Queen Anne: Patroness of Arts by James Anderson Winn

Abstract

Reviewed by: Queen Anne: Patroness of Arts by James Anderson Winn David Oakleaf James Anderson Winn. Queen Anne: Patroness of Arts. Oxford: Oxford, 2014. Pp. xxi + 792. $41.95. Scholars in the arts usually approach monarchs through their reflection in the arts or historical events. This handsome study of an underestimated queen tells a familiar story of personal tribulations and public duties with uncommon sympathy and respect, giving the last Stuart to rule England due credit for major accomplishments in peace and war, not least the Act of Union (1707) that joined Scotland with England in the single British nation whose flag is still the Union Jack. Looking at the arts through Anne rather than the reverse, Mr. Winn gives us a life in spectacle, spectacle involving sound as fully as sight. Well trained in music and dance, Anne was a discerning participant; the critic, this book argues, must move easily among different arts to interpret royal performances, birthday odes, coronations, and services of national thanksgiving or mourning in which poetry, dance, visual spectacle, song, and instrumental music collaborate to assert royal authority. Thirty-five black-and-white illustrations, eighteen color plates, and scores for twenty-eight musical examples bolster the text. In a welcome innovation, Mr. Winn and Boston area specialists in early music have produced recordings of his musical examples, some never recorded before, and made them available on a companion website (see p. x). Sometimes, heard melodies are sweeter than those unheard. Spectacles dominate this book. Queen Anne enters it in 1675, a ten-year-old acting with other ladies, including her twelve-year-old sister Mary, in John Crowne's Calisto; or the Chaste Nimph, an extravagantly produced masque framed by professionally performed opera scenes. Since the princesses declaimed in favor of chastity and innocence to a notoriously licentious court, Stuart mythmaking clashed with reality—as it had in the masques of Anne's ill-fated grandfather, Charles I. When the newly crowned James II attended a performance of John Dryden and Luis Grabu's Albion and Albanius (1685), he was again taking refuge in royal myth, this one embodied in "the only full-length, through-sung opera in English publicly presented in London before the eighteenth century." The arts are clearly no more separable from one another than they are from politics. A conspicuous strength of this book, the analysis of musical passages captures grand patterns and nuances. Musical dissonances on peace and love, it is argued, register Henry Purcell's consciousness that the kingdom was far from the harmony celebrated in the psalm he was setting for James II. Elsewhere, Purcell emphasizes Princess Anne's virtues ("Her virtues make all hearts their own") to obscure an awkward text's tactless claim that "[Anne] reigns without a crown," a claim that risked offending William III, with whom Anne had a strained relationship. Mr. Winn is alert to the challenges posed by collaboration when Grabu falls short of Dryden's verse, say, or Jeremiah Clarke deftly treats an awkward poem by Nahum Tate. A versatile cultural critic, he shows brilliantly, can capture sometimes awkward, sometimes splendid negotiations within the spectacles commanded by the Queen. As new arts gained ground, old ones adapted to modern challenges. Mr. Winn is naturally alert to the gradual naturalization in England of Italian style opera. Handel's success [End Page 51] with Rinaldo receives its due, of course, but readers of the Scriblerian may especially relish the account of a Whig project that failed, Addison and Thomas Clayton's Rosamond (1707). Mr. Winn shows why and how Addison merits some of the blame for failure that is usually shouldered disproportionately by Clayton. Unable to grasp the necessary subordination of his words to music, Addison looks as uncharacteristically awkward socially as aesthetically. How else could he inscribe to the Duchess of Marlborough an opera about a conquering hero returning not to his wife but his mistress? If a sympathetic modern like Addison failed to rise to opera's challenge, Scriblerian resistance to it may be less purely philistine than it sometimes seems. Addison's whiggish modernity looks more attractive in Mr. Winn's account of The Campaign (1704), the...