Shakespeare, sound and sense

Abstract

What does music mean, and how is meaning attached to music? These are questions that have been at the heart of musicological debate in recent decades, and it seems they were similarly important questions for Shakespeare and his contemporaries too. In his new book, Joseph M. Ortiz argues that Shakespeare's representations of music reveal a sceptical attitude to many of the musical meanings that scholars commonly associate with the 16th and 17th centuries—notions of heavenly and political harmony; the affective power of music; indeed, the extent to which music’s meaning can be fixed at all. Instead, Ortiz suggests that Shakespeare presents music’s meanings as potentially infinite, whereas such commonplace interpretations were attempts to universalize musical meaning and control music’s sensuousness and indeterminacy. Ortiz’s book has a dual significance. On one level the book is an analysis of Shakespeare’s representation of music, while on another level Ortiz’s analysis of these plays revises our current perception of music and language in the period, offers new insights into the sixteenth-century debates surrounding music, and illuminates the cultural and political ideologies that lay behind conventional tropes of musical meaning. It manages this because the chapters not only focus on particular Shakespearean plays and the extensive literary criticism that surrounds them, but also draw on emblem books, essays on music theory, handbooks on practical music, classical mythographies and, in the final chapter, the works of John Milton.