ABSTRACT
The evolution of dramatick opera from the mid-1670s to the genre’s zenith in the hands of Henry Purcell and his successors during the 1690s was by no means a smooth process. The form came in for its fair share of mockery, criticism, and even excoriation during its earliest days, and its shadowy transformations during the highly-politicized 1680s (the subject of Chapter 5) are a testament both to its vulnerability—in commercial as well as artistic terms—and to its role as an engine of pragmatic adaptation. Nevertheless, throughout the period of its existence, dramatick opera exhibits a number of fairly consistent features that distinguish it from related forms, including through-composed opera (explored in my book Masque and Opera in England) and spectacle-tragedy, whose continuing development after Macbeth will be surveyed briefly at the end of this chapter. While some of these features can be found individually in either opera or spectacle-tragedy (or both), it is their appearance in combination that marks the distinctive genre of dramatick opera. Certain characteristics are self-evident and have already been noted: chief among them is the desire to achieve a sensational effect through overwhelming spectacle and, to that end, the comprehensive integration of music, dance, and machine technology into the drama, and their widespread appearance from start to finish. With these considerations come certain corollaries related to production practice, such as the doubling (or tripling) of ticket prices, the printing of programme libretti for distribution to the audience, and the highly unusual publication of playbooks immediately after or even in advance of the premiere. 1 But there are other generic markers as well, which emanate not so much from the external formal or practical features of the works in question, but from their content. These include an emphasis on rhymed verse, a tragicomic plot arc, a heavy reliance on supernatural occurrences, a fascination with ceremonial events, and, in nearly every instance, a grand concluding celebration that occupies a significant portion of the final act. What most fundamentally characterizes dramatick opera is its direct engagement with the mythological and the fabulous: whether tapping into the rich vein of Ovidian storytelling or summoning up the deep enchantments practiced by sorcerers such as Prospero, Circe, Delphia, Merlin, or Oberon, the form evokes a golden age of gods, magic, and the kind of regular congress between mortals and immortals that has no equivalent in the more removed and occasional spiritual encounters of spectacle-tragedy. In every respect, dramatick opera is a grand, illusionistic confection in which the miraculous is ever-present, whether as actual spectacle occurring in real time or as the barely contained potential for that spectacle to erupt at any moment into both the characters’ and the audience’s ocular and aural frame. It is the resulting tension between anticipation and surprise, with its ability to heighten the spectator’s experience and thereby to provoke wonder, that gives dramatick opera its unique theatrical profile and, moreover, establishes its affinity with earlier, explicitly royalist theatrical forms. Indeed, dramatick opera may be viewed as the closest analogue the Restoration theatre had to the Jacobean and Caroline court masque. Despite certain obvious differences of structure, audience, and intent, it is possible to see in the Dorset Garden multimedia spectacular an innate link to the ideologies of divine-right monarchy, to the rhetoric and style of Baroque royalism, and to the creative energies of courtly innovation. In the 1670s, all of this was made suitable to a public production and to the incumbent social, administrative, and fiscal realities, but the underlying sensibility of dramatick opera nonetheless remained closely aligned with that of the earlier court masque.
