Striking a Miltonic Pose: William Jackson’s Lycidas and National Musical Identity

Introduction: A Memorial De-Memorialized

On November 4, 1767, Lycidas, adapted and composed by William Jackson (1730–1803), debuted in London. The last full-length musical adaptation of John Milton’s poetry in the eighteenth century, the elegy followed a performance of Nicholas Rowe’s Tamerlane (1701) at Covent Garden and was designed to honor the recently deceased Prince Edward Augustus, Duke of Albany and York, brother of George III, and onetime heir presumptive. Unfortunately for Jackson (and for the memory of Prince Edward), Lycidas was a commercial and critical flop. The November 4 performance was its only one in the metropolis, and the Monthly Review had nothing kind to say about it: “Milton’s Lycidas is here applied to the late breach made in the Royal Family, by the death of the Duke of York. The design was absurd, and the performance was treated as such a piece of impertinence deserved.”¹

Nonetheless, Jackson soon put the poor London showing behind him. A few weeks later, he took his unappreciated work to the friendlier environs of Bath, where it fared slightly better. Concrete evidence for additional performances in Bath or elsewhere is lacking, but, regardless of whether Lycidas truly did better commercially at Bath than at London, it at least found one ardent admirer in the former city. Thomas Underwood penned “The Grateful Tribute” “upon hearing the Lycidas of Milton perform’d . . . Thursday, Nov. 26, 1767.” Perhaps letting his enthusiasm run ahead of his judgment, Underwood proclaims that the “fire” of Frederick Handel has been revived in Jackson and fervently enrolls the singers in the “List of Fame.” He does not mention the original occasion for Jackson’s Lycidas (i.e., Edward’s death), but Underwood does allude to its lackluster reception in London, referring to the audience’s “Roast-Beef Ears” and explaining that “This piece was but indifferently receiv’d at Covent-Garden.”² Apparently, Londoners did not know a good thing when they heard it.

Beauty may be in the ear of the auditor, but the difference of opinion between Underwood and the Monthly Review bespeaks something more than a simple matter of taste. The elegy’s uninspiring showing at Covent Garden reveals Jackson’s poor decision making in yoking the debut to an event to which the work was not originally connected, for Jackson did not adapt Lycidas as an actual memorial. Trapped in Exeter for most of his career and already working on this adaptation, he seized the opportunity to attract a wealthy or aristocratic patron by attaching Lycidas to “the late breach . . . in the Royal Family” and maneuvering his “memorial” onto the London stage the day after Edward’s funeral. When this gambit failed, Jackson reverted to his original and far more ambitious plans for the piece and took Lycidas to Bath, where he had intended to introduce it in the first place.

In London, Lycidas mourned the dead; in Bath, it heralded the philosophical concerns of the living. Much as Milton’s Lycidas is less about the death of his friend, Edward King, than about Milton’s own poetic vocation, so is Jackson’s Lycidas about his own career goals in music.³ Even though its success was less than spectacular, the choice was most fitting, for Jackson revered Milton as a creator of a national poetic idiom and hoped to do the same for English music. Like Milton’s rejection of modish rhyme in the 1660s, Jackson’s vocal compositions of the 1760s dismiss cosmopolitan fashions for a more native idiom, and his writings express a passionate desire to preserve clear words in music and to revive England’s “national melody” — a program related to Milton’s own musical theories and to his reclamation of “ancient liberty” through blank verse. A trailblazing artist in his own right, Jackson molded Lycidas into a poignant expression of his musical philosophy and thereby identified himself with Milton as a stout defender of “Englishness” who uses art as his weapon.

Nationalism, Milton, and the English Literary and Musical Canons

Jackson’s decision to adapt...