The period of western music in which Purcell's and most of Handel's works were composed is characterised above all by the emergence, development and widespread dissemination of opera. Born in Italy at the end of the sixteenth century, this form of theatre music flew the nest of aristocratic courts in the seventeenth and, thanks to the efforts of itinerant companies of actor-musicians, gradually moved into public theatres throughout the peninsula. It also crossed the Alps to Catholic courts in the Empire, initially Vienna and Munich, and examples of opera were taken to the French court by visiting Italians, such as Luigi Rossi and Cavalli. At Versailles a local dialect of the operatic language was later coined by another Italian, Giovanni Battista Lulli, who had settled in Paris in 1646 and became known as Lully.

The reception of opera in England was less straightforward. In the early seventeenth century the strong traditions of spoken drama (often with songs) and court masque militated against the adoption of a further kind of theatre music. During the Commonwealth, theatres were closed, so it was the courtyard of William Davenant's home in London that served as the venue for the performance of his Siege of Rhodes (1656), now regarded as the first all-sung drama in English. But the genre did not take root. After the restoration of the monarchy the musical theatre continued to be dominated by plays with music (in which the amount of music could, nevertheless, be very substantial) and by masques. The situation appears not to have been altered by Blow's all-sung masque Venus and Adonis (c. 1683) or by Purcell's miniature opera Dido and Aeneas (?1684), neither of which received a public performance at the time. There seem to have been several reasons for this lack of interest. Opera was regarded as intrinsically Italian and Catholic, and therefore, in some quarters, suspect. So far as the English were concerned, it was ridiculous for the part of an ancient hero like Alexander the Great to be sung on stage by a castrato at a pitch generally associated with women, and the castration of young male singers was considered an offence against nature.

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.

Modern scholarly editions take years to prepare, and long exposure to the source material usually encourages a measure of respect for it. When expert editors deliver withering critical judgment on a major author, something must be very wrong. Albion and Albanius (the only Dryden libretto designed for musical setting all the way through) ‘probably qualifies for last place among the many kinds of writing Dryden composed for public performance … Today, the preface and postscript hold greater interest than the libretto.’ We draw on the preface and postscript in this chapter, but the libretto itself is a more significant piece of writing than the California editors allow, a genre-stretching literary experiment to which Dryden's late-career triumph with Alexander's Feast can be traced back. So, indirectly, can the runaway success of Dryden's posthumous collaboration with Handel via Alexander's Feast.

Seventeenth-century English writers of words for music had a strong instinctive preference for duple-metre lyrics. Instinct could be overruled, of course: most could and did write triple-metre lyrics in addition (lyrical conformity to triple-metre dance-tune templates was readily achieved); but not enough of these were written to meet composers’ needs. Composers developed ways to bend the duple-metre material with which they were superabundantly supplied into fairly convincing triple-metre shape. We have labelled this ‘parametrical’ word-setting: words of one song to the metrical patterns of another. Here is a famous example:

Though Purcell's setting sounds entirely natural, in fact ‘Fairest Isle’, in triple time, involves a moderately severe parametrical distortion of Dryden's duple metre original. We could have chosen dozens of other examples from the Purcell song repertoire, putting poems by most of the leading poets of the day through this metrical mangle.

Why did the poets not notice a gap in their technical armoury and do something to fill it? Dryden must take much of the blame. A critic and theoretician of enormous influence, his views on the natural capacities of the English language carried great weight.