Wayward Sisters and wayward musicologists – understanding Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas

If you want to understand Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, Barnes and Noble is as good a starting place as any.  Not in the Music section, nor British Studies still less English Literature. In Current Affairs just browse the titles that relate in some way to the theme of the nation-in-danger. Foreigners have long been bemused about and frequently discuss America’s apparent obsessive need for an external enemy/fifth column.  At the same time, while disagreeing over how to confront that enemy, it is difficult to dispute the fact that a threat of sorts exists – after all, the Twin Towers hardly collapsed of their own accord.

Purcell’s England (1659-1695) was no different. Purcell’s contemporaries were told that they faced a powerful, largely unseen but potentially imminent threat to their national values, identity and security.  The threat ultimately emanated from the Devil, whose hostility was manifested through the linked evils of heresy (primarily Roman Catholicism) and witchcraft. Cosmic threat is fundamental to Dido and Aeneas but modern commentators, who live in a mental universe which generally shuns any belief in the reality of objective evil, ignore it completely.  In order to explain Dido and Aeneas in terms a late-seventeenth century audience might have understood, musicologists have written literally dozens of pages trying to find the exact key to unlock its political sub-text but as yet there is no conclusive proof when Dido was composed or for what occasion.  In the process, they have overlooked a major plot point in Nahum Tate’s slim-line version of the story in Virgil’s Aeneid.  Dido Queen of Carthage is attracted to Aeneas, a drop-dead gorgeous refugee Prince of Troy. At the behest of her advisers, Dido overcomes her initial hesitation and accepts his courtship. This enrages a Sorceress and her witches who scheme to destroy the Queen and her realm, promising “to make all Carthage flame”.  While out hunting, the royal lovers are interrupted and scattered by a storm that has been conjured up by the witches.  This enables the spirit of the Sorceress disguised as Mercury, the messenger of the gods, to command Aeneas “by Jove’s command” to fulfill his destiny, leave Carthage for Italy immediately and “ruined Troy restore”. The sailors of Aeneas’s fleet make ready to depart. A somewhat apologetic Aeneas explains to Dido that it’s all over and he has to leave. Dido is not impressed. She orders him away. After remarkably momentary second thoughts (all of 10 bars), Aeneas exits. Dido yields herself to “Death…now a welcome guest”, sings one of the most achingly beautiful laments in the history of western music…… and promptly dies.  Cupids scatter roses on her tomb: a very Baroque ending but one that Hollywood would surely have felt compelled to re-write.

The plot point? Game, set and match to the witches. Dido was first and foremost the victim of deliberate witchcraft. Yet the witches’ role has been treated in a peculiarly cursory fashion by modern commentators almost as if Dido was a pilot for Bewitched. Much weight has been placed on a comment by the Restoration playwright Thomas Shadwell whose 1682 preface to his play “The Lancashire Witches” boasted that “I resolved to make as good an entertainment as I could…which was the reason of my introducing the Witches” and the fact that it allowed the Dorset Garden theatre to show off its stage machinery by depicting them flying around the set.  As a result, by inference, the witches in Dido have been dismissed as “pantomime”, “comic relief” with embarrassed explanations that “educated people no longer credited them with actual powers”.  This of course is to visualize the witches in question as if they had just flown in from a Greenwich Village Halloween Parade.

This is not very convincing. Purcell’s contemporaries held a range of views about witches but very few indeed thought they were funny.  Nor did they merely think witchcraft was a metaphor for Popery - they thought it was its Big Brother. Educated people did not think it was stupid to believe in the reality of witchcraft. Moreover “those who brought malicious prosecutions or enjoyed the power over old women were relatively rare…it was more common to fear witchcraft, and share a sense of dread as suspicion crystallized that a particular set of misfortunes were caused by a witch and a sense of duty that suspected witches should be tried as fairly as current practices allowed and punished if found guilty”.  In the decade Purcell composed Dido, there was no shortage of published legal advice for those who were required to do their duty and prosecute witchcraft in the courts: A Discourse of the Impositions of Witches and Astrologers (1680); Richard Bernard’s Guide to Grand Jurymen (1680, reprinted 1686); and John Keble’s An Assistance to the Justice of the Peace (1683).

In 1682 at the Exeter Assizes, three women from the seaport of Bideford were hanged for witchcraft.  The Lord Chief Justice, Sir Francis North, explained to the Secretary of State Leoline Jenkins that the judges proceeded with capital punishment lest acquittal spark a witch-hunting craze.  His brother Raymond had been one of the two presiding judges: “they were the most old, decrepid, despicable, miserable creatures that ever he saw…the evidence against them was full and fanciful, but their own confessions exceeded it….I found the whole county so fully possessed against them, that tho’ some virtuosi [i.e. chattering-classes] may think those things the effects of confederacy, melancholy, or delusion and that young folks are altogether as quicksighted, as they who are old and infirm, yet we cannot reprieve them without appearing to deny the very being of witches, which, as it is contrary to law, so I think it would be ill for His Majesty’s service for it may have given the faction the occasion to set a foot the old trade of witch finding, which may cost many persons their live, which justice [i.e. execution] will prevent.” North was referring to witch-crazes in Essex in the 1640s which had resulted in over 70 prosecutions and almost as many in Kent the following decade. The 1682 trial executions prevented hysteria even if they did not stop persecution entirely – another woman was sentenced to death in 1685.

The Judges might be concerned to secure the peace of the realm, but so were those who brought the indictments.  The author of the 1693 “collection of modern relations of matter of fact, concerning witches and witchcraft upon the persons of people” explained that it was not intended to “convince the Atheists and Sadducees” who were hopeless cases, but to help others to gain a “better Understanding of the Nature, Power and Operations of these Spirits, of the Means by which they get Advantage against us, and of the Means whereby we may either prevent the same, or be relieved and extricated out of their Power”, an explanation that would be “of no little Use and Benefit to Men”.  Inevitably that author pointed out that the nation’s Christian polity was under threat.  The Devil threatened God’s “Invisible Oeconomy” through “Impure Spirits” who acted as “Rebels and Malefactors against their Lord” just as in the secular world where “there is continued Diligence…by seditious turbulent minded Men to break the Peace of a Kingdom or City, or place”.  The same year – the year of the Salem witch trials - in New York Cotton Mather published “The Wonder of the Invisible World” in which he warned that confusion and dissension over witchcraft was part of Hell’s “War upon a people” requiring a united front to confound “the design of the Devil…to sink that Happy Settlement of Government, wherewith Almighty God has graciously inclined Their Majesties to favour us….”

Mather’s call to unite against the witchcraft menace is the key to its cultural significance in Purcell’s England. The Restoration polity was deeply divided and divisive.  James II’s disastrously inept attempts to favour his Catholic co-religionists to the detriment of the Church of England’s privileged status, laid bare as never before quite how fresh were the wounds sustained during the Civil War and Commonwealth (1642-1660). There was virtually nothing on which the Crown’s subjects could agree – certainly not who should and should not be persecuted on the grounds of their religion.  But as the ultimate anti-religion party, witches, provided the perfect focus for multiple fears, insecurity and loathing, a reminder that however difficult the task of governing the kingdom – and the three realms of England, Scotland and Ireland were very difficult indeed to govern in the period – the ultimate Enemy lay outside, not within.  Highly intelligent contemporaries did not dispute the existence of witchcraft any more than we dispute the existence of terrorism.  For example the philosopher John Locke and novelist Daniel Defoe both wrote tracts whose basic premise was the reality of witchcraft.  Even the skeptical essayist Addison in the Tatler (1709) did not dare to question its existence.  Later in the century, that gold-standard of Enlightened thought, Diderot’s Encyclopedie in its article on Sorcerers warned that “To believe all these stories or reject them absolutely – these are two equally dangerous extremes”. 

Yet for all this, in 1736 the government repealed the English and Scottish witchcraft laws with no pamphlet controversy and very little Parliamentary debate.  The repeal made it illegal to bring any suit or proceeding in any court in Great Britain for witchcraft, sorcery, enchantment, conjuration or for charging another with any such offence.  It was not exactly a rapid change. The last death sentence for witchcraft was in 1685; the last prosecution was in 1717; twenty years later the law itself was dead.  It looks fast on paper but in reality it was the equivalent of a lifetime.  Clearly, at least among the law-making and law-enforcing classes, something had changed.

The change had been signaled by a precipitous decline in prosecutions. Whereas in the Home Counties around London juries brought some 20 indictments a year in the 1660s and 70s, in the 1680s and 90s this dropped to less than ten a year, and hardly any by the turn of the century. The immediate decline in prosecutions owed less to growing skepticism on the part of juries about the existence of witches as to the fact that judges were increasingly rigorous about the rules of evidence required to secure sound convictions.  Of course the public’s appetite to see a good sensational witch trial was undiminished.  In 1701 Sarah Moordike was only saved from Richard Hathaway’s extended campaign against her by the direction of her judges, not Londoners’ sympathy which was clearly with her tormentor. Individual judges proved major impediments. Sir John Holt heard witchcraft prosecutions in 1690, 1693, 1696, 1701 and 7 others – all resulted in acquittals.  The trial of Jane Wenham in March 1712 attracted a media frenzy that left the trial judge Sir John Powell unmoved, allegedly dismissing the more sensational aspects of the prosecution’s case with the pertinent legal observation that in England there was no law against flying.

Educated opinion was diverging from that of ordinary people.  In 1718 the future bishop Francis Hutchinson’s “An historical Essay” drew a distinction between “sober belief” in spirits and “the fantastick doctrines that support the vulgar opinions of witchcraft”.  He explained that “The credulous multitude…will ever be ready to try their tricks, and swim the old women [i.e. subject them to the seventeenth-century’s equivalent of water-boarding], and wonder at and magnify every unaccountable symptom and odd accident”.  Clearly for Hutchinson as for many others among the scientifically literate, the issue of proof was a real one.  He knew that it was an uphill struggle to introduce rationality where the people clung to existing beliefs.  In 1722 he wrote a 200 page defence of his earlier book noting that “These books and narratives [about witches] are in tradesmen’s shops and farmers’ houses, and are read with great eagerness, and are continually leavening the minds of youth, who delight in such subjects; consider some evils these notions bring where they prevail, I hope no man will think but that they must still be combated, oppos’d and kept down”.

The role of opera in fostering this divide between elite and popular responses to witchcraft has yet to be investigated.  This is because historians, with few honourable exceptions, seem to apply a thoroughly twentieth-century sensibility to the role music, treating as a matter of mere entertainment, a diversion from the serious and proper stuff of historical study.  Musicologists for their part, impatient to get down into the weeds of textual appreciation, or at least to scrum down in the mud dissing the views of other scholars, apply what can only be charitably described as the most broad brush descriptions of any genuine historical background to the music they are discussing.  This is to apply a modern understanding of the integrity and independence of artistic enterprise that no Baroque composer would have recognized – certainly not Henry Purcell. The fact that audiences in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries might have been genuinely affected by what they saw appears to have occurred to neither historians nor musicologists.

By contrast, contemporary commentators were worried that theatre audiences might be changed by what they saw and heard on stage – and not for the better.  Arthur Bedford’s catchily titled “Serious Remonstrance In Behalf of the Christian Religion Against the Horrid Blasphemies and Impieties which are still used in the English Play Houses, to the great Dishonour of Almighty God, and Contempt of the Statutes of this Realm. Shewing their plain Tendency to overthrow all Piety, and advance the Interest and Honour of the Devil in the World” addressed just this concern.  One of the many evils of the theatre was to “encourage…Witchcraft and Magick” by representing them on stage…”Such Places and Entertainments as these must be a disservice to our King, our Church, and our Constitution”.  While it was still scandalous to quote scripture directly in any theatrical production, as the early opposition to Handel’s Messiah showed, neither the Lord Chamberlain (the official censor) nor public opinion seemed much concerned by representations of the powers of darkness.  Bedford was quite wrong.  Familiarity bred not emulation but contempt.

It has long been recognized that sorcery was a stock ingredient in Baroque Opera. “Long recognized” and “of no interest” are virtually synonymous but the sheer number of operas in the period that featured the supernatural is worthy of note. Purcell’s Dido is not known to have received a public theatrical performance in the form that we know it but the stage directions at least allowed for the possibility of public performance. Witches, witchcraft and enchantment featured prominently in his subsequent semi-operas King Arthur, Fairy Queen and Dioclesian (the Prophetess). One of the most successful of semi operas in the years after Purcell was George Granville’s The British Enchanters (written 1681, first staged 1706) which featured magic in every scene.  Handel established his reputation as London’s leading opera composer partly through the agency of his magic operas: Rinaldo (1711), Teseo (1712), Amadigi (1715), Orlando (1735) and Alcina (1735).  A similarly large proportion of works by Italian composers included magic and its practitioners in their plots.

Law-makers and law-enforcers who saw on the stage behaviour that still technically carried the death penalty came to see it as a matter of entertainment, no longer a criminal law issue to be enforced.  Not even eighteenth-century audiences could quite take Baroque opera seriously.  As Addison acidly commented when protesting the introduction of Italian opera onto the London stage in 1711, “one scare knows how to be serious in the Confutation of an Absurdity that shews itself at first Sight”.  Moreover the fashionable elite, influenced by their exposure to magic in operas, adopted the language. A lifelong fan, Mrs Pendarves, after witnessing a rehearsal of Alcina, noted “Whilst Mr. Handel is playing his part, I could not help thinking him a necromancer in the midst of his own enchantments”. Opera had both signaled and reinforced a shift in fundamental attitudes:  Dido’s revenge?

© A J Fellows - Big Apple Baroque - New York - August 2009