The gaze of the listener : Shakespeare's sonnet 128 and early modern discourses of music and gender

From the Tudor period, keyboard skills were a staple in the education of girls of 'quality'. However, theoretical admiration of music and its social instrumentalization 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 a 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 and particularly female performance.