The cultural politics of Dido and Aeneas

Controversial efforts to find political allegory in Dido and Aeneas (c.1689), the great chamber opera by Nahum Tate and Henry Purcell, have obscured the opera’s broader concern with the politics of culture. As rival political factions claimed ownership of the nation’s cultural heritage, Tate and other dramatists in Restoration England asked searching questions about the relationship between the artist and political authority. Grappling with Virgil’s Aeneid, a central text of Stuart absolutism, Dido and Aeneas explores the workings and the costs of partisan myth-making. The opera joins many other Restoration voices in taking up an ancient ‘chaste Dido’ tradition, which accused Virgil of mangling Dido’s historical reputation in the service of imperial propaganda. Yet Dido does not set forth a topical allegory or a coherent critique of Stuart misrule, but takes an unstable, irresolute attitude towards the cultural legacy of Virgil, the aesthetics of female suffering, and the politics of royal praise.