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By the 1620s, the romantic episodes in Gerusalemme liberata had become popular as a source for operatic libretti. The story of Rinaldo and Armida proved to be the most popular, and eventually, by the end of the seventeenth century, this phenomenon had reached the stage in England, via Italy, France and even Germany. The fourth chapter explores ambitious musical adaptations of the episode for the London stage in the native form of dramatic opera in John Dennis’s Rinaldo and Armida: A Tragedy (1699), with music by John Eccles, and in the through-sung Italianate form in Handel’s Rinaldo, with a libretto by Giacomo Rossi, first performed to great acclaim in 1711. It will also examine the idiosyncratic interpretation, by Paolo Rolli, of a different romantic episode in Tasso, that of Erminia and Tancredi, as the source for another Italianate London opera, Giovanni Bononcini’s L’Erminia favola Boschereccia (1723). These musical works founded, often closely but sometimes more freely, on the Italian poem demonstrate the breadth of Tasso’s impact in England, both chronologically and across a range of art forms.

Within thirty years of William Hide's resignation, Harrow School had become a recognized competitor for the education of the gentry, a ‘public school’ in England. A barometer of this progress was the extended argument between the Usher and the Head Master over the division of fees paid by ‘foreigners’. It is unmistakable that ‘foreigners’ had become the central element at Harrow. Two lasting institutions had been established which helped define the corporate identity of the school. On October 20, 1674 ,John Dennis, a ‘foreigner’, delivered a Latin ‘Oration’ at the governors' annual audit meeting, a tradition that has continued, with some gaps and at least one foray into English, until the present. The invention of public rituals and deliberately arcane customs suggests the social composition of the Restoration school. The appointment of William Horne, the Under Master of Eton College and a fellow of King's College in Cambridge, as Head Master of Harrow School began over a century of domination of Harrow by Eton and King's.

This chapter begins by exploring the Church of England’s embattled and divided situation in the years after 1688. The significance of ecclesiastical faction, it argues, has been underestimated by literary historians, with important consequences for our understanding of whig poetics in the decades following the ‘glorious revolution’. This claim is substantiated via the writings of John Dennis, John Toland, and the third earl of Shaftesbury. Dennis’s early critical writings are discussed with reference to the author’s hostility to both high church politics, and Toland’s free-thinking religious radicalism. Shaftesbury’s philosophical and critical writings are shown to possess a far closer relationship to contemporary religious politics than hitherto acknowledged, not least in the case of his best-known work, the Characteristicks of 1711, which responds directly to the trial of the high church preacher, Henry Sacheverell.

This chapter questions why John Dennis, the first literary critic to associate Milton with the poetic sublime, refuses to apply this term to Samson Agonistes or even publicly to discuss the drama. This omission is particularly problematic given that Dennis regards Milton’s sublimity as the product of his religious passion and defends the portrayal of tragic heroes who share much the same flaws as his Samson. The answer to the problem explored here is that while Dennis generally shared Milton’s politics, after the Restoration the political resistance theory implicit in his drama is far more radical than John Locke’s theory in the Second Treatise on Government, which Dennis explicitly approved. The post-Restoration implications of these differences are thoroughly discussed, along with the probable influence of George Buchanan’s Jephtes (1554) on Samson Agonistes.

The chapter discusses the author's interest on Aaron Hill, which began when he was a graduate student in mid-1980s, working on the relationship between patriotism and poetry in the Walpole era. Hill seemed to be an ambivalent figure, linked to Pope in his prognostications of cultural doom and national decline, yet wedded to an entirely different poetic derived from a critically marginalized tradition of enthusiasm and sublimity: a poetic associated before the middle of the 18th century with writers such as John Dennis, Isaac Watts, and James Thomson. Critical scholarship of the 1980s and beyond has challenged and reconfigured the so-called ‘Augustan’ literary canon, shedding light on neglected authors and scrutinising the processes of canon-formation which shape our perception of 18th-century writing. Brean Hammond's Professional Imaginative Writing questioned Pope's own adjudication of literary values, particularly his suspicious dismissal of professional writers such as Colley Cibber, Eliza Haywood, and Aaron Hill.

Literary history often positions Dryden as the precursor to the great Tory satirists of the eighteenth century, like Pope and Swift. Yet a surprising number of Whig writers expressed deep admiration for Dryden, despite their political and religious differences. They were particularly drawn to the enthusiastic dimensions of his writing. After a short reading of Dryden’s poem to his younger Whig contemporary William Congreve, this concluding chapter presents three case studies of Whig writers who used Dryden to develop their own ideas of enthusiastic literature. These three writers are Elizabeth Singer Rowe, John Dennis, and the Third Earl of Shaftesbury. These case studies are used to critique the political polarizations of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literary history and to stress instead how literary friendship crossed political allegiances, and how writers of differing ideological positions competed to control mutually appealing ideas and vocabularies.

The debate over word choice between Socrates and Prodicus in Plato’s Protagoras introduces the significance of the fear-terror word cluster for the critical tradition, which also draws on important moments in Aristotle’s theory of tragedy and in Homer’s Iliad. Homer employs a vast range of fear-terror terms (most famously deos and phobos) needing simplification and rationalization in the hands of his various translators. So too does Virgil’s Aeneid, translated by Dryden with exceptional sensitivity to the nuances of the Latin fear-terror vocabulary. In the eighteenth century, especially in the work of Edmund Burke and John Dennis, there emerges a model of the aesthetic sublime in which terror is proposed as a pleasurable experience. This legacy continues to inform the discussion of terror even in its more restricted modern forms.

This chapter assesses Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock. The two-canto The Rape of the Lock of 1712 had mythological machinery of an ordinary epic (or mock-heroic) sort—‘Now Jove suspends his golden Scales in Air’. But in the five-canto 1714 version, Pope greatly enlarged and individualized the machinery. Indeed, much of the poem’s effect is due to its Rosicrucian mythology. Yet John Dennis, the Critic himself, called it contemptible, in his Remarks on Mr Pope’s The Rape of the Lock. As often with Dennis’s admirably detailed criticism, even his formidable failures, compounded as they are by irascibility, help more than many other critics’ successes to define the context of Pope’s intentions. The chapter then explores the psychological machinery, moral machinery, and political machinery in The Rape of the Lock.

Since its publication in 1732, most readers and scholars have treated Richard Bentley’s edition of Paradise Lost with hardly muted laughter, finding it easy to dismiss as an aberration in a teleology of modern editing practice. However, when considered as a response to a nascent English critical tradition that was arising around Milton’s epic as admirers attempted to defuse its political content, Bentley’s edition may be better contextualized and understood. Far from being the singular, monstrous creation it was made out to be by the wits of the time, Bentley’s project becomes more intelligible (if still not quite defensible) in light of its contextual relationship to the critical and editorial work of John Dennis, Joseph Addison, and Alexander Pope.

This chapter provides a reading of Whitefield’s reliance on affective rhetorical strategies for preaching. It aligns his views on the religious necessity of emotion alongside contemporary notions of the affective impact of poetry and oratory, and argues that the literary-critical developments of the period are closely connected to the defence of the emotions within evangelical poetics. Rather than characterize Whitefield’s oratory as emotionally overwhelming and melodramatic, however, this chapter turns to his printed sermons for evidence of a much more nuanced and sceptical assessment of the religious affections. A detailed close reading of the sermon ‘Abraham’s Offering up his Son Isaac’ shows how Whitefield’s insistence on the partial and human nature of the affections is central to his belief that the object of his preaching must lie in the conviction of his auditory, and that emotional transformation is only a prelude to final conversion.

Samson Agonistes engages with two heated Long Restoration debates: the use of rhymed verse in tragedy and the status of the tragic chorus. Each might seem pedantic now or merely technical, but they were vitally important to Milton and his contemporaries. Indeed, Samson Agonistes’s chorus remains at the very heart of current (widely varied and fiercely contested) readings; our understanding of Milton’s rhyming chorus thus determines our overall understanding of this disturbing Restoration tragedy. This chapter reads Samson Agonistes’s chorus closely in order to understand the dramatic poem in contemporary terms.

This chapter states, and briefly explains, the main claims of the book: that early evangelicalism must be understood as a central aesthetic movement of the eighteenth century; and that to understand early evangelicalism as it first took shape requires sustained attention to its prolific poetry. The chapter situates the book, which is the first history of early American non-hymnal poetry, within the current scholarship of early American culture and poetry, early evangelical history and hymnody, and British eighteenth-century enthusiasm. The author defines evangelicalism (as primarily a way of feeling and doing “authentic” Christianity) and then three new terms this study introduces: revival poetry (a constellation of verse forms, which addresses the tendency to associate evangelical poetry soley with hymnody); poet-minister (a revitalized role at the nexus of the affective sermon and aesthetic oriented conversion); and print itinerant (an evangelical conception of print within the new practices of itinerancy). The author concludes with a narrative summary of the book and each of the chapters.

This chapter explores the contours of Addison’s afterlife in the eighteenth century by looking carefully at Samuel Johnson’s varied criticism of his works over a lifetime of writing about him. In his final statement in his famous Life of Addison, Johnson declares Addison’s reputation secure from the ups and downs it underwent in the eighteenth century by determining that Addison’s works, like those of Shakespeare, had stood the test of time. In Johnson’s long journey to this conclusion, his work on the Dictionary is perhaps the most important landmark. By citing Addison so frequently and in illustration of so many common words, Johnson demonstrated that Addison’s prose had knit itself into the fabric of English and would therefore endure. Although the enthusiastic cult of Addison that saw him as a perfect Christian had faded by mid-century, Johnson saw his works enduring because they had, almost invisibly, become part of British social discourse, both linguistically and ethically, and thereby ‘given Addison a claim to be numbered among the benefactors of mankind’.

This chapter focuses on the final decade of Gilbert’s life, following his return from the Belgian Congo. It shows how racism within the MECS and lack of commitment within the CME prevented Gilbert from returning as a missionary to the Congo, despite the great success of his trip with Lambuth. The chapter traces Gilbert’s continuing educational and civic work in Augusta and beyond, paying special attention to the crucial role he played in keeping Paine College alive during the years after 1911. The chapter closes by examining the circumstances of Gilbert’s extended illness, which confined him to bed from 1921 onward, and by describing his death in 1923.