Butler's singing of Cupid, describing it as "beyond anything I ever heard upon the stage", partly ascribing her success to "the liberty she had of concealing her face , which she could not endure should be so contorted as is necessary to sound well, before her gallants, or at least her envious sex." King Arthur was revived at least twice during Purcell's lifetime and continued to be performed in the later 1690s. The first major revival in the eighteenth century was staged in 1736. This production left the work unaltered, but later revivals involved varying degrees of revision. They included a performance in Dublin in 1763; David Garrick and Thomas Arne's version in 1770; and John Kemble and Thomas Linley's transformation of King Arthur into a two-act after-piece entitled Arthur and Emmeline in 1784. Libretto Interpretation based on political allegory According to Curtis Price, the original 1684–5 version was probably an allegory of the Exclusion crisis, a major political dispute over who would succeed Charles II: his Catholic brother, James, Duke of York or the Duke of Monmouth, his illegitimate — but Protestant — son. The faction backing James was nicknamed the "Tories"; that in favour of Monmouth, the "Whigs". The latter were led by Anthony Ashley-Cooper, the Earl of Shaftesbury. Dryden was a convinced Tory and had already satirised Shaftesbury and other Whigs in his poem Absalom and Achitophel (1681). In Price's reading, King Arthur represents Charles II, the Britons are the Tories, and the Saxons are the Whigs. Oswald is the Duke of Monmouth and Osmond/Grimbald is the Earl of Shaftesbury. Philidel is the Marquess of Halifax, a political moderate much admired by Dryden (he would dedicate the printed edition of King Arthur to Halifax). Emmeline personifies the "national conscience." Sources and influences Dryden did not base his libretto on standard versions of Arthurian myth, although he was familiar with such books as Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae. He did, however, use other works of literature as sources of inspiration. There are clear parallels between King Arthur and Shakespeare's The Tempest (which Dryden had revised in line with Restoration taste in collaboration with Sir William Davenant in 1667 and which had been turned into a semi-opera with music by Matthew Locke in 1674). Ellen A. Harris has described the links between the characters: Prospero and Merlin are both good magicians who use an "airy spirit" (Ariel in