TY - JOUR
AU - Pinnock,, Andrew
AB - Abstract James A. Winn’s paper ‘A versifying maid of honour: Anne Finch and the libretto for Venus and Adonis’ (Review of English Studies, lix (2008), pp.67–85) presented an array of evidence enabling him to identify Anne Kingsmill (later Anne Finch, ultimately Anne, Countess of Winchilsea) as the likely author of the libretto of Venus and Adonis, an all-sung court entertainment performed before King Charles II probably in 1683. John Blow composed the music. This article—complementing Winn’s—does not dispute his main findings but does examine additional pictorial evidence suggesting that Anne Killigrew also worked on the court’s Venus and Adonis project, producing several paintings on the Venus and Adonis theme and perhaps helping to shape the libretto in some way. Killigrew and Kingsmill were both serving as Maids of Honour to Duchess Mary of Modena at the crucial time. Signs of rivalry rather than untroubled friendship can be detected. With Killigrew included, a clearer picture of the social world from which Venus and Adonis emerged can be discerned—a world in which the authorship concept had vivid meaning (authors knew who they were), while open acknowledgement of authorship could prove problematic. The suggestion that multi-media artworks such as masques and operas of the English Restoration period reward and perhaps deserve multidisciplinary study makes intuitive sense. But the practical difficulty of getting multidisciplinary research findings into print should not be underestimated. Unnamed and under-theorized—except by Robert D. Hume, who coined the term and wrote a book-length manifesto explaining what he meant by it—a cloud of ‘archaeo-historicist’ austerity has gathered over the field in recent years.1 From it thunderbolts can be called down on anyone thought to hold unsound views on the nature of evidence, on permissible uses of evidence or on the cross-border portability of evidence. Evidence readily analysable using methods appropriate to one discipline might not, from other disciplinary perspectives, look like evidence at all. Archaeo-historicists themselves keep the risk of rejection to a minimum by avoiding risk across the board. They give external documentary evidence priority over evidence in every other category. When external documentary evidence ‘is non-existent or manifestly insufficient’ to settle attribution, dating and related contextual questions, according to Hume ‘the best thing to do is admit defeat and retreat to other territory’:2 find some other artwork, about which more can be learned from external documentary sources, and try instead to make sense of that as a text—or text-enabled theatrical experience—to which contemporary readers or spectators could have attached meaning. No one doubts the value of external documentary evidence, doubts its role as the scaffolding of serious history or doubts the effort required to discover more of it in archives, but Hume’s reluctance to allow the existence of any worthwhile middle ground between provable truth and pointless speculation may trouble some.3 Andrew Walkling’s recently published monograph Masque and opera in England, 1656–1688 puts Humean precepts briskly into practice.4 There Nahum Tate and Henry Purcell’s ‘Dido and Aeneas warrants consideration … only as a somewhat peripheral phenomenon whose existence serves as a foil for the evaluation of a corpus of works that are better documented and hence more readily accessible to classification and analysis on the basis of context’.5 Because Venus and Adonis is ‘not known from any court documents or contemporary commentary’ it too ‘is a difficult piece to categorize’, and difficult to analyse on the basis of context.6 Walkling does not want to analyse Venus on any other basis, so he treats it mainly as a case study in the chance survival of court documents and likely disappearance of most of those that once existed. (Dido and Venus, it hardly needs saying, are through-composed highlights of the English masque and early opera repertory, peripheral phenomena only on the narrowest of definitions.) Though court documents and contemporary commentary may be lacking, in other respects Venus and Adonis is remarkably well preserved. Several early manuscript copies of John Blow’s score are extant, made by professional musician copyists with whom Blow was closely connected.7 One copy of the libretto printed for sale to members of the audience watching Venus and Adonis when it was performed at Josias Priest’s Chelsea girls’ school resurfaced in 1988. This had been lightly annotated by its first owner, one of his annotations recording the school performance date: 17 April 1684.8 British Library Add. Ms.22100 (henceforth ‘22100’), ‘the principal manuscript source of Venus and Adonis in its original version’,9 heads the score ‘A Masque for ye Entertainment of ye King’. Annotations in a different hand identify two performers: Mary Davis, one of Charles II’s mistresses (a successful professional actress earlier in her career), and Lady Mary Tudor, Davis’s daughter by Charles II. I shall have more to say about Mary Davis and Lady Mary Tudor later. 22100 is a bound volume containing 31 pieces by a selection of composers, elegantly and accurately copied by John Walter, organist of Eton College. Binding preceded copying: sometimes Walter shut the book before just-applied ink had dried, offsets from one page to another resulting. The order in which Walter copied pieces into 22100 is therefore not in doubt. He added Venus and Adonis last of all.10 22100 has an ownership inscription: ‘Mr Dolbins book / Anno domini 1682/1’. This, together with the name ‘Mr James Hart’ and a duplicate (undated) inscription ‘Mr Dolbins Booke’, can now be found at the back of the volume: for some reason Walter turned 22100 over and started copying from the ‘wrong’, uninscribed end.11 Mr Dolbin was Gilbert Dolben, almost certainly, a well-connected musical patron in 1680s London. Hart was a bass singer in the Chapel Royal choir, an experienced theatre performer (he had appeared with Mary Davis in the 1675 court masque Calisto), and a former co-proprietor of the Chelsea school that Priest owned and managed from 1680.12 Walter’s reason for copying so much music into Dolben’s book can only be guessed at. Perhaps he charged a fee; perhaps he owed Dolben a favour. Dolben may have given him the book to do what he liked with, not expecting its return. Hart’s role in the selection of repertory for inclusion and the sourcing of copy texts is similarly obscure—if indeed he had one.13 Most scholars from Sir Anthony Lewis in 1949 through to Robert Shay and Robert Thompson in 2000 read the ‘Anno domini 1682/1’ date in Dolben’s book as a loosely specified terminus ad quem, before which all the music copied into it, including Venus and Adonis, must have been composed.14 Bruce Wood was I think the first to suggest that copying started early in (modern) calendar year 1682 and continued for over a year, finishing with Venus and Adonis in ‘mid-1683 or later’.15 This dating issue is important: I shall return to it. Whether Venus was brand new or months or years old when Walter copied it into 22100 is one of the questions on which this article hopes to be able to shed some more light. To its girls’ school audience in April 1684 Venus and Adonis was announced as ‘AN OPERA Perform’d before the KING’. At court, with the king watching and members of his extended royal family taking part, Venus functioned as a masque and was recognized as one. Away from court it did not function as a masque. The Chelsea libretto noted prior performance before the king, rather proudly, but called Venus an opera rather than a masque because its original masque function had lapsed. It seems to me that 22100 and the Chelsea libretto together supply a fair amount of reliable contextual information and do, between them, stake out a manageably narrow chronological search field for scholars hoping to discover more. In my opinion the gains in understanding potentially achievable through close critical engagement with internal evidence recoverable from documents like 22100, the Chelsea libretto and others soon to be introduced far outweigh the risks of error, provided these risks are acknowledged. Internal evidence can be combined with external, and scattered pieces of evidence of both types can be brought tentatively into line without misleading readers, provided that the conjectural links in any resulting chain of inference are marked as such. Signals conventionally used to do this range in obtrusiveness from gentle qualifiers like could/perhaps/probably through to long disclaimers stressing the uncertainty of conclusions reached. Here, for instance, is Peter Holman, discussing Venus and Adonis in Four and twenty fiddlers (1993): as Master of the King’s Music Nicholas Staggins ‘would doubtless have had a hand’ in the court production. Blow’s specifically labelled flute (recorder) parts may have been written for Jacques Paisible and other French woodwind players employed at court, who ‘may have doubled the violins’ on their oboes even though no such arrangement is specified in the score. John Lenton, a member of Charles II’s Twenty-four Violins from 1681, ‘could have played in the first performance’: Lenton’s violin tutor book (published 1694) is full of practice pieces ornamented in the same manner as dance tunes in Venus and Adonis, peppered with the same ornament signs. Holman’s reading of internal evidence and his reasoning by analogy with Calisto, for which full lists of performers’ names have been preserved, led him to conclude that ‘Blow wrote for a group of orchestral size’ (for four-part strings in the main, but with some three-part passages implying a French-inspired grand choeur/petit choeur layout). Many or all of the players known to have served with Charles II’s Twenty-four Violins in the early 1680s, therefore, are likely to have played in the court performance(s) of Venus and Adonis.16 Holman’s suggestion that court instrumentalists were rostered en masse in order to perform a court masque was hardly controversial. Bruce Wood, endorsing most of Holman’s ideas in the Introduction to his 2008 Purcell Society Companion Series edition of Venus and Adonis, added the equally sensible suggestion that men and boys from the Chapel Royal choir presumably took part too.17 Together Holman and Wood pieced together a chain of inference leading from the two performers definitely identified in 22100, Mary Davis and Lady Mary Tudor, to several dozen others probably (but not provably) appearing with them. While editing Venus and Adonis Wood studied all of the musical manuscripts and the printed libretto very closely. Detailed comparison revealed similarities and differences for which Wood tried to account in his Introduction to the edition. There he imputed motives to John Blow and to the various copyists: they wanted to prepare material suitable for use in performance, for instance, needed to prepare that material quickly and efficiently, wanted to make elegant and accurate file copies of Venus as a musical monument worth preserving, wanted to revise Venus for effective performance on occasions subsequent to the one for which it was first designed (retro-fitting it to different casts and different venues).18 Like Holman, Wood built an argument by combining external and internal evidence and he brought scattered pieces of evidence tentatively into line. Had they relied on external documentary evidence alone neither could have built an argument at all. I need to touch briefly on the hypothetico-deductive research technique before finishing this methodological preamble and moving on to the article proper. A hypothetico-deductive enquiry asks: if proposition x were true, where would it be sensible to look for evidence validating proposition x? Much depends on the reasonableness—in particular the historical plausibility—of the hypothesis subjected to test, and on the conscientiousness with which research findings inconsistent with it are reported. Any hypothesis can be ‘proved’ using evidence selected or doctored to deliver that result. Though potential for fraud must be acknowledged, and readers and reviewers need to stay alert to the possibility, I do not consider hypothetico-deductive research to be intrinsically dishonest; nor do I think that evidence generated hypothetico-deductively is by nature of lesser value than evidence acquired by other means. Misuse by political allegory-hunters in the 1980s and 90s brought the hypothetico-deductive method into disrepute,19 but recent attempts to rehabilitate it have met with some success.20 James Winn’s 2008 article ‘A versifying maid of honour’ started with a hypothesis and set out systematically to test it against evidence assembled for the purpose. My work on Venus is greatly indebted to Winn’s. I summarize his arguments here as best I can, but ‘A versifying maid’ should if possible be read or re-read along with this piece.21 According to Winn’s hypothesis, Venus probably originated at the satellite court maintained by Charles II’s younger brother James, Duke of York, and his second wife Maria Beatrice d’Este (‘Mary of Modena’). James and Mary had married in 1673, and Mary sponsored an ambitious cultural programme in which the young women gathered around her participated fully. That programme continued, and continued to involve young women as performers, while the Yorks held court in Brussels (briefly) and then in Edinburgh:22 with some breaks they spent three years in political exile, between March 1679 and late May 1682,23 riding out the anti-Catholic storm with which Charles II was having to deal and for which James’s openly confessed Catholicism was largely responsible. Winn’s hypothesis was not, when he first thought of it, comfortably compatible with the (then) musicological consensus view dating Venus to 1682/1 or ‘about 1682’. Young women living at the ducal court in Edinburgh surely had nothing to do with a masque performed to entertain Charles II hundreds of miles to the south in London, at Windsor or anywhere else on the king’s habitual pleasure circuit. Fortunately Winn and Wood were working on Venus at the same time, and they corresponded. Wood too distrusted 1682/1 or 1682, and thought court production in 1683 more likely. That small displacement was critically important: it allowed the Yorks time to return to London, time for Mary to re-establish her leading position as a London-based cultural patron and time for her to recruit a new cohort of Maids of Honour—more young women with creative flair, ambitious to display it. The move from 1682/1 or 1682 to 1683 changed everything. Two of Mary of Modena’s new Maids of Honour, Anne Kingsmill and Anne Killigrew, wrote poetry that is still read and admired today. Killigrew was also a painter. Because she died in 1685, aged 25, her surviving poems and paintings must be judged as juvenilia or apprentice pieces and not as mature works.24 Kingsmill, by contrast, lived to the age of 59, wrote over 200 poems, and gained hugely in authorial confidence along the way. She wrote most of her poems as Anne Finch (ultimately Anne, Countess of Winchilsea), after marrying Heneage Finch in 1684, but for economy of reference this paper calls her Anne Kingsmill most of the time. Winn noticed that a number of distinctive words, rhymes, images and phrases found in the Venus and Adonis libretto also occur in poems definitely written by Kingsmill, and in one poem possibly written by Kingsmill, but published under the name of a male relative for what Winn suggests were strategic reasons. Indeed, Kingsmill emerged from Winn’s attribution study both as the likely author of the libretto and, crucially, as someone who would not have wanted her identity revealed had she been its author. Winn did not consider Kingsmill’s candidacy in isolation: ‘Circumstantial arguments do not eliminate Killigrew as a candidate’, Winn accepted, ‘nor do they rule out a collaboration’ between Kingsmill and Killigrew.25 But with so few Killigrew poems surviving (33 at most), scope for comparative literary argument prioritizing Killigrew over Kingsmill was non-existent. At the time Winn published his article in 2008, connections linking two or perhaps three of Killigrew’s paintings with Venus and Adonis the court masque were unsuspected. Venus attired by the Graces, extant but still in private hands, was known to scholars mainly through published black and white reproductions doing it much less than justice (illus.1).26Venus and Adonis and Satyr playing upon a pipe had both been lost. An early 18th-century Bernard Lens engraving of Venus and Adonis was known to exist, but it had not been studied or reproduced.27 1 View largeDownload slide Anne Killigrew, Venus attired by the Graces, as reproduced in The Burlington Magazine, December 1915. The painting’s then owner was a ‘Mr Stenhouse, Sandgate Road, Folkestone’. The Isaac Beckett mezzotint engraving based on Killigrew’s self-portrait is also reproduced; this served as frontispiece to her memorial collection of Poems (1686), and was separately available to print collectors for decades following (photograph by Andrew Stewart) 1 View largeDownload slide Anne Killigrew, Venus attired by the Graces, as reproduced in The Burlington Magazine, December 1915. The painting’s then owner was a ‘Mr Stenhouse, Sandgate Road, Folkestone’. The Isaac Beckett mezzotint engraving based on Killigrew’s self-portrait is also reproduced; this served as frontispiece to her memorial collection of Poems (1686), and was separately available to print collectors for decades following (photograph by Andrew Stewart) In 2012 Venus attired by the Graces came onto the market. Art dealer Philip Mould arranged its sale to Falmouth Art Gallery and had the painting expertly conserved while it was in his hands. ‘The naked figure of Venus had been over-painted with a yellow drape, probably in the early nineteenth century. This prudish addition has now been removed.’28 Conservation changed the look of the picture (illus.2). Falmouth Art Gallery publicized its new acquisition vigorously and made full-colour images of it accessible online. Margaret Ezell included a colour reproduction of Venus attired in her 2013 edition of Killigrew’s poems, and James Winn included a colour reproduction in his 2014 book Queen Anne: patroness of arts.29 Ezell and Winn had swapped notes on Venus attired, Winn sharing and Ezell noting his suggestion that the three Graces shown dressing Venus could be portraits of real Maids of Honour.30 2 View largeDownload slide Anne Killigrew, Venus attired by the Graces (oil on canvas, c.1684?) (Image © Falmouth Art Gallery) 2 View largeDownload slide Anne Killigrew, Venus attired by the Graces (oil on canvas, c.1684?) (Image © Falmouth Art Gallery) Carol Barash, in her ground-breaking book English women’s poetry, 1649–1714 (1996), looking at a photograph of Venus attired by the Graces before its restoration—not at the naked figure of Venus therefore, but at Venus decorously draped—saw ‘[a] painting which seems to depict court life indirectly … [in which] both the community and the hierarchy among court women are shown’.31 Barash cited Aphra Behn’s A Pindarick poem on the coronation (1685) to support a claim that ‘Mary of Modena was often portrayed as Venus’, but she did not compare Behn’s poem directly with Killigrew’s painting.32 In 2014 Winn did compare the poem with the painting. Behn describes and Killigrew depicts substantially the same scene, one ‘much loved by baroque painters’. The scene would have ‘had special resonance in [Mary of Modena’s] court’ if Venus and Adonis the masque originated there, because Venus and Adonis the masque turned it into a fairly lengthy singing-and-dancing production number. Winn made all these connections without speculating as to how they might have come about.33 The removal of Venus’s prudish drape during conservation is another small but significant perspective change. We now have two naked Venus paintings by Killigrew to consider, Venus attired and Venus and Adonis, both representing identifiable scenes in Venus and Adonis the masque. The scenes are identifiable thanks to stage directions preserved in manuscript music sources and in the Chelsea libretto: these describe or prescribe actions closely matching those performed by Killigrew’s painted characters. (The matches are not exact and given the incompleteness of the stage directions we should not expect them to be so.) Venus and Adonis the masque dramatizes aspects of court life, to be sure. And because Killigrew’s Venus attired and Venus and Adonis depict scenes in the masque, they do indeed depict aspects of court life indirectly. But no one in the 1680s would have recognized either of the Killigrew Venuses as a formal allegorical portrayal of Mary of Modena or of any other woman of high prestige.34 When real queens were cast in the role of Venus they played it fully clothed. Venus in Venus attired has golden hair (this would not have been obvious to Barash in 1996, looking at a monochrome photo), whereas Mary of Modena’s was jet black—the ‘Ebon Hair’ and ‘flowing jetty curles’ of Behn’s Pindarick poem. Venus attired and Venus and Adonis both manage to compress several minutes of masque business into a single image, conflating actions described in several successive stage directions in order to achieve this. The paintings are openly erotic. They are not in every respect realistic. Killigrew returns most of the masque characters to their proper Arcadian states of dress or undress; Cupid flies without the aid of ropes. Killigrew’s decision to keep the Graces fully clothed lends support to Winn’s suggestion that real Maids of Honour were their models. Like poems, paintings of course have to be ‘read’ or interpreted. Early Music’s generous policy on illustrations allows me to reproduce all the visual and textual evidence so that readers can see it for themselves. To begin with Venus attired, its corollary in Venus and Adonis the masque is the ‘Call the Graces’ scene at the end of Act 2: Venus. Call the Graces. Cupid. Come, all ye Graces! ’Tis your duty To keep the magazine of beauty. [40] Venus. ’Tis your duty To keep my magazine of beauty. Enter the Graces. Chorus of the Graces. Mortals below, Cupids above, Sing, sing the praises of the Queen of Love. [45] The world for that bright Beauty dies; Sing, sing the triumphs of her conqu’ring eyes. Hark! hark! ev’n Nature sighs: this joyful night She will beget desire and yield delight. The Graces’ Dance; Gavatt; Sarabrand for the Graces. While the Graces dance, the Cupids dress Venus, one combing her head, another ties a bracelet of pearls round her wrist, etc. A Ground. After the dances the curtain closes upon them.35 In Venus attired Killigrew has Cupid hovering overhead (top right; see illus.2). The Graces have arrived on the scene and now perform their duty, dressing Venus rather minimally. One ties up her hair with a ribbon and may well have combed it first. Another has several strings of beads ready to tie in place, starting with Venus’s left anklet—as shown in the painting—but obviously not intending to stop there. Bracelets and perhaps a necklace were to come next, predictable etceteras for which the stage direction provided. Pearls turned to red beads in Venus attired, I suspect, because these would be easier to see against the light-blue toga worn by the Grace who had them resting on her thigh. In the court production little cupid helpers finished dressing Venus while the Graces performed a suite of dances. The Graces could not do two things at once, and neither could Killigrew represent them doing so. Killigrew’s lost Venus and Adonis (known from the engraving by Bernard Lens, as shown in illus.3) conflates two successive scenes from Act 1 of Venus and Adonis the masque: 3 View largeDownload slide Venus and Adonis; mezzotint engraving by Bernard Lens (1659–1725), after Anne Killigrew (Image © The Trustees of the British Museum) 3 View largeDownload slide Venus and Adonis; mezzotint engraving by Bernard Lens (1659–1725), after Anne Killigrew (Image © The Trustees of the British Museum) ACT 1 The curtain opens and discovers Venus and Adonis sitting together upon a couch, embracing one another. Adonis. Venus! Venus. Adonis! Adonis. Venus! Venus. Adonis! Adonis. Venus! * Venus. Adonis! Adonis. Venus, when shall I Taste soft delights, and on thy bosom lie? Let’s seek the shadiest covert of this grove, And never disappoint expecting love. * Venus. Adonis, thy delightful youth [5] * Is full of beauty and of truth: * With thee the Queen of Love employs * The hours design’d for softer joys. Adonis. My Venus still has something new, Which forces lovers to be true. [10] * Venus. Me my lovely youth shall find * Always tender, ever kind. Hunters’ Music. (They rise from the couch when they hear the music.)36 Here Killigrew presents a frontal view of Venus, sitting on a cloth-draped couch, or perhaps a rock, and embracing Adonis who is standing behind her, a spear in one hand and two dogs’ leads in the other. Cupid, blowing a horn and leading another hound, starts the Hunters’ Music. Adonis has already risen from the couch in response to it; Venus seems reluctant to let him go. As other huntsmen approach—not in the picture but easily imagined—Venus does send Adonis conflicting signals, tempting him with sex (‘I give you freely all delights’ [33]) yet ordering him to join the hunting party (‘No, my shepherd, haste away’ [36]). Killigrew’s Venus and Adonis reflects this tension very successfully. Venus and Adonis exchange names three times at the start. A solo recorder accompanied Venus’s third ‘Adonis!’ in the court production (illus.4). The same recorder returned to support Venus when she made further moves to seduce Adonis, after the Hunters’ Music. It accompanied every line asterisked in the libretto extract above and accompanied these lines a little later: 4 View largeDownload slide John Blow, Venus and Adonis: opening of Act 1 (Version 1, ed. Bruce Wood, Purcell Society Companion Series 2 (London, 2008), p.32; © 2008 The Purcell Society Trust, Reproduced by permission of Stainer & Bell Ltd) 4 View largeDownload slide John Blow, Venus and Adonis: opening of Act 1 (Version 1, ed. Bruce Wood, Purcell Society Companion Series 2 (London, 2008), p.32; © 2008 The Purcell Society Trust, Reproduced by permission of Stainer & Bell Ltd) * [Venus.] My shepherd, will you know the art * By which I keep a conquer’d heart? * I seldom vex a lover’s ears * With business, or with jealous fears; * I give him freely all delights [25] * With pleasant days and easy nights.37 Bruce Wood suspects a private joke hereabouts. He notes ‘the erotic associations of the instrument’, noting too that Mary Davis, who sang Venus in the court production, married recorder-playing Paisible in 1686. The recorder accompaniment was ‘in purely musical terms … an afterthought’: Wood points to ‘clumsy repeated notes’ in some bars and to the ‘awkwardness of its line’ in others. Only the first two bars of recorder accompaniment were originally present in British Library, Add. Ms.31453 (henceforth ‘31453’), the working score of Venus and Adonis that John Walter and several others quickly copied out for use in rehearsals leading up to the masque’s court premiere. Walter went back later to fill in the rest of the recorder accompaniment ‘using a different pen and a different mix of ink’—by which time Blow had decided how it should go. (31453 preceded 22100, as Wood has established.38) The erotic associations of the instrument are visual in origin. For the joke to work properly a recorder needs to be seen on stage in close proximity to Venus. Good pictorial evidence can be produced to suggest that Charles II would have relished the joke, and that it worked in the 1680s exactly as it works today. Benedetto Gennari’s painting A sleeping shepherd discovered by two women—commissioned for furtive display in Charles II’s Whitehall apartamento segreto, and delivered and paid for in 1681—leaves little to the imagination (illus.5). The shepherd’s recorder is accurately rendered. The younger woman has taken hold of it; the older woman ‘points in the direction of the shepherd’s groin’, inviting comparison.39 In an earlier article I cited this painting as the inspiration behind ‘Shepherd, shepherd, leave decoying’ in Dryden and Purcell’s King Arthur, scripted by Dryden in 1684 (though not provided with music or produced in public until 1691); now with permission from the Royal Collection Trust I am able to reproduce it.40 Dryden described King Arthur explicitly as the ‘last Piece of Service’ he performed as Charles II’s Poet Laureate.41 Putting a favourite royal joke on stage was evidently part of that service. 5 View largeDownload slide Benedetto Gennari (1633–1715), A sleeping shepherd discovered by two women (oil on canvas, 1681) (Royal Collection Trust, © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2018) 5 View largeDownload slide Benedetto Gennari (1633–1715), A sleeping shepherd discovered by two women (oil on canvas, 1681) (Royal Collection Trust, © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2018) Killigrew’s painting Satyr playing upon a pipe has disappeared entirely. (Her paintings stayed in the family until 1727, when following the death of her brother Henry they were auctioned off: Satyr playing upon a pipe was listed in the sale catalogue along with Venus attired and Venus and Adonis.42) In Venus attired a satyr carrying a basket of fruit appears to the right of the picture, balancing the fountain on the left: this could be an imaginative touch, but it might perhaps equally imply the presence of one or more costumed satyrs in the court masque’s on-stage cast. Eight dancing satyrs had appeared in Calisto; their costumes (costing £116.10.9 to make) could have been kept for reuse.43 I am not inclined to push this argument too far; still, it seems at least possible that Paisible played his erotic recorder accompaniment in satyr dress, standing next to Mary Davis/Venus and in full view of the court audience.44 If so, it may also be significant that Blow, when revising Venus and Adonis for some subsequent performance—probably not at court, and perhaps for an audience unimpressed by the standards of decency observed at court—slightly reduced the length of time allowed to the solo recorder for (in Wood’s words) ‘twining itself around [Venus’s] sensuous phrases’.45 Killigrew must have learned to paint somehow. Tradition links her with Lely.46 She may have studied with Mary and Charles Beale (a successful artist couple friendly with Lely, long outliving him);47 she may have worked on her own canvases in a properly equipped, professionally staffed studio, where help to finish them would have been available. None of this can be settled for sure. Nevertheless, since she worked in genres thoroughly familiar to her contemporaries, comparisons with the works of other painters can be revealing. Venus and Adonis brought her head to head with Titian, whose painting of the same name was widely distributed and widely admired. (The Titian studio made multiple copies and other artists had copied it subsequently.) In London, Lord Sunderland owned or thought he owned ‘the Venus and Adonis of Titian’: he showed it to John Evelyn during a dinner party in January 1685.48 Evelyn had seen the same picture a few years earlier when in Lord Bristol’s possession. It is now part of the Widener Collection, on display in the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC (illus.6).49 Lely possessed a life-size sketch: ‘Of Titian, Venus and Adonis as big as the Life in manner of a Schiezze [Schizzo]’.50 This was auctioned off along with the rest of his collection in April 1682 (Lely had died in 1680); Thomas Betterton, the actor and theatre manager, bought it for £13.51 Alexander Browne, in London, published John Smith’s mezzotint engraving of the Bristol/Sunderland Venus and Adonis in 1684 (illus.7).52 Smith’s mezzotint mirror-images Titian, putting Venus on the right and Adonis on the left: since Killigrew does the same she may have made some use of the Smith mezzotint as an exemplar, copying parts of it and modifying others.53 Killigrew’s Venus and Adonis would in that case have been painted some time after the court masque production, recalling it and encouraging others, when they viewed the painting, to think back to it. (For tell-tale correspondences between the Titian or Titian/Smith and Killigrew versions of Venus and Adonis, note Adonis’s helmet-like curly hair, the angles at which his hunting dogs are holding their heads, and the strong white stripe on one dog’s nose.) 6 View largeDownload slide Studio of Titian (Tiziano Vecellio, c.1485/90–1576), Venus and Adonis (oil on canvas, c.1560). This painting was in London during the Restoration period, owned by the Earl of Bristol and later by the Earl of Sunderland. (Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC) 6 View largeDownload slide Studio of Titian (Tiziano Vecellio, c.1485/90–1576), Venus and Adonis (oil on canvas, c.1560). This painting was in London during the Restoration period, owned by the Earl of Bristol and later by the Earl of Sunderland. (Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC) 7 View largeDownload slide Venus and Adonis; mezzotint engraving by John Smith (1652–1743), after Titian. Published by Alexander Browne, 1684 (© National Portrait Gallery, London) 7 View largeDownload slide Venus and Adonis; mezzotint engraving by John Smith (1652–1743), after Titian. Published by Alexander Browne, 1684 (© National Portrait Gallery, London) Two differences between Killigrew’s Venus and Adonis and the Titian to which she may have been paying homage—and which set the standard against which hers would be judged in any event—seem to me to be especially significant. Titian’s naked Venus has her back to the viewer; Killigrew shows her from the front. In the Titian, Venus seems solely intent on stopping Adonis leaving for the hunt and Cupid is uninvolved. The Killigrew Venus restrains Adonis much like Titian’s, but here Cupid makes an energetic effort to call him away. Killigrew’s departures from classic Titian, conscious or not, better adapt her version to Charles II’s none-too-subtle taste in erotic art, a taste expertly catered for by Gennari, and cleverly accommodate the most obvious plot-line liberty taken by the masque’s librettist—reinventing Venus as a lover genuinely torn between more sex and a break from it. Venus signals stay; Cupid on behalf of Venus signals go. Killigrew knew her audience and she clearly knew her way around the masque. Killigrew the painter’s demonstrable interest in Venus and Adonis as subjects, and her distinctive treatment of Venus, Adonis and their various attendants when painting them—not so distinctive when masque influences are allowed for—do to my mind increase suspicion that Killigrew the poet had something to do with the writing of the masque libretto. Suspicion prompts hypothetico-deductive action: fresh (by which I mean hitherto un-noticed) evidence may emerge when Killigrew’s poems and the Venus libretto are compared. I attempt this next. The slim volume of Killigrew poems published after her death only included material with which her father and executor Henry, an Anglican divine, wished to see her associated.54 Dryden’s introductory encomium described a ‘Sweet Saint’ who would jump up when the last trumpet sounded, ready to lead everyone else judged worthy of a place in Heaven directly there.55 Her published works have, according to Richard Morton, a ‘firm, evangelical moral tone … clearly distinguishable from the genteel piety of her contemporaries’.56 We are hunting for Venus and Adonis parallels in a far from promising place, therefore, in an edited collection from which poems betraying any interest in the masque’s sexualized subject matter are likely to have been removed. But Killigrew’s moralizing pastoral poems are unintentionally revealing. She cannot warn against temptation and urge readers to resist it without telling them what sorts of temptation lie in wait. In ‘A Pastoral Dialogue’, the second of three poems in the Killigrew collection so titled, Amintor asks the nymph Alinda to explain her coolness towards him: The Gods which did on thee such Charms bestow, Ne’re meant thou should’st to Love have prov’d a Foe, That so Divine a Power thou shouldst defy. [20] Could there a Reason be, I’d ask thee, why?57 He nevertheless admires her ‘Unfeign’d Piety’: Even on thy Beauty thou dost Fetters lay, Least [lest], unawares, it any should betray. Far unlike, sure, to many of thy Sex, [75] Whose Pride it is, the doting World to vex; Spreading their Universal Nets to take Who e’re their artifice can captive make. Alinda, exercising iron self-discipline (fetters applied to herself), does everything she can to dissuade male admirers. Other women lead them on deliberately and indiscriminately. Love’s fetters reappear in Killigrew’s third ‘Pastoral Dialogue’. Here we meet old Melibæus, a poet and philosopher, keen to share his wisdom with anyone who will listen. A small audience gathers, and he delivers a lecture chiefly but not exclusively aimed at the women present: ‘[For] by experience it is daily found, | That Love the softer Sex does sorest wound’ [48–9]. Few men, whatever they promise to begin with, will turn out to be faithful lovers. Expect it not: most, Love their Pastime make, Lightly they Like, and lightly they forsake … [65] A cautionary tale follows, about a too-trusting nymph whose swain abandoned her. Alcander could not help himself: For proud he was, of an Ungovern’d Will, With Love Familiar, but a Stranger still To Faith and Constancy; and did his Heart, Retaining none, expose to ev’ry Dart. [105] Hapless Rodanthe, the Fond Rover, caught, To whom, for Love, with usual Arts he fought … I need not tell the Grief Rodanthe found, [122] How all that should asswage, enrag’d her Wound … In that the World could yield her no Content, [128] But that alone the False Alcander sent. Melibæus points the moral: Remember when you Love, from that same hour Your Peace you put into your Lovers Power … [135] Oh Cruel Fetters! rather wish to feel, [140] On your soft Limbs, the Gauling Weight of Steel; Rather to bloudy Wounds oppose your Breast No Ill, by which the Body can be prest; You will so sensible a Torment find, As Shackles on your captivated Mind. The swain Alcimedon, untouched by Melibæus’s lecture, asks him a question: Old Man, thy frosty Precepts well betray [180] Thy Blood is cold, and that thy Head is grey: Who past the Pleasure Love and Youth can give, To spoyl’t in others, now dost only live. Wouldst thou, indeed, if so thou couldst perswade, The Fair, whose Charms have many Lovers made, Should feel Compassion for no one they wound, But be to all Inexorable found? Others in the audience denounce Alcimedon as a serial philanderer and reel off the names of his previous conquests. The old philosopher urges Alcimedon to mend his ways: Nought adorns Youth like to a Noble Mind, [222] In thee this Union let Amira find. Amira is his latest target. In truth, and as Amira’s nymph-acquaintance Licida suggests in an aside (completing the poem’s only triplet), noble-minded monogamy may not be a state to which either party aspires: Lici[da]. O fear her not! she’l serve him in his kind. [224] The poem ends a few lines later. Melibæus heads home, his moral-educational duty done. Nymphs already persuaded by his arguments have had their faith in the benefits of chaste living reinforced. Amira and Alcimedon ignore him and carry on immorally as before. These lines from Killigrew’s second and third Pastoral Dialogues mesh with the Prologue to Venus and Adonis on a number of levels, and with the opening of the masque’s Act 2. There are verbal parallels: love’s fetters, twice in Killigrew (in two adjoining pastorals) and twice in Venus and Adonis—three times if we add love’s chains to the fetter count: 3rd Shepherd. Cupid, hast thou [Prologue, 27] many found Long in the same fetters bound? Adonis. Yet there is a sort of men Who delight in heavy chains, Upon whom ill usage gains; And they never love till then. [Act 1, 30] Cupid. You place with such delightful care [Act 2, 1] The fetters which your lovers wear … 58 Killigrew’s imperfect wound–found rhyme, used three times in the same Pastoral Dialogue (all three instances are underlined in the extracts above), occurs right at the opening of Venus and Adonis—lines 3 and 4 of the masque’s Prologue: Cupid. Behold my arrows and my bow; And I desire my art to show. No-one’s bosom shall be found, Ere I have done, without a wound … 59 Kingsmill used the same wound–found rhyme at least twice, as Winn remarked, once in a poem ‘Written when I was a Maid of Honour’. Though ‘not uncommon in this period’—Winn searched for wound–found couplets online, and reported his findings—it is, as he says, ‘intriguing to find two Maids of Honour repeatedly using the same rhyme’ in closely analogous contexts.60 Collaboration may be the explanation, or at least awareness of each other’s work, to be expected if they read and perhaps took copies of it. Verbal parallels suggesting a connection between Killigrew’s Pastoral Dialogues and the Venus and Adonis libretto, its Prologue particularly, occur in stretches of text that are also linked thematically.61 The Dialogues deal frankly and disapprovingly with male and female polyamorousness. The Prologue deals just as frankly with the same subject, though it approaches that subject from a different angle, aiming to entertain Charles and his courtiers and not to preach them an unwanted sermon: Cupid. Courtiers, there is no faith in you, You change as often as you can; Your women they continue true [25] But till they see another man.62 Killigrew’s ‘Melibæus’ Dialogue accepts that lustful urges weaken with age (‘Old Man … Thy Blood is cold’). All the more important to fight them when young is its unambiguous message. The masque’s Prologue seems to argue the opposite while mocking the afflicted—take all the sex you can get while it is on offer: Cupid. At court I find constant and true Only an aged lord or two. [30] 3rd Shepherd. Who do their empire longest hold? Cupid. The foolish, ugly, and the old. In these sweet groves love is not taught, Beauty and pleasure is not bought; To warm desires the women nature moves, [35] And ev’ry youthful swain by nature loves. Chorus. In these sweet groves … 63 But Act 3’s fatal outcome spoils the joke. Adonis dies. Venus’s casually attached heart really is broken. Their game of love goes wrong, and a morally reproving voice suspiciously like Killigrew’s reasserts itself. There can be no end to grief for Venus. As a goddess she is cursed with immortality: Venus. Ye cruel gods, why should not I [Act 3, 16] Have the great privilege to die?64 Killigrew laid the same stress on death-as-privilege in the funerary ode (‘An ode’) following ‘An epitaph on her self’: Should she her Airy Race forget … Should she so high a Priviledge neglect, As still on Earth, to walk and sit, affect, What could she of Wrong complain, Who thus her Birdly Kind doth stain, If all her Feathers Moulted were. [20] And naked she were left and bare, The Jest and Scorn of Earth and Aire? ‘She’ is the poet’s soul, pictured as a dove rising from Killigrew’s ashes. With heaven beckoning only a fool would want to spend more time on earth. The ode calls death ‘a Priviledge’ after a stanza and a half of blissfully acceptant build-up encouraging readers to see it that way. There is no room for explanation in the libretto though: ‘why should not I | Have the great privilege to die?’ sounds (and is) shockingly abrupt. Venus stands the ode’s orthodox religious message on its head. She has had enough of eternal life and wants death to release her from it. Thoughts about death and its desirability run along parallel lines in Killigrew’s ode and in the Venus libretto, but in opposite directions. I think it more likely that the libretto writer took a powerful image from the ode and worked it into the masque at a climactic moment, than that Killigrew took a single couplet from the libretto and bothered to construct a whole poem elaborating it. I cannot of course be sure. To bulk out her memorial volume Killigrew’s father placed three anonymous poems in a cordoned-off section at the end: ‘These Three following ODES being found among Mrs Killigrews Papers, I was willing to Print though none of hers’. Margaret Ezell, Killigrew’s modern editor, accepts the disclaimer at face value. So do most other Killigrew critics. Harriette Andreadis has suggested that the poems are actually by Killigrew, that her father wanted them printed but also—owing to their mildly homoerotic content—wanted readers to pin blame for them on unnamed others.65 This is an intriguing possibility. The middle poem of the three, ‘Upon a little lady under the discipline of an excellent person’, is a dense, rather obscure piece blending mythological allusions with likely references to people at court and events concerning them. Its opening stanza describes a scene of desolation: I How comes the Day orecast? the Flaming Sun Darkn’d at Noon, as if his Course were run? He never rose more proud, more glad, more gay, Ne’re courted Daphne with a brighter Ray! And now in Clouds he wraps his Head, [5] As if not Daphne, but himself were dead! And all the little Winged Troop Forbear to sing, and sit and droop; The Flowers do languish in their Beds, And fading hang their Mourning Heads; [10] The little Cupids discontented, shew, In Grief and Rage one breaks his Bow, An other tares his Cheeks and Haire, A third sits blubring in Despaire, Confessing though, in Love, he be, [15] A Powerful, Dreadful Deitie, A Child, in Wrath, can do as much as he. Whence is this Evil hurl’d, On all the sweetness of the World? Among those things with Beauty shine, [20] (Both Humane natures, and Divine) There was not so much sorrow spi’d, No, not that Day the sweet Adonis died! Venus and Adonis the masque relived ‘that Day the sweet Adonis died’. The author of ‘Upon a little lady’ may have seen Venus and Adonis performed at court or even performed in Venus and Adonis at court (supposing the author a friend of Killigrew’s close enough to be on poem-swapping terms with her, or Killigrew herself), and may have been recalling Blow’s agonizingly intense setting of the final section of the libretto. Not so much sorrow indeed: never before had an English court entertainment ended so bleakly. Stanzas II–VI of ‘Upon a little lady’, the rest of the poem, move on from Venus and Adonis to other subjects. Barash’s brief but appreciative reading of the whole poem can be recommended.66 Here only one more feature needs pointing out: yet another wound–found rhyme, closing stanza II. The presence of ‘Upon a little lady’ among Anne Killigrew’s papers proves, if her father-editor was telling the truth, that members of the court-based creative circle to which she belonged did share work with each other. If her father had invented a cover story to protect her reputation while also preserving poems that posthumously-perfect Killigrew ought not to have written then he surely thought that story believable. Text sharing was common practice. It served a social purpose well described by Harold Love, ‘that of bonding [a group] of like-minded individuals into a community … with the exchange of texts in manuscript serving to nourish a shared set of values and to enrich personal allegiances’.67 Words, ideas, recognizable rhymes and seemingly distinctive turns of phrase passed from poet to poet, poem to poem. It is seldom possible, today, to tell who passed what to whom, who was or thought they were a net contributor to the stock of poetical material on which everyone drew, and who took out more than they put in. Expert literary mentoring would have been available to Killigrew and to Kingsmill had they wanted it. Killigrew’s father and uncle William were both published playwrights. Another uncle, Thomas Killigrew—a prolific dramatist himself—had produced a string of Dryden plays with his King’s Theatre company in the 1660s and 70s; Dryden was a Killigrew family friend and a Kingsmill relative by marriage.68 This net of family and friendship ties can be drawn tighter still. Mary Davis (illus.8), who sang Venus in the court production of Venus and Adonis, may well have been the illegitimate daughter of Thomas Howard, future fourth Earl of Berkshire—a relative of other distinguished Howards therefore, and of Dryden, and of Anne Kingsmill.69 Her status at court would be readily explicable in that case. Davis was about the same age as Nell Gwyn and, like Gwyn, had been a popular early Restoration actress. She became a royal mistress in 1668 and left the stage. Charles maintained her in reasonable style until he died.70 He fathered Mary’s daughter, another Mary, born in 1673 or perhaps earlier;71 gave her a title and an allowance and, as her involvement in Venus and Adonis attests, made some provision for her education. Attachment to the court of Mary of Modena for some or all of the Venus and Adonis production period, in company with her mother, placed Lady Mary Tudor in a highly advantageous learning environment, one in which young women with creative ambitions were encouraged and enabled to fulfil them. 8 View largeDownload slide Mary Davis; mezzotint engraving by Carel Allard (1648–1709), after Sir Peter Lely (1618–80) (© The Trustees of the British Museum) 8 View largeDownload slide Mary Davis; mezzotint engraving by Carel Allard (1648–1709), after Sir Peter Lely (1618–80) (© The Trustees of the British Museum) Wood suggests that the court production may have had a coming-out function, presenting Lady Mary Tudor to the court community as a not-quite-legitimate member of the royal family yet a proudly acknowledged one.72 Mary Davis was acknowledged at the same time: the masque made her role as biological mother of the royal love-child now impersonating Cupid the God of Love completely explicit. Charles’s sexual interest in Davis may have waned, but he continued to enjoy her music-making and continued to support it. ‘[W]e can regard her as a kind of court figure by the early 1680s’, as Andrew Walkling remarks.73 The ex-mistress reinvented herself as an adjunct member of the court musical establishment, and as the first authentic star of all-sung English music drama. The social dynamics of Venus and Adonis as produced and performed at court—their sublime complexity—put its young librettist(s) in a position familiar even to men who regarded themselves both as authors and as ‘persons of quality’. Professionals wrote for money and had to identify themselves, but for non-professionals quality and anonymity generally went hand in hand. While no one claimed and no one was accorded special credit for work produced in this ‘social authorship’ environment, no one had to worry about the distribution of reputational rewards, fair or otherwise.74 Killigrew broke rank, first by learning to paint and then by dying tragically young. Painters put signed work on display. Painting unlike poetry-writing was, in 17th-century England, a very rare amateur accomplishment. Killigrew possessed exceptional artistic ability and put it to very effective self-promotional use. Venus attired and the Killigrew portrait of James Duke of York now in the Royal Collection are both signed ‘A. Killigrew’; lost works were probably signed too. Death cleared the way for publication of her poems—not all of them ready or intended for publication, as Ezell observes, but reliquary status once they had appeared in a memorial volume put them beyond criticism. By mid-1686 therefore, thanks not least to the Dryden eulogy with which her memorial volume opens, Killigrew was recognized as a cultural prodigy: one of the brightest ornaments of the Restoration court, uniquely ‘Excellent in the two Sister-Arts of Poesie, and Painting’. When the newly married Anne Kingsmill-Finch resigned her position as a Maid of Honour in May 1684 she had no literary reputation to speak of.75 She waited nearly 30 years before publishing a volume of her own poetry.76 Modern scholarly interest in her work—greatly exceeding modern scholarly interest in Killigrew’s, ironically—makes belated amends for what Kingsmill herself possibly saw as unfair neglect and unjust treatment at the hands of fate. She and Heneage Finch enjoyed a long and, so most biographers assume, a happy marriage.77 Both paid a heavy price for Heneage’s unwavering loyalty to James II’s cause after the 1688 revolution. Heneage refused to take oaths of allegiance to William and Mary, Queen Anne and King George I: refusal barred him from public office and, when eventually he did inherit a peerage, prevented him from taking his seat in the House of Lords. Anne and Heneage retired from London to a modest estate in Kent, a form of internal exile mirroring that of James and Mary of Modena. Anne wrote poems to keep herself busy, and to keep her company Heneage fair-copied many of them into manuscript albums. In one of her last, a poem written to mark the death of Mary of Modena in 1718, Kingsmill remembered Mary’s court as a place of privileged companionship but also—damningly—as ‘the source … of many woes’.78 The ‘Fragment’, another poem that I and others take to be authentically autobiographical, laments the folly of Kingsmill’s younger, pleasure-seeking self. Ambition led her to court where for a while the pleasure-seeking continued. Then disaster struck: So here confin’d, and but to female Clay, ARDELIA’S [Kingsmill’s] Soul mistook the rightful Way: Whilst the soft Breeze of Pleasure’s tempting Air Made her believe, Felicity was there; And basking in the warmth of early Time, To vain Amusements dedicate her Prime. Ambition next allur’d her tow’ring Eye; For Paradice she heard was plac’d on high, Then thought, the Court with all its glorious Show Was sure above the rest, and Paradice below. There plac’d too soon the flaming Sword appear’d Remov’d those Pow’rs, whom justly she rever’d, Adher’d too in their Wreck, and in their Ruin shar’d … 79 Today the catalogue of woes for which Kingsmill held the court or courtiers responsible cannot be accessed directly. Charles Hinnant, in his sensitive critical study of her whole output, reviews evidence explaining ‘the prominence of melancholy as a subject in [her] poetry’80—evidence which, while it needs interpreting (and while interpretations other than Hinnant’s are no doubt possible), was I should stress supplied by Kingsmill herself, choosing to give the subject prominence and choosing to present herself as someone with long and debilitating experience of melancholic symptoms. I know of no Kingsmill scholar who doubts her sincerity in this respect. One of the striking features of the poems that [Kingsmill] devoted to melancholy is their absorption in suffering—as if depression itself was being embraced as a substitute for a lost existence … Indeed, court politics and political disappointment provide a source for the insights and imagery of these poems.81 Here there is no need and no room to analyse Kingsmill’s melancholic pieces. Their existence is the point to note, together with Hinnant’s account—to my mind wholly convincing—of their psychological origins and psychological reframing function. Kingsmill coped with expulsion from the court by rethinking and eventually rejecting the validity of goals at which she and Heneage had been shooting enthusiastically during their time there, goals no longer open to them. They may have been friends at court; but Kingsmill chose to remember Killigrew very differently. The Preface to Kingsmill’s folio manuscript collection Miscellany poems with two plays by Ardelia (copying began around 1694 or 1695)82 seems to be alluding consciously and pointedly to a particular piece of Killigrew’s (today one of her most discussed), ‘On the saying that my verses were made by another’. Kingsmill rebukes Killigrew not by name but by heavy implication both for bad writing and for bad character: … itt is still a great satisfaction to me, that I was not so far abandon’d by my prudence, as out of mistaken vanity, to lett any attempts of mine in Poetry, shew themselves whilst I lived in such a publick place as the Court, where every one wou’d have made their remarks upon a Versifying Maid of Honour; and far the greater number with prejudice, if not contempt.83 Killigrew, by contrast, had shown some of her poems to court cognescenti and was taken aback by their reaction: ‘What ought t’have brought me honour, brought me shame’. ‘On the saying’ fizzes with indignation: her work deserved better, and when presenting it as her work she deserved to be believed. Kingsmill sides with everyone else against Killigrew (abandoned prudence, mistaken vanity)—hardly an act of friendship or of female solidarity. Kingsmill claims categorically that she showed none of her poems to the whole court while she lived there, and thus avoided bringing patronizing or contemptuous judgement down upon her head. The Venus and Adonis masque libretto had been ‘shown’ at court about as publicly as any poem could be. Kingsmill’s manuscript preface and James Winn’s suggestion that Kingsmill wrote the Venus and Adonis libretto are on the face of it completely incompatible, an objection of which Winn was of course aware. Kingsmill’s folio manuscript preface looked, to him, to be a smokescreen put up to discourage further enquiry by readers who suspected or half remembered her involvement in the masque. Kingsmill went further—or if not Kingsmill, someone acting decisively on her behalf—suppressing a targeted selection of poems in the bound octavo volume transcribed for her before Heneage started afresh on its more capacious folio successor. Several pages were torn from the octavo, and two poems were heavily over-inked so that no one would be able to read them subsequently whatever their reasons for wanting to do so.84 The suppressed poems could not be compared with any of Killigrew’s from then on, or with the three poems included in Killigrew’s memorial volume even though ‘none of hers’, or with the Venus and Adonis libretto. There is now no way of knowing what sorts of discovery the manuscript mutilator was most anxious to prevent, but her or his determination to hide something is evident.85 For Kingsmill there was more at stake than possible identification as the author of a coyly erotic court masque text. Had she been outed during her post-revolutionary lifetime as the Venus and Adonis librettist then the highly principled foundations on which her reputation as a living martyr to Jacobitism were assumed to rest would have fallen away—Kingsmill emerging far less attractively as a sore loser, embittered because the colourful court career for which she once seemed destined had crashed in flames. Andrew Walkling was right to describe Venus and Adonis as a ‘recreational masque’, and right to insist that scholars hoping to make sense of Venus and Adonis need to recognize it as such.86 The Venus libretto should be read and interpreted not in isolation but as one part of a small constellation of pastoral poems written by women at court, all exploring similar themes: love, loss, licit and illicit routes to sexual gratification and the partners-for-life ideal. Work to draft and revise these poems was presumably done in private but it kept social wheels turning, focusing literary discussion and generating material that could be shared among peers. Equally, when Killigrew’s paintings went on display people must have talked about them, debating their place in the wider Venus-and-Adonis artworld (Killigrew vs. Titian?) and the skill with which Killigrew had managed to connect past art history with very recent court masque reimaginings of that history. If real Maids of Honour did dance in the masque, as Winn suggests, and did appear as themselves in Venus attired by the Graces, then three more facets of their recreational programme can be glimpsed: dance instruction, costume fittings and portrait sittings for Killigrew. Musical manuscript evidence well aligned with pictorial evidence shows that some court musicians taking part (including Blow) saw Venus and Adonis as an opportunity to joke with the king and to joke among themselves, before turning deadly serious as the masque neared its tragic climax. Resemblances between Venus and Adonis the masque and the poems and paintings discussed in this article are in my view too close and too numerous to have come about by chance. The masque, the poems and the paintings all originated at court—the same court at around the same time. The resemblances are best explained as intertextual traffic between artists who lived and worked in close proximity, who were open to influence, who talked about work in progress and who, when creating work for performance or other means of ‘publick’ dissemination, catered knowingly to the tastes of the same court audience. In my opinion the cumulative weight of evidence now available—external and internal—shows not just that Venus and Adonis could have been produced at court while Killigrew and Kingsmill were living there but that realistically it must have been. The court performance(s) must therefore have happened between summer 1682 and early 1684, after James Duke of York and Mary of Modena had settled back into their London-centred court life but before Venus and Adonis was revived at Josias Priest’s Chelsea school. Allowing weeks or more likely months for libretto-writing, composition and rehearsal, the clear majority of dates on which actual performance(s) could have happened fall in the calendar year 1683 (by modern reckoning, 1 January – 31 December 1683) or in 1683/4 (running 25 March 1683 – 24 March 1684). Arriving at Wood’s and Winn’s date conclusion by a varied route, I am all the more inclined to think it is the right one.87 I have uncovered no new evidence incompatible with Winn’s libretto attribution theory and some that might be thought to support it, giving Kingsmill extra reason for wanting to remain anonymous. The odds on a Kingsmill–Killigrew collaboration, meanwhile, may have shortened somewhat. Little or nothing about authorship can be inferred from the non-appearance of the Venus and Adonis libretto in Anne Killigrew’s memorial volume, for the Rev. Dr Killigrew would not have considered it remotely suitable for inclusion. Anne Killigrew’s heavy recreational investment in the Venus and Adonis masque project and in spinoffs from it is this article’s big reveal. It has not been noticed before and it is significant. Killigrew the painter, engaging unabashedly with erotic subject matter in Venus attired and Venus and Adonis, was not the child-like innocent idealized in Dryden’s memorial ode. Killigrew the writer may not have been a childlike innocent either, or as much of one as her family wanted (and wanted posterity) to believe. Recent critics looking closely at her poems have found evidence of a more complex and much more interesting creative personality, struggling both to understand and to contain ‘unruly passions’.88 Close reading is a necessary part of any attribution study. Comparisons between texts are also necessary. While reading and comparing texts—while actively engaged with them—we learn more than we would by admitting defeat and retreating to other territory. What we learn may well fall into a category of knowledge inferior to absolute truth but that need not invalidate it altogether. Inconclusive attribution studies have a point, in other words: problems that cannot be solved definitively may yet be worth investigating. Andrew Pinnock is a professor in the University of Southampton’s Music Department, a loyal contributor to Early Music (writing mostly about Purcell), a Purcell Society editor and administrator (Honorary Secretary from 2008 to 2014); and a cultural policy specialist in addition. He worked in the Arts Council’s Music Department for 13 years, making policy before taking an academic job and starting to research it. He lives in Salisbury, where one of his sons used to sing in the cathedral choir (frequently Purcell).A.J.Pinnock@soton.ac.uk This article was first submitted to Early Music in a very different form. I have rewritten it to take account of referees’ comments on the original and to make my aims and methods as author completely explicit. I am grateful to Lydia Hamlett, Bryan White, James Winn and Bruce Wood for reading one or both versions and making detailed suggestions for improvement; to three anonymous reviewers for doing the same; to the editors of Early Music for accommodating every necessary illustration (excerpts from poems as well as pictures—without them my argument would be unintelligible); and to museum and gallery colleagues in the UK and USA, for permission to reproduce prints and paintings in their collections. Footnotes 1 See R. D. Hume, Reconstructing contexts: the aims and principles of archaeo-historicism (Oxford, 1999). 2 Hume, Reconstructing contexts, p.129. 3 Italicized truth from Hume, Reconstructing contexts, p.93. 4 A. R. Walkling, Masque and opera in England, 1656–1688 (Abingdon, 2017). Walkling does not mention Hume’s Reconstructing contexts in his ‘Select bibliography’ but its influence on Masque and opera is unmistakeable. 5 Walkling, Masque and opera, p.3. 6 Walkling, Masque and opera, p.133. 7 See the ‘List of Sources’ in B. Wood (ed.), John Blow: Venus and Adonis, Purcell Society Companion Series 2 (London, 2008), pp.xxiii–xxiv. 8 Paul Hopkins’s Cambridge University Library discovery was announced in R. Luckett, ‘A new source for “Venus and Adonis”’, Musical Times, cxxx/1 (1989), pp.76–9. 9 See Wood (ed.), John Blow: Venus and Adonis, p.xi. 10 Information from R. Shay and R. Thompson, Purcell manuscripts: the principal musical sources (Cambridge, 2000), pp.169–71, and Wood (ed.), John Blow: Venus and Adonis, pp.xi–xii. 11 Wood (ed.), John Blow: Venus and Adonis, pp.xi–xii. 12 Wood (ed.), John Blow: Venus and Adonis, pp.xiv–xv. For Priest’s move to Chelsea, see O. Baldwin and T. Wilson, ‘Priest, Josias (d.1734/5)’, ODNB online, www.oxforddnb.com (accessed 17 December 2017). 13 Wood thinks that Hart may have had a role in the selection of repertory for inclusion in 22100, and may have sung Adonis in the court production. See Wood (ed.), John Blow: Venus and Adonis, p.xv. 14 A. Lewis (ed.), John Blow: Venus and Adonis (Monaco, 1949), Foreword; Shay and Thompson, Purcell manuscripts, p.169. 15 Wood (ed.), John Blow: Venus and Adonis, p.xxiii. 16 P. Holman, Four and twenty fiddlers: the violin at the English court, 1540–1690 (Oxford, 1993), pp.374–6. See Holman’s Appendix C for the names and dates of appointment of court violinists implicated. 17 Wood (ed.), John Blow: Venus and Adonis, p.xx. 18 Wood (ed.), John Blow: Venus and Adonis, pp.xv–xix. 19 See R. D. Hume, ‘The politics of opera in late seventeenth-century London’, Cambridge Opera Journal, x/1 (1998), pp.15–43 (pp.42–3 in particular). 20 See, for instance, A. Pinnock, ‘Deus ex machina: a royal witness to the court origin of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas’, Early Music, xl/2 (2012), pp.265–78, and A. Pinnock, ‘Which genial day? More on the court origin of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, with a shortlist of dates for its possible performance before King Charles II’, Early Music, xliii/2 (2015), pp.199–212. 21 J. A. Winn, ‘A versifying maid of honour: Anne Finch and the libretto for Venus and Adonis’, Review of English Studies, lix (2008), pp.67–85. 22 Walkling, Masque and opera, pp.125–8. 23 Dates from J. Miller, James II (New Haven, r/2000), pp.91, 109. 24 For a good Anne Killigrew biography see the Introduction in M. J. M. Ezell (ed.), ‘My rare wit killing sin’: poems of a Restoration courtier (Toronto, 2013). No surviving official records confirm Killigrew’s appointment as a Maid of Honour but she was ‘evidently resident at court’ in some capacity (J. A. Winn, Queen Anne, patroness of arts (Oxford, 2014), p.661 n.107). See also Ezell (ed.), ‘My rare wit killing sin’, p.2 n.3: ‘the most recent entry on her in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography … now states unequivocally that she does appear on the list of maids of honor in 1683’. DNB, though unequivocal, does not identify a source or sources for the list in question. 25 Winn, ‘A versifying maid’, p.85. 26 Reproduced in The Burlington Magazine, xxviii (December 1915), p.114, in C. Barash, English women’s poetry, 1649–1714: politics, community and linguistic authority (Oxford, 1996), p.161 (fig.15), and no doubt elsewhere. 27 See Barash, English women’s poetry, pp.156–61 (especially p.157 n.24). 28 www.historicalportraits.com/Gallery.asp?Page=Item&ItemID=1491&Desc=Venus-Attired-by-the-Graces-%7C-Anne-Killigrew (accessed 6 April 2017). 29 Ezell (ed.), ‘My rare wit killing sin’, plate 1; Winn, Queen Anne, colour plates 9 and 10. 30 See Ezell (ed.), ‘My rare wit killing sin’, p.2 n.4. 31 Barash, English women’s poetry, p.159. 32 Barash discusses Behn’s Pindarick poem very thoroughly elsewhere in her book (English women’s poetry, pp.131–40) but mentions it only in passing in her Killigrew section. 33 Winn, Queen Anne, p.105. 34 Sir Peter Lely was pushing boundaries when in the 1660s he began to release naked pictures of royal mistresses. Discussing Lely’s Portrait of a lady and child as Venus and Cupid (c.1665) in particular, Sir Oliver Millar wrote that ‘Portraits of royal mistresses in the nude had been painted in earlier periods and at other European courts, but ladies of easy virtue had not previously been so unequivocally cast in the role of Venus at the English court’; see O. Millar, Sir Peter Lely 1618–80: exhibition at 15 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1 (London, 1978), p.62. 35 Text, including stage directions, from Wood (ed.), John Blow: Venus and Adonis, p.xxxiv. Line numbers in square brackets are those supplied by Wood. Here and elsewhere I have expanded Wood’s speech tags, so Cup. becomes Cupid., and so on. The precise wording of stage directions varies from source to source: Wood created composites to capture all available information, of course recording original wording in his textual notes. For present purposes subtle distinction between differently worded versions of the same stage direction is not necessary. 36 Adapted from Wood (ed.), John Blow: Venus and Adonis, p.xxxii. I include every repetition of ‘Venus! / Adonis!’ and have added asterisks to denote lines with recorder accompaniment. In Act 1, Version 1 (starting on p.32 in Wood’s edition) the solo recorder accompanies Venus in bars 3–4, 13–23, 31–7 and 86–96. 37 Wood (ed.), John Blow: Venus and Adonis, p.xxxii. 38 Information and all quotations in this paragraph from Wood (ed.), John Blow: Venus and Adonis, p.xvi (on 31453’s probable function) and p.xx (on the evolving recorder obbligato). 39 For a formal description of Gennari’s A sleeping shepherd discovered by two women, see M. Levey, The later Italian pictures in the collection of Her Majesty the Queen (Cambridge, 2/1991), pp.87–8. 40 See Pinnock, ‘Deus ex machina’, p.277 n.30. The relevant King Arthur stage direction reads as follows: ‘Here the Men offer their Flutes to the Women, which they refuse’. Shepherds with permission to play ‘All the Night on [their] Flutes’ count themselves blessed and make their lasses happy. Quotations from H. Neville Davies’s edition of King Arthur in M. Burden (ed.), Henry Purcell’s operas: the complete texts (Oxford, 2000), p.296. 41 Preface to King Arthur (‘To the Marquiss of Hallifax’), published 1691; in Burden (ed.), Henry Purcell’s operas, p.269. 42 Barash, English women’s poetry, p.157 n.24. 43 ‘An ENTRY of SATYRS’ at the end of Act 3; see E. Boswell, The Restoration court stage (1660–1702), with a particular account of the production of ‘Calisto’ (Cambridge, MA, 1932), pp.333–4. 44 Costumed instrumentalists appeared on stage in Paris opera productions fairly regularly. For Paisible’s experience in this capacity, gained before he relocated to London, see R. Harris-Warrick, ‘Magnificence in motion: stage musicians in Lully’s ballets and operas’, Cambridge Opera Journal, vi/3 (1994), pp.189–203. 45 Wood (ed.), John Blow: Venus and Adonis, p.xx. 46 See M. Reynolds, The learned lady in England 1650–1760 (Boston, 1920), p.85. Reynolds is sceptical: ‘There is a tradition that she studied with Sir Peter Lely. If so she must have taken those lessons before she was twenty, for Lely left England in 1680.’ (Lely died in 1680, still in England, but Reynolds’s main point holds.) 47 Ezell’s suggestion, in ‘My rare wit killing sin’, pp.29–30. 48 27 January 1685; see E. S. De Beer (ed.), The diary of John Evelyn, now first printed in full from the manuscripts belonging to Mr. John Evelyn (Oxford, 1955), iv, p.403. 49 15 January 1679; see De Beer (ed.), The diary of John Evelyn, iv, pp.161–2. The National Gallery of Art’s website gives provenance particulars: www.nga.gov/Collection/art-object-page.1223.html (accessed 18 December 2017). Every link in the chain of ownership leading from Restoration London to Washington DC is accounted for. 50 So listed in the 1682 Lely sale catalogue; reprinted with a useful Editorial in The Burlington Magazine, lxxxiii (August 1943), pp.185–8. 51 See D. Dethloff, ‘The executors’ account book and the dispersal of Sir Peter Lely’s collection’, Journal of the History of Collections, viii/1 (1996), pp.15–51 (p.35 in particular). 52 For ‘The chronology of the plates made by John Smith’, placing his Titian Venus and Adonis (‘w385’) unequivocally in 1684, see A. Griffiths, ‘Early mezzotint publishing in England—I: John Smith, 1652–1743’, Print Quarterly, vi/3 (1989), p.257. 53 To avoid mirror-imaging an original the engraver had first to make (or get someone else to make) an accurate drawing of the original in reverse. Engraving followed the drawing. Printing from the engraved plate reversed the image once again, restoring the left–right orientation of the original. Sometimes that intermediate reverse drawing stage was omitted: prints stuck in reverse were the result. I do not want to press this argument too far; we cannot after all be sure whether prints taken from the Lens engraving of Killigrew’s Venus and Adonis were correctly or reverse orientated. Though Smith’s mezzotint undoubtedly represents the Bristol/Sunderland Venus and Adonis, and not any other Titian studio variant on the same theme (or none now extant), Smith himself probably worked not from the original but from an earlier engraving made by Raphael Sadeler II before the original had crossed the Channel. This Sadeler engraving is dated 1610. The British Museum’s online print collection website allows direct comparison between Smith and Sadeler; see www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/search.aspx?searchText=sadeler+venus+and+adonis (accessed 10 April 2018). Prints taken from the Sadeler plate preserved Titian’s left–right orientation, while prints taken from the Smith plate based on Sadeler reversed it. 54 Poems by Mrs Anne Killigrew (London: [Samuel Lowndes], 1686). R. Morton (ed.), Poems (1686) by Mrs Anne Killigrew: a facsimile reproduction with an introduction (Gainesville, 1967) is useful, not least for its Introduction. 55 John Dryden, ‘To the pious memory of the accomplisht young lady Mrs Anne Killigrew, excellent in the two sister-arts of poësie, and painting’, in Poems by Mrs Anne Killigrew (1686), sig.a1v–b2v. 56 Morton (ed.), Poems … by Mrs Anne Killigrew, p.viii. 57 All Killigrew quotations are taken from the 1686 edition of her Poems (1967 facsimile reprint: see n.54). Line numbers in square brackets are those supplied in Ezell (ed.), ‘My rare wit killing sin’. 58 Wood (ed.), John Blow: Venus and Adonis, pp.xxxi, xxxii, xxxiii. 59 Wood (ed.), John Blow: Venus and Adonis, p.xxxi. 60 Winn, ‘A versifying maid’, p.77. 61 Like Winn, I have read and have tried at all times to follow Harold Love’s advice on responsible parallel-hunting. I report verbal parallels only when thoughts behind the words also run in parallel. See H. Love, Attributing authorship: an introduction (Cambridge, 2002), pp.89–91. 62 Wood (ed.), John Blow: Venus and Adonis, p.xxxi. 63 Wood (ed.), John Blow: Venus and Adonis, p.xxxi. 64 Wood (ed.), John Blow: Venus and Adonis, p.xxxv. 65 See H. Andreadis, Sappho in early modern England: female same-sex literary erotics 1550–1714 (Chicago, 2001), pp.118–9. I am grateful to my student Catherine Davis for this reference. 66 Barash, English women’s poetry, pp.155–6. 67 H. Love, Scribal publication in seventeenth-century England (Oxford, 1993), p.177. 68 The Introduction to Margaret Ezell’s edition of Killigrew’s poems (see n.24) gives a thorough account of her family background. For Dryden’s relationship with the Kingsmill family, see B. McGovern, Anne Finch and her poetry: a critical biography (Athens, GA, 1992), p.22. 69 The DNB Mary Davis biography is sympathetic and well informed; see O. Baldwin and T. Wilson, ‘Davis, Mary (c.1651–1708)’, ODNB online, www.oxforddnb.com (accessed 19 December 2017). For Lady Mary Tudor, see P. Beauclerk-Dewar and R. S. Powell, Right royal bastards: the fruits of passion (Wilmington, DE, 2006), pp.55–7. 70 Davis was free to marry after Charles’s death, and she promptly did. 71 There is, according to Andrew Walkling, ‘some question about the accuracy of Lady Mary’s recorded date of birth’; see Walkling, Masque and opera, p.72 n.4. 72 See Wood (ed.), John Blow: Venus and Adonis, p.xii. 73 Walkling, Masque and opera, p.133. 74 On social authorship, ‘the serious pursuit of literary excellence shared with a select audience of readers using the medium of circulating handwritten copies’, see Ezell (ed.), ‘My rare wit killing sin’, p.32. 75 McGovern, Anne Finch and her poetry, p.29. 76 Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, Miscellany poems on several occasions: written by a lady (London: [John Barber], 1713). 77 McGovern, for instance (Anne Finch and her poetry, p.30): ‘From all indications Anne and Heneage … sustained during the entire thirty-six years of their married life an intimate, happy relationship’. Ellen Moody’s online biographical notes are more circumspect: see www.jimandellen.org/finch/emionch3.htm (accessed 18 December 2017). Winn found Professor Moody’s Kingsmill website highly informative and I too have made grateful use of it. 78 ‘On the death of the Queen’, in B. McGovern and C. Hinnant (eds.), The Anne Finch Wellesley Manuscript poems: a critical edition (Athens, GA, 1998), pp.25–9 (quote from l.44). 79 ‘Fragment’, in M. Reynolds (ed.), The poems of Anne Countess of Winchilsea: from the original edition of 1713 and from unpublished manuscripts (Chicago, 1903), pp.13–14. 80 C. Hinnant, The poetry of Anne Finch: an essay in interpretation (Newark, DE, 1994), p.197. 81 Hinnant, The poetry of Anne Finch, p.198. 82 Dates from McGovern, Anne Finch and her poetry, p.70. 83 Anne Kingsmill-Finch, Preface opening her folio manuscript collection of ‘Miscellany poems with two plays by Ardelia’ (now in the Folger Shakespeare Library). First printed in Reynolds (ed.), The poems of Anne Countess of Winchilsea, pp.6–12. Winn quotes this crucial passage from Reynolds’s edition (‘A versifying maid’, p.74). 84 McGovern, Anne Finch and her poetry, p.69. 85 Whether Kingsmill or someone else wanting something hidden mutilated the octavo manuscript is now an unanswerable question. The vehement nature of the mutilations does suggest a personal motive. 86 Walkling, Masque and opera, pp.133–5. 87 Sandra Tuppen has suggested Shrove Monday, 19 February 1683 (1682/3) as a possible performance date, with Whitehall Palace’s Hall Theatre serving as venue in that case. She cites a court document showing that generous quantities of bread, beer and wine were delivered to the Hall Theatre that day, ‘for the Musick and Dancing Masters’, along with coal to fuel their dressing room fires. Bruce Wood considers Windsor performance(s) on balance more likely, during the court’s summer vacation period 31 July – 29 August 1683 (the Eton organist John Walter’s involvement as copyist ‘hints at a Windsor connection’), though he agrees that Shrovetide—running up to Lent—was ‘a traditional season for court entertainments’. See S. Tuppen, ‘Shrove-tide dancing: balls and masques at Whitehall under Charles II’, The Court Historian, xv/2 (2010), pp.157–69, and Wood (ed.), Venus and Adonis, p.xiii. 88 Andreadis, Sappho in early modern England, pp.116–18. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - The Rival Maids: Anne Killigrew, Anne Kingsmill and the making of the court masque Venus and Adonis (music by John Blow)
JF - Early Music
DO - 10.1093/em/cay066
DA - 2018-12-31
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SP - 631
VL - 46
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
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