Added to this, Purcell’s musical interludes, as integrated living tableaux dispersed regularly throughout, also exalt a certain idea of England and its monarchy, one which draws upon Jacobean and Caroline masques for its aesthetics. The play centers around Golden Age mythology, with an approach similar to some Greek works that, despite depicting nostalgia for lost days, single their own culture out as superior to others. Permeated with Renaissance as well as seventeenth-century themes and imagery, the plot makes use of those elements Dryden felt most worthy of this emblematic tribute to England. When he finally completed King Arthur in 1691, the semi-opera he wrought was unsurprisingly less politically topical than Albion and Albanius, which achieves greater permanence than the earlier work. 2 The sudden death of Charles II, however, and political upheaval over the succession, cast a shadow over the play’s raison d’être. Various reasons kept him from completing it at the time, notably a royal request to lengthen the sung prologue to Arthur, which became a distinct work on its own, Albion and Albanius, and was frequently rehearsed at Whitehall. Brewer, 2002, 8.ġAfter what has appeared to some as a period of personal ambivalence over political allegiance 1, Dryden took up his pen in the name of the monarchy in 1684 to compose the verses of King Arthur, undoubtedly to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Restoration.
![golden age mythology golden age mythology](https://www.wikigallery.org/download=243231-Peranda_The-Golden-Age.jpg)
![golden age mythology golden age mythology](https://content3.cdnprado.net/imagenes/Documentos/imgsem/df/df4d/df4d69a2-2c84-40c8-8c53-7b07e50979dc/4a386ea5-bd51-9d3e-b8b9-20c0c5523e3e.jpg)
2 Richard Barber (ed.), King Arthur in Music, Rochester, NY: D.1 Phillip Harth accounts in part for this silence in “Dryden in 1678-1681: The Literary and Historic (.).