The Challenges of Orpheus

by Heather Dubrow

  57. Mary Ann Radzinowicz, Milton’s Epics and the Book of Psalms (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 1.

  58. Henry Ainsworth, Annotations Upon the Book of Psalmes, 2nd ed. (London, 1617), A2–A2v.

  59. Robert Scholes, “Language, Narrative, and Anti-Narrative,” Critical Inquiry 7 (1980), 210.

  60. Greene, Post-Petrarchism, esp. 34–35, 42.

  61. On the relationship between achieved seduction and temporality, see Claudine Raynaud, “Naked Words: Figures of Seduction in Donne’s Poetry,” in La Poésie Métaphysique de John Donne, ed. Claudine Raynaud (Tours: Groupe de Recherches Anglo-Américaines de l’Université François Rabelais de Tours, 2002), 35.

  62. Because of the popularity and influence of this text in England during the early modern period, instances from it can usefully be juxtaposed with those from romances by English authors.

  63. The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, ed. Josephine A. Roberts (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995), 254. Future references to this edition appear within my text.

  64. Stillman, Sidney’s Poetic Justice, 85.

  65. Citations from the Old Arcadia are to Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia), ed. Jean Robertson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973). The quotation in question appears on 55.

  66. Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, ed. Maurice Evans (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1977), 773. Subsequent page references are to this edition and will appear in parentheses within my text. When discussing both versions of the Arcadia, I follow its author’s practice in referring to characters in terms of the name and gender associated with them at that point in the text, since this practice is so significant in the text.

  67. David Kalstone, Sidney’s Poetry: Contexts and Interpretations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), 71–72.

  68. Blair Worden, The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s “Arcadia” and Elizabethan Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 11.

  69. On these aspects of Antissia, see, e.g., Sheila T. Cavanagh, Cherished Torment: The Emotional Geography of Lady Mary Wroth’s “Urania” (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001), 73–77; Naomi J. Miller, Changing the Subject: Mary Wroth and Figurations of Gender in Early Modern England (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1996), 174–176.

  70. Although Robert F. Stillman’s analysis differs from mine in emphasizing the dangers of solipsism and of persuasion rather than gender, in “The Perils of Fancy: Poetry and Self-Love in The Old Arcadia” (TSLL 26 [1984], 1–17) he comments usefully on what their lyrics show about the princes. Maria Teresa Micaela Prendergast demonstrates persuasively that the Old Arcadia connects femininity and poesy in the broad sense of the latter, but, as my earlier comment on her essay indicates, her assertions about how and why Sidney distinguishes verse and prose in this text are not convincing (“Philoclea Parsed”).

  71. For an analysis of one exception, see R. S. White, “Functions of Poems and Songs in Elizabethan Romance and Romantic Comedy,” English Studies 5 (1987), 399–400. This essay also provides a useful overview of its subject.

  72. On the association of songs with marginalized characters, see esp. two studies by Leslie C. Dunn: “The Lady Sings in Welsh: Women’s Song as Marginal Discourse on the Shakespearean Stage” in Place and Displacement in the Renaissance, ed. Alvin Vos, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies (Binghamton: State University of New York, 1995); and “Ophelia’s Songs in Hamlet: Music, Madness, and the Feminine,” in Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture, ed. Leslie C. Dunn and Nancy A. Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Also see John H. Long, Shakespeare’s Use of Music: A Study of the Music and Its Performance in the Original Production of Seven Comedies (1955; rpt., Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1961), esp. 3. These critics’ analyses differ from mine in a number of ways, however. For example, Dunn also observes the containment of the threat represented by singing women, but she attributes it largely to the framing devices used by men (64–66), and she argues throughout that the contrast between song and other discursive registers primarily intensifies the prior margin-alization of these characters. Though he also notes the power of song in performance (66–67), Long unpersuasively attributes the association of song with marginal characters to mores forbidding gentlemen to perform publicly (3).

  73. William R. Bowden, The English Dramatic Lyric, 1603–42: A Study in Stuart Dramatic Technique (New Haven and London: Yale University Press and Oxford University Press, 1951), v–vi; Diana E. Henderson, Passion Made Public: Elizabethan Lyric, Gender, and Performance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995). Citations from these books appear in parentheses within my text.

  74. Jonathan Culler, “Apostrophe Revisited,” paper delivered at the 2001 Modern Language Association convention in New Orleans. I am grateful to the author for making his work available to me prior to publication.

  75. Andrew Welsh, Roots of Lyric: Primitive Poetry and Modern Poetics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), Chapters 6, 7.

  76. I am indebted to Dunn for drawing my attention to this comment and for a useful analysis of the passage in which it appears (“The Lady Sings in Welsh,” 58–60).

  77. Welsh, Roots of Lyric, esp. 162–166.

  78. Wolfgang Clemen, Shakespeare’s Soliloquies, trans. Charity Scott Stokes (London: Methuen, 1987); James Hirsh, Shakespeare and the History of Soliloquies (Madison, NJ, and London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and Associated University Presses, 2003).

  79. Henderson, Passion Made Public, 169.

  80. Paul Alpers, “Pastoral and the Domain of Lyric in Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender,” Representations, no. 12 (Fall 1985), 83–100.

  81. On the relationship of singing to social status, see esp. Dunn, “The Lady Sings in Welsh” and “Ophelia’s Songs in Hamlet.” Also see John H. Long, Shakespeare’s Use of Music.

  82. Nona Paula Fienberg, “‘She Chanted Snatches of Old Tunes’: Ophelia’s Songs in a Polyphonic Hamlet,” in Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare’s Hamlet, ed. Bernice W. Kliman (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2002), 154–155.

  83. In “Functions of Poems and Songs” (404–405), R. S. White notes a different but related form of transgression, the use of songs to call into question the celebration of marriage on which Shakespearean comedies typically end.

  84. William C. Carroll, “Songs of Madness: The Lyric Afterlife of Shakespeare’s Poor Tom,” Shakespeare Survey 55 (2002), 82–95.

  85. On the sources of Ophelia’s songs, see Ross W. Duffin, Shakespeare’s Songbook (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), esp. 52–53, 72–74, 407–408.

  86. Greene, Post-Petrarchism, esp. 5–13, 109–152; Welsh, Roots of Lyric, esp. Chapter 6.

  87. On the putative coerciveness of lyric, see Greene, Post-Petrarchism, esp. 5–6; Ramie Targoff, Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

  88. Mark W. Booth, The Experience of Songs (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), esp. 14–17.

  89. See Maurice Bloch’s discussion of song as one type of formalized language, “Symbols, Song, Dance and Features of Articulation: Is Religion an Extreme Form of Traditional Authority?” in Archives Européennes de Sociologie 15 (1974), 55–81.

  90. White, “Functions of Poems and Songs,” 392–405.

  91. See Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition, VIII, 88–89 on connections between dreamwork and jokework.

  92. For a valuable discussion of Feste’s final song, see Booth, Experience of Songs, 1–5, 26–28.

  93. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisá (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), 22.

  94. The central argument of Dunn’s “Ophelia’s Songs” is that the play links song to madness, irrationality, and the feminine. See also Sophie Tomlinson, Women on Stage in Stuart Drama (Cambridg
e: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 129–155.

  95. My interpretations differ significantly from Dunn’s, however, inasmuch as I emphasize the significant, though limited, communicative potential of Ophelia’s words.

  96. For a more detailed discussion of authorizers, see my essay “‘The tip of his seducing tongue’: Authorizers in Henry V, ‘A Lover’s Complaint,’ and Othello,” in Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s “A Lover’s Complaint”: Suffering Ecstasy, ed. Shirley Sharon-Zisser (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006). I am indebted to Linda Woodbridge for some useful comments in personal correspondence on the issue of authorizers. Citing Desdemona’s song as an instance of authorizers, the essay also includes an early version of the argument about Desdemona that I lay out in this chapter.

  97. On this and other issues about the passage, see Emily C. Bartels, “Strategies of Submission: Desdemona, the Duchess, and the Assertion of Desire,” Studies in English Literature 36 (1996), 417–433; Bartels and I agree that the song empowers Desdemona, though Bartels traces that effect to its content rather than to its status as a song (see esp. 429–431).

  98. On the addition of Barbary and other changes in the text, see Ernest Brennecke, “‘Nay, That’s Not Next!’: The Significance of Desdemona’s ‘Willow Song,’” Shakespeare Quarterly 4 (1953), 35–38.

  99. Sources of the willow song are analyzed in Duffin, Shakespeare’s Songbook, 467–470.

  100. My argument thus differs from that of Brennecke, who sees the song as a product of “her subconscious awareness” (“‘Nay, That’s Not Next!’” 37).

  101. Lloyd Davis, “The Plots of Othello: Narrative, Desire, Selfhood,” Sydney Studies in English 25 (1999), esp. 17.

  102. Other analyses of the power of song include Roland Barthes’s theory of what he terms the “grain” in the singing voice: identified in his essay with a bodily materiality, the grain plays down the literal meaning of the song and instead conveys the authority of the Father. One might question that argument in some respects (e.g., Do not certain voices, notably sopranos, seem to escape materiality? Do not many songs with “grain” in Barthes’s sense lack authority?), and in this instance Desdemona’s authority is closely related to her ability to create meaning. But his argument does remind us how intense the impact of the singing voice can be, thus, from a different perspective, implicitly questioning the critical interpretations that focus on Desdemona’s impotence (“The Grain of the Voice,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath [New York: Hill and Wang, 1977]).

  103. Henderson, Passion Made Public, esp. 169.

  CHAPTER 6: THE RHETORICS OF LYRIC

  1. In contrast to my point about borders, Philip Schwyzer, in an astute article, argues that Milton associates Sabrina with the purity of boundaries, which, he maintains, the text contrasts with the impurity and hybridity of the region’s borderlands (“Purity and Danger on the West Bank of the Severn: The Cultural Geography of A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634,” Representations, no. 60 [Fall 1997], 22–48).

  2. All citations from Milton are to Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis: Odyssey Press, Bobbs-Merrill, 1957); translations of his Latin and Italian poems are also from this volume.

  3. Louis L. Martz, “The Music of Comus,” in Illustrious Evidence, ed. Earl Miner (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 106–107. The shift from Martz’s assertion that the text valorizes and celebrates poesy to my emphasis on Milton’s anxieties about lyric aptly marks a shift in critical paradigms.

  4. Stella P. Revard, Milton and the Tangles of Neaera’s Hair: The Making of the 1645 “Poems” (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), 131. Also see 140–146 for her argument that the positive associations of the sirens dominate here.

  5. S. E. Sprott, John Milton, “A Maske”: The Earlier Versions (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), 8.

  6. A Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton, ed. A. S. P. Woodhouse and Douglas Bush, Vol. 2, Pt. 3 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 965; John Guillory, Poetic Authority: Spenser, Milton, and Literary History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 90.

  7. See Nancy Lindheim, “Pastoral and Masque at Ludlow, University of Toronto Quarterly 67 (1998), 654–655, 659–660; the phrase cited appears on 655.

  8. Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), esp. 32. Debora Kuller Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (1990; rpt., Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 257.

  9. Lynn Enterline, The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), Chapter 3.

  10. Ramie Targoff, Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), esp. Chapters 1 and 2.

  11. Compare Michael Macovski’s Bakhtinian analysis of the passage, which stresses that the poet is also addressing former selves, Dialogue and Literature: Apostrophe, Auditors, and the Collapse of Romantic Discourse [New York: Oxford University Press, 1994], 56–66.

  12. Wordsworth, “Lyrical Ballads” and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).

  13. I cite The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., ed. Larry D. Benson and F. N. Robinson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).

  14. Two important exceptions do trace connections between Renaissance literature and the dramatic monologue: John Maynard, “Speaker, Listener, and Overhearer: The Reader in the Dramatic Poem,” Browning Institute Studies 15 (1987), 105–112; Alan Sinfield, Dramatic Monologue (London: Methuen, 1977), Chapter 5.

  15. Marshall Brown, “Negative Poetics: On Skepticism and the Lyric Voice,” Representations, no. 86 (Spring 2004), 131.

  16. In addition to Maynard’s “Speaker, Listener, and Overhearer” and Sinfield’s Dramatic Monologue, among the most influential treatments of these and related issues are Carol Christ, Victorian and Modern Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), Chapter 2; Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957); and two essays by Ralph W. Rader, “The Dramatic Monologue and Related Lyric Forms,” Critical Inquiry 3 (1976), 131–151; and “Notes on Some Structural Varieties and Variations in Dramatic ‘I’ Poems and Their Theoretical Implications,” Victorian Poetry 22 (1984), 103–120. In Chapter 2 Langbaum argues that the reader’s predominant response to the dramatic monologue’s speaker is sympathy, though he acknowledges the presence of judgment as well. For the argument that we judge the speaker in dramatic monologue in ways we do not use to evaluate his counterpart in lyric, see, e.g., Rader, “Notes,” esp. 103–104.

  17. Maynard, “Speaker, Listener, and Overhearer.”

  18. Ezra Pound, “A Retrospect,” in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1918), 11–12.

  19. See, e.g., William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (London: Chatto and Windus, 1935).

  20. For earlier versions of this argument, see, e.g., Chapter 6 of my study, A Happier Eden: The Politics of Marriage in the Stuart Epithalamium (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990).

  21. See esp. my essay “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? Reevaluating Formalism and the Country House Poem,” Modern Language Quarterly 61 (2000), 59–77; reprinted in revised and expanded form as “The Politics of Aesthetics: Recuperating Formalism and the Country House Poem,” in Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements, ed. Mark Rasmussen (New York: Palgrave Press, 2002).

  22. Theodor W. Adorno, “Lyric Poetry and Society,” Telos 20 (1974), 56–71.

  23. Semler’s observation was made at a meeting of the Macquarie University (Australia) Department of English Early Modern Group, July 2006.

  24. Hutcheon has written frequently and powerfully on replacing combative exchanges with collaborative “both/and” models. See, e.g., “Presidential Address,�
� Publications of the Modern Language Association 116 (2001), 518–530. The citation is from Linda Hutcheon, “Saving Collegiality,” Profession 2006 (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2006), 62.

  25. For a fuller discussion of this and other issues in collegiality, see Dubrow, Introduction, in Profession 2006, as well as other articles and features in the section on collegiality in the journal.

  Index

  Abad, Gémino H., 63, 89, 254n23, 259n99

  absence. See presence and absence

  Abu-Lughod, Lila, 245n34

  address, 57; direction of, 83–94, 103–5, 211. See also audiences; voice

  ado, in ritual and lyric, 133

  Adorno, Theodor W., 1, 116, 196, 199, 201, 239, 263n32, 275n27, 281n22

  agency, authorial, 159–61, 165–88. See also authority, authorial

  aggression, in love poems, 87–88

  Ainsworth, Henry, Annotations Upon the Book of Psalmes, 209

  air, 31–35

  Alberti, Leon Battista, 60

  Albright, Daniel, 4, 243n15

  Alexander, Bill, 85

  Alpers, Paul, 6, 92–93, 103, 218, 245n32, 260n109, 260n110, 261n138, 278n80

  Ammons, A. R., 28, 247n23

  Amphion, 24–25

  Anacreon, 51–53

  Andrewes, Lancelot, 121

  animator, 72, 78, 80, 84, 92, 94, 97, 103, 151, 211

  answer poems, 61, 70, 83–84, 162, 177, 181, 231

  anthologies, 157, 176, 181. See also grouping of poems

  anthropological studies, 133, 136, 151–52. See also names of scholars

  anticipatory amalgam, 204–7

  anxiety, 134–35, 230–31. See also guilt

  aoide, 40

  aoidós, 40

  apostrophe, 4, 83, 114;

  lyric as apostrophic, 188

  Appel, Libby, 85

  Appel, Willa, 137

  Archer, Michael, 264n51

  architecture: contemporary, 54–56, 132;

  domestic, 82

  Arion, 24–25, 32