The Challenges of Orpheus

by Heather Dubrow

  The connection between singing and power in cases like that one is significant in part because it highlights the question at the core of this section: how and why do marginalized characters sing? In the instance from As You Like It, male courtiers perform the song, but it is striking how often in Shakespearean drama the singer is a woman, a Fool, or someone else whose power and status are delimited, as Leslie C. Dunn, among others, has observed.81 Similarly, although she does not discuss Hamlet at length, Henderson’s overall argument that song is often linked to both positive and negative responses to female power is as germane to that play as to the ones she does analyze. Ophelia’s songs are transgressive: she is insisting, as Nona Paula Fienberg has pointed out, on becoming a subject not an object, and her subject matter is deviant and threatening in that she is talking about her father’s death and about male betrayal of women.82 The play is concerned throughout with how one can speak the truth in a world of spies, which is one of the many implications of the hall of mirrors, with people concealed, in the Branagh film version, and various solutions—Ophelia’s turn to song, Hamlet’s disguised and whirling words, the license of the gravediggers—are compared with each other.

  The contrast between Hamlet’s and Ophelia’s songs alerts us to how often in Shakespeare’s plays marginal characters sing to accomplish a very different function from Hamlet’s: to find a means by which they can say what they otherwise dare not say, or, indeed, to have any voice at all.83 It is no accident that, as William C. Carroll has demonstrated, Poor Tom sings frequently.84 In the case at hand, song allows Ophelia two interrelated opportunities: she can introduce ideas that might not otherwise be voiced or voiceable, and she can express those ideas in a social situation, as a form of communication and even interaction.85 One could readily envision a play in which madness is figured by the solitary singing of these words, but that is precisely the opposite of what Ophelia does; although her performance is a marker of madness, there is indeed method in it, and the method fills social functions. To the queen’s “what imports this song?” (IV.v.27), she replies, “pray you mark” (28) and then delivers the verses that should be marked by the audience. And she repeats exactly the same three words six lines later. Insisting that her audience both interpret and participate in the songs, shortly afterwards she declares, “Pray, let’s have no words of this, but when they ask you what it means, say you this” (46–47). What follows, the song she prefers to other types of words, concerns a man who seduces a virgin. Michael Boyd’s 2004 Royal Shakespeare Company production emphasizes the social interactions performed by this and her other songs: she addresses them directly to specific characters (in this instance, Claudius, thus clearly linking his political transgressions with sexual ones and also, more debatably, perhaps hinting at her own Oedipal scenario). Shakespeare’s Fools are, of course, another case in point of using songs not only to express the transgressive but to communicate it to others. Through ditties that, as the text tells us, are sung, Lear’s Fool attempts to alert him to his mistake in surrendering power to his daughters.

  How, then, does song grant a voice to otherwise marginalized Others? What gives song the power to empower? The answers, however complex and various, reside above all in three mechanisms of this medium. It rewrites ontological rules through its connection to ritual. It rescripts conversational rules by substituting an alternative discursive register. And it recasts closural rules through its ability to impose an alternative ending.

  First, its connections with ritual, traced so acutely by Roland Greene and Andrew Welsh among others, imbue it with quasi-magical potency.86 Chapter 2 demonstrated how the ritualistic characteristics of lyric can encourage the participation of the audience and even on occasion identification with the speaker; I argued that these processes are often seductive, though not necessarily as coercive as other critics, notably Greene in his very different approach to the ritualistic elements in lyric, have claimed.87 When lyric takes the form of song, however, its coerciveness sometimes intensifies. For singing can do for discursive space what its analogue, ritual (like game), can do for space in the more literal, geographical sense: that is, song questions or unsettles other rules and imposes its own. Many early modern playwrights were surely aware of the common Neoplatonic links between song and magic. More specifically, those connections among song, charm, and chant contribute to its ritualistic practices. Especially relevant here is how charms substitute for the quotidian practices of the workaday world their alternative etiologies, which are often rule bound—anyone touched by this flower will necessarily fall in love and so on. Shakespeare’s plays are full of examples of these patterns, even beyond the most obvious ones like the magical lyrics in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The utterances of Lear’s Fool manifest a type of ritualistic power, and it is both invoked and ironized in Imogen’s funeral dirge.

  But the potency of song relates not only to the rules established by the world of the magical or quasi-magical but also those established in and about discourse, and this introduces the second source of the power of song. One of that medium’s most intriguing aspects is its preemptive redefinition of the regulations of speech. If, as Mark W. Booth asserts, song builds a sense of communal identity, arguably the singer acquires authority from speaking for and with those around her.88 But Booth’s theory is limited by its assumption that listeners do not wish to take issue with the song; hence it needs to be supplemented by the work of the anthropologist Maurice Bloch. Bloch’s observation that the special status of song precludes argument or interruption is very germane to how song entitles those who might otherwise be suppressed to speak despite potential opposition.89 He also points out that such interruption would itself be transgressive. To put it another way, the turn-taking practices of conversation are suspended. In support of Bloch, observe that Lear does not interrupt his Fool’s songs. And even if Ophelia sings an accusation directly at and about the king, as in the Michael Boyd production, he does not interrupt her musical mousetrap as he interrupts its spoken analogue.

  Third, song plays and is played by its own rules when it concludes a play, thus again permitting an assertion of power. Characters often struggle for the right to bring about closure—which is, in effect, having the last word in a conversation or, in a heated one, hanging up the telephone before the other party can do so. Many of Shakespeare’s dramas conclude on what might be termed “contestatory closure” in that several characters battle to create an ending and to achieve the other types of authority that act represents. Among the clearest examples is the conclusion of King Lear (however one resolves editorial debates about the assignment of certain speeches); similarly, at the termination of Hamlet Horatio and Fortinbras in effect compete for the right to end the play on their own terms, with Hamlet’s team losing yet again. Especially interesting examples are the final scene of As You Like It, where in a sense Rosalind, Hymen, Jacques, and the Duke all try to bring about closure, and the ending of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where both the human characters and the fairies offer their versions of closure.

  Song can be an appropriate ending to a play in such contested situations because it marks that conclusion with a change in registers, in fonts, as it were. Witness Feste’s final song. Like an epilogue addressing the audience, a song that the hearers might recognize and hum under their breaths or even join breaks down the separation between players and spectators in a way appropriate to the liminal moment of closure. At the same time, as R. S. White points out in a thoughtful study of songs in Elizabethan romances and comedies, in Shakespeare’s texts as elsewhere, a song may destabilize other forms of closure by calling into question comedic resolution. In these instances, too, singing enjoys agency and potency.90

  I have been arguing, then, that the force of ritual, the workings of everyday speech, and the operations of closure in a range of circumstances all write special rules and thus give a song a force that allows previously powerless characters to acquire agency and instrumentality; in so doing, this medium often
shifts the social dynamics and especially the hierarchies of power in a preexisting situation. The work of that controversial singer of songs Freud suggests additional ways song grants agency to Others. Whereas Freud persuasively associates dreamwork with the hidden agendas of jokes, one might usefully import his insights about both of those forms to create a category of “songwork.”91 Songs, like dreams and jokes, may condense a story, as in Ophelia’s lament about her father or the Fool’s commentaries on Lear’s relationship to his daughters. They may deflect a story by associating it with people other than the original participants; arguably Ophelia’s song about the betrayed woman is a version of her own experiences with Hamlet, while Feste’s final song, apparently about his own sexuality, also refers to the shenanigans of the other characters.92 And, again like dreams and jokes, songs may express something by seeming to say the opposite, as when Ophelia claims that young men are not to blame for seducing women and Desdemona similarly seemingly excuses male betrayal as she sings.

  But if Shakespearean song bestows power on those who lack it by overturning ontological, discursive, and closural rules, as well as through its similarities to dreamwork and jokework, its own power to do so is sometimes constrained. The transgression it enables may be delimited, though not as consistently as a bald subversion/containment model would lead us to expect. A song functions the way speech acts in drama function according to J. L. Austin and other speech act theorists: it undermines its truth value, surrounds its statements with an “as if.”93 In other words, Ophelia is reading Derrida when Hamlet believes she is engrossed in a different type of prayer book. If on one level singers like her rightly imply that they are not only telling truths but telling ones of great import—”when they ask you what it means, say you this” (IV.v.36–37), she insists—on another level their medium produces a signature in quotation marks. In their potentially compromised but nonetheless significant relationship to empowerment, songs, whether they be lyric or narrative, playground jingles or ballads or performed sonnets, have more in common with each other than, say, the prose romance does with the novel.

  Similarly, although songs give the singer the power and authority to express radically dissonant truths, they nonetheless do not guarantee an appropriate response on the listeners’ parts, a fact learned and publicly lamented by many Shakespearean characters, as well as numerous sonneteers in the early modern period. (Thus too the work of jokes may be compromised by a listener who refuses to play straight man or replies with, “I don’t get it.”) A source of revelation, songs also are treated as a symptom of madness, as Dunn and Sophie Tomlinson have demonstrated, the latter having acutely adduced the Jailer’s Daughter in Two Noble Kinsmen as well as Ophelia.94 This linkage between bursting into song and mental instability obviously reflects the ambivalences about the power of lyric traced throughout this study, and in so doing it provides another way the agency of singers may be circumscribed.95 The ability of song to achieve or challenge closure may be similarly curtailed. Ending on song, as Feste does, celebrates his power—but such lyrics were in many cases followed by the jig, a rival form of music by which a rival author brings about closure. So, in this sense, songs contributed to rather than terminating contestatory closure.

  In another respect as well Shakespearean drama delimits the potency it assigns to songs. If they are often associated with powerless but sympathetic characters like Desdemona, songs are also treated ironically by being assigned to unappealing characters like Stephano or to those who at best evoke an ambivalent response, such as Caliban and Bottom—much as poems that are not necessarily sung, such as the lyrics of Orlando and the courtiers in Love’s Labor’s Lost, are mocked. Sometimes the content rather than the speaker will be ironized and even discredited: the beautiful funeral dirge sung for Imogen in Cymbeline is as inappropriate as the intriguingly similar moment in the Coen brothers’ film Raising Arizona when the convicts wail for the baby they have left in the road.

  This amalgram of power and powerlessness invites us to place the songs in drama within the broader context of a linguistic form that I have elsewhere termed “authorizers”—that is, types of speech such as riddles, stories, and prophecies that negotiate power and authority, as well as their often contested relationship.96 Authorizers function by impelling a process aimed at establishing the authority of the speaker, even, or especially, if it did not exist previously, a process that often involves first establishing and then qualifying that authority. Thus, much as a song grants power to the singer in the ways I have identified, so a riddle allows the person who poses it to determine what the appropriate answer is; but his or her status changes dramatically if the conundrum is successfully solved. And in establishing power and authority, these types of discourse, like song, typically abrogate the rules for everyday conversation and substitute their own regulations.

  Desdemona’s willow song exemplifies the workings of authorizers and in so doing provides intriguing encapsulations and extensions of issues discussed in earlier chapters and previously in this one. In the course of talking with her own maid, Emilia, and preparing for bed shortly before Othello kills her, Desdemona delivers a lament she heard from her mother’s maid, Barbary. It is a text about someone who is singing a song by a stream and has been betrayed by a lover who, like Othello, “prov’d mad” (IV.iii.27). Critics have noted that the geographical locale of the area termed “Barbary” shifts from one text to the next in the early modern period.97 No less significant are the shifts in its subject positions, modes, and types of discourse.

  To begin with, Desdemona’s song, like those in prose romances sung by a character who had previously been the listener, provides a useful analogue to the shifting positions of lyric speaker and audience analyzed in Chapter 2. Barbary sings an “old thing” (29) sung by others; Desdemona then sings Barbary’s song and sings about Barbary singing it; the song quotes the man involved; and Emilia subsequently refers to singing it before she dies. By adding Barbary, who has no counterpart in the original ballad, and by including Emilia’s desire to repeat the song, the text enables and emphasizes these shifts in position. Thus it develops from a different perspective the cognate changes that occur elsewhere within the play, notably the ways Othello comes to mirror Iago; at the same time, the text draws attention to the changing subject positions characteristic of lyric itself, a potentiality and problem that, as my analysis of Sonnet 35 in Chapter 2 indicates, preoccupied its author.98

  As that description suggests, the willow song also blends narrative and lyric in ways previously explored in this chapter. Although it is based on a very popular ballad and thus owes more to narrative than to lyric, it certainly includes lyric elements as well.99 The narrative within the song (“The poor soul sat [sighing] by a sycamore tree” [40]) echoes the preceding narrative about it (“My mother had a maid call’d Barbary.…She had a song of ‘Willow’” [26, 28]) until the two are hard to distinguish semantically, though they are distinguished by the move into the register of song; and the Russian-doll effect of stories within stories is extended by a tale within the song:

  “I call’d my love false love; but what said he then?

  Sing willow, willow, willow;

  If I court moe women, you’ll couch with moe men.”

  (55–57)

  At the same time, as is so often the case, those stories introduce the lyric complaint that is being sung: “‘Sing all a green willow must be my garland’” (51) and the refrain emphasizes lyricality.

  But if Desdemona’s song exemplifies the larger contentions of this chapter about the relationship of lyric and narrative, it also enacts the arguments of this particular section about song. Until she sings, Desdemona has been attempting to excuse Othello. Here, albeit tentatively and obliquely, she acquires enough authority and autonomy to begin to blame him. From where does she draw and sustain the agency to challenge his plots in several senses of that noun?100

  The answers are interlocking. First, the important issues about female commun
ity adumbrated earlier contribute to her power as a narrator. Second, she achieves that power in part through narrativity. Although commenting on the scene in question only in passing, Lloyd Davis’s acute analysis of Othello traces the instrumentality of narrative, especially the ways in which telling stories about the past can be an important action in its own right and one that will influence the future.101 Desdemona, unlike many other storytellers in the play, lays claim to an instrumentality that she did not previously have, or at best had in limited form, the power to attack Othello for his betrayal of her love and the grievously unfair accusations that result. As a result, two scripts, one authorizing Desdemona and one authorizing Othello, struggle for supremacy.

  Above all, however, both Desdemona’s agency as a singer and its limits relate to the ways songs reinterpret rules and other social practices. The procedures of ritual replace those of everyday interactions, and one of the many functions of the refrain here is to render the utterance more ritualistic.102 In a sense this song is an apotropaic charm for women, a defense against the seductions of all too charming men. We could profitably extend the arguments of earlier critics about female community, summarized above, by recognizing that in such ways singing establishes and strengthens gendered bonds. And if, as I have suggested, songs resist interruption, this instance shows us that they may do so in part through what is the polar opposite of and a defensive strike against interruption: ensuring the repetition of their own words. Whereas Desdemona’s complaint temporarily blocks the novella by Othello and his ghost writer Iago, reminding us that the power of song, like that of narrative, often derives from blocking another form of speech, it does so by means of patterns of repetition that both enact and figure the breeding of stories. In the refrain we find the most obvious instance, and that poetic device stages its own workings in the phrase “‘Sing willow, willow, willow’” (56). Desdemona gives Barbary’s song currency, makes it current, much as her own song will be repeated. The streams by which she sings echo the story, though if the mirroring effect of the water figures these types of recurrence, it also reminds us that iteration may involve distortion. In any event, all these echoes draw attention to the encouraging fact that Desdemona’s story may be repeated just as Barbary’s has been and just as Barbary herself has reproduced an old song. And, authorized in her transgressive defiance both by song itself and by Desdemona’s previous deployment of it, Emilia does repeat a snatch of it. A stanza from one common version of the ballad omitted from the text requests the listener to note on the singer’s tomb that he was true to his love: though on one level erased, on another level that stanza becomes dramatic action in that Emilia in effect inscribes in the play an epitaph about Desdemona’s chastity.