surmises” and the daring defiance of mere facts indulged in by biographers are indeed wonderful, as they strive and strain to read and to fill in the nearly obliterated, dim and distant record of Purcell’s life.  Yet it is risky for a biographer to laugh; perhaps it is utterly wrong to conjecture that towards the end of his life Purcell had become indispensable, and was engaged to supply the music for all the plays as they were given, big or little, as they came along.  Nor do we know how much more music may have been written for the first plays, nor how much of what has been preserved is genuine Purcell.

On one point we may be quite certain.  It is the greatest pity that Purcell wasted so much time on these Restoration shows.  When the English people revolted against Puritanism, and gave the incorrigible Stuarts another chance, Charles the Wanderer returned to find them in a May-Day humour.  They thrust away from them for a little while the ghastly spiritual hypochondria of which Puritanism was a manifestation, and determined to make merry.  But, heigh-ho! the day of Maypoles was over and gone.  From the beginning the jollity and laughter were forced, and the new era of perpetual spring festival soon became an era of brainless indecency.  Even the wit of the Restoration was bitter, acid, sardonic (as Charles’s own death-bed apology for being an unconscionable time a-dying).  Generally it was ill-tempered, and employed to inflict pain.  And there was not even wit in most of the plays.  It is hard to see what even the worst age could discover to laugh at in Shadwell’s Libertine, the story of Don Juan told in English, and, in a sense, made the most of.

Because of their nastiness, often combined with stupidity, the Restoration dramas will never be resurrected.  There is another reason.  The glorious Elizabethan era and spirit were gone; the eighteenth century was coming on fast.  Dryden and his fellows had noble rules for the construction of plays, and nobler ones for the language that might or might not be used.  They derived all their rules, if you please, from “the ancients.”  Like Voltaire, they reckoned Shakespeare a barbarian with native wood-notes wild.  They took his plays and “made them into plays.”  They improved The Tempest, Timon of Athens, The Midsummer Night’s Dream, and goodness knows how many more.  Davenant, in search of material for entertainments, began it; Dryden continued it; even Shadwell had his dirty fingers in it.  And this matters to us, for some of Purcell’s most glorious songs, choruses and instrumental pieces were composed for these desecrations, and can never again be listened to under the conditions he had in his mind.