Alfred: A Masque. Represented before their Royal Highnesses the Prince and Princess of Wales, at Cliffden, on the First of August, 1740 (London: A. Millar, 1740).
This is a disbound libretto of a masque about King Alfred the Great by James Thomson and David Mallet. It was first performed in the garden at Cliveden House, the country retreat of Frederick, Prince of Wales, near Maidenhead, to commemorate the accession of George I and the birthday of Princess Augusta on 1 August 1740. Its music was written by Thomas Arne, and it includes 'Rule, Britannia!' as its finale. This patriotic song, outliving the work itself and still current, was originally composed for this masque and its words were printed here for the first time.
In this masque, King Alfred, defeated by the Vikings and taking refuge in a house of a shepherd, eventually fights back and wins the battle, gaining support from the Britons. As a Scottish man spending nearly half of his life in England, Thomson is said to have desired to help foster a British identity among people (it had passed only a few decades after England and Scotland were united in 1707). The story in which the Anglo-Saxon king, praying to the goddess Britannia and supported by the Britons, defeats the invaders could be seen as embodying an imaginative scene of history supporting Thomson's idea of national identity of the United Kingdom handed down from the Anglo-Saxon period.
