Content area
Full Text
The Tragedy of Othello, The Moor of Venice has been called Shakespeare's most musical tragedy, but critics examining the role of music in the play have tended to use the word in very different and even contradictory ways. G. Wilson Knight coined the phrase "the Othello music" to describe a poetic style characteristic of the play, while Lisa Hopkins criticizes Knight for focusing on the hero's verbal music and ignoring the real music, the Willow Song of the heroine.1 In "Shakespeare's 'Dull Clown' and Symbolic Music," Lawrence J. Ross discusses the play's treatment of speculative music and touches only briefly on its actual songs and not at all on the style of its poetry.2 These separate approaches make a good deal of sense. After all, while venerable tradition permits the description of poetry as metaphoric "music," a discussion of poetic style would seem to impinge little on an analysis of inset songs and vice versa. Similarly, early modern music theory makes careful distinctions between practical music (musica instrumentalis) and speculative music (musica mundana and musica humana), and critics such as Ross very responsibly preserve the integrity of these categories in their criticism. Nevertheless, critical responses to Othello have overlooked the way the play repeatedly questions and blurs the distinctions that separate different kinds of music. The actual, stylistic, and symbolic "musics" of the play cannot be kept separate, but their conflation should not be taken for granted. In Othello, the confusion of literal and figurative music generates an interpretive crisis in which the play's own language and the way it communicates meaning and events to an audience are implicated. The play's probing examination of the nature of music becomes self-reflexive as it works to reproduce the same ambiguous musical effects that it depicts.
Knight memorably remarked that "[t]he beauties of the Othello world are not finally disintegrated: they make 'a swan-like end, fading in music.'"3 But music in Othello is not quite what it was for the dying Sir Philip Sidney, who supposedly ordered music to be played at his death "to fashion and enfranchise his heavenly soul into that everlasting harmony of angels whereof these concords were a kind of terrestrial echo."4 In early modern England, the relationship between the unheard music of the...