Upon the death of William III in 1702, Queen Anne took the throne without incident.1 Unfortunately, after this smooth transfer of power, strife marked the early years of Anne’s reign: the War of the Spanish Succession raged in Europe, renewed French support for the Jacobite cause threatened the stability of her realm, and partisan factions divided Parliament. To demonstrate support for the new queen and to assuage the fears of the public during difficult times, a series of musical panegyrics appeared on the London stage: Thomas D’Urfey’s The Old Mode and the New (1703), Richard Steele’s The Lying Lover (1704), and Peter Motteux’s Britain’s Happiness (1704), all of which feature songs in praise of Anne. In these entertainments, many of the same rhetorical strategies of praise and celebration found in court odes of this period carried over into a more public context. Even nonelite audience members would have recognized the encomiastic strategies deployed in these entertainments, as court odes were widely disseminated in printed sources. Odes were also performed in concert settings, allowing a broader audience to become conversant with the elaborate sound of monarchical praise. This essay traces the process by which courtly musical and poetic rhetoric circulated in the early eighteenth-century marketplace. As we shall see, during the early years of Anne’s reign, the products of court culture were increasingly available; this was part of a larger trend that commodified and marketed what had previously been available to only a small coterie.
Recent musicological studies demonstrate how direct royal subsidy for music in public settings waned over the course of the late Stuart era.2 Charles II had been intimately involved in the playhouse, shaping content and supplying his court musicians for lavish musical entertainments, such as the operatic revision of The Tempest (1674) performed at Dorset Garden Theatre.3 The symbiosis between the courtly and the public realms was disrupted during James II’s fractious and short reign, but when William and Mary took the throne in 1689, the relationship between the two was reestablished and significantly reconfigured, not by the monarchs themselves but rather by the musicians in their service. As Bruce Wood and Andrew Pinnock have shown, during the 1690s, Henry Purcell used Dorset Garden Theatre as a “job creation agency for members and former members of the Private Music,” using the prestige associated with the court to “sell instruments, sheet music, tutor books and private lessons.”4 Furthermore, there were numerous “gestural or ideational” correspondences between Purcell’s odes and his operas during this period, with musical ideas generally moving from the court ode to the commercial opera.5
After the untimely deaths of Queen Mary and Henry Purcell in 1695, the two London theater companies—the United Company and the company at Lincoln’s Inn Fields—competed with each other to celebrate important milestones in William’s reign.6 For instance, Thomas Dilke included an ode honoring William in his play The City Lady, performed at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1696. The playwright acknowledged that the ode did not fit well within the play, but he was willing to sacrifice dramatic coherence for panegyric musical pleasure:
I very well know that the Ode in the third Act [“Give to the Warrior Loud and Lasting Praise”] seems to be introduc’d something unseasonably. It was made and set long since, in hopes of having it perform’d before the King, at his return from Flanders; and the Music being so finely compos’d by Mr. John Eccles, I was loath it shou’d be wholly lost to the Town.7
In the following year when William signed the peace treaty with Louis XIV at Ryswick, both theater companies offered public celebrations to honor the king. Thomas Morgan and other composers contributed to an entertainment celebrating the peace at Drury Lane, and Jeremiah Clarke set an ode, “Tell the World Great Caesars Come.”8 For Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Eccles provided music for Peter Motteux’s libretto, Europe’s Revels for the Peace (1697), a French-style ballet des nations.9 As with Dilke’s insertion of the ode into The City Lady, the musical celebrations of William as peace broker served multiple purposes: to entertain an audience hungry for music, to prove the loyalty and patriotism of the creators, and, perhaps, to procure future preferment for the playwright and composer.
During William and Mary’s reign some music of the court also began to appear regularly in print.10 Certain publishers specialized in the conveyance of courtly propaganda: one was the aforementioned Motteux, who, after emigrating to England upon the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), became a major force in designing musical entertainments in support of the Williamite cause.11 Starting in 1692, he began publishing New Year’s and birthday odes in The Gentleman’s Journal, his short-lived but influential periodical.12 As Margaret Ezell observed, in this magazine “one can see the process of transforming the mechanics and genres characteristic of earlier coterie literary practice to suit a wider commercial reading public.”13 Motteux’s presentation of the poetic ode with its music was part of the process whereby music intended for a small, bounded audience was transformed into mass culture, the courtly commodified. John Blow also included odes in his self-published collection, Amphion Anglicus (1700) and Henry Purcell’s widow, Frances, followed suit, publishing her husband’s birthday ode for the Duke of Gloucester as well as two birthday odes for Queen Mary in the second book of Orpheus Britannicus (1702).
By the accession of Queen Anne in 1702, there had already been a long-standing precedent for blurring the lines between courtly and public entertainments; indeed, during Anne’s reign, the dissemination of courtly cultural products to a broader public only increased.14 Yet this claim directly contradicts recent narratives of late Stuart culture; R. O. Bucholz has argued that Anne attempted “to provide a court life that was, in her terms, entertaining, inspiring, and popular, as her uncle’s had been.” Ultimately, she failed, because of economic exigencies, an “antiquated administrative system,” and courtiers more interested in individual preferment than court culture. According to this line of argument, the center of artistic life had shifted irrevocably from the court to the “public theater and concert hall.”15
This tale of courtly artistic decline can also be found in the work of the tremendously influential social theorist Jürgen Habermas. According to Habermas, in England a distinct public sphere emerged after the Glorious Revolution, one in which the “middling sort,” a newly empowered bourgeoisie, enjoyed “rational-critical debate and discussion” in coffee houses and via pamphlets and newspapers.16 Habermas was careful to point out that the public sphere was “coextensive with public authority.”17 However, citing Whig historian G. M. Trevelyn for support, Habermas described a secluded court with diminished artistic influence.18 This notion has proved tremendously persistent.19 Although Habermas may not have intended to create a rigid separation between his public sphere and the court, his work did little to mitigate the impression that one existed.
James Winn, Estelle Murphy, and others have questioned this narrative of courtly marginalization and decline, as they have amply demonstrated the importance of Anne as a generator of culture, both at court and for a wider public.20 In his recent comprehensive study, Winn demonstrated that Anne was an avid and knowledgeable patron of the arts. As Murphy pointed out, during Anne’s reign the performance of New Year’s and birthday odes were regularized and courtly discourses increasingly made their way into the public sphere.21 Viewing this development through a Habermasian lens, we might cynically wonder if the increasingly powerful public sphere co-opted and commodified courtly cultural products, causing them to lose “their aura of extraordinariness” and “their once sacramental character,” as they were “profaned” by the “private people” who could independently determine their meanings.22 Yet, there is little historical evidence to support this assertion. Instead, in the marketplaces of the London stage, the concert room, and print culture, musical paeans to the monarch were valuable and attractive precisely because they were imbued with the aura of royal power.
Following the groundwork laid by Winn and Murphy, we might shape a new model that acknowledges the increased audibility of courtly musical rhetoric as well as the inherent permeability between the courtly and noncourtly spheres. Indeed, we might even question the existence of a Habermasian public sphere at all, instead thinking in terms of overlapping audiences, courtly rhetoric flowing freely into noncourtly discourses.23 Or, as Harold Love has argued, we might consider “the existence of a considerable number of discrete publics and the fact that members of these publics were usually also members of other publics.”24 For the person who first heard an ode at court might hear it again in the theater, finally buying a printed copy for consumption and performance at home.
A common encomiastic language deployed in both courtly and noncourtly musical entertainments allowed the rhetoric of the court to circulate freely among diverse publics. To understand the parameters of the panegyric mode developed for Anne, we must first turn to the texts of court odes, which, despite their artistic poverty, provide an invaluable medium for understanding the symbols and allegorical language associated with the queen between 1702, the time of her accession to the throne, and 1704, when The Lying Lover and Britain’s Happiness were performed.25
Although poets continued to use some rhetorical strategies from odes written for William (in particular the invocation of Phoebus), the ode texts for Anne mostly forged a new path, as language was reshaped to accommodate a female monarch. In his 1703 New Year’s ode, poet laureate Nahum Tate compared Anne (or Anna as she is often styled) to a goddess of spring who inspires rebirth, ushering in a golden age of peace and plenty to England.26 Motteux pursued many of the same themes in his birthday ode from the same year. Anne’s powers transcend those of the natural world, and she is aligned with the wise goddess Pallas Athena, a strategy that had been previously deployed during her coronation, when, during the singing of the coronation anthems, spectators received medals that depicted Anne as Pallas Athena battling a Hydra-like creature.27 In his birthday ode, Motteux also carefully defended Anne’s feminine virtues: while some may “disclaim” a female monarch, Motteux averred that her critics will soon “totter.” Other poets implicitly or explicitly compared Anne with her female predecessor on the throne, Elizabeth I. For example, playwright Thomas D’Urfey’s coronation ode for Anne refers to the Queen as Gloriana and claims that Anne’s reign will equal Eliza’s in glory.28
Table 12.1 Odes for Anne, 1702–1704.
In response to the ongoing English involvement in the War of the Spanish Succession, many of the odes are martial in tone. Anne brings peace, but she uses military might to secure her nation’s interests. For instance, in Tate’s New Year’s ode of 1703, he praised the peace that will come in Anne’s reign (she silences “War’s Angry Voice” after quelling “Oppressors” and awing “Tyrants”). Motteux also celebrated her husband’s position as “Lord High Admiral” of the navy. He is called “England’s Protecting GEORGE, AND / Guardian of the Main.” Motteux used a similar strategy in his 1703 birthday ode for Queen Anne. She only arms herself “to secure the World’s Repose” and deploys military might to secure peace and to “Keep Europe free.”
Given the fraught political circumstances of the time and very real health problems of both Anne and George, these odes were clearly more propaganda than truth. Anne, obese, gout-ridden, and female, was an unlikely candidate for warrior-monarch. George, an asthmatic with little experience in battle, would never be a respected military leader. Anne had tried to persuade her allies to appoint him commander of the forces during the War of the Spanish Succession, but the Dutch preferred the Duke of Marlborough; thus, George had to settle for the largely ceremonial title of “Lord High Admiral.”29 Nevertheless, in song, poetry, and image, a potent alternate reality was crafted, one in which George valiantly protected the seas, and Anne, Pallas-like, ruled with wisdom and might, vanquishing all strife.
The propaganda found in the odes was not simply heard by a lucky few at court; to promote the message about Anne’s glorious new reign, these pieces were sometimes performed in theaters and concert halls. In 1703, either the New Year’s or birthday ode was performed at Lincoln’s Inn Fields while Lincoln’s Inn Fields singers Short, Cook, and Davis performed “Chide the Drowsy Spring” from Eccles’s 1704 birthday ode as part of a benefit for Mr. Short and Mrs. Willis.30 Also in 1704, Daniel Purcell enjoyed a long-delayed first performance of his coronation ode for Anne, Phoebus, Monarch of the Skies, at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane by well-known singers Richard Leveridge, Mrs. Lyndsey, Francis Hughes, and Mrs. Campion.31
Odes also resonated beyond the public theaters and concert halls. They were printed in collections, putting them within the reach of a literate, book-buying public. The public undoubtedly experienced printed odes differently than performed odes. Publishers sometimes printed odes in significantly reduced form, sometimes only including the barest musical outlines, as with D’Urfey’s ode in honor of the queen’s coronation, printed in volume four of the 1706 Wit and Mirth (see figure 12.1): like other songs in Wit and Mirth, only the vocal line and text are given. Some consumers probably silently scanned the words and music or perhaps performed the piece a cappella by themselves or with friends, but if they wanted more information on the ground (allowing for a more elaborate performance), they would have needed to flip back a few pages to The Kings Health, D’Urfey’s celebration of William’s exploits, which had a header identifying the name of the ground used in both pieces: “Farinel’s Grounds.” “Farinel’s Grounds” (a folia by French violinist and composer Michel Farinel) would have been well-known to musically educated consumers of the period, as it circulated in print, and, one must assume, in the aural tradition as a bass line designed for improvisation.32 The musically ambitious consumer would have needed to fit the vocal line and text of the ode to the suggested ground bass—an act of composition or at least substantial arrangement.33
D’Urfey’s ode would have required reconstruction before it was performable with accompaniment, but other song sheets altered the material to make it more accessible for domestic performance (see figure 12.2). This movement, from Nahum Tate and John Eccles’s 1703 New Year’s ode, Hark How the Muses Call Aloud, was printed as part of John Walsh’s serial, The Monthly Mask of Vocal Musick. Practical concerns shaped the publication. Placing “They Call and Bid the Spring Appear” within the “compass of a flute” (recorder) gave purchasers some flexibility in their mode of performance. Also, choruses for this ode were omitted; they would have taken up too many pages.34 Regardless of the musical forces consumers had available, performing these odes for or with like-minded friends could foster a community of belief—about the monarch’s goodness, her benevolent stewardship of the nation, and her ability to foster fear in her foes.
Figure 12.1. Thomas D’Urfey, Mars Now Is Arming in Wit and Mirth: Or Pills to Purge Melancholy, vol. 4 (London: Printed by W. Pearson, 1706), © The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.
Figure 12.2 “They Call and Bid the Spring Appear,” from Hark How the Muses Call Aloud in The SONGS and Symphonys Perform’d before Her MAJESTY at her Palace of St. James, on New=years day . . . Published for February 1703 (London: Printed for and sold by J[ohn] Walsh, 1703), © The British Library Board.
Figure 12.3 John Eccles, While Anna with Victorious Arms in John Eccles, A Collection of Songs for One, Two, and Three Voices (London: Printed for J[ohn] Walsh, [1704]), © The British Library Board.
Sometimes, song-sheet versions of the odes reproduced instrumental parts that stretched the bounds of the typical resources deployed in domestic music-making (see figure 12.3).35 The New Year’s ode for 1704, While Anna with Victorious Arms was printed in Eccles’s 1704 collection of his songs. While Anna served a different purpose than the odes in Wit and Mirth or The Monthly Mask. As mentioned previously, Wit and Mirth included only the vocal line and text. On the other hand, Walsh’s Monthly Mask was a serial, and the publisher was concerned with novelty—putting out the newest songs as quickly as possible so the target audience could play and sing the “hit tunes” at home.36 Eccles’s 1704 collection served yet another purpose. Published by subscription, this volume was expensive (18s.) and lengthy—165 pages not including the introductory material—rendering it unwieldy to use in performance.37 Instead, Eccles’s songbook was intended to be his approved, corrected collected works, an omnibus organized by key. It contains unique versions not found in earlier imprints and pieces never before issued (as is the case with While Anna). Eccles also retained symphonies for violins or flutes, although these resources may have been unavailable to most consumers.38 Because of their lavish presentation, the odes in Eccles’s collection signaled to the consumer the resources brought to bear at the moment of original performance and thereby served as a visual (rather than aural or performative) signifier of the queen’s power. Indeed, strategically displaying a beautifully engraved ode in one’s home, whether or not it was played, demonstrated the owner’s musical and political proclivities, as well as his ability to afford luxury items.39
As the foregoing discussion makes clear, the rhetoric and music of the ode reverberated well beyond the confines of court. Given the fact that odes were available in print and were performed in the theaters, it is not surprising that playwrights who wanted to demonstrate their support for the queen would insert ode-like songs into their plays. Indeed, there is very little difference between the odes performed at court and the songs and entertainments produced to praise the queen in the theaters.
To return to the aforementioned Thomas D’Urfey, a notorious trimmer who had been writing plays since the reign of Charles II: D’Urfey had supported each successive monarch—regardless of their religion or politics—in print and song. By 1703, D’Urfey’s fortunes were waning, but he tried to curry favor with Anne by penning the previously discussed ode in honor of her coronation and praising her in song in his comedy The Old Mode and the New (1703). The plot of The Old Mode and the New also engages with politics: the only virtuous male character in the play is Will Queenlove, a country gentleman and scholar, who is “moderate in Opinion, and pleas’d with the present Reign and Posture of Affairs.”40 The meaning of the name Queenlove, is, of course, abundantly obvious. D’Urfey was not a subtle man.
D’Urfey’s foray into musical encomium occurs in act 2, scene 2 of the play. Musicians entertain Queenlove and his companions with the song “The Infant Blooming Spring,” as they eat dinner. The text of the song, as with the court odes from around the same time, makes mention of the War of the Spanish Succession, comparing Anne to a goddess, who, in partnership with Bellona will defeat the French. D’Urfey also explicitly (and probably deliberately) echoed Tate’s 1703 ode for New Year’s Day. D’Urfey mentioned spring and Phoebus overcoming “the winter shade,” while Tate compared Anne to the goddess of spring, who promotes rebirth in the kingdom.
After two movements, dialogue interrupts the musical performance. Queenlove and his friend Frederick ridicule their companion Major Bombast, who feels slighted because he has not yet received career advancement from the queen. To establish Bombast’s loyalty to the new regime, they cajole him into toasting the queen’s health with them. It is unclear in the play text whether this toast was sung, but consulting other concordant sources makes clear that the first five lines were a continuation of the “The Infant Blooming Spring” (see figure 12.4). As mentioned above, the communal performance of odes in a domestic setting could have promoted or enforced support for the queen—a possibility that D’Urfey dramatized with Queenlove, Frederick, and Bombast’s boozy celebration.
“The Infant Blooming Spring”—like the court odes discussed previously—outlived the moment of original performance, for its patriotic message spread in print. Bernard Lintott published the text of D’Urfey’s play, and although the music has been lost, D’Urfey printed the words to “The Infant Blooming Spring” in his collection Songs Compleat (1719) (see again figure 12.4). Thus, D’Urfey’s celebration of Anne, like the printed odes discussed above, rearticulated the author’s loyalty to the Stuarts and promoted the memory of Anne to those who purchased such wares, even years after her death.
Richard Steele, like D’Urfey, used his play The Lying Lover, a revision of Corneille’s Le menteur (1642) to solidify his position with the new queen. At the time of its writing, Steele, a military officer, had been stationed at the dilapidated Landguard Fort and through a dedication to the Duke of Ormond—then raising a new regiment of dragoons—and his compliments to the queen, he hoped to secure a better position.41 In his preface, Steele specifically appealed to “Her Most Excellent Majesty.” He is pleased that she “has taken the Stage into Her consideration” and anticipated that “by Her gracious Influence on the Muses, Wit will recover from its Apostacy; and that by being encourag’d in the Interests of Virtue, ’twill strip Vice of the gay Habit in which it has too long appear’d.”42 In addition to his appeal to Anne in the preface, Steele further aligned himself with her by including encomiastic music in the final moments of the play, a song “The Rolling Years” performed by singer Richard Leveridge.
Although the music has unfortunately been lost, the text of the song recapitulates many of the themes previously discussed. The first stanza equates Anne with Elizabeth, a monarch who presided over a former “female age” in which “Britain” was “happy.” All the beauty of rural England is subsumed under the queen’s power, and in turn she protects “Their Safety and their Pride.” Although Steele’s praise of Anne is not as well integrated into the plot of the play as D’Urfey’s was (perhaps because Steele revised his play from a preexisting French source), his invocations of the queen’s morality, power over nature, and connection with the glorious English past bookend the entertainment. From his laudatory mention of Anne in his preface to the musical finale in her honor, Steele made clear his allegiance to the new regime. Unfortunately, his panegyrics did not produce the desired effect. The Lying Lover was a failure, and by 1705 a frustrated Steele had left the army to pursue preferment in London.43
Figure 12.4 Comparison between The Old Mode and the New (1703) and Songs Compleat (1719), © The British Library Board.
Although songs and act tunes were commonplace in plays, the 1703–1704 season saw a focused effort to increase musical offerings in London. As Olive Baldwin and Thelma Wilson have discussed, two groups of noblemen sponsored subscription concerts in winter 1703–1704. The Tories organized concerts featuring Margherita de L’Epine, while prominent Whigs supported a series of ten concerts held in the London theaters.44 The Whig concert series featured encomiastic music for Anne, including performances of the aforementioned coronation ode by Daniel Purcell and Motteux’s Britain’s Happiness set by John Weldon and Charles Dieupart. A later concert featured a performance of the same libretto, this time set by Richard Leveridge.
As mentioned previously, Motteux had written texts for court odes and entertainments such as Europe’s Revels (1697), so he had ample experience with encomiums. From the opening of Britain’s Happiness, Motteux used strategies that had worked in his previous endeavors, beginning with martial rhetoric as two officers incite all good Englishmen to fight to save Europe (a clear nod to the ongoing conflict). The soldiers then compare Anne to Eliza of blessed memory and suggest that just as Elizabeth quelled the aggression of Spain and France, so too shall Anne. Instead of praising her husband George (as Tate had done), Motteux celebrated Anne’s own power over the seas: “she can awe the whole World who is Queen of the Main.” Pallas Athena, a goddess Motteux had previously equated with Anne in his 1703 birthday ode, also makes an appearance to reconcile Neptune, threatened by Anne’s nautical powers, to the naturalness of female rule.
Unfortunately, very little music from Britain’s Happiness survives. Three songs by John Weldon appeared in the June 1705 issue of The Monthly Mask of Vocal Musick, while one piece by Leveridge, a setting of the raucous “Just Comeing from Sea,” survives in The Bottle Companions (1709). From an encomiastic perspective, the most interesting surviving piece is Weldon’s setting of “The Welfare of All on Blest Anna Depends.” Weldon carefully deployed melismas on the words Anna, Honour, and Awe to ornament and emphasize Anne’s powers (see figure 12.5). This musical strategy would have been evident even to the most casual listener in the theater, and it certainly makes a visual impact on the page. Indeed, Weldon deployed a technique found in many late-Stuart court odes: emphasizing important words, including the monarch’s name, through ornamental elaboration.45 As with the court odes, the printed song sheet, whether performed or not, provided purchasers the opportunity to prove their loyalty through the consumption of goods.
Figure 12.5 “The Welfare of All on Blest Anna Depends,” in The Monthly Mask of Vocal Musick . . . Publish’d for June (London: Printed for and sold by J[ohn] Walsh and J[ohn] Hare, 1705), © The British Library Board.
During the early years of Anne’s reign, there was considerable cross-fertilization between the court and the public stage, and Londoners were presented with diverse opportunities to demonstrate their political allegiance through the act of consumption. By the turn of the century, many court odes were appearing in print and were performed outside the environs of court, bringing a much wider audience into contact with their musical and rhetorical style. In turn, composers and playwrights used the now-familiar language of the court ode, repurposing it for a theatrical context, deploying it publicly in a careful and calculated attempt to secure preferment with the new regime. In the case of D’Urfey’s play, The Old Mode and the New, praise of the new monarch infiltrates many elements of the play, including the very name of the character Queenlove. On the other hand, Steele’s The Lying Lover takes another approach. Here, the encomiastic design is relegated to the preface and conclusion of the play, perhaps because Steele adapted a French source. Finally, Motteux’s Britain’s Happiness, like Europe’s Revels before it, is a freestanding musical entertainment. Although Neptune sounds a note of discord, the appearance of Pallas Athena, a goddess associated with Anne in her coronation and the 1703 birthday ode, quickly defuses the storminess of the sea god. In all these cases, printed songs and texts ensured a life beyond the initial performance, allowing the message to reverberate beyond the theaters, giving consumers the opportunity to buy (and perhaps even sing) songs in praise of “glorious Anna.”
1. A version of this essay was presented at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies conference, San Antonio, 2012. I thank James Winn for his suggestions, Olive Baldwin and Thelma Wilson for their detailed feedback, and Estelle Murphy for sharing her dissertation with me.
2. Peter Holman provided a comprehensive discussion of the relationship between the court musical establishment and the public stage in Four and Twenty Fiddlers, 331–355. As he observed, “by [the 1690s] the centre of London’s musical life had shifted away from the court, and the theatres no longer relied on the Twenty-four Violins for their orchestras” (p. 355).
3. Ibid., 334. For a broader view of the blurred lines between courtly and public discourses during this period, see Shohet, Reading Masques; Jenkinson, Culture and Politics; and Backschneider, Spectacular Politics, particularly 1–66.
4. Pinnock and Wood, “Come, Ye Sons of Art—Again,” 448.
5. Ibid., 449, 457.
6. For more on the development of the rival companies, see Milhous, Thomas Betterton, 3–77. For a musicological perspective, see Price, Henry Purcell, 16–17.
7. The City Lady, A[3r]. On this play and its music see Eccles, Incidental Music, 105–130.
8. On the entertainments at Drury Lane, see Lowerre, “A ballet des nations for English Audiences,” 420.
9. On Europe’s Revels, see ibid., 419–433.
10. Previously, some court ode texts had been disseminated without music; for example, Robert Veel printed birthday and New Year’s ode texts in New Court-Songs and Poems (1672). For more information, see McGuinness, English Court Odes, 45.
11. On Motteux’s musical/theatrical activities, see Hook, “Motteux and the Classical Masque,” 105–115.
12. On the music in The Gentleman’s Journal, see ibid., 107–109.
13. Ezell, “The ‘Gentleman’s Journal,’” 324.
14. Murphy, “The Fashioning of a Nation,” particularly vol. 1, chapter 4.
15. Bucholz, The Augustan Court, 35.
16. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 32–33.
17. Ibid., 30.
18. Ibid., 32.
19. See, for instance, Brewer, “‘The Most Polite Age and the Most Vicious,’” 342–343: “[In England] culture failed to thrive as an artifact of state power, court intrigue, or religious instruction and understanding.”
20. Winn, Queen Anne; Murphy, “The Fashioning of a Nation”; and Reverand, ed., Queen Anne and the Arts.
21. Murphy, “The Fashioning of a Nation,” vol. 1, chapters 1 and 4.
22. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 36–37.
23. This theory partially recapitulates Gerard Hauser’s notion of dialogic public spheres organized around issues rather than the class identity of the population engaging in the discourse. “A public sphere, then, is a discursive space in which strangers discuss issues they perceive to be of consequence for them and their group” (Hauser, Vernacular Voices, 64).
24. Love, “How Music Created a Public,” 259–260.
25. For recent considerations of ode texts as sources for political information, see Walkling, “Politics, Occasions, and Texts,” 211–216, and Murphy, “The Fashioning of a Nation,” vol. 1, chapter 3.
26. As Olive Baldwin and Thelma Wilson noted in private correspondence, Anne’s birthday was February 6, so her association with the coming spring was understandable.
27. Winn, Queen Anne, 290–291.
28. Anne chose Elizabeth’s motto, Semper Eadem, as her own. See Bucholz, The Augustan Court, 206. For more on Anne’s connection to Elizabeth, see Gregg, Queen Anne, 152.
29. Winn, Queen Anne, 294.
30. Baldwin and Wilson, “Music in the Birthday Celebrations,” 6.
31. For a reprint of the program from this performance, see Baldwin and Wilson, “The Subscription Musick of 1703–04,” 36–39.
32. Benoit and Kocevar, “Farinel,” GMO (accessed May 14, 2013). “Faronells Division on a Ground” was published in The Division-Violin (1685).
33. For similar instances in contemporary manuscripts where players were expected to fit a ground bass to a melody line, see Herissone, “Daniel Henstridge,” this volume.
34. Personal communication with Olive Baldwin and Thelma Wilson. For more on the publication history of this ode, see The Monthly Mask of Vocal Music, 1702–1711, 5–6, 25.
35. On the usual performing forces used in domestic contexts, see Westrup, “Domestic Music under the Stuarts,” 19–53; Forgeng, Daily Life in Stuart England, 179–181; Trillini, The Gaze of the Listener, 33–62. But, as Candace Bailey has recently noted, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, “differences between the contents of amateur and professional manuscripts diminished” (“Blurring the Lines,” 512, 515).
36. Despite the elimination of the choruses, the February 1703 Monthly Mask was still longer and far more costly than usual (1s. 6d.). Baldwin and Wilson suggest that this issue was not successful with the Monthly Mask clientele, as Walsh never again charged more than sixpence. See their edition of The Monthly Mask of Music, 5–6.
37. For the cost of a smaller publication from the same time period, see note 36. The scope of Eccles’s volume is similar to other self-published volumes sold by subscription; see Herissone, “Playford, Purcell, and the Functions of Music Publishing,” 243–290. Composers who self-published such volumes (Purcell, Blow, Eccles), bore the brunt of the cost but retained control over its production (p. 256). Many are dedicated to a noble person (in Eccles’s case, Queen Anne). Herissone suggests that the dedicatee may have contributed funds to support the volume after its production (p. 262). For more on subscription publication and book prices during the period, see Hume, “The Economics of Culture in London,” 487–533. As Hume notes, musical books of all kinds were fantastically expensive; he cites Eccles’s collection as one of the more expensive publications (p. 531). Hume gives the price as 15s.; however, it was advertised as 18s. in The Post Man; see Hunter, Opera and Song Books, 34.
38. Walsh also retained string and flute parts in The Monthly Mask. The upkeep of string instruments would have been prohibitively expensive in most households; see Hume, “The Economics of Culture in London,” 531–532.
39. Murphy has suggested that purchasing large volumes such as Eccles’s Collection served as an “indicator of taste, fashion,” and, given the political content in support of Anne, as a signifier of “political affiliation and loyalty” (“The Fashioning of a Nation,” vol. 1, 249).
40. D’Urfey, The Old Mode and the New, unpaginated dramatis personae.
41. Winton, “Steele, Sir Richard (bap. 1672, d. 1729),” in DNB (accessed May 30, 2013).
42. Steele, The Lying Lover, a2r.
43. Winton, “Steele, Sir Richard.”
44. Baldwin and Wilson, “The Subscription Musick of 1703–04,” 29–44.
45. See, for example, Eccles’s setting of When Anna, reproduced earlier in this essay.
