In short, the very repetitions of the song both testify and contribute to its potency: each successive singer in effect authorizes the next one to sing it, demonstrating that one may control the future by ensuring that one’s tale will be told again. If on the one hand the alienability of lyric demonstrates the destructive aspects of scattering, here one is reminded that both narrative and lyric may achieve power through dissemination in its most positive senses. Thus, in a play whose praxis is the contestation of rival stories and rival storytellers, Desdemona becomes not only a lyric poet but a narrative one, telling a tale that rivals those proffered by that master and slave of narrative Othello. She achieves this in no small measure through the iterability of song.
But singing often involves not only the assertion but also the delimitation of authority, and Desdemona’s song is no exception. Reminding us of how the potency of that medium is impeded in instances like Ophelia’s performance, Desdemona tellingly presents her performance in terms of lack of agency:
That song to-night
Will not go from my mind; I have much to do
But to go hang my head all at one side
And sing it like poor Barbary.
(30–33)
Notice that she associates singing with the pitiful physical position and lower social position of Barbary; notice too that her phraseology here transfers agency to the lyric, literally the subject of the first sentence.
Although mitigated by the act of singing, Desdemona’s culturally encouraged tendency to blame herself for being a victim does not disappear: “‘Let nobody blame him, his scorn I approve’” (52). The limitations in her agency register in the limitations in the potentialities I have ascribed to song. If on one level Desdemona’s song resists interruption from other storytellers, on another level she suspends it with her own interjections. Breaking into and hence breaking apart her own song, Desdemona complicates though does not obviate the anthropological work of Bloch on the ability of song to resist interruption inasmuch as these interruptions are partly subsumed into the tale. Nor is the ability of song to establish a rival version of closure fully achieved here; tellingly, Desdemona’s song culminates on a series of questions. The only closure it achieves involves a tragic diminishment of power: as Emilia explicitly asserts, this is a swan song. Yet all these challenges to her authority do not erase the accusatory story she, like Ophelia, authorizes through song.
Thus, in a study that has repeatedly adduced paradoxes, a few more can now join the zoo of those cavorting creatures. Narrative and lyric, we have seen, assume a wide range of different relationships, and in many cases the distinctions between those modes can help us to understand each of them. Yet I have emphasized throughout that in early modern culture as well as other eras, in addition to exemplifying the conflict and conquest that critics generally anticipate, those two modes often interact cooperatively, at times even producing intriguing amalgams. In particular, whereas they may impede or interrupt narrative action, lyric passages often advance it.
The same is true of the songs in Shakespeare’s plays, which, as Henderson observes in relation to Love’s Labor’s Lost, typically participate actively in the action and the relationships among characters rather than primarily expressing the emotions of a single personage.103 In so doing, I have argued, those songs bestow agency and other types of power, even if they are circumscribed. The principal reason for that achievement lies in our final one, their peculiar ontological status. Although this chapter has drawn attention to blurred categories elsewhere in poetry, when songs are performed in Shakespeare’s plays, as in many other venues, it is distinction, in its several senses, that matters most. In diction, mood, and rhythm such songs may resemble other passages in the plays, especially intense lyrical descriptions and chants. Under these circumstances, however, Frye’s radical of presentation trumps other determinants. Even as song participates in the spectrum of various types of heightened or lyricized speech, it often insists on its difference from other registers and on its ability to authorize new types of insight and to write a new set of rules.
CHAPTER 6
The Rhetorics of Lyric
Conclusions and New Perspectives
Beneficent spirit of the Severn’s ominous borderlands, Milton’s Sabrina harbors odd companions on her own borders.1 So significant for the purposes of this conclusion is the song invoking her that its latter section merits a lengthy quotation:
Sabrina fair 859
Listen where thou art sitting
Under the grassy, cool, translucent wave,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Listen and save. 866
Listen and appear to us
In the name of great Oceanus,
By the earth-shaking Neptune’s mace
And Tethys’ grave majestic pace. 870
By hoary Nereus’ wrinkled look,
And the Carpathian wizard’s hook,
By scaly Triton’s winding shell,
And old soothsaying Glaucus’ spell,
By Leucothea’s lovely hands 875
And her son that rules the strands.
By Thetis’ tinsel-slipper’d feet,
And the Songs of Sirens sweet,
By dead Parthenope’s dear tomb,
And fair Ligea’s golden comb, 880
Wherewith she sits on diamond rocks
Sleeking her soft alluring locks,
By all the Nymphs that nightly dance
Upon thy streams with wily glance,
Rise, rise.
(A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle,
859–861, 866–885; emphasis in original)2
In line 878 references to the sirens begin to invade Milton’s catalogue of more appropriate attendants for Sabrina, alluring the lyric away from the translucency, semantic and aquatic, on which it began. Five of the nineteen lines quoted above (878–882) directly invoke that treacherous glee club, while the “wily glance” (884) of the nymphs, not fortuitously an echo of Comus’s earlier description of his own trains (151), at least mirrors the enticements of the sirens and, alternatively, may be read as an additional description of them.
Might one explain away the unsettling appearance of the sirens’ narrative by claiming that these are not the seductive singers whom Comus links to Circe earlier in the poem (“I have oft heard / My mother Circe with the Sirens three” [252–253]) but rather merely the embodiments of Platonic celestial harmony invoked by Milton himself in “At a Solemn Music” and Arcades? Haemony, Louis Martz suggests, may represent sacred song.3 Or one might join Stella P. Revard in glossing this passage as a description of “nurturing” water deities linked thematically to Sabrina?4 Any attempt to finesse the sirens’ presence in these ways is, however, countered by the reference to “soft alluring locks” (882); although the menacing implications of a woman plotting seduction coexist with the appeal of the phrase (as erotic menace so often does in Milton), its negative resonances are intensified by that use, only two lines later, of “wily,” an adjective not only deployed earlier in this poem as noted above, but also applied twice to the snake in Paradise Lost. And the connection between the sirens’ modus operandi and that of Circe and her son is surely more powerful and more immediate for most Renaissance and contemporary readers than the positive biographical entries Revard adduces for them. The point is not that those positive stories are completely erased; rather, if the presence of these dangerous singers casts a shadow over even Sabrina, the myth of the menacing sirens overshadows the alternative story of their unthreatening alter egos. A similar conflation occurs in the nineteenth-century English painter William Etty’s illustration for the poem. Now in the Art Gallery of Western Australia, his “Scene from Milton’s Comus” recalls the cast of characters in the woodcut by the seventeenth-century Italian Jiulio Bonasone, discussed in Chapter 1. Etty’s canvas represents Circe, the Naiades, and the sirens; while the raised eyes of two of those singers suggest spirituality, their voluptuous bodies, so charac
teristic of Etty’s nudes, as well as the company they keep, evoke the threatening seductiveness Milton associates with them.
The textual history of the poem registers its author’s unease with the inclusion—and the exclusion—of the sirens. Their description was crossed out, then restored, a process that the most thorough student of Milton’s editorial emendations, S. E. Sprott, believes occurred when its author was drafting the poem.5 Moreover, the fact that the wily nymphs were inserted after the passage was initially composed is telling, as is the number of trochaic adjectives with very different valences that might have been substituted for “wily”: “playful glance,” “loving glance,” and so on would have toned down the menace that is instead intensified by Milton’s modifier. Not only the obvious semantic content of the passage but also the reference to Parthenope, associated in Virgil’s Georgics IV.563–566 with the author’s guilt about the genres of his earlier poetry, encourage us to read that menace in relation to the dangers of song.
For all the attention excited by other hints of inconsistency or anxiety in the poem, notably Milton’s reference to “glutinous heat” (917), most critics have ignored Sabrina’s unlikely attendants completely; a handful of acute readers, a select company ranging in critical approach from Douglas Bush to John Guillory, has noted their inappropriateness without offering any detailed etiology for the pathology of the passage.6 In a brief but suggestive commentary on these lines, Nancy Lindheim acknowledges a “hint of danger” while maintaining that the masque as a whole successfully contains it, thus instancing the young Milton’s attraction to sensuous beauty.7 What, then, is a nice girl like Sabrina doing in a place like this?
Immediately before she rises up through the magic of the masque’s engineering to exercise her sanative powers through the magic of lyric, a competing story about that mode rises up through dark regions in the poet and his culture. Yet the anticlosural relationship of those two tales can in fact effect closure to my own narrative about early modern lyric, for from the turbulent waters of this passage arise as well summaries of and supplements to many no less turbulent issues traced throughout The Challenges of Orpheus. Throughout early modern lyric we encounter, for example, the conflict between the positive valences of sirens and the negative ones. Manifest in the distinctions between various types of lyric instrument and various classical instruments, this ambivalence is often gendered, as it is here, with the result of intensifying anxieties about writing lyric. The resonances of the apparent binary in question, like those of many other gendered issues, frequently in fact involve the blurring of borders: much as the positive and negative associations of sirens cohere and even coalesce in this passage, so the attempt to associate Good Lyric with the psalms, in contrast to the ungodly songs they may drown out, is compromised by doubts about the moral value of singing even those heavenly songs. Milton’s invocation is also about Milton’s vocation, as is so much of his canon, and hence this passage reminds us, too, how often early modern poets discuss decisions in their careers as choices among genres or, as in the instance of the two versions of lyric, between positive and negative versions of the same genre. Above all, like many songs, this book has its refrains, and Milton’s passage may recall my emphasis on the guilt engendered by lyric in the early modern period and on the many types of movement and process associated with that mode.
The excerpt from Comus also gestures towards key arguments pursued seriatim in the successive chapters of The Challenges of Orpheus, enabling recapitulation. Most obviously, it is appropriate to conclude this study on an excerpt about myth, since, as I have demonstrated in Chapter 1 and elsewhere, the early modern period often expresses the problems and potentialities of lyric through mythological narratives and tropes. The selection from Comus in turn draws attention to the complex issues about audience discussed in Chapter 2. Although it is indubitably a direct address to Sabrina, reminding us how frequently early modern lyric does speak to a you, in invoking other spirits, including some that literally dwell by the sides of the river, the poem demonstrates the significance of side participants in many lyrics. Moreover, Sabrina’s reply recalls another predilection very germane to the audiences of lyric, the early modern attraction to answer poems, one of many dialogic propensities traced in this book. This extraordinary selection from Milton’s masque also stages the interplay between immediacy and distance examined in my third chapter; not only are this song and Sabrina’s reply to it framed in the sense that they appear in a larger text, but they are also called up in a way that draws attention to them, turning them into songs about singing and thus introducing some measure of distance. At the same time, the appearance of Sabrina can be said to figure the emphasis on the deictics this and here that we have so often encountered in lyric and the immediacy associated with them. The connections between this song and Sabrina’s answer in turn recall the issues about modularity explored in Chapter 4. Chapter 5 demonstrated the limitations of applying a conflictual model to the relationship between lyric and narrative: in many instances, I argued, lyric encourages or even engenders narrative, thus representing not the stasis often identified with such poetry but rather a pathway to action, even a release of a blockage rather than the blocking effect associated with it in the myth of Orpheus and many other texts. And here it is through song that Sabrina appears in order to deliver her own song and then literally to release the Lady from the stasis imposed on her.
Remembering that Orpheus, at once the bad boy and the patron saint of lyric, learned the hard way about the dangers of glancing backwards at crucial moments, this study concludes by looking ahead with some suggestions for future work on early modern and other literary texts, as well as for other shifts in our professional practices. First, then, The Challenges of Orpheus has indicated several subjects and problems that students of Renaissance English literature could profitably explore in the future. Since around 1980, the widespread materialist dismissal of lyric as hermetic, interacting with a reaction against the New Critical privileging of that mode, created not simply another pendulum swing but rather what might better be described as a virtual lurch towards drama among academics specializing in early modern literature in the academy in the United States. To avoid such overcorrections in the future, we need to be alert to how both an interest in and a recoil from a field of study can be as contagious as the air whose negative valences I explored in my opening chapter. A new faculty appointment can stimulate interest in what had been a dormant field, and seeing some students enter it will encourage their peers to do likewise; conversely, if the staffing in a given field is allowed to decline, enrollments may do so as well, thus seeming to justify the previous hiring decisions and guiding future ones. For this and many other reasons, basing these personnel decisions largely or entirely on current patterns of student enrollment, as too often happens in the United States, is dangerous. Moreover, those policies in hiring, faculty evaluation, and course assignment that encourage specialists in early modern literature and culture to define themselves as experts in either dramatic or nondramatic texts but not both contribute to the current imbalance between drama and lyric. A stockholder in both the companies in question, I am hardly denying the value of studying theater; but if lyric is associated with disease in more troubling respects, I hope that this book will help early modern scholars and students catch and transmit a serious case of lyric.
In particular, future students of early modern lyric might profitably reconsider its relationship to subjectivity, an issue treated pervasively but relatively briefly in this study because a full analysis of its complexities would demand a book in its own right. The connections between lyric and subjectivity have been incisively, but again only briefly, discussed of late by distinguished critics, notably Katharine Eisaman Maus and Debora Shuger, who have located in the inwardness of the mode one important source of changing views of the subject; but The Challenges of Orpheus reveals the need for further revising these and similar revisionist analyses. Maus’s contrast between the dis
played inwardness of theater and the more privatized lyric inwardness with which she implicitly compares it needs to be complicated by all the types of display lyric can involve, not least those emphasized by the versions of framing explored in my book. Shuger’s suggestion that lyric offers a private space that contrasts with the social dimensions she traces elsewhere is a useful corrective to the many critics of her—and my—generation who refuse to see lyric or virtually anything else as anything other than social; but I have argued for a middle position where lyric, the genre of turns and twists, moves back and forth between private and social worlds.8
Furthermore, references to lyric as a potential breeding ground for the self need to be extended and qualified with an acknowledgment of how the changing positions the speaker may assume, notably the exchange of roles with the auditor and the voicing of fragments from others, can complicate subjectivity. Indeed, in a powerful reading of the Rime sparse, Lynn Enterline traces the alienation of lyric speakers from their own voices, and of course certain theorists and experimental poets of our own age have questioned to what extent if at all a putative subject should even be posited and studied.9 Those changing positions of lyric speakers and audiences also invite reinterpretation of assumptions about subjectivity that extend to areas besides lyric. Although some of the theoretical models behind early modern criticism, notably the work of Althusser and Foucault, do attribute to subject positions types of instability and fluidity cognate to those I have been positing, too often students of the period reduce the complexity of those models in the interests of conforming to current shibboleths. Thus approaches to subjectivity frequently emphasize the creation of a passive static state or position rather than a continuing process that may involve some agency: interpellation is misinterpreted as definitive and unchangeable, the stitches of suture as unalterably binding.
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