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“Clamorous with War and Teeming with Empire”: Purcell and Tate's Dido and Aeneas

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“Clamorous with War and Teeming with Empire”: Purcell and Tate's Dido and Aeneas Eighteenth-Century Life ECL26203-44-fiskREV.q4 5/28/02 2:49 PM Page 23 “Clamorous with War and Teeming with Empire”: Purcell and Tate’s Dido and Aeneas Deborah Payne Fisk American University & Jessica Munns University of Denver Two notorious problems have beset Dido and Aeneas: assessing its possible political allusions and possible political meanings, and assigning a date for its premiere performance. Early in the last century, W. Barclay Squire argued that the epilogue pointed to the revolution of 1688.1 Other critics have since maintained that the prologue’s stage directions for Phoebus’ rising “Over the Sea,” his remarks to Venus that her “lustre . half Eclipses mine” (I.14–15), and the Act I song “When Monarchs unite how happy their State / They Triumph at once on [or’e] their Foes and their Fate” (I.20–21) refer to the arrival of William III and to his joint monarchy with Mary.2 Other political interpretations not only link the work’s first per- formance date to the coronation of William and Mary in April 1689, but also argue that the Sorceress’ machinations allude to new Catholic plots, while Aeneas’ abandonment of Dido warns William III against neglecting England— although it should be noted that that would have deeply offended the new monarchs.3 Many critics agree upon a première of 1689;4 but others object that the opera’s musical style pre-dates 1689 and that Pur- Eighteenth-Century Life Volume 26, Number 2, Spring 2002 © 2002 by The College of William & Mary 23 Published by Duke University Press Eighteenth-Century Life ECL26203-44-fiskREV.q4 5/28/02 2:49 PM Page 24 24 Eighteenth-Century Life cell would have been too busy with coronation music and birthday odes to have composed an opera in 1689. Instead, it is conjectured that, like Blow’s Venus and Adonis, which was presented at court some time in 1681 or 1682 (London Stage, p. 301) and revived for performance at Josias Priest’s girls boarding school at Chelsey, Dido and Aeneas may similarly have had its premiere at court, perhaps shortly after the performance of Blow’s opera. However, until some firm evidence is unearthed, all of these conjectures about political meanings and dates remain tentative. A precise dating would be desirable, especially for those scholars who interpret the piece (largely the text) as politically allusive and commenting on, variously, Charles II, James II, or William and Mary. Such readings are fascinating; however, our approach differs: and we shall explore the issues the opera raises about gender and imperialism, the costs of conquest, and the emotional experience of loss. There is all but complete consensus that the opera pre- miered between 1684 and 1689; and we assume that it was written for a perfor- mance at Priest’s school in 1689, possibly during the coronation month. The earliest known libretto of Dido and Aeneas announces it was performed at Priest’s school “By Young Gentlewomen. The Words Made by Mr. Nat. Tate. The Musick Compos’d by Mr. Purcell”; and that, alas undated libretto, is the earliest concrete evidence of a performance.5 Josias Priest, a dancing master and choreographer frequently employed by the playhouses, had taken over the aristocratic girl’s school in Gorges House, Cheyne Walk, in 1680, nine years before the first known performance of Dido and Aeneas.6 The school had a tradition of performing musical dra- mas prior to Priest and under his management moved from half-spoken, half-sung dramas such as Thomas Duffett’s and John Bannister’s Beauties Triumph in 1676 (a rendering of the story of the Judgment of Paris) to fully-sung dramas— or operas— such as, on 17 April 1684, John Blow’s Venus and Adonis, a miniature opera of the sort popularized by Marc- Antoine Charpentier in France. Dido and Aeneas, an opera, was part of the vogue for what Judith Milhous has aptly called “multimedia spectaculars” that flourished in the 1670s and then again in the 1690s.7 Priest ’s school was obviously unable to compete with the scenic glories available to the Dorset Garden Theatre, where those spectaculars were staged; but the stage directions in the libretto indicate that the school had the machinery to stage descents, as with the arrival of Phoebus and Venus in the prologue and the cupids “in the clouds” at the conclusion of Dido and Aeneas. On the face of it, the erotic Dido and Aeneas episode from Book IV Published by Duke University Press Eighteenth-Century Life ECL26203-44-fiskREV.q4 5/28/02 2:49 PM Page 25 Purcell and Tate’s Dido and Aeneas 25 of Virgil’s Aeneid hardly seems appropriate for a schoolgirl performance. Nevertheless, one can imagine that Purcell, Tate, and Priest thought the putative morals embedded in the story of Dido and Aeneas— that women should not build empires or succumb to passion— might have had a certain relevance for a girls’ school that sought to inculcate proper feminine virtues.8 However, various socio-political forces rend holes in the ideolog- ical fabric of this moral. Put another way, the disjunction between social and aesthetic realms, the putative moral’s not squaring with the opera’s representation of Dido, resulted from 1680s ambivalence about empire- building. In order to persuade its intended audience of the legitimacy of a symbolic action— in this instance, the tragedy of Dido’s death— and secure its status as a tragedy, the opera must demonstrate the inevitability of Dido’s plight, a plight that arises because both characters fulfill their respective “destinies”: Dido follows the dictates of passion, Aeneas, the call of duty. In its bid for tragic stature, Dido and Aeneas opens itself to several contradictions. On a social level, the story as received from Virgil appar- ently censures Dido’s overreaching ambitions. After all, when Aeneas abandons her, Dido chooses suicide over leadership, thereby suggesting that female rulers, unlike their male counterparts, toss aside duty when emotions run high. On an aesthetic level, Purcell’s music, by making prominent the female voice, and Tate’s libretto, by presenting a diminished male warrior, throw into relief the very “moral” the story presumably upholds. While giving voice (literally) to Dido, the foreigner, the exotic, the other, Dido and Aeneas questions the heroism of Aeneas. Indecisive and weak, he skulks, rather than strides, to his imperial destiny.9 Tate’s Redaction of Virgil The emphasis on Dido— and in particular, her musically magnificent last lament— shifts the focus of the story from duty to abandonment; and Tate’s libretto, which minimizes the role of Aeneas, further undercuts the imperial theme implicit in the original story. Virgil’s Aeneid had long been understood to be about empire; indeed, as such it formed a basic text for Roman schoolboys learning the myth of Roman origins and destiny. It is a patrilineal myth: Pater Aeneas flees devastated Troy with his son, Asca- nius, and carries his own father, Anchises, on his shoulders. Aeneas’ wife, Creusa, disappears. Lost, dead, or destroyed by the gods, she is excluded Published by Duke University Press Eighteenth-Century Life ECL26203-44-fiskREV.q4 5/28/02 2:49 PM Page 26 26 Eighteenth-Century Life from the founding of Rome. Aeneas and his men are given refuge by Queen Dido, herself a refugee, who has founded the city of Carthage in North Africa. The gods Venus and Juno organize a thunderstorm during a hunt; Dido and Aeneas take refuge in a cave, make love, and, at least from Dido’s perspective, are now married. Aeneas throws himself into building Carthage until the gods, petitioned by a neighboring king, Iarbas, jealous of Aeneas’ presence in the city, remind Aeneas of his destiny to found a new home for his Trojans and a new realm for Ascanius. As secretly as possible, Aeneas prepares his ships and men for departure, and when confronted by Dido denies that any legal or binding marriage has taken place. Mercury again reminds Aeneas of his destiny; and, as he sails off for his ultimately successful destination in Italy, Dido organizes her suicide, killing herself with Aeneas’ sword on a high funeral pyre of his deserted possessions. In the Aeneid the brief moment in which a man might collaborate with woman in building and defending her realm, and the brief moment in which a city is founded and run by a woman, are imagined— and rejected. As Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément put it in The Newly Born Woman, “The good love for a man is his country, the fatherland. A masculine land to hand down from father to son.”10 The female-founded Carthage, now destroyed, will pass into the hands of the rival African king. Aeneas, respectful of his father, careful for his son’s patrimony, eager for the battles that awaits him, will found Rome. And, of course, as Virgil constantly inti- mates, Aeneas’ Rome will eventually conquer the reborn Carthage. Empire-building, the proper business of men, has been saved from female contamination. Ironically, it is Dido’s passionate nature— a “female” nature— that renders her unfit to govern. Impulsive, generous, more devoted to desire than duty (upon glimpsing Aeneas she quickly forgets her vow never to marry again), Dido represents the qualities that a man must “lose” (like his mother) on the way to founding an Empire. Yet this brief “feminine” episode has over the centuries threatened to overwhelm the “main” narrative of masculine imperial foundation. (Only Aeneas’ descent into the underworld has been as frequently invoked as the narrative of Dido’s love and betrayal.) Versions of Book IV,11 as well as pic- torial images of the suicidal Dido (Figure 1), had made this episode widely known and much cited, and one in which the heroic founder of Rome plays second lead.
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