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The cultural politics of Dido and Aeneas

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2009

ANTHONY WELCH
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Abstract

Controversial efforts to find political allegory in Dido and Aeneas (c.1689), the great chamber opera by Nahum Tate and Henry Purcell, have obscured the opera's broader concern with the politics of culture. As rival political factions claimed ownership of the nation's cultural heritage, Tate and other dramatists in Restoration England asked searching questions about the relationship between the artist and political authority. Grappling with Virgil's Aeneid, a central text of Stuart absolutism, Dido and Aeneas explores the workings and the costs of partisan myth-making. The opera joins many other Restoration voices in taking up an ancient ‘chaste Dido’ tradition, which accused Virgil of mangling Dido's historical reputation in the service of imperial propaganda. Yet Dido does not set forth a topical allegory or a coherent critique of Stuart misrule, but takes an unstable, irresolute attitude towards the cultural legacy of Virgil, the aesthetics of female suffering, and the politics of royal praise.

Type
Research Article
Information
Cambridge Opera Journal , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , March 2009 , pp. 1 - 26
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

1 I am grateful to David Quint, Ellen Rosand, Suzanne Aspden and my anonymous readers at Cambridge Opera Journal for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this essay.

2 When a visiting French company performed Pierre Perrin's Ariane in 1674, for example, first at court and later at Drury Lane, the Duke's Company responded by mounting a string of musical spectaculars at the recently opened Dorset Garden Theatre, such as Thomas Shadwell's operatic arrangement of the John Dryden / William Davenant Tempest (1674) and his own musical tragedy Psyche (1675), based on the court opera by Jean-Baptiste Lully; the rival King's Company, in turn, fought back with parody shows, The Mock-Tempest (1674) and Psyche Debauch'd (1675).

3 On the efforts of various partisan groupings to claim ownership of literary culture (or to define the parameters of high culture and the emerging literary canon in terms that favoured their own ideology), see for example Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven, 1994), 1–19 and passim; Stephen N. Zwicker, Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649–1689 (Ithaca, 1993), 9–36; and especially Derek Hirst, ‘The Politics of Literature in the English Republic’, The Seventeenth Century, 5 (1990), 133–55. On the struggle of seventeenth-century literature to emancipate itself from political and religious discourses, see Michael McKeon, ‘Politics of Discourses and the Rise of the Aesthetic in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth- Century England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (Berkeley, 1987), 35–51.

4 Virgil was widely thought to have written his poem to strengthen his new emperor's political authority, ‘to reconcile all the World, and more particularly the Romans, to the New Establishment, and the Person of Augustus Caesar’ (John Dennis, Remarks on a Book Entituled Prince Arthur [London, 1696], 6); celebrating Augustus as an ideal prince, the Aeneid was said to have taken up the emperor's effort to polish his image after his controversial rise to power. See T. W. Harrison, ‘English Virgil: The Aeneid in the XVIII Century’, Philologica Pragensia, 10 (1967), 1–11, 80–91, for this period's view that Virgil set out to mask ‘the proscriptions and “justified” illegalities of Octavianus, the Triumvir’ with a vision of ‘the beneficent and constitutional paternalism of Augustus, the Princeps’ (3).

5 John Dryden, ‘Dedication of the Aeneis’, in The Works of John Dryden, gen. ed. H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., 20 vols. (Berkeley, 1956–89), II, 277. Further quotations from Dryden's poetry and prose refer to this edition, hereafter cited as Works.

6 Charles Perrault, Parallèle des anciens et des modernes, 4 vols. (Paris, 1688–97), I, 92–3, paraphrased in the anonymous Verdicts of the Learned Concerning Virgil and Homer's Heroic Poems (London, 1697), 11.

7 Robert D. Hume, ‘The Politics of Opera in Late Seventeenth-Century London’, this journal, 10 (1998), 15–43. Another sceptical approach to the search for topical allegory in Dido, retracting his earlier speculations on the matter, is found in Curtis Price, ‘Dido and Aeneas: Questions of Style and Evidence’, Early Music, 22 (1994), 115–25.

8 John Buttrey, ‘The Evolution of English Opera between 1656 and 1695: An Investigation’, Ph.D. diss. (University of Cambridge, 1967). Buttrey summarises his argument in ‘Dating Purcell's Dido and Aeneas’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 96 (1967–8), 52–60.

9 The 1689 date was first proposed by W. Barclay Squire in ‘Purcell's Dido and Aeneas’, Musical Times, 59 (1918), 252–4, based in part on a spoken epilogue to the opera written by Thomas Durfey and printed in November of 1689. For a full summary, with analysis of the political context in 1689, see Buttrey, ‘Dating Purcell's Dido and Aeneas’, and Ellen T. Harris, Henry Purcell's ‘Dido and Aeneas’ (Oxford, 1987), 4–6, 18–20.

10 John Blow's Venus and Adonis was staged at court in the early 1680s. A libretto of Blow's opera, recovered in 1989, reveals that the text was printed not for that initial court performance, but for a later revival staged at Josias Priest's school in 1684. See Richard Luckett, ‘A New Source for Venus and Adonis’, Musical Times, 130 (1989), 76–9. The discovery that Blow's opera moved from the court stage to Priest's school has led to widespread speculation that Dido and Aeneas did the same. The theory is explored in Bruce Wood and Andrew Pinnock, ‘“Unscarr'd By Turning Times”? The Dating of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas’, Early Music, 20 (1992), 373–90, and in a series of responses published in the same journal. In positing a pre-1689 court performance, Wood and Pinnock also draw on stylistic analysis of Purcell's score and other circumstantial evidence.

11 A theory put forward in two essays by Andrew R. Walkling, ‘Political Allegory in Purcell's Dido and Aeneas’, Music and Letters, 76 (1995), 540–71, and ‘Politics and the Restoration Masque: The Case of Dido and Aeneas’, in Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration: Literature, Drama, History, ed. Gerald MacLean (Cambridge, 1995), 52–69.

12 The opera's clearly allegorical prologue, for which no music survives, is also frustratingly ambiguous. Celebrating the passage of Phoebus and Venus across the sea, it could refer to the arrival of William and Mary from Holland in early 1689, as noted by A. Margaret Laurie, ‘Allegory, Sources, and Early Performance History’, in Henry Purcell, Dido and Aeneas, ed. Curtis Price (New York, 1986), 42–6. Possibly it refers more generally to James II and Mary of Modena, since James had served for more than a decade as Lord High Admiral; see Andrew R. Walkling, ‘“The Dating of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas”? A Reply to Bruce Wood and Andrew Pinnock’, Early Music, 22 (1994), 473–6. It is not clear, furthermore, whether the prologue was a late addition joined to an earlier libretto for the opera's 1689 performance.

13 Hume, ‘The Politics of Opera’, 40.

14 Hume, 31, 43.

15 Susan J. Owen, Restoration Theatre and Crisis (Oxford, 1996), 29, and compare Hume, ‘The Politics of Opera’, 27.

16 Christopher Spencer, Nahum Tate (New York, 1972), 84.

17 On the rhetorical tactics of royalist drama during the 1680s, see J. Douglas Canfield, ‘Royalism's Last Dramatic Stand: English Political Tragedy, 1679–89’, Studies in Philology, 82 (1985), 234–63, but see also the qualifications offered by Owen, Restoration Theatre and Crisis, 200–38.

18 Nahum Tate, Brutus of Alba, or, The Enchanted Lovers (London, 1678), 6. Subsequent quotations refer to this edition and are cited parenthetically by page number.

19 For a list of Dido's borrowings from Brutus, see Robert R. Craven, ‘Nahum Tate's Third Dido and Aeneas: The Sources of the Libretto to Purcell's Opera’, The World of Opera, 1 (1979), 73–6.

20 Quotations from Dido and Aeneas refer to the libretto reproduced in Henry Purcell, Dido and Aeneas, ed. Curtis Price (New York, 1986), 63–79, and are cited parenthetically in the text.

21 Price, ‘Dido and Aeneas: Questions of Style and Evidence’, 122.

22 David Z. Kushner, ‘Henry Purcell's “Dido and Aeneas”: An Analytical Discussion’, American Music Teacher, 21 (1971), 28; Joseph Kerman, Opera as Drama, 2nd edn (Berkeley, 1988), 43.

23 For a related reading, stressing the opera's valorisation of private feeling at the expense of Aeneas's public world, see Wilfrid Mellers, ‘The Tragic Heroine and the Un-Hero’, in Harmonious Meeting: A Study of the Relationships between English Music, Poetry and Theatre, c. 1600–1900 (London, 1965), 203–14.

24 Samuel Butler, Characters and Passages from Note-Books, ed. A. R. Waller (Cambridge, 1908), 442.

25 For more on this reassessment, including a more substantial discussion of John Locke and William Temple, see James William Johnson, ‘England, 1660–1800: An Age Without a Hero?’ in The English Hero, 1660–1800, ed. Robert Folkenflik (Newark, 1982), 25–34.

26 John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (London, 1693), 132.

27 Sir William Temple, ‘Of Heroick Virtue’, in Miscellanea. In Four Essays (London, 1690), 146.

28 On the Restoration reaction against Virgil, see especially Howard D. Weinbrot, Augustus Caesar in ‘Augustan’ England: The Decline of a Classical Norm (Princeton, 1977), and Paul N. Hartle, ‘“Lawrels for the Conquered”: Virgilian Translation and Travesty in the English Civil War and Its Aftermath’, in Reinventing the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Constructions of the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, ed. William F. Gentrup (Turnhout, 1998), 127–46.

29 Francis Atterbury may have been the first to use ‘Augustan age’ to designate the English Restoration era and its classicising literary culture; see the preface to The Second Part of Waller's Poems (London, 1690), A4r, and Howard Erskine-Hill, The Augustan Idea in English Literature (London, 1983), 223.

30 John Denham, The Destruction of Troy (London, 1656), 28. On the topicality of this and other translations, see Lawrence Venuti, ‘The Destruction of Troy: Translation and Royalist Cultural Politics in the Interregnum’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 23 (1993), 197–219.

31 On the 1661 Royal Entry, see Erskine-Hill, Augustan Idea, 216–19. Erskine-Hill argues, however, that the political use of iconography from Augustan Rome was neither wholly new nor particularly widespread in Restoration England.

32 See Boys, Aeneas His Errours, or, His Voyage from Troy into Italy (London, 1661), 52–61.

33 Weinbrot, Augustus Caesar in ‘Augustan’ England, 61.

34 The edition's illustrations were inherited from John Ogilby's lavish 1649 translation of Virgil's works. See the discussion of the format and presentation of Dryden's volume in Stephen Zwicker, Politics and Language in Dryden's Poetry: The Arts of Disguise (Princeton, 1984), 188–96.

35 Dryden, ‘Dedication of the Aeneis’, in Works, V, 281.

36 Works, V, 280: citing the Cato passage, Dryden argues that Virgil's ‘Conscience could not but whisper to the Arbitrary Monarch, that the Kings of Rome were at first Elective, and Governed not without a Senate’. Compare René Rapin, Observations on the Poems of Homer and Virgil, trans. John Davies (London, 1672), 58, and see Aeneid, VI, 841, for the earlier reference to Cato the Elder. In the eighteenth century, readers such as Alexander Pope came to believe that Virgil had been referring to the conservative Cato the Censor – a view already sponsored by Servius in the fourth century – and their view of his politics soured accordingly; see Weinbrot, Augustus Caesar in ‘Augustan’ England, 127. On continuing eighteenth-century claims for a secretly republican Virgil, see also T. W. Harrison, ‘English Virgil: The Aeneid in the XVIII Century’, 4–7.

37 The earliest surviving reference to the story of Aeneas's treason against Troy is that of Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Roman Antiquities, I, 48). Aeneas and Antenor are linked in Aeneid, I, 242–53, and a connection between Aeneas and the treason of Antenor appears in the fourth-century journals attributed to Dares the Phrygian and Dictys of Crete.

38 For further discussion see Walkling, ‘Political Allegory’, 553–4.

39 Anon., The Conspiracy of Aeneas and Antenor Against the State of Troy. A Poem (London, 1682), 12.

40 For a summary of ancient commentary on the question, see Arthur Stanley Pease, ed., Publi Vergili Maronis Aeneidos Liber Quartus (Cambridge, MA, 1935), 64–7. For a survey of the early modern reception, see also Don Cameron Allen, ‘Marlowe's Dido and the Tradition’, in Essays on Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama in Honor of Hardin Craig, ed. Richard Hosley (Columbia, 1962), 55–68. Some further details appear in Janet Schmalfeldt, ‘In Search of Dido’, Journal of Musicology, 18 (2001), 584–615.

41 Servius, notes to Aeneid, IV.36, 459, in Servianorum in Vergilii Carmina Commentariorum, ed. E. K. Rand et al., 3 vols. (Lancaster, PA, 1946–), III, 263–4, 400; Macrobius, Saturnalia, V.xvii.4–6, in Macrobius, ed. Franz Rudolf Eyssenhardt (Leipzig, 1893), 320–1.

42 De Exhortatione Castitatis, XIII, in Tertullian, Treatises on Marriage and Remarriage, trans. William P. Le Saint (Westminster, MD, 1951), 63. See also Tertullian's Ad Nationes, I.xviii.2.

43 Augustine, Confessions, trans. F. J. Sheed, 2nd edn (Indianapolis, 2006), 14–15 (I.xiii.21–2).

44 Boccaccio, Famous Women, ed. Virginia Brown (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 166–81; Petrarch, ‘Triumphus Pudicitie’, lines 9–12, 154–9, in Rime, Trionfi, e Poesie Latine, ed. Francesco Neri (Milan, 1951), 509, 516.

45 See Jacqueline Fabre, ‘Les Figures Amoureuses dans les Tragédies de Didon: Étude de la Réception du Livre IV de L'Énéide aux XVIIe et XVIIIe Siècles Français’, in Enée et Didon: Naissance, Fonctionnement et Survie d'un Mythe, ed. René Martin (Paris, 1990), 107–8.

46 Rapin, Observations, 100.

47 Thomas Hearne, Ductor Historicus, or, A Short System of Universal History (London, 1698), 8.

48 William Walsh, ‘To His Mistress’, in Letters and Poems, Amorous and Gallant (London, 1692), 75–7.

49 Anon., Verdicts of the Learned, 8–9.

50 Roger Savage, ‘Producing Dido and Aeneas’, in Price, ed., Dido and Aeneas, 261.

51 See Steven E. Plank, ‘“And Now About the Cauldron Sing”: Music and the Supernatural on the Restoration Stage’, Early Music, 18 (1990), 393–407, and Curtis Price, ‘Dido and Aeneas in Context’, in Price, ed., Dido and Aeneas, 9–11.

52 Richard F. Thomas, Virgil and the Augustan Reception (Cambridge, 2001), 186–9.

53 Dryden, ‘Dedication of the Aeneis’, in Works, V, 296.

54 Works, V, 296.

55 Works, V, 298. Compare Rapin, Observations, 100: ‘And whereas this artifice was advanc'd only to humour the Romans … yet he thought himself concern'd to use all precautions, to prepossess their minds, upon that disguising of the truth. To that purpose he cunningly brings the Gods into the plot, to put a better gloss upon the sacrificing of her.’

56 Dryden, Aeneis, IV, 542–3, 546–7. Several of the Renaissance tragedies of Dido express a similar scepticism about the gods, who are frequently portrayed as arbitrary and remote. The tendency is perhaps strongest in Etienne Jodelle's Didon se sacrifiant (c.1555), on which see Allen, ‘Marlowe's Dido’, 60–4, and Madeleine Lazard, ‘Didon et Enée au XIVe [sic] siècle: La Didon se sacrifiant de Jodelle’, in Enée et Didon, ed. Martin, 89–96.

57 A brief, well-documented discussion of Dido and Cleopatra is found in Pease, ed., Aeneidos Liber Quartus, 24–8; see also C. M. Bowra, From Virgil to Milton (New York, 1967), 51–4.

58 All for Love, 2.1.161, in Dryden, Works, XIII, 44.

59 This formulation was suggested to me by Suzanne Aspden, who adds that Dido's efforts at self-expression against the ‘fateful’ ground bass perhaps not only conform to standard ideological patterns of distressed womanhood, but, in taking up those patterns, ironically seem to justify her confinement by the controlling bass line as a check on her erratic, unruly femininity. The only form of protest available to this victimised woman is one that further sponsors her victimisation. Understood this way, Purcell's setting might therefore expose the footnote continued on next pageworkings of gender ideology in much the same way that Tate works to expose the political ideology of Virgilian epic.

60 On this figure as a musical topos, see Ellen Rosand's influential essay, ‘The Descending Tetrachord: An Emblem of Lament’, Musical Quarterly, 65 (1979), 346–59. It has become traditional to read the Dido ground bass as a mark of the inevitable pressure of the heroine's tragic destiny; compare Schmalfeldt, ‘In Search of Dido’, 611: ‘she lingers to plead with us, even though the ongoing ground-bass repetitions would seem relentlessly to urge her toward her end’.

61 Eric Rothstein, Restoration Tragedy: Form and the Process of Change (Madison, 1967), 105. In addition to this classic account of the rise of pathetic tragedy, see also Laura Brown, Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century Literature (Ithaca, 1993), 64–102; Susan Staves, Players' Scepters: Fictions of Authority in the Restoration (Lincoln, NE, 1979), 111–89; and Mary Beth Rose, Gender and Heroism in Early Modern English Literature (Chicago, 2002), arguing that the end of the seventeenth century witnessed a widespread shift from conventionally ‘masculine’ to ‘feminine’ models of heroism.

62 Thomas D'Urfey, The Injur'd Princess, or, The Fatal Wager (London, 1682), 31.

63 Nathaniel Lee, Theodosius, or, The Force of Love (London, 1680), 49.

64 Brown, Ends of Empire, 65–6, cites four cultural underpinnings of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ‘she-tragedy’: ‘an intense affective engagement with female suffering; a corollary and explicit interest in the female body and female sexuality; a major change in the representation of class distinctions, including a transition toward the moralised and bourgeois forms of the mid-eighteenth century; and … a striking and symptomatic leap from suffering female sexuality to commodification.’

65 Thomas Otway and others preferred to speak of the ‘Noble … pleasure’ derived from compassionate tears, a term that suggests some continuity with the older aristocratic drama that these plays displaced; see Otway, Preface to Don Carlos, Prince of Spain (London, 1676), A3v. On ‘noble’ tears and lingering connections between heroic drama and pathetic tragedy, see Eugene M. Waith, ‘Tears of Magnanimity in Otway and Racine’, in Eugene M. Waith and Judd D. Hubert, French and English Drama of the Seventeenth Century (Los Angeles, 1972), 1–22.

66 Wendy Heller, ‘“A Present for the Ladies”: Ovid, Montaigne, and the Redemption of Purcell's Dido’, Music and Letters, 84 (2003), 196. Heller's essay, which I encountered at a late stage in writing this study, overlaps with mine in its concern for the opera's debt to a ‘chaste Dido’ tradition, although our conclusions differ about Tate's principal sources and motives.

67 Nahum Tate, A Present for the Ladies: Being an Historical Account of Several Illustrious Persons of the Female Sex (London, 1692), 25, 59, A3r.

68 Tate, A Present for the Ladies, A4v.

69 On Virgilian travesty in the seventeenth century, see Paul Scarron, Le Virgile Travesti, ed. Jean Serroy (Paris, 1988), 1–23, and Hartle, ‘“Lawrels for the Conquered”’, 127–46. Of the many English travesties – including Charles Cotton's Scarronides (1664–7), R. M.'s Scarronides (1665), Maurice Atkins's Cataplus (1667), John Phillips's Maronides (1672–3), and John Smyth's Scarronides (1692) – Cotton's version was both the best and the most popular.

70 Of the arrival of Mercury in Book IV to order Aeneas to Rome, he notes: ‘By Revelating Spirits thus we see / Obtained was the Fourth Monarchy: / Harrison and Vane ventured a lift / By the same Spirit for a Fift.’ A. I. Dust, ed., Charles Cotton's Works, 1663–1665: Critical Editions of The Valiant Knight and Scarronides (New York, 1992), 165. Subsequent quotations are from this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text by line number. This example should make clear that attacks on Virgilian historiography were not limited to the Whigs; Cotton himself was a lifelong supporter of the Stuarts.

71 Spencer, Nahum Tate, 23.

72 Andrew Pinnock, ‘Book IV in Plain Brown Wrappers: Translations and Travesties of Dido’, in A Woman Scorn'd: Responses to the Dido Myth, ed. Michael Burden (London, 1998), 249–71, an essay to which I am indebted for my reading of Act III.

73 Henry Lawes, Ayres and Dialogues, for One, Two, and Three Voices. The First Booke (London, 1653), [C2r].