If you think I'm going to click on that link you're very wrong.

And there you were thinking Britain was a centre of high art, eh?  No, but they 'ad a very good song about a combine 'arvester which would go just luvverly in any o' them pastorales.  Oi can just see Acis & Galatea with one o' them...  with a new storyline about moi sister an' 'er friend in the teashoppe.  It's called A SIS & GAL O' TEA, ARR!

Baked by the composer 'isself, they are - after he were a runaway from the Eton Chapel*

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cornysh


* see above

No, but neither are they likely to sing in rhyming anapestic stanzas, even irregular ones.  How much "realism" should a performer inject?  And is a ridiculously overbaked accent "realism"?  And why particularly West Country - as David Underdown pointed out, London and Southampton were major ports in the 17th century as well as points further west.  Is it only in the 20th century that people started to conflate sailors/pirates/wurzels into one generic ridiculous accent?

Some see the sailor's song as a moment of comedy that leavens the weighty tragedy of the piece.  I'm not so sure - yes it's jaunty, but it also reveals another point of view on leaving one's "nymphs" behind.  Perhaps the sailors are simply more honest than Aeneas.  (Hasn't he known all along that his fate will lie elsewhere?)  But laying on a thick comedy accent makes it hard to take the sailor's moment at all seriously.

In Virgil's original he's under the power of Venus at this point, which obviously isn't replicated in the version that Purcell is setting, but I think that it is realistic to note that under the power of strong emotion, infatuation, love we tend to be very good at convincing ourselves that what we're doing is for the best. And anyway, as far as Aeneas is concerned all he's doing is finding a new home for the Trojan people. I can't remember if his destination is specified in any of the accounts that I can recall (except, of course, for Berlioz's 'Italy! Italy!'). Carthage would be just as good as Etrusca, and he would be joining with an established ruler etc. etc.

In my time a grounding in the classics and regular flogging were the pillars of a sound education.

I suppose by "honest" I mean that Aeneas wasn't being honest with himself (easily done when in the tangles of love and passion).  As for knowing it's all doomed, very early in the piece Dido tells him "Fate forbids what you pursue", and he responds "Aeneas has no fate but you! Let Dido smile, and I'll defy the feeble stroke of Destiny."  But of course he doesn't.

Back to accents - I had nearly buried the memory, but I've done one performance of this where the witches sang in a horrible witchy cackle.  Talk about embarrassing.  They all but shrieked "I'll get you my pretty! and your little dog empire too!"

This is a vexed question for me in any English music of that period. I can believe that some kind of indication of rustic accent might have featured in 17th century performances, but, as has been pointed out, what it would have contrasted with would have been something quite different from mid-20th-century RP (which nobody speaks any more anyway, so Purcell is generally performed with a "historical" accent but the wrong one). I'd be in favour of trying to recreate something like "authentic" pronunciation(s). The work that's been done in this direction for earlier English music, after a faltering start, has become quite convincing and natural-sounding in the meantime. I don't know whether Dido has been done in this way.