1. A History of the Tory Party 1640-1714 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), p. 288. See also Gilbert Burnet, History of His Own Times , 6 vols. (Oxford University Press, 1833), 4:151-152. For a brief but representative list of Jacobite grievances, see An Old Cavalier Turned a New Courtier (n.p., n.d.): At the Revolution

It was not . . . consider'd what an entailed War was like to succeed even after the death of the King, betwixt the Prince of Wales and the issue of the Princesses, which can have no termination, without restoring him the Crown, to whom of right it doth belong. They foresaw not the strength of France , nor what a Thorn Ireland would be in our side, or that the Dutch would rob us of our Trade, and that Transportation and Pestilential Diseases, would sweep away so many Thousands of our Sea-men and Souldiers, nor could divine that our Merchants should lose so many Millions by Storm and Surprise. They had no apprehensions that the Country should not onely be Fleeced by quarter and Taxes, but be reduced to a very Skeleton, and the Forreign Beare-skins and Thrum Caps should suck the marrow out of our Bones. (P. 3) [BACK]

2. Poems on Affairs of State , vol. 5, ed. William J. Cameron (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), p. 234. Dryden wrote his ''Character of Polybius" for Sheeres's 1693 translation of that historian. [BACK]

3. Poems on Affairs of State , 5:232; Henry Horwitz, Parliament, Policy, and Politics in the Reign of William III , p. 62. [BACK]

4. The Parliamentary History of England , ed. William Cobbett (London, 1809), 5:659-662. [BACK]

5. H. C. Foxcroft, The Life and Letters of Sir George Savile, Bart. First Marquis of Halifax , 2 vols. (London: Longmans, 1898), 2:143. [BACK]

6. Foxcroft, 2:138-139. [BACK]

7. Foxcroft, 2:456. [BACK]

8. King Arthur is called a "dramatic opera" on its title page and has been described with other works of its age and genre as a "semi opera" and a ''play with music." In calling it simply a "play," I advance no theory of its genre; I mean merely to use the least cumbersome of available terms. [BACK]

9. The Works of John Dryden , ed. Sir Walter Scott, rev. ed. George Saintsbury, vol. 8 (Edinburgh: William Paterson, 1882), p. 137. All citations to King Arthur and Cleomenes are to this edition. [BACK]

10. For the reaction to Beachy Head see Poems on Affairs of State , vol. 5, ed. William Cameron (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), pp. 226-230, especially "A Long Prologue to a Short Play," a poem critical of naval management written about October 1690 by Dryden's friend Sir Henry Sheeres. For a satire written in 1691 on the impotence of the navy, see "The English Triumphs at Sea," pp. 392-394. Even William's supporters recognized the inadequacy of the fleet. See for example Reflections upon the Occurences of the Last Year (London, 1689), p. 8:

If . . . we take a Prospect of the Progress of our Affairs at sea , we shall find . . . the two famous Nations for Action at Sea, not onely baffled by the sole Power of France , but our losses in Men by Sickness and Mortalities greater than by Fight , and in our Merchandise and Trade, not less than our Expences: And, as if the Power of our Enemies were not enough to annoy us, after all, (if the Complaints of our Merchants and their Mariners be true,) our Ships have been made a Prey by those who should have been their Guard and Convoy, and were imployed for that Purpose.

See also The Management of the Present War against France Consider'd (London, 1690); A Modest Enquiry into the Causes of the Present Disasters in England. And who they are that brought the French Fleet into the English Channel (London, 1690): "To see the French Masters at Sea , and the English Glory thus sunk in the eyes of all Christendom by a

Complication of Disasters , cannot but raise the Curiosity of all true Lovers of their Countrey to enquire into the Source and Cause of so important Events" (p. 1); Henry Maydman, Naval Speculations (London, 1691): England must "reassume her ancient Glory and Prowess , in her Naval Affairs , and command of the Narrow- Seas , which we have lost in a great degree; or at least eclipsed . . . the which, if not gained speedily, I fear it may prove too late afterwards" (sig. A). [BACK]

11. This humble submission to authority was originally countered by a parenthetical reference to the commendable manner in which Dryden surrendered the laureateship rather than alter his principles. See Fredson Bowers, "Dryden as Laureate: the Cancel Leaf in 'King Arthur'," TLS , 10 April 1953, p. 244. [BACK]

12. Sir Walter Scott, in The Works of John Dryden , vol. 8 (Edinburgh: William Paterson, 1884), p. 127; Roberta F. Brinkley, Arthurian Legend in the Seventeenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1932), p. 144. The most extreme expression of this view is James D. Merriman's, in The Flower of Kings: A Study of Arthurian Legend in England Between 1485 and 1835 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1973), p. 63: "The final effect of the whole—to use the word loosely—with its compounding of sentimentalized blindness and exposed innocence, rhetorical passions and febrile eroticism, resembles a slightly sticky marshmallow sundae laced with absinthe and sprinkled with cantharides." In "The Impossible Form of Art: Dryden, Purcell, and King Arthur," Studies in the Literary Imagination , 10 (1977), 125-144, Michael W. Alssid attempts with dubious success to apply to the opera various New Critical notions of thematic manipulation and self-reflexiveness. [BACK]

13. Samuel Kliger, in The Goths in England: A Study of Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952), pp. 192-193, sees the Britons as Royalists and the Saxons as Democrats, and suggests that the opera recommends a reconciliation of the two parties. Robert E. Moore, in Henry Purcell and the Restoration Theatre (London: Heinemann, 1961), p. 72, and Franklin B. Zimmerman, in Henry Purcell, 1659-1695: His Life and Times (London: Macmillan, 1971) agree that Arthur represents William, though Zimmerman casts some doubt on Dryden's sincerity. Eugene M. Waith, in "Spectacles of State," SEL , 13 (1973), 317-330, places King Arthur in the masque tradition of compliment to the reigning king. Joanne Altieri, in "Baroque Hieroglyphics in Dryden's King Arthur, PQ , 61 (1982), 431-451, finds in the conclusion of the opera a celebration of mercantile values, in which she suspects some undercurrent of irony. [BACK]

14. Henry Purcell and the London Stage (Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 289-319. Price lists five "humorous juxtapositions" in King Arthur , and together they make up a rather miscellaneous set. First is the

juxtaposition of the Saxon chorus of sacrifice with the song "I call ye all," in which the Saxons are invited to drink in Woden's Hall—Price remarks that "the solemn sacrifice becomes a bacchanal" (p. 299). There may well be some intentional deflation here; certainly there is quite a lot in the sacrifice itself. However, Ethel Seaton, in Literary Relations of England and Scandinavia in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935), p. 257, has shown that "I call ye all'' is an imitation of "the Death Song of Rangnar Lothbrok" in Aylett Sammes Britannia Antiqua Illustrati ; it is therefore perhaps merely a display of Dryden's antiquarian learning. Next Price finds that ''The Arcadian vision of guiltless pleasure" presented before Emmeline and Matilda by the Kentish shepherds "is blurred by a reminder of the possible consequences of pre-marital sex" (p. 299). Next, in the famous Frost Scene, Purcell's music makes us feel the suffering of the cold genius, which is then ridiculed by Cupid's response. The remaining ironies occur in the prophetic masque at the end of the opera, and they are, I think, certainly crucial to Dryden's meaning. Price remarks that the "holy composition ['For Folded Flocks'] is followed by the Jolly, blasphemous folk-song 'Your hay it is mowed'" (p. 314), and that William's authority is undercut in the Grand Chorus by Dryden's reference to his "Scepter'd Subjects" (p. 316). In his new biography of Dryden, published since I wrote my own account of the play, James A. Winn follows Price in finding contradictory parallels; and adds much of his own. I coincide with Winn in seeing in Philidel a reflection of Dryden, and in finding opposition protest against the war in the Dedication and the play. See John Dryden and His World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 448-451. [BACK]

15. See for example Some Reflections upon His Highness the Prince of Orange's Declaration (n.p., 1688): War "is his Passion; his Education has been under that Discipline, and his Skill is in Martial Affairs. He told his Father (he now Invades) nine years ago, This his Army had cost him 1300 Lives to bring it to that Discipline it was in. A story that we, who talk of Magna Charta's, Trials by Juries , and Habeas-Corpus-Laws , may at leisure think upon" (p. 12). [BACK]

16. For Alssid (p. 135), this stanza shows that "the Britons are sceptical . . . of their small achievements." The Britons do indeed sing the stanza, but that it does not express their point of view is clear from a change in pronouns—"we" in the first stanza becomes "they" in the second—and from the contrast between the second stanza and the fourth, in which the Britons' view is clearly expressed: "Now the victory's won, / To the plunder we run: / We return to our lasses, like fortunate traders, / Triumphant with spoils of the vanquished invaders" ( Works , 8:151). [BACK]

17. See Howard Erskine-Hill, "Literature and the Jacobite Cause," in Ideology and Conspiracy: Aspects of Jacobitism, 1689-1759 , ed. Eveline

Cruickshanks (Edinburgh: James Donald Publishers, 1982), p. 49. In the speech quoted above, Halifax warns that "No Prince can bee so chast as that it is adviseable to tempt him to committ a rape," Foxcroft, p. 139. [BACK]

18. A History of the English Church and People , trans. Leo Sherley Price, rev. ed. R. E. Latham (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 58. [BACK]

19. Henry Purcell , p. 312. [BACK]

20. The author of The Dutch Design Anatomized (London, 1690), for example, thus illustrates his assertion that William will bring in "a medley of Nations" that will "ravage and despoil our Country": ''When Vortigern called in the Saxons to his aid, for a while they seemed content with Pay, and some Portion of Quarters; but finding the pleasure and riches of our Country so far exceed their own Habitations, they soon opened a passage for new recruits, and not only expelled the Britains the Country, but after an Infinite effusion of Blood, laid all the Cities, Burghs, Castles, and Fortresses in Ashes" (pp. 14-15); the author of The Dear Bargain (n.p., n.d.) claims of the Dutch:

Doubtless we shall find them equally Conservators of our Properties, and of our Religion, such as the Normans were to the Saxons , and the Saxons in their turn had been to the Britons : The first under the Conquerour of this Man's fatal Name, had but one landing place, and made all England his own; the other under Hengist and Horsa , with but the sixth part of the number of our present Invaders, having got Possession of the Isle of Thanet , yet by little and little brought over so many from the same Shoar from whence our new Recruits are coming, that they entirely reined the British Monarchy (p. 23). [BACK]

21. In addition to Feiling, Horwitz, and Burnet, cited above, see David Ogg, England in the Reigns of James II and William III (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), pp. 297-303. [BACK]

22. Henry Purcell , p. 314. [BACK]

23. Henry Purcell , pp. 316-317. [BACK]

24. See Charles Ward, The Life of John Dryden (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961), pp. 253-254 for a full account of these events. [BACK]

25. See Ward, p. 254, and The Letters of John Dryden , ed. Charles Ward (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1942), p. 49. Winn also mentions this request and remarks briefly that in view of it Dryden "acted inprudently" in writing Cleomenes ( Dryden , pp. 451-452). [BACK]

26. This is not entirely true of the most famous parallel of the age, Absalom and Achitophel ; but this poem is in many ways a special case.

For a more representative use of overt parallel see Dryden and Lee's The Duke of Guise . [BACK]

27. Anne Barbeau Gardiner, in a paper delivered at the MLA Conference on 27 December 1986, reads Cleomenes in light of contemporary Jacobite poetry, in which the English are portrayed as ingrates and degenerates; and thus identifies Dryden's Egyptians with them. It is not, however, likely that Dryden would depict his countrymen as backward during a Revolution. In all his works since the exclusion crisis, he had described them as inconstant to their leaders, and in the Dedication of Eleanora , written soon after Cleomenes , he makes a point of protesting this inconstancy. J. Douglas Canfield, in a paper delivered at the ASECS Conference on 24 April 1988, also considers Cleomenes an expression of unambiguous Jacobitism. The only dissent from this view is Judith Sloman's, who suggests, in a work published since I wrote my own account, that "The play salvages James as an object of personal admiration and loyalty while admitting the virtual impossibility of seeing him as a focus of concrete political action" ( Dryden: The Poetics of Translation , Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), pp. 45-46. [BACK]

28. James Macpherson, Original Papers Containing the Secret History of Great Britain (London, 1775), I:233. [BACK]

29. Letters, p. 252. [BACK]