Robert D. Hume

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.

“Satire” in the Reign of Charles II

c 2005 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0026-8232/2005/10203-0002

The Origins of the Actor Benefit in London

10.00 How did readers and theatergoers in the period circa 1660–85 understand “satire” as a genre, mode, concept, or whatever they took it to be? I pose the question because I am convinced that we tend to bring severely distortive knowledge and assumptions to the poems, prose pieces, and plays that constitute Carolean satire. Almost inevitably we think of classical antecedents (Horace, Juvenal) and of a tradition that extends from the time of William Langland and Geoffrey Chaucer through John Donne and beyond. Naturally we also tend to think in terms of John Dryden’s foundational history and definition in his 1693 “Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire.” We may or may not refrain from invoking the concept of “Augustan satire” as it has come down to us from Ian Jack, Maynard Mack, Robert C. Elliott, Alvin B. Kernan, Ronald Paulson, and others—excellent and important scholarship, all of it, but heavily influenced by concern with Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. I am focusing on the quartercentury arbitrarily delimited by the reign of Charles II because broad reading has convinced me that the actual practice of satire changed quite a lot in mid-century and again after the revolution of 1688. There are few studies concentrating on the period at issue. Rose Zimbardo’s 1998 book on satire in “Restoration England,” for example, covers not only the 1690s but A Tale of a Tub. I am going to argue that our easy lumping together of Carolean and later writing is bad methodology—and is seriously misleading in its results. Carolean satire should not be classified as a part of the so-called Augustan satire. I am also going to argue that although “satire” unquestionably exists in at least a small number of Carolean plays, the problems of dealing with satiric verse and prose are significantly different from those we encounter in satiric drama of the time. This essay presents, in short, an attempt at historicist reconstruction of contemporary readers’ understanding of “Satire” in the Reign of Charles II

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

The importance of the actor benefit in the eighteenth-century London theatre is manifest. An actors benefit was a key part of his or her contract, and the income it produced was a crucial supplement to the performers ordinary salary. A benefit for a single performer could easily yield more than £50 (after expenses) early in the century – a. sum which might double the annual income of a second or third rank member of a company. The long string of benefits at both Drury Lane and Lincolns Inn.Fields each spring soon after 1700 (visible as soon as daily newspaper advertisements become customary) often total twenty or more at each house, and the actor benefit was to remain a basic feature of financial arrangements in London theatres throughout the eighteenth century.

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

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

Fielding at 300: Elusive, Confusing, Misappropriated, or (Perhaps) Obvious?

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)

If Henry Fielding Ltd. were quoted on the London Stock Exchange, would it be a buy, a hold, or a sell? Even in the 1730s, shortly after the founding of the firm, Henry Fielding proved exceptionally controversial, and his reputation has variously soared and crashed in the course of three centuries. Quite a lot of important scholarship and criticism on Fielding appeared in print in the fifty years following the Second World War, although there has been a falling off in both number and significance in recent years. A quant investor would take a gloomy view of comparative statistics in the MLA Bibliography. Here are some figures for the years 2005 and 2009 (as of September 2010) with cumulative totals since the inception of that bibliography.

William Wycherley: Text, Life, Interpretation

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.

Theatre History, 1660–1800: Aims, Materials, Methodology

The appearance within a few months of each other of what will certainly be the definitive twentieth-century edition of Wycherleys plays and the first biography to be written in nearly fifty years provides an occasion both to assess these substantial additions to Wycherley scholarship and to ask, more broadly, where Wycherley studies now stand and what possibilities his works hold for scholars in the foreseeable future. Wycherley has been a popular critical subject during the past thirty years. To claim reasonable familiarity with scholarship in the field requires the would-be contributor to it to read some seventy books and articlesomitting the tangential and the markedly obscure. Wycherley occupies only a small part of some of the books, to be sure, but considering that he wrote only four plays (two of which are usually dismissed pretty briefly) and two volumes of rather awful poems (dismissed even more briefly), one cannot say that Wycherley has lacked attention. This accumulation of criticism has not, however, brought us to anything approaching consensus. We now have a splendid edition to work from and a biography which takes us about as far as we can go on present evidence. Barring the somewhat unlikely discovery of journals or a major cache of new letters, we are not going to learn much more, factually, than we now know about Wycherley. This makes the inconclusive state of the criticism even more disturbing. A major edition should be the starting point for exciting new scholarship-but what work do we need to do? A reviewers inevitable quibbles and differences of opinion aside, I can give the two books immediately at issue a warm welcome. But looking at Wycherley studies more broadly, I think we need to face some troubling implications-about criticism and our practice of it, and perhaps about the nature of the corpus we have been so energetically dissecting. The problem is simply stated: where do we go from here?

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

‘Theatre history’ is a discipline much practised but severely under-theorized. Astonishingly little has been written about what the theatre historian is to try to do, how it is to be done or why it is worth doing. Collecting evidence about the theatrical past has been done and can be done, but to what end? With what aims and according to what principles? We now work in a postpositivist world and we cannot simply assume that cheery antiquarianism is a thing good in itself. In this essay I want to address both some general questions about the discipline and some very specific ones about the problems and possibilities of working in the long eighteenth century. A great deal of scholarship has been published in this area during the last sixty years. Surveying what has been accomplished since 1945 from the vantage point of 2005, I am struck by how much of it is good, but also by how patchy and limited a lot of it is. Investigating what has been done in such realms as texts, performance records, performers, physical production circumstances, economics, socio-political contexts and audience responses, I find myself forced to admit that theatre history is a badly balkanized field. Scholars have mostly been unadventurous and unimaginative - one could say timid. Singularly poor use has been made of The London Stage and the Biographical Dictionary. Fundamental differences in the practice of theatre history between the late seventeenth century and the later eighteenth century have been little understood and have received almost no comment from either practising theatre historians or theoreticians of historiography. I shall argue that we need to get out of our ruts and make more imaginative use of the evidence available to us. Theatre history is wide open for transformational changes, both within this period and more broadly. Indeed, I shall make the claim that the objects of theatre history need to include kinds of interpretation rarely practised within this discipline.