Rule, Britannia: The Masque of Alfred and the Journey to a Global Media Event

Thomas Arne’s The Masque of Alfred (1740) with a libretto by James Thomson and David Mallet was written and performed in the historical context of George II’s reign where a kind of constitutional monarchy based on the Bill of Rights from 1689 was granting civil rights to the early bourgeoisie. The climax of the masque was “Rule, Britannia!” This song advocated a strong navy as a guard against the absolutist European powers with their lack of civil liberties. Furthermore, a strong navy made a standing army superfluous, and so an army could not be deployed as a repressive force of the state. Later a significant change was made to the lyrics with the removal of commas and the adding of an “s”. Now the song was sometimes sung as "Rule Britannia! Britannia rules the waves!" as a patriotic and imperialist celebration of Britain’s world domination. Today the song is ritualistically known from the Last Night of the Proms, and this article considers it as a global real-time media event. “Rule, Britannia!” is placed in the contexts of political history, cultural history and experience economy.