The following is a draft
for an article finally published as
Artful Anthology: The Use of Literary Sources for Handel’s Jephtha’ in The Musical Quarterly, Summer 2002 Volume 86, Number 2 (OUP, 2004)
pp.349-62.
Artful Anthology: The Literary Sources for Handel's
Jephtha
Winton Dean argues that the language of the text for Handel's Jephtha "is more concrete than that
of Morell's earlier librettos, and provided a much stronger stimulus to the
musician". He then qualifies the sense of praise that might be due to
Thomas Morell, who if he "deserves credit for this" does so as
"an anthologist".1 This seems a reasonable comment, in the
light of the numerous borrowings and quotations from a range of literary and
other sources which have been noted in the text. But there are different kinds
of anthologist. To think of Morell as merely
a collector of others' words might well suggest an uncritical anthologist - someone who (perhaps unimaginatively)
throws together a range of sources to form a single work. The sense that
Morell's role was not a particularly creative one led Dean to conjecture that
other, more able, writers were involved in the composition. But a closer
examination of the use of sources suggests that Morell himself was an able,
astute, and creative compiler, whose
borrowings have a logic perfectly suited to the subject of the oratorio. If Jephtha is a literary anthology it is an
extremely knowing one, with its passages and echoes chosen to bring a thematic
and artistic unity to the subject. The creation of the libretto suggests,
beyond the limitations of a mere collection
of sources, an intentional complex interplay of intertextual ideas.
Handel was certainly inspired by the text for his last major
composition, as his contemporaries noted. In January 1753, for instance,
William Hayes, Professor of Music at Oxford, used the oratorio to rebuff a
criticism that Handel, being so "voluminous" a composer, was not
always a correct one. He saw Jephtha as
indisputable proof of Handel's continued and consistent creative vigour:
Perhaps, as I have been so
particular in delivering my sentiments concerning the Hero of th[is] Essay, You
may expect me to give you a Detail of the various Excellencies, which still
remain unmentioned in HANDEL; and to point out wherein he excels all others of his Profession: The Man
[...] Who hath maintained his Ground against all Opposers: - Who at the Age of Seventy, with a broken Constitution,
produced such a Composition which no Man [...] is, or ever was [...] equal to,
in his highest Vigour.2
Though Handel wasn't actually seventy when he wrote Jephtha he was in his mid-sixties.
And though his constitution wasn't exactly broken it was certainly breaking. He
had had to stop work on the piece in 1751, scribbling in the margin of the
manuscript (in German): "got as far as this on [...] 13th February 1751,
unable to go on owing to weakening of the sight of my left eye".3 Handel's
response to illness was always proactive, but, despite dangerous and unpleasant
surgery (involving the piercing of the cornea with a needle) and visits to spa
waters (which had previously proved helpful when he was partly paralysed) his
sight was not fully to recover and he was to end his years in increasing
blindness. Handel's contemporary biographer, John Mainwaring, suggested that
this loss of sight, in 1751, brought with it a natural depression:
This misfortune sunk him
for a time into the deepest despondency. He could not rest until he had
undergone some operations as fruitless as they were painful. Finding it no
longer possible for him to manage alone, he sent to Mr. SMITH to desire that he
would play for him, and assist him in conducting the Oratorios.4
In these circumstances the text of Jephtha
must have had a special private significance for Handel, surely understood by
his librettist. How movingly apt that Handel's last great work, composed despite
intermittent bouts of blindness, should have darkness as one of its central
unifying motifs. Jephtha's visions are "set in darksome Night"; his
wife fears "Scenes of Horror, Scenes
of Woe,/ Rising from the Shades below". His daughter rejects the
"black Illusions", but no sooner has she welcomed "the chearful Light,/ Driving darkest Shades
of Night", than Jephtha sees her, and therefore, by his vow, sees her
doomed: "Open thy marble Jaws, O
Tomb,/ And hide me, Earth, in thy dark Womb".5 It is a system of images which finds its
emotional climax in one of Handel's greatest choruses – 'How dark, O Lord, are
thy Decrees'. And it was at this point in the manuscript that Handel wrote his
note about his worsening sight. How dark indeed.
But Handel's librettist would naturally find ideas of blindness and
insight suitable for the material. Central to the original biblical source of Jephtha - Chapter XI of the Book of
Judges - is the oath which binds sight with doom:
And Jephthah vowed a vow
unto the LORD, and said, If thou shalt without fail deliver the children of
Ammon into mine hands, Then it shall be, that whatsoever cometh forth of the
doors of my house to meet me, when I return in peace from the children of
Ammon, shall surely be the LORD'S, and I will offer it up for a burnt offering.
So Jephthah passed over unto the children of Ammon to fight against them; and
the LORD delivered them into his hands. And he smote them [...] with a very
great slaughter [...] And Jephthah came [...] unto his house, and, behold, his
daughter came out to meet him with timbrels and with dances: and she was his only child [...] And it came to
pass, when he saw her, that he rent his clothes, and said, Alas my daughter! 6
But Thomas Morell, fellow of King's College, Cambridge - clergyman,
classicist and, previously, librettist for Handel's Judas Maccabaeus and
Alexander Balus - turned not only to the Bible for his text of Jephtha, but also to a wide range of
other sources. Jephtha had already
been the subject of a Latin play by the Renaissance scholar George Buchanan,
which gave Morell the characters of Zebul, and Jephtha's wife Storgè, neither
of whom appear in the Biblical source. It also gave the name Iphis to the
Bible's unnamed daughter, encouraging an obvious parallel with the story of
Iphigenia, another drama of female sacrifice. Jephtha had also been the subject
of other musical compositions,
notably an oratorio by Maurice Greene, Professor of Music at Cambridge, to a
text by John Hoadly, which had been produced at the King's Theatre in 1737.
This work was certainly used by Morell, but was also known to Handel.7
The influence of these and other sources means that Morell's libretto is
significantly removed from the biblical original. But the most important change
by far is apparently Morell's own. His
libretto rescues Jephtha's daughter from death. At the moment of impending
sacrifice Morell introduces a deus
(or rather an angelus) ex machina. The Angel turns out to be a
textual critic:
Rise, Jephtha, -- And, ye reverend Priests, withhold
The slaughtrous Hand. ---
No Vow can disannul
The Law of God. --- Nor
such was its Intent
When rightly scann'd; --- (p.17, my italics in the last line.)
Iphis instead of being burnt is devoted to a virgin life. On the one
hand, this ending might seem to satisfy the kind of eighteenth-century
sentiment that preferred to avoid tragic female sacrifice. On the other hand, it
offers an answer to the unacceptable face of an implacable Old Testament God, a
subject which certainly preoccupies other eighteenth-century meditations on the
biblical story. Written some thirty years after Handel's oratorio, for
instance, Ann Yearsley's poem on Jephtha's vow expresses a typical humane
response; she describes the moment of sacrifice:
Bright Cynthia twice had
fill'd her wasted horn:
When the sad hour
approach'd, she quits the hills,
And Israel's priests lead
on the charming maid.
The fillet, censer, frankincense, and myrrh,
Are all prepar'd; the
altar's blaze ascends
In curling flame; while
bigots dare pronounce
The sacrifice acceptable to
Heaven.
Hence, dupes! nor make a Moloch of your God.
Tear not your Infants from
the tender breast,
Nor throw your Virgins to
consuming fires.
He asks it not [...] 8
Yearsley's poem is entitled 'On Jephtha's Vow, taken in a Literal
Sense', but the 'literal sense' of the Bible's oath and its resolution is
itself an issue, and Morell was no 'dupe'.
Ruth Smith, in her book on Handel's
Oratorios and Eighteenth-Century Thought, draws attention to the crucial
ambiguity of the biblical passages (indeed any well-annotated version of the
Bible will give the hint).9 Where the Book of Judges has Jephtha's vow as
"whatsoever cometh forth [...] to meet me [...] shall surely be the
LORD'S, and I will offer it up for a burnt offering" the Hebrew allows the
and to be or ('Judges', XI, 31). It is
possible, then, that the vow allows
the daughter to be 'made' the Lord's - as a virgin forever - rather than being
burnt. Further, after Jephtha has apparently fulfilled his vow, where the Bible
has "the daughters of Israel went yearly to lament the daughter of
Jephthah" ('Judges', XI, 40), 'lament' can also be translated 'condole
with' - in which case she is still clearly alive, and the condolences would
refer to her enforced virginity. Morell's libretto, for Handel's oratorio,
shows a clear awareness of the exegetical problem - hence the Angel's
insistence on 'rightly scanning' the vow. Hence also the details of Jephtha's vow:
If, Lord, sustain'd by thy almighty Pow'r,
Ammon I drive, and his insulting Bands,
From these our
long-uncultivated Lands,
And safe return a glorious
Conqueror; ---
What, or who-e'er shall
first salute mine Eyes,
Shall be for ever thine, or fall a Sacrifice. --- (p.5, my
italics in the last line.)
The critics, then, who have often suggested that Morell's libretto, in
saving the daughter's life, does great violence to the original, may have
missed a biblical footnote or two. But Morell, naturally, realises that the
drama of the narrative depends on the possible
sentence of death, not virginity - so though the textual ambiguity will allow a
happier denouement it is not allowed to compromise the earlier anticipation of
a darker end. True, the libretto is not finally
faithful to the spirit of the
biblical original - there, whether burnt or sworn to holy but barren chastity,
the daughter's fate is tragic and
treated as such. Morell, writing in an age when 'virtue' was substitutable for
'virginity', doesn't exactly lament
the fate of Iphis:
Happy, Iphis, shalt thou live;
While to thee the Virgin Choir
Tune their Harps of golden
Wire,
And their yearly Tribute give.
Happy, Iphis, all thy Days,
(Pure, angelic, Virgin-state,)
Shalt thou live […] (p.17)
Hamor, the lover invented for the libretto, has to accept Iphis's fate
with a strange combination of relief and disappointment, having recently
imagined a rather different consummation! But the combination of emotions
created by the theme of tragedy averted perfectly suits the oratorio, allowing
Handel more dynamic variation. There's nothing strange in the formula - most of
Handel's operas, for instance, anticipate darker ends than are actually
delivered.
It can still be acknowledged, of course, that the darker side of
Morell's text was more compelling to Handel than its comforting conclusion. The
composer's treatment of the great chorus, 'How dark, O Lord, are thy Decrees',
for instance, gives a clear sense that Handel, touched perhaps by the personal
relevance of its message, and impressed by its sense of doom and fatalism,
conjured a profoundly moving and tragic utterance.
The words of this chorus also reveal the extent of the librettist's
borrowings:
How dark, O
Lord, are thy Decrees!
All hid from mortal Sight!
All our Joys to Sorrow turning,
And our Triumphs into Mourning,
As the Night succeeds the Day.
No certain Bliss,
No solid Peace,
We Mortals know,
On Earth below;
Yet on this
Maxim still obey;
Whatever is, is right. (p.15)
Two of these lines are taken almost verbatim from Hoadly's libretto for
Greene's 1737 Jephtha, and others
were probably suggested by the Buchanan play on the same story. The crucial
last line, though, does not derive from one of these main sources, or indeed
any Jephtha source. It is, of course, from Pope's Essay on Man. Originally, in fact, Morell had written "What
God ordains is right" but Handel preferred a direct quotation and inserted
his correction throughout the manuscript.
Handel, following Morell's hint, has also changed completely the effect
of the words. Morell's echo of Pope is not, in its emphasis on misery, exactly
in keeping with the spirit of Pope's passage which the words conclude. Pope is
urging the status quo. His God is the God of oxymorons, uniting the opposites
with perfect art. We should submit to God's most complex order: we are safe and
secure in his often unfathomed pattern:
Cease then, nor ORDER
Imperfection name:
Our proper bliss depends on
what we blame.
Know thy own point: This
kind, this due degree
Of blindness, weakness,
Heav'n bestows on thee.
Submit - In this, or any
other sphere,
Secure to be as blest as
thou canst bear:
Safe in the hand of one
disposing Pow'r,
Or in the natal, or the
mortal hour.
All Nature is but Art,
unknown to thee;
All Chance, Direction,
which thou canst not see;
All Discord, Harmony, not
understood;
All partial Evil, universal
Good:
And, spite of Pride, in
erring Reason's spite,
One truth is clear,
'Whatever IS, is RIGHT.' 10
Applied to the oratorio, on one level these lines are prophetic. Iphis
will be relatively "Safe in the
hand of one disposing Pow'r" as the Angel will finally reveal the
commuting of her sentence. But this end is in the next Part, and Handel's
chorus represents the height of despair at the end of Part II. How different,
then, is the tone of Pope's passage from Handel's dark and imposing expression
of our helplessness - we are not happy to accept our destiny: we have no
choice. The thought that God might have a plan for us which includes the
sacrifice of our only child, makes right a matter of power not justice. Our
'due degree' of blindness leads us to anything but happy complacency.
Pope's lines are part of his scheme to "vindicate the ways of God
to Man", in his own version of Milton's great agenda for Paradise Lost, which aims to
"justify the ways of God to men". And it's not only Pope who echoes
Milton. Here are the words of another Chorus from Jephtha:
Theme sublime of endless Praise,
Just and righteous are thy Ways;
And thy Mercies still endure,
Ever faithful, ever sure. (pp.17-18)
The direct quotation from Milton, here, is taken from the refrain to his
version of the 136th Psalm, which begins:
Let us with a gladsome mind
Praise the Lord, for he is kind
For his mercies aye endure,
Ever faithful, ever sure.11
This seems to imply a rather different God from the one whose decrees
are dark and awful. This seems to be the merciful God who triumphs at the end
of Jephtha. But the full message of
this Miltonic Psalm actually concerns the delivery of the Israelites.
Celebrated, then, as a sign of God's enduring mercies is his
"thunder-clasping hand" which smites "the first-born of Egypt
land", and the "bloody battle" where he "brought down/Kings
of prowess and renown". Morell understood the full significance of his own
Miltonic borrowing. It perfectly suits the ambiguity of the libretto, torn as
it is between a God of violence and mercy. And included in the 'Psalm', perhaps
the thematic link which first suggested the borrowing to Morell, is a direct
reference to the biblical history which precedes the subject of the oratorio:
He foiled bold Seon and his
host,
That ruled the Amorrean
coast [...] 12
Before vowing his vow in the Book of Judges, Jephtha reminds the
Amorites that previously God has already given over the disputed land to the
Israelites, destroying their King: "And the LORD God of Israel delivered
Sihon and all his people into the hand of Israel, and they smote them"
('Judges', XI, 21). In moving beyond the Jephtha sources and weaving his
libretto from miscellaneous poetic fragments, Morell manages to convey echoes
of the broader biblical context. Two chapters further in the Book of Judges, of
course, we will encounter another great war-hero, God's scourge, and deliverer
of Israel, himself the subject of a great Handel oratorio - Samson. And we can
find him in Jephtha too, if we return to that chorus which first suggested the
reference to Milton, where "Just and
righteous are thy Ways". There is perhaps another textual echo, here,
though rather less explicit. Here are the words of Newburgh Hamilton’s libretto
for Handel's Samson, the source being
Milton's Samson Agonistes:
Just are the Ways of God to Man,
Let none his secret Actions scan;
For all is best, tho' oft' we doubt
Of what his Wisdom brings about:
Still his unsearchable Dispose
Blesses the Righteous in the close.13
It would be difficult to get closer to the spirit and message of Pope's
celebration of God's unquestionable purpose than this. Again we find the
central idea of trusting to God's benign, if unfathomable, plan, the important
thing being not to presume, not to over-reach. But this gives an
eighteenth-century slant to the re-writing of the Milton. Samson Agonistes does dare to question God's purposes for us, and
does so not with such neat eighteenth-century couplets, but with tortuous and
irregular blank verse: here is the chorus addressing Milton's Samson,
ultimately the source of our line from Jephtha:
Just are the ways of God,
And justifiable to men;
Unless there be who think
not God at all,
If any be, they walk
obscure [...] 14
This is quintessentially Miltonic in its elliptical complexity - the
ways of God may be straightforwardly 'just', but not inasmuch as they are to be
understood by men, some of who might "think not God at all". It's
almost as if there isn't a natural grammar for atheism. Those who "think
not God" must "walk obscure". But the appalling irony, here, is that the lines are spoken to
Samson, who is "eyeless in Gaza". Samson, as deliverer of the
Israelites, struggles to understand
that the ways of God are just - as he is at this moment blinded and enslaved.
Once again, then, to follow one of Morell's echoes is to return to the
problem of Jephtha. If God's ways are just their justice is not always obvious.
Jephtha's family is supposed to learn the lesson, the same lesson of Pope's
"whatever is is right", but in the midst of suffering they cry out
against this message. We walk obscure if we walk without God, but apparently we
also walk obscure when we walk with him. It's a message that could hardly be
missed by Handel, trying to compose what will be his last great work, marking
his blindness in the margin of a manuscript whose subject is the darkness of
the Lord's decrees.
Blindness, at least partial,
has also clouded our understanding of the composition of the libretto for Jephtha. The main problem, here, is that
though Morell had identified passages as 'borrowings' he had not indicated the
exact sources, which remained obscure, and allowed Dean his conjecture about
collaboration:
When visiting his old
college at Cambridge Morell had only to walk the few yards from King's to
Peterhouse to find a very respectable poet in Thomas Gray, with whom he may
have been acquainted. Gray published his Elegy,
his fourth poem to appear in print, on 15 February 1751, while Handel was
composing Jephtha, and was then at
work on his Odes.15
Scholarship has now taken us further in our knowledge of the true
sources, since Dean first put this suggestion forward in 1959. Ruth Smith has
cleared up Dean's mistake in attributing the earlier Jephtha libretto to Burnet rather than Hoadly, and notes a direct
borrowing from that source, as well as detailing the general indebtedness to
George Buchanan's play (Jephthes, sive
Votum, 1554).16 But many of the literary borrowings have remained
obscure. Of course Morell's reluctance explicitly to acknowledge his sources
has never been a problem with well-known passages from Milton and Pope, but
lesser-known borrowings have been a problem.
For Dean only "one line" had been identified from the passages
noted by the librettist as 'quotations' . But even confident attributions are
subject to uncertainty. Dean confirms Addison as the source of the Chorus line:
"They ride on Whirlwinds, and direct
the Storms" (p.9). This apparent certainty is not quite as secure as it
seems, as the line itself is the subject of an intertextual process. Addison's
line in The Campaign (1705) describes
Marlborough's victory; the hero, like an angel commanded by God:
... pleas'd th'Almighty's Orders to perform,
Rides in the Whirl-wind, and
directs the Storm.17
This seems the unequivocal source. But it might have been more logical,
as he was certainly reading Pope, for Morell to take the prompt for the line
from The Dunciad, where it was used
verbatim (with due attribution from Pope) in a satirical attack on the theatre
director Rich:
Immortal Rich! how calm he
sits at ease
Mid snows of paper, and
fierce hail of pease;
And proud his mistress'
orders to perform,
Rides in the whirlwind, and
directs the storm.18
To reconstruct the processes that went into the creation of the libretto
it makes sense to think of the patterns of reading that would constitute the
necessary research for a project like Jephtha.
As we know Morell had been reading Pope and Milton, it's not surprising to find
complex echoes from each. But Morell was doing more than finding fine lines for
his text from the acknowledged literary greats. He was also researching the
subject of the biblical story - the sacrifice of a child; the death of a daughter
- in poetic and classical analogues (in fact the project was perfectly suited
to his combination of skills as classicist, literary scholar, and biblical
exegete). Dean had believed that the air
'Open thy marble Jaws, O Tomb' was a possible example of privately
contributed lines. But the original source is much more interesting. Here is
Morell's passage:
Open thy marble Jaws, O Tomb,
And hide me, Earth, in thy dark Womb:
Ere I the Name of Father stain,
And deepest Woe from Conquest gain. (p.12)
And here is the possibly direct source:
Open thy marble Jaws, O
Tomb,
Thou Earth conceal me in
thy Womb! 19
These lines are found in William Broome's Poems on Several Occasions (1727). But the exact source is more interesting than the mere fact of the
borrowing. The poem that Morell went to in that volume was entitled
'Melancholy: An Ode, Occasion'd by the Death of a beloved Daughter, 1723'.
There is clearly a thematic method
behind the borrowings. Just as Morell had used the symbolic theme of
'blindness' to provide the kind of textual links we have observed above, so he
also looked for materials in keeping with the concern of the biblical story - a
story about the possible sacrifice of a child, as lamented by the parent. It
must have been this theme, with the added aptness of the sense of parental
responsibility, which sent him to the period's favourite translation of
Virgil's Aeneid. Again the relevant
passage from Morell was thought by Dean to have been provided privately; here
are Morell's words:
Some dire Event hangs o'er our Heads,
Some woful Song we have to
sing
In Misery extreme. --- O,
never, never
Was my foreboding Mind
distress’d before
With such incessant Pangs.
--- (p.6)
The lines faintly recall the opening of The Rape of the Lock ("What dire Offence from am'rous Causes
springs") and even the fateful mock-epic anticipations of Pope's sylphs,
but this is because Pope himself is encouraging intertextual echoes. Here is a
better candidate for the real source, from the tenth book of Virgil's Aeneid, in Dryden's translation:
Far off he heard their
cries, far off divined
The dire event with a
foreboding mind.20
That this echo should have occurred to Morell confirms our sense of his
method. The context is the death of Lausus, whose father, Mezentius, has braved
Aeneas in battle, finally suffering a
crippling blow. As he has been trying to retire from the field his son Lausus
sees his plight and, rash with filial honour, has rushed to face the Trojan
Prince in an unequal battle, ready to die to protect his father. Aeneas is
provoked and deals Lausus a fatal blow, but then immediately honours the
vanquished son for his nobility and bravery. Meanwhile Mezentius ("his
father (now no father)") has reached the Tiber for relief, only to have
the corpse of his son brought to him, which, as it approaches, prompts the
lines that Morell echoes. He continues:
To see my son, and such a
son, resign
His life a ransom for
preserving mine?
And am I then preserved,
and art thou lost?
How much too dear had that
redemption cost! 21
The situation has obvious and ironic correspondences with the story of Jephtha, where the warrior is preserved
in battle only to find that his oath must mean the doom of his daughter.
We can begin then, in examining possible sources for Jephtha, to construct the practice of
its librettist - in the imaginative knitting together of quotations from
sources which thematically or symbolically have some affinity.
We know that Morell wasn't engaged in simple plagiarism,
because of the textual acknowledgement that a number of marked passages were
borrowed (as is true of both the passage from Broome and the echo of Dryden's
Virgil, though inconveniently the source is, of course, not named). It is,
though, possible to go further and conjecture on the possibility of learned and
subtle acknowledgement.
From the discussion of some of the Miltonic borrowings (and there are
others - he provides more source passages than any other author, including, as
Dean noted, imagery and verbatim reference to the Nativity Ode ('On the morning of Christ's Nativity')22, it is clear that our librettist certainly knows his
Milton. Why, then, does he apparently misquote Milton?
Happy, Iphis, shalt thou live;
While to thee the Virgin Choir
Tune their Harps of golden
Wire,
And their yearly Tribute give. (p. 17)
The echo, here, aptly for a work of music, is from Milton's 'At A Solemn
Music':
And the cherubic host in
thousand choirs
Touch their immortal harps
of golden wires 23
Why substitute the mundane "tune" for the magnificent
"touch"? Is this just evidence of low level literary theft, with a
hint of disguise? It is more plausibly a kind of literary joke. The Milton echo
had already been followed for another Handel libretto - none other than Samson, written by Hamilton. Here is the
passage from Samson:
Let the Cherubick Host, in tuneful Choirs,
Touch their immortal Harps with golden wires. (p.32)
It certainly seems possible, then, that Morell is echoing
Handel/Hamilton echoing Milton, and picking up the aptness of 'tuneful' for an oratorio. And, perhaps not
surprisingly, Morell may have reserved one of his subtlest acknowledgements for
his borrowings from Milton. We have already quoted the intense Miltonic echoes
in the chorus 'Theme sublime'- finding an indirect reference in the second line
("Just and righteous are thy Ways")
and direct quotation in the third and fourth lines, but the "theme sublime"
itself certainly sounds like a Miltonic inversion. It is possible, though, that
the source is not Milton himself, but a certain 'commendatory poem' 'On
Paradise Lost'. This poem ends:
Thy verse created like thy
theme sublime,
In number, weight, and measure,
needs not rhyme.24
The poem is by Andrew Marvell, and as it was prefaced to the second and
subsequent editions of Paradise Lost,
the lover of Milton would have it always to hand. How apt that in a network of
references to Milton, Morell should quote one of the earliest poetical tributes
to Paradise Lost. To look at the
opening of Marvell's poem itself is additionally to find the direct connection
between light and sight so important to Milton, Morell, Jephtha, and Handel:
When I beheld the poet blind, yet bold,
In slender book, his vast
design unfold,
Messiah crowned [...] 25
Is it too fanciful to imagine Morell, reading these lines, noting the
aptness which links a sightless Milton creating his Messiah to a Handel, whose
sight was failing, famous for his Messiah?
Or is it fanciful, again, to suggest there is a subtle acknowledgement
in this source for the learned.
Marvell has been momentarily concerned that Milton's success is such that some
"less skilful hand" might turn creation into a facile play; but he
has retracted this fear with the lines:
But I am now convinced, and
none will dare
Within thy labours to
pretend a share.
Thou hast not missed one
thought that could be fit,
And all that was improper dost
omit:
So that no room is here for
writers left,
But to detect their
ignorance or theft.26
It seems more than coincidental that the libretto should echo a source
which explicitly considers literary theft, and concludes, with a kind of
seventeenth-century anxiety of influence, that all other writers on themes
sublime can do is to steal from Milton.
Not only, then, was Morell working to a clear method in gathering his
materials and piecing them together to form a libretto, but he was doing so
with wit and intelligence - creating a work which drew on the range of his
knowledge and making allusive virtue of the symbolic combination of
circumstances which found, in blindness and darkness, insight and light. It's
fitting that the central reference for this overarching theme - "How
dark, O Lord, are thy Decrees!/ All hid from mortal Sight!" - should
find its anticipation in a passage from one of the eighteenth-century's most
important classical sources - Horace, as paraphrased by one of Morell's
favoured interpreters of the ancients - Dryden:
But God has wisely hid from human sight
The
dark decrees of future fate,
And
sown their seeds in depth of night [...] 27
As classical, biblical and literary scholar, Morell would have delighted
in the intertextual coincidences that allowed his several themes to merge in
echoes linking the heathen with the Christian age.
Notes
1. Winton Dean, Handel's Dramatic
Oratorios and Masques (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 592.
2. Otto Erich Deutsch, Handel: A Documentary
Biography (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1955), 734.
3. Deutsch, 701.
4. John
Mainwaring, Memoirs of the Life of the
Late George Frederic Handel (London: R. and J. Dodsley,1760), 138.
5. All
quotations from Jephtha are taken
from Jephtha, An Oratorio. Or, Sacred
Drama. As it is Perform’d at the Theatre-Royal in Covent-Garden. Set to Musick
by Mr. Handel. (London: J. Watts and B. Dod, 1752). Here the passages
quoted are found on pages 5, 6, 7, 11, and 12, respectively. Further page
references to this edition are given in brackets after quotations.
6. All quotations from the Bible are taken from the Authorized King
James Version, edited by Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett (Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Here the quotation is from 'Judges', XI,
30-35.
7. For a full discussion, see Ruth Smith, Handel's Oratorios and Eighteenth-Century Thought (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995), 338-40.
8. Ann Yearsley, 'On Jephtha's Vow, taken in a Literal Sense', lines
87-97, in Poems, on Various Subjects. By
Ann Yearsley, A Milkwoman of Clifton, Near Bristol; Being Her Second Work
(London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1787), 137-38.
9. Smith, 343.
10. Alexander Pope, An Essay on
Man, Epistle I, lines 281-94, edited by Maynard Mack (London and New Haven:
Methuen and Yale University Press, 1950), 49-51.
11. John Milton, 'Psalm cxxxvi', lines 1-4 in The Poems of John Milton, edited by John Carey and Alastair Fowler
(London and Harlow: Longman's, 1968), 7.
12. John Milton, 'Psalm cxxxvi', lines 65-68 in The Poems of John Milton, 9.
13. All
quotations from Samson are taken from
Samson. An Oratorio. As it is Perform’d
at the Theatre-Royal in Covent-Garden. Alter’d and adapted to the Stage from
the Samson Agonistes of John Milton. Set to Musick by George Frederick Handel. (London:
J. and R. Tonson, 1743). Here the passage quoted is found on page 14. Further
page references to this edition are given in brackets after quotations.
14. John Milton, 'Samson Agonistes', lines 293-96 in The Poems of John Milton, 357.
15. Dean, 593.
16. Smith, 340.
17. Joseph Addison, The Campaign,
A Poem, To His Grace the Duke of Marlborough, second edition (London: Jacob
Tonson, 1705), lines 291-92, 14.
18. Alexander Pope, The Dunciad,
Book III, lines 257-60, edited by James Sutherland (London and New Haven:
Methuen and Yale University Press, 1963), 179.
19. William Broome, 'Melancholy: An Ode, Occasion'd by the Death of a
beloved Daughter, 1723', lines 17-18, in Poems
on Several Occasions (London: Bernard Lintot, 1727), 45.
20. The Aeneid of Virgil,
translated by John Dryden, Book X, lines 1201-02, edited by Robert
Fitzgerald (New York and London: Macmillan, 1964), 338.
21. The Aeneid of Virgil,
translated by John Dryden, Book X, lines 1208-11, 339.
22. Dean, 593.
23. John Milton, 'At A Solemn Music', lines 12-13, in The Poems of John Milton, 163.
24. Andrew Marvell, 'On Paradise Lost', lines 53-54, in The Poems of John Milton, 456.
25. Andrew Marvell, 'On Paradise Lost', lines 1-3, in The Poems of John Milton, 455.
26. Andrew Marvell, 'On Paradise Lost', lines 25-30, in The Poems of John Milton, 456.
27. John Dryden, 'The Twenty-ninth Ode of the Third Book of Horace',
lines 45-47, in The Oxford Authors: John
Dryden, edited by Keith Walker (Oxford and New York, Oxford University
Press, 1987), 303.
