Albion and Albanius
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Albion and Albanius is an opera, closely resembling a French tragédie en musique, by Louis Grabu with an English text by John Dryden.
The words were written by Dryden in 1680. It was initially intended as a prologue to a play "of the nature of 'The Tempest'", which was apparently Shakespeare's masque-like play, in the drastically cut and "corrected" form in which it was presented to Restoration audiences: for Dryden's strictures on Shakespeare's play, see The Tempest. "But some intervening accidents having hitherto deferred the performance of the main design, I proposed to the actors to turn the intended prologue into an entertainment by itself, as you now see it, by adding two acts more to what I had already written." (Dryden's Preface).
