The music plays
RICHARD Music do I hear?
Ha, ha, keep time. How sour sweet music is
When time is broke and no proportion kept.
So is it in the music of men’s lives;
And here have I the daintiness of ear
To check time broke in a disordered string,
But for the concord of my state and time
Had not an ear to hear my true time broke. (5.5.41-48)
The music is mysterious: a more realist production might suggest that it is overheard from ‘somewhere else’ in the building, the castle, but given the intensely imaginative, generative speech which has just preceded this moment, it could be anything; it doesn’t have to be portentously plinking lute music, for instance. (I like lute music.) Richard is, after all, thinking aloud (although a soliloquy is more than that), so there’s no reason why we shouldn’t hear whatever music his exhausted, traumatised mind supplies. It can, I think, be ecstatically beautiful for a decent while, properly ecstatic in the sense of transporting Richard, briefly, from himself, the thing he’s been trying and failing to do. But the music itself cannot resist the pull of metaphor (another reason why it makes sense that it’s ‘inside’ Richard’s head).
The music is out of time—ha, ha, keep time, he interjects—and out of tune, sour. Its time is broke (and there’s perhaps just a suggestion that this could be part music, played by what was known as a ‘broken consort’, for example of viols, here punningly suggesting that the players are out of time with each other). That the music keeps no proportion is either a further suggestion that the timing is off, or else that the proportions of the musical intervals, the harmonies, the proper tempering of the notes, is being neglected; the tuning’s off too, and what began as something transporting and beautiful has become an ugly reminder of Richard’s own situation. (Of course it has, if it’s inside his head.) Music as order and harmony, whether cosmic (the music of the spheres) or psychological is a commonplace, but here the attentiveness to the conceit, and its aptness in this most lyrical play (and interrupting its greatest aria) makes it precisely appropriate to Richard. (Sweet bells jangled out of time and harsh, as Ophelia says of Hamlet, in Q2; that the Folio has tune suggests the easy slippage between two when thinking about music, order, and harmony.)
As ever, Richard is able to be wryly detached from his own situation: here (in this prison, or, in this instance) I have the daintiness of ear to check time broke in a disordered string. (There is a pleasing, ironically harmonious echo here, of the Gardener’s description of Richard’s fall as a disordered spring, back in 3.4.) Oh, I can detect those tuning problems now, the way in which the ensemble’s falling apart, the rhythm’s out. I just couldn’t do it when I was a king: but for the concord of my state and time had not an ear to hear my true time broke. I couldn’t hold it together or properly see where the problems were. My time as a king was always out of joint, unresolved, discordant. My true time broke.
