In seventeenth-century Italy the term ‘oratorio’ was applied to certain vocal musical works having characteristics in common but often quite different in scale and style. The fact that the word did not appear in the title of a work did not necessarily debar it from being considered a member of the genre. Almost any vocal work having a non-liturgical religious text, written for more than one singer and of greater extent than a single aria or chorus, could be considered an oratorio. Since the form was largely confined to Catholic Italy, the texts were invariably in Italian or Latin, and generally there was an implication that the work was dramatic – that is, the singers, at least when performing solo, represented named characters, whether historical, mythical, supernatural or allegorical. The text might include narration, sung either by a single voice or shared among a number of singers, thus setting the work at a distance from pure theatrical drama, while by no means precluding highly personalised emotion. The best-known example of an oratorio of the mid-seventeenth century, Giacomo Carissimi's Historia de Jepthes, has several narrative solos, but the main characters of Jephtha and his daughter are impersonated consistently by a tenor and a soprano, and the Israelites by the chorus. Their music is powerfully expressive, and clearly designed to involve the listener in the events of the tragic story and its effects on the participants.

Handel first came to London in his capacity as an opera composer, and that remained his primary occupation for more than twenty-five years. Consequently the ‘theatre system’ in London had a profound effect on the conditions in which he worked. The fledgeling opera company was far from stable when he arrived in 1710 and underwent several major revolutions in the course of Handel's life: confusing as these are, one must try to make sense of them if one is to understand Handel's often stormy career in the theatre.

London was (in theatrical terms) quite different from any other European city of its time. The multiple theatres that had flourished in Shakespeare's day had been abolished by the Puritans in 1642, and after Charles II was restored in 1660 he granted a pair of perpetual patents, creating a monopoly for two favoured courtiers. Neither Charles nor any of his successors could afford to create a court theatre or to patronise the arts on a lavish scale comparable to the promotion of masques by James I and Charles I before 1642. The London theatres were commercial enterprises dependent on daily ticket sales. The patent grants of the 1660s limited London to just two active theatre companies for more than fifty years: opera (or semi-opera, to be precise) was presented occasionally by the resident companies as part of their regular repertories. When Handel arrived, the patent theatres were Drury Lane (opened in 1674) and the Queen's Theatre in the Haymarket (opened in 1705).

When Handel arrived in London in the last weeks of 1710, Henry Purcell had been dead for just fifteen years. His younger brother Daniel, though still active as a professional organist, was no longer a productive composer, and much the same is true of the long-lived William Turner (1651–1740), who, with John Blow (d. 1708), had been the most distinguished of Purcell's colleagues and contemporaries in the Chapel Royal. Likewise John Eccles, the leading English theatrical composer at the turn of the century, and official court composer from 1700 until his death in 1735, had by this time retired from the hurly-burly of life in the city and gone to live in Hampton Wick where, according to Hawkins, he spent most of his time fishing. As for Jeremiah Clarke, one of the more impressive creative talents of the next generation, he had, seemingly for love, put a pistol to his head in late November 1707. Of those native composers still left and active on the London musical scene, much the most gifted were John Weldon (1676–1736) and William Croft (1678–1727), both of whom Handel must surely have encountered quite early on in his first visit.

A former organist of New College, Oxford, Weldon moved in 1701 to London where, as a rank outsider, he immediately succeeded in winning first prize (over the heads of both Eccles and Daniel Purcell, who came second and third respectively) in a celebrated competition for a setting of Congreve's masque The Judgment of Paris. In 1708 he succeeded Blow as one of the two organists of the Chapel Royal, and not long after he was also appointed second composer for the Chapel, at which point he seems more or less to have dried up.

For the sheer number of issues that it raises and potentially illuminates, the investigation of Handel's compositional process constitutes a particularly bountiful field of inquiry. It has yielded new insights into Handel's concept of musical style and structure, his approach to text and drama, and his interactions with singers and librettists. As a result of recent studies we can identify many of Handel's creative tendencies: his attempts upon revision to mitigate thematic garrulousness and to achieve a continuous musical surface, his use of ‘cut and paste’ techniques akin to eighteenth-century ars combinatoria, his concern with musical imagery and drama and with the roles of specific singers in the creation of the operas and oratorios. Yet more remains unknown than known about Handel's compositional process, and even the most basic of received views must sometimes be questioned.

Such is the case with one of the traditional models for Handel's compositional procedures, invoked whenever the genesis of a work must be described, which is generally stated roughly as follows: ‘Handel began composing by writing down a skeleton score, drafting the principal melodic lines and bass for arias and choruses (the lines for accompanying instrumental parts were left blank), and writing the recitative texts between the set pieces. At a later stage, he went back and “filled up” the score, providing music for the recitatives and writing out the orchestral parts.’

Handel is remembered above all as a great composer for the human voice, the creator of operas, cantatas, anthems and oratorios; but in his lifetime he was also renowned as a brilliant keyboard player. As well as displaying his gift for improvisation, for which he was particular admired, he composed some superb music for keyboard instruments. The organ concertos of his later years were written for public performance, but his harpsichord music was no doubt composed for his own pleasure, the enjoyment of his friends and the instruction of his pupils; most of it was written by the time he was thirty-five, and was concentrated into two comparatively brief periods of his life.

The first of these periods covers his earliest years up to 1706, which is not surprising when we consider that the training he received as a boy in Halle from the excellent Zachow laid considerable emphasis on music for keyboard instruments. Zachow's world was that of the seventeenthcentury German Protestant organist, whose art was based on the solemn counterpoint of the Lutheran chorale, on the well-wrought fugue, the church cantata, and sets of variations on choral tunes, with some light relief in suites and chaconnes in the French style. Earlier in the century French composers had developed a true harpsichord idiom distinct from that of the organ, involving among other techniques the style brisé accompaniments used by lutenists; but although their influence on German keyboard music after 1650 was considerable, initially conveyed through the works of Froberger, the distinction between the textures and figurations appropriate for the harpsichord and those for the organ was hardly observed in Germany.

During the fifty years preceding Handel's half-century in London, Italian music gradually eclipsed the French, which had enjoyed much favour after Charles II returned from France in 1660. Purcell had abetted this change in taste, for he had ‘faithfully endeavour'd a just imitation of the most fam'd Italian Masters; principally, to bring the seriousness and gravity of that sort of Musick into vogue, and reputation among our Country-men, whose humor, 'tis time now, should begin to loath the levity, and balladry of our neighbours’. Italian music had overwhelmed the English as well as the French by 1714, when John Macky noted that the decade-old theatre ‘for Opera's at the End of the Pall-Mall, or Hay-Market, is the finest I ever saw, and where we are entertained in Italian Musick generally twice a Week … The English affect more the Italian than the French Musick; and their own Compositions are between the Gravity of the first, and the Levity of the other … They have now a good many very Eminent Masters; but the Taste of the Town being at this Day all Italian, it is a great discouragement to them’. This was true for instrumental as well as vocal genres. When reflecting upon the ‘circumstances which concurred to convert the English Musick intirely over from the French to the Italian taste’, Roger North (c. 1650–1734) found the decisive step to be the arrival of Corelli's sonatas and concertos, which ‘cleared the ground of all other sorts of musick whatsoever’ and ‘are to the musitians like the bread of life’.

Handel was involved in the composition of sacred music throughout his career, although it was rarely the focal point of his activities. Only during the brief period in 1702–3 when he was organist for the Cathedral in Halle did he hold a church job which required regular weekly duties and, since the cathedral congregation was Calvinist, these duties did not include composing much (if any) concerted music. Virtually all of his sacred music was written for specific events and liturgies, and the choice of Handel to compose these works was dictated by his connections with specific patrons. Handel's sacred music falls into groups of works which were written for similar forces and occasions, and will be discussed in terms of those groups in this chapter.

During his period of study with Zachow in Halle Handel must have written some music for services at the Marktkirche or the Cathedral, but no examples survive. His earliest extant work is the F major setting of Psalm 113, Laudate pueri (HWV 236), for solo soprano and strings. The autograph is on a type of paper that was available in Hamburg, and he may have written it there in late 1706 to take with him to Italy; alternatively, he may have written it at Rome early in 1707 on paper brought with him from Hamburg. The jagged vocal lines for the solo soprano are typical of his early style and may be related to Mattheson's comment that Handel knew a great deal about fugue and counterpoint but ‘very little about melody’ in this period.

Scholars outside Germany have, with good reason, tended to avoid a direct confrontation with the first twenty-one years of Handel's life. First, there are few primary sources relating to his upbringing and education, and the secondary material from the eighteenth century is fraught with obvious inaccuracies and misunderstandings. Furthermore, whatever can be gleaned from the most influential accounts – most notably Mainwaring's of 1760 – might seem, on first sight, irrelevant to a composer whose talents and international exposure seem to stretch well beyond the confines of Halle and Hamburg.

Two of Handel's earliest English biographers, Mainwaring and Hawkins, both try to portray the composer as an isolated genius, who – in Hawkins's view – learned to play the clavichord with virtually no previous experience of music. Even the most significant German biographer, Chrysander (who otherwise fills in many of the spaces in previous accounts of the German years), tends to underplay the achievement of Handel's teacher, Zachow, in order to emphasise the composer's innate talent. More recent writers have, fortunately, redressed the balance, showing quite clearly that Handel did not miraculously spring fully formed into cosmopolitan musical life. Nevertheless, surprisingly few have observed the sheer variety of musical institutions and patronage that Handel experienced before he left Germany, something which undoubtedly contributed to his uncanny ability to handle both court support and public financing during his active career in England.

While in our own time Handel's choruses (particularly those in Messiah) are perhaps his best known vocal music, throughout much of his career it was his arias that generated the most public enthusiasm. Partially owing to the relative neglect of the works in which arias are the most prominent element (the operas and cantatas) in the two centuries following Handel's death, and partially owing to rapidly changing tastes in the genres to which those works belong (both then and now), our appreciation of Handel's aria composition has suffered. Arias are the most important structural element in all of Handel's vocal works, however, and consequently they occupied more of his creative energy than any other form. As a result, Handel's arias provide us with a clear picture of his compositional development and also with insights into his aesthetic aims throughout his career.

Certainly part of our neglect of Handel's arias is the result of the fact that the vast majority of them are in da capo form, a form most commonly associated with opera seria. Until quite recently, opera seria as a genre has been relentlessly criticised by both contemporary commentators and modern scholars alike; moreover, quite often the focus of the criticism has been the da capo aria itself. Essentially an expanded ternary form, the grand da capo aria (or five-part da capo, the type most commonly found in Handel's arias) takes the form A1 A2 B (B) A1 A2, in which A1 is the first stanza of text, A2 is a repetition of the first stanza, and B is the second stanza of text.

Demography, economy and social class

It is estimated that, at the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth, Italy, inhabited by about 12 million people, had an urban population fluctuating between 14 and 19 per cent of the total. This was a higher percentage than in Germany (8–11 per cent) and compared well with the English figure (13–16 per cent). Nevertheless, the future Anglican bishop and parliamentarian Gilbert Burnet, who in 1685 traversed a large part of the Italian peninsula from Milan to Naples, was astonished ‘how there should be so much poverty in so rich a country, which is all over full of beggars’. The most populous Italian city was Naples, with about 250,000 inhabitants (half as many as London but equal to Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Leipzig put together); some distance behind came Milan, Venice, Rome and Palermo, with populations of between 100,000 and 140,000 (thus of the same order of magnitude as Vienna, with just over 100,000 people), while Genoa, Bologna and Florence, each mustering between 60,000 and 80,000 inhabitants, had stagnant population figures or had even slightly regressed in the previous hundred years.

Italy suffered a dramatic social and economic decline in the seventeenth century, as a result of the reduction in importance of the Mediterranean area following the rise of the great maritime empires and the powerful centralised monarchies north of the Alps. The production of woollen cloth fell in Milan from 15,000 pieces per annum to little more than 3,000 – a tendency followed by other centres in Lombardy such as Como, Monza and Cremona, as well as by Florence.

The history of modern literary theory begins in Germany with Johann Christoph Gottsched's Versuch einer Critischen Dichtkunst (An Essay in Critical Poetics, 1730), a poetics that is novel in spite of itself. Introduced by a translation and commentary on Horace's De Arte Poetica, the first, general part of the poetics contains doctrines still indebted to the neoclassical tradition. But Gottsched's views on the theory of genres, the concept of taste, and on the role of the critic all point towards an imminent break with this tradition. The time between 1730 and 1751, when the fourth edition of the Critische Dichtkunst appeared and when Lessing made his debut as a literary critic, was a time of transformation, during which literary discourse was still dominated by the old concepts while new approaches were not yet strong enough to transform the old into something explicitly new. René Wellek, from a twentieth-century perspective, proposes as a meaningful starting-point for the history of modern literary theory the middle of the eighteenth century. This perspective is still generally accepted, but it requires some qualification in the case of Germany, where change was slow in coming. Not until the end of the eighteenth century was the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, which Perrault had started in France in 1687, finally decided in favour of the Moderns.

The fact that German theory lived so long under the spell of antiquity and neo-classicism had much to do with the miserable state of literary life in Germany. As late as 1795 Goethe complained about the backwardness of Germany's literary conditions which did not allow a national author to emerge.

Criticism of Gothic fiction in English dates from 1765, when the first reviews of Horace Walpole's pioneering Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, were published. The medieval revival, which gave Walpole the impetus to write his pseudo-medieval novel, cannot be so precisely dated. A new reverence, however, towards medieval literature was displayed in Richard Hurd's impressionistic Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762), and in the revised edition of Thomas Warton's Observations on the Fairy Queen, published in the same year. While this essay is concerned primarily with the work of later eighteenth-century English critics writing on medieval literature, on contemporary forgers of the medieval such as Macpherson and Chatterton, and on Gothic fiction and drama, a brief account of the attitudes toward medieval literature prevalent between the Restoration and the 1760s will provide a necessary background for subsequent developments.

In the preface to his translation of Rapin's Réflexions sur la poëtique d'Aristote (1674), Thomas Rymer devotes a paragraph to the Middle Ages, which he describes as ‘the Age of Tales, Ballads, and Roundelays’, and as such finds unworthy of critical consideration. Rymer also passes over Chaucer, ‘in whose time our Language … was not capable of any Heroick Character’ (Critical Works, p. 5). In A Short View of Tragedy (1693), Rymer was more explicit. For those who wrote before Chaucer, he still had only scorn; they ‘made an heavy pudder, and are always miserably put to't for a word to clink’. Even though Chaucer himself is given credit for mingling Provençal, French and Latin vocabulary with English, ‘our language retain'd something of the churl; something of the Stiff and Gothish did stick upon it, till long after Chaucer’ (Critical Works, pp. 126–7).

From the very beginning of his career, Arthur Miller has engaged with the critical enterprise, but perhaps even more interestingly he has himself been a relentless and passionate critic, in all of his plays, of the human social and psychological condition, and has consistently ascribed a high value to that critical engagement. In fact, Miller's is a remarkably diverse yet tautly consistent group of major works that have made him, without doubt, the major American dramatic writer of his time, perhaps of the twentieth century. And yet, perhaps not surprisingly, given the nature of the expectations of American theatre audiences, Miller's critical reception, particularly in his native America, has been mixed, at times downright hostile; Miller has irked critics from the beginning of his career and continues to do so, and it is precisely this irksomeness, along with his relentless will to excavate his own and the general human psyche and to place his discoveries into hypotheses about the human experience that draw broad (and often very critical) conclusions, that make his plays so compelling and powerful. “Great drama,”he declares, “is great questions or it is nothing but technique.”

The hundred years of classical scholarship which elapsed between the careers of Richard Bentley (1662–1742.) and Friedrich August Wolf (1759–1824) may not have been as rich in individuals of passionate genius as the first centuries of Renaissance humanism (though, as we shall see, they too were enlivened by their own cranks and lunatics), nor as productive of enduring accomplishments as the well-organized national philological industries of the nineteenth century (though not a few of the editions and reference works published then are indispensable even today). But by working out the implications of some of the insights scattered throughout humanist scholarship, the classical philologists of the eighteenth century finally made it possible to overcome humanism; and by gathering and systematically organizing a vast amount of material and by putting on a firm basis for the first time the ancillary disciplines which were to study it, they laid a secure foundation for the scholars of the next century (who were all too often eager to deny how much there was to learn from them).

The most significant contribution of eighteenth-century classical scholarship to the history of literary criticism is to be found in the ‘internal’ development of a new set of literary critical methods and concepts within classical scholarship itself rather than in the ‘external’ relations between the academic study of Greek and Latin texts and contemporary discussions of literary-critical and theoretical issues. For the most part, in this period those ‘external’ relations were, at best, distant and vague. On the one hand, most eighteenth-century literary critics professed to share with their readers not only a cultivated familiarity with the classic texts but also a gentlemanly disdain for the dusty pedantry of the professors who studied them – Swift's and Pope's attacks on Bentley in such texts as The Battle of the Books and The Dunciad are two drastic but not unrepresentative examples – and it was only gradually, and especially in the last decades of the century, that some of the professors' insights and terms sifted into the critics' more popular discourse.

‘Among the ancients’, wrote Robert Eden Scott, the first Professor of Moral Philosophy in King's College, Aberdeen, ‘Criticism was chiefly cultivated as an art, and consisted rather in practical rules than in scientific investigation: it is to the Moderns, and those too of a very late date, that we owe a philosophical investigation of that science of Rhetoric, and an analysis of those faculties of the mind, upon which peculiar effects are produced, by literary composition, in its various kinds.’ ‘Philosophical investigation’ was the occupation of Scottish academics, ministers and lawyers in the heyday of the Enlightenment. It was rooted in the Scottish system of higher education, and it flowered in the concern for professional status, communal interests and national identity which evolved from the religious, political and cultural events of the recent past.

A strong sense of changing times, embodied in the Act of Union in 1707, of the superior refinement and politeness of metropolitian society, and of the need for efficiency in communication and consensus not only between countries but among regions (forcing to the periphery the issue of the large Gaelic-speaking population), determined the priorities of inquirers pursuing those ‘inner formative forces’ which for Cassirer distinguished the mind of the Enlightenment. Forces such as feeling, sympathy and taste, inherent in the writings of Shaftesbury and his popularizer Addison and grafted on to the stock of humanist speculation congenial to the religious temper of Scotland were expanded by Francis Hutcheson in the Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (17Z5). These found their way into the critical principles of Smith, Hume and their contemporaries.

Biography begins during the eighteenth century to develop a substantial body of critical assumptions and terminology, though a fully elaborated account of its form and subject-matter does not emerge until the nineteenth century. When the term ‘biographer‘ first entered the English language, it was applied interchangeably to an historian or to a writer of individual lives. While the Oxford English Dictionary lists the first use of the word as John Dryden's in the 1683 introduction to his edition of Plutarch, ‘biography’ was earlier employed in the modern sense in the lives of Thomas Fuller (1661) and Oliver Cromwell (1663), where it meant the history of a particular individual. Dryden, following Francis Bacon's earlier categorization, divides history into three types – annals or chronicles, general history or narrative, and biographia. Dryden imagined biography as a more circumscribed and less dignified (but more pleasurable) branch of history because it limited its treatment to aspects directly relevant to an individual man's fortune.

The formulation of biographical and autobiographical theory at first appears primarily in casual remarks occasioned by prefaces and reviews rather than in discrete essays. In addition, occasional critical comments are interspersed in criminal accounts, anecdotes, scandalous memoirs, fictional biographies, newspapers, and legal documents that incorporate biographical approaches and techniques. Biography in its earliest manifestations also frequently commingled with other genres of individuation such as novels, diaries and letters. The memoir, for example, with its daily record of public affairs, often interweaved fiction and history with biography and autobiography. Georges May's argument that the genealogies of English and French life-histories were different is convincing when he writes, ‘British biography developed earlier and more fully than French biography… because it evolved more directly from historiography, whereas in France, it emerged primarily (and slowly) from memoir writing and fiction’ (p. 156).