Late Eighteenth-century London Research Articles

Accommodations for Pregnancy and Childbirth on the Late Eighteenth-Century London Stage

Drawing on close examination of surviving financial, biographical, and repertory records, this article demonstrates the existence of a number of accommodations for childbearing women at Covent Garden and Drury Lane between 1768 and 1800, including paid leave policies and repertory changes. It dispels assumptions about working women and pregnancy, proves that the late eighteenth-century theatre had a more generous paid family leave policy than most U.S. citizens enjoy today, and positions the embodied realities of women's experiences as a major factor in theatrical management throughout the eighteenth century.

Picturing Ekphrasis: Image and Text in Shakespeare Painting

ABSTRACT In this essay I consider the counter-intuitive (even apparently impossible) enterprise of picturing ekphrasis—of visually depicting the verbal representation of the visual. I do so by attending to two paintings, by William Martin and James Barry, of the disturbing scene in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline in which Iachimo gains illicit entry to Imogen’s bedroom and proceeds to record details of both the room and her body, details he later uses to convince Posthumus, Imogen’s exiled husband, of her infidelity. I argue that Martin’s and Barry’s attempts to paint this event of ekphrasis—of ekphrasis as violation—respond to and need to be understood within the specific institutional and aesthetic contexts of vexed intermediality in late-eighteenth century London, in particular the ascendancy of spectacular dramaturgy, the arrival of the literary gallery, and entrenched notions of painting’s textuality. Martin and Barry, I suggest, show ekphrasis in order to interrogate and eschew both its rhetorical imperative (image as word) and its iconophobic implication (image as less than word). In picturing ekphrasis, their paintings trouble the conception of the painting as a would-be poem and resist the textual and textualizing gaze that demands that they submit to the procedures of reading.

Reading Henry Tresham's Theatre Curtain: Metastasio's Apotheosis and the Idea of Opera at London's Pantheon

AbstractWhen London's new Pantheon Opera opened in 1791, the artist Henry Tresham, not long returned from Italy, was paid to paint the ceiling and proscenium of the new auditorium and to provide a drop curtain. The curtain provided a focus for the new institution's aspirations and for the audience's attention on those inspirations when they arrived at the theatre. Its elaborate nature – the zodiac, the music of the spheres, ancient and modern composers, the passions, and with a centrepiece of the apotheosis of Pietro Metastasio – was the subject of a series articles in the press explaining the curtain's allegory. All visual material was thought to be lost, but the recent identification of a preparatory watercolour of the apotheosis has offered an opportunity to re-examine both its place in the context of late eighteenth-century iconography and the place of Metastasio in the late eighteenth-century London opera house.

Joseph Banks and Charles Blagden: cultures of advancement in the scientific worlds of late eighteenth-century London and Paris.

This paper explores the relationship between Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society, and Charles Blagden, secretary to Banks and the Society between 1784 and 1797. Blagden is often referred to as one of Banks's key assistants, as a trusted adviser, collaborator and source of information. Yet, despite his significance, the nature of Blagden's association with Banks has not been explored in detail. This paper traces the development of their sometimes tumultuous relationship, exposing it as one in which Blagden, an aspiring gentleman, sought Banks's patronage to further his career and social ambitions. Key to Blagden's strategy was his role as a source of information for Banks from Paris. Yet, while Blagden pursued patronage with Banks in London, on visits to Paris he encountered a situation where merit, in terms of published scientific outputs, determined one's membership of the scientific community. Exploration of these conflicting cultures of advancement-patronage versus advancement through merit-here informs a re-assessment of scientific exchange at a key moment in Blagden's career, the 1783 'water controversy'. The limitations of Banks's patronage for ambitious clients are also explored, in the context of a rupture in the relationship between Blagden and Banks at the end of the 1780s.

‘OF THE TEMPERAMENT OF THOSE MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS’: CONSIDERING TIBERIUS CAVALLO AND THE SCIENTIFIC OBSERVATION OF MUSICAL SOUNDS IN LATE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LONDON

The connection of music to scientific exploration in late Enlightenment London can be considered from various perspectives, perhaps most evidently through the binary of amateur–professional. These two realms intersected within natural philosophical observation, a practice that often served concurrently as entertainment and as study. The development of scientific instruments for the observation of various phenomena appeared in both professional and amateur contexts, contributing to technological growth and research. Natural philosopher Tiberius Cavallo (1749–1809) and his 1788 article on musical temperament (‘Of the Temperament of Those Musical Instruments, in Which the Tones, Keys, or Frets, are Fixed, as in the Harpsichord, Organ, Guitar, &c’) provide a captivating example of amateur interest overlapping effectively with the professional domain; as an amateur musician and professional scientist, Cavallo observed equal temperament in both mathematical and aesthetic terms. Consideration of his work promotes a more nuanced view of London as a place where scientific and musical ideas could meet and be ‘instrumentalized’, emphasizing the city's status as a vibrant arena for the interaction of scientific exploration, artistic endeavour and professional identities. In this sense, Cavallo's work on temperament was not merely a scientific activity; it reflected technological change during a stimulating period of scientific and musical progress in late eighteenth-century London. For example, instrument builders were actively developing ways to improve pitch control and tuning stability, as witnessed by numerous British patents for harp mechanisms, the addition of flute keys and keyboard construction.

The Operatic Voice of Leoni the Jew: Between the Synagogue and the Theater in Late Georgian Britain

AbstractMichael Leoni, a leading singer in late eighteenth-century London, became famous for his role in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's anti-Jewish operaThe Duenna. He was discovered, however, at the Jewish synagogue, where his singing enthralled non-Jews in the early 1770s. Tracing Leoni's public reception, this article argues that the performative effect of his singing had a multifaceted relation to his audience's psychology of prejudice, serving to both reiterate and reconfigure a variety of preconceptions regarding the Jews. Leoni's intervention through operatic singing was particularly significant––a powerful, bodily manifestation that was capable of transforming listeners while exhibiting the deep acculturation of the singer himself. The ambivalence triggered by his performances would go on to define the public reception of other Jewish singers, particularly that of Leoni's protégé, John Braham, Britain's leading tenor in the early nineteenth century. Ultimately, the experience of these Jews' performances could not be easily deconstructed, as the Jewish performers' voices were emanating from within written, sometimes canonical, musical works. This representational impasse gave rise to a public discourse intent on deciphering their Jewishness, raising questions of interpretation, intention, and confession.

Heteronormativity in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture ed. by Ana de Freitas Boe and Abby Coykendall (review)

Reviewed by: Heteronormativity in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture ed. by Ana de Freitas Boe and Abby Coykendall Caroline Gonda Ana de Freitas Boe and Abby Coykendall, eds., Heteronormativity in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014). Pp. 219. £60.00. “Remember: As far as anyone knows we’re a nice normal family.” Doubtless hilarious to some, the bumper stickers and wall plaques on eBay are not so funny to the queer children excluded, silenced, or sacrificed in order to preserve the so-called normal family’s image of itself. It’s in the nature of ideology that those processes of exclusion, silencing, and sacrifice are so often themselves invisible or denied. The appearance of obviousness, naturalness, this-is-just-how-things-are, is what gives particular forms of being their power to control—or, at their most extreme, to destroy—the lives of others. In a world where, as the Scottish lesbian novelist Iona Macgregor says, “the dominant class never sees its own boundaries,” the work of a collection such as Heteronormativity in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture is an important intervention, making critically visible both “the heteronormative legacy of the eighteenth century as a historical period” and the continuing presence of heteronormativity in eighteenth-century studies. As the editors note, the chapters in this volume “set out to reconfigure our sense of how gender and sexuality have become mapped onto space; how public and private have been carved up, and gendered and sexual bodies socially sanctioned; and how narrative conventions have been put in the service of affirming or subverting cultural orthodoxies about sex, gender, and sexuality. They also spotlight the literary traditions, scholarly criticisms, and pedagogical practices that buttress or subvert heteronormativity both in the past and in the present” (15). Whether or not one subscribes to Karma Lochrie’s argument in Heterosyncrasies: Female Sexuality When Normal Wasn’t (2005)—that only the emergence of statistics as a science in the late eighteenth century makes it possible to speak meaningfully about norms and the normal (including in sexuality)—this collection makes the case for the eighteenth century as a crucial period in the formation of heteronormativity. By the end of the century, the editors argue, heteronormativity “congeals into a fully fomented hegemony,” although “alternate sex/gender configurations” continue to materialize (14–15). The chapters here explore heteronormativity across a wide range of areas and subjects: for example, the history of shopping and its impact on the sexual geography of the city (O’Driscoll); changes in French wedding-night customs (Roulston); the use of heteroerotic pornography as an element in male homosocial bonding (Kavanagh); moral panic, sexual assault, and protective masculinity in late eighteenth-century London (Braunschneider); Gothic fiction’s resistance to heteronormative closure (Haggerty); and the racial and sexual politics of colonialism (de Freitas Boe). In addition to Coykendall’s chapter on the critical and historical reception of Gray and Walpole, the two chapters that frame the volume address themselves to eighteenth-century studies, examining the workings of heteronormativity in scholarly research (Lanser) and the pedagogic practices and new readings of texts that result from attending to transgender issues in the classroom (Saxton, Mance, and Edwards). As powerful and pervasive a force as heteronormativity becomes, it is not monolithic, but is enmeshed with other structures of power. Ana de Freitas Boe’s [End Page 427] chapter on John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1790) makes this particularly clear: “Stedman’s depiction of the erotic life of the colony forces us to reconsider how concerns about race and miscegenation shaped emergent heteronormative conceptions of sexuality in the eighteenth century. The monogamous couple—and monogamy as a concept—looks different from the vantage point of the colonial periphery” (165). Questions of class as well as of race are important in this volume, as seen particularly in Sally O’Driscoll’s chapter “Conjugal Capitalism,” which focuses on the figure of the domestic woman as “mulier mercans,” defined no longer by her sexual desires but by the fetishistic transfer of those desires onto material goods and purchasable commodities. The city in which she wanders is transformed, gentrified by the...

Civilizing Taste: “Sandman Joe,” the Bawdy Ballad, and Metropolitan Improvement

Focusing on the ballad “Sandman Joe” from Francis Place’s collection of flash ballads remembered from his youth, this article tracks how and where bawdy ballads were performed in London in the 1780s in order to understand better the soundscapes of late eighteenth-century London. Questioning narratives that assume the “civilizing process” begins with the middling sorts and spreads belatedly to the lower orders, attention to bawdy urban ballads makes visible the complex dynamics affecting elite and popular culture in the late eighteenth century and the subsequent desire to affix stable meanings on to urban space.

When William Met Mary: The Rewriting of Mary Lamb’S and William-Henry Ireland’S Stories in Peter Ackroyd’S The Lambs Of London

Abstract Peter Ackroyd’s London novels represent a distinctive component in his project of composing a literary-historical biography of the city. Understanding London as a multilayered palimpsest of texts, Ackroyd adds to this ongoing process by rewriting the city’s history from new, imaginative perspectives. For this he employs approaches and strategies such as parody, pastiche, genre mixture, metafiction, intertextuality and an incessant mixing of the factual with the fictititious. The aim of this article is to explore the various ways in which he toys with historical reality and blurs the borderline between fiction and biography in The Lambs of London (2004), offering thus an alternative rendering of two unrelated offences connected with late eighteenth and early nineteenth century London literary circles: Mary Lamb’s matricide and William-Henry Ireland’s forgeries of the Shakespeare Papers.

Unveiling Nature: Wonder and Deception in Eighteenth-Century London Shows and Exhibitions

This paper examines six exhibitions of machines, clocks, and automata which were performed in the squares, salons and coffee-houses of late eighteenth-century London. It does not take into account those natural philosophers whose enquiries were acknowledged by institutional science, rather focusing on those mechanicks, illusionists, and circus owners (Gulielmo Pittachio, John Joseph Merlin, Benjamin Rackstrow, Henry Breslaw, Philip Astley and James Cox), often collocated in the category of charlatans. By taking into account original advertisements, catalogues and pamphlets, it argues that these shows, with their moments of veiling and unveiling, their dissimilar “methods” to astonish and induce credulity in the beholders, and their separation from institutional venues, were still conceived as places to enlighten and edify the mind, and conveyed concepts such as wonder, deception, curiosity and philosophical understanding to the public.

Gauging crime in late eighteenth-century London

This article uses a new method to gauge eighteenth-century crime. It counts the crimes committed against metropolitan London's justices noted in newspapers and in the Old Bailey Sessions Papers, and finds crime more prevalent than current historiography acknowledges. The article contests current claims that the manner in which newspapers noted crime constructed their readers' perception of crime, making their readers believe crime was much more horrific, and the judicial system much more just, than readers would otherwise have thought they were. The article also argues that some crimes were attacks on the powerful because they were powerful.

<i>The Seven Lives of John Murray: The Story of a Publishing Dynasty, 1768-2002</i> (review)

Reviewed by: The Seven Lives of John Murray: The Story of a Publishing Dynasty, 1768-2002 Andrew Nicholson The Seven Lives of John Murray: The Story of a Publishing Dynasty, 1768–2002. By Humphrey Carpenter. Edited by Candida Brazil and James Hamilton, with additional material by James Hamilton. London: John Murray, 2008. Pp. xiv + 370. ISBN 978 0 7195 6532 8. £25.00. When Humphrey Carpenter died, so sadly and prematurely at the age of 58 in January 2005, he had already submitted a first draft of The Seven Lives of John Murray and was in the process of revising it and filling in the gaps he had left to cover at a later date. It has been the task of his editors, Candida Brazil and James Hamilton, to complete this process, drawing on Humphrey's own notes and research and, where lacunae remained – as was the case in certain areas of the nineteenth century – supplying the deficiency. It is much to their credit, therefore, that the resulting volume should read so smoothly and effortlessly – a seamless narrative, whose pace never falters, in which the lively and engaging voice of Humphrey is heard throughout. The Seven Lives of John Murray traces the personal and publishing lives of the seven successive John Murrays who have run the firm from its foundation in 1768 up to its sale in 2002. The book runs chronologically and is divided into three parts, with an appendix to which two amusing but purely imaginative film scenarios have been wisely relegated (though gratefully retained) by the editors. Humphrey had full and free access to the Murray Archive (then at 50 Albemarle Street, London, but now permanently housed in the National Library of Scotland) and has made every possible use of original material therein as well as of manuscript and other documentary sources in the British Library and the Bodleian. While he has profited from Bill Zachs's exemplary biography, The First John Murray and the Late Eighteenth-Century London Book Trade, he has been extremely cautious and judicious in relying on Samuel Smiles's laborious and often inaccurate A Publisher and His Friends: Memoir of John Murray – Smiles's agenda having been, as Humphrey justly observes, 'to elevate the Murray family, socially and intellectually' from the outset. In the case of John Murray IV, where there is rather a dearth in the records, and in order to illustrate how the firm and dynasty might have appeared to an outsider, Humphrey has allowed himself (as have his editors) his single venture into quasi fiction by personating the member of another publishing family, Charles James Longman; but, [End Page 71] we are assured, although he is 'an invented character', 'everything factual he says about John Murray IV is based on documentation in the archive'. With regard to those nearer our own time, Humphrey conducted viva-voce interviews with the cheroot-smoking, stout-drinking, bicycling travel writer Dervla Murphy (who carried a gun and used it three times), with Diana Murray, John and Virginia Murray, and other members of the family and firm and has drawn on the recollections of many of those whom they published or who were connected with them, such as Peter Quennell, Harold Nicolson, Freya Stark, Osbert Lancaster, Patrick Leigh Fermor and John Betjeman. Such a variety of voices and perspectives gives colour and freshness to a story that covers more than two hundred years of publishing and embraces almost every author of repute. Part I (1768–1811) introduces us to the first John Murray (originally McMurray) of Edinburgh, who had begun life in the Navy before coming south and setting up the bookselling business (and dropping the 'Mc') at 32 Fleet Street. Although he had literary pretensions of his own and a preference for literature (he established the English Review, which he edited himself and for which he paid reviewers generously), he published a wide range of disciplines – science, medicine, religion, travel, topography – and traded not only locally in England, Scotland and Ireland, but as far afield as Australia and India (to which he also exported beer). Like his son, he had a circle of advisers, gave trade dinners and held literary gatherings, but, unlike...

Performing the Resurrection: James Graham and the Multiplication of the Real

In contrast to recent work on the charlatan James Graham which locates him in relation to medical history, this paper focuses on his various performances, the theatrical spaces he constructed (or imagined) for them, and the ‘other’ realities that these spaces and performances were designed to conjure. It argues that in the unprecedented commercial and cosmopolitan milieu of late eighteenth-century London, the charlatan emerges as the uncanny double (rather than straight-forward antagonist) of the scientist and the artist, from which both must struggle to distinguish themselves. Both romantic poet and enlightenment scientist are concerned to manage the relation problematized in a culture of simulation, between first-order and second-order realities. The charlatan is the uncanny double of both of these projects because he raises the possibility that each attempt to mediate between these realms will be revealed as one more simulation, and that artist, scientist, and charlatan will be found to be the ‘guardian saints' of a culture shaped to a single identity by lawless difference.

Review: The Eighteenth-Century Diaspora of Italian Music and Musicians Edited by Reinhard Strohm; Opera and Drama in Eighteenth-Century London: The King's Theatre, Garrick and the Business of Performance By Ian Woodfield; Italian Opera in the Late Eighteenth-Century London, vol. 2, The Pantheon Opera and Its Aftermath 1789-1795 By Judith Milhouse, Gabriella Dideriksen, and Robert D. Hume

Review Article| August 01 2004 Review: The Eighteenth-Century Diaspora of Italian Music and Musicians Edited by Reinhard Strohm; Opera and Drama in Eighteenth-Century London: The King's Theatre, Garrick and the Business of Performance By Ian Woodfield; Italian Opera in the Late Eighteenth-Century London, vol. 2, The Pantheon Opera and Its Aftermath 1789-1795 By Judith Milhouse, Gabriella Dideriksen, and Robert D. Hume The Eighteenth-Century Diaspora of Italian Music and Musicians. Edited by Reinhard StrohmOpera and Drama in Eighteenth-Century London: The King's Theatre, Garrick and the Business of Performance. By Ian WoodfieldItalian Opera in the Late Eighteenth-Century London, vol. 2, The Pantheon Opera and Its Aftermath 1789-1795. By Judith MilhouseGabriella Dideriksen, and Robert D. Hume Mary Ann Parker Mary Ann Parker Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the American Musicological Society (2004) 57 (2): 410–420. https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2004.57.2.410 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Mary Ann Parker; Review: The Eighteenth-Century Diaspora of Italian Music and Musicians Edited by Reinhard Strohm; Opera and Drama in Eighteenth-Century London: The King's Theatre, Garrick and the Business of Performance By Ian Woodfield; Italian Opera in the Late Eighteenth-Century London, vol. 2, The Pantheon Opera and Its Aftermath 1789-1795 By Judith Milhouse, Gabriella Dideriksen, and Robert D. Hume. Journal of the American Musicological Society 1 August 2004; 57 (2): 410–420. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2004.57.2.410 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the American Musicological Society Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2004 by the American Musicological Society. All rights reserved. Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Words and Bodies: A Discourse on Male Sexuality in Late Eighteenth-Century English Representational Practices

In 1772, William Kenrick published Love in the Suds, a direct attack on David Garrick. In 1776, Humphrey Nettle [William Jackson] published Sodom and Onan, a satire against Samuel Foote. Both of these texts make explicit charges of homosexuality against the two men. Why were these two actors singled out at this particular moment: serendipity or a new mechanism of power? An examination, thus, is required, of the representational practices operating within and without theatre, through which accepted sexual practices and new forms of personhood were normalized and put into discourse in late eighteenth-century London. The fact that this was to be achieved by placing actor's image and actor's body, occupying an ambiguous social position, under close scrutiny, points to a new economy in performing cultural and societal norms.

Italian Opera in Late Eighteenth-Century London, Volume 2: The Pantheon Opera and Its Aftermath, 1789–1795. By Judith Milhous, Gabriella Dideriksen, and Robert D. Hume. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001; pp. 883 + illustrations. $125.00 hardcover; Opera and Drama in Eighteenth-Century London: The King's Theatre, Garrick and the Business of Performance. By Ian Woodfield. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001; pp. 339. $59.95

Opera buffs and anglophiles are sure to find their own pleasures in Opera and Drama in Eighteenth-Century London and in volume 2 of Italian Opera in Late Eighteenth-Century London, but these new works will also appeal to general readers and theatre scholars who have long-standing interests in the profusion of theatrical entertainments in London during the latter half of the eighteenth century. Both volumes capture an overheated theatre scene, stoked by class-consciousness at its most acute. Both books, but especially Italian Opera, find uses for financial records. The meticulous bookkeeping of eighteenth-century London opera underscores the need for lots of money to run an enterprise made up largely of foreign performers, designers, and composers, none of whom came cheap, in the competitive bidding and prototypical stardom that marked the European opera scene of the time. Both works show opera managers spending money on attractions they could bring to London to aggrandize their patrons' vaunting senses of themselves, and vaunting came naturally at a time of high imperial ambitions and high colonial revenues, though neither book searches opera for its metatheatrical possibilities.

Italian Opera in Late Eighteenth-Century London Volume 2: The Pantheon Opera and Its Aftermath 1789-1795

Italian Opera in Late Eighteenth-Century London Volume 2: The Pantheon Opera and Its Aftermath 1789-1795

Review: The Writing Life of Hugh Kelly: Politics, Journalism, and Theater in Late Eighteenth-Century London

Review: The Writing Life of Hugh Kelly: Politics, Journalism, and Theater in Late Eighteenth-Century London

Italian opera in late eighteenth-century London: v.2: The Pantheon opera and its afermath, 1789-1795

Italian opera in late eighteenth-century London: v.2: The Pantheon opera and its afermath, 1789-1795

Monstrous Opera: Rameau and the Tragic Tradition, and: English Opera in Late Eighteenth-Century London: Stephen Storace at Drury Lane (review)

Reviewed by: Monstrous Opera: Rameau and the Tragic Tradition, and: English Opera in Late Eighteenth-Century London: Stephen Storace at Drury Lane William Weber Charles Dill. Monstrous Opera: Rameau and the Tragic Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). Pp. xx + 197. $39.95 cloth. Jane Girdham. English Opera in Late Eighteenth-Century London: Stephen Storace at Drury Lane (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). Pp. xiv + 272. $89.00 cloth. These two studies have more in common than one might suppose. Rameau and Storace may seem apples and oranges, but Charles Gill and Jane Girdham each studies an opera composer in reference to larger social contexts, and generally to good effect. And they both approach the music in intelligent critical terms, trying to establish what was better and worse in the musician’s work. Charles Dill’s Monstrous Opera is a broad, original, and very interesting work. Its main goal is to study the relationship of Jean-Philippe Rameau to his public, starting from Jeffrey Kallberg’s conceptualization of the contract between composer and listeners. “What makes Rameau’s operas significant is at least in part that they serve as a ground upon which the composer [End Page 157] and his audiences contested the issues related to authorship” (xv). He begins with the puzzle of what Rameau’s omission of recitative from the edition of Les Indes Galantes had to do with his interaction with the public; he ends up concluding that, “however entertaining it might have been, Rameau’s work represented the failure of the generic contract between composer and public, the failure of the circuit through which artist and audience communicated” (138). Dill’s argument is that Rameau began his work on tragédie en musique with a dramatic approach that went far beyond its origins in the productions of Jean-Baptiste Lully and that challenged his audiences to listen on an unusually serious plane. But when he made revisions to these works he drew back from that goal, providing either simple word painting or light divertissement. Dill quotes Friedrich Melchior Grimm in arguing that the 1756 version of the 1748 Zoroastre amounted to a “trivialization” of the story by Cahusac (119). What that involved was the tension between music and poetry in the French context, the pressures to keep music in a subservient position to the drama. Dill makes a lucid discussion of the problem, showing the complexities by which Voltaire approached opera. The problem with this thesis, however, is that it draws a terribly exaggerated dichotomy between tragedy and what Dill persists in calling mere “entertainment.” In using that term he draws upon the extreme cultural values of our massified society; he makes Rameau’s revised scores serve virtually as background music. He does not go so far as to say that people did not listen, and indeed illustrates the vitality of the audience’s engagement with what it heard. But he fails to grasp how vague and contradictory eighteenth-century people were in defining the more casual or serious genres and cultural experiences. Dill neglects to draw upon work by historians on the public, indeed the public sphere. My article on revivals of old works at the Opera, for example, published in the Journal of Modern History in 1984 (not cited), shows that after the 1750s Rameau’s works were performed far more impressively than he suggests. Nor are any of the important publications by the musicologist Elisabeth Bartlet named. Jane Girdham makes a marvelous contribution in studying the career in the London theatre made by Stephen Storace, a still much too little-known composer of significance. She does not approach her subject with quite the imagination that Charles Dill displays, but she accomplishes her tasks with great care and discernment. She starts from the premise that composing for the musical theater was by definition a collective effort for which one cannot ask too much idealism. She defines nicely just how Storace conducted his business, with whom, and under what practical circumstances. The book is a handy guide to the important details one might want to know about how English opera institutions operated. One of the more current issues Girdham takes up is borrowing—how Storace inserted...