‘Can doleful notes, to measured accents set, express unmeasured grief?’
Résumé
That music’s function was both to stir emotions and to soothe them is a trope of many early modern texts. The rhetorical question posed in the title of John Danyel’s 1606 song “Can doleful notes” relies on the frequently used conceit of measure, playing on its meanings of meter or rhythm and appropriate amount. Because grief is usually associated with excess, the question of music’s ability to express it constitutes an endless source of such conceits, in poems like George Herbert’s “Grief”, in dramatic works, or self-referentially, in the texts set to music by composers like Danyel or Dowland. Ironically, in spite of their debated power to express such excess, songs are often used as a rhetorical device to that very end by early modern dramatists – the most famous cases in point being Desdemona’s “Willow Song”, Ophelia’s mad songs or Measure for Measure’s “Take, o take those lips away”.
Such songs – we are being told by long-standing critical tradition – point to a quasi heroic feat on the part of characters like Mariana and Desdemona, whose measure, restraint and decorum in the midst of despair and suffering they epitomize. The dignity of those female characters was exalted in countless iconographic or poetic tributes in the 19th and early 20th century.
Stage history contradicts these overly harmonious representations of grief in two significant ways: it shows grief migrating into opera as a new form and production site as early as the late 17th century, while most 20th and 21st century theatre productions omit the original songs or substitute them with new tunes. Opera, or so it seems, has appropriated the ability for song to express grief, and this is true far beyond the handful of operas based on Shakespeare.
Has opera asserted a monopoly on the performance of musical grief ? Has the rhetoric of measure and excess been re-appropriated through other means by today’s spoken theatre?