Music and the crisis of meaning in Othello.(Critical essay)

Erin Minear, Music and the Crisis of Meaning in Othello

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. This essay argues that the actual, verbal, and symbolic musies of the play cannot be kept separate--but nor should their conflation 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.

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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 spheres and the audible earthly music of voices and instruments was considerably more problematic than this account of Sidney's death would suggest. On the one hand. Thomas Browne could claim to perceive all earthly music as an inspiring echo of the everlasting harmonies of the angels: "[E]ven that vulgar and Taverne Musicke. which makes one man merry, another mad. strikes mee into a deepe fit of devotion, and a profound contemplation of the first Composer: there is something in it of Divinity more than the eare discovers ... In briefe, it is a sensible fit of that Harmony, which intellectually sounds in the eares of God." (5) Stephen Gosson. however, does not allow for any dependable connection between audible music and the harmony of the universe: "If you will bee good scholers. and profite well in the arte of musike. shut your fidels in their cases and looke uppe to Heaven." (6) From this perspective, earthly musical productions are audible, seductive, and transitory, while true music inheres in the proportions of an ordered cosmos. Terrestrial echoes of such Platonic music do not necessarily guide the hearer toward true harmony, and echoes themselves can both affirm and negate. Indeed, two conflicting traditions, both familiar to the Renaissance, surround the mythological figure of Echo. Ambrosius Theodosius Macrobius allegorized her as the music of the spheres, but in the Ovidian Narcissus story she is "a powerful mocker." and "Ovid's poetic device in telling her story becomes in later poetry a way of deconstructing words, often of love, into their hidden but operative ultimate." (7) In Othello, audible music threatens to become a similarly satiric terrestrial echo of the everlasting harmony of angels: heaven mocking itself (III. iii. 282). (8) Furthermore, the play's language, in its own partially metaphorical and partially literal relation to music, does not merely slide between the two poles of empty noise and transcendent poetry but struggles to negotiate and express the idea that, by some seeming impossibility, these opposing poles occupy the same space.

As the hero and heroine meet on the shores of Cyprus they exchange an ecstatic greeting, while Iago promises to "set down the pegs that make this music" (II.i. 197). (9) What does Iago mean by "this music"? Marital concord? The ravishing blank verse lines that Othello and Desdemona have been spinning out? During the course of the following two acts, Iago reduces Othello to incoherent prose even as he destroys the symbolic concord between husband and wife. Yet, even at this moment of perfect music, Othello approaches another kind of incoherence in speech that edges toward its own dissolution:

 
  I cannot speak enough of this content. 
  It stops me here, it is too much of joy. 
  And this, (they kiss) and this, the greatest discords be 
  That e'er our hearts shall make! 
  (II-i. 193-6)