_Dido_, in pianoforte score, is generally accessible; only a few of the
spoken play sets are as yet published, and they are ridiculously
expensive. Let us not repine and give up hope. Some day that unheard-of
thing an intelligent music publisher may be born into the world, and he
may give Englishmen a trustworthy edition, at a fair price, of the works
of England's greatest musician. Meantime, the reader must do as the
writer did for some years--he must grub and laboriously copy in the
British Museum, buying, when he can, the seventeenth-century edition of
_Dioclesian_ and the eighteenth-century editions of such works as _The
Tempest_ and _The Indian Queen_, and also the _Orpheus Britannicus_. To
penetrate to Purcell's intention, to understand with what skill and
force the intention is carried out, a knowledge of the music alone
hardly suffices. I would not advise anything so terrible as an endeavour
to read the whole of the plays, but at least _Boadicca, The Indian
Queen, The Tempest, The Fairy Queen, Dioclesian_ and _King Arthur_ must
be read; and it is worth while making an effort especially to grasp all
the details of the masques. For themselves, few of the plays are worth
reading; and, unluckily, the best of them have the least significant
music. The others are neither serious plays nor good honest comedy; and
a malicious fate willed that the very versions for which Purcell's aid
was required were the worst of all--what little sense there was in the
bad plays was destroyed when they were made into "operas" or
"entertainments"--spectacular shows. Dryden was the best of the
playwrights he was doomed to work with, and in _King Arthur_ Dryden
forgot about the aim and purpose of high drama, and concocted a
hobgoblin pantomime interlarded with bravado concerning the greatness of
Britain and Britons. _Dioclesian_, the first of Purcell's great theatre
achievements, is even more stupid. The original play was _The
Prophetess_ of Beaumont and Fletcher, straightforward Elizabethan stodge
and fustian: and if Betterton, who chose to maltreat it, was bent on