There has been considerable debate over the politics of the great English chamber opera, Dido and Aeneas.Footnote 1 Speculation has swirled over the opera's engagement with the crises and controversies of the troubled final years of the Stuart monarchy. Was Dido and Aeneas a coded commentary on James II's growing authoritarianism? Was it a warning to his successor, William III, not to mistreat his English queen and her people? These debates have tended to turn on questions of topical allegory – reading the opera as a symbolic representation of royal politics in the 1680s – and have become entangled in problems of dating and chronology. Yet the first operas in England were often concerned with a different kind of political argument: a contest over what we might call the politics of culture.
In one sense, this term refers to opera's participation in the everyday competitive jostling of the Restoration theatre, as poets, composers, performers and theatre managers scrambled to find a foothold for their new dramatic forms, and to articulate the nature and purpose of those forms as works of art.Footnote 2 But ‘politics of culture’ refers more broadly to the ways in which state politics became entangled in the period's artistic production, its canons of taste, and its arguments about aesthetic value. While art and propaganda had long coexisted in the service of the monarch – above all, perhaps, in the Jacobean and Caroline court masque – the Civil War era had shown to English elites that the very idea of a high culture was politically contestable.Footnote 3 Campaigns were waged not just for possession of the battlefield but for ideological ownership of literature and the arts. From devotional music to stage drama to the literary epic canon, the artistic and intellectual life of the nation was colonised by partisan interests. Royalists and rebels, and, later, Tories and Whigs laid claim to competing aesthetic visions and competing versions of England's cultural heritage. When the theatres were re-established after 1660, artists and audiences found themselves facing fundamental questions. What is art? What is its role in the state? Who owns high culture? Whose interests does it serve?
A case in point involves the troubled reception of Virgil's Aeneid. Virgil had long been the darling of the continental neoclassical critics whose influence swept through English literary culture after 1660. The Stuart kings adopted the rhetoric and iconography of imperial Rome, cultivating the fantasy of a renewed pax Augustana in the wake of civil war. This Augustan myth revived and reworked older models of translatio imperii, the westward migration of imperial power exemplified by Aeneas's journey out of the smouldering ruins of Troy. The Aeneid's vision of providential empire came to symbolise late Stuart Britain's sense of itself as a new historical Golden Age, presiding over a refinement of manners and taste, a renewed ideal of shared civic purpose, and a regime of enlightened cultural patronage sponsored by the nation's ruling elites. Waves of translations and adaptations of Virgil's Aeneid celebrated the monarchy as the seat of cultured civility and embraced the role of the artist as a panegyrist to royal power.Footnote 4 But the Virgilian cultural politics of the 1660s later darkened. ‘Virgil is attack'd by many Enemies: He has a whole Confederacy against him’, wrote John Dryden in 1697.Footnote 5 If some viewed the Aeneid's imperial vision as a model for political myth-making, there were also long European counter-traditions that attacked both Virgil's partisan history and the manners of his epic hero. Those writers who chafed against the Stuarts' Augustan myth reactivated ancient grievances against Virgil's artistry. While his defenders lavished praise on Aeneas's civic heroism, his filial piety, his martial prowess and his concern for his people, his detractors returned again and again to a question posed by Charles Perrault: ‘What had that Piety of Father Aeneas to do in the Cave with Dido Queen of Carthage?’Footnote 6
When Nahum Tate and Henry Purcell collaborated on Dido and Aeneas, the fourth book of the Aeneid was already the most translated, imitated and commented-upon episode in Virgil's poem. Many Restoration critics found Aeneas's abandonment of Dido unsettling. Why, they asked, should Virgil have degraded his hero, so tender of feeling elsewhere in the poem, by portraying him as a casual seducer? But larger issues were at stake. The last decades of the century marked the widespread return of an ancient ‘chaste Dido’ tradition: an effort to recover the putative historical Dido, the founder of Carthage who never met the legendary Aeneas and who, when pursued by foreign suitors, chose suicide for the sake of her country. For many readers, the loss of the historical Dido revealed the costs of imperial myth-making. To measure the gap between this figure and the fabled queen of the Aeneid was to expose Virgil's tampering with the historical record in the name of a prejudicial political fiction. The English fascination with Dido, in turn, pointed to a breakdown in the cultural authority of the Stuart court, and to a struggle for control over the meaning of the nation's literary heritage. At stake were some of the period's most urgent questions about the relationship between art and politics, about the power of patronage and the implications of rewriting history as myth. Dido and Aeneas, I suggest, was concerned with just these questions about art and ideology, about the triangular relationship among the artist, political authority and the cultural past. I shall argue that the opera takes up the ‘chaste Dido’ tradition and reflects some of the period's scepticism over partisan epic fictions.
Yet I hesitate to conclude that Dido and Aeneas can be aligned politically with the Whigs, or that it makes a coherent statement about Stuart absolutism. Joining other students of Restoration opera who have raised concerns about reading for topical allegory, I will try instead to show how Dido struggles uncertainly, and sometimes inconsistently, with its period's central myths. This will require placing the opera alongside other cultural forms – epic poetry and satire, affective tragedy, classical translations and travesties, literary criticism and historiography – that shared, and in some cases helped to shape, its ambivalent treatment of Virgil, female suffering, and the politics of royal praise. I should note at the outset that I will concern myself only glancingly with Purcell's score. Although I acknowledge the limitations of this approach, Tate's dramatic text – and the recent upsurge of scholarly interest in its politics – offers an unusually rich test case for the study of early opera's political sources and motives. I would argue that we need to understand it on its own terms before we can fully address the further complexities of its musical setting and its conditions of performance. With these premises in mind, I will read Dido as broadly hostile towards Virgil's imperial fictions, but I will end by trying to isolate some currents in Tate's text that suggest a more unstable, irresolute attitude towards the tragic heroine at its centre.
I
Recent debate over the politics of Dido and Aeneas has raised important methodological questions about allegory, intention and audience, questions that carry wider implications for the study of opera as a literary and cultural form. In his 1998 essay, ‘The Politics of Opera in Late Seventeenth-Century London’, Robert D. Hume took issue with the search for covert topical allegory that had exercised Dido scholars for some thirty years.Footnote 7 In a 1967 dissertation, John Buttrey influentially read the opera as a cautionary tale, a political allegory written in 1689 to remind the new foreign monarch, William III (i.e., Aeneas), of his responsibilities to Queen Mary (Dido) and her nation.Footnote 8 Sceptics replied that such a message would have been not only rather tactless but also anachronistic; William's prolonged absences from his country did not become a problem until years after the opera was first staged at Josias Priest's boarding school for young women in Chelsea.Footnote 9 Furthermore, new evidence about the performance history of that other great Restoration chamber opera, John Blow's Venus and Adonis, fuelled speculation that Dido and Aeneas in fact premièred at court before 1689.Footnote 10 More topical allegories were proposed to fit earlier performance dates. Could Aeneas, for instance, represent James II, abandoning his queen (England) to found a Roman (Catholic) empire?Footnote 11 Neither Tate's text nor any surviving early response to it, as Hume and others have noted, yields direct evidence for these interpretations.Footnote 12
Pondering such readings, Hume is less troubled by the problem of dating the opera than by questions of courtly protocol. Most fundamental is a question of motive: why would a dramatist and a composer risk their livelihood by staging an opera built on a coded allegory that insults the ruling monarch?Footnote 13 But the fact that these readings are tied so tightly to the opera's supposed date of first performance points to a deeper methodological concern. Scholars have tended to assume that a ‘political’ Dido and Aeneas is ipso facto a topical allegory, a veiled representation of historical persons and events that offers legible, coherent and paraphrasable commentary on some aspect of the author's political environment. There was, of course, no shortage of politics in the late Stuart theatre. But with a few notable exceptions, such as the work of John Otway, political content in the drama of the 1680s was generally transparent and unsubtle, and arguably more often placed in the service of royal praise than dissent. A prominent case is the grand masque by John Dryden and Louis Grabu, Albion and Albanius (1685), which makes no secret of its intended function as propaganda. Marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stuart Restoration, it recounts the failed efforts of Zeal and Democracy to woo Augusta (London) away from Albion (Charles II) and his heir Albanius (James, Duke of York) – a thinly disguised re-enactment of the king's fortunes since 1660, with an emphasis on his return from exile, the Popish Plot of 1678–81, and the Rye House Plot of 1683.
For an English opera of any variety to comment in this way on recent political events was very unusual, however. Albion is an anomaly, indebted to the obsequious allegorical prologues of French tragédie lyrique and crying out for topical application. Looking at the Restoration operatic repertory as a whole, Hume finds only a small handful of works – two of them French imports – that trade in allegories of royal praise, and none, with the possible exception of the Dryden–Purcell King Arthur (1691), that embeds within its plot a covert critique of the reigning monarch. Distinguishing between allegorical meanings that are programmed into dramatic texts by their authors and topical parallels that might arise in the minds of seventeenth-century audiences as they encountered the ‘commonplace subjects and plots’ of those texts, he concludes that ‘the political point of these operas, whether explicit or indirect, is a lot likelier to be flagrantly obvious than it is to be subtle and hidden’.Footnote 14 From Hume's findings we can draw some further inferences. First, in the absence of strong evidence to the contrary, we can reasonably expect that political allegory in English court opera, as in Dryden's Albion, will support royalist ideology and will rest clearly on the surface of the text. Drama in the public theatres offers a more mixed picture, but recent studies of the repertory have tended to find less promise in close topical parallels than in broader political ‘themes and tropes’: for instance, a recurring concern with questions of trust, loyalty and rebellion, order and disorder, and the like.Footnote 15 Second, even if we discern political engagement in a work by a writer opposed to the regime in power, we need not assume that the drama makes a single, consistent polemical argument fully under the artist's control; this is especially the case when its engagement appears to take ambiguous or covert forms. Works such as King Arthur, and Dido, remind us that an opera libretto need not simply be the delivery mechanism for a pre-formulated policy message, but can be a site for wrestling with conflict and uncertainty – whether this means deliberately testing a range of partisan viewpoints or just struggling to advance a stable ideological programme in the face of self-doubt and self-division. Instead of joining the debate over the topical politics of Dido, therefore, I suggest that we set this and other English Restoration operas against a wider cultural field and that we view each of them as a more loosely structured mosaic of political ideas. Of special urgency to this repertory, I believe, are questions about the status of the artist and the uses of theatrical fiction as an instrument of power.
How might these principles apply to Dido and Aeneas? Unfortunately, Nahum Tate's slippery political loyalties over the 1680s offer us little purchase on the opera. Tate came from a family of Irish Puritan ministers, but he soon slipped into London Tory circles, and his early plays noisily took up the cause of the Stuart kings. His notorious adaptations of Shakespeare – Richard II, The History of King Lear and Coriolanus (retitled The Ingratitude of a Common-Wealth) – draw sympathetic portraits of embattled rulers, victimised by scheming usurpers and Whiggish mobs. Tate soon won the patronage of the powerful Earl of Dorset, who also gave financial support to Thomas Shadwell and Dryden. With Dryden's help, Tate published a Second Part of Absalom and Achitophel in 1682, after the initial arrest of the Duke of Monmouth. He was invited to write the Saint Cecilia's Day Ode for 1685, and was among the first poets to elegise Charles II after the king's death later that year. Tate's early writings show equally strong partisanship for the king's heir, the Duke of York. But Tate became uncharacteristically quiet after the accession of York as King James II in 1685. By the end of 1689, Tate had already begun a series of poems in praise of King William III, and in 1692 the new king awarded him the poet laureateship. Whether Tate was a sly temporiser, or a naïve courtier-poet with an ‘unpolitical mind’,Footnote 16 or just one of the many Tory partisans who were disappointed in James II, his changing allegiances make Dido's political sympathies even harder to measure.
We do, however, have the great advantage of an earlier play by Tate on the same Virgilian subject. In 1678 he adapted the fourth book of the Aeneid in a tragedy called Brutus of Alba, or, The Enchanted Lovers (1678). A comparison of the two dramas leaves the strong impression that Tate has tried to shake Dido and Aeneas free from the politics of the moment. Like Tate's other early plays, Brutus of Alba was a blunt propaganda vehicle for the Stuart monarchy. In it, Virgil's Aeneas becomes Brutus, the legendary founder of England; Dido becomes a nameless queen of the Mediterranean outpost of Syracuse, where Brutus has been driven by a storm on his way to Albion. To his Virgilian source Tate adds a network of subplots involving a sorceress and a power-hungry courtier (perhaps corresponding to the Earl of Shaftesbury?) who league with a neighbouring kingdom to overthrow the queen. Tate's changes to Virgil's text combine the vitiated shock tactics of the late heroic play – ghosts, witches' rites, swoonings, suicides, a poisoned bracelet, ravings and hysterics – with the standard political talking points of royalist tragedy during the Exclusion Crisis.Footnote 17 The play shares its genre's taste for moralising sententiousness, as when the scheming courtier uses the murder of his son as a pretext to mount a rebellion against the Queen: ‘To my ambition too 'twill give pretence, / … That else had been detested Treason stil'd. / Thus specious forms give foulest crimes applause.’Footnote 18
The clumsy Tory polemic of Brutus of Alba makes the restraint of Dido and Aeneas all the more conspicuous. Tate lifted enough material directly from Brutus to make it clear that he used the play as the main source for his opera.Footnote 19 Yet where Brutus of Alba swells with bombast and spectacle, Dido and Aeneas offers brevity and compression. Although we would expect this to happen in the transition from spoken drama to chamber opera, Tate goes out of his way to highlight the secretive remoteness of Dido's world. Brutus is showy and extroverted: all motives are made clear, all plot mechanisms made visible. In place of the uncanny divine forces that drive the plot of the Aeneid, Tate substitutes a local political conspiracy. He exposes the inner lives of Brutus and the Queen to plain view; both characters exhaustively analyse their conflicted feelings in long set speeches. When they feel guilty over breaking their past marriage vows, we watch their dead spouses rise as ghosts to haunt them. By contrast, Dido and Aeneas is oddly reticent. In Brutus of Alba, the Queen confides her passion to her nurse and feels relief in the telling: ‘I kn[e]w thou wouldst be shockt with the relation, / But now I've told my grief I am at ease’ (9). In Dido and Aeneas's version of the same scene, Dido insists on secrecy:
Dido. I languish till my grief is known,
Yet would not have it guess'd.
Belinda. Grief increasing, by concealing,
Dido. Mine admits of no revealing.
(I.12–15)Footnote 20
Heavy-handed plot expedients give way to a coyer elaboration of character. In the first two acts of the opera, Dido addresses just one line of dialogue to Aeneas. Tate's villains, too, lose their clarity of motive. In Brutus, the sorceress announces that ‘I hate all humane kind, / But envy most the prosperous and great’ (19). The passage survives in Tate's opera, where the witches rail against Dido – ‘whom we hate, / As we do all in prosperous state’ (II.9–10) – but the revealing word ‘envy’ has dropped out.
In contrast with Brutus, Dido feels ‘chastely untopical’, indifferent to geopolitics, uninterested in picking partisan fights.Footnote 21 Tate's opera vastly compresses Virgil's historical frame. Aeneas's famous tale to Dido of his misfortunes, adapted for Brutus of Alba as a long set of expository speeches in Act I, disappears in Dido. The gods have no part in the action and no clear investment in Aeneas's future. Aeneas's son Ascanius no longer appears as a living emblem of dynastic duty unfulfilled, and no one ever refers to him. The military invasion that ends Brutus of Alba has been stripped away. In Aeneas's wooing speeches, the pains of empire shrink into metaphors for disprized love, the flames of Troy becoming the flames of passion: ‘Ah!’ he pleads, ‘make not in a hopeless fire, / A hero fall, and Troy once more expire’ (I.54–5).
Tate transmutes Virgil's scenes of epic warfare into Ovidian themes of hunting and pursuit. ‘Pursue thy conquest, Love’, urges Belinda (a version of the Aeneid's Anna), and the opera's second act stresses the erotic symbolism of Virgil's Book IV hunting expedition. Tate's courtiers dance around a fountain where ‘Actaeon met his fate, / pursued by his own hounds’ (II.37–8); Aeneas shows off a ‘monster's head’ borne on his spear, and compares it to the famous boar that mauled ‘Venus’ huntsm[a]n', Adonis (44). The Aeneid's vision of the divine is replaced here by an Ovidian mosaic of chance erotic encounters, suggesting the helplessness of both mortals and gods to control the natural madness of the libido. Ovid's doomed hunters implicitly offer themselves as analogues for Aeneas, who has earlier scorned ‘the feeble stroke of Destiny’ in favour of the ‘dart’ of Cupid (I.48–9). Virgil's epic struggle of civilisation against chaos gives way to a private human struggle of reason against passion.
In Tate's hands, then, political history becomes domestic tragedy. The main effect of this tight focus on the domestic is to weaken Aeneas. In Virgil's poem, Aeneas's break with Dido forces him to tear out the private man and fully become the instrument of a public destiny. His sojourn in Carthage disastrously elides the domestic with the political: erotic love presents itself to him as a basis for empire, a source of authority in itself, rather than as a private madness that wars against the established authority of history and nation. Dido and Aeneas glances at this form of temptation – Carthage offers a false synthesis of ‘Empire growing, / pleasures flowing’ (I.3–4) – but the opera quickly lets Aeneas's public world fade before the mounting intensity of Dido's tragedy. With no feeling of historical pressure, no overriding geopolitical stakes to counter Dido's claims upon him, Tate's Aeneas becomes ineffectual and irresolute. He has been widely dismissed by modern critics as ‘a meandering oaf’, ‘a complete booby’.Footnote 22 As Dido's intimate suffering swells to fill the opera's narrow circle of action, Aeneas's thinly realised psychology fades into invisibility.Footnote 23
II
Why should Tate have so annihilated Virgil's hero? He was, for one thing, reflecting a wider English cultural trend, sceptical of the literature of war and empire. Although poets in the 1680s and 1690s continued to churn out noisy martial epics, their form and style policed by doctrinaire neo-Aristotelian critics like Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux and René Le Bossu, the genre's cultural authority was weakening. Martial heroics had come to feel anachronistic and gauche. Samuel Butler acutely measured the malaise when he noted that ‘No Age ever abounded more with Heroical Poetry then the present, and yet there was never any wherein fewer Heroicall Actions were performed’.Footnote 24 Hugely popular burlesques, travesties, parodies and pastiches sprang up around the traditional epic canon. Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel (1681) and Macflecknoe (1682) transmuted heroic poetry into an instrument of topical satire; the vogue for mock-epic writing was further nourished in England by John Crowne's 1692 translation of Boileau's Le Lutrin and by local imitations such as Samuel Garth's Dispensary (1699). English prose fiction, meanwhile, was coalescing into the early novel, as a widening bourgeois reading public sought out stories that more closely resembled its own domestic world. Growth in popular piety and moral activism near the end of the century coincided with a philosophical reassessment of the nature of the hero.Footnote 25 John Locke's 1693 treatise on education scorned ‘the Honour and Renown, that is bestowed on Conquerours (who for the most part are but the great Butchers of Mankind)’, and discouraged the reading of martial histories, which would only persuade young people ‘to think Slaughter the laudable Business of Mankind, and the most Heroick Vertue’.Footnote 26 William Temple's essay ‘Of Heroick Virtue’ (1690) defined the nature of heroism as ‘the deserving well of Mankind’, an approach that raised Confucius and Mohammed above Almanzor and Aureng-Zebe, the heroes of Dryden's early heroic plays.Footnote 27
When Tate took on Virgil's Aeneas, however, he involved himself in a narrower cultural argument. For the reception of the Aeneid – and, in particular, responses to its troubled hero – had for some time acted as a frame for political controversy. Throughout this period, the English veneration of the Aeneid competed with a less deferential strain of Virgil criticism, a counterculture of interpretation, adaptation and mock-translation that reread the poem at the expense of its hero and his imperial ambitions. Dryden's talk of a ‘Confederacy’ against Virgil, cited at the beginning of my essay, marks the spread of that counterculture in the 1680s and 1690s, led by but not limited to the Whigs, taking Dido's side against Aeneas and ranging itself against both Virgil's epic and the Stuarts' Augustan myth.Footnote 28 Widely read as a celebration of Augustus Caesar's empire in the making, Virgil's poem had long set the tone for a period of royalist entrenchment that was early described as the English ‘Augustan age’.Footnote 29 Royalist poets had made the Aeneid their own in a series of partisan vernacular translations during the Commonwealth era. John Denham, for one, had evoked the martyred King Charles I in his 1656 version of the Aeneid's second book, which ends with the murder of Priam: ‘On the cold earth lyes this neglected King, / A headless Carkass, and a nameless Thing’.Footnote 30 With the installation of Charles II, the royalists' Aeneid changed its function from dissent to praise. Robert Howard began his 1660 Poems with verses celebrating Charles II's Virgilian journey across the sea to launch a new imperial era. Dryden's Astraea Redux (1660), too, announced a triumphant Augustan politics, as did the series of triumphal arches prepared for Charles II's coronation entry in 1661, their inscriptions celebrating the ‘Adventus Augusti’.Footnote 31 When John Boys published his 1661 translation of Book III of the Aeneid, he appended a set of ‘Reflections’ comparing the new king to Aeneas in piety, wisdom and valour.Footnote 32 James II, inheriting the motif, later commissioned Grinling Gibbons to sculpt him in bronze decked out as Augustus.Footnote 33 As late as 1697, Dryden's refusal to dedicate his translation of the Aeneid to William III generated enough controversy that his publisher, Jacob Tonson, stepped in to alter the volume's illustrations as a compliment to the king – Aeneas's nose being duly hooked to bring out a resemblance to the Prince of Orange.Footnote 34
Views of the historical Augustus were, however, mixed. Even according to a loyal Jacobite like Dryden, Virgil recognised ‘that this Conquerour, though of a bad kind, was the very best of it’, that is, a harsh autocrat who nonetheless brought needed stability to Rome after its civil war.Footnote 35 Special attention fell on Virgil's flattering reference to Cato in the Aeneid, VIII.670, which was widely thought to refer to the republican hero, Cato of Utica, rather than to his great-grandfather, Cato the Censor, who is mentioned in Book VI. The reference seems to have been enough to convince Dryden, along with earlier French critics, that Virgil ‘was still of Republican principles in his Heart’ when he wrote his epic – and that he secretly opposed his emperor's rise to tyranny.Footnote 36 It took little imagination for other writers to develop such anti-Augustan rhetoric into a mode of resistance against the Stuarts' Virgilian cultural politics. The dramatist Nathaniel Lee, for one, spent the 1670s writing veiled polemics in the form of plays attacking Roman emperors. Alongside his Nero (1674) and Lucius Junius Brutus (1680), the latter quickly suppressed for its alleged anti-monarchism, Lee took on the Augustan myth directly in Gloriana, or the Court of Augustus Caesar (1676). Its story of a lecherous, predatory and paranoid Augustus features a subplot involving his banishment of Ovid from Rome, among other acts of misrule.
Hostile reassessments of Augustus took their toll on Virgil's epic and its hero. Although some were ready to imagine a crypto-republican Virgil, most Restoration critics assumed that the poet had designed his Aeneas as an idealised portrait of Augustus, and they read the Aeneid as an effort to reconcile the Roman people to his principate. As the Stuart regime lurched through the crises of the 1680s, darker legends of Aeneas surfaced in opposition to Virgil's account. One ancient tradition held that Aeneas had betrayed Troy to the Greeks, perhaps motivated by a political grudge against the house of Priam.Footnote 37 At least one late Stuart pamphlet, discussed at some length by Andrew Walkling, updated the legend to serve the Whigs.Footnote 38 The anonymous 1682 poem, The Conspiracy of Aeneas and Antenor Against the State of Troy, tells how Aeneas (i.e., the Duke of York), jealous of Priam's ‘brave eldest son’ Hector (Monmouth), is bribed by the Greeks (the French) to help them conquer Troy. The Greeks' arguments show how easily Aeneas's translatio imperii could be recast as political and religious tyranny:
Aeneas's Roman destiny figures here as an abandonment of his nation rather than as its extension and fulfilment. The quest for empire does not test and confirm the hero's pietas, but exposes it as a fraud, in an act of betrayal that the poem goes on to link with Aeneas's desertion of Dido.
Indeed, the Aeneid's Dido episode became a favourite tool for those who wanted to blacken Aeneas's reputation. Ancient legend told of a chaste Dido, the devoted widow of Sychaeus who chose to die rather than contemplate a new dynastic marriage. Early readers of the Aeneid seem to have known the story, and influential ancient commentators criticised Virgil for overwriting it with his own.Footnote 40 Servius and Macrobius accused Virgil of libelling Dido.Footnote 41 Tertullian praised the historical Dido as a model of chastity and conjugal affection.Footnote 42 Augustine famously wept over Dido's abandonment in the Aeneid, but he barely finished telling the story in his Confessions before noting that Aeneas's journey to Carthage was agreed by the learned to be an impossible fiction.Footnote 43 Early Renaissance scholars recovered the historical Dido in their classical research; she appears, for example, in Boccaccio's De mulieribus claris and in Petrarch's Trionfi.Footnote 44 As part of the claris mulieribus tradition, she came to seventeenth-century France, where she was championed in Boisrobert's tragedy, La vraye Didon, ou la Didon chaste (1643).
The French had been debating the manners of Virgil's hero for some time – one of several border skirmishes in their emerging war of the ancients and the moderns – and English critics reproduced many of their arguments. The most striking aspect of this strain of Virgilian reception, for our purposes, is its animus not just against Aeneas but against Virgil's false presentation of history. The mid-century French critics made much of the gulf between Virgil's injured queen and the chaste historical Dido. Jean Regnault de Segrais, whose 1668 translation of the Aeneid informed Dryden's, objected to Virgil's flagrant anachronism: Aeneas could never have encountered Dido, for Carthage was thought to have been founded in the ninth century BC, 300 years after the supposed fall of Troy.Footnote 45 Lodging the same objection, the influential neoclassicist René Rapin summed up Virgil's fourth book as a cunning political artifice: a ‘filthy slur’ on the historical Dido by a cagey propagandist, ‘imagining he might, without any disparagement to himself, sacrifice her, the better to flatter his own Country, which no doubt, would have boggled at the reputation History gave that Princess’.Footnote 46 Nourished by the growing influence of continental criticism in England, the chaste Dido tradition flowered there in the 1680s and 1690s. Criticism of Virgil's tampering with the historical record became so widespread that by 1698, when a history primer by Thomas Hearne set out to define the term ‘anachronism’, it needed only to cite the Dido episode: ‘an Error or Mistake in the Computation of Time. Thus Virgil is guilty of an Anachronism in his Aeneis, by making Aeneas and Dido Co[n]temporaries, whereas they lived 300 Years distant one from another.’Footnote 47
As the English critics' hostility migrated from Aeneas's bad manners to Virgil's bad history, their complaints came into sharper focus as an assault on the politics of imperial praise. In 1692, the poet William Walsh complained that the reputations of heroic women like Dido and Penelope lay at the mercy of the poets, who ‘as they please, give Infamy or Fame’:
Walsh, a Whig, quietly links Virgil's ‘arbitrary Verse’ with political despotism: he has just finished comparing poets to ‘Monarchs, on an Eastern Throne, / Restrain'd by nothing but their Will alone’. Virgil is implicated in the tyranny of Augustus, and, by extension, in the arbitrary rule of the Stuarts (by now superseded by the constitutional settlement of 1688). In 1697, the year when Dryden published his Aeneis, the anonymous Verdicts of the Learned Concerning Virgil and Homer's Heroic Poems was able to announce a critical consensus linking Virgil's alleged libel of Dido, his manipulation of history, and his role as a mouthpiece for absolutism:
all Authors have observed two considerable Faults of Anachronism and Slander in that Episod[e] of Dido in the fourth Book. By the first of false Chronology, he makes that Princess Elder by 300 Years than in reality she was. By the other of Scandal, he has disgrac'd the most Discreet and Vertuous Princess of her Age … And thus has utterly ruined her Reputation in the Mind of all Posterity. This is both a base and unpardonable Fault in Virgil, to raise the Glory of the Romans, by ruining the good Name of a Woman, the Ornament of her Sex; because forsooth she was the Foundress of an hostile City.Footnote 49
If the early Restoration era had conflated the literary hero Aeneas, the emperor Augustus and the triumphant Stuart monarchy, a new axis had now emerged: the grouping of Augustus as a tyrant, Virgil as a fawning propagandist, and Aeneas as an unscrupulous cad, all ranged against a wronged woman who stood between them and their shared political ambitions.
It is within this milieu that we should assess the Virgilian cultural politics of Dido and Aeneas. If we put topical allegory to one side, we will find the opera wrestling with fundamental questions of ideology and representation: the costs of empire, the political functions of art, the tensions between documentary history and partisan mythology. The rest of this essay will explore how Dido and Aeneas tackles those problems. In his handling of Virgil's Dido episode, Tate is fascinated by the politics of epic fictions – the ways in which heroic story overwrites true history, the reasons why it is deployed to do so, and the sacrifices that its mythology demands. Dido takes a sustained interest in how the Augustan imperial myth has been constructed and in the violence that the myth inflicts on its victims.
III
‘Remember me, but ah! forget my fate’ (III.62): Dido's dying words pull in two directions. Her famous ‘remember me’, echoing the mantra of Hamlet's father, appears to be a call for pity, for the preservation of her story, and perhaps, glancing along with Virgil at the future enmity between Rome and Carthage, for revenge. Yet in her next breath Dido asks us to forget her story of abandonment and untimely death. This climactic, puzzling cry suggests that Tate is especially concerned with the problem of Dido's ‘fate’, the tragic destiny that Virgil has prepared for her. Dido and Aeneas returns again and again to the matter of fate; the word appears ten times in the drama.Footnote 50 The ambiguous use of the term in Dido's final line, I suggest, opens up a distinction that Tate's opera explores at some length: a conflict between Dido's public destiny in the Aeneid, that is, the poem's ‘official’ record of her tragic actions, and a largely hidden inner life, a mysterious ‘me’ that asks to stand apart from Virgil's fateful story of doomed love.
We have already seen that Tate's Dido remains at a distance from us throughout the drama, her thoughts and motives emerging only fleetingly in a phrase or gesture before receding again into obscurity. Against this impulse to turn away from public scrutiny, this reclusive selfhood that ‘admits of no revealing’, Tate's Aeneas champions a ‘fate’ that would fuse the private with the public. Even as he insists that ‘Aeneas has no fate but you’, he asks Dido to accept him ‘If not for mine, for empire's sake’ (I.46, 52). The Carthaginian courtiers paint a royal marriage as ‘The greatest blessing Fate can give, / Our Carthage to secure, and Troy revive’ (18–19). Already Aeneas's public ‘fate’ appears to serve as a screen or pretext for human desire. Again and again, the opera portrays destiny as a thing of human making – in effect, a work of art – rather than an inscrutable force of nature. Dido demurs: ‘Fate forbids what you pursue’ (45). Where Virgil's Dido had fatally confused the private with the public good, Tate's Dido stubbornly resists Aeneas's bland conflation of the personal and the political. The line just quoted is Dido's only direct address to Aeneas before the opera's final act, and, like the rest of her conduct, it gives little of her inner life away.
The public world around Tate's Dido also contains troubling dark spots. Almost at once, the opera's Virgilian backdrop begins to suffer tears and fissures, exposing ominous forms of local faction and conspiracy underneath the surface drama of fated empire. Tate's earlier plays repeatedly register anxiety over political dissent. His Ingratitude of a Common-Wealth adds to its Shakespearean source an attack on the Roman tribunes as ‘Faction-Mongers’ and ‘Canting Caballers’. And we have already noted the emphasis on civil conflict in Brutus of Alba. In Dido, as in Brutus, Tate makes the agents behind Dido's downfall a local coven of witches rather than the Olympian gods. The witches' topical political resonance is real, albeit unfocused; Shadwell's Lancashire Witches (1681), a harsh anti-Catholic satire, had recently cemented a growing link in Restoration drama between stage witches and Catholics.Footnote 51 Whether or not Tate's cabal of witches has a specific topical referent – from the Popish Plot to rumours that the unexpected birth of a son to James II in 1688 was a hoax engineered by the Vatican – they absorb, as if in the symbolic language of a dream, the period's popular unease over the threat of a political enemy operating invisibly inside the state.
In their uncanny, fictive quality, the witches become Tate's focal point for a meditation on epic myth-making. The witches' scenes in Acts II and III unearth a dark substratum underneath the public pageant of the Aeneid: crucially, Tate's Dido owes her death not to the grand imperatives of Virgil's epic fatum, but to the scheming of an internal enemy that remains invisible to history. The witches expose the private and irrational forces that shape the chronicle of empire. They perform their work in secret and in darkness: ‘In our deep-vaulted cell the charm we'll prepare, / Too dreadful a practice for this open air’ (II.29–30). They are concerned not with the metaphysical ordering of history, furthermore, but with Dido's good name. The Sorceress announces that her goal is to deprive Dido at a single stroke ‘of fame, of life and love’ (12). The epic plot – the imperial teleology that means everything to Aeneas – works merely as a means to an end, the real goal of staining Dido's reputation. Tate's story of Dido and Aeneas reshapes Virgil's vision of world empire into the personal tragedy of a good name lost to history.
The opera's signal plot event – the witches' notorious fabrication of a false Mercury to order Aeneas to leave for Rome – raises important questions about the politics of art. It is a daring twist on an equally notorious turning point in Virgil's poem. Virgil had pressed the god Mercury into service to resolve a sticky plot problem. Aeneas must be extricated from Carthage, but without carrying a heavy burden of ethical blame for breaking Dido's trust. Mercury's intervention resolves the problem, but also renders it visible. The god's marching orders for Aeneas form a transparent plot mechanism, a narrative lever or hinge that momentarily exposes the structural mechanics behind Virgil's story of translatio imperii. The gods have this meta-narrative function throughout the Aeneid, as their manipulation of Aeneas's destiny mirrors the poet's own task of shaping the epic's ideology and form.
The preface to Dryden's Aeneid struggles at length with the gods' role in Book IV. As Richard F. Thomas has shown, Dryden's translation tweaks its source text to weaken Dido's claims on Aeneas.Footnote 52 At the same time, Dryden magnifies his hero's religious obligations. He stresses that the domestic commitments of Aeneas as a husband cease to apply after Mercury's arrival, since ‘an immediate Revelation dispenses with all Duties of Morality’.Footnote 53 Dryden does not hide the fact that he needs this expedient to redeem a hero who would otherwise come across as an ethical failure: ‘humanely speaking’, he concedes, ‘I doubt there was a fault somewhere; and Jupiter is better able to bear the blame, than either Virgil or Aeneas’.Footnote 54 But his recourse to the gods brings Dryden directly to the hostile view of Virgil put forward by the French critics. Dryden explains that Virgil had overriding political reasons to stage Aeneas's break with Dido, since he needed a fiction that would account for the long historical enmity between Rome and Carthage. The task obliged Virgil to sacrifice not just the manners of Aeneas, but also the reputation of the historical Dido: ‘He knew he cou'd not please the Romans better, or oblige them more to Patronize his Poem, than by disgracing the Foundress of that City … [H]e knew the Romans were to be his Readers; and them he brib'd, perhaps at the expence of his Heroe's honesty, but he gain'd his Cause however; as Pleading before Corrupt Judges.’Footnote 55 In Dryden's reading, the gods' intervention in Book IV relieves Aeneas of personal blame for his treachery, but at the expense of both confirming that treachery as a moral problem and damaging the integrity of Virgil's gods, who are exposed as a mystification, a cover for a coolly pragmatic political myth.
Tate, for his part, also makes the Aeneid's ideological scaffolding visible, but he does so by exposing yet another layer of causality behind the Virgilian gods. Rather than simply erase the gods from his drama, as he had done in Brutus of Alba, Tate reintroduces them as a flimsy human construct: a manufactured ‘trusty elf, / In form of Mercury himself’ (II.20–1) to dupe Aeneas into leaving Carthage. Tate seems eager not just to collapse the divine infrastructure behind Aeneas's quest for empire, but to expose the process whereby such an epic ideology has been constructed. Tate both flaunts the fictionality of Virgil's Mercury and shows how Aeneas turns that baseless fiction into the foundation for an imperial myth. Tate's Dido, meanwhile, starts to recognise the partisan history that is beginning to form around her, and struggles with growing helplessness against it.
When the ‘trusty elf’ appears to Aeneas, it strips down the message of Virgil's Mercury to its core plot element: Aeneas must sacrifice ‘love's delights’ in Carthage to ‘gain th'Hesperian shore / And ruined Troy restore’ (II.55–8). As in the Aeneid, Aeneas assents without hesitation. His thoughts then turn to Dido: what words can he find to ‘pacify’ his ‘injured Queen’? Tate's Aeneas promptly takes refuge in fatalism. He told Dido in Act I that he would ‘defy / The feeble stroke of Destiny’, and would answer to ‘no fate but you’ (I.46–8). That strong claim to authority now abruptly melts away. Aeneas now portrays ‘fate’ as an agency so external and impersonal that, as the hero's guilty ‘I’ disappears, even the grammatical relation of subject and object breaks down: ‘from her arms I'm forced to part. / How can so hard a fate be took, / One night enjoyed, the next forsook?’ (II.64–6). By the end of the speech (and in a further addition to Virgil), Aeneas has embraced his new role as the helpless instrument of a divine plot teleology, imposed on him from above, which recasts Dido as a necessary sacrifice to his manifest destiny: ‘Yours be the blame, ye gods, for I / Obey your will – but with more ease could die’ (67–8).
We are watching an epic myth in the making. The witches, the true agents behind Dido's downfall, recede into the background, their motives left obscure. Over the opera's core plot-engine of conspiracy and rebellion they have succeeded in stretching a layer of fiction. Aeneas wholly accepts their mystification: history has shaped itself into a providential public destiny to which his personal will must be forfeited. As Tate's hero begins his final interview with Dido, an opening rhetorical question, with its self-exculpating swivel into the third-person voice, advertises his powerlessness: ‘What shall lost Aeneas do? / How, royal fair, shall I impart / The gods' decree and tell you we must part?’ (III.29–31). Dido is not convinced. Virgil's Dido had already raised passing doubts about Aeneas's claim of a divine visitation; in Dryden's translation, she rages, ‘A God's Command he pleads, / And make's Heav'n accessary to his Deeds / … as if the peaceful State / Of Heav'nly Pow'rs were touch'd with Humane Fate!’Footnote 56 In Virgil's account, Dido is tragically mistaken to doubt the gods' investment in Aeneas's future. In Tate's new context, however, her argument gains force and point. The bulk of his Dido's recriminations target Aeneas's shift of responsibility from himself to the gods. In Dido's view, overlaying the gods onto what is really a matter of human choice amounts to wilful fraud and hypocrisy:
More than one critic has raised an eyebrow at the incongruous metaphor of the crocodile, but it is not a trivial one. Virgil had linked Dido thematically with the archetypal eastern queen of the Nile, Cleopatra.Footnote 57 Both women embodied the irrational, wily and prevaricating social world of the southern Mediterranean: the uncontrollable forces that pressed in on the Roman Empire from its frontiers, symbolic of the volatile passions that threatened each Roman from within. Tate would have known Shakespeare's portrait of Cleopatra as a seductive spinner of tales, deeply preoccupied with the power of language, and eager to craft her own role in history. And Tate's Brutus of Alba alludes more than once to Dryden's Shakespearean adaptation, All for Love (1677), a play in which Cleopatra is labelled a ‘False Crocodyle’ for her cold-blooded manipulation of language and affect.Footnote 58 Similarly, at the climax of Brutus of Alba, Tate recycles the metaphor to link Cleopatra with Dido. Brutus rails against the Queen for asking him, reluctantly and tearfully, to leave her country: ‘’Twere Woman's Fraud t’ have ruin'd with your Smiles, / But to betray with Tears, the Crocodile's’ (31).
In Dido and Aeneas, the crocodile metaphor has migrated to Aeneas, who inherits Cleopatra's association with hypocrisy and prevarication. We find in retrospect that he has wrapped himself in self-serving fictions throughout the drama. When Aeneas had attached his domestic affair with Dido to the fate of a revived Troy – ‘If not for mine, for empire's sake’ – he had cast a screen of imperial destiny across what was finally a transient erotic passion. His growing confidence in his rhetorical authority shows itself in the hunting scene in Act II, where he rewrites the story of Adonis: ‘Behold upon my bending spear, / A monster's head stands bleeding, / With tushes far exceeding / Those did Venus’ huntsmen tear' (41–4). His mastery over the boar serves equally as a claim of narrative control, as this new Adonis exorcises the old tragic myth in the name of his own love story in the making. The witches' false Mercury persuades Aeneas that he is the victim of a divine destiny rather than its prime mover, but it strengthens his impulse to rewrite his life as myth, and history as fate.
Read in these terms, the end of the opera shows Aeneas's Virgilian myth slowly invading Dido and absorbing her into itself. No longer held at a moody distance from us, the reticent, shrinking figure of the first two acts is now transformed into the familiar doomed queen of the Aeneid. Suddenly voluble and volatile, she flings abuse at her betrayer. The outlines of Virgil's tragic structure take shape around and within her as Aeneas's language and ideology begin to imprint themselves on her restless speech. Dido pleads with fate, ‘The only refuge for the wretched left’ (III.25), even as she rejects Aeneas's appeal to the supernatural agency of ‘heaven and gods’ (35). She scorns Aeneas's offer to stay with her, yet she adopts his tragic terminology, calling herself ‘The injured Dido’ (46) as he had earlier called her his ‘injured Queen’ (II.62). With Aeneas's departure, Dido embraces death as ‘a welcome guest’ (III.59), a new paramour to replace the ‘Trojan guest’ (I.16) who has left the scene, but her conclusion that ‘Death must come when he is gone’ (III.53) comes across as strangely impersonal, an acknowledgment that she is caught in an inexorable machine created by another. The apparatus of tragedy seems to act upon her like an external force – ‘More I would but death invades me’ (58) – rather than as an impulse emerging from within.
With her dying lament, Tate's elusive and mysterious Dido is abruptly recast as the Aeneid's archetypal abandoned woman. Secretive emotional autonomy gives way to conventional feminine self-display:
The lyric suggests a Carthaginian Ariadne, weighed down by guilt and grief. What to make of this sudden self-exposure? Just as Tate's witches had disappeared under the false screen of Aeneas's imperial myth, Tate seems to show his Dido being supplanted or overwritten by Virgil's anti-heroine; the opera's ‘historical’ Dido, so to speak, is absorbed into Aeneas's widening fiction and compelled to play the role it demands of her. If we wish to describe this process at the level of character psychology, we might call Tate's Dido a classic victim of ideology, who internalises the conventions that oppress her and becomes their unwitting ally in her own loss of autonomy.Footnote 59 In a cruel irony, Dido's efforts to protest her ‘fated’ role only make her conform more tightly to it: any form of passionate self-expression simply consolidates her resemblance to the irrational, unstable women of the Aeneid. Purcell's scoring of Dido's lament, heavy with abstract inexorability, strengthens this dramatic argument. Its famous chromatic ground bass, descending relentlessly in a repeating five-bar phrase, overlaps with and pulls against Dido's melodic line to produce ripples of suspensions and discords. Its descending tetrachordal structure, the signature device of continental operatic laments, gives form to the external forces that draw Dido helplessly towards her mandated end.Footnote 60 The resulting push and pull of the fixed bass against her chromatically ascending vocal line suggests Dido's struggle to break free from the myth that the other characters have wrapped claustrophobically around her – a struggle, however, in which her every gesture is itself a conventional reflex of feminine lamentation, a stylised confession of anguish that seems to arise more from the tragic protocol of the moment than from Dido's prior emotional life. The gloomy, sinuous eroticism of her dying melody is no less a prison than the unyielding fixed bass. By thrashing about inside the trap of her Virgilian ‘fate’, she binds herself still more tightly in its toils.
Dido's lament brings her into close conformity with the heroines of English tragic drama in the 1680s, whose genre obliged them to collude in their own victimisation. The plays of Nathaniel Lee, Thomas Otway, John Banks, Thomas Southerne and, later, the ‘she-tragedies’ of Thomas Rowe and his imitators turned from the bombast and spectacle of the earlier Restoration heroic play towards pathos and sentiment. In contrast with the preening titans who strode the stage in the 1660s, the new anti-heroes try and fail to exert control over their disordered world. Gods and fate seem remote or irrelevant. A transfer of interest from awe to pity called for stories of hapless lovers, domestic conflicts and endangered women, as the playwrights strategically used ‘eroticism … to compensate for the loss of heroic flamboyance’.Footnote 61 We hear the familiar cadences of Dido's lament in a range of mourning voices from this repertory, such as the threatened wife Eugenia in Thomas D'Urfey's The Injur'd Princess (1682) – ‘Come, strike my Lord, / Strike the innocent Mansion of my Love, my heart, / And give a hapless, much wrong'd Woman, rest, / As lasting as her woes. … / And tell my Lord, when I am laid in Earth, / He then may revel quietly’Footnote 62 – or, indeed, since there is sometimes little to distinguish male from female characters in these pathos-ridden plays, the voice of the grieving suitor Varanes in Lee's Theodosius (1680), parting with his star-crossed beloved:
Both he and his beloved later commit suicide. These characters' erotic self-renunciation, often accompanied by acts or threats of violence against themselves, has troubled modern critics, who find that the pathos of these plays carries overtones of voyeurism and sadism; much of the repertory shares a prurient fascination with female sexuality and victimhood.Footnote 64 The complex emotional dynamic of such scenes points to a dramatic form in transition.Footnote 65 These tragic heroines' suffering stirs our indignation against their abusers, often male figures who recall the ranting warlords of earlier heroic drama and their outmoded ambitions – the ancestors of Tate's shrivelled Aeneas. At the same time, audiences were clearly eager to watch the emotional unravelling of Lee's Teraminta in Lucius Junius Brutus (1681), of Otway's Belvidera in Venice Preserv'd (1682) and, perhaps, of Tate's Dido: women who, torn between incompatible loyalties, are conventionally bound to bear the pain of their genre's break with its bright heroic past.
Tate's chorus, with its habit of projecting Dido's private life onto a wider public canvas, encourages this response, and is ready to write Dido into history as the victim of a fatal inner conflict: ‘Great minds against themselves conspire, / And shun the cure they most desire’ (54–5). Dido's last word in the opera is ‘fate’, an unwilling concession to Aeneas's rhetoric of destiny. And the afterlife of Dido in the Aeneid – the underworld meeting where, reunited with her first husband, she turns away from the pleading Aeneas – is suppressed, to be replaced by a fixed memorial in the world of the living. Cupids are called down to strew Dido's tomb with roses: ‘Soft and gentle as her heart, / Keep here your watch and never part’ (65–6). Virgil's epic myth has extracted its required sacrifice, and Aeneas sails towards his imagined Roman destiny.
IV
The reading that I have just sketched suggests that Dido and Aeneas is a tough, coherent critique of art in the service of power. Virgil's fiction of divinely mandated empire is reshaped into a cautionary tale about the costs of such political fictions, as Dido's lament marks her tragic absorption into the imperial myth that Augustan Rome wrote for itself. But this reading is too schematic in its account of the opera as a response to the cultural politics of the Aeneid. For Dido and Aeneas shows some anxiety and confusion in its portrayal of female suffering. Elements of Dido's dying lament seem to resist the form's conventional expectations. Unlike the suicidal Ariadne, Tate's Dido does not unequivocally wish to die: ‘Darkness shades me … More I would but death invades me’ (III.56–8). Her words carry a strong aura of ceremonial detachment and reserve, another solemn gesture of turning away from public view. Both the text and its musical setting create an effect of such distilled purity, such patient, formal elegance, as to convey an emotional experience serenely remote from any human context, deeply intimate but also elusive and mysterious in its terms. From this perspective, Dido's divided sentiment – remember, but forget – continues to separate an inner ‘me’ from the imperial ‘fate’ that binds her to Aeneas. Apparently trying to have it both ways, Tate both exposes and conceals Dido's torment, both embraces and attacks Virgil's account of her tragic victimhood.
We can blame much of this confusion on Tate's ambivalence towards his source material. He seems to have been sympathetic towards the chaste Dido tradition, and inclined to take Dido's side against Virgil's partisan mythology, but he was unable or unwilling to forego the emotional impact of Dido's lingering death. The result is an effort at once to retain Dido's famous scene of lamentation but to try to frame it as a critique of Virgil's exploitation of the legendary queen. Tate's mixed feelings about the Dido legend probably account for its striking absence from his A Present for the Ladies (1692), a rambling tract in defence of women that has received little attention from students of the opera. In a suggestive essay on the opera's Ovidian and anti-Virgilian strains, Wendy Heller has argued that Tate ‘had no need to include Dido in A Present for the Ladies because he had already amply defended her in the opera Dido and Aeneas, adorning her with far more eloquent praise than she might have garnered from a passing reference in an admittedly minor publication’.Footnote 66 Yet the singular absence of Dido from this volume – a book devoted to rescuing the good name of womankind from libellous male poets and historians – is puzzling. The chaste historical Dido appears nowhere in the ‘whole Annals of Greece and Rome’ which Tate calls forth to vindicate the ladies, nor in his ‘Army of Ladies at sundry times, Famous for Conjugal Affection and Fidelity’, nor in his list of capable women rulers. Nor is Dido mentioned when Tate rails against ‘the Ingratitude of Heroes’, a subject that ‘more than half furnisht Ovid with Subjects for his Epistles’.Footnote 67 His refusal to include his own most prominent literary heroine in this defence of women suggests real misgivings about Dido's place in Restoration culture and in his own art. There is, however, a hint of Tate's earlier preoccupations when he chooses to praise, among other virtuous attributes, the ‘Heroical Quality’ of female ‘Secrecy’.Footnote 68 His praise for secretive self-restraint recalls both the shrinking, reticent heroine of Dido and Aeneas and the frustrating opacity of Tate's own political views in the 1680s.
Tate was not alone in finding something startlingly invasive in the scene of Dido's mourning. Among the Aeneid's most popular Restoration recensions was a widespread vogue for Virgilian parody and burlesque.Footnote 69 A Tory poem by one ‘W. B.’, for example, chided Virgil's Aeneas for using the gods' marching orders to justify his treachery: a divine mandate, he complains, is just an excuse for Aeneas to establish his own political authority – so convenient an excuse, indeed, that the English Commonwealth regime had used it too.Footnote 70 As we would by now expect, the writer links that false authority with Virgil's libel of the historical Dido, ‘Chast Queen to be abus'd by story, / Virgil's infamy, as Virgil's glory’ (27–8). But the poem's next move is an unexpected one, for this was a dedicatory poem introducing Charles Cotton's mock-translation of the Aeneid, Book IV, frequently reprinted after its initial publication in 1665. Cotton's pastiche, W. B. explains, will happily embrace Virgil's spirit of libellous fiction-making: ‘But let's proceed (though all must know it / A story false) along with Poet’ (29–30). Taking Virgil's lies as their precedent, burlesques like Cotton's revelled in exposing Dido's inner life to vulgar public scrutiny.
Written in a childlike register of scatology and bawdry, Cotton's Scarronides strips the Dido story of its mythical weight and stresses the biological facts on the ground. Of the infamous tryst of Dido and Aeneas in the cave, we are told,
The glib euphemism of the last line, teasingly drawn over a prurient sexual pun, renders absurd any effort to dignify this act of anonymous copulation. Cotton's poem enthusiastically replaces the chaste Dido of history with her polar opposite, a sexually voracious anti-heroine whose passion for Aeneas is frankly centred on his ‘weapon, / For which she did so scald and burn / That none but he could serve her turn’ (6–8). The narrator's tasteless exposure of her body, forcing its most private aspects into open view, suggests a parody of Virgil's own exploitative treatment of Dido. Refusing to collude with Virgil in mourning his tragic heroine, Cotton pointedly trains a cold public gaze on her emotional life and vulgarises it beyond recognition.
There is some evidence connecting Cotton with Tate; he owned a copy of Tate's first volume of poetry, and their mutual friends included Dryden and the poet Thomas Flatman.Footnote 71 Some points of contact can be found, too, between Cotton's bawdily sceptical treatment of the Dido story and the Act III sailors' scene in Tate's opera, a scene that has puzzled critics with its jocular, cynical tone. The Trojans offer a coldly comic foil to Aeneas's mournful leave-taking:
As in Cotton's parody, the intimate circle of Aeneas's relationship with Dido is thrown open, its contours rendered rough and crude by its new public frame. Dido and Aeneas become, like Cotton's hero and heroine, mere Jacks and Joans, playing out an immemorial romantic endgame which makes the story's high epic ambitions lurch into parody. It is as if Tate cannot fully commit himself to a tragic perspective on Dido's fatal affair; scenes of brooding pathos jostle uncomfortably against glib, comic sequences like this one. The unevenness of the opera's tone leaves us finally unsure how to react to Dido's bathetic ‘crocodile’ metaphor, or to the infamous ‘Ho ho ho’ of the witches. This odd tonal mixture has made it possible for Andrew Pinnock to read the opera as a Cottonesque comic burlesque in its own right.Footnote 72
What, then, are we to conclude about the cultural politics of Dido and Aeneas? Earlier I noted that the politics of Restoration culture involves at least two elements: first, the colonising of the aesthetic sphere by partisan political interests; but also, in a looser sense, the shifting network of alliances and rivalries that formed among artists, patrons and theatre personnel as they sought a home for this period's shaky new dramatic forms, including the experimental court operas of the 1680s. Teasing apart these two elements, I suggest that Tate found himself torn between the imperatives of politics and those of culture. He takes polemical aim at Virgil's Augustan fiction, where the impassioned suicide of Dido confirms the danger that she poses to Aeneas and his Roman future. Her violent unreason seems to justify the anti-feminist gender politics of the Aeneid, its hero constantly forced to protect his patrilineal inheritance against the assaults of wrathful females both mortal and divine. Tate recasts Dido's lament as a kind of ideological trap, a manipulative spectacle forced upon the heroine in the name of Virgil's masculinist, absolutist and imperial myth. At the same time, pioneering one of the first tragic operas in English, Tate joined a theatrical trend towards bourgeois ‘she-tragedy’ and its fascination with distressed women, new champions for an age that alternately lamented and took pride in its own anti-heroism. A final lament for his lovelorn heroine was to form the structural and emotional climax of Tate's new generic form, already modelled in English by Blow's Venus and Adonis and in French by Perrin's Ariane and other imported London operas of the 1670s. Together, Tate and Purcell may even have been searching for a space within Restoration opera where passionate feeling might speak authentically to the heart, remote from the historical contingencies of the moment, and without choosing to confront the ideological implications of feminine victimisation and mourning.
Drawn throughout his career to the figure of Dido, Tate seems, however, to have been aware that in staging the death of Virgil's maligned anti-heroine, he did not just expose and undermine the epic's political myths, but shared a kind of complicity with them. Like the theatrical laments for female voices which had by now become continental opera's stock in trade, Dido's lament aestheticised her torment and traded in female suffering – calling up responses like this one from an English commentator who praised an Ariadne lament written some decades earlier by Henry Lawes: ‘Thy Ariadne's Grief's so fitly shown / As bring's us Pleasure from her saddest Groan’.Footnote 73 Although Tate opted to give his Dido a quiet, mysterious love-death rather than a violent suicide – another sign of his desire to have things both ways – her lament nonetheless threatened to reinforce the central stigma attached to Virgil's Dido, and, later, to opera itself: an association with the exotic, the irrational, the decadent, the spectacular and the feminine. Tate may not have been able to articulate these problems for himself. But his fitful efforts to screen Dido's emotional life from us, and his occasional lurch towards cynicism and bathos, suggest that he could not find a stable position inside tragic opera from which to critique Stuart Augustanism.
On the strict question of topical polemic in Dido and Aeneas, we may therefore have to settle for a political muddle. In exchange, however, we can both acknowledge Dido's inconsistencies and achieve a fuller sense of the place of opera in English culture during a period acutely conscious of the relationship between art and ideology. Tate's handling of the Dido legend suggests his unhappiness with Virgil's partisan history. Exploring the dark side of political myth-making, Dido and Aeneas may well be the work of a disenchanted Tory, impatient with the Augustan absolutism of the Stuarts. Yet efforts to read the opera as a topical commentary on the royal politics of the 1680s have not so far been able to account for its uncertainties and mixed messages, its abrupt shifts of tone, its extreme reticence, its unstable relationship with the Aeneid and with the wronged woman at its centre. Some of these conflicts, I have suggested, stem from Tate's own uncertain loyalties, divided between polemical and affective approaches to his art. It should by now be clear that early English opera's politics cannot be assessed in a vacuum. The political commitments of Dido and Aeneas are enmeshed in a dense matrix of cultural forces that give shape to its ideology and form: among them, critical debates over the meaning and legacy of the classical past, shifting models of heroism and of gender relations, the changing makeup of theatre audiences and the evolution of their tastes, and the protocols of genre that organised Dido's relationship with earlier works and families of works. Our assessment of the opera should take account, in the fullest sense, of its cultural politics.
