provided.

In this context it is perhaps illuminating union', whined Ovid from his exile on the far
that the editor himself has fallen into the trap: he side of the Black Sea, concluding from this that
says in his preface that all contributors chose to the Emperor Augustus should not hold Ovid's own
concentrate on the papal court and its main mu- penchant for erotic subjects against him—after all,
sical institution, the choir of the papal chapel. This everyone loves the stuff (Tristia, 535—6). As an
is palpably not true of the final essay here, Jessie argument for recall from exile it failed, but it
Ann Owens's discussion of Palestrina's composi- does suggest that even the generation of Romans
tional methods: none of the manuscript sources on immediately following Virgil was selecting Book IV
which she concentrates are connected with the of the Aeneid as the most emotionally engaging part
Cappella Pontificia (though some do come from of the epic, identifying more with the apparent
its separate sister-institution, the Cappella Giulia in tragedy of the Carthaginian queen than with the
St Peter's). As a result, this contribution seems ultimate triumph of their own founding figure.
somewhat adrift from the main thrust of the book. The fascination with Dido has persisted. Augus-
A long time-lag between the original conference tine's self-castigation for weeping at her death
and the appearance of this book means that this rather than at his own sins is famous (Confessions,
piece has already appeared as the final chapter in 1.13); he also described his own departure to Rome
Owens's very valuable book Composers at Work: thefrom Carthage and from his mother in terms
Craft of Musical Composition, 1450-1600 (New York recognizably like Aeneas' departure from Dido
& Oxford, 1997). The version in the present and her city (Conf. V.8). Andrew Pinnock reminds
volume has been somewhat revised, beefing up us in this volume that, in addition to Dryden's
the section on Palestrina's compositional proced- translation of the entire Aeneid, at least five trans-
ures. Unfortunately there are no facsimile repro- lations of Book IV alone were available to the
ductions associated with her essay here, so that, English reader in the late seventeenth century.
ideally, one needs to refer back to her book to see Pigler's Barockthemen lists 77 paintings of Dido's
Palestrina's autograph alterations (though the death (ii. 314—176), and Sartori's catalogue of
music examples in the book under review are Italian librettos printed before 1800 has 145 entries
certainly well presented). The recent availability for 'Didone' librettos (many of them based on
in facsimile of the autograph Lateran Codex 59 Metastasio's text), which surely makes it one of
means that a further revision will probably be the most popular subjects of early opera (ii, Nos.
needed and will certainly be welcome. Owens 7724 ff.). Whether Virgil got carried away in creat-
builds up a plausible scenario to explain the, ing a character he found more sympathetic than his
admittedly fragmentary, evidence of Palestrina's post-Homeric epic hero, as some have thought, or
autograph corrections. whether, as others think, he was deliberately ques-
Overall, this volume makes an important contri- tioning the imperial programme which Aeneas
bution to the history of the papal chapel, and more: embodied by creating a heroine more attractive
it throws illuminating light into a very wide variety than Augustus' legendary ancestor, the Dido epi-
of corners of music history between 1300 and 1600. sode certainly remains one of the most famous in
The essays are of a uniformly high standard, as is the epic and one of the focal points of discussion.
the editing; and the production by the Clarendon A Woman Scom'd: Responses to the Dido Myth, in
Press is exceptional: the cover, featuring the arms the words of one of the contributors, 'keeps the
of Pope Clement VII Medici, is one of the most game going'. The editor, Michael Burden, has
beautiful I have seen, and the type-faces used, collected ten new essays by scholars from various
especially that for italics, are classics of their kind.
fields which examine the Dido 'myth' (about this
Let us hope that recent changes in Oxford Uni- term, more below). A deft and learned introductory
versity Press's arrangements for the publication of survey by Roger Savage is followed by two groups
music books do not mean that such a book cannot of essays. The first contains 'Interpretations' of
be produced again. Virgil's telling of the story. The second addresses
NOEL O'REGAN 'Reinterpretations', mostly from the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, in spoken drama, opera,
pictorial art and poetry. However, since most of
A Woman Scorn 'd: Responses to the Dido Myth. Ed. by the authors range further afield to material which is
Michael Burden, pp. xiii + 290. (Faber & Faber, chronologically both earlier and later, one gets a
London, 1998, £12.99. ISBN 0-571-17699-2.) sense by reading through the book of the 'Matter of
Dido' (Savage's phrase) from its earliest appear-
'No part of the whole Aeneid is read more than ances down to the twentieth century. In addition,
Aeneas' and Dido's love affair joined in illicit the notes to the essays collectively provide a useful

287
 annotated bibliography on the subject, and the
index is helpful. The period between Macrobius
and Petrarch is mostly not addressed, but the book
makes no claims for itself which cause the hiatus to
be a fault. Gaps in later periods, such as treatments
of Dido by Shakespeare, Metastasio and Berlioz,
are briefly but helpfully covered in Savage's intro-
duction.
I found the volume as a whole of great interest,
but will review the first section on ancient inter-
pretations primarily as an introduction to the early
modern material in the second section. As is the
case in any collection, some essays are stronger
than others; several are quite excellent contribu-
tions to the ongoing discussion which Virgil for all
practical purposes started.
I say 'for all practical purposes' because, despite
this book's subtitle and the drift of Savage's initial
remarks, the Dido story is not a myth in the sense
that it is a traditional tale handed down from
anonymous oral sources about the interaction of
gods and heroes in an earlier time. As this collec-
tion makes clear, it is not even a folk legend, or not
much of it is. It is largely a literary construct based
on the pattern and including personnel of earlier
myths and legends, and the outlines of its devel-
opment can be fairly precisely traced, beginning in
the historiographical sources of the third century
BC. Furthermore, its most engaging version, that of
the passionate and unhappy affair between Dido
and Aeneas, was probably invented by Virgil
himself from material he inherited from Greek
historians and earlier Latin poets. The essays in
the first section engage in various ways with this
invention, its relation to previous sources, and its
meaning for the Aeneid as a whole.
However, this distinction between myth and
literary construct is perhaps academic. If the
Dido story is not genuinely a myth for the
Romans (the Romans arguably did not have
myths anyway, but borrowed them ad libitum
from the Greeks and the Near East), it had
become one for medieval and modern Europe,
which, as the essays in the second section of the
book show, used it for the same purposes of
aetiological explanation, legitimization of power
and social status, artistic decoration and even
humour to which the ancients had put their own
traditional tales. That use, according to the essays
in this volume, nearly always reinforces a male
sense of superiority, even when reference to Dido's
story legitimizes a female sovereign such as
Elizabeth I.
The essays in the first section all address the
problem that Dido presents for the interpretation of
the Aeneid. As has frequently been noted, the
288
episode is much like a tragedy, but the question
is: whose tragedy? If the poem is Aeneas', and a
celebration of Rome and Augustus, should we be
allowed to sympathize so much with the founder of
Rome's great enemy, Carthage? If we are not
supposed to sympathize with Dido, what elements
of the poem discourage us from doing so?
Answers in the scholarship have recently had it
both ways, suggesting that Virgil's voices and
sympathies are multiple. But in the end, choices
have to be made—to paraphrase James Davidson
in the present volume (p. 83), not all possible voices
are equal—and analyses tend either to stress
Aeneas' fault and Dido's tragedy, thereby making
Virgil a political or aesthetic critic of the Augustan
project; or else they fault Dido and emphasize the
lightness of Aeneas' actions which will fulfil destiny
and found the Rome which will ultimately be
Augustan. The four essays in the first section of A
Woman Scorn 'd dance around this tension.
Two contributions may serve to illustrate the
point. For James Davidson ('Domesticating Dido:
History and Historicity') and A. D. Nuttall ('Incon-
stant Dido'), the 'sheer niceness of Dido' and her
Carthaginians is a remarkable aspect of the Aeneid.
Davidson sets out with admirable clarity the tradi-
tion Virgil inherited concerning Carthage, and it is
all negative. Carthaginians, in the eyes of the
Greeks and Romans of the third and second
centuries BC, were duplicitous traders of Eastern
origin who committed atrocities in war and wor-
shipped savage Semitic deities to whom they
sacrificed even their own children. But Virgil's
Carthaginians, observes Davidson (pp. 78—9), 'are
not savages . . . They offer up no human sacrifices
to strange gods . . . [Dido's] gods are recognizably
Roman gods. Her city is a recognizably Roman
city.' The reason for such a move was in part
political: as Virgil wrote the Aeneid, the site of
Carthage was being recolonized at the direction
of Augustus, more than 100 years after Rome had
destroyed her and cursed the ground she lay on.
Virgil deliberately takes Aeneas to Carthage in
order to show that her hostility was an aberration,
not an inherent quality of the place. Dido's final
curse and ritual suicide are a beginning, an aetiol-
ogy for Carthaginian human sacrifice and her
hostility to Rome. Only in the course of Aeneid IV,
and as a result of Dido's actions, does her city
become a place for Aeneas to shun.
Mercury's notorious aphorism, Vanum et muta-
bile semper / femina (IV.569-70), sets Aeneas on his
way from Dido to Rome. It is a bit of standard
sexism which nevertheless seems to play on
Aeneas' worst fears; it is also both reinforced and
denied by the subsequent narrative, as Dido's love
turns to hate but also returns her to consciousness
of her earlier vows to her deceased husband
Sychaeus. In Book VI, when her ghost is
approached by the regretful Aeneas, she refuses
to speak to him but returns faithfully to the ghost
of Sychaeus. Thus, for Nuttall, a tragic conception
of the queen is embedded in Virgil's celebration of
empire. He emphasizes the ways in which Dido's
'niceness' casts shadows over Aeneas' treatment of
her, and concludes that her lapse from her oath to
remain constant to her first husband is temporary.
Of particular interest for this book is Nuttall's
discussion of the pastoral element in the story,
since it is also important for the discussion of the
grove scene in Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, as dis-
cussed by Burden and Pinnock later in the
volume. When Aeneas arrives in Africa after the
storm, his killing of the deer for food is, in terms of
literary convention, a violation of the pastoral
landscape. The violation is repeated in the
famous simile of Dido as wounded deer (Aen.
IV.69ff.) Nuttall suggests that Virgil, by making
Dido a victim of that violation, means us to have
more sympathy for her than for Our Hero. It is not
the city and place that is supposed to have our
sympathy, as Davidson believes, but rather the
woman who rules it.
The essays in the second section, entitled 'Rein-
terpretations: Dido on the Stage (and Elsewhere)',
are more directly concerned with the early modern
background to musical expressions of the Dido
myth. As nearly all the authors in this volume
indicate, there is another, and probably original,
version of Dido's story which reads differently from
that told by Virgil: this is the Shakespearian 'widow
Dido' (The Tempest, II. 1, 73 ff.) who never knew
Aeneas but stayed chastely faithful to her first
husband and committed suicide only when it
looked as if she might have to marry the local
North African chieftain Iarbas. It was a version
known in antiquity, and later ages also recognized
that Virgil had indulged in an anachronism by
putting Aeneas and Dido in the same story, since
Troy fell in the twelfth century BC, while Dido is
supposed to have founded Carthage about 300
years later. Early moderns therefore considered
the 'chaste Dido' a perfectly legitimate alternative
to the Virgilian version, the true story in fact, as
evidenced in Morley's 1554 translation of Pet-
rarch's Trionfi (quoted by Diane Purkiss in this
volume), which speaks of
Not that Dydo that men doth wryte,
That for Eneas wyth death was dyte,
But that noble lady true and juste
For Sychen her joye and hartes luste.
289
More earthily, Tom Brown in 1702 (quoted by
Michael Burden), wrote of a Dido who vigorously
asserts that Virgil lied, and that she 'dyed in bed
with as much decency and resignation as any
woman in the Parish'. It is this version which in
the later European tradition is often asserted
instead of, or in combination with, the Virgilian
version.
The first two essays in the section discuss
representations of the subject in pictorial art and
spoken drama. Jennifer Montagu's 'Ut Poesis Pic-
lura? Dido and the Artists' is a survey of the artistic
treatment of the queen from ancient to modern
times, concentrating principally on the sixteenth,
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Diane Pur-
kiss's 'The Queen on Stage: Marlowe's Dido, Queen
of Carthage and the Representation of Elizabeth I'
addresses the feminist issues which are of course
inherent in the subject of Dido. She analyses three
artistic products of the Elizabethan age: the Siena
or 'Sieve' portrait of Elizabeth I, William Gager's
Latin play Dido, and Dido Queen of Carthage by
Marlowe and Nashe. Purkiss suggests that each
uses the different versions of the Dido legend to
reflect changing attitudes towards Queen Elizabeth
during her reign. In Marlowe and Nashe's play,
the tension between the traditions of the chaste
Dido and the Virgilian queen creates wicked
comedy.
The last three essays in the volume addresses the
subject of opera and so are probably of the most
immediate interest to readers of this journal:
Wendy Heller's '0 Castitd Bugiarda, Cavalli's
Didone and the Question of Chastity', Michael
Burden's 'Great Minds against Themselves Con-
spire: Purcell's Dido as a Conspiracy Theorist',
and Andrew Pinnock's 'Book IV in Plain Brown
Wrappers: Translations and Travesties of Dido'.
Wendy Heller's study of Cavalli's Didone forms a
pair with Purkiss's essay by noting the ways in
which tension between the two versions of the
Dido story could be exploited by male artists to
mediate anxieties about female power. The two
traditions '[resonate] perfectly with the contradic-
tory views about women and female sexuality held
by the first promoters of opera in Venice'. These
early promoters were associated with the now
much discussed intellectual group known as Gli
Incogniti, whose writings on gender roles contem-
plated the fundamental contradiction between
male desire for release and male demands for
female chastity. Heller's claim for Didone is an
ambitious one: that Busenello and Cavalli 'created
a heroine who unwittingly played an important
role in defining the contemporary Venetian views
about civic virtue and female sexuality, and
became the ideal prototype for the treatment of the Arianna and Ottavia seem far more to set the
abandoned woman in opera' (p. 171). In her tone. What is more, Arianna is a 'nice girl',
concluding remarks she writes: 'Didone's passion certainly enough, but Ottavia, who is given her
and the danger of female sexuality and power as wrenching 'Addio Roma' as she leaves for exile in
represented by both Venere and Giunone have L'incoronazione di Poppea is as tainted as the rest of
been subdued by Giove, the ultimate patriarch. the cast. Yet 'Addio Roma' became the model for a
The delirious Didone demonstrates the utter long line of jilted women, including Cavalli's own
incompatibility of female power and passion. As Isifile in Giasone. But Eric Chafe {Monteverdi's Tonal
in the conclusion of Book IV of the Aeneid, she has Language, New York, 1992, pp. 342-8) and Heller
once again been written out of the story' (p. 219). elsewhere (Chastity, Heroism and Allure: Women in the
In between these two statements Heller sets out Opera of Seventeenth Century Venice, Ann Arbor, 1995,
carefully and at length the way in which Busenello pp. 248—85) have suggested that the treatment of
and Cavalli contrasted their treatment of the truly Ottavia's famous laments is also musically anom-
tragic Cassandra and Hecuba in Act I of Didone alous in the text of Poppea and so isolates Ottavia
with the way in which they wrote Didone's part. from the lyricism of Poppea and Nerone. In that
She shows with music examples how the two opera the bad girl gets the lyricism, but Monteverdi
tragic Trojan women are given full-blown lyrical employs the technique of isolating the abandoned
laments, putting us in sympathy with them as woman by means of lament which contrasts music-
victims. In contrast, Didone, 'as a failed emblem ally with the lyricism of others. It is quite possible,
of chastity, object of scorn and parody, . . . not then, that Didone, produced two years before
only loses her birthright as the opera's tragic Poppea, did indeed provide the dramatic template
heroine to other more worthy candidates; she for the treatment of the abandoned woman.
sacrifices her lyrical voice and is all but robbed Finally, I am struck by the way in which Heller's
of the abandoned operatic woman's most valuable conclusions correspond with those of Denis
asset, the power of lament' (p. 176). While she is Feeney, whose essay 'Leaving Dido: Appearance(s)
an object of Aeneas' passion, her lament 'avoids of Mercury and Motivations of Aeneas' ends the
seductive lyricism in favour of an almost catatonic book's first section. Feeney claims that Mercury's
lethargy'. 'Seductive lyricism' is reserved on the declarations to Aeneas in Aeneid IV concerning fate
one hand for Cassandra and Hecuba, lamenting and the will of Jupiter bring Aeneas and the poem
among the ruins of Troy, and on the other for back into line with its real agenda. But Mercury's
satires on female sexuality. Lyric satire is sung by a appearance, with its careless misogyny (see above),
sexy trio of court ladies, and by Iarba, whose is also the locus of unease about the cost of that
maddened love for Didone is a masculine inversion agenda and its attitudes towards those who do not
of the more usual abbandonala. Lyricism is restored fit into it. For Heller, too, the defeat of Didone is
finally to Didone once she has repented of her the successful assertion of the patriarchy of Giove
passion and is on the road to a safe marriage with and the suppression of all forms of female power as
Iarba. According to Incogniti thoughts about embodied in Giunone and Venere. In this respect
female sexuality, women are irrational trouble- Cavalli and Busenello appear to have observed
makers who drive men mad. And so, in Cavalli's Virgil very carefully, despite Busenello's claim in
formulation, beautiful music is only for nice girls. his preface (quoted by Heller) that it is 'permissible
This is a very stimulating and significant essay, for poets not only to alter stories but even history'.
which generated for me a quibble and two observa- An important difference comes, however, with the
tions. First, the quibble. I believe, and the essays in lieto fine. There, if Heller is right, the Venetians do
the first section of this book show, that, while Dido successfully write Didone out of the story in a way
may be suppressed, she is not exactly 'written out that Virgil did not. With her penitence, her mar-
of the story' in the Aeneid. Her curse is fulfilled in riage to Iarba and her reward of lyricism, she is
the action of the last six books of the poem as well made safe in a way that Virgil's Dido never is.
as in history, and her reappearance in Book VI is The last two essays, by Burden and Pinnock, in
anything but reassuring to Aeneas. Within the various ways address Purcell and Tate's Dido and
events of the poem, she is given the last word or, Aeneas. Burden's is a close psychological reading of
rather, a telling refusal to speak to him that denies Dido; Pinnock argues for a more comical approach
closure. in the light of seventeenth-century translations and
Second, Heller's claim that Cavalli's Didone is travesties of Book IV. Both accept recent research
'the ideal prototype for the treatment of the aban- which has suggested that the opera was not origin-
doned woman in opera' would on the face of it ally commissioned for performance at Josias
appear to be an overstatement. Monteverdi's Priest's boarding-school for young ladies, and

290
argue fora more adult reading of the piece. Burden Carthaginian hinterland just before walking on to
works out several suggestions in Roger Savage's the stage in Act II for the grove scene. This is part
essay 'Producing Dido and Aeneas' (Early Music, iv of his argument that Tate's Dido is more neurotic
(1976), 393-406). He sees Dido as a victim of her than virtuous and her actions throughout the opera
own insecurities and lack of trust in her commit- dictated by her own self-destructive inclinations
ment to Aeneas. But Dido is also the victim of her and fantasies.
own neurotic 'conspiracy theories'. Furthermore, But unless we ignore Aeneas's words at the end
the Sorceress and her cohorts are not real per- of Act II, 'One night enjoyed, the next forsook',
sonages so much as expressions of her neurotic Burden's chronology cannot be right. In any case,
fantasies about herself and her court. The darkness it is clear from Aeneas' entry with the boar's head
that shades her at the end is 'the darkness of that he has been hunting, not making love to Dido.
suspicion and distrust', and her death is spiritual I do not deny that the speared boar's head can be a
rather than physical. Because Dido is her own grotesque phallic symbol and the source oi Dido's
victim, both Aeneas and Belinda are exonerated disgust and immediate flight, an interpretation
from causing her tragedy, and Aeneas in particular, accepted by both Burden and Pinnock. Savage
Burden suggests, is not Kerman's 'complete booby' discussed this interpretation in 'Producing Dido
but a character of some substance and honour. and Aeneas' and insisted on its importance ('Rule
Burden then analyses the key structure in Purcell's I for Z)i</o-producers is "Find a good maker of
score to support his reading. Boars' heads." If you can't, do The Seagull instead
Pinnock claims to make 'a novel attack on the . . .'). Pinnock's parallels from travesty make that
Dido libretto (excluding the Prologue) locating it reading even more likely. But if we are to read it
partly (not entirely) in the English travesty tradi- that way, it can just as easily be a reminder for
tion, showing how the interpretative crux that most Dido of something that has happened the previous
determinedly resists "serious" solution yields easily night in reasonably decorous surroundings rather
when a different approach is tried'. He compares than moments before in the bushes. I agree with
five seventeenth-century English translations of the Roger Savage's chronology: the lovemaking takes
cave scene from the Acneid (IV.165ff.) to observe place in the night following the action of Act I; the
that the translators, who 'stuck close to their ori- Sorceress/witch scene at the beginning of Act II
ginal . . . and close to each other', were unanimous marks the passage of the night, arriving at the
in their attitude that Dido's actions were a moral moment when the next day's hunt begins ('The
error, and the pretence of marriage just that—a Queen and he are now in chase'); the grove scene,
pretence. The language chosen nowhere blames the arrival of 'Mercury' and the last act all take
Aeneas. Pinnock then uses W. H. Wendrof's place during that next day ' 'ere the set of sun'.
unpublished dissertation Restoration Classical Tra- This is something of a side-issue, as Pinnock also
vesty: a Study in Literary Taste (Columbia University, suggests (p. 270 n. 26), and I discuss it here only
1982) as a launching-point for an intriguing dis- because Burden is so insistent upon it. The timing
cussion of the deflating and obscene Virgile Traves- does not seriously affect either his or Pinnock's
lie by a 'W.B., Esq.', which, he believes, 'has as argument that the grove scene, with Dido's sudden
much claim to consideration as a source for the interest in the storm and unexplained refusal to
opera libretto as any other [he] has seen cited'. have anything to do with Aeneas, represents her
Whatever the actual influence on Tate, it was own discomfort with what has happened between
'bound to affect' the reception by the audience, them off-stage. The visual and literary images of
'providing a disreputable backdrop against which hunt and violent death (the bending spear, the
Dido and Aeneas was doomed to be acted out' allusions to 'Venus' huntsman' and 'Acteon's fate')
(p. 262). This view of the opera in its turn suggests bear directly on Dido's own error and fate. In this
that the presentation of the witches and the issue of Burden and Pinnock are in agreement. They differ
sex between Dido and Aeneas in the opera are both radically in approach, however. Burden denies that
more comic travesty than serious tragedy. one should bring to the opera preconceptions from
I am apparently less worried than some about Virgil's Aeneid, pointing out that Tate went out of
when Tate's Dido and Aeneas are supposed to have his way to rewrite the events of the plot in ways that
had intercourse, perhaps because I always thought are not Virgilian. This allows one to see Dido much
it was clear enough from the lines of Tate's libretto. more clearly as her own destroyer. Pinnock's whole
But the issue is raised in a significant way by both point, in contrast, is the influence of literary back-
Burden and Pinnock, and so I will interject a brief ground on both author and audience: 'Ellen Harris
word on the subject. Burden believes that the points out, rightly if she's thinking of modern
couple have 'had it off' in the wilds of the audiences, that "the plot [of the opera] has been

291
so distilled [as] to be at times difficult to under-
stand". True: except Tate didn't expect people to
take it in like overproof whiskey, undiluted. Every-
one has memories of other, fuller versions of
Book IV stored away in their heads, memories of
the travesty version probably not the least vivid.'
This leads him to a much more concrete interpreta-
tion of the witches: they are 'introduced fora sound
constructional reason, replacing warring goddesses
Juno and Venus with a supernatural guiding force
which fits neatly within the opera's (episodic)
confines . . . not the least providing a good knock-
about crowd-pleasing diversion. If people laugh at
them in performance—maybe they're meant to.'
I find Burden's psychological study a little too
abstract, and am much persuaded by Pinnock's
arguments. Savage worried in 'Producing Dido and
Aeneas' about turning the grove scene into a
'symbolist jamboree', and Burden drifts in that
direction. I have myself written solemnly about
Purcell's opera, following the line of those who
hear it as a Sophoclean-style tragedy. But after
seeing several productions subsequently, I have
had to conclude that whether we like it or not,
the witches are indeed funny, not so much the
Sorceress, perhaps, but certainly her fellows with
their cheerful malice. And then there is the sailor
and his hornpipe at the beginning of Act III: I do
not deny that he is a low-life expression of the love-
her-and-leave-her actions of their leader Aeneas,
and that this is further emphasized by the immedi-
ate appearance and dance of the witches (just as the
witches echo and pervert the court, according to
Burden). But this is also good fun, a cheerful
entertainment.
I am not sure, though, that despite their differ-
ence in assumptions, that Burden's and Pinnock's
conclusions are mutually exclusive, and with that
they may well agree. We can have entertaining
witches and a psychologically complex and conflict-
ridden central character. That is, after all, what
Shakespeare managed in Macbeth, whose witches
certainly stand behind Tate's, mediated through
Shadwell's Lancashire Witches and Tate's own
Brutus of Alba. Moreover, if the Aeneid has multiple
'voices', its literary offspring may well inherit them.
For the opera is tragic, too, or anyway movingly
sad. However we may have enjoyed the witches
and sailors, it is hard not to be carried away by the
gorgeous pathos of 'When I am laid in earth', just
as it is difficult not to be moved by the initial
agonies of Dido's 'Ah, Belinda, I am pressed with
torment' in Act I, or be set a little on edge by the
second woman's eerie 'Oft she visits this lone
mountain' in Act II. Tate and Purcell, like Cavalli
and Marlowe, wove comic elements in with the
292
tragic. The comedy is directly related to the
tragedy: the witches mirror the court, as I think
Burden rightly argues, and the sailors mirror
Aeneas. We cry a little harder if we have been
laughing the moment before, and in this opera the
comedy feeds the pathos.
To return for a moment to the material in the
first section of this book. An original story reported
by the Greek historiographer Timaeus suggested
that Dido died by her own hand rather than violate
her oath and marry Iarbas. Virgil invented the
version we know best, but, if Davidson is correct
(p. 84), he was already playing with the tension
inherent in the tradition of the blameless Dido who
is, nevertheless, also the ancestress of Hannibal and
of Carthaginians who perform human sacrifice.
The results of this tension, which include the
assertion of Jupiter's will over the life of a woman
who is both a victim of the gods' machinations and
of their misogynistic scorn (Varium et mutabile
semper), have led many—perhaps most these
days—to see in her fate the cost of Rome's destiny
and Augustus' primacy. In this reading, Virgil
challenges Augustus even has he movingly abets
his programme.
The products of the early modern period
described in this volume, then, do not so much
stray from Virgil but explore the tensions which are
already inherent in the Virgilian telling. To apply
the contradiction of the chaste and the fallen Dido
to social issues of the day is to be as faithful as
possible to what Virgil himself did with the story.
For years, in North America anyway, Virgilian
scholarship has been dominated by what has some-
times been called the Harvard school, which em-
phasized the darker aspects of the Aeneid that
seemed to question the whole Augustan project.
In the last ten or so years there has been a swing
back by scholars such as Philip Hardie and Denis
Feeney who, without denying the audibility of the
alternative voices, move towards examining the
pro-Augustan elements which had been played
down for some time. It is interesting that in this
collection the resuscitation of Aeneas, if I may call
it that, occurs not only in some of the contributions
to the first section on the ancient material but also
here and there in the discussions of Virgil's early
modern heirs. I think the balance is a healthy one.
ROBERT C. KETTERER
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