Restoration: English Literary Culture, 1660–1700 ed. by Misty G. Anderson and John P. Zomchick (review)

Those who look askance at the special issue of Restorationfocused on Dryden’s and Purcell’s King Arthuras too narrow or esoteric to be of general interest should look again. Although devoted to a work rarely discussed and even more rarely praised, it provides unusually fine examples of scholarship ranging across several historical periods that relate music, literature, legend, and history; explicate the ideological and political implications of these interactions; and rightly discuss the dramatic opera as a performance piece. The ultimate value of the issue lies in the whole, which allows the reader to make even more connections and gain richly contextualized insight into the fabric of English culture not only in the late seventeenth century, but in subsequent eras as King Arthurwas adapted and produced.

The special issue resulted from two events: a two-day conference, “Interrogating King Arthur,” held at the Jackson Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto in April 2009, and a concurrent production of the work by the Toronto Masque Theatre. Brian Corman, who serves on the board of directors for the TMT, identifies a fatal flaw in previous scholarship on King Arthur: it obsesses over what Dryden’s and Purcell’s work is not. Dryden, Mr. Corman notes, attempted to define King Arthuron its own terms as a “dramatic opera,” but over three hundred years of criticism continues to imply it is a partial, failed, or even sterile accomplishment, in part by using the term “semiopera” (employed, ironically, by several essays in this volume). Viewing the work as a formal curiosity and artistic dead end has led to a condescending focus on its alleged disunity or on the original English audience’s apparently limited capacity to appreciate “real,” that is, Italian, opera.

David N. Klauser meticulously sorts out two medieval Arthurian legends as well as a range of historical texts dating back several centuries. Intriguingly, Mr. Klauser notes, the two most reliable historical sources for the period in which Arthur was alleged to have lived do not mention him, so it is particularly curious that Dryden’s work “completely ignores both strands of medieval Arthurian tradition [the legends] in favor of a more historicized narrative.”

Acknowledging we have no direct information about his subject, James Winn deftly identifies and deploys the kinds of evidence we do have available to understand the relationship between Dryden and Purcell. For example, he examines Purcell’s skillful and clever setting of mediocre verses by an anonymous author in order to reinforce how much easier and more gratifying it would have been for him to set Dryden’s well-wrought text. Similarly, Mr. Winn argues, Dryden had learned to write songs, in part by hearing his poetry badly distorted when set to music as it is, for example, in Grabu’s score for Albion and Albanius. He suggests Dryden was probably referring to these early frustrations, not Purcell’s settings, in his famous complaint about having “been obliged to cramp my verses” to suit the music. Purcell was clearly sensitive to the words Dryden wanted to stress and echoes the poet’s verbal repetitions with melodic parallelisms, which Mr. Winn illustrates in printed music and lyrics as well as in the accompanying CD.

Essays by Andrew Pinnock, Ken Mc-Leod, and Steven N. Zwicker all address possible political interpretations of this complex work, which Dryden first wrote during the reign of Charles II and revised for production after the Glorious Revolution that marked the laureate’s own fall from royal favor. Noting that print licensing regulations were not regularly enforced, Mr. Pinnock turns to the published text to find traces of the original allegorical representation of Charles as Arthur in contrast to the staged version, in which Arthur becomes a figure for William. The essay argues that Dryden slyly slipped Jacobite elements into print after agilely adjusting the performance text for the new regime.

Mr. McLeod also sees a...