ABSTRACT
An underlying premise of both my previous book, Masque and Opera in England, and the present study is that English musical-theatrical entertainments of the latter part of the seventeenth century came in a considerable variety of forms, and that those forms exercised a good deal of mutual influence upon one another. At the same time, I have sought to show that there were certain important developmental strands whose distinct qualities have hitherto not been fully appreciated. Both of these dynamics can be seen at work in the advent of that peculiarly English genre that we will be calling (with only a modicum of anachronism) “dramatick opera”. Just as the history of spectacle-tragedy in the 1660s and early 1670s is one of gradual evolution, experimentation, and pushback from reactive critiques, so the emergence of this next stage in the process needs to be understood as a step-by-step progression, rather than as the sudden appearance of something entirely new. With that in mind, the present chapter offers an account of the historical events surrounding dramatick opera’s creation and the production of the form’s two earliest exemplars, The Tempest and Psyche. In Chapter 4, we will consider the essential qualities and features of the genre, the critical responses to the form during its early years, the disposition of the term “opera” in contemporary understanding, and the subsequent development of both dramatick opera and spectacle-tragedy through the end of the 1670s.
