I wonder whether the development of an English opera was thwarted because the problem was approached backwards. In Italy, opera grew organically out of the recitative, which quickened into arioso or choral dance at moments of unusual tension or relaxation; but in seventeenth-century England, composers tended to restrict music-drama to undramatical or extradramatical sorts of situations: incidental divertissements, or static depictions of splendor, as if music were simply another machine from which the gods could dangle. It was not easy to find a way of bending these stiff spectacles into a fluent, sensitive medium for drama. The early history of recitative in England is an engrossing subject: Monteverdi's one known English pupil, the madrigalist Walter Porter, did not write any surviving recitative, but there are some accomplished examples by other composers, such as Henry Lawes's Orpheus Hymn and, especially, Nicholas Lanier's imitation of the Monteverdian lamento, Hero's Complaint to Leander, in which the syllabic vocal line breaks out, under pressure, into a rare melisma, in which fleeting patterns in the bass suggest Hero's erotic obsession, and dissonant harmonic movement suggests the internal strife of her emotions. As I’ve noted before, Purcell's contemporary Roger North presented a striking picture of Lanier singing Hero's Complaint to King Charles I:

This very long scena—an all-night vigil in which Hero evolves from anger at Leander's tardiness to hope as she imagines him swimming across the Hellespont, to despair at discovering his corpse—is almost a miniature opera, and might have been a more promising basis for constructing an English opera than the masque turned out to be. But Lanier's and Lawes's grafts of Italian speech-song onto English stock didn't seem to take; it proved hard to integrate recitative, a form well suited to emotional flux, into the arresting, arrested spectacles of the masque-derived music-drama.