Adapting Lully for the London stage: reading a chaconne of 1698

Abstract In the Prologue to Rinaldo and Armida (1698), playwright John Dennis is quick to distance this new work from Lully and Quinault’s earlier Armide (1686). Despite this, traces remain, as evidenced by the presence in Dennis’s drama of Armida’s confidante Phenissa, a figure invented by Philippe Quinault. The most notable link with Lully’s opera comes, however, in John Eccles’s entertainment for Act 3, a divertissement-like masque of Venus and Cupid, which includes a chaconne that bears a close resemblance to the passacaille given in the fifth act of Lully’s Armide. In comparing Eccles’s chaconne with Lully’s passacaille, it is possible to note not only common structural features, but also the corresponding narrative role taken by the respective scenes in which each dance features. It will be argued that the use of such an identifiably French element in Dennis and Eccles’s work represents a conscious dramaturgical decision, and an ironic reframing, consistent with the work’s patriotic intent. Through this, it can be argued that familiarity with the music of Lully allowed it to be readily adapted and reimagined for the London stage.