If vacant, subliterary spectacles were not enough of a threat to dramatists, opera, which had crossed over to England in the Restoration, experienced an enormous surge in popularity with Italian grand opera in England in the 1710s and 1720s. In "The Spectator", both in number 18 and the 3 April 1711 number, and many places elsewhere, Joseph Addison fretted that foreign opera would drive English drama from the stage altogether. These early fears followed the sudden rage for the Italian singers and operas that took over London in 1711 with the arrival of Handel. Inasmuch as opera combined singing with acting, it was a mixed genre, and its violation of neoclassical strictures had made it a controversial form from the start. Addison, damning opera's heterogeny, wrote, "Our Countrymen could not forbear laughing when they heard a Lover chanting out a Billet-doux, and even the Superscription of a Letter set to a Tune." This type of opera not only took up theatrical rehearsal time and space, it also took away dramatic subject matter. Straight playwrights were at a loss. As John Gay lamented (see below), no one could use music in a play unless it was as an opera, and Englishmen were nearly forbidden from that. To add insult to injury, the casts and celebrated stars were foreigners and, as with Farinelli and Senesino (the latter of whom was paid two thousand pounds for a single season in 1721), castrati. Castrati were symbols, to the English, of the Roman Catholic Church. The satirists saw in opera the "non plus ultra" of invidiousness. High melodies would cover the singers' expressions of grief or joy, conflating all emotion and sense under a tune that might be entirely unrelated. Alexander Pope blasted this shattering of "decorum" and "sense" in "Dunciad B" and suggested that its real purpose was to awaken the Roman Catholic Church's power ("Wake the dull Church") while it put a stop to the political and satirical stage and made all Londoners fall into the sleep of un-Enlightenment: