Masque and Opera in England, 1656-1688

The Rival Maids: Anne Killigrew, Anne Kingsmill and the making of the court masque Venus and Adonis (music by John Blow)

“…He never rose more proud, more glad, more gay, Ne're courted Daphne with a brighter Ray! And now in Clouds he wraps his Head, [5] As if not Daphne, but himself were dead! And all the little Winged Troop Forbear to sing, and sit and droop; The Flowers do languish in their Beds, And fading hang their Mourning Heads; [10] The little Cupids discontented, shew, In Grief and Rage one breaks his Bow, An other tares his Cheeks and Haire, A third sits blubring in Despaire, Confessing though, in Love, he be, [15] A Powerful, Dreadful Deitie, A Child, in Wrath, can do as much as he.…”

“…'[W]e can regard her as a kind of court figure by the early 1680s', as Andrew Walkling remarks. 74 The exmistress re-invented herself as an adjunct member of the court musical establishment and as the first authentic star of all-sung English music drama.…”

“…4 There Nahum Tate and Henry Purcell's 'Dido and Aeneas warrants consideration … only as a somewhat peripheral phenomenon whose existence serves as a foil for the evaluation of a corpus of works that are better documented and hence more readily accessible to classification and analysis on the basis of context'. 5 Because Venus and Adonis is 'not known from any court documents or contemporary commentary' it too 'is a difficult piece to categorize' and difficult to analyse on the basis of context. 6 Walkling does not want to analyse Venus on any other basis, so he treats it mainly as a case study in the chance survival of court documents and likely disappearance of most of those that once existed.…”

“…5 Because Venus and Adonis is 'not known from any court documents or contemporary commentary' it too 'is a difficult piece to categorize' and difficult to analyse on the basis of context. 6 Walkling does not want to analyse Venus on any other basis, so he treats it mainly as a case study in the chance survival of court documents and likely disappearance of most of those that once existed. (Dido and Venus, it hardly needs saying, are through-composed highlights of the English masque and early opera repertoire, peripheral phenomena only on the narrowest of definitions.…”

“…Mary sponsored an ambitious cultural programme in which young women close to her participated fully. That programme continued, and continued to involve young women as performers, while the Yorks held court in Brussels (briefly) then in Edinburgh: 22 with some breaks they spent three years in political exile, March 1679 to late May 1682, 23 riding out the anti-Catholic storm with which Charles II was having to deal and for which James's openlyconfessed Catholicism was largely responsible.…”