Introduction: Consuming Foreign Music and Theater in Eighteenth-Century Britain

When foreign performers started arriving in London in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, their presence provoked fierce debates concerning national identity, gender, party politics, and the state of England's own dramatic and musical traditions.¹ Fleeing wars and unstable economies, Continental composers, singers, instrumentalists, and dancers hoped to find a city that would provide ample financial and artistic opportunities for performance.² Instead, they found that England's capital was, paradoxically, of two minds: audiences were eager to hear foreign superstars who could sing and play the virtuosic music they so craved, and yet there were critics—often motivated by political and religious loyalties—ready to scapegoat imported culture in order to bolster native English musical and theatrical traditions.³ In The Spectator, Joseph Addison summarized this confusion:

At present our notions of music are very uncertain that we do not know what it is we like; only, in general, we are transported with any thing that is not English: so it be of a foreign growth, let it be Italian, French, or High Dutch, it is the same thing. In short, our English music is quite rooted out, and nothing yet planted in its stead.⁴

Although Addison's remarks are tinged with hyperbole, this cluster of essays explores the truth behind his politically charged sentiment from the perspective of a broader reception history—one that engages with both public discourse and private experiences concerning foreign culture. By focusing on the idea of consumption in early eighteenth-century England, the three essays here test Addison's claim that Continental culture "rooted out" English music. Our authors find that consuming foreign music and theater allowed audiences to explore new genres, sounds, and styles; debate and refine their own musical tastes; and engage with an expanding European world even from the comforts of London's theaters or their own drawing rooms.

These essays examine the eighteenth-century English reception of foreign musical and theatrical works from multiple disciplinary perspectives, including musicology, cultural history, and the history of theater. In soliciting these essays, we asked our contributors to consider why English men and women embraced foreign culture even as they increasingly defined English national identity in opposition to the Continent. The question is intimately connected to arguments persuasively made by Linda Colley concerning how the British used other nations and peoples (especially Catholic France and Italy, as well as those encountered in the colonies) to provide foils as they struggled to create a new national identity in the wake of the Acts of Union (1706–7).⁵ While Colley provides a starting point from an historical perspective, musicologists have also posed this question—most often with regard to the reception of Italian opera.⁶ Others have approached this question by exploring the reception of specific foreign musicians who found success in England.⁷ More recently, musicologists and historians have turned to methodologies that focus not on prominent genres or historical figures, but rather on the circulation and consumption of the music itself.⁸ The essays in this cluster build upon this scholarship by investigating how the consumption and reception of foreign music and theater, both on the public stage and in domestic spaces, presented an opportunity for the renegotiation of British cultural identity.

Two themes run throughout these essays. First, they all discuss how the British often defined their identity in opposition to another foreign culture. In "Opera, War, and the Politics of Effeminacy under Queen Anne," Amy Dunagin explores the ways in which early criticism of Italian opera participated in a heated political dispute over Britain's involvement in the War of the Spanish Succession. As fears circulated that British society might be undergoing a cultural emasculation that could lead to military weakness, some Whig commentators used opera criticism for political ends by attributing Tories' opposition to the war to the effeminizing effects of Italian opera, while other Whigs defended the controversial genre. Erica Levenson identifies similar patterns of ambivalence toward French performers and performances in "From Royalty to Riots: Nation and Class in the...