1 Maximillian Novak, ‘Introduction’, Edward A and Lillian D Bloom, Educating the Audience. Addison, Steele, & Eighteenth-Century Culture (Los Angeles, 1984), iii Novak describes the influence of the Spectator on English manners and taste as-only slightly-less than that of the Bible'Google Scholar

2 Ibid See, for example, Source Readings in Music History: From Classical Antiquity to the Romantic Era, ed Oliver Strunk (London, 1952), 511–17.Google Scholar

3 Winton, Calhoun, John Gay and the London Theatre (Lexington, 1993), 109 Much excellent work on backgrounds to The Beggar's Opera only reinforces its isolation, though Lowell Lindgren makes a strong case for the work's stylistic similarity to Giovanni Bononcini's Camilla (1696); Lowell E Lindgren, 'Camilla and The Beggar's Opera’, Philological Quarterly, 59 (1980), 44–61.Google Scholar

4 Grout, Donald, A Short History of Opera (2nd edn, New York, 1965), 263; Richard Platt, ‘Theatre Music I’, Blackwell's History of Music in Britain. The Eighteenth Century, ed. H. Diack Johnstone and Roger Fiske (Oxford, 1990), 96–158Google Scholar

5 Fiske, Roger, English Theatre Music in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1973, 2nd edn, Oxford, 1986), 180Google Scholar

6 Curtis Price, Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, Italian Opera in Late Eighteenth-Century London, i. The King's Theatre, Haymarket, 1778–1791 (Oxford, 1995), 3Google Scholar

7 The ‘weather’ evidence is used for Dido's dating by Bruce Wood and Andrew Pinnock, ‘“Unscarr'd by turning times”?. The Dating of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas’, Early Music, 20 (1992), 372–90. The current politically orientated debate about the dating of Dido goes back to John Buttrey, ‘Dating Purcell's Dido and Aeneas’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 64 (1967–8), 51–62Google Scholar

8 J Merrill Knapp, ‘Eighteenth-Century Opera in London before Handel, 1705–1710’, British Theatre and the Other Arts, 1660–1880, ed Shirley Strum Kenny (London, 1984), 92–104 Among Curtis Price's many useful pieces, the two that particularly spring to mind are his Henry Purcell and the London Stage (Cambridge, 1984) and ‘Political Allegory in Late-Seventeenth-Century English Opera’, Music and Theatre Essays in Honour of Winton Dean, ed. Nigel Fortune (Cambridge, 1987), 1–29 See also Andrew R Walking, ‘Politics and the Restoration Masque The Case of Dido and Aeneas’, Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration Literature, Drama, History, ed Gerald Maclean (Cambridge, 1995), 52–69, and ‘Masque and Politics at the Restoration Court-John Crowne's Calisto’, Early Music, 24 (1996), 27–62.Google Scholar

9 Carey, Henry, ‘Satyr on the Luxury and Effeminacy of the Age’, Poems on Several Occasions (3rd edn, London, 1729), 28Google Scholar

10 Fiske, English Theatre Music, 127. Fiske speaks with resignation of the century as a whole and the period of ‘English opera’ and burlesque in particularGoogle Scholar

11 Colley, Linda, Britons Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (London, 1992); Howard D. Weinbrot, Britannia's Issue. The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian (Cambridge, 1993); Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole. Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725–1742 (Oxford, 1994) For nationalism and the Age of Revolution see Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780. Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge, 1990), 14–45Google Scholar

12 Colley, Britons, 11, 6Google Scholar

13 Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities (London, 1983), 24, 26Google Scholar

14 Colley, Britons, 11–18.Google Scholar

15 Anderson sees the notion of ‘prefiguring and fulfilment’ – a ‘medieval conception of simultaneity-along-time’ – as the precursor of ‘simultaneity cross-time’, and one that had to give way to the latter notion before nationalism could make its mark, Imagined Communities, 22–36. The Oxford English Dictionary gives the following range of definitions for ‘Briton': ‘In History and Ethnology. One of the race who occupied the southern part of the island at the Roman invasion, the “ancient Britons”. A Welshman. Since the union of England and Scotland A native of Great Britain, or of the British Empire.'Google Scholar

16 Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition, 101Google Scholar

17 Smith, Ruth, Handel's Oratorios and Eighteenth-Century Thought (Cambridge, 1995), 52–3, 213–29.Google Scholar

18 The opera was ‘the most graceful dramatic compliment’ of many made to the duke that season, John Loftis, The Politics of Drama in Augustan England (Oxford; 1963), 37Google Scholar

19 Spectator no 70 (21 May 1711)Google Scholar

20 Addison and Steele The Critical Heritage, ed Edward A and Lillian D Bloom (London, 1980), 232–47Google Scholar

21 (Ambrose Philips], A Collection of Old Ballads, i (London, 1723; 3rd edn, 1727), pp. iii–iv. Addison had criticized Cowley as ‘gothic’ in Spectator no. 70.Google Scholar

22 [Philips], A Collation of Old Ballads, iii (London, 1725), p. ii. Volume and page numbers for the Collection will hereafter be given in the body of the text.Google Scholar

23 Lowell E. Lindgren, ‘A Bibliographic Scrutiny of Dramatic Works Set by Giovanni and his Brother Antonio Maria Bononcini’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1972), 260–1Google Scholar

24 Full details of fairground productions can be found in Sybil Rosenfeld, The Theatre of the London Fairs in the 18th Century (Cambridge, 1960)Google Scholar

25 Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London, 1776–88) was simply the most famous in a long line of Roman histories designed to serve as exemplary histories for Britain Joseph Levine points out in his study of the battle between the ‘ancients’ and ‘moderns’ over history and historiography that even those who adopted a ‘modern’ approach to their work (philologists and antiquarians) still essentially believed with Dryden that, ‘mankind being the same in all ages’, ‘all history is only the precepts of Moral Philosophy reduc'd into Examples'. Joseph Levine, The Battle of the Books. History and Literature in the Augustan Age (London, 1991), 274–5 and passimGoogle Scholar

26 Weinbrot, Britannia's Issue, 4–5.Google Scholar

27 Temple, William, An Introduction to the History of England (London, 1695), sig A2, cited in Levine, The Battle of the Books, 293, with further discussion on pp. 292–302Google Scholar

28 Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition, 7.Google Scholar

29 Kramnik, Isaac, Bolingbroke and his Circle The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (London, 1968), 24–5Google Scholar

30 Correspondence between Frances, Countess of Hertford … and Henrietta Louisa, Countess of Pomfret (London, 1805), i, 89–90, cited in James Sambrook, James Thomson (1700–1748). A Life (Oxford, 1991), 193.Google Scholar

31 Sambrook, James Thomson, 205.Google Scholar

32 Neuburg, Victor E., Popular Education in Eighteenth Century England (London, 1971), 115–25Google Scholar

33 For example, the tales of Guy of Warwick and of the Seven Champions, both derived from medieval romances, discussed by Neuburg, Popular Education, 116; Pat Rogers, ‘Classics and Chapbooks’, Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England, ed Isabel Rivers (Leicester, 1982), 27–45Google Scholar

34 The Life and Character of Jane Shore Collected from our Best Historians, chiefly from the Writings of Sir Thomas More Humbly offer'd to the Readers and Spectators of her Tragedy Written by Mr Rowe. Inscrib'd to Mrs Oldfield (2nd edn, London, 1714), sig. A2^v.Google Scholar

35 A point Rogers makes with regard to the chapbook adaptation of Thomas Deloney's works; Rogers, ‘Classics and Chapbooks’, 27Google Scholar

36 The London Stage 1660–1800, pt 3 1729–1747, ed. Arthur H Scouten, 2 vols. (Carbondale, 1961), i, p cxlvii; Milton Percival, Political Ballads Illustrating the Administration of Sir Robert Walpole (Oxford, 1916), xxviiGoogle Scholar

37 Dobson, Michael, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Authorship, 1660–1769 (Oxford, 1992), 146–58Google Scholar

38 [John Dryden], King Arthur, or, Merlin, the British Inchanter A Dramatic Opera, As it is performed at the Theatre in Goodman's Fields (London, 1736), Act 5, lines 25ff Gerrard notes that even this production could have been a political two-edged sword, The Patriot Opposition, 119–20.Google Scholar

39 The London Stage, pt 3, ii, 727; i, 537, 541Google Scholar

40 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 12 For a fascinating investigation of the shared iconography of visual and literary satire with special regard to Pope, see Carretta, Vincent, The Snarling Muse: Verbal and Visual Satire from Pope to Churchill (Philadelphia, 1983).Google Scholar

41 The Touch-stone, or, Historical, Critical, Political, Philosophical, and Theological Essays on the reigning Diversions of the Town (London, 1728), 22 While the old attribution of The Touch-stone to James Ralph has been discredited, Lowell Lindgren has recently put forward Robert Samber as another candidate for authorship; Lowell E. Lindgren, ‘Another Critic named Samber whose “Particular historical significance has gone almost entirely unnoticed” ‘, Festa musicologica: Essays in Honor of George J Buelow, ed Thomas J. Mathiesen and Benito V. Rivera (Stuyvesant, 1995), 407–34.Google Scholar

42 The Touch-stone, 21, and discussion on pp. 21–30 His other suggestions included ‘St George and the Dragon’, ‘Tom Thumb’, ‘The Children in the Wood’ and many others The author clearly knew the Collection of Old Ballads, a work compiled by a ‘judicious Antiquary, with learned Observations and Annotations, by which means many remarkable Transactions are preserv'd in those Sing-song Annals, which History has neglected’ (ibid, 24)Google Scholar

43 Arundell, Dennis, The Critic at the Opera (London, 1957), 241–9, Irving Lowens, 'The Touch-stone (1728) A Neglected View of London Opera’, Musical Quarterly, 45 (1959), 325–42, Dennis Martin, The Operas and Operatic Style of John Frederick Lampe (Detroit, 1985), 44–7. Lowell Lindgren, assigning authorship of The Touch-stone to Robert Samber, takes his praise of Italian opera in the first chapter at face value, but also notes Samber's favour for the didactic value of ballad stories; Lindgren, ‘Another Critic named Samber’, 429Google Scholar

44 Martin, The Operas and Operatic Style of John Frederick Lampe, 45–6Google Scholar

45 Smith, Handel's Oratorios, 64–6.Google Scholar

46 A concise discussion of concordance between the ballad, The Touch-stone's commentary and the burlesque opera can be found in Martin, The Operas and Operatic Style of John Frederick Lampe, 44–7 Carey also mimics Philips's prefatory style, recommending his work for the enlightenment of children.Google Scholar

47 With General Monck as George. Saint George, and the Dragon, Anglice, Mercurius Poeticus To the Tune of The Old Souldjour of the Queens, &c (n.p., n.d.) and The Second Part of Saint George for England, To the Tune of To drive the Cold Winter away (n.p., n.d.). The dragon was also an important mytho-historical figure; Jonathan D Evans, ‘The Dragon’, Mythical and Fabulous Creatures: A Source Book and Research Guide, ed. Malcolm South (New York, 1987), 39–49.Google Scholar

48 Percival, Political Ballads, 61–76; Paul Langford, The Excise Crisis. Society and Politics in the Age of Walpole (Oxford, 1975) After completing this piece, it came to my attention that JoAnn Taricani had independently recently made many of the same discoveries about the relationship between The Dragon of Wantley and contemporary politics that I discuss here. Although I have not had the opportunity to read her as yet unpublished findings, I hope that this interest in the interpretative potential of The Dragon will provoke more general consideration of the link between opera and politics in this period.Google Scholar

49 Percival. Political Ballads, 74.Google Scholar

50 Opposition journals commonly depicted Walpole as ‘a bloated monster, an avaricious steward enriching himself at the expense of his master'; Bertrand Goldgar, Walpole and the Wits: The Relation of Politics to Literature, 1722–1742 (London, 1976), 116.Google Scholar

51 Mack, Maynard, The Garden and the City: Retirement and Politics in the Later Poetry of Pope, 1731–1743 (Toronto, 1969), 145.Google Scholar

52 Common Sense, 11 June 1737; cited in Mack, The Garden and the City, 138.Google Scholar

53 According to Lord Hervey, George II was so taken with the work that it was still diverting him shortly before his wife's death; Lord John Hervey, Some Materials towards Memoirs of the Reign of King George II, ed Rornney Sedgewick, 3 vols (London, 1931), iii, 877–8Google Scholar

54 I am grateful to Michael Suarez for pointing out that Dodsley probably knew another version of ‘The King and the Miller of Mansfield’, published anonymously in A Collection of Miscellany Poems, Never before Publish'd (London, 1737), 180–7 This modernized ballad is much closer to Dodsley's afterpiece in both tone and plot than the Collection's version is; however, as this new poem does not include the second part of the old ‘Miller of Mansfield’ ballad, which Dodsley turned into Sir John Cockle at Court, he cannot have worked from the 1737 Miscellany alone.Google Scholar

55 One measure of this song's popular success was its adoption as the basis for a contemporary ballad satirizing the court: The Miller of Essex, a new song, to the tune of The miller of Mansfield ([London, 1735?])Google Scholar

How happy a State did the Miller possess,Google Scholar

Till he wish'd to be greater, which makes him still less:Google Scholar

On his Interest he vainly depends for Support,Google Scholar

And he longs to be servilely cringing at courtGoogle Scholar

56 Lyttelton's apparent penchant for political balladry remained anonymous; Percival, Political Ballads, lv Glover's ‘most enduring Patriot poem was not the pseudo-classical epic Leonidas (1737) but the sentimental seafaring ballad Admiral Hosier's Ghost (1740)'; Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition, 17. Mallet's extremely popular but decidedly new ballad ‘William and Margaret’ was even published in the third volume of the Collection of Old Ballads, for which reason it was suggested in the nineteenth century that Mallet was the editor of the Collection!Google Scholar

57 Philips mentions the story of Edward and Eleanor in his introduction to the ballad ‘The Fall of Queen Eleanor'; Collection, i, 97–9. The popularity of this story was attested by the publication of the pamphlet ‘history’ (mentioned above) designed to accompany the play: The History of the Life and Reign of the Valiant Prince Edward … and his Princess Eleonora. On which History is founded a Play, written by Mr Thomson, call'd Edward and Eleonora (1739)Google Scholar

58 For a detailed study of the work's history, see Burden, Michael, Garrick, Arne and the Masque of Alfred. A Case Study in National, Theatrical and Musical Politics (Lewiston, 1994)Google Scholar

59 McKillop, Alan, ‘The Early History of Alfred’, Philological Quarterly, 41 (1962), 311–24 (p 313), Burden, Garrick, Arne and the Masque of Alfred, 7–9; Sambrook, James Thomson, 200–3Google Scholar

60 Paul Rapin de Thoyras, The History of England, trans. Nicholas Tindal, 2 vols (2nd edn, London, 1732), i, sig A1^v Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition, 101n, notes that Lord Hervey described Rapin as ‘the Craftsman's own political evangelist'; on the prince's education see ibid., 198–205; Sambrook, James Thomson, 203.Google Scholar

61 Rapin, The History of England, 92.Google Scholar

62 Blackmore, Richard, Alfred. An Epick Poem. In Twelve Books (London, 1723), 2, 251Google Scholar

63 Frederick had himself already commissioned a statue of Alfred; Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition, 116–17.Google Scholar

64 Aaron Hill wrote to Mallet, making numerous suggestions for alteration when the work was first submitted for performance on the public stage; Sambrook, James Thomson, 204 McKillop declares that ‘the masque form itself made impossible the dramatic presentation of Alfred as an active and beneficent monarch'; ‘The Early History of Alfred, 315.Google Scholar

65 Thomson and Mallet would surely have known this popular and ancient ballad: apart from anything else, Mallet must have been aware that his own ‘William and Margaret’ was included in the third volume of the Collection of Old Ballads, 218–20.Google Scholar

66 Rapin, The History of England, sig A1^v.Google Scholar

67 Correspondence between Frances, Countess of Hertford and Henrietta Louisa, Countess of Pomfret, ii, 125–6, cited in Sambrook, James Thomson, 204. Here I must disagree with Michael Burden, who takes the ‘clown’ to be Alfred himself, Burden, Garrick, Arne and the Masque of Alfred, 10Google Scholar

68 Letters of Mrs Elizabeth Montagu, ed Matthew Montagu (London, 1809), cited in McKillop, ‘The Early History of Alfred’, 315.Google Scholar

69 Burney, Charles, A General History of Music from the Earliest Ages to the Present Period, 4 vols (London, 1776–89), ed Frank Mercer, 2 vols. (London, 1935; repr New York, 1957), ii, 868–9, Fiske, English Theatre Music, 310–11Google Scholar

70 Delany, Mrs, one of Handel's most loyal supporters, disliked The Beggar's Opera for its detrimental effect on Italian opera, but even the author of The Touch-stone thought badly of it Mary Granville, Mrs Delany, The Autobiography and Correspondence, ed Lady Llanover, 3 vols. (London, 1861), i, 163, 229, The Touch-stone, 16Google Scholar

71 Fiske, English Theatre Music, 520–1Google Scholar

72 Burney masked his authorship under the (entirely fictional) auspices of the ‘Society of the Temple of Apollo’, Fiske, English Theatre Music, 223. Moses Mendez, author of Robin Hood, was a close friend of James Thomson's, Sambrook, James Thomson, 166.Google Scholar

73 William Shaw, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of … Samuel Johnson [and] Hester Lynch Piozzi, Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. During the Last Twenty Years of his Life, ed. Arthur Sherbo (London, 1974), 88, cited in Weinbrot, Britannia's Issue, 21. In his dictionary, Johnson defines patriotism as ‘the last refuge of the scoundrel’, Gerrard, The Political Opposition, 230.Google Scholar