 268; Peter Grimes, 266, 295; The Prince of the Pagodas, 272–72, 282; The Rape of Lucretia, 295; The Turn of the Screw, 266, 278, 281, 295; Young Apollo, 275 Brooke, Arthur, Romeus and Juliet, 36, 55, 60 Budden, Julian, 149–50, 152, 302 Burbage, Richard, 228 Burden, Michael, 247, 304 Byrd, William, 15, 27, 273, 297; Come, woeful Orpheus, 15 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 74–76 Cage, John, 22, 293 Cagney, James, 262, 264 Calvino, Italo, 197 Canova, Antonio, 74 Carew, Thomas, 218, 235–36; Coelum Britannicum, 235 Carpenter, Humphrey, 305 Carré, Michel, 28 Carroll, Brendan G., 305 Carroll, Lewis, 225 Casti, Giambattista, 235 Castiglione, Baldesar, The Book of the Courtier, 42–43 Cavalli, Francesco, 297, 14–15, 19, 258; Giasone, 14–15, 19 Chailley, Jacques, 87, 111, 300 Chan, Mary, 304 Chaplin, Charles, 235 Charles I, King of England, 17, 257–58, 305 Charles II, King of England, 25, 235

Chateaubriand, François-René de, 92 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 27, 200–203, 223, 291; The Canterbury Tales, 27; The House of Fame, 200–203, 223, 291 Chekhov, Anton, 70 Cherubini, Luigi, Médée, 95–96 Chevalier, Maurice, 89 Child, Julia, 148 Citron, Pierre, 299–300 Clearchus, 22, 297 Cohan, George M., 264 Cohen, H. Robert, 302 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 41, 60, 79, 92, 104, 119, 146–47, 224, 298; Biographia Literaria, 41, 298; Lectures upon Shakespeare, 60, 298 Collins, William, 145 Cooke, Mervyn, 283, 305 Coward, Noël, 2, 11 Cox, Jeffrey N., 301 Craft, Robert, 302 Crozier, Eric, 290 Dalayrac, Nicolas-Marie, 80 Dalí, Salvador, 206 Daniel, Samuel, Delia, 50 Dante Alighieri, 49, 75, 83, 112, 198 Danyel, John, Can doleful notes, 15 Davenant, William, 25, 142, 236, 240 De Havilland, Olivia, 262 Debussy, Claude, 11, 30; Pelléas et Mélisande, 30 Delacroix, Eugène, 71 Delibes, Léo, Lakmé, 36 Deller, Alfred, 3, 275 Derrida, Jacques, 59, 224, 304 Deschamps, Émile, 87 DeVito, Danny, 275 D’Indy, Vincent, String Quartet No. 2, 288 Disney, Walt, 197 Donizetti, Gaetano, 183–84, 291, 294; Lucia di Lammermoor, 183–84, 294 Donne, John, 211–12, 218, 231; Metempsycosis, 211–12 Dowland, John, 15–17 Draghi, Giovanni Battista, 25

Dryden, John, 25, 63, 65, 250–51 Du Bus, Gervais, Le Roman de Fauvel, 198 Dudley, Robert, 234 Duffin, Ross W., 18, 297 Dukas, Paul, 197 Dumas, Alexandre, 71 Duncan-Jones, Katherine, 304 D’Urfey, Thomas, 253 Dylan, Bob, 11 Einstein, Albert, 201 Elgar, Edward, Falstaff, 29 Eliot, T. S., 219, 304; Sweeney Agonistes, 219 Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 10, 118, 147, 234 Engell, James, 298 Escudier, Léon, 170, 179–81, 303 Evans, G. Blakemore, 297 Evans, Peter, 272, 305 Ferrabosco, Alfonso, 236 Fiske, Roger, 259, 300, 305 Flaubert, Gustave, 70 Fletcher, John, 16, 63; The Mad Lover, 63 Forster, E. M., 145, 295, 302; A Passage to India, 145, 302 Freud, Sigmund, 13, 152, 232, 268 Friedrich Wilhelm IV, King of Prussia, 262–63 Garber, Marjorie, 123, 164, 301–2 Garrick, David, 67–68, 99, 107, 109, 144, 298, 300 Gay, John, The Beggar’s Opera, 259 Gibbons, Christopher, Cupid and Death, 59, 257 Gibbons, Orlando, The Cry of London, 27 Gide, André, Le Prométhée mal enchaîné, 199 Gill, Roma, 301 Girard, René, A Theater of Envy, 37, 42, 298 Giusti, Giuseppe, 151, 179 Gluck, Christoph Willibald, 78–79, 87, 92; Alceste, 78–79, 92

❧

index

313

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 82, 148, 197, 235; Der Zauberlehrling, 197; Faust, 235; Wilhelm Meister, 82 Golding, Arthur, 218 Gounod, Charles, 28, 98, 151, 285, 301; Faust, 151; Roméo et Juliette, 28, 98, 301 Grabu, Louis, Albion and Ascanius, 251 Gray, Thomas, 145 Greenblatt, Stephen, 118, 120, 301 Griepenkerl, Wolfgang Robert, 83 Gruberová, Edita, 281 Guazzo, Stefano, 37 Guiccioli, Teresa, 74–75 Händel, Georg Friedrich, 77, 143–44, 258–60; Acis and Galatea, 143; Comus, 258; Orlando, 260 Harewood, George Lascelles, Earl of, 281 Hart, James, 25 Hart, John, An Orthographie, 20 Haydn, Franz Joseph, 22, 91; Die Schöpfung, 22 Hill, Benny, 3 Hinton, Stephen, 300 Hitler, Adolf, 126 Hogwood, Christopher, 25 Holbein, Hans, The French Ambassadors, 216 Holloway, Clark J., 297 Holman, Peter, 21, 237, 297 Holoman, D. Kern, 97, 300; Berlioz, 300 Holst, Gustav, Choral Symphony, 265 Holst, Imogen, 265, 305 Howard, James, 63 Howard, Richard, 300 Hugo, Victor, 70–72, 76, 80, 299; La Préface de Cromwell, 70, 299 Humfrey, Pelham, 25–26 Humperdinck, Engelbert, 263 Hunter, William B. Jr., 303 Ibsen, Henrik, Peer Gynt, 210 Iswolsky, Hélène, 305 Ives, Charles, 5

314

❧

index

Jackson, Michael, 275 James I, King of England, 10, 16–17, 118, 122, 125, 235–36, 301; Daemonologie, 118, 301 James, Mervyn, 35–36, 298 Johnson, Lionel, 297 Johnson, Robert, 10, 16–19, 21, 23, 27, 143–44, 152, 236, 246, 252; Arm, arm!, 16; Baboons’ Dance, 17, 246, 252; Charon, O Charon, 17, 27; Come away, 143, 152; Full fathom five, 10, 17–18; O let us howl, 17; Orpheus I am, 17; ’Tis late and cold, 17; Where the bee sucks, 10, 17, 19 Johnson, Samuel, 33–34, 40, 61 Jolson, Al, 295 Jonas, Hans, 196, 303 Jones, Inigo, 20, 236–38, 240, 304 Jonson, Ben, 10, 19–23, 124–25, 205, 207, 234, 236–37, 244, 303–4; “A Celebration of Charis in Ten Lyrick Peeces,” 205, 207; Love’s Triumph, 236; The Masque of Hymen, 235; The Masque of Oberon, 237; The Masque of Queens, 19–22, 124; Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, 238 Jory, Victor, 262 Kassler, Jamie, 304 Kean, Edmund, 71 Keats, John, 73, 265 Kemble, Charles, 71 Kemp, Will, 3 Kermode, Frank, 299, 302 Knight, G. Wilson, 23, 26 Knights, L. C., 131, 301 Kodály, Zoltán, Háry János, 268 Korngold, Erich Wolfgang, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 263–67 Lampe, John Frederick, 257, 259–62, 291; Pyramus and Thisbe, 257, 259–62 Lanier, Nicholas, 26, 257, 305; Hero’s Complaint to Leander, 26, 257 Lawes, Henry, Orpheus Hymn, 257 Lawrence, D. H., 268–69, 305

Lawrence, French, 144 Le Sueur, Jean-François, 82 Lear, Edward, 121 Leutgeb, Joseph, 296 Leveridge, Richard, 143–44, 259 Levy, David B., 83, 299 Linley, Thomas, 144–45 Liszt, Franz, 29, 60, 110, 288, 300; Fantasie und Fuge über das Motiv B-A-C-H, 288; Hamlet, 29 Locke, Matthew, 25–26, 59, 258 Loewe, Carl, 197 Lucas, George, 179 Luckett, Richard, 25–26 Ludwig II, King of Bavaria, 296 Lully, Jean-Baptiste, 186–88, 252, 258; Atys, 186–88, 252; Isis, 252; Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, 252 Maffei, Andrea, 148 Mahler, Gustav, 82 Mak, Su Yin, 300 Manet, Edouard, Music in the Tuileries Gardens, 148 Marenzio, Luca, 15 Marlowe, Christopher, Doctor Faustus, 140, 151 Marschner, Heinrich, Der Vampyr, 149–50, 152 Martini, Jean Paul Égide, Sapho, 112 Marx, Harpo, 164 Massenet, Jules, Scènes dramatiques, 29 McGegan, Nicolas, 22, 297 McPhee, Colin, Balinese Ceremonial Music, 282 Méhul, Étienne, Stratonice, 110 Mendelson, Edward, 304 Mendelssohn, Felix, 103–4, 145, 262–65, 267, 270, 279, 283; An die Entfernte, 262; Antigone, 263; Ein Sommernachtstraum, 262–65, 270, 279, 283; Lieder ohne Worte, 264; Neue Liebe, 262; Ödipus, 263 Michelangelo Buonarroti, 92, 148; Rondanini Pietà, 148 Middleton, Thomas, The Witch, 142

Milton, John, 211, 258; Comus, 258; Paradise Lost, 211 Mitchell, Anne G., 298 Moke, Camille, 74, 76 Montaigne, Michel de, 252 Monteverdi, Claudio, 11–17, 26, 34, 166, 257; Hor che’l ciel e la terra, 13; Lamento d’Arianna, 13, 26; Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, 13, 16; L’incoronazione di Poppea, 14; Orfeo, 11 Moore, Thomas, 276 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 91, 110, 154, 260, 267, 283, 289, 296; Die Zauberflöte, 154, 267; Don Giovanni, 110; Ein musikalischer Spass, 260 Murray, Bill, 220 Mustafa, Domenico, 275 Nabokov, Vladimir, Invitation to a Beheading, 216, 304 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 54, 270 Nijinska, Bronislava, 262 North, Roger, 26–27, 241, 257, 298, 304–5; The Musicall Grammarian, 304 Novalis (Georg Friedrich Philipp von Hardenburg), 54 Nyman, Michael, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, 8, 297 Offenbach, Jacques, Les contes d’Hoffmann, 281 Orff, Carl, 279, 282, 294 Otway, Thomas, The History and Fall of Caius Marius, 64 Ovid, 46, 217–18, 263; Amores, 46; Metamorphoses, 218 Paganini, Niccolò, 83, 100 Palmer, Christopher, 305 Parker, Roger, 302 Pavlov, Ivan, 88 Pears, Peter, 265, 281 Pedicord, Harry William, 298 Pepusch, John Christopher, 259 Pepys, Samuel, 258 Perotinus, 281

❧

index

315

Petrarca, Francesco, 14, 29, 46–52, 61–62, 75, 218, 225–26 Petrobelli, Pierluigi, 302 Petrocchi, Giorgio, 298 Piave, Francesco, 29, 149, 162, 167 Pickett, Philip, 297 Piper, Myfanwy, 305 Pirandello, Luigi, 20 Plato, 1, 12, 13, 59; Laws, 59; Phaedrus, 13 Porter, Andrew, 149, 153, 302–3 Porter, Walter, 15, 257 Poulenc, Francis, Banalités, 149 Pound, Ezra, 14 Powell, Dick, 262 Powers, Harold, 169, 302 Price, Curtis, 304 Prigogine, Ilya, 304 Prokofiev, Sergei, Romeo and Juliet, 42 Puccini, Giacomo, 241, 291; La Bohème, 241 Purcell, Henry, 2, 7, 19, 25, 29–30, 63, 143, 158, 240–59, 262–63, 265–67, 281, 304; Bess of Bedlam, 7; Dido and Aeneas, 63, 253, 258; King Arthur, 250; Now Does This Glorious Day Appear, 253; The Fairy Queen, 19, 29–30, 240–56, 262, 265–67, 304; The Indian Queen, 143, 158, 250; The Tempest, 25 Rabkin, Norman, 65, 298 Racine, Jean, Phèdre, 34 Rameau, Jean-Philippe, Les Indes galantes, 241 Rebel, Jean-Fery, Les élémens, 22 Reggio, Pietro, 25 Reinhardt, Max, 235, 262–63, 305 Respighi, Ottorino, I pini di Roma, 100 Reynolds, Larry J., 301 Rich, Christopher, 262 Richter, David H., 298 Ricordi, Giovanni, 152 Ristori, Adelaide, 183–84 Romani, Felice, 28, 80 Rooney, Mickey, 263–64 Rosand, Ellen, 297

316

❧

index

Rosen, David, 149, 153, 302–3 Rossini, Gioacchino, Guillaume Tell, 112 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 79 Rubens, Peter Paul, 70 Rusconi, Carlo, 148 Rushton, Julian, 98, 103, 299–300; Berlioz: Roméo et Juliette, 300 Sabbeth, Daniel, 302 Sacks, Oliver, 8, 297 Salieri, Antonio, Prima la musica, poi le parole, 235 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 284 Savage, Roger, 304 Schiller, Friedrich, 82, 148–49, 263; Die Braut von Messina, 263; Macbeth, 148–49 Schlegel, August Wilhelm von, 147–48, 179, 302–3 Schmidgall, Gary, 156, 302 Schoenberg, Arnold, 110, 203, 272–73, 284, 286, 292–93; Erwartung, 110; Pierrot lunaire, 292 Schumann, Robert, 8, 109; Ich grolle nicht, 8; Kreisleriana, 109 Sciarrino, Salvatore, Macbeth, 30 Scot, Reginald, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, 118 Settle, Elkanah, 253 Shadwell, Thomas, 25 Shakespeare, William, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 11, 29–30, 57, 64, 84, 103, 195–296; Antony and Cleopatra, 36, 119–20, 189, 233; As You Like It, 3, 223, 234; Cymbeline, 23; Hamlet, 6–7, 9, 28–29, 69, 71–72, 83, 118–19, 127–28, 143, 147, 177, 222–23, 229, 234, 258; Henry IV, part II, 4; Henry V, 20, 226; Henry VI, 36; Henry VIII, 2–3; King Lear, 3, 5, 8–9, 63, 76, 107, 121, 214; Love’s Labors Lost, 48, 207, 217, 226; Macbeth, 6, 11, 17, 29–30, 117–91, 223; Measure for Measure, 2, 28; The Merchant of Venice, 129; The Merry Wives of Windsor, 4, 196, 212, 254; Othello, 2, 4, 8–9, 64, 83, 85, 119, 164, 210;

Richard II, 36; Romeo and Juliet, 2, 14, 28–29, 33–114, 206, 209, 214, 224, 228–30; Sonnets, 46–50, 61, 64, 206–7; The Taming of the Shrew, 117, 269; The Tempest, 10–11, 16–26, 29, 63, 125, 143–44, 223, 227, 234, 240, 252, 256; Twelfth Night, 2–4, 83, 204; The Winter’s Tale, 225; Venus and Adonis, 206–7 Shaw, Simon, 297 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, Prometheus Unbound, 36 Shirley, James, 59, 207 Shostakovich, Dmitri, String Quartet, No. 8, 288 Siddons, Sarah, 184 Sidney, Philip, 50, 230, 304; An Apology for Poetry, 230; Astrophil and Stella, 50 Singleton, Charles, 298 Smart, Mary Ann, 182, 303 Smith, J. C., 19 Smith, Marian, 185–86, 303 Smithson, Harriet, 71–72, 74, 76, 81 Sondheim, Stephen, 37 Sorel, Charles, 65–66 Souriau, Maurice, 299 Spenser, Edmund, 50, 64–65; The Faerie Queene, 64–65 Spielberg, Stephen, 236 Spink, Ian, 305 Spontini, Gaspare, La Vestale, 95–96 Stanislavsky, Konstantin, 134 Steibelt, Daniel, 80 Strasberg, Lee, 117 Strauss, Richard, 7, 11, 29, 235, 268, 274, 281, 284, 289, 295–96; Ariadne auf Naxos, 281; Capriccio, 235; Drei Ophelia-Lieder, 7; Ein Heldenleben, 274; Tod und Verklärung, 268 Stravinsky, Igor, 2, 156, 258, 266, 302; Oedipus Rex, 258; The Rake’s Progress, 266; Three Songs from William Shakespeare, 2 Strong, Roy, 304 Strunk, Oliver, 297 Sullivan, Arthur, 29, 89, 152, 267; H. M. S. Pinafore, 89; Macbeth, 29

Sullivan, Ed, 241 Swift, Jonathan, 223, 225; Gulliver’s Travels, 223 Tate, Nahum, 63 Taverner, John, Missa Gloria tibi Trinitatis, 28 Tchaikovsky, Piotr Ilyich, 29, 98; Romeo and Juliet, 98; The Tempest, 29 Telemann, Georg Philipp, Der Tag des Gerichts, 22 Thomas, Ambroise, 28–29; Hamlet, 28; Le songe d’une nuit d’été, 29 Tinguely, Jean, 23, 208; Hommage à New York, 23 Tippett, Michael, Symphony No. 4, 268 Tomlinson, Gary, 302 Toye, Francis, 149–50, 302 Treitler, Leo, 297 Vaccai, Nicola, 80 Van Laan, Thomas F., 119, 301 Varèse, Edgard, 273 Varesi, Felice, 167 Vaughan Williams, Ralph, Serenade to Music, 2 Verdi, Giuseppe, 29–30, 70, 148–91, 293; Aida, 177; Attila, 154; Don Carlos, 177; Ernani, 154; Falstaff, 4, 29, 70, 156, 159, 167, 196, 212, 254; Giovanna d’Arco, 150; Jérusalem, 177; La forza del destino, 177; La traviata, 183; Le trouvère, 177; Les vêpres siciliennes, 177; Macbeth, 29, 148–91; Rigoletto, 70, 156; Otello, 29, 164, 166–67, 177, 180 Vernon, Joseph, 3 Vickers, Nancy J., 302 Vigny, Alfred de, 71

❧

index

317

Virgil, 75–76, 79, 83 Vitry, Philippe de, 200 Vivaldi, Antonio, 187 Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet de, 64, 69, 72, 77 Wagner, Richard, 11, 28, 60, 76, 103, 114, 156, 167, 177, 195, 241, 263, 269, 275, 289, 296; Das Liebesverbot, 28; Der fliegende Holländer, 269; Der Ring des Nibelungen, 195; Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, 114; Parsifal, 275; Tannhäuser, 156, 177; Tristan und Isolde, 60, 76, 103 Wallace, William, 267 Walls, Peter, 305 Warrack, John, 299 Webb, John, 240 Weber, Carl Maria von, 92, 145, 149–50, 176; Der Freischütz, 149–50, 176 Weill, Kurt, 282 Weldon, John, 25 Wernhard, Eike, 299 Whitman, Walt, Leaves of Grass, 258 Wilde, Oscar, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 72 Williams, Tennesee, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 248 Wilson, John (seventeenth-century), 17 Wilson, John, 298 Winkler, Amanda Eubanks, 301 Yeats, William Butler, 9, 146, 239, 297, 302 Yonge, C. G., 297 Zall, P. M., 297 Zingarelli, Niccolò, 80

Eastman Studies in Music

The Poetic Debussy: A Collection of His Song Texts and Selected Letters (Revised Second Edition) Edited by Margaret G. Cobb

Music and Musicians in the Escorial Liturgy under the Habsburgs, 1563–1700 Michael J. Noone

Concert Music, Rock, and Jazz since 1945: Essays and Analytical Studies Edited by Elizabeth West Marvin and Richard Hermann

Analyzing Wagner’s Operas: Alfred Lorenz and German Nationalist Ideology Stephen McClatchie

Music and the Occult: French Musical Philosophies, 1750–1950 Joscelyn Godwin “Wanderjahre of a Revolutionist” and Other Essays on American Music Arthur Farwell, edited by Thomas Stoner French Organ Music from the Revolution to Franck and Widor Edited by Lawrence Archbold and William J. Peterson Musical Creativity in Twentieth-Century China: Abing, His Music, and Its Changing Meanings (includes CD) Jonathan P. J. Stock Elliott Carter: Collected Essays and Lectures, 1937–1995 Edited by Jonathan W. Bernard Music Theory in Concept and Practice Edited by James M. Baker, David W. Beach, and Jonathan W. Bernard

The Gardano Music Printing Firms, 1569–1611 Richard J. Agee “The Broadway Sound”: The Autobiography and Selected Essays of Robert Russell Bennett Edited by George J. Ferencz Theories of Fugue from the Age of Josquin to the Age of Bach Paul Mark Walker The Chansons of Orlando di Lasso and Their Protestant Listeners: Music, Piety, and Print in Sixteenth-Century France Richard Freedman Berlioz’s Semi-Operas: Roméo et Juliette and La damnation de Faust Daniel Albright The Gamelan Digul and the Prison-Camp Musician Who Built It: An Australian Link with the Indonesian Revolution Margaret J. Kartomi

“The Music of American Folk Song” and Selected Other Writings on American Folk Music Ruth Crawford Seeger, edited by Larry Polansky and Judith Tick Portrait of Percy Grainger Edited by Malcolm Gillies and David Pear Berlioz: Past, Present, Future Edited by Peter Bloom The Musical Madhouse (Les Grotesques de la musique) Hector Berlioz Translated and edited by Alastair Bruce Introduction by Hugh Macdonald The Music of Luigi Dallapiccola Raymond Fearn Music’s Modern Muse: A Life of Winnaretta Singer, Princesse de Polignac Sylvia Kahan The Sea on Fire: Jean Barraqué Paul Griffiths “Claude Debussy As I Knew Him” and Other Writings of Arthur Hartmann Edited by Samuel Hsu, Sidney Grolnic, and Mark Peters Foreword by David Grayson Schumann’s Piano Cycles and the Novels of Jean Paul Erika Reiman Bach and the Pedal Clavichord: An Organist’s Guide Joel Speerstra

Historical Musicology: Sources, Methods, Interpretations Edited by Stephen A. Crist and Roberta Montemorra Marvin The Pleasure of Modernist Music: Listening, Meaning, Intention, Ideology Edited by Arved Ashby Debussy’s Letters to Inghelbrecht: The Story of a Musical Friendship Annotated by Margaret G. Cobb Explaining Tonality: Schenkerian Theory and Beyond Matthew Brown The Substance of Things Heard: Writings about Music Paul Griffiths Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair Annegret Fauser Aspects of Unity in J. S. Bach’s Partitas and Suites: An Analytical Study David W. Beach Letters I Never Mailed: Clues to a Life Alec Wilder Annotated by David Demsey Foreword by Marian McPartland Wagner and Wagnerism in NineteenthCentury Sweden, Finland, and the Baltic Provinces: Reception, Enthusiasm, Cult Hannu Salmi Bach’s Changing World: Voices in the Community Edited by Carol K. Baron

CageTalk: Dialogues with and about John Cage Edited by Peter Dickinson European Music and Musicians in New York City, 1840-1900 Edited by John Graziano Schubert in the European Imagination, Volume 1: The Romantic and Victorian Eras Scott Messing Opera and Ideology in Prague: Polemics and Practice at the National Theater, 1900-1938 Brian S. Locke

Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Worlds: Innovation and Tradition in Twentieth-Century American Music Edited by Ray Allen and Ellie M. Hisama Schubert in the European Imagination, Volume 2: Fin-de-Siècle Vienna Scott Messing Musicking Shakespeare: A Conflict of Theatres Daniel Albright

In this book, Daniel Albright, one of today’s most intrepid explorers of the border territory between literature and music, offers insights into how composers of genius can help us to understand Shakespeare. Musicking Shakespeare demonstrates how four composers—Purcell, Berlioz, Verdi, and Britten—respond to the distinctive features of Shakespeare’s plays: their unwieldiness, their refusal to fit into interpretive boxes, their ranting quality, their arbitrary bursts of gorgeousness. The four composers break the normal forms of opera—of music altogether—in order to come to terms with the challenges that Shakespeare presents to the music dramatist. Musicking Shakespeare begins with an analysis of Shakespeare’s play The Tempest as an imaginary Jacobean opera and as a real Restoration opera. It then discusses works that respond with wit and sophistication to Shakespeare’s irony, obscurity, contortion, and heft: Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette, Verdi’s Macbeth, Purcell’s The Fairy Queen, and Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. These works are problematic in the ways that Shakespeare’s plays are problematic. Shakespeare’s favorite dramatic device is to juxtapose two kinds of theatres within a single play, such as the formal masque and the loose Elizabethan stage. The four composers studied here respond to this aspect of Shakespeare’s art by devising music dramas that call opera into question. Just as Shakespeare risked the collapse of illusion by writing plays that were far too playful, or not nearly playful enough, so some of the composers drawn to Shakespeare liked to go beyond the comfort zone of the operatic medium. Daniel Albright is the Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature at Harvard University. He has written extensively on issues in the comparative arts, especially concerning the twentieth century. Among his books are Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot and the Science of Modernism; Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts; Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources; and, from the University of Rochester Press, Berlioz’s Semi-Operas: Roméo et Juliette and La Damnation de Faust.