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The Cultural Politics of Dido and Aeneas

The document discusses the cultural politics surrounding the chamber opera Dido and Aeneas from the late 1600s. It explores how the opera engaged with debates over who owned England's cultural heritage during a time of political instability. The opera grappled with Virgil's Aeneid, a text used by Stuart kings to promote their absolutist rule, taking an unstable position on Virgil's legacy and the relationship between art and political authority. Rather than presenting a clear critique of Stuart rule, the opera reflected the complex attitudes of the time towards cultural traditions and the role of artists.

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The Cultural Politics of Dido and Aeneas

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Cambridge Opera Journal, 21, 1, 1–26 Cambridge University Press, 2009

doi:10.1017/S0954586709990012 First published online 11 November 2009

The cultural politics of Dido and Aeneas

ANTHONY WELCH

Abstract: Controversial efforts to find political allegory in Dido and Aeneas (c.1689), the great
chamber opera by Nahum Tate and Henry Purcell, have obscured the opera’s broader concern
with the politics of culture. As rival political factions claimed ownership of the nation’s cultural
heritage, Tate and other dramatists in Restoration England asked searching questions about the
relationship between the artist and political authority. Grappling with Virgil’s Aeneid, a central
text of Stuart absolutism, Dido and Aeneas explores the workings and the costs of partisan
myth-making. The opera joins many other Restoration voices in taking up an ancient ‘chaste
Dido’ tradition, which accused Virgil of mangling Dido’s historical reputation in the service of
imperial propaganda. Yet Dido does not set forth a topical allegory or a coherent critique of
Stuart misrule, but takes an unstable, irresolute attitude towards the cultural legacy of Virgil, the
aesthetics of female suffering, and the politics of royal praise.

There has been considerable debate over the politics of the great English chamber
opera, Dido and Aeneas.1 Speculation has swirled over the opera’s engagement with
the crises and controversies of the troubled final years of the Stuart monarchy. Was
Dido and Aeneas a coded commentary on James II’s growing authoritarianism? Was
it a warning to his successor, William III, not to mistreat his English queen and her
people? These debates have tended to turn on questions of topical allegory – reading
the opera as a symbolic representation of royal politics in the 1680s – and have
become entangled in problems of dating and chronology. Yet the first operas in
England were often concerned with a different kind of political argument: a contest
over what we might call the politics of culture.
In one sense, this term refers to opera’s participation in the everyday competitive
jostling of the Restoration theatre, as poets, composers, performers and theatre
managers scrambled to find a foothold for their new dramatic forms, and to
articulate the nature and purpose of those forms as works of art.2 But ‘politics of
culture’ refers more broadly to the ways in which state politics became entangled in
the period’s artistic production, its canons of taste, and its arguments about aesthetic
value. While art and propaganda had long coexisted in the service of the monarch
– above all, perhaps, in the Jacobean and Caroline court masque – the Civil War era
had shown to English elites that the very idea of a high culture was politically

1
I am grateful to David Quint, Ellen Rosand, Suzanne Aspden and my anonymous readers at
Cambridge Opera Journal for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this essay.
2
When a visiting French company performed Pierre Perrin’s Ariane in 1674, for example, first at
court and later at Drury Lane, the Duke’s Company responded by mounting a string of
musical spectaculars at the recently opened Dorset Garden Theatre, such as Thomas
Shadwell’s operatic arrangement of the John Dryden / William Davenant Tempest (1674) and
his own musical tragedy Psyche (1675), based on the court opera by Jean-Baptiste Lully; the
rival King’s Company, in turn, fought back with parody shows, The Mock-Tempest (1674) and
Psyche Debauch’d (1675).

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2 Anthony Welch

contestable.3 Campaigns were waged not just for possession of the battlefield but
for ideological ownership of literature and the arts. From devotional music to stage
drama to the literary epic canon, the artistic and intellectual life of the nation was
colonised by partisan interests. Royalists and rebels, and, later, Tories and Whigs laid
claim to competing aesthetic visions and competing versions of England’s cultural
heritage. When the theatres were re-established after 1660, artists and audiences
found themselves facing fundamental questions. What is art? What is its role in the
state? Who owns high culture? Whose interests does it serve?
A case in point involves the troubled reception of Virgil’s Aeneid. Virgil had long
been the darling of the continental neoclassical critics whose influence swept
through English literary culture after 1660. The Stuart kings adopted the rhetoric
and iconography of imperial Rome, cultivating the fantasy of a renewed pax
Augustana in the wake of civil war. This Augustan myth revived and reworked older
models of translatio imperii, the westward migration of imperial power exemplified by
Aeneas’s journey out of the smouldering ruins of Troy. The Aeneid’s vision of
providential empire came to symbolise late Stuart Britain’s sense of itself as a new
historical Golden Age, presiding over a refinement of manners and taste, a renewed
ideal of shared civic purpose, and a regime of enlightened cultural patronage
sponsored by the nation’s ruling elites. Waves of translations and adaptations of
Virgil’s Aeneid celebrated the monarchy as the seat of cultured civility and embraced
the role of the artist as a panegyrist to royal power.4 But the Virgilian cultural politics
of the 1660s later darkened. ‘Virgil is attack’d by many Enemies: He has a whole
Confederacy against him’, wrote John Dryden in 1697.5 If some viewed the Aeneid’s
imperial vision as a model for political myth-making, there were also long European
counter-traditions that attacked both Virgil’s partisan history and the manners of his
epic hero. Those writers who chafed against the Stuarts’ Augustan myth reactivated

3
On the efforts of various partisan groupings to claim ownership of literary culture (or to
define the parameters of high culture and the emerging literary canon in terms that favoured
their own ideology), see for example Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England,
1640–1660 (New Haven, 1994), 1–19 and passim; Stephen N. Zwicker, Lines of Authority: Politics
and English Literary Culture, 1649–1689 (Ithaca, 1993), 9–36; and especially Derek Hirst, ‘The
Politics of Literature in the English Republic’, The Seventeenth Century, 5 (1990), 133–55. On the
struggle of seventeenth-century literature to emancipate itself from political and religious
discourses, see Michael McKeon, ‘Politics of Discourses and the Rise of the Aesthetic in
Seventeenth-Century England’, in Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-
Century England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (Berkeley, 1987), 35–51.
4
Virgil was widely thought to have written his poem to strengthen his new emperor’s political
authority, ‘to reconcile all the World, and more particularly the Romans, to the New
Establishment, and the Person of Augustus Caesar’ (John Dennis, Remarks on a Book Entituled
Prince Arthur [London, 1696], 6); celebrating Augustus as an ideal prince, the Aeneid was said to
have taken up the emperor’s effort to polish his image after his controversial rise to power.
See T. W. Harrison, ‘English Virgil: The Aeneid in the XVIII Century’, Philologica Pragensia, 10
(1967), 1–11, 80–91, for this period’s view that Virgil set out to mask ‘the proscriptions and
“justified” illegalities of Octavianus, the Triumvir’ with a vision of ‘the beneficent and
constitutional paternalism of Augustus, the Princeps’ (3).
5
John Dryden, ‘Dedication of the Aeneis’, in The Works of John Dryden, gen. ed. H. T.
Swedenberg, Jr., 20 vols. (Berkeley, 1956–89), II, 277. Further quotations from Dryden’s
poetry and prose refer to this edition, hereafter cited as Works.

ancient grievances against Virgil’s artistry. While his defenders lavished praise on
Aeneas’s civic heroism, his filial piety, his martial prowess and his concern for his
people, his detractors returned again and again to a question posed by Charles
Perrault: ‘What had that Piety of Father Aeneas to do in the Cave with Dido Queen
of Carthage?’6
When Nahum Tate and Henry Purcell collaborated on Dido and Aeneas, the fourth
book of the Aeneid was already the most translated, imitated and commented-upon
episode in Virgil’s poem. Many Restoration critics found Aeneas’s abandonment of
Dido unsettling. Why, they asked, should Virgil have degraded his hero, so tender
of feeling elsewhere in the poem, by portraying him as a casual seducer? But larger
issues were at stake. The last decades of the century marked the widespread return
of an ancient ‘chaste Dido’ tradition: an effort to recover the putative historical
Dido, the founder of Carthage who never met the legendary Aeneas and who, when
pursued by foreign suitors, chose suicide for the sake of her country. For many
readers, the loss of the historical Dido revealed the costs of imperial myth-making.
To measure the gap between this figure and the fabled queen of the Aeneid was to
expose Virgil’s tampering with the historical record in the name of a prejudicial
political fiction. The English fascination with Dido, in turn, pointed to a breakdown
in the cultural authority of the Stuart court, and to a struggle for control over the
meaning of the nation’s literary heritage. At stake were some of the period’s most
urgent questions about the relationship between art and politics, about the power of
patronage and the implications of rewriting history as myth. Dido and Aeneas, I
suggest, was concerned with just these questions about art and ideology, about the
triangular relationship among the artist, political authority and the cultural past. I
shall argue that the opera takes up the ‘chaste Dido’ tradition and reflects some of
the period’s scepticism over partisan epic fictions.
Yet I hesitate to conclude that Dido and Aeneas can be aligned politically with the
Whigs, or that it makes a coherent statement about Stuart absolutism. Joining other
students of Restoration opera who have raised concerns about reading for topical
allegory, I will try instead to show how Dido struggles uncertainly, and sometimes
inconsistently, with its period’s central myths. This will require placing the opera
alongside other cultural forms – epic poetry and satire, affective tragedy, classical
translations and travesties, literary criticism and historiography – that shared, and in
some cases helped to shape, its ambivalent treatment of Virgil, female suffering, and
the politics of royal praise. I should note at the outset that I will concern myself only
glancingly with Purcell’s score. Although I acknowledge the limitations of this
approach, Tate’s dramatic text – and the recent upsurge of scholarly interest in its
politics – offers an unusually rich test case for the study of early opera’s political
sources and motives. I would argue that we need to understand it on its own terms
before we can fully address the further complexities of its musical setting and its
conditions of performance. With these premises in mind, I will read Dido as broadly

6
Charles Perrault, Parallèle des anciens et des modernes, 4 vols. (Paris, 1688–97), I, 92–3, paraphrased
in the anonymous Verdicts of the Learned Concerning Virgil and Homer’s Heroic Poems (London,
1697), 11.

hostile towards Virgil’s imperial fictions, but I will end by trying to isolate some
currents in Tate’s text that suggest a more unstable, irresolute attitude towards the
tragic heroine at its centre.

I
Recent debate over the politics of Dido and Aeneas has raised important methodo-
logical questions about allegory, intention and audience, questions that carry wider
implications for the study of opera as a literary and cultural form. In his 1998 essay,
‘The Politics of Opera in Late Seventeenth-Century London’, Robert D. Hume
took issue with the search for covert topical allegory that had exercised Dido
scholars for some thirty years.7 In a 1967 dissertation, John Buttrey influentially read
the opera as a cautionary tale, a political allegory written in 1689 to remind the new
foreign monarch, William III (i.e., Aeneas), of his responsibilities to Queen Mary
(Dido) and her nation.8 Sceptics replied that such a message would have been not
only rather tactless but also anachronistic; William’s prolonged absences from his
country did not become a problem until years after the opera was first staged at
Josias Priest’s boarding school for young women in Chelsea.9 Furthermore, new
evidence about the performance history of that other great Restoration chamber
opera, John Blow’s Venus and Adonis, fuelled speculation that Dido and Aeneas in fact
premièred at court before 1689.10 More topical allegories were proposed to fit
earlier performance dates. Could Aeneas, for instance, represent James II, aban-
doning his queen (England) to found a Roman (Catholic) empire?11 Neither Tate’s

7
Robert D. Hume, ‘The Politics of Opera in Late Seventeenth-Century London’, this journal, 10
(1998), 15–43. Another sceptical approach to the search for topical allegory in Dido, retracting
his earlier speculations on the matter, is found in Curtis Price, ‘Dido and Aeneas: Questions of
Style and Evidence’, Early Music, 22 (1994), 115–25.
8
John Buttrey, ‘The Evolution of English Opera between 1656 and 1695: An Investigation’,
Ph.D. diss. (University of Cambridge, 1967). Buttrey summarises his argument in ‘Dating
Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 96 (1967–8), 52–60.
9
The 1689 date was first proposed by W. Barclay Squire in ‘Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas’, Musical
Times, 59 (1918), 252–4, based in part on a spoken epilogue to the opera written by Thomas
Durfey and printed in November of 1689. For a full summary, with analysis of the political
context in 1689, see Buttrey, ‘Dating Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas’, and Ellen T. Harris, Henry
Purcell’s ‘Dido and Aeneas’ (Oxford, 1987), 4–6, 18–20.
10
John Blow’s Venus and Adonis was staged at court in the early 1680s. A libretto of Blow’s
opera, recovered in 1989, reveals that the text was printed not for that initial court
performance, but for a later revival staged at Josias Priest’s school in 1684. See Richard
Luckett, ‘A New Source for Venus and Adonis’, Musical Times, 130 (1989), 76–9. The discovery
that Blow’s opera moved from the court stage to Priest’s school has led to widespread
speculation that Dido and Aeneas did the same. The theory is explored in Bruce Wood and
Andrew Pinnock, ‘ “Unscarr’d By Turning Times”? The Dating of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas’,
Early Music, 20 (1992), 373–90, and in a series of responses published in the same journal. In
positing a pre-1689 court performance, Wood and Pinnock also draw on stylistic analysis of
Purcell’s score and other circumstantial evidence.
11
A theory put forward in two essays by Andrew R. Walkling, ‘Political Allegory in Purcell’s
Dido and Aeneas’, Music and Letters, 76 (1995), 540–71, and ‘Politics and the Restoration
Masque: The Case of Dido and Aeneas’, in Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration: Literature,
Drama, History, ed. Gerald MacLean (Cambridge, 1995), 52–69.

text nor any surviving early response to it, as Hume and others have noted, yields
direct evidence for these interpretations.12
Pondering such readings, Hume is less troubled by the problem of dating the
opera than by questions of courtly protocol. Most fundamental is a question of
motive: why would a dramatist and a composer risk their livelihood by staging an
opera built on a coded allegory that insults the ruling monarch?13 But the fact that
these readings are tied so tightly to the opera’s supposed date of first performance
points to a deeper methodological concern. Scholars have tended to assume that a
‘political’ Dido and Aeneas is ipso facto a topical allegory, a veiled representation of
historical persons and events that offers legible, coherent and paraphrasable
commentary on some aspect of the author’s political environment. There was, of
course, no shortage of politics in the late Stuart theatre. But with a few notable
exceptions, such as the work of John Otway, political content in the drama of the
1680s was generally transparent and unsubtle, and arguably more often placed in the
service of royal praise than dissent. A prominent case is the grand masque by John
Dryden and Louis Grabu, Albion and Albanius (1685), which makes no secret of its
intended function as propaganda. Marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stuart
Restoration, it recounts the failed efforts of Zeal and Democracy to woo Augusta
(London) away from Albion (Charles II) and his heir Albanius (James, Duke of
York) – a thinly disguised re-enactment of the king’s fortunes since 1660, with an
emphasis on his return from exile, the Popish Plot of 1678–81, and the Rye House
Plot of 1683.
For an English opera of any variety to comment in this way on recent political
events was very unusual, however. Albion is an anomaly, indebted to the obsequious
allegorical prologues of French tragédie lyrique and crying out for topical application.
Looking at the Restoration operatic repertory as a whole, Hume finds only a small
handful of works – two of them French imports – that trade in allegories of royal
praise, and none, with the possible exception of the Dryden–Purcell King Arthur
(1691), that embeds within its plot a covert critique of the reigning monarch.
Distinguishing between allegorical meanings that are programmed into dramatic
texts by their authors and topical parallels that might arise in the minds of
seventeenth-century audiences as they encountered the ‘commonplace subjects and
plots’ of those texts, he concludes that ‘the political point of these operas, whether
explicit or indirect, is a lot likelier to be flagrantly obvious than it is to be subtle and
hidden’.14 From Hume’s findings we can draw some further inferences. First, in the

12
The opera’s clearly allegorical prologue, for which no music survives, is also frustratingly
ambiguous. Celebrating the passage of Phoebus and Venus across the sea, it could refer to the
arrival of William and Mary from Holland in early 1689, as noted by A. Margaret Laurie,
‘Allegory, Sources, and Early Performance History’, in Henry Purcell, Dido and Aeneas, ed.
Curtis Price (New York, 1986), 42–6. Possibly it refers more generally to James II and Mary
of Modena, since James had served for more than a decade as Lord High Admiral; see
Andrew R. Walkling, ‘ “The Dating of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas”? A Reply to Bruce Wood and
Andrew Pinnock’, Early Music, 22 (1994), 473–6. It is not clear, furthermore, whether the
prologue was a late addition joined to an earlier libretto for the opera’s 1689 performance.
13
Hume, ‘The Politics of Opera’, 40.
14
Hume, 31, 43.

absence of strong evidence to the contrary, we can reasonably expect that political
allegory in English court opera, as in Dryden’s Albion, will support royalist ideology
and will rest clearly on the surface of the text. Drama in the public theatres offers
a more mixed picture, but recent studies of the repertory have tended to find less
promise in close topical parallels than in broader political ‘themes and tropes’: for
instance, a recurring concern with questions of trust, loyalty and rebellion, order and
disorder, and the like.15 Second, even if we discern political engagement in a work
by a writer opposed to the regime in power, we need not assume that the drama
makes a single, consistent polemical argument fully under the artist’s control; this is
especially the case when its engagement appears to take ambiguous or covert forms.
Works such as King Arthur, and Dido, remind us that an opera libretto need not
simply be the delivery mechanism for a pre-formulated policy message, but can be
a site for wrestling with conflict and uncertainty – whether this means deliberately
testing a range of partisan viewpoints or just struggling to advance a stable
ideological programme in the face of self-doubt and self-division. Instead of joining
the debate over the topical politics of Dido, therefore, I suggest that we set this and
other English Restoration operas against a wider cultural field and that we view each
of them as a more loosely structured mosaic of political ideas. Of special urgency
to this repertory, I believe, are questions about the status of the artist and the uses
of theatrical fiction as an instrument of power.
How might these principles apply to Dido and Aeneas? Unfortunately, Nahum
Tate’s slippery political loyalties over the 1680s offer us little purchase on the opera.
Tate came from a family of Irish Puritan ministers, but he soon slipped into London
Tory circles, and his early plays noisily took up the cause of the Stuart kings. His
notorious adaptations of Shakespeare – Richard II, The History of King Lear and
Coriolanus (retitled The Ingratitude of a Common-Wealth) – draw sympathetic portraits
of embattled rulers, victimised by scheming usurpers and Whiggish mobs. Tate soon
won the patronage of the powerful Earl of Dorset, who also gave financial support
to Thomas Shadwell and Dryden. With Dryden’s help, Tate published a Second Part
of Absalom and Achitophel in 1682, after the initial arrest of the Duke of Monmouth.
He was invited to write the Saint Cecilia’s Day Ode for 1685, and was among the
first poets to elegise Charles II after the king’s death later that year. Tate’s early
writings show equally strong partisanship for the king’s heir, the Duke of York.
But Tate became uncharacteristically quiet after the accession of York as King
James II in 1685. By the end of 1689, Tate had already begun a series of poems in
praise of King William III, and in 1692 the new king awarded him the poet
laureateship. Whether Tate was a sly temporiser, or a naïve courtier-poet with an
‘unpolitical mind’,16 or just one of the many Tory partisans who were disappointed
in James II, his changing allegiances make Dido’s political sympathies even harder to
measure.

15
Susan J. Owen, Restoration Theatre and Crisis (Oxford, 1996), 29, and compare Hume, ‘The
Politics of Opera’, 27.
16
Christopher Spencer, Nahum Tate (New York, 1972), 84.

We do, however, have the great advantage of an earlier play by Tate on the same
Virgilian subject. In 1678 he adapted the fourth book of the Aeneid in a tragedy
called Brutus of Alba, or, The Enchanted Lovers (1678). A comparison of the two
dramas leaves the strong impression that Tate has tried to shake Dido and Aeneas free
from the politics of the moment. Like Tate’s other early plays, Brutus of Alba was a
blunt propaganda vehicle for the Stuart monarchy. In it, Virgil’s Aeneas becomes
Brutus, the legendary founder of England; Dido becomes a nameless queen of the
Mediterranean outpost of Syracuse, where Brutus has been driven by a storm on his
way to Albion. To his Virgilian source Tate adds a network of subplots involving
a sorceress and a power-hungry courtier (perhaps corresponding to the Earl of
Shaftesbury?) who league with a neighbouring kingdom to overthrow the queen.
Tate’s changes to Virgil’s text combine the vitiated shock tactics of the late heroic
play – ghosts, witches’ rites, swoonings, suicides, a poisoned bracelet, ravings and
hysterics – with the standard political talking points of royalist tragedy during the
Exclusion Crisis.17 The play shares its genre’s taste for moralising sententiousness,
as when the scheming courtier uses the murder of his son as a pretext to mount a
rebellion against the Queen: ‘To my ambition too ’twill give pretence, / . . . That
else had been detested Treason stil’d. / Thus specious forms give foulest crimes
applause.’18
The clumsy Tory polemic of Brutus of Alba makes the restraint of Dido and Aeneas
all the more conspicuous. Tate lifted enough material directly from Brutus to
make it clear that he used the play as the main source for his opera.19 Yet where
Brutus of Alba swells with bombast and spectacle, Dido and Aeneas offers brevity and
compression. Although we would expect this to happen in the transition from
spoken drama to chamber opera, Tate goes out of his way to highlight the secretive
remoteness of Dido’s world. Brutus is showy and extroverted: all motives are
made clear, all plot mechanisms made visible. In place of the uncanny divine forces
that drive the plot of the Aeneid, Tate substitutes a local political conspiracy. He
exposes the inner lives of Brutus and the Queen to plain view; both characters
exhaustively analyse their conflicted feelings in long set speeches. When they feel
guilty over breaking their past marriage vows, we watch their dead spouses rise as
ghosts to haunt them. By contrast, Dido and Aeneas is oddly reticent. In Brutus of
Alba, the Queen confides her passion to her nurse and feels relief in the telling:
‘I kn[e]w thou wouldst be shockt with the relation, / But now I’ve told my grief I
am at ease’ (9). In Dido and Aeneas’s version of the same scene, Dido insists on
secrecy:

17
On the rhetorical tactics of royalist drama during the 1680s, see J. Douglas Canfield,
‘Royalism’s Last Dramatic Stand: English Political Tragedy, 1679–89’, Studies in Philology, 82
(1985), 234–63, but see also the qualifications offered by Owen, Restoration Theatre and Crisis,
200–38.
18
Nahum Tate, Brutus of Alba, or, The Enchanted Lovers (London, 1678), 6. Subsequent quotations
refer to this edition and are cited parenthetically by page number.
19
For a list of Dido’s borrowings from Brutus, see Robert R. Craven, ‘Nahum Tate’s Third Dido
and Aeneas: The Sources of the Libretto to Purcell’s Opera’, The World of Opera, 1 (1979),
73–6.

Dido. I languish till my grief is known,

Yet would not have it guess’d.
Belinda. Grief increasing, by concealing,
Dido. Mine admits of no revealing.
(I.12–15)20
Heavy-handed plot expedients give way to a coyer elaboration of character. In the
first two acts of the opera, Dido addresses just one line of dialogue to Aeneas. Tate’s
villains, too, lose their clarity of motive. In Brutus, the sorceress announces that ‘I
hate all humane kind, / But envy most the prosperous and great’ (19). The passage
survives in Tate’s opera, where the witches rail against Dido – ‘whom we hate, / As
we do all in prosperous state’ (II.9–10) – but the revealing word ‘envy’ has dropped
out.
In contrast with Brutus, Dido feels ‘chastely untopical’, indifferent to geopolitics,
uninterested in picking partisan fights.21 Tate’s opera vastly compresses Virgil’s
historical frame. Aeneas’s famous tale to Dido of his misfortunes, adapted for Brutus
of Alba as a long set of expository speeches in Act I, disappears in Dido. The gods
have no part in the action and no clear investment in Aeneas’s future. Aeneas’s son
Ascanius no longer appears as a living emblem of dynastic duty unfulfilled, and no
one ever refers to him. The military invasion that ends Brutus of Alba has been
stripped away. In Aeneas’s wooing speeches, the pains of empire shrink into
metaphors for disprized love, the flames of Troy becoming the flames of passion:
‘Ah!’ he pleads, ‘make not in a hopeless fire, / A hero fall, and Troy once more
expire’ (I.54–5).
Tate transmutes Virgil’s scenes of epic warfare into Ovidian themes of hunting
and pursuit. ‘Pursue thy conquest, Love’, urges Belinda (a version of the Aeneid’s
Anna), and the opera’s second act stresses the erotic symbolism of Virgil’s Book IV
hunting expedition. Tate’s courtiers dance around a fountain where ‘Actaeon met
his fate, / pursued by his own hounds’ (II.37–8); Aeneas shows off a ‘monster’s
head’ borne on his spear, and compares it to the famous boar that mauled ‘Venus’
huntsm[a]n’, Adonis (44). The Aeneid’s vision of the divine is replaced here by an
Ovidian mosaic of chance erotic encounters, suggesting the helplessness of both
mortals and gods to control the natural madness of the libido. Ovid’s doomed
hunters implicitly offer themselves as analogues for Aeneas, who has earlier scorned
‘the feeble stroke of Destiny’ in favour of the ‘dart’ of Cupid (I.48–9). Virgil’s epic
struggle of civilisation against chaos gives way to a private human struggle of reason
against passion.
In Tate’s hands, then, political history becomes domestic tragedy. The main effect
of this tight focus on the domestic is to weaken Aeneas. In Virgil’s poem, Aeneas’s
break with Dido forces him to tear out the private man and fully become the
instrument of a public destiny. His sojourn in Carthage disastrously elides the
domestic with the political: erotic love presents itself to him as a basis for empire,
20
Quotations from Dido and Aeneas refer to the libretto reproduced in Henry Purcell, Dido and
Aeneas, ed. Curtis Price (New York, 1986), 63–79, and are cited parenthetically in the text.
21
Price, ‘Dido and Aeneas: Questions of Style and Evidence’, 122.

a source of authority in itself, rather than as a private madness that wars against the
established authority of history and nation. Dido and Aeneas glances at this form of
temptation – Carthage offers a false synthesis of ‘Empire growing, / pleasures
flowing’ (I.3–4) – but the opera quickly lets Aeneas’s public world fade before the
mounting intensity of Dido’s tragedy. With no feeling of historical pressure, no
overriding geopolitical stakes to counter Dido’s claims upon him, Tate’s Aeneas
becomes ineffectual and irresolute. He has been widely dismissed by modern critics
as ‘a meandering oaf’, ‘a complete booby’.22 As Dido’s intimate suffering swells to
fill the opera’s narrow circle of action, Aeneas’s thinly realised psychology fades into
invisibility.23

II
Why should Tate have so annihilated Virgil’s hero? He was, for one thing, reflecting
a wider English cultural trend, sceptical of the literature of war and empire.
Although poets in the 1680s and 1690s continued to churn out noisy martial epics,
their form and style policed by doctrinaire neo-Aristotelian critics like Nicolas
Boileau-Despréaux and René Le Bossu, the genre’s cultural authority was weaken-
ing. Martial heroics had come to feel anachronistic and gauche. Samuel Butler
acutely measured the malaise when he noted that ‘No Age ever abounded more with
Heroical Poetry then the present, and yet there was never any wherein fewer
Heroicall Actions were performed’.24 Hugely popular burlesques, travesties, paro-
dies and pastiches sprang up around the traditional epic canon. Dryden’s Absalom
and Achitophel (1681) and Macflecknoe (1682) transmuted heroic poetry into an
instrument of topical satire; the vogue for mock-epic writing was further nourished
in England by John Crowne’s 1692 translation of Boileau’s Le Lutrin and by local
imitations such as Samuel Garth’s Dispensary (1699). English prose fiction,
meanwhile, was coalescing into the early novel, as a widening bourgeois reading
public sought out stories that more closely resembled its own domestic world.
Growth in popular piety and moral activism near the end of the century coincided
with a philosophical reassessment of the nature of the hero.25 John Locke’s 1693
treatise on education scorned ‘the Honour and Renown, that is bestowed on
Conquerours (who for the most part are but the great Butchers of Mankind)’, and
discouraged the reading of martial histories, which would only persuade young
people ‘to think Slaughter the laudable Business of Mankind, and the most Heroick

22
David Z. Kushner, ‘Henry Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas”: An Analytical Discussion’, American
Music Teacher, 21 (1971), 28; Joseph Kerman, Opera as Drama, 2nd edn (Berkeley, 1988), 43.
23
For a related reading, stressing the opera’s valorisation of private feeling at the expense of
Aeneas’s public world, see Wilfrid Mellers, ‘The Tragic Heroine and the Un-Hero’, in
Harmonious Meeting: A Study of the Relationships between English Music, Poetry and Theatre,
c. 1600–1900 (London, 1965), 203–14.
24
Samuel Butler, Characters and Passages from Note-Books, ed. A. R. Waller (Cambridge, 1908), 442.
25
For more on this reassessment, including a more substantial discussion of John Locke and
William Temple, see James William Johnson, ‘England, 1660–1800: An Age Without a Hero?’
in The English Hero, 1660–1800, ed. Robert Folkenflik (Newark, 1982), 25–34.

Vertue’.26 William Temple’s essay ‘Of Heroick Virtue’ (1690) defined the nature of
heroism as ‘the deserving well of Mankind’, an approach that raised Confucius and
Mohammed above Almanzor and Aureng-Zebe, the heroes of Dryden’s early heroic
plays.27
When Tate took on Virgil’s Aeneas, however, he involved himself in a narrower
cultural argument. For the reception of the Aeneid – and, in particular, responses to
its troubled hero – had for some time acted as a frame for political controversy.
Throughout this period, the English veneration of the Aeneid competed with a less
deferential strain of Virgil criticism, a counterculture of interpretation, adaptation
and mock-translation that reread the poem at the expense of its hero and his
imperial ambitions. Dryden’s talk of a ‘Confederacy’ against Virgil, cited at the
beginning of my essay, marks the spread of that counterculture in the 1680s and
1690s, led by but not limited to the Whigs, taking Dido’s side against Aeneas and
ranging itself against both Virgil’s epic and the Stuarts’ Augustan myth.28 Widely
read as a celebration of Augustus Caesar’s empire in the making, Virgil’s poem had
long set the tone for a period of royalist entrenchment that was early described as
the English ‘Augustan age’.29 Royalist poets had made the Aeneid their own in a
series of partisan vernacular translations during the Commonwealth era. John
Denham, for one, had evoked the martyred King Charles I in his 1656 version of
the Aeneid’s second book, which ends with the murder of Priam: ‘On the cold earth
lyes this neglected King, / A headless Carkass, and a nameless Thing’.30 With the
installation of Charles II, the royalists’ Aeneid changed its function from dissent to
praise. Robert Howard began his 1660 Poems with verses celebrating Charles II’s
Virgilian journey across the sea to launch a new imperial era. Dryden’s Astraea Redux
(1660), too, announced a triumphant Augustan politics, as did the series of
triumphal arches prepared for Charles II’s coronation entry in 1661, their
inscriptions celebrating the ‘Adventus Augusti’.31 When John Boys published his
1661 translation of Book III of the Aeneid, he appended a set of ‘Reflections’
comparing the new king to Aeneas in piety, wisdom and valour.32 James II,

26
John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (London, 1693), 132.
27
Sir William Temple, ‘Of Heroick Virtue’, in Miscellanea. In Four Essays (London, 1690), 146.
28
On the Restoration reaction against Virgil, see especially Howard D. Weinbrot, Augustus Caesar
in ‘Augustan’ England: The Decline of a Classical Norm (Princeton, 1977), and Paul N. Hartle,
‘ “Lawrels for the Conquered”: Virgilian Translation and Travesty in the English Civil War and
Its Aftermath’, in Reinventing the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Constructions of the Medieval and
Early Modern Periods, ed. William F. Gentrup (Turnhout, 1998), 127–46.
29
Francis Atterbury may have been the first to use ‘Augustan age’ to designate the English
Restoration era and its classicising literary culture; see the preface to The Second Part of Waller’s
Poems (London, 1690), A4r, and Howard Erskine-Hill, The Augustan Idea in English Literature
(London, 1983), 223.
30
John Denham, The Destruction of Troy (London, 1656), 28. On the topicality of this and other
translations, see Lawrence Venuti, ‘The Destruction of Troy: Translation and Royalist Cultural
Politics in the Interregnum’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 23 (1993), 197–219.
31
On the 1661 Royal Entry, see Erskine-Hill, Augustan Idea, 216–19. Erskine-Hill argues,
however, that the political use of iconography from Augustan Rome was neither wholly new
nor particularly widespread in Restoration England.
32
See Boys, Aeneas His Errours, or, His Voyage from Troy into Italy (London, 1661), 52–61.

inheriting the motif, later commissioned Grinling Gibbons to sculpt him in bronze
decked out as Augustus.33 As late as 1697, Dryden’s refusal to dedicate his
translation of the Aeneid to William III generated enough controversy that his
publisher, Jacob Tonson, stepped in to alter the volume’s illustrations as a
compliment to the king – Aeneas’s nose being duly hooked to bring out a
resemblance to the Prince of Orange.34
Views of the historical Augustus were, however, mixed. Even according to a loyal
Jacobite like Dryden, Virgil recognised ‘that this Conquerour, though of a bad kind,
was the very best of it’, that is, a harsh autocrat who nonetheless brought needed
stability to Rome after its civil war.35 Special attention fell on Virgil’s flattering
reference to Cato in the Aeneid, VIII.670, which was widely thought to refer to the
republican hero, Cato of Utica, rather than to his great-grandfather, Cato the
Censor, who is mentioned in Book VI. The reference seems to have been enough
to convince Dryden, along with earlier French critics, that Virgil ‘was still of
Republican principles in his Heart’ when he wrote his epic – and that he secretly
opposed his emperor’s rise to tyranny.36 It took little imagination for other writers
to develop such anti-Augustan rhetoric into a mode of resistance against the Stuarts’
Virgilian cultural politics. The dramatist Nathaniel Lee, for one, spent the 1670s
writing veiled polemics in the form of plays attacking Roman emperors. Alongside
his Nero (1674) and Lucius Junius Brutus (1680), the latter quickly suppressed for its
alleged anti-monarchism, Lee took on the Augustan myth directly in Gloriana, or the
Court of Augustus Caesar (1676). Its story of a lecherous, predatory and paranoid
Augustus features a subplot involving his banishment of Ovid from Rome, among
other acts of misrule.
Hostile reassessments of Augustus took their toll on Virgil’s epic and its hero.
Although some were ready to imagine a crypto-republican Virgil, most Restoration
critics assumed that the poet had designed his Aeneas as an idealised portrait of
Augustus, and they read the Aeneid as an effort to reconcile the Roman people to his
principate. As the Stuart regime lurched through the crises of the 1680s, darker
legends of Aeneas surfaced in opposition to Virgil’s account. One ancient tradition
held that Aeneas had betrayed Troy to the Greeks, perhaps motivated by a political

33
Weinbrot, Augustus Caesar in ‘Augustan’ England, 61.
34
The edition’s illustrations were inherited from John Ogilby’s lavish 1649 translation of Virgil’s
works. See the discussion of the format and presentation of Dryden’s volume in Stephen
Zwicker, Politics and Language in Dryden’s Poetry: The Arts of Disguise (Princeton, 1984), 188–96.
35
Dryden, ‘Dedication of the Aeneis’, in Works, V, 281.
36
Works, V, 280: citing the Cato passage, Dryden argues that Virgil’s ‘Conscience could not but
whisper to the Arbitrary Monarch, that the Kings of Rome were at first Elective, and Governed
not without a Senate’. Compare René Rapin, Observations on the Poems of Homer and Virgil, trans.
John Davies (London, 1672), 58, and see Aeneid, VI, 841, for the earlier reference to Cato the
Elder. In the eighteenth century, readers such as Alexander Pope came to believe that Virgil
had been referring to the conservative Cato the Censor – a view already sponsored by Servius
in the fourth century – and their view of his politics soured accordingly; see Weinbrot,
Augustus Caesar in ‘Augustan’ England, 127. On continuing eighteenth-century claims for a
secretly republican Virgil, see also T. W. Harrison, ‘English Virgil: The Aeneid in the XVIII
Century’, 4–7.

grudge against the house of Priam.37 At least one late Stuart pamphlet, discussed at
some length by Andrew Walkling, updated the legend to serve the Whigs.38 The
anonymous 1682 poem, The Conspiracy of Aeneas and Antenor Against the State of Troy,
tells how Aeneas (i.e., the Duke of York), jealous of Priam’s ‘brave eldest son’
Hector (Monmouth), is bribed by the Greeks (the French) to help them conquer
Troy. The Greeks’ arguments show how easily Aeneas’s translatio imperii could be
recast as political and religious tyranny:
Apollo speaks Stupendious things to come,
An absolute Empire, and a Spiritual Rome;
Which shall extend her Sway to that Degree,
That Phrigia shall a petty Province be;
...
Let Troy then fall that does your Fate Controul,
And with the Name of Country Checks your Soul:
Let Priam dye, and let Palladium go;
To other Gods your Empire you must owe[.]39
Aeneas’s Roman destiny figures here as an abandonment of his nation rather than
as its extension and fulfilment. The quest for empire does not test and confirm the
hero’s pietas, but exposes it as a fraud, in an act of betrayal that the poem goes on
to link with Aeneas’s desertion of Dido.
Indeed, the Aeneid’s Dido episode became a favourite tool for those who wanted
to blacken Aeneas’s reputation. Ancient legend told of a chaste Dido, the devoted
widow of Sychaeus who chose to die rather than contemplate a new dynastic
marriage. Early readers of the Aeneid seem to have known the story, and influential
ancient commentators criticised Virgil for overwriting it with his own.40 Servius and
Macrobius accused Virgil of libelling Dido.41 Tertullian praised the historical Dido
as a model of chastity and conjugal affection.42 Augustine famously wept over
Dido’s abandonment in the Aeneid, but he barely finished telling the story in his
Confessions before noting that Aeneas’s journey to Carthage was agreed by the
learned to be an impossible fiction.43 Early Renaissance scholars recovered the
37
The earliest surviving reference to the story of Aeneas’s treason against Troy is that of
Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Roman Antiquities, I, 48). Aeneas and Antenor are linked in Aeneid,
I, 242–53, and a connection between Aeneas and the treason of Antenor appears in the
fourth-century journals attributed to Dares the Phrygian and Dictys of Crete.
38
For further discussion see Walkling, ‘Political Allegory’, 553–4.
39
Anon., The Conspiracy of Aeneas and Antenor Against the State of Troy. A Poem (London, 1682), 12.
40
For a summary of ancient commentary on the question, see Arthur Stanley Pease, ed., Publi
Vergili Maronis Aeneidos Liber Quartus (Cambridge, MA, 1935), 64–7. For a survey of the early
modern reception, see also Don Cameron Allen, ‘Marlowe’s Dido and the Tradition’, in Essays
on Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama in Honor of Hardin Craig, ed. Richard Hosley (Columbia,
1962), 55–68. Some further details appear in Janet Schmalfeldt, ‘In Search of Dido’, Journal of
Musicology, 18 (2001), 584–615.
41
Servius, notes to Aeneid, IV.36, 459, in Servianorum in Vergilii Carmina Commentariorum, ed. E. K.
Rand et al., 3 vols. (Lancaster, PA, 1946–), III, 263–4, 400; Macrobius, Saturnalia, V.xvii.4–6, in
Macrobius, ed. Franz Rudolf Eyssenhardt (Leipzig, 1893), 320–1.
42
De Exhortatione Castitatis, XIII, in Tertullian, Treatises on Marriage and Remarriage, trans. William
P. Le Saint (Westminster, MD, 1951), 63. See also Tertullian’s Ad Nationes, I.xviii.2.
43
Augustine, Confessions, trans. F. J. Sheed, 2nd edn (Indianapolis, 2006), 14–15 (I.xiii.21–2).

historical Dido in their classical research; she appears, for example, in Boccaccio’s
De mulieribus claris and in Petrarch’s Trionfi.44 As part of the claris mulieribus tradition,
she came to seventeenth-century France, where she was championed in Boisrobert’s
tragedy, La vraye Didon, ou la Didon chaste (1643).
The French had been debating the manners of Virgil’s hero for some time – one
of several border skirmishes in their emerging war of the ancients and the moderns
– and English critics reproduced many of their arguments. The most striking aspect
of this strain of Virgilian reception, for our purposes, is its animus not just against
Aeneas but against Virgil’s false presentation of history. The mid-century French
critics made much of the gulf between Virgil’s injured queen and the chaste
historical Dido. Jean Regnault de Segrais, whose 1668 translation of the Aeneid
informed Dryden’s, objected to Virgil’s flagrant anachronism: Aeneas could never
have encountered Dido, for Carthage was thought to have been founded in the
ninth century BC, 300 years after the supposed fall of Troy.45 Lodging the same
objection, the influential neoclassicist René Rapin summed up Virgil’s fourth book
as a cunning political artifice: a ‘filthy slur’ on the historical Dido by a cagey
propagandist, ‘imagining he might, without any disparagement to himself, sacrifice
her, the better to flatter his own Country, which no doubt, would have boggled at
the reputation History gave that Princess’.46 Nourished by the growing influence of
continental criticism in England, the chaste Dido tradition flowered there in the
1680s and 1690s. Criticism of Virgil’s tampering with the historical record became
so widespread that by 1698, when a history primer by Thomas Hearne set out to
define the term ‘anachronism’, it needed only to cite the Dido episode: ‘an Error or
Mistake in the Computation of Time. Thus Virgil is guilty of an Anachronism in his
Aeneis, by making Aeneas and Dido Co[n]temporaries, whereas they lived 300 Years
distant one from another.’47
As the English critics’ hostility migrated from Aeneas’s bad manners to Virgil’s
bad history, their complaints came into sharper focus as an assault on the politics
of imperial praise. In 1692, the poet William Walsh complained that the reputations
of heroic women like Dido and Penelope lay at the mercy of the poets, who ‘as they
please, give Infamy or Fame’:
In vain the Tyrian Queen resigns her Life,
For the bright Glory of a spotless Wife,
If lying Bards may false Amours rehearse,
And blast her Name with arbitrary Verse.48

44
Boccaccio, Famous Women, ed. Virginia Brown (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 166–81; Petrarch,
‘Triumphus Pudicitie’, lines 9–12, 154–9, in Rime, Trionfi, e Poesie Latine, ed. Francesco Neri
(Milan, 1951), 509, 516.
45
See Jacqueline Fabre, ‘Les Figures Amoureuses dans les Tragédies de Didon: Étude de la
Réception du Livre IV de L’Énéide aux XVIIe et XVIIIe Siècles Français’, in Enée et Didon:
Naissance, Fonctionnement et Survie d’un Mythe, ed. René Martin (Paris, 1990), 107–8.
46
Rapin, Observations, 100.
47
Thomas Hearne, Ductor Historicus, or, A Short System of Universal History (London, 1698), 8.
48
William Walsh, ‘To His Mistress’, in Letters and Poems, Amorous and Gallant (London, 1692),
75–7.

Walsh, a Whig, quietly links Virgil’s ‘arbitrary Verse’ with political despotism: he
has just finished comparing poets to ‘Monarchs, on an Eastern Throne, / Restrain’d
by nothing but their Will alone’. Virgil is implicated in the tyranny of Augustus, and,
by extension, in the arbitrary rule of the Stuarts (by now superseded by the
constitutional settlement of 1688). In 1697, the year when Dryden published his
Aeneis, the anonymous Verdicts of the Learned Concerning Virgil and Homer’s Heroic Poems
was able to announce a critical consensus linking Virgil’s alleged libel of Dido, his
manipulation of history, and his role as a mouthpiece for absolutism:
all Authors have observed two considerable Faults of Anachronism and Slander in that
Episod[e] of Dido in the fourth Book. By the first of false Chronology, he makes that Princess
Elder by 300 Years than in reality she was. By the other of Scandal, he has disgrac’d the most
Discreet and Vertuous Princess of her Age . . . And thus has utterly ruined her Reputation
in the Mind of all Posterity. This is both a base and unpardonable Fault in Virgil, to raise
the Glory of the Romans, by ruining the good Name of a Woman, the Ornament of her Sex;
because forsooth she was the Foundress of an hostile City.49
If the early Restoration era had conflated the literary hero Aeneas, the emperor
Augustus and the triumphant Stuart monarchy, a new axis had now emerged: the
grouping of Augustus as a tyrant, Virgil as a fawning propagandist, and Aeneas as
an unscrupulous cad, all ranged against a wronged woman who stood between them
and their shared political ambitions.
It is within this milieu that we should assess the Virgilian cultural politics of Dido
and Aeneas. If we put topical allegory to one side, we will find the opera wrestling
with fundamental questions of ideology and representation: the costs of empire, the
political functions of art, the tensions between documentary history and partisan
mythology. The rest of this essay will explore how Dido and Aeneas tackles those
problems. In his handling of Virgil’s Dido episode, Tate is fascinated by the politics
of epic fictions – the ways in which heroic story overwrites true history, the reasons
why it is deployed to do so, and the sacrifices that its mythology demands. Dido
takes a sustained interest in how the Augustan imperial myth has been constructed
and in the violence that the myth inflicts on its victims.

III
‘Remember me, but ah! forget my fate’ (III.62): Dido’s dying words pull in two
directions. Her famous ‘remember me’, echoing the mantra of Hamlet’s father,
appears to be a call for pity, for the preservation of her story, and perhaps, glancing
along with Virgil at the future enmity between Rome and Carthage, for revenge. Yet
in her next breath Dido asks us to forget her story of abandonment and untimely
death. This climactic, puzzling cry suggests that Tate is especially concerned with
the problem of Dido’s ‘fate’, the tragic destiny that Virgil has prepared for her. Dido
and Aeneas returns again and again to the matter of fate; the word appears ten times
in the drama.50 The ambiguous use of the term in Dido’s final line, I suggest, opens
49
Anon., Verdicts of the Learned, 8–9.
50
Roger Savage, ‘Producing Dido and Aeneas’, in Price, ed., Dido and Aeneas, 261.

up a distinction that Tate’s opera explores at some length: a conflict between Dido’s
public destiny in the Aeneid, that is, the poem’s ‘official’ record of her tragic actions,
and a largely hidden inner life, a mysterious ‘me’ that asks to stand apart from
Virgil’s fateful story of doomed love.
We have already seen that Tate’s Dido remains at a distance from us throughout
the drama, her thoughts and motives emerging only fleetingly in a phrase or gesture
before receding again into obscurity. Against this impulse to turn away from public
scrutiny, this reclusive selfhood that ‘admits of no revealing’, Tate’s Aeneas
champions a ‘fate’ that would fuse the private with the public. Even as he insists that
‘Aeneas has no fate but you’, he asks Dido to accept him ‘If not for mine, for
empire’s sake’ (I.46, 52). The Carthaginian courtiers paint a royal marriage as ‘The
greatest blessing Fate can give, / Our Carthage to secure, and Troy revive’ (18–19).
Already Aeneas’s public ‘fate’ appears to serve as a screen or pretext for human
desire. Again and again, the opera portrays destiny as a thing of human making –
in effect, a work of art – rather than an inscrutable force of nature. Dido demurs:
‘Fate forbids what you pursue’ (45). Where Virgil’s Dido had fatally confused the
private with the public good, Tate’s Dido stubbornly resists Aeneas’s bland
conflation of the personal and the political. The line just quoted is Dido’s only direct
address to Aeneas before the opera’s final act, and, like the rest of her conduct, it
gives little of her inner life away.
The public world around Tate’s Dido also contains troubling dark spots. Almost
at once, the opera’s Virgilian backdrop begins to suffer tears and fissures, exposing
ominous forms of local faction and conspiracy underneath the surface drama of
fated empire. Tate’s earlier plays repeatedly register anxiety over political dissent.
His Ingratitude of a Common-Wealth adds to its Shakespearean source an attack on the
Roman tribunes as ‘Faction-Mongers’ and ‘Canting Caballers’. And we have already
noted the emphasis on civil conflict in Brutus of Alba. In Dido, as in Brutus, Tate
makes the agents behind Dido’s downfall a local coven of witches rather than the
Olympian gods. The witches’ topical political resonance is real, albeit unfocused;
Shadwell’s Lancashire Witches (1681), a harsh anti-Catholic satire, had recently
cemented a growing link in Restoration drama between stage witches and
Catholics.51 Whether or not Tate’s cabal of witches has a specific topical referent –
from the Popish Plot to rumours that the unexpected birth of a son to James II in
1688 was a hoax engineered by the Vatican – they absorb, as if in the symbolic
language of a dream, the period’s popular unease over the threat of a political enemy
operating invisibly inside the state.
In their uncanny, fictive quality, the witches become Tate’s focal point for a
meditation on epic myth-making. The witches’ scenes in Acts II and III unearth a
dark substratum underneath the public pageant of the Aeneid: crucially, Tate’s Dido
owes her death not to the grand imperatives of Virgil’s epic fatum, but to the
scheming of an internal enemy that remains invisible to history. The witches expose

51
See Steven E. Plank, ‘ “And Now About the Cauldron Sing”: Music and the Supernatural on
the Restoration Stage’, Early Music, 18 (1990), 393–407, and Curtis Price, ‘Dido and Aeneas in
Context’, in Price, ed., Dido and Aeneas, 9–11.

the private and irrational forces that shape the chronicle of empire. They perform
their work in secret and in darkness: ‘In our deep-vaulted cell the charm we’ll
prepare, / Too dreadful a practice for this open air’ (II.29–30). They are concerned
not with the metaphysical ordering of history, furthermore, but with Dido’s good
name. The Sorceress announces that her goal is to deprive Dido at a single stroke
‘of fame, of life and love’ (12). The epic plot – the imperial teleology that means
everything to Aeneas – works merely as a means to an end, the real goal of staining
Dido’s reputation. Tate’s story of Dido and Aeneas reshapes Virgil’s vision of world
empire into the personal tragedy of a good name lost to history.
The opera’s signal plot event – the witches’ notorious fabrication of a false
Mercury to order Aeneas to leave for Rome – raises important questions about the
politics of art. It is a daring twist on an equally notorious turning point in Virgil’s
poem. Virgil had pressed the god Mercury into service to resolve a sticky plot
problem. Aeneas must be extricated from Carthage, but without carrying a heavy
burden of ethical blame for breaking Dido’s trust. Mercury’s intervention resolves
the problem, but also renders it visible. The god’s marching orders for Aeneas form
a transparent plot mechanism, a narrative lever or hinge that momentarily exposes
the structural mechanics behind Virgil’s story of translatio imperii. The gods have this
meta-narrative function throughout the Aeneid, as their manipulation of Aeneas’s
destiny mirrors the poet’s own task of shaping the epic’s ideology and form.
The preface to Dryden’s Aeneid struggles at length with the gods’ role in Book IV.
As Richard F. Thomas has shown, Dryden’s translation tweaks its source text to
weaken Dido’s claims on Aeneas.52 At the same time, Dryden magnifies his hero’s
religious obligations. He stresses that the domestic commitments of Aeneas as a
husband cease to apply after Mercury’s arrival, since ‘an immediate Revelation
dispenses with all Duties of Morality’.53 Dryden does not hide the fact that he needs
this expedient to redeem a hero who would otherwise come across as an ethical
failure: ‘humanely speaking’, he concedes, ‘I doubt there was a fault somewhere; and
Jupiter is better able to bear the blame, than either Virgil or Aeneas’.54 But his recourse
to the gods brings Dryden directly to the hostile view of Virgil put forward by the
French critics. Dryden explains that Virgil had overriding political reasons to stage
Aeneas’s break with Dido, since he needed a fiction that would account for the long
historical enmity between Rome and Carthage. The task obliged Virgil to sacrifice
not just the manners of Aeneas, but also the reputation of the historical Dido: ‘He
knew he cou’d not please the Romans better, or oblige them more to Patronize his
Poem, than by disgracing the Foundress of that City . . . [H]e knew the Romans were
to be his Readers; and them he brib’d, perhaps at the expence of his Heroe’s
honesty, but he gain’d his Cause however; as Pleading before Corrupt Judges.’55 In

52
Richard F. Thomas, Virgil and the Augustan Reception (Cambridge, 2001), 186–9.
53
Dryden, ‘Dedication of the Aeneis’, in Works, V, 296.
54
Works, V, 296.
55
Works, V, 298. Compare Rapin, Observations, 100: ‘And whereas this artifice was advanc’d only
to humour the Romans . . . yet he thought himself concern’d to use all precautions, to
prepossess their minds, upon that disguising of the truth. To that purpose he cunningly brings
the Gods into the plot, to put a better gloss upon the sacrificing of her.’

Dryden’s reading, the gods’ intervention in Book IV relieves Aeneas of personal

blame for his treachery, but at the expense of both confirming that treachery as a
moral problem and damaging the integrity of Virgil’s gods, who are exposed as a
mystification, a cover for a coolly pragmatic political myth.
Tate, for his part, also makes the Aeneid’s ideological scaffolding visible, but he
does so by exposing yet another layer of causality behind the Virgilian gods. Rather
than simply erase the gods from his drama, as he had done in Brutus of Alba, Tate
reintroduces them as a flimsy human construct: a manufactured ‘trusty elf, / In
form of Mercury himself’ (II.20–1) to dupe Aeneas into leaving Carthage. Tate
seems eager not just to collapse the divine infrastructure behind Aeneas’s quest for
empire, but to expose the process whereby such an epic ideology has been
constructed. Tate both flaunts the fictionality of Virgil’s Mercury and shows how
Aeneas turns that baseless fiction into the foundation for an imperial myth. Tate’s
Dido, meanwhile, starts to recognise the partisan history that is beginning to form
around her, and struggles with growing helplessness against it.
When the ‘trusty elf’ appears to Aeneas, it strips down the message of Virgil’s
Mercury to its core plot element: Aeneas must sacrifice ‘love’s delights’ in Carthage
to ‘gain th’Hesperian shore / And ruined Troy restore’ (II.55–8). As in the Aeneid,
Aeneas assents without hesitation. His thoughts then turn to Dido: what words can
he find to ‘pacify’ his ‘injured Queen’? Tate’s Aeneas promptly takes refuge in
fatalism. He told Dido in Act I that he would ‘defy / The feeble stroke of Destiny’,
and would answer to ‘no fate but you’ (I.46–8). That strong claim to authority now
abruptly melts away. Aeneas now portrays ‘fate’ as an agency so external and
impersonal that, as the hero’s guilty ‘I’ disappears, even the grammatical relation of
subject and object breaks down: ‘from her arms I’m forced to part. / How can so
hard a fate be took, / One night enjoyed, the next forsook?’ (II.64–6). By the
end of the speech (and in a further addition to Virgil), Aeneas has embraced his
new role as the helpless instrument of a divine plot teleology, imposed on him
from above, which recasts Dido as a necessary sacrifice to his manifest destiny:
‘Yours be the blame, ye gods, for I / Obey your will – but with more ease could
die’ (67–8).
We are watching an epic myth in the making. The witches, the true agents
behind Dido’s downfall, recede into the background, their motives left obscure.
Over the opera’s core plot-engine of conspiracy and rebellion they have
succeeded in stretching a layer of fiction. Aeneas wholly accepts their mystifica-
tion: history has shaped itself into a providential public destiny to which his
personal will must be forfeited. As Tate’s hero begins his final interview with
Dido, an opening rhetorical question, with its self-exculpating swivel into the
third-person voice, advertises his powerlessness: ‘What shall lost Aeneas do? /
How, royal fair, shall I impart / The gods’ decree and tell you we must part?’
(III.29–31). Dido is not convinced. Virgil’s Dido had already raised passing
doubts about Aeneas’s claim of a divine visitation; in Dryden’s translation, she
rages, ‘A God’s Command he pleads, / And make’s Heav’n accessary to his Deeds
/ . . . as if the peaceful State / Of Heav’nly Pow’rs were touch’d with Humane

Fate!’56 In Virgil’s account, Dido is tragically mistaken to doubt the gods’

investment in Aeneas’s future. In Tate’s new context, however, her argument
gains force and point. The bulk of his Dido’s recriminations target Aeneas’s shift
of responsibility from himself to the gods. In Dido’s view, overlaying the gods
onto what is really a matter of human choice amounts to wilful fraud and
hypocrisy:
Thus on the fatal banks of Nile,
Weeps the deceitful crocodile.
Thus hypocrites that murder act,
Make heaven and gods the authors of the fact.
(III.32–5)
More than one critic has raised an eyebrow at the incongruous metaphor of
the crocodile, but it is not a trivial one. Virgil had linked Dido thematically with
the archetypal eastern queen of the Nile, Cleopatra.57 Both women embodied the
irrational, wily and prevaricating social world of the southern Mediterranean: the
uncontrollable forces that pressed in on the Roman Empire from its frontiers,
symbolic of the volatile passions that threatened each Roman from within. Tate
would have known Shakespeare’s portrait of Cleopatra as a seductive spinner of
tales, deeply preoccupied with the power of language, and eager to craft her own
role in history. And Tate’s Brutus of Alba alludes more than once to Dryden’s
Shakespearean adaptation, All for Love (1677), a play in which Cleopatra is labelled
a ‘False Crocodyle’ for her cold-blooded manipulation of language and affect.58
Similarly, at the climax of Brutus of Alba, Tate recycles the metaphor to link
Cleopatra with Dido. Brutus rails against the Queen for asking him, reluctantly and
tearfully, to leave her country: ‘’Twere Woman’s Fraud t’ have ruin’d with your
Smiles, / But to betray with Tears, the Crocodile’s’ (31).
In Dido and Aeneas, the crocodile metaphor has migrated to Aeneas, who inherits
Cleopatra’s association with hypocrisy and prevarication. We find in retrospect that
he has wrapped himself in self-serving fictions throughout the drama. When Aeneas
had attached his domestic affair with Dido to the fate of a revived Troy – ‘If not
for mine, for empire’s sake’ – he had cast a screen of imperial destiny across what
was finally a transient erotic passion. His growing confidence in his rhetorical
authority shows itself in the hunting scene in Act II, where he rewrites the story of
Adonis: ‘Behold upon my bending spear, / A monster’s head stands bleeding, /
With tushes far exceeding / Those did Venus’ huntsmen tear’ (41–4). His mastery
over the boar serves equally as a claim of narrative control, as this new Adonis
exorcises the old tragic myth in the name of his own love story in the making. The

56
Dryden, Aeneis, IV, 542–3, 546–7. Several of the Renaissance tragedies of Dido express a
similar scepticism about the gods, who are frequently portrayed as arbitrary and remote. The
tendency is perhaps strongest in Etienne Jodelle’s Didon se sacrifiant (c.1555), on which see
Allen, ‘Marlowe’s Dido’, 60–4, and Madeleine Lazard, ‘Didon et Enée au XIVe [sic] siècle: La
Didon se sacrifiant de Jodelle’, in Enée et Didon, ed. Martin, 89–96.
57
A brief, well-documented discussion of Dido and Cleopatra is found in Pease, ed., Aeneidos
Liber Quartus, 24–8; see also C. M. Bowra, From Virgil to Milton (New York, 1967), 51–4.
58
All for Love, 2.1.161, in Dryden, Works, XIII, 44.

witches’ false Mercury persuades Aeneas that he is the victim of a divine destiny
rather than its prime mover, but it strengthens his impulse to rewrite his life as myth,
and history as fate.
Read in these terms, the end of the opera shows Aeneas’s Virgilian myth slowly
invading Dido and absorbing her into itself. No longer held at a moody distance
from us, the reticent, shrinking figure of the first two acts is now transformed into
the familiar doomed queen of the Aeneid. Suddenly voluble and volatile, she flings
abuse at her betrayer. The outlines of Virgil’s tragic structure take shape around and
within her as Aeneas’s language and ideology begin to imprint themselves on her
restless speech. Dido pleads with fate, ‘The only refuge for the wretched left’
(III.25), even as she rejects Aeneas’s appeal to the supernatural agency of ‘heaven
and gods’ (35). She scorns Aeneas’s offer to stay with her, yet she adopts his tragic
terminology, calling herself ‘The injured Dido’ (46) as he had earlier called her his
‘injured Queen’ (II.62). With Aeneas’s departure, Dido embraces death as ‘a
welcome guest’ (III.59), a new paramour to replace the ‘Trojan guest’ (I.16) who
has left the scene, but her conclusion that ‘Death must come when he is gone’
(III.53) comes across as strangely impersonal, an acknowledgment that she is caught
in an inexorable machine created by another. The apparatus of tragedy seems to act
upon her like an external force – ‘More I would but death invades me’ (58) – rather
than as an impulse emerging from within.
With her dying lament, Tate’s elusive and mysterious Dido is abruptly recast as
the Aeneid’s archetypal abandoned woman. Secretive emotional autonomy gives way
to conventional feminine self-display:
More I would but death invades me;
Death is now a welcome guest.
When I am laid in earth may my wrongs create
No trouble in thy breast;
Remember me, but ah! forget my fate.
(58–62)
The lyric suggests a Carthaginian Ariadne, weighed down by guilt and grief. What
to make of this sudden self-exposure? Just as Tate’s witches had disappeared under
the false screen of Aeneas’s imperial myth, Tate seems to show his Dido being
supplanted or overwritten by Virgil’s anti-heroine; the opera’s ‘historical’ Dido, so
to speak, is absorbed into Aeneas’s widening fiction and compelled to play the role
it demands of her. If we wish to describe this process at the level of character
psychology, we might call Tate’s Dido a classic victim of ideology, who internalises
the conventions that oppress her and becomes their unwitting ally in her own loss
of autonomy.59 In a cruel irony, Dido’s efforts to protest her ‘fated’ role only make
59
This formulation was suggested to me by Suzanne Aspden, who adds that Dido’s efforts at
self-expression against the ‘fateful’ ground bass perhaps not only conform to standard
ideological patterns of distressed womanhood, but, in taking up those patterns, ironically seem
to justify her confinement by the controlling bass line as a check on her erratic, unruly
femininity. The only form of protest available to this victimised woman is one that further
sponsors her victimisation. Understood this way, Purcell’s setting might therefore expose the
footnote continued on next page

her conform more tightly to it: any form of passionate self-expression simply
consolidates her resemblance to the irrational, unstable women of the Aeneid.
Purcell’s scoring of Dido’s lament, heavy with abstract inexorability, strengthens this
dramatic argument. Its famous chromatic ground bass, descending relentlessly in a
repeating five-bar phrase, overlaps with and pulls against Dido’s melodic line to
produce ripples of suspensions and discords. Its descending tetrachordal structure,
the signature device of continental operatic laments, gives form to the external
forces that draw Dido helplessly towards her mandated end.60 The resulting push
and pull of the fixed bass against her chromatically ascending vocal line suggests
Dido’s struggle to break free from the myth that the other characters have wrapped
claustrophobically around her – a struggle, however, in which her every gesture is
itself a conventional reflex of feminine lamentation, a stylised confession of anguish
that seems to arise more from the tragic protocol of the moment than from Dido’s
prior emotional life. The gloomy, sinuous eroticism of her dying melody is no less
a prison than the unyielding fixed bass. By thrashing about inside the trap of her
Virgilian ‘fate’, she binds herself still more tightly in its toils.
Dido’s lament brings her into close conformity with the heroines of English
tragic drama in the 1680s, whose genre obliged them to collude in their own
victimisation. The plays of Nathaniel Lee, Thomas Otway, John Banks, Thomas
Southerne and, later, the ‘she-tragedies’ of Thomas Rowe and his imitators turned
from the bombast and spectacle of the earlier Restoration heroic play towards
pathos and sentiment. In contrast with the preening titans who strode the stage in
the 1660s, the new anti-heroes try and fail to exert control over their disordered
world. Gods and fate seem remote or irrelevant. A transfer of interest from awe to
pity called for stories of hapless lovers, domestic conflicts and endangered women,
as the playwrights strategically used ‘eroticism . . . to compensate for the loss of
heroic flamboyance’.61 We hear the familiar cadences of Dido’s lament in a range of
mourning voices from this repertory, such as the threatened wife Eugenia in
Thomas D’Urfey’s The Injur’d Princess (1682) – ‘Come, strike my Lord, / Strike the
innocent Mansion of my Love, my heart, / And give a hapless, much wrong’d
Woman, rest, / As lasting as her woes. . . . / And tell my Lord, when I am laid in

footnote continued from previous page

workings of gender ideology in much the same way that Tate works to expose the political
ideology of Virgilian epic.
60
On this figure as a musical topos, see Ellen Rosand’s influential essay, ‘The Descending
Tetrachord: An Emblem of Lament’, Musical Quarterly, 65 (1979), 346–59. It has become
traditional to read the Dido ground bass as a mark of the inevitable pressure of the heroine’s
tragic destiny; compare Schmalfeldt, ‘In Search of Dido’, 611: ‘she lingers to plead with us,
even though the ongoing ground-bass repetitions would seem relentlessly to urge her toward
her end’.
61
Eric Rothstein, Restoration Tragedy: Form and the Process of Change (Madison, 1967), 105. In
addition to this classic account of the rise of pathetic tragedy, see also Laura Brown, Ends of
Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century Literature (Ithaca, 1993), 64–102; Susan
Staves, Players’ Scepters: Fictions of Authority in the Restoration (Lincoln, NE, 1979), 111–89; and
Mary Beth Rose, Gender and Heroism in Early Modern English Literature (Chicago, 2002), arguing
that the end of the seventeenth century witnessed a widespread shift from conventionally
‘masculine’ to ‘feminine’ models of heroism.

Earth, / He then may revel quietly’62 – or, indeed, since there is sometimes little to
distinguish male from female characters in these pathos-ridden plays, the voice of
the grieving suitor Varanes in Lee’s Theodosius (1680), parting with his star-crossed
beloved:
cold despair begins to freeze my Bosom,
And all my Pow’rs are now resolv’d on Death. . . .
Since ’tis so doom’d, by Fate you must be wedded,
For your own Peace, when I am laid in Earth,
Forget that e’re Varanes had a Being[.]63
Both he and his beloved later commit suicide. These characters’ erotic self-
renunciation, often accompanied by acts or threats of violence against themselves,
has troubled modern critics, who find that the pathos of these plays carries
overtones of voyeurism and sadism; much of the repertory shares a prurient
fascination with female sexuality and victimhood.64 The complex emotional
dynamic of such scenes points to a dramatic form in transition.65 These tragic
heroines’ suffering stirs our indignation against their abusers, often male figures who
recall the ranting warlords of earlier heroic drama and their outmoded ambitions –
the ancestors of Tate’s shrivelled Aeneas. At the same time, audiences were clearly
eager to watch the emotional unravelling of Lee’s Teraminta in Lucius Junius Brutus
(1681), of Otway’s Belvidera in Venice Preserv’d (1682) and, perhaps, of Tate’s Dido:
women who, torn between incompatible loyalties, are conventionally bound to bear
the pain of their genre’s break with its bright heroic past.
Tate’s chorus, with its habit of projecting Dido’s private life onto a wider public
canvas, encourages this response, and is ready to write Dido into history as the
victim of a fatal inner conflict: ‘Great minds against themselves conspire, / And
shun the cure they most desire’ (54–5). Dido’s last word in the opera is ‘fate’, an
unwilling concession to Aeneas’s rhetoric of destiny. And the afterlife of Dido in the
Aeneid – the underworld meeting where, reunited with her first husband, she turns
away from the pleading Aeneas – is suppressed, to be replaced by a fixed memorial
in the world of the living. Cupids are called down to strew Dido’s tomb with roses:
‘Soft and gentle as her heart, / Keep here your watch and never part’ (65–6). Virgil’s
epic myth has extracted its required sacrifice, and Aeneas sails towards his imagined
Roman destiny.
62
Thomas D’Urfey, The Injur’d Princess, or, The Fatal Wager (London, 1682), 31.
63
Nathaniel Lee, Theodosius, or, The Force of Love (London, 1680), 49.
64
Brown, Ends of Empire, 65–6, cites four cultural underpinnings of seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century ‘she-tragedy’: ‘an intense affective engagement with female suffering; a
corollary and explicit interest in the female body and female sexuality; a major change in the
representation of class distinctions, including a transition toward the moralised and bourgeois
forms of the mid-eighteenth century; and . . . a striking and symptomatic leap from suffering
female sexuality to commodification.’
65
Thomas Otway and others preferred to speak of the ‘Noble . . . pleasure’ derived from
compassionate tears, a term that suggests some continuity with the older aristocratic drama
that these plays displaced; see Otway, Preface to Don Carlos, Prince of Spain (London, 1676),
A3v. On ‘noble’ tears and lingering connections between heroic drama and pathetic tragedy,
see Eugene M. Waith, ‘Tears of Magnanimity in Otway and Racine’, in Eugene M. Waith and
Judd D. Hubert, French and English Drama of the Seventeenth Century (Los Angeles, 1972), 1–22.

IV
The reading that I have just sketched suggests that Dido and Aeneas is a tough,
coherent critique of art in the service of power. Virgil’s fiction of divinely mandated
empire is reshaped into a cautionary tale about the costs of such political fictions,
as Dido’s lament marks her tragic absorption into the imperial myth that Augustan
Rome wrote for itself. But this reading is too schematic in its account of the opera
as a response to the cultural politics of the Aeneid. For Dido and Aeneas shows some
anxiety and confusion in its portrayal of female suffering. Elements of Dido’s dying
lament seem to resist the form’s conventional expectations. Unlike the suicidal
Ariadne, Tate’s Dido does not unequivocally wish to die: ‘Darkness shades me . . .
More I would but death invades me’ (III.56–8). Her words carry a strong aura of
ceremonial detachment and reserve, another solemn gesture of turning away from
public view. Both the text and its musical setting create an effect of such distilled
purity, such patient, formal elegance, as to convey an emotional experience serenely
remote from any human context, deeply intimate but also elusive and mysterious in
its terms. From this perspective, Dido’s divided sentiment – remember, but forget
– continues to separate an inner ‘me’ from the imperial ‘fate’ that binds her to
Aeneas. Apparently trying to have it both ways, Tate both exposes and conceals
Dido’s torment, both embraces and attacks Virgil’s account of her tragic victim-
hood.
We can blame much of this confusion on Tate’s ambivalence towards his source
material. He seems to have been sympathetic towards the chaste Dido tradition, and
inclined to take Dido’s side against Virgil’s partisan mythology, but he was unable
or unwilling to forego the emotional impact of Dido’s lingering death. The result is
an effort at once to retain Dido’s famous scene of lamentation but to try to frame
it as a critique of Virgil’s exploitation of the legendary queen. Tate’s mixed feelings
about the Dido legend probably account for its striking absence from his A Present
for the Ladies (1692), a rambling tract in defence of women that has received little
attention from students of the opera. In a suggestive essay on the opera’s Ovidian
and anti-Virgilian strains, Wendy Heller has argued that Tate ‘had no need to
include Dido in A Present for the Ladies because he had already amply defended her
in the opera Dido and Aeneas, adorning her with far more eloquent praise than she
might have garnered from a passing reference in an admittedly minor publication’.66
Yet the singular absence of Dido from this volume – a book devoted to rescuing
the good name of womankind from libellous male poets and historians – is
puzzling. The chaste historical Dido appears nowhere in the ‘whole Annals of Greece
and Rome’ which Tate calls forth to vindicate the ladies, nor in his ‘Army of Ladies
at sundry times, Famous for Conjugal Affection and Fidelity’, nor in his list of
capable women rulers. Nor is Dido mentioned when Tate rails against ‘the
Ingratitude of Heroes’, a subject that ‘more than half furnisht Ovid with Subjects for

66
Wendy Heller, ‘ “A Present for the Ladies”: Ovid, Montaigne, and the Redemption of Purcell’s
Dido’, Music and Letters, 84 (2003), 196. Heller’s essay, which I encountered at a late stage in
writing this study, overlaps with mine in its concern for the opera’s debt to a ‘chaste Dido’
tradition, although our conclusions differ about Tate’s principal sources and motives.

his Epistles’.67 His refusal to include his own most prominent literary heroine in this
defence of women suggests real misgivings about Dido’s place in Restoration
culture and in his own art. There is, however, a hint of Tate’s earlier preoccupations
when he chooses to praise, among other virtuous attributes, the ‘Heroical Quality’
of female ‘Secrecy’.68 His praise for secretive self-restraint recalls both the shrinking,
reticent heroine of Dido and Aeneas and the frustrating opacity of Tate’s own political
views in the 1680s.
Tate was not alone in finding something startlingly invasive in the scene of Dido’s
mourning. Among the Aeneid’s most popular Restoration recensions was a
widespread vogue for Virgilian parody and burlesque.69 A Tory poem by one ‘W.
B.’, for example, chided Virgil’s Aeneas for using the gods’ marching orders to
justify his treachery: a divine mandate, he complains, is just an excuse for Aeneas to
establish his own political authority – so convenient an excuse, indeed, that the
English Commonwealth regime had used it too.70 As we would by now expect, the
writer links that false authority with Virgil’s libel of the historical Dido, ‘Chast Queen
to be abus’d by story, / Virgil’s infamy, as Virgil’s glory’ (27–8). But the poem’s next
move is an unexpected one, for this was a dedicatory poem introducing Charles
Cotton’s mock-translation of the Aeneid, Book IV, frequently reprinted after its
initial publication in 1665. Cotton’s pastiche, W. B. explains, will happily embrace
Virgil’s spirit of libellous fiction-making: ‘But let’s proceed (though all must know
it / A story false) along with Poet’ (29–30). Taking Virgil’s lies as their precedent,
burlesques like Cotton’s revelled in exposing Dido’s inner life to vulgar public
scrutiny.
Written in a childlike register of scatology and bawdry, Cotton’s Scarronides strips
the Dido story of its mythical weight and stresses the biological facts on the ground.
Of the infamous tryst of Dido and Aeneas in the cave, we are told,
The Cave so darksome was, that I do
Think Joan had been as good as Dido:
But so it was, in that hole they
Grew intimate as one may say[.]
(437–40)

67
Nahum Tate, A Present for the Ladies: Being an Historical Account of Several Illustrious Persons of the
Female Sex (London, 1692), 25, 59, A3r.
68
Tate, A Present for the Ladies, A4v.
69
On Virgilian travesty in the seventeenth century, see Paul Scarron, Le Virgile Travesti, ed. Jean
Serroy (Paris, 1988), 1–23, and Hartle, ‘ “Lawrels for the Conquered” ’, 127–46. Of the many
English travesties – including Charles Cotton’s Scarronides (1664–7), R. M.’s Scarronides (1665),
Maurice Atkins’s Cataplus (1667), John Phillips’s Maronides (1672–3), and John Smyth’s
Scarronides (1692) – Cotton’s version was both the best and the most popular.
70
Of the arrival of Mercury in Book IV to order Aeneas to Rome, he notes: ‘By Revelating Spirits
thus we see / Obtained was the Fourth Monarchy: / Harrison and Vane ventured a lift / By the
same Spirit for a Fift.’ A. I. Dust, ed., Charles Cotton’s Works, 1663–1665: Critical Editions of The
Valiant Knight and Scarronides (New York, 1992), 165. Subsequent quotations are from this
edition and are cited parenthetically in the text by line number. This example should make
clear that attacks on Virgilian historiography were not limited to the Whigs; Cotton himself
was a lifelong supporter of the Stuarts.

The glib euphemism of the last line, teasingly drawn over a prurient sexual pun,
renders absurd any effort to dignify this act of anonymous copulation. Cotton’s
poem enthusiastically replaces the chaste Dido of history with her polar opposite,
a sexually voracious anti-heroine whose passion for Aeneas is frankly centred on his
‘weapon, / For which she did so scald and burn / That none but he could serve her
turn’ (6–8). The narrator’s tasteless exposure of her body, forcing its most private
aspects into open view, suggests a parody of Virgil’s own exploitative treatment of
Dido. Refusing to collude with Virgil in mourning his tragic heroine, Cotton
pointedly trains a cold public gaze on her emotional life and vulgarises it beyond
recognition.
There is some evidence connecting Cotton with Tate; he owned a copy of Tate’s
first volume of poetry, and their mutual friends included Dryden and the poet
Thomas Flatman.71 Some points of contact can be found, too, between Cotton’s
bawdily sceptical treatment of the Dido story and the Act III sailors’ scene in Tate’s
opera, a scene that has puzzled critics with its jocular, cynical tone. The Trojans
offer a coldly comic foil to Aeneas’s mournful leave-taking:
Come away, fellow sailors, your anchors be weighing,
Time and tide will admit no delaying.
Take a bouze short leave of your nymphs on the shore,
And silence their mourning
With vows of returning,
But never intending to visit them more.
(III.1–6)
As in Cotton’s parody, the intimate circle of Aeneas’s relationship with Dido is
thrown open, its contours rendered rough and crude by its new public frame. Dido
and Aeneas become, like Cotton’s hero and heroine, mere Jacks and Joans, playing
out an immemorial romantic endgame which makes the story’s high epic ambitions
lurch into parody. It is as if Tate cannot fully commit himself to a tragic perspective
on Dido’s fatal affair; scenes of brooding pathos jostle uncomfortably against glib,
comic sequences like this one. The unevenness of the opera’s tone leaves us finally
unsure how to react to Dido’s bathetic ‘crocodile’ metaphor, or to the infamous ‘Ho
ho ho’ of the witches. This odd tonal mixture has made it possible for Andrew
Pinnock to read the opera as a Cottonesque comic burlesque in its own right.72
What, then, are we to conclude about the cultural politics of Dido and Aeneas?
Earlier I noted that the politics of Restoration culture involves at least two elements:
first, the colonising of the aesthetic sphere by partisan political interests; but also,
in a looser sense, the shifting network of alliances and rivalries that formed among
artists, patrons and theatre personnel as they sought a home for this period’s shaky
new dramatic forms, including the experimental court operas of the 1680s. Teasing
apart these two elements, I suggest that Tate found himself torn between the

71
Spencer, Nahum Tate, 23.
72
Andrew Pinnock, ‘Book IV in Plain Brown Wrappers: Translations and Travesties of Dido’, in
A Woman Scorn’d: Responses to the Dido Myth, ed. Michael Burden (London, 1998), 249–71, an
essay to which I am indebted for my reading of Act III.

imperatives of politics and those of culture. He takes polemical aim at Virgil’s

Augustan fiction, where the impassioned suicide of Dido confirms the danger that
she poses to Aeneas and his Roman future. Her violent unreason seems to justify
the anti-feminist gender politics of the Aeneid, its hero constantly forced to protect
his patrilineal inheritance against the assaults of wrathful females both mortal and
divine. Tate recasts Dido’s lament as a kind of ideological trap, a manipulative
spectacle forced upon the heroine in the name of Virgil’s masculinist, absolutist and
imperial myth. At the same time, pioneering one of the first tragic operas in English,
Tate joined a theatrical trend towards bourgeois ‘she-tragedy’ and its fascination
with distressed women, new champions for an age that alternately lamented and
took pride in its own anti-heroism. A final lament for his lovelorn heroine was to
form the structural and emotional climax of Tate’s new generic form, already
modelled in English by Blow’s Venus and Adonis and in French by Perrin’s Ariane and
other imported London operas of the 1670s. Together, Tate and Purcell may even
have been searching for a space within Restoration opera where passionate feeling
might speak authentically to the heart, remote from the historical contingencies of
the moment, and without choosing to confront the ideological implications of
feminine victimisation and mourning.
Drawn throughout his career to the figure of Dido, Tate seems, however, to have
been aware that in staging the death of Virgil’s maligned anti-heroine, he did not just
expose and undermine the epic’s political myths, but shared a kind of complicity
with them. Like the theatrical laments for female voices which had by now become
continental opera’s stock in trade, Dido’s lament aestheticised her torment and
traded in female suffering – calling up responses like this one from an English
commentator who praised an Ariadne lament written some decades earlier by Henry
Lawes: ‘Thy Ariadne’s Grief’s so fitly shown / As bring’s us Pleasure from her saddest
Groan’.73 Although Tate opted to give his Dido a quiet, mysterious love-death rather
than a violent suicide – another sign of his desire to have things both ways – her
lament nonetheless threatened to reinforce the central stigma attached to Virgil’s
Dido, and, later, to opera itself: an association with the exotic, the irrational, the
decadent, the spectacular and the feminine. Tate may not have been able to
articulate these problems for himself. But his fitful efforts to screen Dido’s
emotional life from us, and his occasional lurch towards cynicism and bathos,
suggest that he could not find a stable position inside tragic opera from which to
critique Stuart Augustanism.
On the strict question of topical polemic in Dido and Aeneas, we may therefore
have to settle for a political muddle. In exchange, however, we can both
acknowledge Dido’s inconsistencies and achieve a fuller sense of the place of opera
in English culture during a period acutely conscious of the relationship between art
and ideology. Tate’s handling of the Dido legend suggests his unhappiness with
Virgil’s partisan history. Exploring the dark side of political myth-making, Dido and
Aeneas may well be the work of a disenchanted Tory, impatient with the Augustan

73
Henry Lawes, Ayres and Dialogues, for One, Two, and Three Voices. The First Booke (London, 1653),
[C2r].

absolutism of the Stuarts. Yet efforts to read the opera as a topical commentary on
the royal politics of the 1680s have not so far been able to account for its
uncertainties and mixed messages, its abrupt shifts of tone, its extreme reticence, its
unstable relationship with the Aeneid and with the wronged woman at its centre.
Some of these conflicts, I have suggested, stem from Tate’s own uncertain loyalties,
divided between polemical and affective approaches to his art. It should by now be
clear that early English opera’s politics cannot be assessed in a vacuum. The political
commitments of Dido and Aeneas are enmeshed in a dense matrix of cultural forces
that give shape to its ideology and form: among them, critical debates over the
meaning and legacy of the classical past, shifting models of heroism and of gender
relations, the changing makeup of theatre audiences and the evolution of their
tastes, and the protocols of genre that organised Dido’s relationship with earlier
works and families of works. Our assessment of the opera should take account, in
the fullest sense, of its cultural politics.

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The Cultural Politics of Dido and Aeneas

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The Cultural Politics of Dido and Aeneas

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Cambridge Opera Journal, 21, 1, 1–26  Cambridge University Press, 2009

doi:10.1017/S0954586709990012 First published online 11 November 2009

The cultural politics of Dido and Aeneas

Dido. I languish till my grief is known,

Dryden’s reading, the gods’ intervention in Book IV relieves Aeneas of personal

Fate!’56 In Virgil’s account, Dido is tragically mistaken to doubt the gods’

footnote continued from previous page

imperatives of politics and those of culture. He takes polemical aim at Virgil’s

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Cambridge Opera Journal, 21, 1, 1–26 Cambridge University Press, 2009