ey are ridiculously
expensive. Let us not repine and give up hope. Some day that unheard-of
thing an intelligent music publisher may be born into the world, and he
may give Englishmen a trustworthy edition, at a fair price, of the works
of England's greatest musician. Meantime, the reader must do as the
writer did for some years--he must grub and laboriously copy in the
British Museum, buying, when he can, the seventeenth-century edition of
_Dioclesian_ and the eighteenth-century editions of such works as _The
Tempest_ and _The Indian Queen_, and also the _Orpheus Britannicus_. To
penetrate to Purcell's intention, to understand with what skill and
force the intention is carried out, a knowledge of the music alone
hardly suffices. I would not advise anything so terrible as an endeavour
to read the whole of the plays, but at least _Boadicca, The Indian
Queen, The Tempest, The Fairy Queen, Dioclesian_ and _King Arthur_ must
be read; and it is worth while making an effort especially to grasp all
the details of the masques. For themselves, few of the plays are worth
reading; and, unluckily, the best of them have the least significant
music. The others are neither serious plays nor good honest comedy; and
a malicious fate willed that the very versions for which Purcell's aid
was required were the worst of all--what little sense there was in the
bad plays was destroyed when they were made into "operas" or
"entertainments"--spectacular shows. Dryden was the best of the
playwrights he was doomed to work with, and in _King Arthur_ Dryden
forgot about the aim and purpose of high drama, and concocted a
hobgoblin pantomime interlarded with bravado concerning the greatness of
Britain and Britons. _Dioclesian_, the first of Purcell's great theatre
achievements, is even more stupid. The original play was _The
Prophetess_ of Beaumont and Fletcher, straightforward Elizabethan stodge
and fustian: and if Betterton, who chose to maltreat it, was bent on
making the very worst play ever written, it must be conceded that his
success was nearly complete. It gets down to the plane of pure and
sparkling idiocy that the world admires in, say, "The Merry Widow." Yet
the masque afforded him opportunities of which he made splendid use. The
overture is a noble piece of workmanship. There is a Handelian dignity
without any bow-wow or stiffness, and the freshness and freedom are of a
kind that Handel never attained to. Of course, it has no connection with