A more sympathetic and nuanced Whig approach to opera as a legitimate musical-dramatic form is given in Joseph Addison’s early Spectator papers. Readily available and of obvious interest to English literature, aesthetics, as well as opera, they may be the best-known writings on opera of the period – also the most misunderstood. This chapter attempts a wide-ranging re-evaluation of Addison, showing he is not, as often claimed, an opponent of opera but accepts it and proposes to correct some risible features and reform it to accord with a polite society.

The Tatler and Spectator papers and the writings of the Earl of Shaftesbury were the principal proponents of ‘politeness’, the contemporary term that covers the broad transformation of post-Revolutionary English society and culture. This new social-cultural ideal was largely a Whig initiative. Its ideals arose from developments following the Revolution, resulting in Britain’s self-identification as a ‘polite and commercial people’. For Addison, opera is bound with politeness, for it was established by ‘persons of the greatest Politeness’ (no. 18), and the goal of the Spectator’s criticism was to establish among them a ‘Taste of polite Writing … relating to Operas and Tragedies’ (no. 58). Addison can be seen as addressing the implicit question, ‘What sort of opera is suitable for a polite Whig nation?’

The Glorious Revolution of 1688–9 established England as a constitutional monarchy, validated the Revolution Principles, and confirmed it as Protestant nation – ideas all central to Whig ideology. As was readily apparent, England was becoming a wealthy, commercial trading nation with growing prosperity, consumption of consumer goods, and numerous urban institutions from coffeehouses to academies. The requirements of financing and managing William’s wars against France brought about a reorganization of the military, enlargement of the size and functions of the administration, and the Financial Revolution with the establishment of the Bank of England, Royal Exchange, national debt, and public credit.

But this change in society brought into question the terms virtue and corruption of the seventeenth-century English republican tradition. For James Harrington’s vision of the Commonwealth, wealth based on finance and commerce (leading to luxury) was a corruption of the virtues of frugality, agrarian livelihood, and public duty (Publick Spirit) of the free, independent landholder – or what became the ‘landed interest’.