Heroic Song: A Proposal for a Revised History of English Theater and Opera, 1656- 1711

Let me begin by describing the conventions of a theatrical genre. The plots are drawn from Renaissance epic and romance, with a preference for exotic settings. Struggles for sovereignty and successions to the throne loom large; allegorical applications to contemporary events are tempting. The hero is larger than life, and all the characters converse in a formal mode, much elevated above ordinary language. Passions are stylized: love expressed in metaphor rather than caress, anger in rant rather than swordplay. Rigid conventions of form, extending to the smallest details, greatly constrain any sense of spontaneity—even when the characters are supposed to be surprised, enraged, or struck dumb by love. Spectacular scenery and expensive stage machinery thrill the spectator with magical transformations, accompanied by mysterious music. Illusion is thematic: the hero confronts false prophecies, tempting visions, and uncertain identities. So extreme is the striving for elevation that the entire enterprise is susceptible to burlesque, as the playwrights acknowledge by occasional self-parodic gestures.

These conventions describe the rhymed heroic dramas produced by Dryden and his contemporaries during the 1660s and 1670s, but they also apply, in every detail, to the Italian operas produced by Handel and others during the early decades of the eighteenth century. Genres so similar were probably connected, but because literary and musical scholars rarely read each other’s work, we have distorted theatrical history by separating drama and opera too sharply. I propose here an alternative to both the standard view of English theatrical history, in which the rhymed heroic play is seen as a brief, failed attempt to import French literary conventions, and the standard view of European operatic history, in which the stubborn English resistance to opera suddenly yields to the unique genius of Handel. I shall argue for a more unified, less categorical account of the wide variety of dramatic forms in this period, stressing the importance of The Siege of Rhodes, mounted by Sir William Davenant in 1656 as a fully sung opera and regarded by Dryden as the original model for the rhymed heroic play, which owes some of its formality to its musical origins and retains a significant musical dimension. Although literary historians have tended to ignore them, musical scenes occur in most of the heroic plays, as Curtis Price, whose study of music in the Restoration theater has opened up many new vistas, pointed out in 1979:

Nearly all of the 600 or so stage works performed during the period [1660–1700], whether quasi-operas or grim tragedies, required music. Many plays included several songs, at least some of them with choruses and followed by dances; in tragedies one often finds full-blown masques, and music frequently accompanies religious processions or rituals and intensifies and foreshadows tragic events. . . . In all types of plays, music is used for special effects, ranging from battle scenes to pantomimes. ¹

Most other musicologists, focusing on the line of Italian baroque opera leading from Monteverdi to Handel, have neglected not only this considerable body of theater music but even the elaborate English semioperas of the later seventeenth century, which began to flourish just as the rhymed heroic plays waned, and which absorbed many of their most striking theatrical conventions. These semioperas, as Price has shown, were familiar to Aaron Hill, who wrote the scenario for Handel’s Rinaldo (1711) as a logical next step in the development of English musical theater. ² Although Rinaldo was far more coherent musically than the various kinds of “opera” that preceded it, London audiences experienced Handel’s work as an improvement over earlier operas, not as something wholly different in kind.

Even those of us eager to construct a more unified account of this fascinating history are hampered by the absence of crucial primary materials. We have none of the music—by Matthew Locke, Henry Lawes, Henry Cooke, George Hudson, and Edward Coleman—for Davenant’s Siege of Rhodes, although we do possess other music by Lawes and Locke. If we could hear the lost music, we might be less susceptible to the conventional notion that The...