Shakespeare’s Animal Anatomy of Music

This essay argues that Shakespeare discloses and metaphorically reanimates the biological matter incorporated in Renaissance musical instruments: animal skins, horns, bones, even guts. Stringing a lute involves the manipulation of life forms viewed as base and irrational, implying a radical contradiction between smooth instrumental music and the compromised vehicle of its production. Shakespeare rarely allows audiences to ignore the beastly, yet paradoxically euphonious, anatomy of music. Examining the representation of music in Western philosophy and mythology, the paper explains that allusions to animals illustrate Pythagorean-Platonic assumptions about music, such as its universal power over every class of being. Shakespeare sometimes echoes this tradition, but more often invokes animals and their anatomy to undermine the moral value of music and suggest its debasing and disempowering effects on human beings. This article discusses animal-based musical imagery in a wide selection of poetry and plays including The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, and The Merchant of Venice. Particular attention is paid to Venus and Adonis and Much Ado About Nothing, where the multivalent term “horn” brings together hunting, courtship, and music. Horns underscore the slippage between these activities and the animal impulses that motivate what we typically think of as distinctively human social rituals.