The Gaze of the Listener: Shakespeare's Sonnet 128 and Early Modern Discourses of Music and Gender

Abstract

From the Tudor period on, keyboard skills were a staple in the education of girls of ‘quality’. However, theoretical admiration of music and musical skill always co-existed with wariness of actual performers and performances. The hyperbolic musical metaphors for love and marriage contrast with a near-complete absence of harmony and edification in representations of actual music-making. Those two main literary uses of music represent the period's acutely ambivalent discourse on music as well as women, both of which may be perceived as divinely admirable or hellishly tempting. Literary references to keyboard playing favour the latter: the virginals are regularly associated with lewdness and sexual availability. This general discursive and historical background as well as the literary tropes associated with the virginals inform a new reading of Shakespeare's Sonnet 128, whose much-deprecated cruxes and mixed metaphors are read not as authorial oversights but as a significant elaboration of contradictions in the English discourse on musical performance, particularly when undertaken by women.