Opera, War, and the Politics of Effeminacy under Queen Anne

When Italian opera first came to the English public stage in 1705, its reputation as a frivolous, luxurious, and potentially effeminizing entertainment preceded it.¹ Five years before its debut, the dramatist John Dennis preemptively sowed the ground with salt.² In the prologue to his play Iphigenia in 1700, he has the genius of England "rise to a warlike symphony" and relate the muse of Tragedy's exclamation: "Oh is my Brittain faln to that degree, / As for effeminate Arts t' abandon me? / I left the enslav'd Italian with disdain, / And servile Gallia, and dejected Spain: / Grew proud to be confin'd to Brittain's shore / Where godlike Liberty had fix'd before."³ Fearing a growing public taste for "those arts … that soften'd foreign braves, / And sunk the Southern nations into slaves," Dennis attempted to shame audiences by asking how England's past kings might have reacted "to see a bearded more than female throng / Dissolved and dying by an eunuchs song."⁴ In issuing this warning about the dangers of opera, Dennis capitalized on a longstanding set of beliefs about the genre's birthplace. The association of Italy with various sorts of what was considered sexual degeneracy, including lust, effeminacy, and sodomy, was by this time well established in English sources.⁵ To take just one example, in the same year, 1700, Daniel Defoe, in his well-known poem The True-Born Englishman, identified Italy as a "torrid zone," "where blood ferments in rapes and sodomy" and "nature ever burns with hot desires, / Fanned with luxuriant air from subterranean fires."⁶ It is no surprise, then, that the trope of Italian licentiousness informed the public's reception of Italy's premier musico-dramatic export.

From its first introduction in London theaters at the start of the eighteenth century, Italian opera provoked scathing responses from some English critics, who perceived a threat to their nation's masculinity.⁷ Critics of the opera argued that the spectacle and sensuality of Italian opera and the ambiguously sexed, or de-sexed, bodies of some of its star performers, the castrati, could have an effeminizing effect on individual British men and, even more troublingly, on British culture.⁸ Musicologists have noted that this gendering of Italian opera as feminine was completed in England in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—around the same time Italian opera was being introduced—and that it had to do not merely with the characteristics of opera itself, which had not been gendered in the same way in Italy, but also with opera's association with a place that the British were invested in viewing as feminine.⁹ These critiques of Italian opera as dangerously sensual and potentially effeminizing would be deployed against the genre for decades—in fact, centuries—to come. While some contemporaneous Continental opera criticism linked opera with effeminacy, early eighteenth-century English critics emphasized opera's supposed effeminizing, enervating effects with a unique intensity and alarm. Why should these characterizations of Italian opera have been particularly pronounced in England?¹⁰ This article argues that an important facet of the explanation for the gendering of Italian opera in England was early opera criticism's relationship to the fierce partisan debate over England's (after 1707, Britain's) involvement in the War of the Spanish Succession.¹¹

Italian opera arrived in England at a particularly fraught time. In the first decade of the eighteenth century, Britons contended with an era of hyper-partisanship during which Whigs and Tories vied for power, and partisan invective flowed from the pens of the era's most celebrated literary figures. In this hot political climate, the War of the Spanish Succession was the litmus test issue that most galvanized the two parties. In 1700, Whigs and Tories alike lamented the deathbed decision of the childless Spanish King Charles II to bequeath his throne to his grandnephew Philip, Duke of Anjou, a grandson of Louis XIV. Both parties feared, not unreasonably, that this succession could tip the balance of power irrevocably in the French king's favor, and England consequently joined...