“An opera of our own”: The Dryden–Purcell <i>King Arthur</i> and the Campaign for a National Tradition of Musical Theater in Early Victorian Britain

Abstract King Arthur (1691) was, in the early Victorian period, recategorized from a “play” by John Dryden to an “opera” by Henry Purcell. The impetus for this came from the Musical Antiquarian Society, led by Edward Taylor (1784–1863), the distinguished Gresham Professor of Music, whose landmark 1843 edition of King Arthur was accompanied by a fiercely polemical and influential introduction. This misleadingly represented Purcell as the champion of a distinctively British musical theater in which independent musical numbers are separated by spoken dialogue, and Dryden, by contrast, as slavishly international and the advocate of all-sung opera. In the narrative that Taylor and his followers constructed, Purcell’s all-sung Dido and Aeneas, nowadays considered the greatest of his theatrical works, was represented as uncharacteristic juvenilia in a foreign style—adhering to Dryden’s principles—with Purcell then making an artistic decision in favor of the English “dramatick opera” with spoken dialogue, of which King Arthur was the supreme example. This nationalist narrative, which rewrote the existing historiography of British musical theater and conferred a new critical respectability on English-language opera with spoken dialogue, was driven by fears that a “true” British tradition of musical theater had been misunderstood and abandoned.