SOURCE: Fisk, Deborah Payne, and Jessica Munns. “‘Clamorous with War and Teeming with Empire’: Purcell and Tate's Dido and Aeneas.” Eighteenth-Century Life 26, no. 2 (spring 2002): 23-44.

In the following essay, Fisk and Munns explore issues of gender and imperialism, the costs of conquest, and the emotional experience of loss in Dido and Aeneas.

Two notorious problems have beset Dido and Aeneas: assessing its possible political allusions and possible political meanings, and assigning a date for its premiere performance. Early in the last century, W. Barclay Squire argued that the epilogue pointed to the revolution of 1688.¹ Other critics have since maintained that the prologue's stage directions for Phoebus' rising “Over the Sea,” his remarks to Venus that her “lustre … half Eclipses mine” (I.14-15), and the Act I song “When Monarchs unite how happy their State / They Triumph at once on [or'e] their Foes and their Fate” (I.20-21) refer...