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Dejanira, Omphale, and the emasculation of Hercules: allusion and ambiguity in Handel
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 August 2008
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The indebtedness of Handel's English librettos to their sources is increasingly well understood, but much remains to be said concerning the function of those sources in their new context. In other words, scholars have devoted too little attention to literary allusiveness – intentional references to earlier works and their intended ‘messages’ to the audience. That such allusions can be found in these librettos by British authors almost goes without saying, for the British poetry of Handel's day is saturated with allusions. Reuben Brower, in fact, has called the Augustan poets the writers of ‘the poetry of allusion’.
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References
2 Reuben, Brower, Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion (Oxford, 1959).Google Scholar
3 Wasserman, Earl R., ‘The Limits of Allusion in The Rape of the Lock’, Journal of English and German Philology, 65 (07 1966), 425.Google Scholar
4 This process of drawing upon multiple sources in the construction of a libretto was a typical practice of the day. For just one example, see John Winemiller's discussion of the construction of the libretto for Ads and Galatea in ‘Recontextualizing Handel's Borrowing’, The journal of Musicology, 15 (1997), 444–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
5 See Gilman, Todd, ‘Handel's Hercules and Its Semiosis’, The Musical Quarterly, 81 (1997), 454. Gilman's article was what originally drew my attention to Motteux's libretto.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
6 Ovid wrote the Heroides some two decades before The Metamorphoses. For an engaging discussion of Ovid's career, see Knox, Bernard, ‘Playboy of the Roman World’, New York Review of Books, 45/1 (15 01 1998), 32–6.Google Scholar
7 Smith, Ruth, Handel's Oratorios and Eighteenth-Century Thought (Cambridge, 1995), 58–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Broughton's changes to the central characters are also discussed in Dean, Winton, Handel's Dramatic Oratorios and Masques London, 1959), 416–17;Google Scholar and Hurley, David, ‘Dejanira and the Physicians: Aspects of Hysteria in Handel's Hercules’, The Musical Quarterly, 80 (1996), 548–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The initial impetus for these changes might have been Ovid's Metamorphoses, where Dejanira is said to have heard a rumour of Hercules's infidelity with Iole, implying that it is not actually true. See Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Melville, A. D. (Oxford, 1986), 203 and 427 n.137.Google Scholar
8 Edward, Tripp, Crowell's Handbook of Classical Mythology (New York, 1970), s.v. “Omphale.”Google Scholar
9 These adventures are described in Apollodorus, The Library of Greek Mythology, trans. Hard, Robin (Oxford, 1997), 84–6Google Scholar and Siculus, Didorus, The Library of History, Books II.35–IV.58, trans. Oldfather, C. H. (Cambridge, Mass., 1935).Google Scholar
10 An excellent discussion of the Fasti can be found in Alessandro Barchiesi, The Poet and the Prince: Ovid and Augustan Discourse (Berkeley, 1997).Google Scholar
11 Motteux, , The Novelty. Every Act a Play. Being a Short Pastoral, Comedy, Masque, Tragedy, and Farce after the Italian Manner, As it is Acted at the New-Theatre in Little Lincoln's Inn Fields (London, 1697).Google Scholar The masque on Hercules is preceded by a brief pastoral by Oldmixon (see below) and a short comedy, and followed by a farce ‘after the Italian manner’ as well as a one-act version of Filmer's tragedy The Unnatural Brother. According to Robert Hume, ‘the conglomerate caught the town's fancy, and gave Motteux two benefit nights’. See Hume, , The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1976/1990), 410.Google Scholar
12 See Gilman, , ‘Handel's Hercules and Its Semiosis’ (n.5), 454.Google Scholar
13 Excerpts are taken from the original printed libretto, Hercules A Musical Drama (London, 1745).Google Scholar
14 This example may constitute a borrowing rather than allusion, for Broughton presumably would not have expected many in his audience to recognize lines from The Novelty, since the play had been published, however, the possibility cannot be ruled Out.
15 Omphale is mentioned by name twice by Sophocles in the Trachiniae, but the spinning episode is not. It is mentioned in Seneca's Hercules Oetaeus; but it seems to have no particular effect upon Dejanira when her nurse relates it: ‘then queen Omphale – head over heals in love he sat beside her, helping to spin, twisting the moistened threads between his calloused fingers – Omphale, for whom he shed his lion skin and stood before her, her obedient slave …’ It is quite certain, nonetheless, that Broughton knew the Heroides (see below).
16 I have seen two copies in the New York Public Library: the second edition of 1636, published by ‘R. B.adger [sic] for M. Sparke’ and a 1677 edition published by W. Whitwood. I am grateful to Channan Willner for helping me obtain copies. Other editions appeared in 1639, 1663, 1671, and 1695.
17 See Brewer, John, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1997), 477–80.Google Scholar
18 There was a London version that predated Saltonstall: The Heroycall Epistles of the learned Poet Publius Ovidius Naso, in English Verse; set out and translated by George Turbervile Gent. With Aulius Sabinus answeres to certaine of the Same. This appeared in four editions: 1567, 1569, 1570, and 1600.
19 He is not to be confused with George Oldmixon, the author of the English translation of the 1737 version of II trionfo del Tempo, who, according to Händel-Handbuch IV, was busy being born at about this time. (Händel-Handbuch IV, Dokumente zu Leben und Schaffen [Kassel, 1985])Google Scholar The best source of information about John Oldmixon is the Dictionary of National Biography (London, 1896).Google ScholarPubMed
20 Oldmixon's original libretto for Daniel Purcell, The Grove, or Love's Paradise, of 1700 is discussed in Eugene Haun, But Hark! More Harmony: The Libretti of Restoration Opera in English (Ypsilanti, Mich., 1971), 174–5.Google Scholar
21 I have not explored the possibility that Motteux knew the work in French translation; the Heroides was such a well-known source that it would be extraordinary if Motteux had not known it. Sternfeld, F. W. has discussed the importance of the Heroides for Baroque opera in The Birth of Opera (Oxford, 1993), 6–7.Google Scholar
22 See Gilman, ‘Handel's Hercules and its Semiosis,’ (n.5), 454Google Scholar ‘Moreover – and no Handelian has noticed this before – Broughton appears to have drawn his libretto in part from the third-act English masque (composed by John Eccles) of Hercules found in Peter Anthony Motteux's play The Novelty (London, 1697), particularly his characterization of Dejanira and the details of the scene of Hercules's death by burning’. To be fair, Motteux's Dejanira exhibits characteristics familiar from Broughton: most obviously, she is furiously jealous; moreover, her children tell us that she has wept over the absent Hercules, which resonates with the opening of Broughton's drama, where ‘she weeps from morning's dawn to shades of night’. Yet Motteux's construction of Dejanira seems relatively unimportant in light of Broughton's other sources.Google ScholarPubMed
23 See Hurley, , ‘Dejanira and the Physicians’ (n.7).Google Scholar
24 Robinson, Nicholas, A New System of the Spleen, Vapours, and Hypochondriack Melancholy (London, 1729), 213–14.Google Scholar
25 Dean (Handel's Dramatic Oratorios [see n.7], 416) righdy states that ‘the innocent lole and the furiously jealous Dejanira’ came from Ovid's Metamorphoses. The jealous side of Broughton's Dejanira may also owe something to Seneca's Hercules Oetaeus, where Dejanira's jealousy and hysteria are vividly portrayed, culminating in a mad scene in which she has a guilty vision of Megaera and Tisiphone, just as she does in Broughton's libretto. (See Anthony Hicks's notes for the Maryland Handel Festival performance of Hercules in 1992.) Both Ovid's Metamorphoses and Seneca's Hercules Oetaeus attribute vacillating emotions to Dejanira. I have argued elsewhere that Broughton's synthesis of the sources result in a character who exhibits the characteristics of hysteria as described in eighteenth-century British medical treatises (see Hurley, ‘Dejanira and the Physicians’ [n.7]).
26 The British Library contains a later Tonson printing of 1729 as well as a Dublin publication of 1727 by Risk, Ewing, and Smith. I have not consulted these. The later editions I found postdate Hercules.
27 In the Heroides Dejanira remarks that Venus, more than Juno, has been Hercules's bane (the B section of ‘Resign thy Club’ refers to this goddess – ‘Venus and her whining boy / Shall all thy wanton hours employ’). But Venus is also mentioned in the Trachiniae.
28 I am grateful to Ruth Smith for drawing these lines to my attention.
29 Apollodorus states that Hercules had Agelaos, from whom the family of Croesus descended, by Omphale. That Hercules and Omphale share an erotic relationship can be taken for granted in Ovid. The humorous episode in Fasti 2.303–56 in which Faunus assaults Omphale but in her place finds Hercules in female clothing takes place during a night of abstinence between Hercules and Omphale; but the exception proves the rule. Ovid explains that the reason for their taking separate beds that night was that they wished to celebrate in all purity the next morning a festival in honour of the discoverer of the vine. (See James George Frazer, trans., Ovid V Fasti [Cambridge, Mass, 1939], 81.)
30 This might even be consistent with the Trachiniae. In that work Lichas relates Hercules's servitude to Omphale (see lines 69–70, 248–57), but there is no indication of a sexual relationship.
31 Dean, Handel's Dramatic Oratorios and Masques (see n. 7), 414 n.4.