REPRESENTING INTERIORITY IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY OPERA UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD, 11–12 SEPTEMBER 2017

Far from being mimetic of real human psychology, the opera is an exercise in comic folly; indeed, it exemplifies what Simon Dickie termed the ‘cruelty of comedy’ (see Cruelty & Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011)). Keith Chapin (Cardiff University; ‘Pictures of the Self: Theoretical Perspectives from Northern Germany’) presented us with some nice joined-up thinking. The hesitations, silences and gaps in a late aria such as ‘Total Eclipse’ from Samson gave audiences a space to intuit the unspoken language of the heart. There were some vital ideas, such as the continuity in the eighteenth century between sense and sentiment, and the parallel between the Enlightenment framing of convention and the stage's construction of a fourth wall.