Broken Harmony

Titles for monographs are a tricky business. Publishers, understandably exercised by the unpredictability of the marketplace, look for the stripped back and simplified title that is friendly to the search engine; their desire for the straightforward often stands in contrast to the fondness of the academic community for quasi-poetic titles, often fashioned from direct quotation. Any book that has ‘Shakespeare’ in the title is, of course, likely to improve the sales columns of a university press, and sometimes the significance of Shakespeare in the global marketplace can tend to mask the deeper and more varied contents of a book on early modern texts and ideas. A first glance at Joseph Ortiz’s title for his study of the philosophies of music as they were represented and deconstructed by early modern playwrights and poets suggests that there was some compromise between him and his publisher: ‘Broken Harmony’ is a nicely suggestive title for a book that sets out to address radically discontinuous thoughts about music, philosophy, and practice in the early modern period, and the subtitle does the necessary work for those concerned with the world of internet searches. Something of the study’s range and focus is still lost in the process, however. While it would be a churlish critic who tried to deny the centrality of Shakespeare to this study (five of its six chapters are concerned with an impressive number of his plays and poems), there is nothing in the title that would tell an interested reader that the final chapter is a detailed discussion of John Milton’s 1634 Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle (or ‘ A Maske ’, as Ortiz prefers to refer to that text/event throughout). This is a subject to which I will return at the end, but for now it is intriguing to register the suppressed role that Milton plays in this study.

Aesthetics · Art · Compromise · Epistemology · Harmony (color) · Literature · Nothing · Poetry · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Visual arts · Law · Philosophy · Renaissance and Early Modern Studies · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism