The age of Purcell and Handel is one of the brightest in the history of music in England. The 350th anniversary of the birth of Henry Purcell and the 250th of the death of George Frideric Handel were marked in 2009 by a number of events, including a conference on the responses of both composers to literary texts. The conference, entitled ‘Purcell, Handel and Literature’, was a joint venture of the Purcell Society and the Handel Institute, in collaboration with the Royal Musical Association, the Departments of Music and Literature at the Open University and the Institutes of Musical Research and of English Studies of the University of London, which hosted the event at Senate House. Most of the papers read at the conference were concerned with settings of secular texts, and most of the compositions discussed, whether dramatic or not, were intended for performance in a theatre. Hence the origin and orientation of this book.

The editors are particularly grateful to the Purcell Society and the Handel Institute for their commitment to the publication of this volume and to Dr Victoria Cooper, without whose encouragement, as Senior Commissioning Editor for the Humanities at Cambridge University Press, the project might never have got off the ground. They also thank both the authors who have allowed their work to be published and those conference speakers whose papers were excluded by the theme of the book. Last but not least, thanks are due to Ashgate Publishing and the British Library Board for permission to reproduce images, to Peter Jones for engraving the music examples, and to everyone at the Press who has assisted in the process of publication.