The Challenges of Orpheus

by Heather Dubrow

  Lyric serves many other roles as well. Demonstrating the wide range of functions assumed by the poems inserted within the text of the Old Arcadia (in contrast to the eclogues), Robert F. Stillman includes the roles of providing information about the plot and humorous exposition.64 In an analogue to the suasive agendas I mentioned, Lodge’s Salader hangs poems by his father’s hearse to give the impression he is sorrowful, thus building the reputation that allows him to deceive others subsequently. Because the two episodes appear in close conjunction, the text contrasts this deceptive use of poetry with a more positive instance of its rhetorical instrumentality: the love poem Rosader sends Rosalynd early in their courtship intensifies her interest in him and thus advances the plot. I noted that lyric may advance narrative more directly by posing a problem that the story solves, and in Book II, Chapter 12 of Sidney’s New Arcadia, reading a poem leads Zelmane to ask Philoclea for an explanation of it, thus inviting one of the many lengthy inset stories in this romance.

  In prose romances, as in instances observed earlier in this chapter, the energy and intensification of lyric may also participate in the forward movement of the plot. The “Wooing Eclogue” (211) that Rosader and Rosalynd sing together is one incident in the courtship of our hero by a woman pretending to be a man, an episode prominent as well in Shakespeare’s play; but in Lodge’s version, a significant part of the wooing is actually conducted through a song, whereas in Shakespeare’s, Orlando’s atrocious poetry is more an impediment than an encouragement to the course of true love. (To be sure, if Rosader and Rosalynd literally sing the same song, thus symbolizing and abetting their desire to make many types of music together, this incident is implicitly contrasted with Phebe’s poetic answer to Montanus’s love poem, a response that blocks the love interest rather than advancing it.)

  Story may also facilitate or advance lyric in episodes that suggest that lyric is in a sense the achievement and product of narrative, another pattern discussed above. The song Zelmane sings in Book II, Chapter 11 of the New Arcadia when he sees Philoclea bathing is described in terms of Platonic furor and the involuntary poetic outburst sometimes associated with it: this language encourages us to see the poem as an expression of sexual desire, in some senses even a consummation that temporarily replaces but also anticipates the more literal consummation of this love. An even more intriguing example occurs at the end of Book III of the first part of the Urania. Having previously refused Doralina’s request to repeat her poetry, saying she is “weary of rime” (498), Pamphilia instead tells a story about Lindamira that she claims is lifted from “a French Story” (499); the tale, however, culminates in a set of seven sonnets. Although they are labeled, “Lindamira’s Complaint,” they obviously relate to Pamphilia’s condition as well, and as we read we may suspect that the process of telling the story released the blockage that made her hesitate to recite verse earlier. Similarly, the pretense-within-a-pretense-within-a-truth that these poems concern a character in a French story both blocks and releases the fact that they are about Lindamira, and thus in addition really about Pamphilia, both of whom are, of course, characters in an English story.

  All this is not to say that hostile takeovers, whether temporary or permanent, and other types of interruption are absent from the relationship of lyric and narrative in these prose romances. The songs at the end of Book I of the Urania temporarily delay boarding a ship and the literal and narratological advances that vessel represents. In the Old Arcadia, Sidney introduces his eclogues as easing the tediousness of his narrative (an apology for prose that he omits from his revised version): “whereof I will repeat you a few to ease you, fair ladies, of the tediousness of this long discourse.”65 Conversely, the idea that the eclogues—and the social class with which they are primarily associated—threaten the principal plot is both introduced and denied through Sidney’s wording at the end of Book IV of his New Arcadia: “But yet to know what the poor shepherds did, who were the first discriers of these matters, will not to some ears perchance be a tedious digression.”66 Moreover, some of the lyrics within prose romances do not in any sense contribute to the movement of the plot or the development of its characters; when Basilius sings a song about sunset in Book III, Chapter 39 of the New Arcadia, even the most committed New Critic would have trouble finding evidence of organic unity.

  On the other hand, in many other instances what would appear to be a lyric interlude that at worst impedes and at best temporarily suspends the plot in fact proves to be relevant to it in some respects, even if it doesn’t directly advance the action. As David Kalstone has pointed out, when Strephon and Klaius famously address the “gotehead gods” in their extraordinary sestina, they are alluding to the situation of the princes and to lost harmony.67 Similarly, some of the eclogues that conclude Book III gloss marriage in ways very relevant to the text. And the commentary on tyranny in Philisides’s song in the Third Eclogues illuminates many episodes in the narrative, exemplifying Blair Worden’s assertion that Sidney’s political observations can be at their most piercing in those bucolic interludes.68

  The neatest example of a delay that is something else as well occurs at the end of the first book of the New Arcadia. Hearing about Cecropia’s “beasts ranging in that dangerous sort” (181), Basilius brushes aside the issue in favor of attending the performance of eclogues, much as he attempts to brush aside the ranging political discontents he should address and the familial responsibilities he subverts. This is a characterological parallel to the formal textual device of suspending the principal plot in the interest of eclogues, thus ignoring the parts of the story that are, so to speak, still roaming abroad, their teeth bared. This delay indubitably serves positive narratological ends of building suspense, but it also enacts one of the principal ethical concerns of the plot, the danger of suspending heroic action for the values troped through the related symbols of pastoral, poesy in general, and love lyrics in particular.

  In addition, the lyrics in prose romances often serve functions specific to that genre. The suspension of action at the end of the first book of the New Arcadia demonstrates that these poems do not merely provide one version of the delays the genre requires but also enable a formal analogue, the interlacing of genres and registers, to the interlacing of plots that is also characteristic of romance. And they may also contribute to character development. As several students of Wroth have noted, in the Urania Antissia’s uncontrolled effusions of verse participate in the exposure of her weaknesses, establishing her, too, as a kind of negative identity for both Pamphilia and their creator.69 Most telling are the songs delivered by Pyrocles and, in a closely parallel episode that ensues shortly afterwards, by Musidorus: these lyrics demonstrate how the characters of these worthy princes are threatened by the demon desire.70 Pyrocles’s transformation via love and his disguise as a woman are closely associated with his delivering a love poem, that activity so often seen as effeminizing in Sidney’s culture.

  Songs and poems are, in short, typically integrated into the prose romances in a range of ways. Yet the extent to which this incorporation is signaled visually differs significantly from one romance to another. For those who read romances in manuscript, the songs would have necessarily lacked the distinction, in both senses, created by italicization, though they were set off by white space. In contrast, in printed texts such as the 1598 translation of George of Montemayor’s Diana and the 1590 and 1593 editions of Sidney’s Arcadia, poems, like many paratextual elements, are italicized; in those editions of Sidney’s romance, generally though not with absolute consistency, a large capital further flags the shift into poetry. Once again the reader receives varied signals about the status of verse; once again the author does not have absolute control over those signals. This anticipates how song in Shakespearean drama is thoroughly woven into the texture of the drama in some respects, yet insistently distinguished from it in others.

  This chapter focuses on the mating rituals and rebuffs of lyric and narrative: emerging as they
do when one examines speaker and audience, the dramatic qualities of lyric have necessarily been discussed at several other points in this work, notably in my chapter on lyric audiences. Nonetheless, at this juncture a coda on one particular instance of the relationship of lyric and drama, the songs in Shakespeare’s plays, can usefully supplement those discussions because it supports and extends my arguments about the modal relationships traced in this chapter in one way while further complicating them in another. First, much as lyrics are often closely integrated into the romances and other narratives in which they appear, so too Shakespearean songs often advance the action of the drama rather than simply adorning or impeding it.71 In particular, they typically do so through their many connections to issues about power and its limitations. And second, whereas many of the examples examined so far involve some blurring of modal categories, the Shakespearean analyses below demonstrate how and why in certain important respects songs in particular must be sedulously distinguished from other discursive registers.

  Recognizing how song can impel action and why it differs from other forms of discourse provides a new perspective on, among other subjects, the relationship of song to marginalized characters. Many valuable studies of the Others who sing in these plays, such as the work of Leslie C. Dunn, attribute the newfound agency of these performers to characteristics of the social situation, notably the presence or creation of a community of women, or, alternatively, these studies concentrate on the content of what is performed.72 Yet these analyses call for revisionist qualifications, for, although the thematic content and female circles associated with songs often contribute to their power, it is primarily through the distinctive qualities of song per se, notably its ability to substitute its own rules for others, that hierarchies of gender and social status are countered. Thus otherwise marginalized women and men can achieve a measure of agency.

  A large subject in its own right, the issue of Shakespearean songs necessarily gestures towards the even vaster question of the role of such verses in early modern plays. The relationship of those two exemplars of performance, songs and plays, has received far more critical attention than the relationship of lyric and narrative in early modern literature. Especially useful is William Bowden’s survey of the uses of song in seventeenth-century drama; in particular, in demonstrating that songs appear in some 70 percent of the 475 plays he examined, Bowden’s study stresses the range of functions they serve, thus providing a useful warning against making the little world surveyed below an everywhere. No less valuable in its conclusions, though quite different in its focus, Diana E. Henderson’s study of the role of song in Elizabethan drama achieves insights with broader implications through a more focused analysis of three test cases in particular, George Peele’s Arraignment of Paris, Christopher Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage, and Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor’s Lost.73

  Methodological and ontological problems confront any study of songs in early modern drama, even one with my more limited agenda. As my introduction noted, songs differ among each other in multiple ways; especially germane to debates about lyric is the extent to which a given song establishes itself as a performance, a self-conscious representation for an audience. Some Shakespearean songs are not lyrics in most of the senses in which I have defined the mode but rather ballads, while others are lyrics in some senses yet distinctly unlyrical in their mood, such as Silence’s songs in Act V, scene iii of 2 Henry IV or Autoly-cus’s in The Winter’s Tale. My analysis focuses largely on songs that are lyric, not narrative, in mode, but some of its observations apply to both types and to songs that, though primarily narrative, include lyric elements.

  If we cannot always be sure which songs should be described as lyrics, neither can we invariably achieve certainty about which passages in plays were sung. To what extent and in what ways, if any, are the songs in drama ontologically different from types of discourse they resemble? Although Jonathan Culler has suggested a binary divide between lyric and the default position of ordinary speech,74 in fact, as my analysis of the relationship between narrative and lyric demonstrates, many intermediary positions insistently present themselves. Similarly, it is not always possible to locate an inherent linguistic distinction between the songs in plays and other passages. In some respects the seductive language with which Volpone attempts to court Celia immediately after singing “Come, my Celia, let us prove” is more lyrical than that classically restrained song itself. The sonnet delivered during Romeo and Juliet’s courtship is evidently a passage of heightened lyricism but not literally a song. Despite and because of these category crises, Frye’s radical of presentation—that the given words are sung—remains crucial. In particular, Shakespeare so often presents song as discursively ruptural, as a dramatic break from many other kinds of language, that this way of voicing words qualifies some of my earlier generalizations about the overlapping of discursive types.

  This is not to deny the kinship of song with a few linguistic forms that are themselves ruptural. As Andrew Welsh has so cogently demonstrated, charm and chant are among the roots of lyric, and one is certainly aware of their connection in the songs of many Shakespearean plays.75 “Charming your blood with pleasing heaviness” (III.i.215) is the effect predicted for the Welsh song in 1 Henry IV.76 In the opening of Act II, scene ii of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the fairies’ apotropaic song at Titania’s bedside is followed virtually immediately by Oberon’s charm. Arguing as well that charms differ from songs in the former’s characteristic emphasis on the private rather than the communal, irregular rhythm, and reliance on magic words rather than nonsense words, Welsh suggests that chants may combine elements of both charm and song;77 spectators of the scene in A Midsummer Night’s Dream are likely to be aware that while one of the two passages in question is a song aiming to protect Titania and the other a charm intended to harm her, their tones are similar, and both might be performed as chants. In short, the similarities between these types encourage the audience to compare and think further about each of these discursive registers, thus directing attention to their distinctive workings.

  Song itself is not distinctive, however, in a way one might well predict, that is, miming of the properties of soliloquy. Shakespeare, as studies ranging from the classic work of Wolfgang Clemen to the recent revisionist analyses of James Hirsch have shown, was attracted to the soliloquy and redeveloped it from earlier models.78 Given the association, however problematized and limited in the early modern period, between lyric and the meditative, we would expect to find a significant percentage of Shakespearean songs associated with or serving the functions of soliloquies. Quite the contrary. Shakespeare is interested in lyric as a form of speech that interacts with other forms, as we just saw; and in the characterological analogue to that concern, he is interested as well in how the singer interacts with those around him. Diana Henderson’s acute observation about the work of Marlowe and Peele, as well as Love’s Labor’s Lost, applies to the rest of its author’s canon as well: “Shakespeare’s play is very much about lyricism as a social act.”79 Most of the time the use of songs in his plays, unlike those of some of his contemporaries, emphasizes interplay between people and registers of discourse, not isolation or removal. Exceptions of course present themselves; for example, although the song Julia hears in Act IV, scene ii of Two Gentlemen of Verona enables some puns on the behavior of the performer, its performance per se contributes comparatively little. On the whole, however, songs participate actively both in the dramatic action and in the forms of narrativity it involves.

  In so doing, they serve a wide range of roles; for example, the Clown’s love songs in Act II, scene iii of Twelfth Night and his duet with Sir Toby in the same scene establish the rowdiness against which Malvolio rails. One should, however, render Henderson’s observation about lyricism as a social act more specific by acknowledging that Shakespearean songs are typically associated not only with social acts but with ones involving the assertion and achievement of power, whether it is the ap
otropaic magic of the fairies in the concluding scene and some earlier ones in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or the different but not unrelated seductive strategies of Autolycus and Ariel when he is calling to Ferdinand. When Laertes alerts Ophelia to the danger Hamlet represents “If with too credent ear [she] list his songs” (I.iii.30), he is cautioning her about the potency of songs, literal and otherwise, implying that, like the vows against which her father shortly warns her, they may serve as “brokers” (127) in a campaign of “unmast’red importunity” (32).

  Although Laertes also reminds Ophelia that Hamlet’s agency is limited because of his social position, clearly his love lyrics can express and enhance his power as princely lover in predictable and conventional ways. In some particularly intriguing Shakespearean instances, however, the power of song is transgressive because of the type of sentiments being expressed or the type of person expressing them or both. Singing, so often a pastoral activity, may fill a liberatory discursive function similar to the role Paul Alpers attributes to pastoral itself.80 Notice that the hunting song in Act IV, scene ii of As You Like It not only expresses the commonplace anxieties about adultery but links them to male prowess in that the hunter who killed the deer wears the horns. In other words, achievement in male pursuits like hunting is not adequate protection against failure in amorous ones; the song stages male competition, with jealousy of the hunter’s achievements symbolically represented as the fulfilled desire to cuckold him.