This introduction dicusses the imposition of the 1737 Stage Licensing Act and offers a historical account of its effects. It shows how the legislation was poorly conceived and understood leading to a widespread haziness about its precise powers and a large amount of authority being invested in teh office of the Examiner of Plays. It suggests three possible avenues for future work: the chronology of emendation, contextualizing censorship across the repertory, and understanding theatre archives as a resource for social history.

The inevitable pairing of the names of Britten and Purcell, a pairing promoted by Britten himself, was one in which he was linked to Britain’s ‘only’ composer. In response, Britten willingly took on the mantle of hope for English composition. At the same time, there is no doubt that the Britten felt an affinity with the earlier composer, and drew considerable strength and inspiration from his works. However, although Britten’s response is often presented as a personal one, this article suggests that his engagement with Purcell’s music was part of an earlier and broader picture of the use and reuse of earlier English music in the first decades of the twentieth century. His engagement with Purcell’s music, which included realisations of his songs and the use of forms and techniques associated with the composer, was at its most intense in 1945, and was focused on the period round 21 and 22 November, the dates of the Wigmore Hall concerts which saw the premieres of Britten’s Quartet No. 2 and The Holy Sonnets of John Donne. The reception of Britten’s ‘Purcell’ works was sometimes mixed, but this article concludes that for Britten, it was a matter of supreme enjoyment.

Britten’s diaries and letters between the wars reveal a profound irritation with what he saw as the parochialism and amateurishness of British music making, especially in comparison with the standards he admired in Europe. So it is perhaps not surprising that the first singer with whom he worked closely was not British, but the Swiss-born Sophie Wyss. It is clear that by 1942, on his return from America, and with Peter Pears installed as his permanent partner, Britten’s expectations had developed radically. Unique to this volume and building on Roger Vignoles’s career as an internationally recognised collaborative pianist, this chapter continues with discussions of Joan Cross (after her departure from Sadler’s Wells Opera), as well as Jennifer Vyvyan, Arda Mandikian, Heather Harper, Alfred Deller, David Hemmings, Galina Vishnevskaya, Janet Baker, Kathleen Ferrier, Nancy Evans, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Owen Brannigan, Robert Tear, Theodore Uppman, and John Shirley-Quirk.