Healing Music in Pericles, the Winter’s Tale and The Tempest

This essay examines the scenes in Shakespeare’s romances in which music has a healing and revitalizing power, but it also contains its own subversion. In Pericles, in the palace at Pentapolis, Pericles asks for a musical instrument, which he plays while he sings to himself. The wise doctor Cerimon revives Thaisa’s apparently dead body with the help of music in Pericles. In the final reunion scene with his daughter, Marina, the music of her voice has healing power for her father. In The Winter’s Tale, Hermione’s apparently lifeless statue is brought to life while music is playing. Finally, The Tempest is one of Shakespeare’s most musical plays, with songs and music and a masque reviving the action. Shakespeare used songs to establish the character or the mental state of the singer. Music and allusions to music in these plays’ scripts can be interpreted as forms of indirect and covert propaganda, attuned to the politics of the time, but also as individual musical parts, in which music has healing power over the mind. They are like the music of the soul, suggesting interiority. Music is used, therefore, to achieve theatrical effect.