Ideologies of Listening and the Rise of the Hypercritic: Rethinking Italian Opera in The Dunciad

In The Dunciad in Four Books (1743), Alexander Pope imagines a world of chaos which Italian opera has sung into existence. Nonsensical as she is powerful, the character of Italian opera has destroyed men's critical judgment, replaced natural art with monstrous ephemera, and hypnotized masters of taste – even Handel – into prostituting their genius for material gain. Building on his Augustan predecessors who worked to invent the dangers of Italian opera listening, Pope connects this musical genre with the rise of everything destructive. However, he draws the reader's eye to one destructive force in particular: textual criticism and its corruption of the literary arts. Pope depicts fictional hypercritic Martinus Scriblerus as an imitator of Italian opera – an unnatural monster who makes chaos from order, nonsense from reason, and division from unity.