Handel and Homosexuality: Burlington House and Cannons Revisited

Abstract

It has been claimed that Burlington House and Cannons, the homes of the Earl of Burlington and the Duke of Chandos, were homosexual or homoerotic settings and that Handel's presence in these environments suggests that he was ‘gay’ or influenced the secular works he composed there. Examining in detail biographical information about John Gay, Alexander Pope and William Kent, eighteenth-century biographical accounts of Handel and insights from the history of sexuality, this article argues that there is no basis for these claims about the homosexual milieux at Burlington House and Cannons or for Handel's sexuality.

Notes

¹The few sources are summarized in Donald Burrows, Handel (Oxford, 1994), 75–82, and idem, ‘Bringing Europe to Britain: Handel's First Decade in London’, Händel-Jahrbuch, 56 (2010), 65–77. John Mainwaring, in Memoirs of the Life of the Late George Frederic Handel (London, 1760), refers to Handel at Burlington's for the first three years of the period 1715–20 (p. 92); Burrows puts the initial year at 1713. ‘Mr Andrews’ was identified as Henry Andrews by John Greenacombe, in The Cambridge Handel Encyclopedia, ed. Annette Landgraf and David Vickers (Cambridge, 2009), 36–7; see also David Hunter, ‘Bridging the Gap: The Patrons-in-Common of Purcell and Handel’, Early Music, 37 (2009), 621–32 (p. 626). New information about the Cannons years is given in John H. Roberts, ‘The Composition of Handel's Esther, 1718–1720’, Händel-Jahrbuch, 55 (2009), 353–90. No documentary evidence confirms Handel's extended residence at either Burlington House or Cannons.

⁴Thomas, ‘“Was George Frideric Handel Gay?”’, 177.

²Gary Thomas, ‘“Was George Frideric Handel Gay?”: On Closet Questions and Cultural Politics’, Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, ed. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood and Gary C. Thomas (New York, 1994), 155–203 (p. 180). The claim about Handel's sexuality goes back further: Marion Ziegler so identified Handel in ‘The Great Gay Composers’, Gay Source: A Catalogue for Men, ed. Dennis Sanders (New York, 1977), 84. I focus on Thomas because he makes the most extended argument.

³Thomas, ‘“Was George Frideric Handel Gay?”’, 179.

⁵Thomas, ‘“Was George Frideric Handel Gay?”’, 178, 175, 177.

⁶Ellen T. Harris, Handel as Orpheus: Voice and Desire in the Chamber Cantatas (Cambridge, MA, 2001).

⁷Ellen T. Harris, Handel as Orpheus: Voice and Desire in the Chamber Cantatas (Cambridge, MA, 2001)., 209.

⁸Quoting from her summary of her argument, in Ellen T. Harris, ‘Homosexual Context and Identity: Reflections on the Reception of Handel as Orpheus’, Queer People: Negotiations and Expressions of Homosexuality, 1700–1800, ed. Chris Mounsey and Caroline Gonda (Lewisburg, PA, 2007), 41–66 (p. 43).

⁹I discuss these issues in ‘Handel's Acis and Galatea: A Homosexually Coded Allegory?’ (forthcoming).

¹⁰Harris reports many of the reader reactions in ‘Homosexual Context and Identity’.

¹¹Harris, Handel as Orpheus, 22.

¹²The extensive press coverage is reported in Harris, ‘Homosexual Context and Identity’. Instances of uncritical acceptance of Harris's arguments include Philip Brett, [review of Harris, Handel as Orpheus], MLA Notes (March 2003), 642–4; Judith A. Peraino, Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to ‘Hedwig’ (Berkeley, CA, 2006), 209–10; and Reinhard Strohm, [review of Harris, Handel as Orpheus], Journal of the American Musicological Society, 60 (2007), 217–22, who endorses Handel as Orpheus as offering ‘a marvelous enhancement to our critical awareness of Handel's life and world’ (p. 219).

¹³Harris, ‘Homosexual Context and Identity’.

¹⁴Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, i: Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, 1990), 43. On this point, see David M. Halperin, ‘Forgetting Foucault: Acts, Identities, and the History of Sexuality’, Representations, 63 (summer 1998), 93–120, who corrects mistaken applications of Foucault's statement.

¹⁵They are distinguished on the basis of social status, age, class, sameness of sex, active versus passive role, object choice, gender deviance and genital contact, among other features. Modern homosexuality is a conjunction of orientation, sexual object choice (desire) and behaviour (practice) that can be thought different from ‘heterosexuality’; see David M. Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality (Chicago, IL, 2002), 110–36.

¹⁶While homosexual men may associate and bond in all-male (homosocial) groups, the converse – that all-male homosocial groups consist of homosexual men – is not true. Many environments in an early eighteenth-century man's life were homosocial (boarding school, Parliament, coffee houses, clubs, the army and navy, government offices, etc.). The erotic orientations of eighteenth-century all-male groups were usually aggressively masculine and heterosexual, and were characterized by the presence of prostitutes, phallicism and the circulation of erotic verse. See Karen Harvey, Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Bodies and Gender in English Erotic Culture (Cambridge, 2004), 60–77; Ian F. Moulton, Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2004), 39–69; Jason M. Kelly, ‘Riots, Revelries, and Rumor: Libertinism and Masculine Association in Enlightenment London’, Journal of British Studies, 45 (2006), 759–95; Bruce Redford, Dilettanti: The Antic and the Antique in Eighteenth-Century England (Los Angeles, CA, 2008), esp. pp. 113–28; and Stephen Taylor and Hannah Smith, ‘Hephaestion and Alexander: Lord Hervey, Frederick, Prince of Wales, and the Royal Favourite in England in the 1730s’, English Historical Review, 124 (2009), 283–312 (p. 297). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick places homosocial and homosexual at opposite ends of a continuum; Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York, 1985), 1.

¹⁷Foucault, The History of Sexuality, i, trans. Hurley, 43. For a survey of the origins of the concepts of homosexual and heterosexual, see David M. Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (New York, 1990), 15–18. A most crucial point is that at its origins in the nineteenth century, the concept of homosexuality was seen as an ‘inversion’ or deviance from normative male sexuality; in the pre-modern systems based on regulation of sex by the gender system, certain forms of male–male sexual activity (as in classical Greece) were normative or acceptable.

¹⁸As Tim Hitchcock observes, ‘the vast majority of eighteenth-century men who committed sodomy did not think of themselves other than as ordinary, everyday members of their society. They did not belong to a subculture, nor did they have a distinctive self-identity. They would have seen sex with another man simply as an extension of the forms of sexual behaviour common in courting and marriage’; English Sexualities, 1700–1800 (New York, 1997), 63–4. See also David F. Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality (Chicago, IL, 1988), 329–30.

²⁰David Halperin, ‘More or Less Gay-Specific’, London Review of Books (23 May 1996), 24–7 (p. 24).

¹⁹Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley, CA, 1990), 45, 85.

²¹Harris, Handel as Orpheus, 14–16.

²² MLA Notes (March 2003), 643.

²³Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality, 135.

²⁴In addition to sources in notes 135–6 below, see importantly Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (2nd edn, London, 1982); Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality, 326–46; Rictor Norton, Mother Clap's Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England, 1700–1830 (London, 1992); and Hitchcock, English Sexualities, 60–75. On the rake/libertine tradition, see James G. Turner, ‘The Properties of Libertinism’, 'Tis Nature's Fault: Unauthorized Sexuality during the Enlightenment, ed. Robert P. Maccubbin (Cambridge, 1987), 75–87, originally published as a special issue of Eighteenth-Century Life, 9 (1985); Harold Weber, The Restoration Rake-Hero: Transformations in Sexual Understanding in Seventeenth-Century England (Madison, WI, 1986); idem, ‘“Drudging in Fair Aurelia's Womb”: Constructing Homosexual Economies in Rochester's Poetry’, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 33 (1992), 99–118; and George E. Haggerty, Men in Love: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1999), 7–9.

²⁵Pederasty of youth at schools was thought common; Dudley Ryder recorded in his diary (1715) that ‘among the chief men in some of the colleges sodomy is very usual and […] it is dangerous sending a young man that is beautiful to Oxford’; quoted in Hitchcock, English Sexualities, 64.

²⁶The arguments of Thomas and Harris might be reconceptualized and re-argued by attempting to do without the term or concept ‘homosexuality’ and thus be historicized by referring to the types of sexual behaviour, categories and norms prevailing at the time.

²⁸John Gay, ‘Trivia: or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London’, Poetry and Prose, ed. Vinton A. Dearing with Charles E. Beckwith, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1974), i, 134–81 (p. 157, lines 497–9).

²⁷Mainwaring, Memoirs of the Life of the Late George Frederic Handel, 93.

²⁹On the Burlington circle, see Jacques Carré, Lord Burlington (1694–1753): Le connaisseur, le mécène, l'architecte, 2 vols. (Clermont-Ferrand, 1993), i, 177–94.

³²John Gay, ‘An Epistle to the Right Honourable the Earl of Burlington (A Journey to Exeter)’, Poetry and Prose, ed. Dearing with Beckwith, i, 203–4 (p. 203, lines 1–4). Thomas states that the friend is William Kent, but this is impossible because Kent was in Italy from 1709 until 1719; see A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy, 1701–1800, comp. John Ingamells (New Haven, CT, 1997), 569.

³⁰Thomas, ‘“Was George Frideric Handel Gay?”’, 177–8.

³¹Pope, letter to Martha Blount, [March 1716?]; The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1956), i, 338.

³³ Oxford English Dictionary (2nd edn, 1989), s.v. ‘lie’, 5.a.

³⁴In Virgil, Eclogue II, Corydon desires Alexis; in Theocritus, Idyll II, the spurned lover is indifferent whether her unfaithful love shares his bed with a man or woman. In general, the sexuality of males in pastorals is not made explicit. Even the major example, Corydon in Eclogue II, is ambiguous: after being spurned by Alexis, he returns to his love, Amaryllis. Thomas's discussion of Arcadia focuses primarily on its ‘history of homosexual appropriation’ and use as a ‘symbolic sign system’ (p. 177) rather than recovering its literary and artistic representations.

³⁵The principal works include Theocritus, Idylls; Virgil, Eclogues; Ovid, Metamorphoses, Fasti; Boccaccio, Bucolicum carmen (1340–1), Ameto (1341–2), Ninfale fiesolano (1346–9 or 1344–6); Petrarch, Bucolicum carmen (1346); Angelo Poliziano, Favola di Orfeo (1480); Jacopo Sannazaro, Libro pastorale nominato Arcadia (1485–6, 1501, 1504); Edmund Spenser, Shepheardes Calender (1579); Torquato Tasso, L'Aminta (1580, 1590); Battista Guarini, Il pastor fido (1590, 1602); Sir Philip Sidney, Arcadia (1593); and Guidobaldo Bonarelli, Filli di Sciro (1607).

³⁶On the mythic-pastoral Arcadia in literature and painting, see W. Leonard Grant, Neo-Latin Literature and the Pastoral (Chapel Hill, NC, 1965); Bruno Snell, ‘Arkadien: Die Entdeckung einer geistigen Landschaft’, Die Entdeckung des Geistes: Studien zur Entstehung des europäischen Denkens bei den Griechen (4th edn, Göttingen, 1975), 257–74; Luba Freedman, The Classical Pastoral in the Visual Arts (New York, 1989), 103–52; Maria Grazia Accorsi, Pastori e teatro: Poesia e critica in Arcadia (Modena, 1990); Paul Alpers, What is Pastoral? (Chicago, IL, 1996); and Il mito d'Arcadia: Pastori e amori nelle arti del Rinascimento: Atti del Convegno internazionale di studi, Turin, 14–15 March 2005, ed. Danielle Boillet and Alessandro Pontremoli (Florence, 2007). See also Bruno Snell, ‘Arcadia: The Discovery of a Spiritual Landscape’, The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought, trans. Thomas Gustav Rosenmeyer (New York, 1960), 281–309. Contending interpretations of the significance of Arcadia are surveyed in Ernst A. Schmidt, ‘Arkadien: Abendland und Antike’, Antike und Abendland, 21 (1975), 36–57. On painting specifically, see Erwin Panofsky, ‘Et in Arcadia ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition’, Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City, NY, 1955), 295–320; Margaretha R. Lagerlöf, Ideal Landscape: Annibale Carracci, Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain (New Haven, CT, 1990), 7–11; Humphrey Wine, Claude: The Poetic Landscape (London, 1994), 29–37; Gianni Carlo Sciolla, ‘Pastori in Arcadia: Pittori tra Orlanda e Italia nel primo Seicento’, Il mito d'Arcadia, ed. Boillet and Pontremoli, 191–221; Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions, ed. Pierre Rosenberg and Keith Christiansen (New Haven, CT, 2008), 76–81.

³⁷On Old Chiswick House and Burlington's new villa, see John Harris, The Palladian Revival: Lord Burlington, his Villa and Garden at Chiswick (New Haven, CT, 1994). The house and gardens remained essentially unchanged from their views in Britannia illustrata until 1716.

³⁸On the Accademia degli Arcadi and aspects of its literature and art, see Michele Maylender, Storia delle accademie d'Italia, 5 vols. (Bologna, 1926–30), i, 232–81; Tre secoli di storia dell'Arcadia, ed. Maria Teresa Acquaro Graziosi and Barbara Tellini Santoni (Rome, 1991); Maria Teresa Acquaro Graziosi, L'Arcadia: Trecento anni di storia (Rome, 1991); Anna Laura Bellina and Carlo Caruso, ‘Oltre il Barocco: La fondazione dell'Arcadia’, Storia della letteratura italiana, ed. Enrico Malato, vi: Il Settecento (Rome, 1998), 246–65 (and, for further bibliography, pp. 305–8); Liliana Barroero and Stefano Susinno, ‘Arcadian Rome, Universal Capital of the Arts’, Art in Rome in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Edgar P. Bowron and Joseph J. Rishel (Philadelphia, PA, 2000), 47–75; and Susan M. Dixon, Between the Real and the Ideal: The Accademia degli Arcadi and its Garden in Eighteenth-Century Rome (Newark, DE, 2006).

³⁹The Bosco Parrasio is discussed and illustrated in great detail in Daniella Predieri, Bosco Parrasio: Un giardino per l'Arcadia (Modena, 1990), and Dixon, Between the Real and the Ideal.

⁴⁰On women among the Arcadi, see Anna Teresa Romano Cervone, ‘Presenze femminili nella prima Arcadia romana: Per una teoria dei modelli’, Tre secoli di storia dell'Arcadia, ed. Graziosi and Santoni, 47–57; Elisabetta Graziosi, ‘Arcadia femminile: Presenze e modelli’, and Anna T. Romano Cervone, ‘Faustina Maratti Zappi e Petronilla Paolini Massini: L’“universo debole” della prima Arcadia romana’, Accademia letteraria italiana: Atti e memorie, 3rd ser., 9/2–4: Convegno di studi, 15–18 May 1991, III Centenario dell'Arcadia (Rome, 1991–4), 249–73 and 169–76 resp.; Luisa Ricaldone, La scrittura nascosta: Donne di lettere e lore immagini tra Arcadia e Restaurazione (Paris, 1996); Susan M. Dixon, ‘Women and the Academy’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 32 (1999), 371–90; and A History of Women's Writing in Italy, ed. Letizia Panizza and Sharon Wood (Cambridge, 2000), 103–4, 144, 313, 322.

⁴¹Carré, Lord Burlington, i, 165–73.

⁴²John Harris, The Palladians (London, 1981), 18 (my italics). Quoted by Thomas, ‘“Was George Frideric Handel Gay?”’, 180, and by Harris, Handel as Orpheus, 188.

⁴³Rudolph Wittkower, The Earl of Burlington and William Kent, York Georgian Society Occasional Papers, 5 (York, 1948), 10, states that Burlington brought Kent back from Italy ‘to stay with him until his death in 1748’. Cf. Marjorie Isabel Webb, Michael Rysbrack, Sculptor (London, 1954): ‘Kent lived with the Earl in Burlington House until his death in 1748’ (p. 45). Wittkower is referring to their joint return from Italy in 1719.

⁴⁴Michael I. Wilson, William Kent: Architect, Designer, Painter, Gardener, 1685–1748 (London, 1984), 37.

⁴⁵George Vertue, Vertue Notebooks, 6 vols., Walpole Society, 18, 20, 22, 24, 26, 30 (Oxford, 1930–55), iii (1934), 140.

⁴⁶Kent, letter to Burrell Massingberd, 30 January 1720, quoted in Timothy Mowl, William Kent: Architect, Designer, Opportunist (London, 2006), 84.

⁴⁷Margaret Jourdain, The Work of William Kent, Artist, Painter, Designer and Landscape Gardener (London, 1948), 41–2; Wilson, William Kent, 87.

⁴⁸Quoting Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England, 4 vols. (London, 1785), iv, 246, and Vertue, Vertue Notebooks, iii, 140.

⁴⁹Quoting here from Wilson, William Kent, 37.

⁵⁰Harris, Handel as Orpheus, 188. Halperin points out that male friendships between social equals as recorded in the past (and as might be assumed between Burlington and Kent) are likely to be perceived as homosexual by moderns; he shows that historically such was the stigma about the passive (pathic) role in sodomy that ‘sexual penetration [was] not the sort of thing you would do to someone you really love’ (How to Do the History of Homosexuality, 121).

⁵¹Anthony Hicks, ‘Fantasia on a Theme’, The Times Literary Supplement (31 May 2002), 5–6 (p. 6). Hicks refers to Lindsay Boynton, ‘Lord Burlington at Home’, Belov'd by Ev'ry Muse: Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington and 4th Earl of Cork (1694–1753), ed. Dana Arnold (London, 1994), 21–8, 52–4. The passage reads (citations omitted): ‘As to the supposed homosexual ménage at Burlington House, the insinuation is based on no evidence, direct or indirect, but on the presumption (not always correct) that males deeply concerned with the creative/visual arts are almost invariably “so”. It does not bear examination: (1) the impression that Kent “lived with” Burlington is wide of the mark – Kent had a room at Burlington House, as did numerous other protégés, where he lived his own social life; (2) Kent apparently had at least one mistress by whom he probably fathered children and he left the bulk of his estate to them; (3) the alleged relationship could not have existed without comment, whereas Burlington's reputation is, to the best of my knowledge, not only entirely clear of scandal but positively that of any upright and – in the best sense – virtuous man; (4) his marriage was far closer than has been generally allowed – his wife was almost cloyingly in love with him, notwithstanding her affair with the Duke of Grafton, and, if he was less effusive, that was self-evidently part of his character’ (p. 52, note 7).

⁵²Harris, ‘Homosexual Context and Identity’, 53–5 (‘scare quotes’ added by Harris).

⁵³I am probably included in the charge, since I presented much of the same evidence as Boynton in my paper, at which Harris was present: ‘The Sexual Milieux of Burlington House and Cannons’, at the American Handel Society Meeting, University of Iowa, Iowa City, 27–28 February 2003, and in my review, ‘A Gay Studies Handel’, Early Music, 30 (2002), 608–12.

⁵⁴Harris, ‘Homosexual Context and Identity’, 53–5. There is no doubt that ‘a conventionally masculine man’ can perform such same-sex acts; but as long as he is in the active role, such activity can even be seen as acting out a male/masculine role and not reflecting a sexual orientation; see Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality, 114–15.

⁵⁵Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits, 4 vols. (Paris, 1994), iv, 315–16, trans. in Halperin, ‘Forgetting Foucault’, 114, note 8; see also Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality, 113–17.

⁵⁶On the principles of verification and falsification, see such classic discussions as Alfred Jules Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (2nd edn, London, 1950), Chapter 1 and pp. 114–20; Karl R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (New York, 1962), esp. pp. 33–41, 193–200, 253–79; Carl G. Hempel, ‘Studies in the Logic of Confirmation’, Aspects of Scientific Explanation and Other Essays in the Philosophy of Science (New York, 1965), 3–51; and those by Hempel, Marhenke, Waismann, Ayer and Flew in Meaning and Knowledge: Systematic Readings in Epistemology, ed. Ernest Nagel and Richard B. Brandt (New York, 1965), 17–52.

⁵⁷Harris, Handel as Orpheus, 188, 240, 241.

⁵⁸Harris, Handel as Orpheus, 188. Of Pope and Gay, George S. Rousseau had stated: ‘These men were probably not homosexual (certainly there is no evidence of genital activity), but they were homosocial and homoerotic by any definition’ (p. 134); ‘The Pursuit of Homosexuality in the Eighteenth Century: “Utterly Confused Category” and/or Rich Repository’, 'Tis Nature's Fault, ed. Maccubbin, 132–68.

⁵⁹David Nokes, John Gay: A Profession of Friendship (Oxford, 1995), 44–50, 203–4. Nokes cites John Harris on p. 44 and quotes from private correspondence from Harris.

⁶⁰David Womersley is sceptical of Nokes's sexual speculations, noting how Nokes's ‘scholarly scruple’ of using qualifying words ‘acts as the fig-leaf for recklessness’; ‘Did He Defer?’, The Times Literary Supplement (24 March 1995), 12.

⁶¹The examples are Aaron Hill, The Progress of Wit: A Caveat. For the Use of an Eminent Writer (1730), and Pope, ‘Summer’, from Pastorals (1709).

⁶²Harris, Handel as Orpheus, 244–5. I discuss this line of argument in detail in ‘Handel's Acis and Galatea’.

⁶³But even if such examples do exist, accusations by a contemporary, who probably would have been defaming Pope maliciously, would not be reliable testimony of Pope's actual sexuality.

⁶⁷‘A Farewell to London. In the Year 1715’; The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (London, 1963), 245–6.

⁶⁴Valerie Rumbold, Women's Place in Pope's World (Cambridge, 1989), 48.

⁶⁵Pope, letter to John Caryll, 18 January 1718; The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. Sherburn, i, 461–2. On Pope's youth, see George Sherburn, The Early Career of Alexander Pope (Oxford, 1934), and Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life (New York, 1986).

⁶⁶Mack, Alexander Pope, 292.

⁷⁰ The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. Butt, 305–7.

⁶⁸On the Maids of Honour, see Sherburn, The Early Career of Alexander Pope, 198–9; Mack, Alexander Pope, 289–91; and Nokes, John Gay, 240, 250–1.

⁶⁹Nokes, John Gay, 251.

⁷¹On Pope's physical condition and its psychological effects on him and his poetry, see Marjorie Nicolson and George S. Rousseau, ‘A Medical Case History of Alexander Pope’, ‘This Long Disease, my Life’: Alexander Pope and the Sciences (Princeton, NJ, 1968), 7–82; and Maynard Mack, ‘“The Least Thing Like a Man in England”: Some Effects of Pope's Physical Disability on his Life and Literary Career’, revised version printed in Collected in Himself: Essays Critical, Biographical, and Bibliographical on Pope and Some of his Contemporaries (Newark, DE, 1982), 372–92.

⁷²Rumbold, Women's Place in Pope's World, 52. James A. Winn sees the extravagance and artifice of Pope's letters as veiling genuine admissions of romantic attraction; ‘Pope Plays the Rake: His Letters to Ladies and the Making of the Eloisa’, The Art of Alexander Pope, ed. Howard Erskine-Hill and Anne Smith (New York, 1979), 89–118.

⁷³Pope, letter to Teresa and Martha Blount, 8 October [1718]; The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. Sherburn, i, 515.

⁷⁴Pope, letter to Henry Cromwell, 21 December 1711; Pope, letter to Teresa and Martha Blount, 8 October [1718]; The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. Sherburn, i, 137.

⁷⁵Rumbold, Women's Place in Pope's World, 125.

⁷⁶ The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. Butt, 310.

⁷⁷ The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. Butt, 128; Sherburn, The Early Career of Alexander Pope, 291–7.

⁷⁸Pope, letter to William Broome, 18 September 1722; The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. Sherburn, ii, 134–5; see also Sherburn, The Early Career of Alexander Pope, 292.

⁷⁹Pope, letter to John Caryll, 25 December 1725; The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. Sherburn, ii, 352–4; see also Sherburn, The Early Career of Alexander Pope, 292.

⁸⁰ Letters of Mary Lepel [sic], Lady Hervey (London, 1821), 68; quoted in Sherburn, The Early Career of Alexander Pope, 292.

⁸³Pope, letter to Mary Wortley Montagu, 10 November 1716; The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. Sherburn, i, 369.

⁸⁶Pope, letter to Mary Wortley Montagu, autumn 1717; The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. Sherburn, i, 439–40.

⁸¹Rumbold, Women's Place in Pope's World, 131. On Pope and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, see Sherburn, The Early Career of Alexander Pope, 168–9, 203–8; Robert Halsband, The Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Oxford, 1956), 62–3, 75–6, 86–7; Mack, Alexander Pope, 301–6; Rumbold, Women's Place in Pope's World, esp. pp. 136, 140; and Isobel Grundy, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Oxford, 1999), xviii, 90–4, 125–6, 164–5, 181, 201–2, 270, 348.

⁸²Rumbold, Women's Place in Pope's World, 136.

⁸⁴Grundy, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 163–4.

⁸⁵Nokes, John Gay, 251.

⁸⁷Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men Collected from Conversation, ed. James M. Osborn, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1966), i, 110–11 (no. 252).

⁸⁸ Oxford English Dictionary (2nd edn, 1989), s.v. ‘gay’, 2.a (citing usages dating from 1637, 1700, 1703).

⁸⁹Sherburn, The Early Career of Alexander Pope, 292; Mack, Alexander Pope, 308.

⁹⁰The attacks are catalogued and excerpted in Joseph Vincent Guerinot, Pamphlet Attacks on Alexander Pope, 1711–1744: A Descriptive Bibliography (London, 1969); see also Sherburn, The Early Career of Alexander Pope, 149–85.

⁹¹John Dennis, Reflections Critical and Satyrical upon a Late Rhapsody, Call'd, an Essay upon Criticism (London, 1711), 26; see also Mack, ‘“The Least Thing Like a Man”’, 373–4.

⁹²Cibber, A Letter from Mr. Cibber, to Mr. Pope (London, 1742), 47–8.

⁹³The episode and prints are described and reproduced in Norman Ault, New Light on Pope, with Some Additions to his Poetry Hitherto Unknown (London, 1949), 298–307; Eric V. Chandler, ‘Pope's “Girl of the Game”: The Prostitution of the Author and the Business of Culture’, ‘More Solid Learning’: New Perspectives on Alexander Pope's ‘Dunciad’, ed. Catherine Ingrassia and Claudia N. Thomas (Lewisburg, PA, 2000), 106–28; and Mack, Alexander Pope, 292–3, 778–81; prints are reproduced in Guerinot, Pamphlet Attacks, opposite p. 288.

⁹⁴Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men, i, 111 (no. 251).

⁹⁵ A Full and True Account of a Horrid and Barbarous Revenge by Poison on the Body of Mr. Edmund Curll (London, 1716). The episode and various publications relating to it are described in Sherburn, The Early Career of Alexander Pope, 167–72, 204.

⁹⁶John Oldmixon, The Catholick Poet (London, 1716), 1.

⁹⁷ The Life of the Late Celebrated Mrs. Elizabeth Wisebourn, Vulgarly Call'd Mother Wybourn (London, 1721). See Sherburn, The Early Career of Alexander Pope, 294–5, and Guerinot, Pamphlet Attacks, 80–2.

⁹⁸On Hervey's relationship with Stephen Fox, see Robert Halsband, Lord Hervey: Eighteenth-Century Courtier (New York, 1974), 68–70, 88–91, 100–1, 102–3; Norton, Mother Clap's Molly House, 146–58; and Taylor and Smith, ‘Hephaestion and Alexander’.

⁹⁹Charles Henry Collins Baker, The Life and Circumstances of James Brydges, First Duke of Chandos, Patron of the Liberal Arts (Oxford, 1949).

¹⁰⁰Susan Jenkins, Portrait of a Patron: The Patronage and Collecting of James Brydges, 1st Duke of Chandos (1674–1744) (Aldershot, 2007), 78–86.

¹⁰¹Harris, Handel as Orpheus, 188.

¹⁰²On the authorship of Acis and Galatea, see Brian Trowell, ‘Acis, Galatea and Polyphemus: A “Serenata a tre voci”?’, Music and Theatre: Essays in Honour of Winton Dean, ed. Nigel Fortune (Cambridge, 1987), 31–93. The authorship of Esther is very uncertain; Winton Dean, Handel's Dramatic Oratorios and Masques (London, 1959), 197–8, suggests it is most plausible that Arbuthnot planned the scheme, with Pope helping with versification.

¹⁰³Graydon Beeks, ‘Handel and Music for the Earl of Carnarvon’, Bach, Handel, Scarlatti, ed. Peter Williams (Cambridge, 1985), 1–20; idem, ‘“A Club of Composers”: Handel, Pepusch and Arbuthnot at Cannons’, Handel Tercentenary Collection, ed. Stanley Sadie and Anthony Hicks (Ann Arbor, MI, 1987), 209–21; and idem, ‘The Chandos Anthems of Haym, Handel and Pepusch’, Göttinger Händel-Beitrâge, 5 (1993), 161–93.

¹⁰⁴Nokes, John Gay, 277.

¹⁰⁵ The Letters of John Gay, ed. Chester Francis Burgess (Oxford, 1966).

¹⁰⁶Nokes, John Gay, 308. William H. Irving, John Gay: Favorite of the Wits (Durham, NC, 1940), 184, thinks Gay was ‘doing his bit’ for the production of Esther (which argument Otto Erich Deutsch questions in Handel: A Documentary Biography (New York, 1955), 113).

¹⁰⁷Collins Baker, The Life and Circumstances of James Brydges.

¹⁰⁸Nokes, John Gay, 289–90.

¹⁰⁹Whether Cannons was the model for Timon's Villa is in dispute; for the classic statement of the problem, see George Sherburn, ‘“Timon's Villa” and Cannons’, Huntington Library Bulletin, 8 (1935), 131–52; Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope, 498–501; and James McLaverty, Pope, Print and Meaning (Oxford, 2001), 144–7. The controversy is reviewed in Jenkins, Portrait of a Patron.

¹¹⁰Sherburn, ‘“Timon's Villa” and Cannons’, 143, 138, 142.

¹¹¹Footnote to line 357 of the first edition of the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot (quoted in Sherburn, ‘“Timon's Villa” and Cannons’, 142).

¹¹²Thomas, ‘“Was George Frideric Handel Gay?”’, 180.

¹¹³Thomas, ‘“Was George Frideric Handel Gay?”’, 163–7.

¹¹⁴Thomas, ‘“Was George Frideric Handel Gay?”’, 163. George S. Rousseau set the pattern for Thomas's approach by suggesting that Handel's biographers’ overlooking his sexuality ‘for reasons they never explicitly state’ is cause to suspect his homosexuality; ‘The Pursuit of Homosexuality in the Eighteenth Century’, 135.

¹¹⁵As transcribed in Donald Burrows, ‘Handel and Hanover’, Bach, Handel, Scarlatti, ed. Williams, 35–59 (p. 39). See also Anthony Hicks, ‘Handel's Early Musical Development’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 103 (1976–7), 80–9 (p. 83).

¹¹⁶On Vittoria, see Carlo Vitali and Antonello Furnari, ‘Händels Italienreise: Neue Dokumente, Hypothesen und Interpretationen’, Göttinge Händel-Beiträge, 4 (1991), 41–66 (p. 61); Ursula Kirkendale, ‘Handel with Ruspoli: New Documents from the Archivio Segreto Vaticano, December 1706 to December 1708’, Warren and Ursula Kirkendale, Music and Meaning: Studies in Music History and the Neighbouring Disciplines (Florence, 2007), 361–415; and Carlo Vitali, ‘Vittoria Tarquini’, The Cambridge Handel Encyclopedia, ed. Landgraf and Vickers, 630–1.

¹¹⁷Mainwaring, Memoirs of the Life of the Late George Frederic Handel, 53–4. Mainwaring reported previously how Vittoria had ‘conceived a design of transferring her affections’ to Handel at Florence (pp. 50–1).

¹¹⁸Mainwaring, Memoirs of the Life of the Late George Frederic Handel, 53–4. Mainwaring reported previously how Vittoria had ‘conceived a design of transferring her affections’ to Handel at Florence (pp. 50–1), 28–9.

¹¹⁹John Hawkins, A General History of the Science and Practice of Music, 2 vols. (London, 1853), ii, 911–12.

¹²⁰Thomas, ‘“Was George Frideric Handel Gay?”’, 160.

¹²¹Thomas, ‘“Was George Frideric Handel Gay?”’, 161.

¹²²William C. Smith, ‘George III, Handel, and Mainwaring’, Musical Times, 65 (1924), 789–95 (p. 793).

¹²³[William Coxe], Anecdotes of George Frederick Handel, and John Christopher Smith (London, 1799), 28–9; repeated in C. F. Abdy Williams, Handel (London, 1901), 191.

¹²⁴Harris, Handel as Orpheus, 46.

¹²⁵Thomas, ‘“Was George Frideric Handel Gay?”’, 161.

¹²⁶Charles Burney, ‘Sketch of the Life of Handel’, An Account of the Musical Performances in Westminster-Abbey (London, 1785), 1–38 (first pagination) (pp. 34, 37).

¹²⁷Hawkins, A General History of Music, ii, 912; and Jacob Simon, Handel: A Celebration of his Life and Times, 1685–1759 (London, 1985), 289–90.

¹²⁸Ellen Harris, ‘Handel the Investor’, Music and Letters, 85 (2004), 521–75.

¹²⁹The anecdotes about Handel and Prince Frederick are presented in Thomas McGeary, ‘Handel and the Feuding Royals’, Handel Institute Newsletter, 17 (autumn 2006), 5–8.

¹³⁰David Hunter, ‘Just the Facts?’ (review of Winton Dean, Handel's Operas, 1726–1741), Early Music, 35 (2007), 460–2 (p. 461).

¹³¹Handel's relations with Goupy are presented at length in Ellen T. Harris, ‘Joseph Goupy and George Frideric Handel: From Professional Triumphs to Personal Estrangement’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 71 (2008), 397–452.

¹³²The relevant extracts from the correspondence of Mary Delany (Mary Pendarves) are printed in Deutsch, Handel. The correspondence from the Harris family circle is extracted in Music and Theatre in Handel's World: The Family Papers of James Harris, 1732–1780, ed. Donald Burrows and Rosemary Dunhill (Oxford, 2002), 23, 26, 27, 29, 36, 46, 68, 70, 76, 79, 80, 86, 88, 94, 97, 98, 99, 115, 117, 119, 142, 143, 152, 163, 166, 178, 180, 182, 207, 220, 225, 226, 233, 282, 314, 326, 327, 328, 335 and 338.

¹³³Harris, ‘Homosexual Context and Identity’, 49–50.

¹³⁴Harris, Handel as Orpheus, 188, 240, 241. This mistaken idea seems to have been taken from Foucault (‘the nearly universal reticence in talking about it [sodomy]’); The History of Sexuality, i, trans. Hurley, 101.

¹³⁵Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York, 1981); Sedgwick, Between Men; Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford, CA, 1992); Emma Donoghue, Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture, 1668–1801 (London, 1993); Cameron McFarlane, The Sodomite in Fiction and Satire (New York, 1997); Harriette Andreadis, Sappho in Early Modern England: Female Same-Sex Literary Erotics, 1550–1714 (Chicago, IL, 2001); and Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2002). See also the following anthologies of texts: Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment England: Literary Representations in Historical Context, ed. Claude Summers (New York, 1992); Chloe Plus Olivia: An Anthology of Lesbian Literature from the Seventeenth Century to the Present, ed. Lillian Faderman (New York, 1994); Pages Passed from Hand to Hand: The Hidden Tradition of Homosexual Literature in English 1748–1914, ed. Mark Mitchell and David Leavitt (London, 1997); The Lesbian Pillow Book, ed. Alison Hennegan (London, 2000); and The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology from Ariosto to Stonewall, ed. Terry Castle (New York, 2003).

¹³⁶On the visibility of sodomy, see Randolph Trumbach, ‘London's Sodomites’, Journal of Social History, 11 (1977), 1–33; Barry Richard Burg, Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition: English Sea Rovers in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean (New York, 1984), 1–41; Trumbach, ‘Sodomitical Subcultures, Sodomitical Roles, and the Gender Revolution of the Eighteenth Century: The Recent Historiography’, 'Tis Nature's Fault, ed. Maccubbin, 109–21; idem, ‘Sodomitical Assaults, Gender Role, and Sexual Development in Eighteenth-Century London’, The Pursuit of Sodomy: Male Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe, ed. Kent Gerard and Gert Hekma (New York, 1989), 407–29 (also published as Journal of Homosexuality, 16/1–2 (1988)); idem, ‘The Birth of the Queen: Sodomy and the Emergence of Gender Equality in Modern Culture, 1660–1750’, Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin B. Duberman, Martha Vicinus and George Chauncey, Jr (New York, 1989), 129–40; idem, ‘Gender and the Homosexual Role in Modern Western Culture: The 18th and 19th Centuries Compared’, Homosexuality, Which Homosexuality? Essays from the International Scientific Conference on Lesbian and Gay Studies (London, 1989), 149–69; and Dennis Rubini, ‘Sexuality and Augustan England: Sodomy, Politics, Elite Circles and Society’, The Pursuit of Sodomy, ed. Gerard and Hekma, 349–81. Unflinching descriptions of sodomy in printed trial reports are given in George E. Haggerty, ‘Keyhole Testimony: Witnessing Sodomy in the Eighteenth Century’, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 44 (2003), 167–82; and in satire and fiction in McFarlane, The Sodomite in Fiction and Satire, 25–107.

¹⁴⁰ The Diverting Muse, or, the Universal Medly (1707), 156–65 (p. 151).

¹³⁷4th edn (1704), 403.

¹³⁸In Poems on Affairs of State […] to 1703, ii (2nd edn, 1716), 156–65 (p. 164).

¹³⁹In Poems on Affairs of State from 1640 to […] 1704, iii (1704), 370–1 (p. 370).

¹⁴¹John H. O'Neill, ‘Sexuality, Deviance, and Moral Character in the Personal Satire of the Restoration’, Eighteenth–Century Life, 2 (1975), 16–19; Harold Weber, ‘“Drudging in Fair Aurelia's Womb”: Constructing Homosexual Economies in Rochester's Poetry’, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 33 (1992), 99–117; and Paul Hammond, Figuring Sex between Men from Shakespeare to Rochester (Oxford, 2002), 155–85.

¹⁴²For Charles II's sexual behaviour, see Harold Weber, ‘Charles II, George Pines, and Mr. Dorimant: The Politics o\f Sexual Power in Restoration England’, Criticism, 32 (1990), 193–219; Paul Hammond, ‘The King's Two Bodies: Representations of Charles II’, Culture, Politics, and Society in Britain, 1660–1800, ed. Jeremy Black and Jeremy Gregory (Manchester, 1991), 13–48 (esp. pp. 26–30); and Rachel Weil, ‘Sometimes a Scepter is Only a Scepter: Pornography and Politics in Restoration England’, The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800, ed. Lynn Hunt (New York, 1993), 125–53. For William III, see Rubini, ‘Sexuality and Augustan England’, and McFarlane, The Sodomite in Fiction and Satire, 79–80.

¹⁴³Edward Gregg, Queen Anne (London, 1980), 275–6, 326.

¹⁴⁶ The Genuine Works of Mr. Daniel D'Foe (London, 1721), 85.

¹⁴⁴ Poems on Affairs of State […] to 1703, ii (2nd edn, London, 1716), 438–41 (p. 440).

¹⁴⁵ Poems on Affairs of State […] to 1703, ii (2nd edn, London, 1716), 438–41 (p. 440), 361.

¹⁴⁷ The Memorial of the Church of England (London, 1705; quoting Dublin, 1711 edn), 20. The circumstances are discussed in J. A. Downie, Robert Harley and the Press: Propaganda and Public Opinion in the Age of Swift and Defoe (Cambridge, 1979), 80–100.

¹⁴⁹ The Conspirators; or, The Case of Catiline (quoting from 9th edn, 1721), 25. A manuscript newsletter from 1717 reported: ‘There are many malicious stories talked of the Earl of Sunderland, of scandalous law actions thereupon, but with what ground time will show’; Historical Manuscripts Commission, The Manuscripts of His Grace the Duke of Portland Preserved at Welbeck Abbey, 9 vols. (London, 1891–1923), v (1899), 551.

¹⁴⁸On the case of Sunderland, see Norton, Mother Clap's Molly House, 41–3.

¹⁵⁰In The Windsor Medley (London, 1731), 3–5. The volume is a collection of prose and verse handed about while the court was at Windsor the previous summer.

¹⁵¹William Pulteney, A Proper Reply to a Late Scurrilous Libel; Intitled, Sedition and Defamation Display'd (London, 1731), 5, 6 and 27; see also A Tryal of Skill between 'Squire Walsingham and Mother Oborne […] to Which are Added, Horace to Fannius (London, 1734). Hervey is similarly characterized in a description of his feud with Pope in A Tryal of Skill between a Court Lord, and a Twickenham 'Squire (London, 1734).

¹⁵³ Grub-Street Journal, 26 June 1735.

¹⁵²Lines 305, 308, 309, 326, 328–9. Further poems about Hervey's sexuality are explored in Jon T. Rowland, ‘Swords in Myrtle Dress'd’: Toward a Rhetoric of Sodom: Gay Readings of Homosexual Politics and Poetics in the Eighteenth Century (Cranbury, NJ, 1998), 65–87.

¹⁵⁴These are discussed and reprinted in Thomas McGeary, ‘Verse Epistles on Italian Opera Singers, 1724–1736’, Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle, 33 (2000), 29–88. See also idem, ‘Gendering Opera: Italian Opera as the Feminine “Other” in England, 1700–42’, Journal of Musicological Research, 14 (1994), 17–34; and idem, ‘Repressing Female Desire on the London Opera Stage, 1724–1727’, Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, 4 (2000), 40–58.

¹⁵⁵Autograph letter from Mary Delany, Newport Public Library; as quoted in Harris, Handel as Orpheus, 19.

¹⁵⁶‘Little Peggy’; The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole's Correspondence, ed. Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis, 34 vols. (New Haven, CT, 1937–), xxx (1961), 309.

¹⁵⁷On justifying such a historicist approach and arguments against extreme scepticism about the very possibility of it, see Eric Donald Hirsch, Jr, The Aims of Interpretation (Chicago, IL, 1976), Chapters 5 and 9; Robert D. Hume, ‘Texts within Contexts: Notes toward a Historical Method’, Philological Quarterly, 71 (1992), 69–100; John R. Searle, ‘Rationality and Realism: What is at Stake?’, Daedalus, 122/4 (autumn 1993), 55–83; Hume, Reconstructing Contexts: The Aims and Principles of Archaeo-Historicism (Oxford, 1999); and idem, ‘The Aims and Limits of Historical Scholarship’, Review of English Studies, n.s. 53 (2002), 399–422. For replies to the postmodern critique of traditional history, see Gertrude Himmelfarb, ‘Telling It as You Like It’, The Times Literary Supplement (16 October 1992), 12–15; Richard J. Evans, In Defense of History (London, 1997); and Himmelfarb, ‘Beyond Method’, What's Happened to the Humanities?, ed. Alvin Kernan (Princeton, NJ, 1997), 143–61.

¹⁵⁸Harris, Handel as Orpheus, 14.