Hopkins made large claims about the originality of his efforts in the composition of music. This chapter expresses caution about the interest and significance of these efforts. It notes large gaps in Hopkins’s understanding of music and finds his surviving comments on the music he heard unenlightening. Even his poem on the composer Henry Purcell reveals little in this respect. Hopkins’s correspondence with the Irish musician Sir Robert Stewart required the musician to attempt to correct basic errors in Hopkins’s musical practice. Music can therefore be considered a meaningful context for Hopkins only in the limited sense that his interests here connect with his view of poetry as sound and as requiring performance.

The inevitable pairing of the names of Britten and Purcell, a pairing promoted by Britten himself, was one in which he was linked to Britain’s ‘only’ composer. In response, Britten willingly took on the mantle of hope for English composition. At the same time, there is no doubt that the Britten felt an affinity with the earlier composer, and drew considerable strength and inspiration from his works. However, although Britten’s response is often presented as a personal one, this article suggests that his engagement with Purcell’s music was part of an earlier and broader picture of the use and reuse of earlier English music in the first decades of the twentieth century. His engagement with Purcell’s music, which included realisations of his songs and the use of forms and techniques associated with the composer, was at its most intense in 1945, and was focused on the period round 21 and 22 November, the dates of the Wigmore Hall concerts which saw the premieres of Britten’s Quartet No. 2 and The Holy Sonnets of John Donne. The reception of Britten’s ‘Purcell’ works was sometimes mixed, but this article concludes that for Britten, it was a matter of supreme enjoyment.

Addressing recent screen productions of Jane Austen’s 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice (dir. Langton, BBC1, 1995; dir. Wright, 2005), and 1815 novel Emma (dir. Lawrence, ITV, 1996; dir. McGrath, 1996), Maribeth Clark explores the function of music, dance, drama and visuals in specific danced divertissements. She focuses on choreographed versions of social dance scenes set to the late-seventeenth-century music of Henry Purcell and his contemporaries up to the late eighteenth century. Her chapter describes an impulse towards unity and congruence, towards the establishment of a stable repertoire, a conservative tradition – a canon that builds on the work of those involved in the twentieth-century English country dance revival.