Deidamia is the final operatic collaboration of Handel with the distinguished librettist Paolo Rolli. By the date of its première, 10 January 1741, these sometimes uneasy collaborators had accrued between them several decades’ experience addressing the tastes of British patrons and a wider British public. While Handel's response to British culture has been explored, the possibility that the librettists of his Italian operas might have responded to the literary and theatrical culture of their adoptive home is, perhaps surprisingly, a neglected area of enquiry. Certainly there is scope to examine Deidamia from this angle. In this work Rolli demonstrates considerable invention and openness to experimentation and arguably was stimulated to do so by his immediate – i.e., his British – literary and theatrical environment.
The story of the Grecian hero Achilles, taken (in female disguise) to the isle of Scyros by a mother who was anxious that he should not fight in the Trojan War, would have been familiar to some members of Rolli's and Handel's audience through Sir Robert Howard's translation of Publius Papinius Statius’ Achilleid. Others may have known the story through John Dryden's earthy translation of Ovid, or through John Gay's ballad opera Achilles, which opened on 10 February 1733 at the Covent Garden theatre and enjoyed a certain success. According to Statius, Achilles falls for the beautiful princess Deidamia at first sight and soon becomes her lover. He is discovered by the wily Greek ambassador Ulysses, who has been sent to find him, but manages to wed his pregnant beloved (having enjoyed one night of marital passion) before finally joining his warrior comrades. As the warships set sail, Achilles looks back and sees Deidamia holding their new-born son Pyrrhus in her arms. This episode was a fairly popular topic in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century opera, with Achilles typically assuming the title-role.
The choice of title normally precedes the writing of the libretto, as the principal character in a drama of this period effectively drives the action. Chambers's Cyclopædia of the Arts – of which Rolli owned a copy – confirms this practice, relating it to a required ‘unity’ (consistency) of character:
