This is Thomas McGeary's third effort to explore the elusive relationship between British politics and Italian opera during the first half of the eighteenth century, following his previous works, The Politics of Opera in Handel's Britain (Cambridge, 2013) and Opera and Politics in Queen Anne's Britain, 1705–1714 (Boydell, 2022). He continues to challenge the idea of any direct links between the two. In his present study, he revisits the historical period (and many of the sources) examined in the first volume of his trilogy, adopting a different perspective to focus on cultural politics. For him, this concerns ‘how a cultural product was put to use in the pursuit of political power’ (xiii). His title might still be regarded as a misnomer, since opera is not actually the cultural product in focus with regard to the pursuit of political power. Instead, the cultural products that are politically useful at the heart of his argument are writings such as poems, formal verse, satirical prints, pamphlets, and newspaper essays, whose authors, according to McGeary, projected political meaning onto opera to further their (usually partisan) case within ‘the “culture wars” of the Walpole era’ (xiii). The blurring of the lines between the cultural media used for political criticism (writings) and the cultural symbol referenced in these media (opera) extends beyond the title and is arguably the most significant flaw in this book's reasoning. Politically, the focus is on the rise, dominance, and fall of Robert Walpole or, ultimately, on writers of oppositional affiliations (dissident Whigs, Tories and Jacobites) who attempted to use literary print forms to criticise Walpole's politics and remove him from office. McGeary traces the development of such partisan writings which draw parallels between Whig-dominated politics, specifically as represented by Walpole, and vices on and around the opera stage in the 1720s and 1730s (ending in 1742, the year Walpole left office). Drawing on Bourdieu's different forms of capital, the author argues that opera, as a cultural symbol of the elite, lent itself easily to such projections, specifically considering that members of the Whig party were the primary promoters of the introduction of Italian opera in England during the reigns of Queen Anne and George I. He identifies the key links consistently employed in ‘popular’ as well as sophisticated writings, from Viscount Bolingbroke's Craftsman to Alexander Pope's The New Dunciad (1742), as being between excessive luxury (opera) and corruption (politics), and between deteriorating taste (opera) and the deterioration of the country (politics). The general idea is intriguing, albeit not entirely original. Ultimately, through his analyses of various writings from over two decades, he does prove its prominence and continuity. However, McGeary's indirect approach is rather awkwardly reflected in the arrangement of the book's chapters, which leave readers waiting a long time for a chance to comprehend what he actually means by ‘cultural politics’. In some chapters, he recounts political developments, separating the actions of party members from those of the royal family, with only a few references to cultural politics, other than the (well-known) political backgrounds of the authors of the writings (Chapters 1, 3, 5, 7, and 11). In others, he does much the same with the Royal Academy of Music, the Opera of the Nobility, and the Middlesex opera company, as well as Handel's further operatic endeavours (which also ended at the end of the 1741–42 season), separating their developments from those of the royal family and political developments (Chapters 2 and 6). For the most part, albeit not exclusively (Chapter 4 is a pleasing exception), these chapters largely serve as background to those in which McGeary analyses said writings (Chapters 8–10 and 12). The imbalance between the assumed intention to introduce political and operatic history to a so far uninformed audience (e.g., students), the intention to engage in scholarly discourse, and the author's perspective on opera as a symbol in partisan cultural politics can sometimes lead to a cumbersome reading experience. In closing, McGeary briefly leaves the realm of critical writings and actually focusses on Italian opera as a cultural product, using Bourdieu's theory of capital to evaluate its place within the broader cultural sphere of the time. (Admittedly, this had been part of his proclaimed plan all along, but it was not clearly evident in the main chapters of the book, since when he focused on it, he did it only through the lens of the competition's writings.) Interestingly, he also revisits the idea that opera libretti might contain the occasional political allusion. Even more interestingly, he raises the question of how effective the partisan writers were in their scheme to use opera against Walpole. For my taste, he should have started with that.
Ina Knoth (2026) studied this question.