| The history of music's meaning in the Renaissance does not admit a simple narrative of progression or development. Ideas about music as a mode of signification periodically clash with demonstrations of music as a fundamentally acoustic event that promiscuously accommodates any number of verbal meanings. Subsequently, much writing on music in the period reflects a desire to ward off music's discursive promiscuity rather than come to terms with its actual effects. At the heart of this debate is a deeply-rooted concern over language's ability to contextualize sensuous experience and render it meaningful. Ovid's Metamorphoses, arguably more than any other classical text, engages a similar conflict between language, text, and embodied phenomena. The idea that music and Ovidian poetry similarly illustrate the limitations of contextualization suggestively explains their frequent conjunction in Shakespeare, an aspect of the works which criticism has rarely identified, much less theorized.;Music, Ovid and the Triumph of Sound argues that Shakespeare repeatedly refers to music and Ovid to thematize the gap between language and sensuous experience. Through close readings of Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, The Rape of Lucrece, The Merchant of Venice, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, and Milton's Comus, this study interprets passages in early modern literature where music collides with words and where (often simultaneously) Ovidian allusion contaminates the dramatic plot. Rather than conforming to a "consent" model of art in which dramatic wholeness is the terminus ad quem, Shakespeare's plays and poems often evoke contradictory interpretations of music and mythology that undercut a grand, unified aesthetics. Specifically, Shakespeare's foregrounding of music's acoustic nature and his allusions to Ovid's tales of speechlessness challenge the universalizing, text-based representations of music in conventional Renaissance music theory. Likewise, by exploiting the polysemousness of Ovidian allusion, Shakespeare reflects critically on the textual, allegorical tradition of the Metamorphoses itself. In this respect, Shakespeare's use of music and Ovid signals his participation in a larger cultural and ideological debate in early modern England, which might be described as an ongoing tension between textual and sensuous authorities. |
