De The Faerie Queene de Spenser à The Fairy Queen de Purcell : échos, transformations, métamorphoses

Abstract

The Fairy Queen by Purcell is an adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Shakespeare, but the librettist (who is supposed to be anonymous) has greatly modified the original play, by suppressing certain scenes, adding new ones and new verses, and by changing the chronology of the dramatic progression. A close analysis of the libretto reveals that the opera seems to have been deeply influenced by the work of Edmund Spenser, whose Faerie Queene gave it its title, but other echoes can also be found in The Mutabilitie Cantos, the Epithalamion and the Prothalamion. The references to the cycle of time recur in the opera as well as in Spenser 's world : the four seasons, the succession of night and day, the birth and death of all things, are examples of such a vision of time. Nature follows that evolution and that perpetual renaissance, and visually displays it ; the elements present on the stage recall those of Spenser, and underline that cyclic vision of the world : arches, porches, bending branches or other elements of the set all concur to give a general impression of circularity. Lastly, some characters strangely remind us of Spenserian ones, such as Cynthia, Bacchus or Juno. They do not appear in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but show once more how much the librettist refers to Spenser throughout the opera. The aim of Purcell and of his librettist is to give an impression of concord, of harmony (both in a musical and literary way), to show the world as a united whole, where everything that dies will be born again and eternally will the pattern of renaissance repeat itself. As those references very often use the same vocabulary as in King Arthur by John Dryden, comparable images and metaphors, and as Spenser ’s poetry sometimes appears as quoted in The Fairy Queen as in King Arthur, we can venture to say that both operas may have been written by the poet. The similarities between the three works seem too close to be mere coincidence.