Music, Fable, and Fantasy: Thomas D’Urfey’s Wonders in the Sun and the Eighteenth-Century Political Animal

This article considers a strange, understudied work of eighteenth-century musical theatre, Thomas D’Urfey’s Wonders in the Sun (1706) . This highly intertextual, generically heterogeneous comic opera is a pastiche of literary and performative modes and ultimately a machine for generating wonder; it draws on elements from Aristophanes’ The Birds , seventeenth-century masque and semi-opera, as well as the lunar fictions. The article situates this play not only within a history of literary wonder and stage spectacle, but within the English tradition of politicized animal fable. Discussing D’Urfey’s comic opera against selections from John Gay’s Fables , it argues that the utopian/dystopian animal in these imaginative satires reveals the period’s twinned fascinations with discovery and alterity, as well as emergent discomfiture with anthro- and Eurocentric Enlightenment beliefs.