The Lively Arts of the London Stage, 1675-1725. Ed. by Kathryn Lowerre

Abstract

What the reader might expect from the title of this book is hard to guess. It comprises thirteen chapters. The first three are devoted to Congreve’s The Judgment of Paris and the music for the 1701 Prize Musick competition composed by John Eccles, Gottfried Finger, Daniel Purcell, and John Weldon. The rest are decidedly disparate in date and subject. References run as early as 1601 and as late as 1800, but most of the chapters are within or close to within the fifty-year span specified in the title. Seven have substantial musical interest; six focus entirely or largely on a single work (including the three on Congreve’s masque); four involve generic issues; one concerns dance; and one focuses on actors in the plays of Nathaniel Lee. Such collections are inevitably mixed bags. Happily, this one contains several decidedly good chapters along with two or three of less interest. The gem in this collection is Olive Baldwin and Thelma Wilson’s ‘The Singers of The Judgment of Paris’. The story of the competition—featuring Weldon’s surprising victory and Finger’s furious departure from England—is ultra familiar, and one might wonder what further needed to be said. The strategy adopted by Baldwin and Wilson is simple but effective: they utilize detailed knowledge of the singers’ skills and repertory to construct a highly plausible analysis of what each composer hoped to achieve. In three of the four cases, the score survives, but does not identify the performers. Eccles worked at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and Congreve names some of his performers in a letter. Purcell and Finger worked at Drury Lane and probably wrote for the company’s singers. The identity of Weldon’s performers is known from receipted bills for a 1702 performance under the auspices of the Duke of Bedford. A degree of speculative uncertainty is unavoidable, but Baldwin and Wilson are scrupulously judicious, and the result is a distinctly better sense of the four versions than we have ever had before. I might point out that the prizes awarded (100, 50, 30, and 20 guineas) were far from inconsiderable. By the multipliers I favour for obtaining rough equivalence in buying power, 100 guineas has anything from £21,000 to £31,500 in value today. At a time when average household income in Britain was about £40 per annum, even the fourth prize was a substantial sum of money.