Editing Opera in English (section)

==Purcell and his contemporaries==
[[Image:Henry Purcell.jpg|thumb|left|[[Henry Purcell]]]]The approach of the [[English Commonwealth]] closed theatres and halted any developments that may have led to the establishment of English opera. However, in 1656, the [[dramatist]] Sir [[William Davenant]] produced ''[[The Siege of Rhodes]]''. Since his theatre was not licensed to produce drama, he asked several of the leading composers ([[Henry Lawes]], Cooke, Locke, Coleman and Hudson) to set sections of it to music. This success was followed by ''[[The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru]]'' (1658) and ''[[The History of Sir Francis Drake]]'' (1659). These pieces were encouraged by [[Oliver Cromwell]] because they were critical of Spain. With the [[English Restoration]], foreign (especially French) musicians were welcomed back. In 1673, [[Thomas Shadwell]]'s ''[[Psyche (Locke)|Psyche]]'', patterned on the 1671 'comédie-ballet' of the same name produced by [[Molière]] and [[Jean-Baptiste Lully]]. [[William Davenant]] produced ''The Tempest'' in the same year, which was the first [[Shakespeare]] play to be set to music (composed by Locke and Johnson).

[[Image:John Blow 1687.jpg|thumb|right|[[John Blow]]]]
About 1683, [[John Blow]] composed ''[[Venus and Adonis (opera)|Venus and Adonis]]'', often thought of as the first true English-language opera. Blow's immediate successor was the better known [[Henry Purcell]]. Despite the success of his masterwork ''[[Dido and Aeneas]]'' (1689), in which the action is furthered by the use of Italian-style recitative, much of Purcell's best work was not involved in the composing of typical opera, but instead he usually worked within the constraints of the [[semi-opera]] format, where isolated scenes and masques are contained within the structure of a spoken play, such as [[Shakespeare]] in Purcell's ''[[The Fairy-Queen]]'' (1692) and [[Beaumont and Fletcher]] in ''The Prophetess'' (1690) and ''Bonduca'' (1696). The main characters of the play tend not to be involved in the musical scenes, which means that Purcell was rarely able to develop his characters through song. Despite these hindrances, his aim (and that of his collaborator [[John Dryden]]) was to establish serious opera in England, but these hopes ended with Purcell's early death at the age of 36.