[In the following essay, Iselin explores the relationship between music, myth, and politics in The Tempest, comparing classical and Renaissance views regarding the power and value of music and statecraft.]

In an early scene of Henry VIII (or All Is True), while denouncing the ‘spells of France’ displayed at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and the extravagant vanities imitated from the French, Sir Thomas Lovell rejoices in the recent prohibition of these foreign customs and deplores their efficacy in the form of a local ‘O tempora, O mores’, which is not altogether devoid of personal frustration or innocent of erotic meaning:

LOVELL
                                                                      The sly whoresons
Have got a speeding trick to lay down ladies.
A French song and a fiddle has no fellow.
SANDS
The devil fiddle 'em! I am glad they are going,
For sure there's no converting of 'em. Now
An honest country lord, as I am, beaten
A long time out of play, may bring his plainsong,
And have an hour of hearing, and by'r Lady,
Held current music, too.

(Henry VIII 1.3.39-47)

The characteristic reduction of music to an object of discourse, the use of the musical double entendre, with the implicit equation of music and love making, and the superior efficacy of French—and now fortunately illicit—music as erotic recipe, thus estrange the musical material in a threefold manner, making it simultaneously improper, foreign, and alien. Music's potential for seduction is held dangerous to courtiers and puritans alike, and its Trojan horse status, on the stage and elsewhere, raises issues of limits and transgression, both semiotic and ideological, not to mention the Mercurial roles of spies, plotters, ambassadors, messengers, regularly ascribed to musicians in the court and on the stage.¹ Whether it is performed by an aerial spirit acting as informer or by a man of mode, music has a taste of the foreign. Is not Sir Andrew Aguecheek one who ‘plays o' th' viol-de-gamboys, and speaks three or four languages word for word without book’ (Twelfth Night 1.3.23-4)?

More often than not ridiculed as inappropriate and ineffectual—not to say incongruous—stage music is also the butt of institutional criticism in the Puritan attacks on entertainment. An extreme version of artistic ‘abuse’, the former constitutes a territory hardly defensible even to the warmest apologists of art and music. This, The Praise of Musicke—one plausible reply to The Schoole of Abuse (1579)—posthumously² and anonymously published in Oxford seven years after Gosson's tract, makes a single passing remark on what is presented as the object of an ethically, culturally, and politically heated debate. In non-committal, rather cautious terms, the hybrid, ‘depraved’ form of art—to follow Quintilian³—is rhetorically given up through paralipsis and ideologically held at a distance, in order not to contaminate more respectable and safer grounds:

For I dare not speak of dauncing or the theatrall spectacles, least I pull whole swarms of enimies upon me […] I confesse I am accessory to their injurie against Musick in bereaving it of these so ample, notable provinces, because I doe not by open resistance hinder their riot. For howsoever obscenity may bring the stage in suspicion of unchasteness and incontinency, make dauncing disfavorable and odious, I am sure that neither of them keeping themselves under saile, that is not overreaching their honest and lawful circumstances, can want either good groundes to authorize them, or sufficient patronage to maintain them.⁴

The vocabulary of war, of territorial loss, confirms that in the period's controversy over art and entertainment in general, music in the theatre is a fragile, nearly untenable outpost. This indeterminacy of strategic status may partly account for its interstitial, front-line position in the field of theatrical representation and inscribes it in the topography of warfare. The military metaphor is not fortuitous, as is evident in the notions of ‘penetration’ and ‘appropriation’, two neoplatonic concepts central to the definition of music's efficacy. Not only the power of music per se, but also the comparative power of music and drama are at stake in this cultural confrontation. It is no accident that The Tempest—a play itself largely concerned with issues of power(s)—makes several species of power, the musical, the magical and the political, coalesce in the character of Prospero, conferring on him a complex status as artist, magus and ruler through the unifying discourse of myth, and that of praise, the epideictic.⁵ A song, even if not sung in parts, may thus be viewed as a virtual cultural polyphony, a potential form of debate.

In the Shakespearian canon, a significant change may also be traced in the clearly discernible shift from verbal allusion and complex musical polysemy to a more and more abundant inscription of actual music and songs in the plays; this possibly reflects the growing expectations of the audiences in terms of stage-music, making the latter an economic as well as an artistic stake in the commercial rivalry between the theatres and the dramatists. It is significant, for instance, that the play in the canon in which most is said about music, The Taming of the Shrew, is paradoxically one in which the scanty stage music holds very little meaning.⁶ Conversely, The Tempest represents the terminus ad quem of an evolution and has the position of an ultimate crossroads of dramaturgical and musical channels, with a considerable amount of music and song, quite a few significant verbal commentaries on the music actually heard on the stage, and few—altogether commonplace—conceits of musical tenor. The inclusion of music and song can therefore be seen as part of an implicit cultural and economic transaction between the dramatist and his audience.

Concluding her study of the singer's voice in Elizabethan drama, Elise Bickford Jorgens develops this idea of an implicit polyphony contained in any stage music:

in these songs, the singer's voice provides us with many voices, carrying on, at several levels, the period's cultural debate about the physical, spiritual, emotional, and moral efficacy of music. The voice of the dramatic character, […] the voice of the playwright […]. And beneath these a multitude of other voices from the culture sing out: the Gassons and the Cases, the Mulcasters and the Elyots and the Lodges and the Brights, and the members of the audience who—whatever their private response to the songs they heard from the stage—were all in some way party to the debate.⁷

Even though The Tempest does not characteristically echo the debate raging in the late 1580s, as the play is—even if problematically—related to the Jonsonian Court masque⁸ and the sphere of private theatres, still it will be shown how the praise of music constitutes a discursive pattern, ‘un schème de culture’ in Jean Jacquot's words,⁹ which has late representatives at the beginning of James I's reign,¹⁰ and above all which is contrapuntally related to another discourse of encomium, the panegyric of the Prince. In the discursive polyphony on the theme of power, musical myth and political allegory will thus be shown to represent two closely connected parts in The Tempest.

Inherent in stage music is therefore a set of discourses making up an implicit system of exchange, one obvious aspect of which is the variety of the responses of stage audiences, in the form of verbal commentaries, and those of the paying audience more or less ironically anticipated or echoed on the stage. Nevertheless, the polyphony is not only to be construed as the superposition of voices of varying actantial relevance, but also as a dialectical relationship of mutual framing—the coalescence/confrontation of two mutually dependent sign-systems—, since on the one hand music is the indispensable gambit of theatrical representation, on the other no musical piece is left unframed by language, the variety of these verbal commentaries and responses inducing in turn one more polyphonic construction to the whole.

A crossroads of media, verbal and nonverbal, the theatre is also a crossroads of discourses. For the isle in The Tempest is not only ‘full of noises’, as Caliban has it, but also full of voices and discourses. Variously defined in the text as manipulative, civilizing, maddening, magical, rapacious—like Prospero-as-ruler—music has a particular significance in The Tempest as it features as a metonymic version of Prospero's power, while at the same time it is also the figure of the challenge to this very power in its discordant, anarchic dimension. Its plural meanings in the play do but reproduce its contested meanings in the culture of the period, and The Tempest's music(s) may thus be said to articulate several discursive voices: those of myth and praise, that of furor, but also those of disruption and scepticism.

The isle appears as a nautical magnet and a place full of acoustic oddities even before the landing of Prospero; the transaction between Ariel and the wrecked magician has immediate acoustic resonances: the groans of the imprisoned spirit, which ‘Did make wolves howl, and penetrate the breasts / Of ever-angry bears’ (1.2.288-9) are turned to playing and singing throughout the play. Musical (ex-)change in politics has become a trope with the usurping brother Antonio, who, ‘having both the key / Of officer and office, set all hearts i'th' state / To what tune pleased his ear’ (1.2.83-5). Both categories of subjects therefore comply musically with their respective prince's likings. In the economy of power, music regularly appears as an asset, an object of implicit or explicit transaction, as well as a tool of metamorphosis and manipulation. Prospero promises a musical show to reward Ferdinand's chaste resolution—and possibly, as will be seen, to cool the heat of physical desire; similarly, all the retributive and elective music in The Tempest is part of the political deal, when some are granted sleep through ‘solemn music’, and others given warnings; virtually an opiate for the people, the acoustic wealth of the isle is oneirically transmuted into ‘riches ready to drop upon [Caliban]’ (3.2.144-5). Another form of exchange takes place when Ariel amends the tune of Caliban's catch, learnt from Stefano (3.2.119-29), the ‘three-men's song’ literally becoming a ‘free-men's’ one. Another complex form of musical negotiation is reflected in Caliban's song of rebellion. ‘No more dams I'll make for fish’, which has been seen to contain a reference to those artificial fish weirs which were a traditional skill of the aborigines of Virginia, described by Ralph Lane on his visit to Virginia in 1586. These dams, whose construction was intricate enough, represented an important source of sustenance for the colonists—hence a fear that the Indians might destroy them.¹¹ Travel literature thus provides a credible context for Prospero's resigned confession to Miranda that, villainous as Caliban is (1.2.311), they ‘cannot miss him’, so indispensable are his practical skills—a discourse clearly resonant with colonial anxieties:

                                                                      He does make our fire,
Fetch in our wood, and serves in offices
That profit us.

(1.2.313-15)

It is not too far-fetched, I think, to see in Prospero's beast of burden a local version of Zethus, the more pragmatic of the two mythical twins, the one who did lift the stones to build the walls of Thebes, whereas the new Amphion, Prospero, can raise and dissolve in a single breath ‘cloud-capped towers’, ‘gorgeous palaces’, and ‘solemn temples’ to boot (4.1.152-3). The allusion to the wonderful musician is ironically made by the two usurping brothers, Antonio and Sebastian, while debunking the generous and visionary chattering of Gonzalo:

ANTONIO
His word is more than the miraculous harp.
SEBASTIAN
He hath raised the wall, and houses too.
ANTONIO
What impossible matter will he make easy next?

(2.1.91-4)

Ironically enough, the powers thus derided by the two ‘auro-sceptics’ are effectively at work, much of the action in the play being attributable to the workings of the air and musical sound. The figure of the mythical hero is thus exploded into two dramatis personae, Prospero and Gonzalo; besides, the Amphion myth itself is fragmented and displaced, giving birth to the confrontation of two attitudes towards language, the magic and poetic view of the natural origin of language as opposed to its conventional definition. Characteristically, the usurpers and the boatswain question the magical and the tropical senses, deride their inconsistencies at a literal level, and use blasphemous idiom. In the initial scene, which stages an acoustic competition between Prospero's loudspeakers and the characters' voices, the boatswain exclaims: ‘What care these roarers for the name of king?’ (1.1.15-16). Here not only do the topical and the tropical meanings superpose—‘roarers’ referring both to the billows and the street rioters—but while the name of the king proves an ineffective talisman to ‘command these elements to silence, and work the peace of the present’ (1.1.20-1), it is precisely not the name, but the word of ‘wronged duke of Milan’ that is commanding. The debate on the status of language thus seems to be ironically blurred by dramaturgical strategies, or even truncated perspectives, as the irony only appears retrospectively, when we are told in the following scene that it was by his ‘art’ that Prospero ‘put the wild water in this roar’ (1.2.2).

Conversely, traces of verbal realism¹² or auralist magic are to be found among the other school of thought, the two attitudes being represented in Gonzalo's winning remark in the last scene:

GONZALO
                                                                                                              … Now, blasphemy,
That swear'st grace o'erboard: not an oath on shore?
Hath thou no mouth by land?

(5.1.221-3)

or in Prospero's address to his brother:

PROSPERO
For you, most wicked sir, whom to call brother
Would even infect my mouth, I do forgive
Thy rankest fault.

(5.1.132-4)

A burlesque, literalized, rendition of the cult of the word can be seen in the parody of a traditional scene of dubbing staged by the mock-usurpers, with Caliban kissing what Stefano blasphemously calls ‘the book’. The parallel with the serious magical attitude goes even further, as the object of their cult is unwillingly drowned in the pool, and this ‘infinite loss’ (4.1.210) operates a grotesque anticipation of the deliberate drowning taking place within a hundred lines, that of the instruments of the ritual, the staff and the book (5.1.54-7). The last page perused by Prospero may well have been concerned with musical charms as described by Ficino,¹³ judging from the proximity of the two statements: ‘when I have required / Some heavenly music […], I'll drown my book’ (5.1.51-7). This drowning, and its grotesque double, thus cast a problematical, fragmented, light on the mythical, unnamed, exemplum of Amphion. Disruption, construed both as interruption on the part of the Magus and as insurrection on that of the rebels, threatens the unifying discourse of myth, which happens to be equally that of empire, since the musical powers of the hero are subservient to the political ambition to wall in the city of Thebes.

Another musical myth lurks beneath the surface of the text, as its hero tries to survive above the surface of water; one can catch a glimpse of the figure of Arion, one associated with theft, treachery and watery death, in Prospero's account of his voyage in exile:

PROSPERO
There they hoist us,
To cry to th' sea that roared to us, to sigh
To th' winds, whose pity, sighing back again,
Did us loving wrong.

(1.2.148-51)

Life does not depend here on the legendary dolphin charmed by the musician's valedictory song, but on the ‘rotten carcase of a butt, not rigged, / Nor tackle, sail, nor mast’ (1.2.146-7), a mere ruined barrel then, which had been ‘prepared’ for that purpose. The notions of premeditation, of nightly plotting and of political usurpation, the lexical oddity of ‘butt’ as an unrecorded trope for ‘boat’, and the merging of the discourses of statecraft and music already observed, may be seen to constitute a network of hermeneutic signs and suggest the palimpsest vision of a living monarch, equally ‘rapt in secret studies’—a new Arion—who had recently been threatened by a plot involving gunpowder barrels in 1605.

An interesting verbal parallel can here be established between Ferdinand's commentary on the ‘effect’ of the isle's music,

This music crept by me upon the waters,
Allaying both their fury and my passion
With its sweet air

(1.2.394-6)

and the Arion fable as told in the text of The Praise of Musicke:

Arion seeing no way to escape the furie of his cruel enemies, tooke his Citterne in his hand, and to his instrument sang his last song, wherewith not only the dolphines flocked in multitudes about the ship readie to receive him on their backes, but even the sea that rude and barbarous element, being before roughe and tempestuous, seemed to allay his choler, waxing calme on a sodaine, as if it had bene to give Arion quiet passage through the waves.¹⁴

Another evident association of Prospero with the arch-musician, Orpheus, may be perceived in the definition of iatromusic,

PROSPERO
A solemn air, and the best comforter
To an unsettled fancy, cure thy brains,
Now useless, boiled within thy skull.

(5.1.58-60)

Perspective—a visual, elective device introduced into the dramaturgy of the court masque in 1605 by Inigo Jones, that creates ‘another focus for the show of royal power’¹⁵—operates here: if one can see an Orphic magus and pedagogue in Prospero, then the same royal perspective makes it possible to

Behold how like another Orpheus, Amphion, and Arion, he draweth to the true knowledge of God, very salvage Beasts, Forrests, Trees and Stones, by the sweet Harmony of his harp: the most fierce and wilde, the most stupid and insenced, the most brutish and voluptuous, are changed and civilized by the delectable sound of his Musicke.¹⁶

The epideictic discourse therefore seems to unfold an implicit two-part polyphony: the praise of art and music being the plain-song, the praise of the inspired sovereign the descant, with the addition of the discourse of disruption, a burden distinctly audible at times too.

The common denominator between the first two discourses is obviously the notion of ‘power’, which appears in the related form of ‘effects’. In his Apologia Musices (1588), John Case, the Aristotelian scholar, declares he will refrain from resorting to mythology in his defence of music; still it is only a few pages later that he comes to list not only the classical mirabilia, which are as many topoi, among which those ‘nymphs Islands’, in Lydia, ‘which at the sound of the trumpet forthwith come into the middle of the sea …’,¹⁷ but also lists the modern analogues of acoustic mirabilia so as to establish the continuity between the classical and the contemporary worlds:

[…] in the much renowned church of Winton, a choir—as it were—of the sweetest harmonies, with no human voice, was distinctly heard, and with no little admiration, for many years: […] at the sepulchure of a Scottish nobleman dead for few years, some kind of music—shall I say celestial or terrestrial, doleful for sure—could be heard.¹⁸

The uncertainty Case identifies is probably of the sort expressed by Ferdinand, who wonders about the origin and the destination of this non-human harmony:

FERDINAND
Where should this music be? I' th' air, or th' earth?
It sounds no more; and sure it waits upon
Some god o' th' island.

(1.2.390-2)

This is no mortal business, nor no sound
That the earth owes. I hear it now above me.

(1.2.409)

But the discourse of myth, which articulates that of power, is here brought to its limits: the deceptive ‘ditty’ of Ariel's song does have political implications in that it furthers the dynastic premeditation of Prospero, but simultaneously its potential for seduction and erotic allurement contradicts the father's anxious concern with chastity. In playing with music, Prospero more than once proves to be a sorcerer's apprentice rather than a full-fledged magus. He even seems to trap himself in his own stratagem when the beauty of the masque makes him forget the ‘foul conspiracy of the beast Caliban’, and causes the much debated ‘interruption’. It is indeed through the channel of ‘noises, sounds and sweet airs’ that access is given to the ‘artificial paradise’ of golden dreams (3.2.138-46); yet the musical fable is unambiguously annexed by the theatre when musical transe becomes simultaneously a process both purifying and introspective—merging the characteristics of the two aristotelian notions of catharsis and anagnorisis:

ALONSO
                                                            O, it is monstrous, monstrous!
Methought the billows spoke and told me of it,
The winds did sing it to me, and the thunder,
That deep and dreadful organ-pipe, pronounced
The name of Prosper. It did bass my trespass.
Therefor my son i' th' ooze is bedded, and
I'll seek him deeper than e'er plummet sounded,
And with him there lie mudded.

(3.3.95-102)

Musical furor is here conducive to a forced anamnesis, a painful recollection, the mise en scène of guilt: it operates as an acoustic ‘mirror of truth’ held up to Alonso to purgatory ends. Shakespeare—or Prospero—here merges the two meanings Aristotle gives of catharsis, one referring to the tragic, the other to the musical experience.¹⁹ The alchemical meaning of the word tempest, ‘a boiling process which removes impurities from base metal and facilitates its transmutation into gold’,²⁰ only adds a further symbolic significance to the process of change and exchange, metamorphosis and negotiation, at work in the play's musical dramaturgy. If music is a tool for political manipulation, it can be equally asserted that it is in turn the object of theatrical manipulation. For if music in The Tempest can be ascribed the two definitions of the Aristotelian catharsis, and if nemesis follows the path of forced recollection, anamnesis, still this version of the musical furor is a downgraded one. To neo-Platonic philosophers, from Ficino to Parrizi, ‘furor was nothing other than a forced anamnesis, a celestial raptio, by which individual planetary Muses recalled to themselves the souls most like them’.²¹ In The Tempest, poetic justice has turned into musical retribution, the powers of music have become those of Prospero and these powers are precisely those of ‘penetration’ and ‘appropriation’, two notions which partake both of the aural and the political, two versions of imperium applied to the spheres of the physical body and the body politic. Plato's simple definition in The Republic,

Rhythm and harmoniai penetrate most deeply into the recesses of the soul²²

is extrapolated by Ficino, who gives of it a quasi-imperialistic definition in his commentary on the Timœus:

Musical sound moves the body by the movement of the air; by purified air it excites the airy spirit, which is the bond of body and soul; by emotion it affects the senses and at the same time the soul; by meaning it affects the mind; finally by the very movement of its subtle air it penetrates strongly; by its temperament it flows smoothly; by its consonant quality it floods us with a wonderful pleasure; by its nature, both spiritual and natural, it at once seizes and claims as its own man in his entirety.²³

Ficino here defines a form of prerogative that does not altogether differ from Prospero's virtually violent desire of aural appropriation of Miranda:

PROSPERO
Dost thou hear?
MIRANDA
Your tale, sir, would cure deafness.

(1.2.106)

A run-of-the-mill version of ‘furor’ is offered in the scene where Ariel charms the three drunkards' ears only to drive them into a ‘filthy-mantled pool’, their quasi-‘swinish’ behaviour being reminiscent of Circe's metamorphosis of Ulysses' companions on the isle of Aeaea,²⁴ and of the German myth of the ‘Rattenfänger von Hameln’,

ARIEL
I told you, sir, they were red-hot with drinking;
So full of valour that they smote the air
For breathing in their faces, beat the ground
For kissing of their feet; yet always bending
Towards their project. Then I beat my tabor,
At which like unbacked colts they pricked their ears,
Advanced their eyelids, lifted up their noses
As they smelt music. So I charmed their ears
That calf-like they my lowing followed, through
Toothed briars, sharp furzes, pricking gorse, and thorns,
Which entered their frail skins. At last I left them
I' th' filthy-mantled pool beyond your cell,
There dancing up to th' chins, that the foul lake
O'er-stunk their feet.

(4.1.171-84)

Soul loss, ‘alienatio mentis’ to use Ficino's phrase, is parodied here in grotesque manner, human beings being brought to the level of ‘brutish beasts’. It is interesting to note that the exact tune of Stefano's catch played in tune—musical exact truth—deceives more than alcohol itself: the play literalizes and dramatizes the adage: ‘musica multos magis dementat quam vinum’.²⁵

This bacchic context seems to be poles apart from the discourse of praise. Nevertheless, Ariel's recital bears more verbal resemblances to Shakespeare's own version of the encomium musicæ, in The Merchant of Venice:

For do but note a wild and wanton herd
Or race of youthful and unhandled colts,
Fetching mad bounds, bellowing and neighing loud,
Which is the hot condition of their blood,
If they but hear perchance a trumpet sound,
Or any air of music touch their ears,
You shall perceive them make a mutual stand,
Their savage eyes turned to a modest gaze
By the sweet power of music.

(5.1.71-9)

The classical source for this topos is certainly Ælian,

But the mares of Libya … are equally captivated by the sound of the pipe [aulos]. They become gentle and tame and cease to prance and be skittish, and follow the herdsman wherever the music lead them; and if he stands still, so do they. But if he plays his pipes with greater vigour, tears of pleasure stream from their eyes.²⁶

But the passage immediately following in Ælian is occulted in most texts of praise, as it describes the erogenous power of music—a moot point which encomiasts would rather not tackle. They would not readily cite exempla demonstrating the diametrically opposed effect of Dorian music, of which Clytemnestra's story is the paradigm:

Touching the first effects of musick we read that Agamemnon going to the war of Troy left behind him Demodocus, an excellent musician, skilfull in Modo Dorio, to keep chast his wife Clitemnestra, whom he nicely had in suspicion of wantonness and levity with Ægistus.²⁷

One may wonder in this light if what Prospero calls a ‘trick’ of his, a ‘vanity of [his] art’ does not partake of this manipulative policy of desire which inscribes ‘the contract of true love’ in the frame of cultural, dynastic and erotic exchange. The masque, or rather the ‘allusion’ to it (in David Lindley's words²⁸)—or the citation of it—thus seems to explore the limits of power at several levels: musical, mimetic, ethical and imperial. Its interruption, apparently due to local amnesia and the musical show's potential for seduction, might be seen as the term of a particular type of exploration, the ‘artistic correlative’ of the final drowning of the book.

Another instance of how myth, music and politics merge in the play's dramaturgy is the way musical messages are either semanticized, or de-semanticized: Alonso perceives the name of ‘Prosper’ in the thunderous celestial organ; conversely, Gonzalo recollects the awakening song (2.1.305-10), whose allegorical meaning is transparent (‘Open-eyed conspiracy / His time doth take […] Awake, awake’), as first a mere ‘humming’ (322), then a ‘noise’ (325) which obviously contrasts with the ‘hollow burst of bellowing’ that Antonio and Sebastian pretend they have heard. The inarticulate sound Gonzalo alludes to, and the visual spectacle of the two men with their swords drawn, looking ‘aghast’ (313), dramatically juxtaposed here, are evocative of another emblematic confrontation: if Gonzalo's ‘humming’ be construed as the sound of bees, then one is entitled to perceive in Gonzalo's acoustic reception the attributes of the Golden Age as represented by Cesare Ripa, an age ‘without winter’ in which ‘pearls grew under the water’²⁹ (Malherbe), whereas the visual tableau of the ‘false’ brothers is characteristically that of the Iron Age, emblematized by a ‘shield, in the midst of which fraud is represented in the figure of a monster with a man's head and a serpent's body, or, if you like, of a siren alluring passers-by to devour them.’³⁰ The allegorical reading of Ripa thus telescopes Ariel's discriminating, elective musical process: verbalizing one's response to music is tantamount to defining the symbolic age one belongs to. The co-existence of ages and their problematical dialogue is the emblematic version of the play's multidiscursive, polyphonic construction.

The ‘noises’ of the island, because they are perceived in such an individualized, differentiated manner, and induce such discordant commentaries, contribute to the æsthetic uncertainty of the play, and to the spectator's own doubts as to the validity of his or her own experience. The efficiency of music, represented verbally and dramatically, is indeed regularly ‘taken over’ by that of the theatre. Not a single musical citation is innocent of a mise-en-scène in the play—possibly except Ariel's last song: ‘Where the bee sucks …’, which nevertheless is to be found in the vicinity of a highly theatrical scene of magical dressing. In the musical utopia of The Tempest, music can hardly be said to be given ‘for nothing’: the terms of the exchange, if implicit, are made clear by the action of the play itself. Not only does music give access to the intimate theatre of the self, or such experiences as dream, trance, phantasm, madness, sleep or traumatic recollection, but it can be said to be an actual agency.

The general tenor of this paper is that the play may be viewed as a series of dramatic variations on and explorations of the limits of authority. The following remarks are a tentative attempt at mapping the discursive ‘maze’ of the play, and the problematical inscription of music in its economy. Translated into musical idiom, it is the notion of ‘effect’ which is at issue for at least six reasons.

(1) The notion of effect, and its extreme form, that of ‘furor’, is distanced, not to say alienated on the stage by its individualized, highly differentiated, reception. For instance, Ferdinand perceives the first song as ‘music’, the second one as ‘ditty’, though we have heard both as songs; Gonzalo is the only one to perceive Ariel's song, but does not understand or remember its verbal message.

(2) The Ficinian definition receives both a serious treatment and a farcical, grotesque one. This contrapuntal development is itself complicated by its correlation with the notion of power. It is in the course of an insurrection that musical dissonance appears in the form of the drunkards' canon. If the catch is a regular emblem of inebriation on the stage, here the song becomes a song of a free thought, as its burden claims, as well as a failed attempt at perfect equality—the three voices being in perfect imitation. It is probably far-fetched to read a precise ideological or allegorical meaning into this scene; still the exclusion of this part from Prospero's harmonious scheme is precisely the cause of its failure. As Yves Peyré suggests in his brilliant analysis of Ariel's masques, ‘the final chord of The Tempest integrates wrong notes: it depends on the lucid integration of the discordant elements, not on their exclusion’.³¹

(3) The musical ‘effect’ is regularly distanced or even undermined by the recurrent allusion to the illusory and transient status of the representation. The staging of musical deceit partakes of this strategy, whether the text of a dirge convincingly tells lies, or the right tune of a song allays the drunkards' fury only to deceive them the better. Musical truth may thus turn to dramatic lie. The contest between the two media turns to a spectacular encounter.

(4) Owing to the fickle nature of music, the ‘furor’ theme receives an all but univocal treatment. The discourse of praise, which extols the power(s) of music, is debunked by the numerous Circean, Siren-like episodes which the play offers, as if to warn against the excess of power. The discourse of abuse paradoxically surfaces here.

(5) Music is not only an agency; it operates in the play as correlative of other discourses, those of desire and authority being the most prominent.

(6) The final remark far exceeds the scope of this discussion and is utterly tentative: can one not see in the fragmented discourse of effect and its correlates the unstable interplay of two orders of knowledge at a particular moment of history, the shift from magic, auralist thought to a more analytical, visualist type of representation, which the final ‘vision’ of the two young princes ‘playing at chess’ may emblematize? The drowning of the book, which a long tradition has made to mean the poet's farewell to the stage, might thus be viewed as a farewell to a particular approach to poetics.

Notes

1. For the roles of the musicians William Kinlock and James Lander in Scotland, see Helena Mennie Shire, Song, Dance and Poetry of the Court of Scotland under James VI (Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp. 71 and 77; for those of William Byrd, Alfonso Ferrabosco and Thomas Morley in England, see Alan Haynes, Invisible Power: The Elizabethan Secret Service, 1570-1603 (Alan Sutton Publishing Limited, Phoenix Mill, 1992), pp. 12, 71, 79, 84.

2. The text of The Praise of Musicke (anon., Oxford, 1586) is presented by its publisher, Joseph Barnes, as ‘an Orphan of Musickes children’, a statement which, in the absence of contrary evidence, must allude to the death of its author.

3. Quintilian, De institutione oratorica, I.X.9-33.

4. The Praise of Musicke, pp. 79-80.

5. In this connection, see Donna Hamilton, Virgil and The Tempest: The Politics of Imitation (Ohio State University Press, Columbia, 1990), pp. 7-10.

6. See T. M. Waldo and T. W. Herbert, ‘Musical Terms in The Taming of the Shrew: Evidence of Single Authorship’, Shakespeare Quarterly, X (1959): 185-200.

7. Elise Bickford Jorgens, ‘The Singer's Voice in Elizabethan Drama’, in Renaissance Rereadings, Intertext and Context, ed. M. C. Horowitz, A. J. Cruz and W. A. Furman (University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 1988), p. 45.

8. The many parallels between Shakespeare's play and Jonson's Masque of Union, Hymenæi, performed on the fifth of January 1606 to celebrate a dynastic marriage, are numerous and clear enough not to necessitate a full-length demonstration here.

9. Jean Jacquot, ‘L'éloge de la Musique: grandeur et décadence d'un schème de culture’, Revue Belge de Musicologie, XX, 1-4 (1966): 91-110.

10. See in particular The Praise of Musicke and the profite and delight it bringeth to man […], Ms. Roy. 18 B XIX, British Museum, which was written in the very first years of James I's reign in an attempt at praising both music and the monarch for the sake of corporative interests.

11. ‘Thy Kynge [of the Indians] was disposed to have assuredly brought us to ruine in the moneth of March 1586. himself also with all his Savages to have runne away from us which if he had done wee coulde [not] have bene preserved from starving. For wee had no weares of fish, neither coulde our men skill of the making of them. [But finally we] wanne this resolution of him, that out of hand he should goe about, and withall, to cause his men to set up weares foorthwith for us’. Hakluyt's Voyages, ed. Hakluyt Society (1903-5), VIII, pp. 334-6.

12. Other instances of verbal realism can be found in the play, in particular at 1.2.266-9, 2.1.112-13, 3.2.70-1 and 4.1.10-11.

13. See his De vita coelitus comparanda, III, 21, 32, 42; the last two passages mentioned refer to the role of music in the evocation of certain demons and the spirits of the dead, which may represent aspects of Prospero's ‘rough magic’.

14. The Praise of Musicke, pp. 57-8.

15. K. R. McNamara, ‘Golden Worlds at Court: The Tempest and its Masque’, Shakespeare Studies, 19 (1987): 185.

16. George Marcelline, The Triumphs of James the First (London, 1610), p. 35, cited by Robin Headlam Wells, Elizabethan Mythologies, Studies in Poetry, Drama and Music (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 69.

17. John Case, Apologia musices, p. 3 [my translation].

18. Ibid., p. 4. J. Cardan similarly reports: ‘In Caledony, a region of Scotland, on a hill called “mournful”, one can hear by night voices sounding like those of tormented human beings—either demons or souls of the defunct.’ (De subtilitate, Opera omnia, Lugd., 1663, p. 301) [my translation].

19. Aristotle, Politics, 8.7.1841b37.

20. John S. Mebane, Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age: The Occult Tradition and Marlowe, Jonson, and Shakespeare (Lincoln & London: Nebraska University Press, 1989), p. 181.

21. Gary Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others (Chicago & London: Chicago University Press, 1993), pp. 213-14.

22. Plato, Republic, 401 d, A. Barker ed. (Cambridge University Press, Greek Musical Writings, 1984), vol. I, p. 305.

23. M. Ficino, In Timœum Commentarium, Opera Omnia, Basileae, 1576, p. 1453 [my translation].

24. Odyssey, 10, 135 and 210ff.

25. ‘For many people, music inebriates more than wine.’

26. Aelian, On the Nature of Animals, tr. A. F. Scholfield, 3 vols. (London: Loeb, 1958-9), XII. p. 44.

27. The Praise of Musicke, p. 57.

28. David Lindley, ‘Music, Masque and Meaning in The Tempest,’ The Court Masque, ed. David Lindley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 47-59.

29. L'on n'avoit plus d'Hyver, le iour n'avoit plus d'ombre,

                                  Et les perles sans nombre
    Germoient dessous les Eaux au milieu des graviers.

    (M. de Malherbe, cited in Ripa, II, p. 43)

30. Cesare Ripa, Iconologie où les principales choses qui peuvent tomber dans la pensée touchant les vices sont representées, trans. J. Baudoin: 1643 (repr. Paris: Aux Amateurs de Livres, 1989), II, p. 44.

31. Yves Peyré, ‘Les Masques d'Ariel: Essai d'interprétation de leur symbolisme’, Cahiers Elisabéthains, 19 (1981): 65.