Revenge and ambition, past and present

Revenge and ambition had meanings in Shakespeare's world significantly different from what they mean now. Yet we can still easily recognize them in Shakespeare's plays, allowing us both an emotional connection to the human past, and an intellectual perspective on it.

Shakespeare's brilliant contemporary, Francis Bacon, called revenge 'a kind of wild justice', and it must have been an important supplement to official justice in an era of very limited police powers and severely enforced social hierarchy. The Tudor monarchies made some progress in controlling lawlessness, but there must have been some basis for the persistent jokes about incompetent constables and watches in Elizabethan comedy. With so many crimes unsolved, so many criminals immune to punishment, and so many outrages (against women, the poor, and ethnic and religious minorities) not even considered crimes, it is hardly surprising that the public developed an appetite for revenge stories.

Though Waller (if he actually made that remark) was speaking to a neophyte jazz fan, had he lived to see scholars ‘messing’ with jazz he probably would have disapproved of that activity as well. They spend lengthy amounts of time listening to it, reading and thinking about it, for they find the music fascinating, irresistible and sometimes mysterious. Ever curious, they examine it, using a variety of skills and approaches. Then they write about it in their spare time (no one makes a living analysing music), hoping to reach an interested audience with their insights into the music. Readership and book sales are minuscule by popular-press standards. But if the readership is small, jazz analysts still may take pride in providing informed alternatives to the pseudo-intellectual verbiage and scrambled terminology that sometimes characterises jazz writing for the general reader.

Music analysts strive to describe or explain musical phenomena with some combination of words, musical notation and graphic representation. But while a jazz piece, like any other piece of music, may be a fixed object – an audio recording or written score – analyses may be dramatically different, as John Brownell has pointed out (1994, 23), depending upon what each analyst listens for and finds in a piece.

Jazz is often presented as a musical art form, which is fine for musical connoisseurship. But any serious inquiry into the nature, history, aesthetics and even future of jazz needs to examine the unique relation between music making and dancing that existed at its origin and was mutually nourishing for decades. The severing of this relation brought about tremendous changes in both the music and the dance.

Popular dancing is an extremely important cultural activity, for bodily movement is a kind of repository for social and individual identity. The dancing body engages the cultural inscripting of self and the pursuit of pleasure, and dancing events are key sites in the working and reworking of racial, class and gender boundaries. For this reason Linda Tomko has argued that dancing is ‘a social and cultural process operating in the midst, and not at the margins, of American life – indeed, as American life’ (1999, xiii). Particularly significant are moments of transformation, when conventional forms of popular dancing are no longer sufficiently expressive, leading to experimentation with and development of new forms of bodily identity. New music emerges whose kinetic power reflects and reinforces the new bodily identity; the music and dance resonate with each other. These episodes of transformation inevitably generate alarm about the release of unbridled sexuality and trigger efforts to repress and supervise dancing and the places where it occurs.

The purpose of this chapter is to contribute towards a systematic study of those ‘economic circumstances’ by suggesting two frameworks within which jazz can be situated as part of the wider music business.

The three music markets

The first framework is a ‘horizontal’ dimension which allows jazz to be viewed in relation to the three general types of music market to be found in the twentieth century: those of traditional (or folk) music, of popular music and of art (or classical) music. At different times jazz has been part of each of these markets.

The principal characteristic of a traditional music market is the close relationship of music to social ritual: the main occasions for music are such events as weddings, funerals, carnivals and festivals. Early jazz activity in New Orleans – the parades, picnics and funerals – included elements of this music culture (see Buerkle and Barker 1973).

In societies subject to such processes as urbanisation and industrialisation, traditional music markets give way to the popular music market that supplies entertainment as a commodity to be consumed within leisure time (see Laing 1969). And from the beginning in New Orleans, the musical elements of a traditional culture were interwoven with the dance jobs, the mobile advertising jobs and other elements of a de-ritualised and commercialised leisure and entertainment economy.

The poet John Dryden, writing near the end of the seventeenth century, criticized Shakespeare for failing to respect the unity of character in his tragedies: 'The last property of manners is, that they be constant, and equall, that is, maintain'd the same through the whole design: thus when Virgil had once given the name of Pious to Aeneas, he was bound to show him such, in all his words and actions through the whole Poem.' According to Dryden, the playwright is bound by the canons of realism – rules that characters as represented in literary works ought to manifest a high degree of psychological and behavioural consistency. Thus for Aeneas to be himself – to have the identity of Aeneas – he should be pious in mind as in deed. For Dryden, this artistic requirement is grounded in a conviction that real human beings are psychologically consistent and, as such, the autonomous source of their meanings. Self-sameness in a person's behaviours flows from an invisible self-identity. This inner identity is the product of a disembodied consciousness that sees the world as the objectified instrument of its own willed designs. The ‘I’ with which an individual represents him- or herself to the world is fully present to itself and thus can be held accountable for its words and deeds.

Throughout the twentieth century critical and popular opinion regarded Shakespeare's tragedies as his highest achievement; there is no sign that their pre-eminence will be modified in the twenty-first. In a largely secular world they have been invested with the status of secular scripture, often treated with reverence as spiritual masterpieces of transcendent literary art rather than as great plays written about four hundred years ago. The texts have sometimes appeared like sacred objects, especially in collected editions. Certainly the discussion of individual plays (sympathetic or hostile) has often been conducted as if the text of each were definitively established, canonically determined, and available for exegesis.

However, such is not the case. The notion of a single authentic text belongs to the tradition of reading plays rather than that of performing them in the playhouse, where performance admits variation. The texts of Shakespeare’s tragedies, as of all of his plays, are unstable. The modern editions that we study are derived from documents of doubtful origin and imperfect execution about which there is less external evidence than we desire. Those early documents are constantly re-edited in the light of new knowledge, new theoretical concerns, and new hypotheses.

In one sense, Shakespeare wrote tragedies throughout his career. To be sure, among the plays classified as tragedies in the great Folio edition of 1623, only Titus Andronicus (c. 1589-92) and Romeo and Juliet (1594-6) were written before 1599. Yet Shakespeare certainly pursued tragic themes and consequences in his early historical plays. The title page of The First Part of the Contention betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster, published in 1594 as a somewhat shortened version of what was to appear in the 1623 Folio as The Second Part of Henry the Sixth, announces among its subjects 'the death of the good Duke Humphrey', the 'banishment and death of the Duke of Suffolk', and 'the tragical end of the proud Cardinal of Winchester'. The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, and the Death of Good King Henry the Sixth, published in 1595 as a version of what was to appear in the 1623 Folio as The Third Part of Henry the Sixth, describes itself as a tragedy in that quarto title. So does The Tragedy of Richard III, registered and published in 1597 after having been written in about 1592–4. The Life and Death of King John (written in about 1594–6 and first published in the 1623 Folio) and The Tragedy of Richard the Second (registered and published in 1597) are similarly characterized as tragedies on their title pages, at least (in the case of King John) by the implications of tragedy in the King’s ‘death’.

Speaking to himself – and heard by an offstage audience – Hamlet decides to have the visiting troupe of actors 'play something like the murder of my father': 'the play's the thing', he concludes, 'Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king'. Hamlet imagines theatrical enactment as a persuasive intervention which will provoke his uncle to reveal his guilt. Implicitly, he also affirms that his words – and those of the already 'extant' play in the troupe's repertoire – will tell only part of the story and that the acted and felt play will be the 'real' thing. Real, and also material, for performance not only reimagines 'the play' but invites us to think concretely about how words – and silences – do theatrical work. How do particular actors' bodies, their physical and gestural languages, make meanings; how do theatrical set design, lighting, and costume discipline and enhance those bodies? How do particular spaces and stage images arrest attention, remain etched in memory? Tracing a range of performances of a play such as Antony and Cleopatra – once considered by literary critics to be, like King Lear, unperformable – opens a window on to a flexible, shape-shifting theatrical literacy and legacy, revealing how changes in theatrical spaces and fashions, in critical and cultural histories, have shaped and reshaped both the imaginative and material contours of Cleopatra’s ‘infinite variety’ as well as those of the play.

Since jazz emerged from its geographical origins it has travelled back and forth across the disputed terrain between high and low culture, variously located as folk, popular, art music and permutations. Its shifting position makes it a particularly instructive vehicle through which to study the matrix of cultural politics, the balances of power that determine which cultural forms carry authority. The migrations of jazz within musical politics and aesthetics depend upon negotiations between text (the particular jazz performance) and context (the physical and cultural space within which it is situated). The Eurocentric arbitration of musical value by the end of the nineteenth century was predicated on the stability of the musical text and of its relationship with context. Jazz appeared to demolish this model. As aurally based improvisation, in performance the ‘text’ evaded fixity, and the sites and conditions of performance blurred the distinction between art and social practice, music and noise. Even preserved on a sound recording, its formal components were scarcely intelligible in established musical terms such as background–foreground, melody–harmony and structural coherence. Jazz was a site of unruliness.

Jazz categorisations

The rapid international diaspora of jazz (see Chapter 2) meant that it could not be ignored; jazz was arguably the most pervasively influential development in twentieth-century music. Apart from the particular musical forms and practices in which it has been seminal, it was the most widespread musical vehicle of the progressive thrust into the experience of modernity in the early twentieth century, in such matters as gender, mass mediations and technological innovation.

An eminent Shakespearean scholar famously remarked that there is no such thing as Shakespearean Tragedy: there are only Shakespearean tragedies. Attempts (he added) to find a formula which fits every one of Shakespeare's tragedies and distinguishes them collectively from those of other dramatists invariably meet with little success. Yet when challenging one such attempt he noted its failure to observe what he termed 'an essential part of the [Shakespearean] tragic pattern'; which would seem to imply that these plays do have some shared characteristics peculiar to them.

Nevertheless, objections to comprehensive definitions of ‘Shakespearean Tragedy’ are well founded. Such definitions tend to ignore the uniqueness of each play and the way it has been structured and styled to fit the particular source-narrative. More generally, they can obscure the fact that what distinguishes Shakespeare’s tragedies from everyone else’s and prompts us to consider them together are not so much common denominators but rather the power of Shakespeare’s language, his insight into character, and his dramaturgical inventiveness.

‘Free Jazz’ refers to a historical movement that, despite earlier precedents, first significantly flowered in the late 1950s in the US. Its central focus was a liberation from musical conventions – but from a jazz player's perspective, since no liberation is ever complete. Initially known simply as the New Thing, it became Free Jazz after borrowing the title of a seminal 1960 album by saxophonist/composer Ornette Coleman. It subsequently has had international repercussions that seem set to continue well into the twenty-first century.

Its impact and relations to other developments remain controversial, and a variety of accounts of it are possible: as a culmination of the drive for individual creativity, a radicalisation of the scope of musical materials of jazz, a collection of statements by salient individuals and groups, or as a movement shaped by extramusical forces of political, cultural, racial and spiritual liberation – to mention only the most obvious. Here these are all taken as valid viewpoints, in need of reconciliation.

The seminal role of creative improvisation

The nucleus of all jazz is creative improvisational expression (Louis Armstrong's ‘the sound of surprise’), a process that brings into the music the joy of discovery, the magic of communication, and the uniqueness of both the moment and the individual. Yet it also introduces several profound tensions which early on planted the seeds for the ultimate blossoming of free jazz.

While it remains a fascination that one of the first recordings of African-American music was made in Sweden in 1899 – ‘Cake Walk’ (a version of ‘At A Georgia Camp Meeting’ by Kerry Mills), by the Kronoberg Society Regimental Band conducted by Erik Högberg – the first jazz recording is usually cited as ‘Darktown Strutters Ball’ by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band from January 1917. Prior to that we can only guess what the music might have sounded like as a deliquescent folk music in the rural southern states of America. But we do know that early jazz drew together several strands of vernacular music, including Negro spirituals, work and folk songs, ragtime, minstrel music, brass-band music and blues, that were freely mixed with elements from hymns, popular songs and popular classics of the day.

From the start, jazz was a pluralistic music. One of its great early practitioners, Jelly Roll Morton, argued that the music should always include a ‘Spanish tinge’ while the unambiguous habañera section in St Louis Blues, published by W. C. Handy in 1914, is revealing of jazz's practice of appropriation; an important, if often neglected, feature of a music that already comprised a diversity of elements drawn from a variety of sources both from within and without the African-American diaspora.

Once the Dixieland revival found an audience in the 1940s, the monolithic façade of swing began to splinter into the interest groups that have populated the subsequent history of jazz: bop, cool, third stream, free jazz, fusion, neo-traditionalist. Jazz as music is inseparable from the African-American experience, and Duke Ellington rightly insisted that ‘the Negro is the creative voice of America, is creative America’ (Tucker 1993, 147). The question of the jazz audience, on the other hand, encompasses amore indeterminate populace. One could approach the topic of audience by offering a demographic profile of various constituencies of fans, but this would lend tacit assent to consumerism as validating criterion. There was an audience for jazz before there were consumers, in part because ‘the Jazz Age was born … almost before there was jazz’ (Schiff 1997, 87). ‘Jazz’ was initially so mercurial a term that it was applied to music intermittently: the audience responded to a social spectrum in which music was only a part. None the less, historians have gravitated to the narrative magnetism of giants shaping the music to their personal visions, and 1923 is often cited as an inaugural moment because it marks the first recordings of Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet and Bessie Smith. Gunther Schuller even refers to a ‘pre-1923 era’ (1968, 71). But if we de-prioritise recordings, a significant fact appears: jazz had already had a worldwide impact before 1923.

Shakespeare's tragedies are usually remembered for the central characters for whom they are named. However, the fact that all of their heroes are what in the period were termed 'princes', occupying the power centres of their realms, means that these narratives of usurpation and death are also anatomies of political crises. In setting out contexts for his tales of woe or wonder Shakespeare reveals himself to have been as curious about the make-up of courts and kingdoms as he was about the psychology of individuals. The sufferings of great men and women in Shakespearean tragedy derive from conflicts, the analysis of which inevitably entails a consideration of 'the properties of government' – its characteristics and its proprieties. In 1589, at about the time Shakespeare was beginning to write, George Puttenham observed that ‘poets . . . were the first lawmakers to the people, and the first politicians, devising all expedient means for th’establishment of commonwealth’. Although in his tragedies Shakespeare may concentrate far more on rulers than on the ruled, ‘commonwealth’ interests are inevitably invoked by the fact that any act on the part of a king is de facto what, in Hamlet, Claudius terms ‘sovereign process’ (4.3.65).