But Handel resembled the mythical Antaeus, who whenever he fell renewed his own powers by contact with Mother Earth. Before long he was turning out masterpieces in bewildering continuity. In 1723 he composed the superb “Ottone”, in 1724 “Tamerlano” and “Giulio Cesare” and the following season the sumptuous “Rodelinda”; in 1726 “Scipione”, and “Alessandro”, in 1727 “Admeto” and “Riccardo I”, in 1728 “Siroe” and “Tolomeo.” This period, incidentally, brings us to those excesses of singer worship and rivalry which stirred the public to white heat and turned the opera house into something between a wild prize fight and a three ring circus. Then, in 1722-23, the species _prima donna_ suddenly invaded the scene, in the person of Francesca Cuzzoni, who was squat and ungainly, but had an astounding voice and an art of song that made high society overlook her bad temper and her worse style in dress. Handel had occasion to experience her tantrums at the rehearsals of “Ottone”, when she refused to sing an aria as the composer wanted it; whereupon he had recourse to real “Taming of the Shrew” tactics, seized her bodily and threatened to throw her out of the window, at the same time shouting to her in French: “Oh, Madame, I know full well that you are a real she-devil; but I intend to teach you that I am Beelzebub, the Chief of Devils!” Whereupon the humbled Cuzzoni sang her “Falsa imagine” exactly as Handel wanted. Possibly the incident did not end Handel’s difficulties with her but in her relations with him she became more tractable and if she could not subdue the insensitive master she did subdue her audiences. “Damme, she has a nest of nightingales in her belly!”, yelled one of the gallery gods on a certain occasion and the plebeian indelicacy seems to have won the approval of the boxes. Soon Anastasia Robinson, revolted by the turmoil over Cuzzoni, retired from stage life and married the Earl of Peterborough. Cuzzoni, however, was only one obstacle of her kind. Soon afterwards the management, on the lookout for another sensation, secured the soprano’s most hated Continental rival, Faustina Bordoni, who was to become the wife of the composer Hasse. Handel brought the pair on the stage together in his opera “Alessandro”. Lady Pembroke was “protectress” of Cuzzoni, Lady Burlington of Faustina. Finally, in May, 1727, things culminated when the two jealous creatures came to blows during a performance of Bononcini’s “Astyanax”, tore each others hair and pummeled one another in full view of the spectators, who took sides and shrieked with delight as the coiffures of the combatants were ruined and faces scratched. The “fighting cats”, as the pair were called, later were made the subject of Colley Cibber’s farce, “The Rival Queens”.