The Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music

Volume 11 (2005) No. 1

Narrating a Nation: Venus on the Late Seventeenth-Century English Stage

Ken McLeod*

Abstract

The character of Venus is commonly found in seventeenth-century English theater music, typically embodying a binary representation of both heavenly love (Venus Coelestis) and bodily love (Venus Vulgaris). With particular emphasis on John Blow’s Venus and Adonis and John Eccles’ The Loves of Mars and Venus this essay demonstrates that Venus provided a powerful emblem of the factionalized nature of Britain and its Trojan heritage while simultaneously functioning as an icon of the dangers of the feminine “other,” an image which aided in coalescing an emerging national ideal of British masculinity.

1. Introduction

2. Venus, Music, and Politics

3. Venus and Adonis and the Loves of Mars and Venus

4. The Loves of Mars and Venus

5. Venus and the Monarchy on the Restoration Stage

6. Conclusion

References

Musical Examples

Figures

1. Introduction

1.1 Venus, goddess of love and beauty, appeared often on the late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century musical stage. Major works incorporating her character include John Blow’s Venus and Adonis (1682), Louis Grabu’s Albion and Albanius (1685), Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (1684–9?) and King Arthur (1691), John Eccles and Gottfried Finger’s The Loves of Mars and Venus (1696), various musical settings of William Congreve’s The Judgment of Paris (1700), and numerous lesser-known or smaller works.¹ To some extent this interest in Venus was a by-product of her close ties to England and its monarchy. As the mother of Aeneas and great-grandmother of Brutus (Britain’s namesake), Venus was the matriarch of England’s mythical Trojan heritage and monarchy. Her association was such that she was often even portrayed as a resident. As Dryden writes in King Arthur “Venus here will choose her dwelling, and forsake her Cyprian Groves” (V, 2).² Johann Pepusch’s cantata The Island of Beauty (1715) is similarly devoted to the topic of Venus settling in her “favorite land” of Britain. Attributes commonly associated with Venus include, grace, nobility, elegance, affability, courtesy, patience and wealth.³ As such, Venus was representative of a moneyed and successful society, as England aspired to be—a nation that could afford to be devoted to music, beauty, and pleasure.

1.2 Venus, like Love, was well known for her mutable nature. She was the goddess of sacred love and beauty but also the goddess of profane love and the patroness of prostitutes and libidinous affections. An historically ambiguous figure, and arguably a dubious choice to be associated with the monarchy and image of a nation, Venus variously depicted either the stability or instability of the monarchy and state as well as the power of women. The profane side of her character provided a cautionary representation of both uncontrolled monarchical and feminine power. In keeping with this latter theme, many, if not most, Restoration plays and musical dramas are rife with images of male jealousy, fears of cuckoldry, shrewish or scolding women, and women who transgress sexual boundaries. Typically the product of male authors, such works testify to the centrality of issues involving gender and sexuality and a prevailing concern for the maintenance of masculine order during this period.⁴

1.3 Despite the common presence of Venus in theater music from this period there has been little or no recognition of her symbolic importance. In addition to rectifying this omission, I will attempt to account for the contradictions that result from the inevitable confrontation of and negotiation between definitions of love as sacred and orderly or profane and disruptive. In particular I am concerned with how Venus embodied both aspects of love and how her various images functioned during the Restoration to sustain many of the privileges and prerogatives of men. I focus on images of Venus on the Restoration musical stage that expose the construction of woman as “other” that, in keeping with the mutability of her character, either confirm or disrupt masculine identity and patriarchal order commonly associated with the emerging national identity of England during this period.

2. Venus, Music, and Politics

2.1 Venus’s musical and political associations in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries had important classical roots. In imitation of notions expressed in Plato’s Symposium she was recognized as Venus Coelestis, goddess of sacred love, pacifier of Mars, loving mother of Aeneas, and sanguine source of universal harmony. She was also Venus Vulgaris, goddess of bodily love and passion, and the seductress who led Helen and Paris astray causing the Trojan war.⁵ This dual nature is reflected in Colley Cibber’s libretto for the masque Venus and Adonis (1715) in which the innocent Adonis calls to “Celestial Venus!” while Mars calls to “O perjur’d Venus! False as fair!”⁶ These two sides of Venus correspond with a binary opposition of order (Coelestis) and disorder (Vulgaris). However, Venus is typically assigned multivalent personalities and characteristics that both transcend and encompass such reductive polarities. Taken as a whole, Venus’s oppositional character has led many to regard her as a representation of mutability and change.⁷ She was an embodiment of transience—the evanescence of love and passion, kings and countries, and even music.

2.2 Associations of Venus with music were common throughout English history. Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, for example, depicted her rising from the waves, “A citole [cittern] in hir right hand hadde she”; and her temple was described as having “Festes, instrumentz, caroles, daunces, Lust and array … peynted on the wal.”⁸ Reflecting her association with profane love, Shakespeare’s poem Venus and Adonis, compared Venus’s voice to a “tempting tune” that is “bewitching like the wanton mermaids song.”⁹ Not only are musical instruments, in general, iconographic symbols of love, but also Medieval astrology taught that musicians of all kinds were among “the children of Venus.”¹⁰ Medieval and Renaissance representations of Venus’s nativity commonly portray her being transported to shore on a scallop shell—iconography that carried over to the incorporation of her likeness on lutes and citterns with their analogous shell-like constructions.¹¹ Venus with music was often the subject of artworks such as Titian’s “Venus and the Lute Player” (ca.1560), and Breugal the Elder’s “Hearing” (1618). English sources and iconography also underlined Venus’s relationship with music. In 1565, Thomas Cooper described the “Cithera” (or Cittern) as “A womanly harpe singyng songs of loue and not of valient acts.”¹² The term “Cithera” would seem to derive from Venus’s island birthplace of Cytherea.¹³ Venus is also often depicted teaching music. A detail from the frontispiece to the published songs in Handel’s Rinaldo (1711), for example, portrays Venus instructing Cupid in the art of music (see Figure 1).¹⁴ Similar scenes of Venus-like figures teaching music to cupids were common in decorative English music title pages.¹⁵

2.3 Venus’s musical associations often reflected a connection with political and social harmony. This relationship is reinforced by the ancient belief in the harmonious reconciliation of opposed qualities in a stable union, or discordia concors—a concept relating love, politics, and music.¹⁶ Indeed, according to Plutarch’s Moralia, it was “well known to all that … Concord [Harmony] is sprung from Aphrodite [Venus] and Ares [Mars], the one of whom is harsh and contentious, and the other mild and tutelary.”¹⁷ Thus Venus, goddess of both sacred and profane love, was an embodiment of discordia concors. She is tied to the notion of state harmony and, as outlined below, it is she who invariably instigates and/or resolves the discords of the works in which she appears.

2.4 In a similar fashion, the concept of love in much Restoration poetry was often related to the monarchy and the establishment or maintenance, often by forceful means, of order or disorder. As Dryden writes in Cymon and Iphigenia:

… Love disdains the Laws,
And like a King by conquest gains his Cause:
When Arms take place, all other Pleas are vain,
Love taught me Force, and Force shall Love maintain.
(II, 300–3)¹⁸

Dryden here alludes to love’s transcendence of social rules and draws a parallel with kingly conquest and the maintenance of this conquest by force. It is also a not too subtle reference to William III’s ascension to the throne over James II in the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688–9.¹⁹ Dryden thus equated the power of love directly with the power of the monarchy. He and other authors also made less overt associations between Venus and the monarchy.²⁰ Andrew Walkling, for example, has pointed out the analogy of James II’s wife Mary of Modena as a new Venus in Dryden’s 1682 Prologue to The Duchess, On Her return from Scotland.²¹ The work celebrates the return of the future queen following her husband’s exile in France:

When Factious Rage to cruel Exile, drove
The Queen of Beauty, and the Court of Love;
The Muses Droop’d, with their forsaken Arts,
And the sad Cupids broke their useless Darts.

As James Winn has discussed, this version of mythology places Venus rather than Minerva in the role of patroness of the arts.²² These examples underline the state of harmony or disharmony that existed within and between the monarchy and the nation. Love was viewed as the most powerful expression of that relationship, and the “Queen of Love” was a common representation both of the king’s consort and of his symbolic marriage to the nation. As such Venus embodied aspects of both the nation and the monarchy, either of which could be loving or fickle.

3. Venus and Adonis and the Loves of Mars and Venus

3.1 Though Venus was undoubtedly representative of both the monarchy and the nation during the Restoration, in her Venus Vulgaris persona, she also symbolized male fears of female empowerment. Nowhere is this dichotomy more evident than in the well-known myths of Venus and Adonis and the Loves of Mars and Venus, particularly their respective musical settings by John Blow and John Eccles.

3.2 Ovid’s Metamorphoses presents the standard version of the Venus and Adonis story which recounts the tale of a powerful older woman, Venus, attempting to seduce the youthful Adonis. Ignoring Venus’s protective warnings of the dangers of the hunt, Adonis is fatally gored during a boar hunt and a grieving Venus turns him into an anemone, a symbol of the fragility and ephemerality of his life and love.²³ This story was elaborated upon by various authors, notably by Shakespeare who, in his famous poem, has the lovers consummate their relationship. But even a basic outline of the myth contains the elements of Venus’s power. In contrast to the rurally naïve, conservative, and constant character of Adonis (described in Blow’s work as “faithful” and “ever tender ever kind”), Venus embodies a liberal character, mutable in her role as both a maternal figure and lover and as a woman who pursues and desires control but ultimately has none. To some extent, in her “hunt” for Adonis she is a symbol of unnatural destructive lust while Adonis, in his innocence, can be read as an agent of natural reason, truth, and beauty. Venus here subverts both her typical gender roles and her traditional role as the personification of desire in that, rather than being the object of desire, she is now placed in the position of a powerful older suitor. She represents a male constructed image of female disruption, an unstable, uncontrollable, and dangerous political force who, through her seductive powers, can emasculate and render traditional patriarchal order impotent.²⁴

3.3 John Blow’s Venus and Adonis (1682) is the most well-known musical setting of this story. Subtitled “A Masque for the Entertainment of a King,” the work is rife with thinly veiled political commentary. The anonymous libretto, based on the danger of the “hunt,” satirizes the amorous proclivities of Charles II and his court.²⁵ Andrew Walkling suggests that Charles was represented by Adonis while the boar that kills him “clearly represents the factional and partisan strife that threatened … Charles’s rule … following the Exclusion Crisis.”²⁶ Reading Charles as Adonis, it seems natural to read Venus as England—the ultimate object of his desire. Just as Adonis claimed to “have already caught the noblest prey” so too had Charles assumed the throne of England. This scenario, of course, provides an alternate model to the typical allegory of a harmonious king-country relationship. In the manner of keeping a mistress, Adonis (Charles) is seduced by the charms and powers of Venus (England) yet he must also pay for her love (and the affection of the country) through his benevolent acts. Venus’s variable character in the work, spanning that of a loving mother and manipulative seductress—Madonna and whore—corresponds to the generally fickle attitude of the English public towards Charles as manifest in his previous Scottish and continental exiles and by the internal and often antimonarchical “partisan strife” to which Walkling alludes.

3.4 Blow’s work begins with a profane image of Venus. Act I opens with the two lovers “sitting together upon a Couch Imbracing one another” and passionately moaning each other’s name in a succession of what Edward Dent cautiously refers to as “whispered caresses.”²⁷ With the couple engaged in what might be termed today “petting,” a sensuous flute obbligato accompanies Venus’s final melismatic repetition of “Adonis,” eventually lingering on a voluptuous half cadence as if to prolong her pleasure (see Example 1). It is clear however, that the relationship has not been consummated as Adonis next asks “Venus when shall I taste soft delights, / And on thy bosome dye?” To this Venus replies “With thee the Queen of Love employs / The hours designed for softer joys.” Adopting a coquettish persona, she is here presumably referring to the intentions of pursuing a future liaison, possibly in the evening or nighttime hours.

3.5 Their intimate conversation is interrupted by the sound of “Hunters Musick” which immediately disrupts the harmony of their lovemaking. In the original Ovidian version of the myth, Venus tries to dissuade Adonis from the hunt. In this version, however, Venus insists on Adonis joining the hunting party: “They summon to ye chase, haste, haste away!” When Adonis protests, claiming to “have already caught the noblest prey,” the goddess continues to encourage his departure with the justification that “absence kindles new desire / I would not have my Lover tire.”²⁸ The negotiation continues with a duet in which Adonis insists that he “will not hunt today” while Venus urges “No my shepherd haste away.” Venus ends the dispute by simply exiting the stage, forcing Adonis to join the hunt—essentially by default. Thus Venus dominates Adonis, usurping and negating his freedom of choice.²⁹ In the end she manipulates and controls Adonis’s fate as he joins the hunt, eventually meeting his death, ostensibly at her insistence. In the Ovidian version, Venus unsuccessfully begs Adonis not to hunt and, in the manner of a nation cautioning a king, warns him not to be foolish “lest your manly courage be the ruin of us both.”³⁰ She tries to protect him and herself but fails. In Blow’s version, Venus/England doesn’t try to protect Adonis/ Charles II but instead urges him into the fray. The work can thus be read as a caution to Charles to remain outside of the “partisan strife” even if encouraged by his subjects.

3.6 The manipulative side of Venus’s nature is further revealed in Act II. Venus “takes Cupid into her lap” and asks if he has “been reading Thy Lessons and refined Arts.” Cupid replies that he has, but asks his mother to “teach me to destroy / all such as scorn your wanton boy.” Venus responds with some drastic advice:

Fit well your arrows when you strike,
And choose for all what each may like;
But make some love, they know not why,
And for the ugly and ill humour’d die.

Again Venus councils Cupid to deny freedom of choice and is exposed as a dangerous source of male anxiety, a woman capable of controlling a man’s fate.

3.7 Later in Act II, Venus briefly reverses roles following “The Cupids Lesson” in which a coterie of Cupids syllabize a litany of negative character traits: “The insolent, the arrogant, … the mercenary, the vain and silly, the jealous and uneasy.” Adopting a Socratic strategy, Venus interrupts the exercise with the question: “But Cupid how shall I make Adonis constant still?” In confirming typical masculine fears of female manipulation, Cupid immediately responds “Use him very ill.” Venus responds with a burst of uncontrollable laughter which Blow appropriately highlights with a disturbing a''-flat which descends in a rush of thirty-second notes—roughly underlaid with the syllable “Ah” (see Figure 3, transcribed in Example 2). At a climactic moment in the masque, Venus reveals the depth of her depravity. Convulsed with laughter she is now her most deceptive, dangerous, and uncontrolled self. It is a moment of complete feminine disruption—excessive, verging on madness—which Blow reinforces with an equally excessive setting.

3.8 In Act III Venus, reflecting public disinterest in the Parliamentary strife which threatened Charles’s rule, appears to be almost entirely self concerned when Adonis is led in dying from injuries inflicted by “th’ Aedalian boar!”.³¹ Venus initially grieves, not for her lover, but for herself:

My groans shall reach the heav’ns: Oh pow’rs above,
Take pity on the wretched Queen of Love!

The ever “Faithful Adonis” expires and in her concluding lament the now “wretched Queen of Love” mourns again as much for herself as for Adonis: “He shall adorn the heav’ns: here I will weep / Till I am fall’n into as cold a sleep.”

3.9 Superficially, at least, Venus is sometimes also portrayed benevolently in the work. Blow presents her as an attentive mother to Cupid (she encourages the Cupids “To play, my Loves, to play”) and also as a grieving lover to Adonis. These apparently benign characteristics are, however, constantly belied, transformed, and undercut by her aggressive pursuit, domination, and manipulation of Adonis which ultimately results in his death. Such divergent characterizations—passionate seductress, doting playful mother, and grieving lover—underline Venus’s transitory, often oppositional, nature and reflect something of the contradicted, factionalized, and partisan nature of the state itself in the wake of the Exclusion Crisis. Perhaps an unlikely representation of the state, Venus nonetheless embodied a stereotypical image of female power while simultaneously reflecting the chameleon face of society and the evanescence of life, be it of Adonis, the king, or even the country.

4. The Loves of Mars and Venus

4.1 Another story that was often subjected to musical interpretation was the illicit love affair of Mars and Venus.³² According to this myth, which forms a brief episode in book IV of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Venus was appointed a husband, Vulcan, the lame god of metal working. The marriage between the crippled blacksmith and golden goddess of love was an obvious mismatch. Venus constantly cuckolded Vulcan, above all with Mars, the god of war and Vulcan’s half brother. Vulcan, however, is informed of his wife’s deceit and forges a metal net of invisible mesh that he throws over the couple as they lie together. Unable to escape, he exposes the couple to the ridicule of the rest of the gods.

4.2 In 1696, Pierre Motteux’s The Loves of Mars and Venus was set by Gottfried Finger and John Eccles as an interpolated masque in Thomas Ravenscroft’s play The Anatomist. In telling the well-known myth of the illicit affair, the work casts Venus in a purely Vulgaris mode and is also a negative commentary on female fidelity. In many ways the work parallels the tone and content of the Venus and Adonis story which also depicts an illicit relationship. Motteux sums up Venus’s role in “An Explanation of the Fable” attached to the libretto:

Venus is libidinous Pleasure, which is always wedded to the Fire of Lust … she’s [also] apt to cause stormy commotions, Fire and Bloodshed … By Mars Warriors are to be understood, who gazing upon Venus … are entic’d; and … lose their martial vigor.³³

Venus is thus represented as a dangerous figure capable of rendering even the most vigorous men impotent. The misogynist overtones of the work also become evident when in Act I Vulcan refers to Venus as “Thou plague of my Life, Thou devil, thou wife,” while Venus shrewishly replies “My Fool … I’ll dress when I please, nay I’ll Cuckold Thee too.” Indeed, the Epilogue spoken by Mars advises the audience to “Learn of Vulcan to forgive; Or else, egad, few plays or Wives will live.”

4.3 Similar to Charles II’s association with Adonis in Venus and Adonis, Mars is associated with William III who was well known for his military prowess. In a spoken section of the libretto Mars directly identifies himself with William, proclaiming:

Let future Heroes there appear;
Place Greece’s, Rome’s, and brave Britain’s there.
Let Alexander, Caesar, Arthur meet,
And all their Lawrels lay at greater William’s Feet.
William, more God-like, and as brave,
Shall only fight th’ endanger’d World to Save:
            William, my other self shall be;
             Inspir’d by Themis, and by me.

By casting Mars as William, Motteux is potentially satirizing William’s ad hoc installation as a consort king, and thus Venus might again be viewed as representative of England.³⁴ As in Blow’s Venus and Adonis, England and its citizenry are portrayed as a fickle mistress with whom William carries on an illicit affair. Given this scenario, Vulcan could be identified as James II seeking to undermine and humiliate William and his relationship with England. This interpretation would seem to be reinforced by the fact that William had recently survived a number of Jacobite plots, including an assassination attempt in 1696, carried out in order to help James recapture the Crown.³⁵ Thus Mars/William demands an apology from Vulcan/James for his transgressions against Venus/England:

Come, for her Pardon humbly sue!
Tho’ she were not so true,
She’s still too good for you.
Come, for her Pardon humbly sue!

Later, a humbled Vulcan is engaged in forging Mars’s weapons, “thunder-Bolts for Heav’ns King.” He imagines Mars slinging these bolts at a long list of cowards, atheists, fools and, finally and most notably, “At a Briton who says, he can long live contented.” This is again a backhanded comment on the fickleness of his wife Venus, and by analogy, of the British public.

4.4 Underlining the Venus Vulgaris portrayal in this satire is the overt consummation of Venus and Mars’s illicit relationship. Venus coos to Mars, “In thy arms I ravish’d fall, / Tranc’d in melting Joys I dye.” William similarly consummated his relationship with England by becoming king. Indeed later, in a cloying speech to Mars, Venus reinforces the analogy between male seduction and kingly conquest: “Ev’ry Town that’s worth the keeping, / Keeps a while th’ Invader out.” No sooner is the lovemaking completed than Vulcan—accompanied by “Wild Musick!”—casts his net over the pair, trapping them on the couch and exposing them to the ridicule of the other gods. To carry the political allegory further one need only imagine James’s casting his own net of blame and ridicule in recounting the illicit installation of William to various monarchs and dignitaries while in exile. The active acts of rebellion and assassination attempts against William made on his behalf would also appear to support this reading.

4.5 Cupid ends the torment of Venus and Mars, proclaiming “Thus all unequal Unions break”—a none too subtle sanctioning of the nation’s right to sever its ties and allegiances to James II. Vulcan is then struck by Cupid’s arrow and, now compelled by love, sets the couple free.        

4.6 In 1704, productions of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas removed the laudatory Prologue, and its images of Venus Coelestis (see par. 5.1), replacing it with The Loves of Mars and Venus, with its overtly critical tone and images of Venus Vulgaris.³⁶ The reasons for this apparently pointed reversal in tone, occurring some two years after William’s death, are unclear although perhaps Motteux’s comment on marital infidelity was merely meant to reinforce the consequences of the similarly illicit passion of Dido and Aeneas and the notion, common to both works, of the abandonment of masculine order and destiny in the face of feminine power. This scenario is reinforced by the presence of a powerful woman, Queen Anne, on the throne.

4.7 In 1696, the same year as the premiere of The Loves of Mars and Venus, Dorset Garden mounted the “opera” Brutus of Alba, or, Augusta’s Triumph, an adaptation by George Powell and John Verbruggen of Nahum Tate’s tragedy Brutus of Alba (1678). The work is musically rather unremarkable but includes a final act that recounts the Mars and Venus myth. Set in ancient Britain, in and around the Thames and the cliffs of Dover, Brutus of Alba is based on Britain’s Trojan namesake. It is largely a laudatory reinforcement of the monarchy and thus possibly another allegory of William III.

4.8 According to the stage directions, in the fifth act “A very large Machine descends” in which “sits Apollo, Cupid, Mars, Vulcan, Juno, Venus etc.”³⁷ The episode that ensues briefly recounts the story of Mars and Venus, and of Vulcan’s remonstrations over Venus’s infidelity. As in The Loves of Mars and Venus, Venus is confined to the role of an adulteress whose husband (Vulcan) “to Cuckolding was so much us’d.”³⁸

4.9 In Venus and Adonis, The Loves of Mars and Venus, and in the final act of Brutus of Alba, Venus is portrayed as a manipulative seductress who carries on transgressive affairs with either a young boy or behind the back of her husband. There are certainly notable differences between the two scenarios, among the most prominent being that, unlike Adonis, Mars does not die as a result of his relationship. Nonetheless, in each case Venus can be viewed as a representation of England—analogous to a fickle, yet seductive, courtesan with whom Charles II and later William III are having transitory affairs.

5. Venus and the Monarchy on the Restoration Stage

5.1 In contrast to the portrayals of Venus as the inconstant nation found in Venus and Adonis (1682) and The Loves of Mars and Venus (1696), the intervening period witnessed a number of works that promoted Venus as a positive representation of the monarchy.³⁹ The controversy surrounding the monarchy that led to the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688–9 resulted in an increase of theatrical subjects based on the Trojan origins of the early Britons. This myth provided English kings with a series of heroic monarchs, such as Brutus, Aeneas, and King Arthur on which to model their own political ambitions. In works evoking a Trojan origin of Britain, such as Albion and Albanius (1687), Dido and Aeneas (1684–9?), and King Arthur (1684–91), Venus appears solely in her Coelestis persona, a source of social harmony, and the celebrated matriarch of England’s Trojan lineage. Similarly there is little evidence in these works that she represents any danger to masculine order and control. Indeed the reverse appears true, as she is typically reduced to singing encomiums to the monarchy and nation.

5.2 Louis Grabu and John Dryden’s opera Albion and Albanius (1685) reaffirms the lineage of the English monarchy from Albion (a.k.a. Brutus) to Charles II. In an unreservedly royalist preface, Dryden explains that the work “plainly represents the double restoration of his Sacred Majesty,” in particular Charles II’s restoration in 1660 and the exile and return of James, Duke of York, following the Bill of Catholic Exclusion.⁴⁰ The work thus clearly represents Albion and his brother Albanius as Charles II and his successor James II.

5.3 Venus appears in the final act, rising from the ocean to return Albanius/James from exile and present Albion/Charles with “Peace and Pleasure.” Functioning as Venus Coelestis, she is directly associated with the monarchy and Britain as she restores both Albanius and civic peace and order to the nation. Reflecting her regal association her main musical function is to sing acclamations to the two kings and to “Thy glorious Race, where Love and Honour claim an equal place” (III, 2).

5.4 Venus also makes a brief appearance in Naham Tate’s prologue to Dido and Aeneas. Addressed as “The Sovereign Queen of Beauty” (in opposition to “The wretched Queen of Beauty” as in Blow’s Venus and Adonis) she brings spring, and hence fertility and abundance, to the shores of England and is again representative of monarchical order, peace, and prosperity.⁴¹ Andrew Walkling’s association of Venus with James II’s queen, Mary of Modena, again points to a monarchical symbolism.⁴² Venus’s often depicted function as the corrupting woman is usurped in this work by the presence of the equally uncontrollable Sorceress and Witches and by the character of Dido who can also be read as representing a jilted English nation.

5.5 Dryden and Purcell’s semi-opera King Arthur (1684–91) is similarly drawn from the myth of English Trojan ancestry. The libretto revolves around Arthur’s quest to unify Britain and liberate the Christian Britons from the pagan Saxons. The final act offers an assortment of patriotic, rustic, and pastoral numbers highlighted by the unexpected arrival of Venus and her minuet aria “Fairest Isle.” An unalloyed adoration of Britain (“all isles excelling”), its lilting triple meter and string introduction and accompaniment mark it as a prime exemplar of Venus Coelestis.⁴³ The undulating melodic phrases, exhibiting almost palindromic symmetries, are another manifestation of the stable and orderly society that Venus represents. Indeed, contrasted with the preceding blasphemous protest song, “Your hay it is mow’d,” “Fairest Isle” represents the civilizing strength and power of love and the restoration of peaceful national order in the wake of chaotic Saxon rule. No longer the instigator of civil unrest, as in Venus and Adonis or The Loves of Mars and Venus, in “Fairest Isle” she is the sanguine representative of peace and love who honors the beauty and virtue of Britain.

5.6 In works from the late 1680s Venus appears as the benign matriarch of England’s Trojan lineage and a positive, socially harmonizing figure. Following the unrest engendered by the Glorious Revolution, subsequent works reverted to depictions of Venus which emphasized the disruptive Vulgaris side of her character. This is evident not only in The Loves of Mars and Venus and Brutus of Alba (see Section 4), but also in Dryden’s The Secular Masque (1700), and Congreve’s “Prize Musick” libretto The Judgment of Paris (1700), works which depict her libidinous predilections.⁴⁴

5.7 Venus remained a common subject of English theater music well into the eighteenth century. Works such as “Venus and Adonis, a Cantata, Set by Mr. Handel” (ca. 1711),⁴⁵ Johann Pepusch’s opera Venus and Adonis (1715), and new settings of Congreve’s Judgment of Paris by Giuseppe Sammartini (1740) and Thomas Arne (1742)⁴⁶ ensured her profile until the mid-century when classical deities gradually declined as subjects of serious contemplation.⁴⁷

5.8 Britain was by no means unique in its use of Venus either as a musical subject or as an allegorical representation of the state. The relationship of Venus with music and politics has been recognized in various forms throughout history and in many regions of Europe.⁴⁸ In terms of their relevance to English works, however, the most important settings to involve Venus originated in Italy. Like Britain, Italy—and particularly Venice and Rome—saw themselves as heirs of the Trojan empire. As such, they too had a common fascination with Venus as the progenitor of their, albeit fragmented, monarchical lineage—a fascination which manifests itself in a similar use of Venus as a subject for many musical works which all incorporate her character in relation to the myth of Trojan origins.⁴⁹ In addition to sharing the same myth with Britain, the Venetian republic had long served as a model for the English parliamentary system.⁵⁰ Politicians such as the Earl of Shaftesbury, a staunch Whig, were interested in reducing the power of the king and increasing individual liberty by refashioning Parliament on the model of a Venetian Senate.⁵¹

5.9 Despite this geographically widespread fascination with Venus, Britain, nonetheless, had a particular affinity for the character. Venus was a central subject in medieval English poetry, particularly in the works of Chaucer, Lydgate, and Gower.⁵² This interest was carried through into the Renaissance, with works such as Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, and on into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as is evident in the numerous references to Venus in the works of authors such as Dryden, Congreve, Cibber, and Prior.

6. Conclusion

6.1 Venus, in her liminal representations of both nation and monarchy, was also a common personification of masculine anxiety over female power. Classical authors regularly wrote about the loss of masculine strength when faced with feminine powers of seduction. In myths featuring the Sirens or Venus and Adonis, for example, female protagonists seduce and ostensibly control weaker mortal males who die as a result. Homer’s fifth hymn similarly recounts Anchises’ fear of emasculation upon discovering that he is making love to Venus:

I knew it in that first moment, when I saw Thee—well I knew
That Thou wert indeed a Goddess.
Twas Thy tongue spoke not true.
Leave me not, I beseech Thee, on earth to linger now
A feeble, strengthless shadow! For that man wastes away,
Who once in the arms immortal of a daughter of heaven lay.⁵³

Indeed the male orgasm has historically been interpreted as a supreme moment of masculine disempowerment and vulnerability, embodying a literal and figurative loss of masculine agency and self-control.⁵⁴ Similarly, the term “venereal disease” is also evidence of the widespread anxiety regarding the fear of Venus who functions as a symbolic representation of the sexual powers of women in general.⁵⁵

6.2 As manifest in Venus’s beauty, female vanity was particularly viewed as a threat to male power. John Andrews outlined the danger in 1783, when he observed that French women were consumed by an “appetite for admiration,” and their “natural eloquence” rendered men powerless and submissive such that “subjection of some kind or other seems necessary for a Frenchman.”⁵⁶ The introduction of Italian opera into England was also viewed as a feminine disruption. In 1706, for example, John Dennis voiced his anxiety regarding the pernicious influence of “the soft and effeminate Measures of Italian Opera” which caused Italian men to be “neither Vertuous, nor Wise, nor Valiant” and similarly caused “they who have reason to know their Women, [to] never trust them out of their sight.”⁵⁷

6.3 Englishmen’s view of their own women was scarcely any more enlightened. Alexander Pope’s Epistle to a Lady: Of the Characters of Women (1732–4), for example, directly comments on the duplicitous and vain nature of women. Pope in his opening argument explains “How Contrarieties run thro’ them all” and that “the Particular Characters of this Sex are more various than those of Men.”⁵⁸ Later, at line 215, Pope includes the following verse:

Men, some to Bus’ness, some to Pleasure take;
But ev’ry Women is at heart a Rake:
Men, some to Quiet, some to public Strife;
But ev’ry Lady would be Queen for life.
Yet mark the fate of a whole Sex of Queens!
Pow’r all their ends, but Beauty all the means.

Such a comment of course reflects something of the transgressive ambition manifest in Venus’s character.

6.4 The mutable representations of Venus that inhabited the late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century English stage in part reflected a fear of the feminine disruption of the masculine concept of order and peace that governed the country. In terms evocative of Venus’s pluralistic character, political historian Tom Nairn propounds nationalism’s chameleon-like ability to be “communal and authoritarian, friendly and bellicose” and “to rouse unlike peoples in unlike conditions.”⁵⁹ Venus’s representation of the nation is grounded in both her historical image as matron of the Trojan lineage of Britain and in the literary analogy, derived from ancient Greek writers, of either the socially harmonizing or disruptive goddess of love. Venus is often symbolic of a (female) English populace that can be either positive (a good wife devoted to the monarchy) or negative (a masculinized, cuckolding wife opposed to the monarchy). In Venus and Adonis, Mars and Venus, and Brutus of Alba, for example, Venus is portrayed as negative and destructive. As such, the association of Venus with England in these works warns against the consequences of a transgressive English populace subverting their monarchy like a bad wife.⁶⁰ In the project of unifying a diversity of individual experiences under an identifiable national image, Venus, in this latter guise, often represented a readily identifiable feminine “other” against which notions of the masculine image of the nation might be focused. The portrayal of England as a strong, powerful, and masculine nation (in opposition to France and Italy, whose language and nature were commonly viewed as feminine) infused language, literature, and music throughout the early eighteenth century.⁶¹ Indeed, to a large degree, conquest of the “other” is a matter common to the forging of both empire and nation. In this manner Venus’s seemingly antithetical roles of dangerous women and national matriarch are inextricably linked.

6.5 Restoration-era Britain was never a singular identifiable national entity but rather a mutable conglomeration of factions and ideologies. Recent scholarship has demonstrated that before the mid-eighteenth century, Europeans identified more strongly with their monarch, religion, or native region than with Benedict Anderson’s definition of nation as an “imagined community.”⁶² Nonetheless, preceding this development, Venus provided not only a powerful emblem of the plurality and factionalized nature of Britain and its Trojan heritage but also an icon of the dangers of the feminine “other” which aided in coalescing an emerging national ideal of British masculinity. During an era when Britain was struggling to form a coherent national identity her mutable nature was manipulated to appeal to all people, and thus she was a suitable polysemic emblem of the fickle populace of Britain in general.

6.6 As with much history, there is a lack of linear teleology in Restoration socio-political life. All elements of society were subject to continual change, decay, and renovation, and it cannot reasonably be claimed that there was ever a complete triumph of absolutist divine-right ideologies or Whiggish libertine values. Venus, however, was emblematic of such competing ideologies and of a multi-faceted, often conflicted, nation. Her royal and musical associations, combined with her highly mutable character, made her a perfect emblem of the often fractious and constantly evolving society that marked the period surrounding the Civil War and Glorious Revolution.⁶³ Robin Headlam Wells has recently outlined the importance of the “musician-king” during the English Renaissance, arguing that “the state is like a family, united in loving concord by the offices of a paternal musician-king whose task is to harmonize the conflicting elements in society.”⁶⁴ In the Restoration, associating the king with the ambivalent character of Venus served to complement his harmonizing power while simultaneously warning of the dangers of exceeding royal authority and abusing the powers vested in him by Parliament. Ultimately a cautionary figure, Venus typically represented both the harmony and potential discord of state—reinforcing the Trojan lineage of the monarchy and its potential transience. She represented not only the beauty, peace, prosperity and order which Britain desired, but also the wanton disorder which it feared. In this manner the state and monarchy were deemed analogous to a woman, often beautiful and nurturing yet dangerous if allowed too much control or power. Thus, embedded in Venus’s representation of state order or disorder was a powerful paradigm of female possibility and a prototypical form of female empowerment. To understand Venus’s presence on the Restoration stage is to discover a powerful and liminal figure who was instrumental in negotiating notions of love, beauty, gender, politics, nation, and music during this period.

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