The Review of English Studies Advance Access published online on March 1, 2007
The Review of English Studies, doi:10.1093/res/hgl153
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press 2007; all rights reserved
‘A Versifying Maid of Honour’: Anne Finch and the Libretto for Venus and Adonis
Boston University
 |
Abstract |
|---|
The anonymous libretto for John Blow's Venus and Adonis (c. 1683) may be the work of Anne Kingsmill, later Anne Finch, who was a Maid of Honour to the second Duchess of York at the time it was performed. Earlier musical dramas originating in that court, such as Ariane and Calisto, also have mythological plots, pastoral interludes, and an emphasis on female characters. While at court, Finch began a translation of Tasso's Aminto, a pastoral drama resembling Venus and Adonis. ‘The Grove’, a partially blotted manuscript poem ‘Written when I was a Maid of Honour’, has close verbal parallels with the musical work. A Maid of Honour would have reasons to conceal her authorship of this delicately erotic libretto. Finch later remarked on that she had been careful not ‘to lett any attempts of mine in Poetry shew themselves whilst I livd in such a publick place as the Court, where every one would have made their remarks upon a Versifying Maid of Honour’. Her efforts to efface or conceal later works with close resemblances to the opera suggest that she remained determined to cover her tracks. There are numerous verbal parallels between Venus and Adonis and later works by Finch, and if some of the phrases are conventional, their frequency points to Finch as the author of Venus and Adonis.