Any one who attempts to translate from one tongue into another will know moods of despair when he feels he is wasting his time upon an impossible task but, irrespective of success or failure, the mere attempt can teach a writer much about his own language which he would find it hard to learn elsewhere. Nothing else can more naturally correct our tendency to take our own language for granted. Translating compels us to notice its idiosyncracies and limitations, it makes us more attentive to the sound of what we write and, at the same time, if we are inclined to fall into it, will cure us of the heresy that poetry is a kind of music in which the relations of vowels and consonants have an absolute value, irrespective of the meaning of the words.
MUSIC IN SHAKESPEARE
Mustek to heare, why hear'st thou musick sadly, Sweets with sweets warre not, joy delights in joy: Why lov'st thou that which thou receav'st not gladly,
Or else receav'st with pleasure thine annoy?
jfft
Professor Wilson Knight and others have pointed out the important part played in Shakespeare's poetry hy images related to music, showing, for instance, how music occupies the place in the cluster of good symbols which is held in the bad cluster by the symbol of the Storm.
His fondness for musical images does not, of course, necessarily indicate that Shakespeare himself was musical—some very good poets have been musically tone deaf. Any poet of the period who used a musical imagery would have attached the same associations to it, for they were part of the current Renaissance theory of the nature of music and its effects.
Anyone at the time, if asked, "What is music?" would have given the answer stated by Lorenzo to Jessica in the last scene of The Merchant of Venice. Mr. James Hutton in an admirable article in the English Miscellany on "Some English Poems in praise of Music" has traced the history of this theory from Pythagoras to Ficino and shown the origin of most of Lorenzo's images. The theory may be summarized thus:
O Music is unique among the arts for it is the only art practiced in Heaven and by the unfallen creatures. Conversely, one of the most obvious characteristics of Hell is its discordant din.
2,) Human reason is able to infer that this heavenly music exists because it can recognize mathematical proportions. But the human ear cannot hear it, either because of man's Fall or simply because the ear is a bodily organ subject to change and death. What Campanella calls the molino vivo of the self drowns out the celestial sounds. In certain exceptional states of ecstasy, however, certain individuals have heard it.
Man-made music, though inferior to the music which cannot be heard, is a good for, in its mortal way, it recalls or imitates the Divine order. In consequence, it has great powers. It can tame irrational and savage beasts, it can cure lunatics, it can relieve sorrow. A dislike of music is a sign of a perverse will that defiantly refuses to submit to the general harmony.
Not all music, however, is good. There is a bad kind of music which corrupts and weakens. "The Devil rides a fiddlestick." Good is commonly associated with old music, bad with new.
Nobody today, I imagine, holds such a theory, i.e., nobody now thinks that the aesthetics of music have anything to do with the science of acoustics. What theory of painting, one wonders, would have developed if Pythagoras had owned a spectroscope and learned that color relations can also be expressed in mathematical proportions.
But if he has never heard of the theory, there are many things in Shakespeare which the playgoer will miss. For example, the dramatic effect of the recognition scene in Pericles.
pericles : But what music?
helicanus: My lord, I hear none.
pericles: None! The music of the
spheres! List, my Marina! LYSIMACHUS: It is not good to cross him: give
him way.
pericles: Rarest sounds! Do ye not hear? helicanus: My Lord, I hear.
(Act V, Scene i.)
or even such a simple little joke as this from Othello:
clowtnt: If you have any music that may
not be heard, to't again; but, as they say, to hear music the general does not greatly care. ist. mus.: We have none such, sir.
(Act III, Scene i.)
Music is not only an art with its own laws and values; it is also a social fact. Composing, performing, listening to music are things which human beings do under certain circumstances just as they fight and make love. Moreover, in the Elizabethan age, music was regarded as an important social fact. A knowledge of music, an ability to read a madrigal part were expected of an educated person, and the extraordinary output of airs and madrigals between 1588 and 1620 testifies to both the quantity and quality of the music making that must have gone on. When Bottom says, "I have a reasonable good ear in music: let's have the tongs and the bones," it is not so much an expression of taste as a revelation of class, like dropping one's aitches; and when Benedick says, "Well, a horn for my money when all's done," he is being deliberately epatant.
Whether he personally cared for music or not, any dramatist of the period could hardly have failed to notice the part played by music in human life, to observe, for instance, that the kind of music a person likes or dislikes, the kind of way in which he listens to it, the sort of occasion on which he wants to hear or make it, are revealing about his character.
A dramatist of a later age might notice the same facts, but it would be difficult for him to make dramatic use of them unless he were to write a play specifically about musicians.
But the dramatic conventions of the Elizabethan stage permitted and encouraged the introduction of songs and instrumental music into the spoken drama. Audiences liked to hear them, and the dramatist was expected to provide them. The average playgoer, no doubt, simply wanted a pretty song as part of the entertainment and did not bother about its dramatic relevance to the play as a whole. But a dramatist who took his art seriously had to say, either, "Musical numbers in a spoken play are irrelevant episodes and I refuse to put them in just to please the public," or, "I must conceive my play in such a manner that musical numbers, vocal or instrumental, can occur in it, not as episodes, but as essential elements in its structure."
If Shakespeare took this second line, it should be possible, on examining the occasions where he makes use of music, to find answers to the following questions:
O Why is this piece of music placed just where it is and not somewhere else?
In the case of a song, why are the mood and the words of this song what they are? Why this song instead of another?
Why is it this character who sings and not another? Does the song reveal something about his character which could not be revealed as well in any other way?
What effect does this music have upon those who listen to it? Is it possible to say that, had the music been omitted, the behavior of the characters or the feelings of the audience would be different from what they are?
II
When we now speak of music as an art, we mean that the elements of tone and rhythm are used to create a structure of sounds which are to be listened to for their own sake. If it be asked what such music is "about," I do not think it too controversial to say that it presents a virtual image of our experience of living as temporal, with its double aspect of recurrence and becoming. To "get" such an image, the listener must for the time being banish from his mind all immediate desires and practical concerns and only think what he hears.
But rhythm and tone can also be used to achieve non- musical ends. For example, any form of physical movement, whether in work or play, which involves accurate repetition is made easier by sounded rhythmical beats, and the psychological effect of singing, whether in unison or in harmony, upon a group is one of reducing the sense of diversity and strengthening the sense of unity so that, on all occasions where such a unity of feeling is desired or desirable, music has an important function.