1 See Reinhard Strohm, ‘Handel and his Italian Opera Texts’, Essays on Handel and Italian Opera (Cambridge, 1985), 34–79; Curtis Price, ‘English Traditions in Handel's Rinaldo’, Handel Tercentenary Collection, ed. Stanley Sadie and Anthony Hicks (London, 1987), 120–35; William Weber, ‘Handel's London’, Cambridge Companion to Handel, ed. Donald Burrows (Cambridge, 1997), 45–54; Edward Corp, ‘Music at the Stuart Court at Urbino, 1717–18’, Music and Letters, 81 (2000), 351–63; Ellen Harris, Handel as Orpheus: Voice and Desire in the Chamber Cantatas (Cambridge, MA, 2001); David Hunter, ‘Handel among the Jacobites’, Music and Letters, 82 (2001), 543–56; Strohm, ‘Darstellung, Aktion und Interesse in der höfischen Opernkunst’, Händel Jahrbuch, 49 (2003), 13–26; Harris, ‘With Eyes on the East and Ears in the West: Handel's Orientalist Operas’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 36 (2006), 419–43; Paul Monod, ‘The Politics of Handel's Early London Operas, 1711–1718’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 36 (2006), 445–72; James Winn, ‘Style and Politics in the Philips–Handel Ode for Queen Anne's Birthday, 1713’, Music and Letters, 89 (2008), 547–61; Corp, The Stuarts in Italy, 1719–1766 (Cambridge, 2011), 87–92; and Thomas McGeary, The Politics of Opera in Handel's Britain (Cambridge, 2013).

2 Some studies, including Ruth Smith, Handel's Oratorios and Eighteenth-Century Thought (Cambridge, 1995), and Deborah Rooke, Handel's Israelite Oratorio Libretti: Sacred Drama and Biblical Exegesis (Oxford, 2012), treat librettos almost exclusively. Others focus strongly on text, suggesting, for example, that ‘musicologists have looked in vain for […] musical clue[s]’ to interpretation. Suzanne Aspden, ‘Ariadne's Clew: Politics, Allegory, and Opera in London (1734)’, Musical Quarterly, 85 (2001), 735–70 (p. 746).

3 Aspden, ‘Ariadne's Clew’, 753; cf. Smith, Handel's Oratorios, 187.

4 McGeary, The Politics of Opera, 5–6.

5 See, for example, Ruth Smith's review of McGeary, The Politics of Opera, in Eighteenth-Century Music, 11 (2014), 294–9.

6 Michael Marissen, Tainted Glory in Handel's Messiah (New Haven, CT, 2014), 3. Compare John Roberts, ‘False Messiah’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 63 (2010), 45–97.

7 See, for example, Lawrence Klein, ‘Politeness and the Interpretation of the British Eighteenth Century’, Historical Journal, 45 (2002), 869–98 (p. 873); Jules Prown, Art as Evidence: Writings on Art and Material Culture (New Haven, CT, 2002), 220; Peter Burke, ‘Performing History: The Importance of Occasions’, Rethinking History, 9 (2005), 35–52; and Steven Connor, ‘Spelling Things Out’, New Literary History, 45 (2014), 183–97.

8 Winn, ‘Style and Politics’, 548.

9 See Ruth Loewenthal (now Smith), ‘Handel and Newburgh Hamilton: New References in the Strafford Papers’, Musical Times, 112 (1971), 1063–6; Smith, Handel's Oratorios, 192; Thomas McGeary, ‘Handel and the Feuding Royals’, Handel Institute Newsletter, 17 (2006), 5–8; and Winton Dean and Ruth Smith, ‘Hamilton, Newburgh’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, <www.oxfordmusiconline.com> (accessed 11 February 2015).

10 Dean and Smith, ‘Hamilton, Newburgh’; Smith, Handel's Oratorios, 192.

11 Everard Hamilton, Hamilton Memoirs (1891), 2nd edn (Dundalk, 1920), 24–5 (on Newburgh). My thanks to the reviewer who drew my attention to this source, which is also mentioned by John Andrews, ‘The Historical Context of Handel's Semele’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2007), 140.

12 Some theatre historians had assumed Hamilton to be Scottish-born. Terence Tobin, Plays by Scots 1660–1800 (Iowa City, IA, 1974), 123–6; Adrienne Scullion, ‘The Eighteenth Century’, A History of Scottish Theatre, ed. Bill Findlay (Edinburgh, 1998), 80–136 (pp. 81–5).

13 Hamilton, Hamilton Memoirs, 18, 24–5; Alumni Dublinenses: A Register of the Students, Graduates, Professors and Provosts of Trinity College in the University of Dublin (1593–1860), ed. George Dames Burtchaell and Thomas Ulick Sadleir, rev. edn (Dublin, 1935), 364.

14 Hamilton, Hamilton Memoirs, 24.

15 What this says about familial and personal affiliations is more elusive. James Ivan McGuire judges that non-juring was a political ‘luxury’ that ‘the besieged protestant colony could not afford’ in early eighteenth-century Ireland. McGuire, ‘The Church of Ireland and the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688’, Studies in Irish History Presented to R. Dudley Edwards, ed. Art Cosgrove and Donal McCartney (Dublin, 1979), 137–49 (p. 149).

16 Three of Newburgh's contemporaries, for instance, defaced a statue of William III in 1710, an act harshly punished and linked in the press with pro-Sacheverell and non-juring positions. See John Thomas Gilbert, History of the City of Dublin, 3 vols. (Dublin, 1854–9), iii, 42–5, and Robert Munter, History of the Irish Newspaper 1685–1760 (London, 1967), 120–1.

17 Hamilton, Hamilton Memoirs, 17.

18 Ibid., 4.

19 Ibid., 5–6.

20 Ibid., 8–11; Lawrence Smith, ‘Boyle, John, Fifth Earl of Cork and Fifth Earl of Orrery’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, <www.oxforddnb.com> (accessed 11 February 2015; hereafter DNB). Everard Hamilton does not mention Orrery's politics, and may play down other Jacobitical strands in the family's history.

21 See Hamilton, Hamilton Memoirs, 6, 12–13. Everard Hamilton reports that the family applied to reclaim lands confiscated under William III. Confiscations essentially targeted Jacobites, yet both confiscations and claims are notoriously complex. See John Gerald Simms, The Williamite Confiscation in Ireland (London, 1956). A William Hamilton made a claim by descent on lands in Tyrone held by Lord Abercorne; this Hamilton may have been caught up in rapid redistributions involving the Fourth Jacobite and Fifth Williamite Earls of Abercorne. See A List of the Claims as They are Entred with the Trustees at Chichester-House on College Green, Dublin […] 1700 (Dublin, 1701), 348, entry 3030.

22 David Foxon, English Verse 1701–50: A Catalogue of Separately Printed Poems with Notes on Contemporary Collected Editions, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1975), i, 323; Andrews, ‘The Historical Context of Handel's Semele’, 142–4; Ilias Chrissochoidis, ‘“True Merit Always Envy Rais'd”: The Advice to Mr. Handel (1739) and Israel in Egypt‘s Early Reception’, Musical Times, 150 (2009), 69–86 (p. 84); English Short Title Catalogue, <estc.bl.uk> (accessed 15 February 2015). There are six known copies with the anonymous title page. No entry for the poem exists in the Stationers’ Register.

23 Newburgh Hamilton, The Changes: Or, Faction Vanquish'd. A Poem. Most humbly Inscrib'd to those Noble Patriots, Defenders of their Country, and Supporters of the Crown, the Not Guilty Lords (London, 1711), line 34.

24 The sermon, printed as The Perils of False Brethren (London, 1709), was preached at St Paul's, London, in 1709. See Geoffrey Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell (London, 1973); Francis Falconer Madan, A Critical Bibliography of Dr Henry Sacheverell, ed. William Arthur Speck (Lawrence, KA, 1978); Faction Displayed: Reconsidering the Impeachment of Dr Henry Sacheverell, ed. Mark Knights, special issue, Parliamentary History, 31/1 (Chichester, 2012); The State Trial of Doctor Henry Sacheverell, ed. Brian Cowan, Parliamentary History, 31, Supplement s1: Texts and Studies, 6 (Chichester, 2012).

25 See Tobias Smollett, A Complete History of England, 2nd edn, 11 vols. (London, 1758–60), x (1759), 37.

26 See Mark Knights, ‘Introduction: The View from 1710’, Faction Displayed, ed. Knights, 1–15, and Ashley Marshall, The Practice of Satire in England, 1658–1770 (Baltimore, MD, 2013), 158–68.

27 David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance, rev. edn (Oxford, 2002), 70; David Colclough, Freedom of Speech in Early Stuart England (Cambridge, 2005), 249–50.

28 William Arthur Speck, ‘Harley, Robert, First Earl of Oxford and Mortimer’, DNB. It is not the case that The Changes expresses ‘a definite preference for moderate, coalition government’ (Andrews, ‘The Historical Context of Handel's Semele’, 144).

29 On the connection with Sacheverell, see A Collection of Hymns and Poems, for the Use of the October Club (London, 1711).

30 The Examiner, 42 (London, 10–17 May 1711). ‘Mr. Examiner’ was still advocating two years later that faction be abolished by destroying the Whigs (ibid., 4/36 (London, 2–9 October 1713)).

31 On Morphew's politics, see for example Michael Treadwell, ‘On False and Misleading Imprints in the London Book Trade 1660–1750’, Fakes and Frauds: Varieties of Deception in Print and Manuscript, ed. Robin Myers and Michael Harris (Winchester, 1989), 29–46 (pp. 34–5), and Maximillian Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions (Oxford, 2001), 358. On Sacheverell and Morphew, see Brian Cowan, ‘Introduction: Reading the Trial of Dr Sacheverell’, The State Trial of Doctor Henry Sacheverell, ed. Cowan, 1–34 (pp. 17–19), though Cowan curiously suggests Morphew had no strong party allegiances.

32 Ruth Herman, The Business of a Woman: The Political Writings of Delarivier Manley (Newark, DE, 2003), 152–65.

33 Novak, Daniel Defoe, 125.

34 Robert Griffin, ‘Anonymity and Authorship’, New Literary History, 30 (1999), 877–95 (p. 882). Cf. Lee Erickson, ‘“Unboastful Bard”: Originally Anonymous English Romantic Poetry Book Publication, 1770–1835’, New Literary History, 33 (2002), 247–78. As Foxon notes (English Verse, i, 323), there is no sign of a cancel in the New York Public Library copy. The distribution of type on the anonymous title page seems identical to that on the variant, barring the text with the attribution and necessary respacing.

35 My thanks to Gavin Alexander for this suggestion. For one example of a minuscule print run for a ‘coterie’ audience, see Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725–1742 (Oxford, 1994), 186.

36 See also the verbal echo of Faction Display'd, lines 176–7, in The Changes, lines 197–9. Personifying Faction as a female fiend may have been a relatively new device, and was also used by Swift and Manley around this time. Herman, The Business of a Woman, 51–2.

37 The remainder are significantly shorter. See Defoe's Dyet of Poland (1705; 1,326 lines) and his Scots Poem (1707; 1,125 lines), in Poems on Affairs of State: Augustan Satirical Verse, 1660–1714, gen. ed. George deForest Lord, 7 vols. (New Haven, CT, 1963–75), vii: 1704–1714, ed. Frank Ellis (1975), 72–132, 233–82.

38 Ibid., 208–20.

39 Knights, ‘Introduction’, 5. On moderation and debate as Whiggish values, see further Nicholas Phillipson, ‘Politics and Politeness in the Reigns of Anne and the Early Hanoverians’, The Varieties of British Political Thought, 1500–1800, ed. John Greville Agard Pocock (Cambridge, 1993), 211–45 (pp. 217–27).

40 Faction Display'd, ‘To the Reader’, [2].

41 Hamilton, Hamilton Memoirs, frontispiece; cf. Juvenal, Book III, Satire viii.20.

42 John Dennis, The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (London, 1704), 79. On satire and seventeenth-century sublimity, see Andrew Stauffer, Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism (Cambridge, 2005), 26–7.

43 See Brean Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing in England, 1670–1740: ‘Hackney for Bread’ (Oxford, 1997).

44 Paula Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: Ambition and Innovation (Lexington, KY, 1986), 15.

45 Ibid.

46 Newburgh Hamilton(?), ‘To Mr. Handel, on his Setting to Musick Mr. Dryden's Feast of Alexander’, Handel, Alexander's Feast; or, the Power of Musick: An Ode, Wrote in Honour of St. Cecilia, By Mr. Dryden, Set to Musick by Mr. Handel (London, 1739), 5–6 (line 5). See also Loewenthal (now Smith), ‘Handel and Newburgh Hamilton’; Ellen Harris, George Frideric Handel: A Life with Friends (New York, 2014); and the explorations of friendship and feeling in Harris, Handel as Orpheus.

47 Naomi Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship and Patronage (Cambridge, 2001), 167.

48 See Basil Morgan, ‘Osborne, Peregrine, Second Duke of Leeds’, DNB.

49 See Hannah Greig, The Beau monde: Fashionable Society in Georgian London (Oxford, 2013), 153.

50 Matthew Spring, The Lute in Britain: A History of the Instrument and its Music (Oxford, 2001), 445–7. The manuscript in question is Rochester, NY, Eastman School of Music, Sibley Music Library, MS Vault M2.1.D172.

51 In winter 1724–5 Hamilton also subscribed to A Pocket Companion for Gentlemen and Ladies, which contained a large proportion of pieces by Handel. See George Frideric Handel: Collected Documents, ed. Donald Burrows et al., 2 vols. (Cambridge, 2013–15), i, 686, 769.

52 Spring, The Lute in Britain, 447.

53 Quoted from Morgan, ‘Osborne, Peregrine’.

54 Ibid. Cf. Smith, Handel's Oratorios, 192.

55 Newburgh Hamilton, The Power of Musick (London, 1720), 49–52, 54, 56–8. Cf. John Dryden, Alexander's Feast, lines 47–60, in The Works of John Dryden, ed. Edward Niles Hooker and Hugh Thomas Swedenberg Jr, 20 vols. (Berkeley, CA, 1956–2002), vii (2000), 3–9. Hamilton's swerve into the sceptical vein was probably inspired by burlesques on Orpheus by earlier wits. See John Dennis, ‘The Story of Orpheus Burlesqu'd’, Poems in Burlesque (London, 1692), 14–17; William King, ‘Orpheus and Euridice’, Some Remarks on the Tale of a Tub (London, 1704), 11–63.

56 Most of these poets’ careers need not be rehearsed. ‘D[avenan]t’ may refer to the Royalist playwright and theatre manager William Davenant or, more probably, to his son Charles Davenant, a Tory writer, administrator and politician strongly attached to James II's government, who fell from favour under William and was later suspected of Jacobitism. Charles was at the height of his popularity in the 1700s, following satires like The True Picture of a Modern Whig (1701). He helped shape debate about political obligation, the balance of powers, patriotism and the public good in ways that resonate with The Changes. Texts like Davenant's Essays (1701) also have a strand of anti-war rhetoric that would probably appeal to Tory writers around 1711. See Steve Pincus, ‘Addison's Empire: Whig Conceptions of Empire in the Early 18th Century’, Faction Displayed, ed. Knights, 99–117 (pp. 99–115), and Julian Hoppit, ‘Davenant, Charles’, DNB.

57 See Linda Frey and Marsha Frey, ‘Wentworth, Thomas, First Earl of Strafford’, DNB.

58 Speck, ‘Harley, Robert’.

59 Loewenthal (now Smith), ‘Handel and Newburgh Hamilton’, 1065. The manuscript is labelled ‘Hambleton's Verses’. London, British Library (hereafter BL), Add. MS 31152, fol. 65^v. Like much of Hamilton's output, it alludes to Dryden, here using the phrase ‘enchanted Ground’ from Dryden's The Flower and the Leaf.

60 The poem, a New Year's ode for 1714, makes clear that Anne and the speaker are outside ‘Britain's lovely Isle’ without Strafford. BL Add. MS 31152, fols. 64–5; cf. the Straffords’ letters, BL Add. MS 22226.

61 Greig, The Beau monde, 30–44, 151–6.

62 On Harrison, see for instance Winn, ‘Style and Politics’, 549.

63 See Greig, The Beau monde, esp. pp. 151–3.

64 Wentworth papers, BL Add. MS 31142, Hamilton to Strafford, 8 June 1732, fols. 43–4; Hamilton to Strafford, 5 January 1733, fols. 116–17. The Straffords’ collection of poetry preserves several satires concerning Hervey (BL Add. MS 31152, fols. 25–6, 32–3, 80).

65 Jonathan Swift, Journal to Stella: Letters to Esther Johnson and Rebecca Dingley, 1710–1713, ed. Abigail Williams, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Claude Rawson et al. (Cambridge, 2013), 389.

66 See An Impartial Account of […] the Case of Dr. Henry Sacheverell (London, 1710), 10; and A Vindication of the Reverend Dr. Henry Sacheverell (London, 1711), 8–9.

67 See the letters between December 1709 and February 1712 in The Wentworth Papers, 1705–1739, ed. James Cartwright (London, 1883), 99–101, 106, 109–18, 155, 264. The verse preserved in the Wentworth papers from this period is exclusively pro-Sacheverell. BL Add. MS 31152, fols. 39, 100, 109; one scrap of manuscript verse (fol. 68) commemorates Harley's stabbing in terms similar to The Changes.

68 The Wentworth Papers, ed. Cartwright, 100, 113; Greig, The Beau monde, 37.

69 BL Add. MS 31152, fol. 65; Frey and Frey, ‘Wentworth, Thomas’.

70 Frey and Frey, ‘Wentworth, Thomas’; cf. Smith, Handel's Oratorios, 192.

71 On Strafford's political career, see Linda Colley, In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party 1714–60 (Cambridge, 1982), 27, 64, 106, 135, 182, 198–9, 207, 217. On the family's London life, see Greig, The Beau monde.

72 Newburgh Hamilton, The Doating Lovers: or, The Libertine Tam'd (London, 1715), ‘Dedication’ (unpaginated).

73 David Erskine Baker, Biographia dramatica, rev. edn, 2 vols. (London, 1782), i, 206. His supposition is related as fact in Charles Dibdin, A Complete History of the English Stage, 5 vols. (London, 1797–1800), v, 79, and Winton Dean, Handel's Dramatic Oratorios and Masques (Oxford, 1990), 270.

74 On the duke's family, see, for instance, Rosalind Marshall, ‘Hamilton, James, Fourth Duke of Hamilton and First Duke of Brandon’, DNB, and Lord Berkeley to Thomas Wentworth, letter of 5 March 1712, in The Wentworth Papers, ed. Cartwright, 276.

75 Baker, Biographia dramatica, i, 206.

76 Newburgh used his coat of arms as a seal. See, for instance, BL Add. MS 31142, fol. 186^v. Cf. Hamilton, Hamilton Memoirs, 2, 18, 24–5. The dedication of The Doating Lovers is headed by the duchess's arms.

77 On varieties of reform in Restoration comedy, see Robert Hume, The Rakish Stage: Studies in English Drama, 1660–1800 (Carbondale, IL, 1983), 167–72, and Aparna Gollapudi, Moral Reform in Comedy and Culture, 1696–1747 (Farnham, 2011).

78 Hamilton, The Doating Lovers, 71 (emphasis added).

79 Ibid., 1–2. On the following, see John O'Brien, ‘Drama: Genre, Gender, Theater’, A Concise Companion to the Restoration and Eighteenth Century, ed. Cynthia Wall (Oxford, 2005), 183–201 (pp. 191–3).

80 The Spectator, 65 (15 May 1711). Published around the same time as this issue, The Changes (lines 37–9) explicitly attacked Steele's The Tatler.

81 Leonard Welsted, prologue to The Conscious Lovers, quoted in O'Brien, ‘Drama’, 192.

82 Ibid. On the continuing appetite for Restoration comedy, see Hume, The Rakish Stage, 64–81, 312–13.

83 Newburgh Hamilton, The Petticoat-Plotter, a Farce of Two Acts, as it was Acted at the Theatre Royal in Drury-Lane, and the New Theatre in Lincoln's-Inn-Fields (London, 1720), 6–8.

84 Hamilton, The Petticoat-Plotter, 7.

85 Ibid., 23, 56.

86 See Pincus, ‘Addison's Empire’. Trade's importance in perceptions of the peace is evident in satires like The Queen's Speech (1711), in Poems on Affairs of State, ed. Ellis, vii, 533–5.

87 O'Brien, ‘Drama’, 196–8.

88 Hamilton, The Petticoat-Plotter, 58.

89 Ibid., 11, 39–40.

90 On the neutralizing of politics, see for example Anthony Hicks, ‘Handel and the Idea of an Oratorio’, Cambridge Companion to Handel, ed. Burrows, 145–63 (pp. 155–6) (on Alexander's Feast), and Stella Revard, ‘Restoring the Political Context of Samson Agonistes: Milton, Handel, and Saint-Saëns’, Milton, Rights and Liberties, ed. Christophe Tournu and Neil Forsyth (Bern, 2007), 379–400.

91 Hamilton, Hamilton Memoirs, 26–7. My thanks to the anonymous reviewers for this journal for comments on this point. Smith, Handel's Oratorios, 78–80, discusses complexities facing interpreters of eighteenth-century politics and Handel's oratorios. Recent studies of change and continuity in political ideology and sensibility include ‘Cultures of Whiggism’: New Essays on English Literature and Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. David Womersley (Newark, DE, 2005); Toni Bowers, Force or Fraud: British Seduction Stories and the Problem of Resistance, 1660–1760 (Oxford, 2011); Matthew McCormack, ‘Rethinking “Loyalty” in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies, 35 (2012), 407–21; and Living with Jacobitism, 1690–1788: The Three Kingdoms and Beyond, ed. Allan Macinnes, Kieran German and Lesley Graham (London, 2014).

92 Bessie Proffitt, ‘Political Satire in Dryden's Alexander's Feast’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 11 (1970), 1307–16; C. P. Macgregor, ‘“Lying Odes”: Dryden's Alexander's Feast’, Sustaining Literature: Essays on Literature, History, and Culture, 1500–1800, ed. Greg Clingham (Cranbury, NJ, 2007), 67–84.

93 Hamilton, ‘Preface’, Handel, Alexander's Feast; or, the Power of Musick, 7–9 (pp. 7–8).

94 Ibid., 9.

95 Hamilton(?), ‘To Mr. Handel’, lines 1–2, 4. Compare Ruth Smith's observation that Handel in the poem counters the subversive effects of Timotheus’ music. Smith, ‘Timotheus, Alexander, Semele and Handel’, Handel Newsletter, 14 (2003), 1–4.

96 Hamilton(?), ‘To Mr. Handel’, lines 6–8, 10, 16.

97 Generic differences are evident in another possible Hamilton publication, the satirical Advice to Mr. Handel (1739). See Chrissochoidis, ‘“True Merit Always Envy Rais'd”’, 78–9, 84. For a review of the extensive literature on politeness, see Klein, ‘Politeness’; for a dissenting view of the connection between politeness and Whiggism, see Markku Peltonen, ‘Politeness and Whiggism, 1688–1732’, Historical Journal, 48 (2005), 391–414.

98 Hamilton, ‘Preface’, Handel, Alexander's Feast; or, the Power of Musick, 8.

99 Dryden's non-rhyming line is absent from the early wordbooks, although Handel includes a striking setting of the repeated word. Handel, Alexander's Feast; or The Power of Musick, 16. George Frideric Handel, Das Alexander-Fest, oder, Die Macht der Musik, ed. Konrad Ameln, Hallische Händel-Ausgabe, I/1 (Kassel, 1957), no. 12, bars 24–8. This is probably one of the lines Hamilton altered to ‘reduce’ the poem ‘to the present [regularity-focused] Taste in Sounds’ (Hamilton, ‘Preface’, Handel, Alexander's Feast; or, The Power of Musick, 8).

100 Handel, Alexander's Feast; or, The Power of Musick, 16.

101 Donald Burrows, ‘The Composition and First Performance of Handel's “Alexander's Feast”’, Music and Letters, 64 (1983), 206–11 (pp. 208–10).

102 Ibid., 208. The abbreviation, Burrows suggests, helped Handel in ‘tightening up […] the flow of the scenes’ (p. 211); on this reading, we might conclude that Hamilton imagined Darius's defeat carrying greater dramatic or aesthetic weight than did Handel.

103 Handel, Alexander's Feast; or, The Power of Musick, 17.

104 Newburgh Hamilton, ‘Preface’, George Frideric Handel, Samson: An Oratorio: As it is Perform'd at the Theatre-Royal in Covent-Garden: Set to Musick by George Frederick Handel (London, 1743), [i]–[iii] (p. [ii]). The preface appears only in what Burrows identifies as the first version of the first edition of the 1743 wordbooks. Donald Burrows, ‘The Word-Books for Handel's Performances of Samson’, Musical Times, 146 (2005), 7–15 (p. 10).

105 Rooke, Handel's Israelite Oratorio Libretti, 120.

106 Smith, Handel's Oratorios, 295.

107 Ibid., 293. See further Dustin Griffin, Regaining Paradise: Milton and the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1986), 7, 14–16.

108 Music and Theatre in Handel's World: The Family Papers of James Harris, 1732–1780, ed. Donald Burrows and Rosemary Dunhill (Oxford, 2002), 80.

109 Ibid., 85–9.

110 Smith, Handel's Oratorios, 292. A recent virtuoso study of Kitty Clive (the first Dalila) extends the idea of a ‘Patriot subtext’ in the oratorio. Berta Joncus, ‘Handel at Drury Lane: Ballad Operas and the Production of Kitty Clive’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 131 (2006), 179–226 (p. 221).

111 Smith, Handel's Oratorios, 295.

112 Hamilton, The Changes, title page.

113 Colley, In Defiance of Oligarchy, 217. Broadsides and ballads in the family collection from this decade suggest a continuing interest in propaganda against Walpole and the king, compatible with Whig Patriot cooperation (e.g. BL Add. MS 31152, fols. 12, 23), but also against Hanoverian rule more fundamentally (e.g. fols. 13, 16).

114 The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1715–1754, ed. Romney Sedgwick, 2 vols. (London, 1970), ii, 296.

115 See Horace Walpole to Horace Mann (4 February 1741/2), Letters of Horace Walpole, ed. Peter Cunningham, 9 vols. (London, 1857–9), i (1858), 123–4, and Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England, with Some Account of the Principal Artists, and Incidental Notes on the Other Arts, rev. edn, ed. Ralph N. Wornum, 3 vols. (London, 1849), iii, 813.

116 Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole, 68–95, esp. pp. 93–5.

117 John Milton, Samson Agonistes, lines 1720, 1723–4, 1746 (cited here and below in the text from Laura Ferrell and Thomas Luxon's edition at The Milton Reading Room, <www.dartmouth.edu/~milton>, accessed 13 February 2015).

118 John Dryden, Epitaph on the Monument of the Marquis of Winchester, Miscellaneous Poems and Translations (London, 1712), 283, line 9.

119 Ibid., lines 2, 6, 14. Paulet is named as a not-guilty lord in Britannia: A Poem. With all Humility Inscrib'd to the Fifty Two (Not Guilty) Lords (London, 1710), 9.

120 William Parker, Milton: A Biography, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1996), 96.

121 The mixing of verse forms in Samson Agonistes may help explain Handel's willingness to set it, while declining numerous encouragements to set Paradise Lost. To construct Samson's airs, duets and choruses, Hamilton not only adapted rhyming sections of Milton's drama and interpolated text from his minor poems, but also ingeniously turned fragments and even whole lines of blank verse into rhyming movements. See George Frideric Handel, Samson, ed. Hans Dieter Clausen, Hallische Händel-Ausgabe, I/18/1 (Kassel, 2011), nos. 8, 10, 25, 26, 33, 34, 44, 45. On Handel's approach to Milton, see Ruth Smith, ‘Milton Modulated for Handel's Music’, Milton in the Long Restoration, ed. Blair Hoxby and Ann Baynes Coiro (Oxford, 2016), 159–78.

122 John Milton, Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester, lines 57–8, from The Milton Reading Room.

123 There was a long-standing typological connection between Samson and Christ – as Rooke notes, without suggesting that Hamilton utilized the connection. Handel's Israelite Oratorio Libretti, 100, 120. On Milton's phoenix, see for instance Sanford Budick, ‘Milton's Joban Phoenix in Samson Agonistes’, Early Modern Literary Studies, 11/2 (2005), 1–15.

124 Quotations from Handel, Samson, ed. Clausen, Act 3, scene iii. On the marchioness, see Louis Schwartz, Milton and Maternal Mortality (Cambridge, 2009), 91–140.

125 John Milton, ‘Of that sort of Dramatic Poem which is call'd Tragedy’, Samson Agonistes, ed. Ferrell and Luxon. This is one of only two named tragedies, and the only Christian one.

126 See the illuminating study by Jonathan Rhodes Lee, ‘From Amelia to Calista and Beyond: Sentimental Heroines, “Fallen” Women and Handel's Oratorio Revisions for Susanna Cibber’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 27 (2015), 1–34 (pp. 18–25, 33); further, Ruth Smith, ‘Intellectual Contexts of Handel's Oratorios’, Music in Eighteenth-Century England: Essays in Memory of Charles Cudworth, ed. Richard Luckett and Christopher Hogwood (Cambridge, 1983), 115–34, esp. p. 118.

127 Handel, Samson, ed. Clausen, xxvi.

128 Some biblical commentaries indeed derived Samson's name from ‘Shemesh, the sun’: ‘because of his great strength’, ‘the sun is compared to a strong man; (Ps. xix. 5) why should not a strong man then be compared to the sun when he goes forth in his strength? […] [Samson is a] type of christ, the Sun of righteousness.’ Matthew Henry, Exposition of the Old and New Testament, 5th edn, 5 vols. (London, 1761–3), i (1761), commentary on Judges xiii. 24.

129 Milton draws on the symbolism of the ‘Proleptic Passion, the sacrifice made visible already in [Christ's] Infancy’, a common medieval figure akin to typology in its use of one ‘historical’ event (nativity) to foreshadow another (crucifixion). See for instance Alfred Acres, ‘The Columba Altarpiece and the Time of the World’, Art Bulletin, 80 (1998), 422–52 (pp. 424–5).

130 Smith, Handel's Oratorios, 293. On connotation, see William Weber's review of McGeary, The Politics of Opera, in Music and Letters, 95 (2014), 99–102 (p. 100).

131 Bowers, Force or Fraud, 4.

132 See Quentin Skinner, ‘A Third Concept of Liberty’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 117 (2002), 237–68, esp. pp. 247–51.

133 Bowers, Force or Fraud, 5.

134 Hamilton discussed such constraints in the first wordbook (‘Preface’, Handel, Samson: An Oratorio).

135 See Henry, Exposition of the Old and New Testament, i, commentary on Judges xv. 9–17.

136 See Smith, ‘Intellectual Contexts of Handel's Oratorios’, 116–18; cf. Rooke, Handel's Israelite Oratorio Libretti, 111–20.

137 Aspden, ‘Ariadne's Clew’, 758–9.

138 Ruth Smith, ‘Handel's English Librettists’, Cambridge Companion to Handel, ed. Burrows, 92–108.

139 Quoted in Poems on Affairs of State, ed. Ellis, vii, 346.

140 The term is Jennens's; see Andrews, ‘The Historical Context of Handel's Semele’, 182–6.

141 Gillen D'Arcy Wood, Romanticism and Music Culture in Britain, 1770–1840 (Cambridge, 2010), 50.

142 Ibid., 29.

143 See for instance Harris, Handel as Orpheus, esp. p. 21; and Aspden, ‘Ariadne's Clew’.

144 Compare the implications of, for example, Hunter, ‘Handel among the Jacobites’, 547–8.

145 Robert Hume, Reconstructing Contexts: The Aims and Principles of Archaeo-Historicism (Oxford, 1999); Andrews, ‘The Historical Context of Handel's Semele’, 2; McGeary, The Politics of Opera, 5, 12; and Smith, review of McGeary, 294–6.

146 Hume, Reconstructing Contexts, 193 (emphasis original).

147 Ibid., 30–3.

148 McGeary, The Politics of Opera, 5, citing Hume, ‘The Politics of Opera’, 43.

149 William Warner, ‘Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 40 (2000), 561–93 (p. 562); Eric Rothstein, review of Hume, Reconstructing Contexts, in Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 100 (2001), 110–14.

150 As Georgina Born observes, there are ‘distinct empiricisms’ and ‘resilient tensions between them’. Born, ‘Towards a Relational Musicology’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 135 (2010), 205–43 (p. 215). On facts as made, see Bruno Latour, The Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (Durham, NC, 2010).