Judith Milhous

The Ornament of Action: Text and Performance in Restoration Comedy

List of illustrations Preface Note on references 1. The text and the audience 2. Performance: theatres and scenery 3. Performance: actors and the cast 4. Performance and the published text 5. Text and performance (1): the comedies, 1691 to 1693 6. Text and performance (2): Wycherleys The Plain-Dealer 7. Text and performance (3): the comedies of Congreve Appendices Notes Select Bibliography Index.

Opera Salaries in Eighteenth-Century London

Until the last fifteen years, very few salaries have been known for Italian opera singers or ballet dancers in eighteenth-century London. Two major new sources are presented here for the first time: Chancery testimony concerning salaries in the 1780s, and a series of manuscript annotations giving salaries of principals for eight seasons between 1796 and 1808. Added to recent discoveries concerning the first decade of the century, the Royal Academy of Music in the 1720s, and Chancery testimony about the pay scale in the 1760s, this information makes an overview possible. The top and bottom of the salary scale (£1,500 to £100) remained surprisingly stable from the 1720s to the 1790s. During the last third of the century ballet emerges from relative insignificance and attains virtual parity in cost and status with opera itself. The star system was established as early as 1708, and the size of the theater was always a key determinant in limiting salaries. The huge new opera house of 1791, coupled with Napoleonic-era inflation, quickly increased salaries at the top end of the scale, culminating in the £5,250 paid to Catalani in 1808. The gap between top and bottom salaries was always enormous, but in the later years of this survey the gap was widening substantially.

The Rebuilding of the King's Theatre, Haymarket, 1789-1791

The rebuilding of the Kings Theatre, Haymarket, after its destruction by fire in June 1789 has occasioned virtually no surprise or analysis. Built by Sir John Vanbrugh and opened in 1705, the theater had been Londons principal Italian opera house for nearly a century and Michael Novosielskis new theater of 1791 was to remain so until the late 1840s. Hailed at the time as an architectural marvel of a size and

Eighteenth‐century Equity Lawsuits in the Court of Exchequer as a Source for Historial Research

Equity lawsuits in the court of Exchequer remain neglected by historical scholars. They present a treasure-trove for historians, literary scholars, musicologists and others: any suit that could be brought in Chancery between the mid-seventeenth century and 1841 could equally well be brought in Exchequer. Relying largely on name searches, we have discovered more than fifty suits connected with our own interests in theatre and opera history. Organization (and hence the search process) differs significantly from Chancery, but we have provided a kind of beginner’s guide to the records as well as illustrations of the sorts of discoveries we have made.

A plan of the Pantheon Opera House (1790–92)

The Pantheon Opera remains among the least known of the major theatrical ventures in eighteenth-century London. It came into being amidst the conspiracies that flourished after the Kings Theatre, Haymarket, was destroyed by fire in June 1789. Conceived as a kind of English Court Opera, the Pantheon was backed at enormous expense by the Duke of Bedford and the Marquis of Salisbury. It struggled through the 1790–91 season, accumulating ruinous debts, and then on 14 January 1792 it too burned to the ground, just four nights into its second season.

James Lewis's Plans for an Opera House in the Haymarket (1778)

In 1780 James Lewis published the first of two magnificent folios, entitled Original Designs in Architecture . The title page explains that it consists of ‘Plans, Elevations, and Sections, for Villas, Mansions, Town-Houses, &c. and a New Design for a Theatre. With Descriptions, and Explanations of the Plates, and an Introduction’. Plates XIX-XXII are for ‘a New Theatre, designed for the Opera’. In fact, the designs are for a new opera house intended to occupy the site on which John Vanbrughs Queens/Kings Theatre in the Haymarket had stood since 1705. The building would consume all the existing site and much of the surrounding property. Lewis explains the origins of his plans: ‘Our Theatres being upon a very small scale, compared with those of other principal cities in Europe, about two years ago [that is, in 1778] a report prevailed that a New Theatre was intended to be built by subscription, which might serve as well for all Dramatick Performances, as Concerts, Assemblies, Masquerades, &c. And the proprietors of the Opera House intending to purchase several adjoining houses and ground, to render the theatre eligible for the various purposes mentioned, suggested the idea of making a design adapted to the situation of the present Opera House, with the principal front towards Pall Mall’ (p. 12). This grand edifice would be like no other theatre in London.

A Royal Opera House in Leicester Square (1790)

The Kings Theatre, Haymarket, was destroyed by fire in June 1789. Shortly thereafter some wealthy and powerful patrons – notably the Prince of Wales (the future George IV), the Duke of Bedford and the Marquis of Salisbury – launched an ambitious scheme to build a fabulously expensive Royal Opera House in Leicester Square. The venture was designed to re-establish London as a major centre for Italian opera and ballet, to reform the wayward financial and artistic management of the Kings Theatre and to give the capital city a grand opera house of modern design that would rival any in Europe. Because the royal patent promised for Leicester Square was blocked, the scheme had to be dropped, and the sponsors wound up establishing the ill-fated and short-lived Pantheon Opera instead – but that is another story. Our concern here is with the Leicester Square project which, though never realised, did set in motion many of the changes desired by its backers and helped to return London to the mainstream of opera.

A Scholar's View of the Effects the Collections Have had on Scholarship

When she asked me to join this panel, Catherine suggested three subjects she would like me to comment on. The first is how scholarship to date has benefited from theatre collections; the second is the need for theatre collections as separate entities; and the third is what kinds of material should be collected in the future, particularly to avoid oversights in previous collecting policies. At the risk of telling you what you already know, and without pretending to speak for most scholars, let me first make some generalizations about how scholars have benefited from existing collections.

Illustrations of the English Stage, 1580-1642

Acknowledgements Abbreviations List of illustrations Preface 1. maps and panoramas 2. Drawings, plans and vignettes relating to the stage 3. Illustrations relating to the stage in printed texts of plays 4. Miscellaneous illustrations connected with the English stage 5. Illustrations in play-texts having no reference to the stage Index.