Queen Anne and the Arts

The cultural highlights of Queen Anne's reign (1702-1714), coming as it did after the glories of Restoration culture, and before the recognized cultural achievements from the long Hanoverian successions, have long been overlooked. Partially, this is because Anne's reign was a period of political instability, with yet another "surprise" monarch on the throne, and partially it is because Anne herself has long been considered an ineffective, pitiable figure-dull, awkward, passive, sickly, immensely fat, and incapable of doing the one thing required of all monarchs: producing a male heir. She had eighteen pregnancies (that we know of), with only one child surviving past infancy, and he died at the age of eleven. However, recent scholarship, including the essays in this volume, show that Anne has been seriously underestimated, as a person and as a monarch, and that there was much cultural activity in what might be called an interim period-after the deaths of Dryden and Purcell but before the blossoming of Pope and Handel; after the glories of Baroque architecture but before the triumph of Burlingtonian neoclassicism. The authors of this volume make a case for Anne's reign as a time of experimentation and considerable accomplishment with new genres of entertainment and culture, some of which developed, some of which faded. This volume includes essays on the period's music, drama, poetry, quasi-operas, political pamphlets, and architecture, as well as on newer disciplines such as coin and medal collecting, hymns, and poetical miscellanies.