By P. J. Heslin
As we keep on with Achilles' metamorphosis from wild boy to demure lady to lover to hero, Statius brilliantly illustrates a chain of contrasting codes of habit: female and male, epic and elegiac. this primary full-length research of the poem addresses not just the narrative itself, but additionally units the parable of Achilles on Scyros inside a large interpretive framework. The exploration levels from the reception of the Achilleid in Baroque opera to the anthropological parallels that experience emerged to give an explanation for Achilles' transvestism.
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Example text
43 Nevertheless, it must be remembered that Gay himself wrote the Beggar’s Opera not as a declared enemy of opera seria, but as a past intimate of it. He had shared a patron with Handel in the Earl of Burlington, one of the founders of the Royal Academy, in whose house they had both lodged; Gay had written the libretto for Handel’s Acis and Galatea. 44 Gay began Polly, his sequel to the Beggar’s Opera, with a very explicit satire on the tantrums of an operatic prima donna: 3rd Player. Sir, Signora Crotchetta says she finds her character so low that she had rather dye than sing it.
The girlhood of Achilles is framed as an incident isolated and “unnatural” in the context of the hero’s biography, just as the plot of a play is detached from ordinary life. 79 A number of modern readers have commented on the incongruity of this little nursery-rhyme image with an ostensibly serious lesson, and it is illustrative to quote a similar objection from the hostile reviewer in the Daily Courant:80 As the Simile of the Cat was introduced in the Beginning of the Opera, it is likewise made to conclude it.
La finta pazza, on Heller’s reading, was thought by moralists to be bad not so much because Achilles appeared in drag, but because it made Deidamia rather than Achilles the focus of the drama, and so gave the world the first great prima donna role. By returning the focus of Achille in Sciro to Achilles’ emergence as a hero at the hands of Ulysses, Metastasio rescued the story from effeminacy. 85 82 83 84 85 The libretto is available in Brunelli (1953: vol 1, pp 751–803). Heller (1998: 571). On the lack of respectability of female opera singers, see Rosselli (1992: 56–78).