The Fairy Prince is in three parts; it was all-sung with much of the spoken dialogue of Jonson’s original transformed into recitative. The first part comprises the bulk of the text, and essentially compresses the first half of Oberon. It opens in a moonlit ‘wild country’ with a Satyr calling for his cronies by winding ‘his cornett’ (No. 2). He is fooled by an off-stage echo, with which he sings the duet ‘Idle nymph, I pray thee, be’ (No. 5) before the rest of the Satyrs and Silenus advance. In response to the Satyrs’ questions in recitative about the fairy prince, Oberon, Silenus sings an air, ‘Satyrs, he doth fill with grace’ (No. 6a), describing the prince’s virtues. The Satyrs respond by forsaking Bacchus and promising (in recitative) to serve Oberon; this leads to an air and chorus ‘And, to answer all things else’ (No. 8). Then follows the discovery of the Sylvans asleep at the gates of St George’s Chapel; as a means of waking them, the Satyrs sing a lively catch, ‘“Buzz”, quoth the blue fly’ (No. 11). The Satyrs tease the sentinels about the poor standard of their watch, to which the Sylvans reply that the gates would not open before the second crowing of the cock, whether they slept or not. This much Colman borrowed Jonson largely unchanged. But instead of the song ‘Now, my cunning lady, moon’, Colman introduces a pair of Wood-Nymphs, one of whom sings an adaptation of ‘See, see, oh, see, who here is come a-maying!’ (No. 12) from Jonson’s A Private Entertainment at Highgate. The following recitative (‘Now, now, prepare to set’) is Colman’s own invention, but he returns to Oberon for Silenus’ recitative ‘Stay, the cheerful Chanticleer’. Then follows a new scene: ‘a vision of the inside of St George’s Chapel, at Windsor, with the original knights in their several stalls’. This leads to a chorus, ‘Hail, fair knighthood; let our lays’ (No. 15), adapted from West’s The Institution of the Garter. The recitative and air that follow (Nos. 16–17) describe the virtues of the court; they were adapted from Jonson’s 1617 masque The Vision of Delight. An additional scene, depicting the taking of the Bohemian Standard at Cressy, was inserted into this recitative in several of the 1772 performances. The final duet and chorus are Colman’s. Arne changed the last line from ‘Long live the King!’ to ‘God save the King’ in an apparently deliberate reference to the famous chorus in Handel’s 1727 coronation anthem Zadok the Priest (see Aspden, 2002, 205-9).