Dear members of the MHT Workshop:

We cordially invite you to our next session, featuring postdoctoral fellow Jonathan Lee. The meeting will take place on Feb 12 at 4:30, Logan 801.

The pre-circulated reading is available in our blog with the password Handel. Jonathan has also provided an abstract to get a preview (pasted below).

Please join us!

All best,

Chelsea and Ana.

 

“The Ligaments of Love”:
Men of Feeling, Religious Sentimentalism, and Joseph and His Brethren

Jonathan Rhodes Lee
Of all Handel’s oratorios, Joseph and His Brethren (1744) is the one most frequently associated with the sentimentalism so popular among mid-eighteenth-century authors and playwrights. The libretto by James Miller bears the marks of contemporary sentimental drama, with its tearful family tableaux and moral precepts issued by the faultless protagonist, a man of feeling who continually weeps, displaying his sensitive, ardent empathy. Scholars have frequently critiqued this sentimental hero, complaining of his “static” characterization (Paula O’Brien) and his “tearful sensibility worthy of [Laurence] Sterne” (Winton Dean). Duncan Chisholm and Ruth Smith have both attempted to soften these critical blows by claiming that beyond this sentimentalism lay a more exciting political symbolism; they see Robert Walpole lurking behind Joseph, the Egyptian “Prime Minister,” and posit that Joseph’s sensitive goodness contrasted with the distinctly unsympathetic portrayal of Walpole during the 1740s. Yet by the time that Joseph premiered, Walpole had been out of office for two years, and even Smith admits that such political readings are “opaque.” I offer an alternative explanation for the roots of the protagonist’s lachrymosity. Miller penned not only plays bitingly satirizing his contemporaries, but also sermons embracing the Latitudinarian viewpoints prevalent among religious writers of his time. Such ministers focused on benevolence and empathy, proclaiming this approach as a new and defining feature of contemporary Anglicanism. Like those of his like-minded contemporaries, Miller’s published sermons (as well as his libretto) advocated an ideal person whose love and empathy culminate in ardent fellow-feeling. R. S. Crane once proposed that the most influential models for the culture of sentiment lay not in secular philosophy, but in such Latitudinarian teachings. This religious outlook was intimately connected to the man of feeling whom Miller proffered as an exemplar for his Handelian audiences. To take seriously the sentimentalism of Joseph reminds us that Handel’s oratorios were not only political allegories, but also works that aimed to touch the private lives of the men and women of feeling for whom (and by whom) they were written.