Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Series Editor's Preface
- 1 Introduction: ‘Audiences to this Act’
- 2 Sound in Mind and Body: Hearing Early Modern Revenge Tragedy
- 3 ‘Sprinkled Among your Ears’: Ben Jonson, John Marston and the Cultivation of the Listening Connoisseur
- 4 ‘Caviare to the General’?: Taste, Hearing and Genre in Hamlet
- 5 Listening for Form at the Cockpit Theatre
- 6 Epilogue
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - Epilogue
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 September 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Series Editor's Preface
- 1 Introduction: ‘Audiences to this Act’
- 2 Sound in Mind and Body: Hearing Early Modern Revenge Tragedy
- 3 ‘Sprinkled Among your Ears’: Ben Jonson, John Marston and the Cultivation of the Listening Connoisseur
- 4 ‘Caviare to the General’?: Taste, Hearing and Genre in Hamlet
- 5 Listening for Form at the Cockpit Theatre
- 6 Epilogue
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In 1668, after attending his seventh performance of The Tempest, or the Enchanted Island, Pepys writes that he slipped backstage to ask the actor Henry Harris ‘to repeat to me the words of the Echo, while I writ them down’. Though he had tried to record the part as it was being performed, ‘having done it without looking upon my paper’, he explains, ‘I [found] I could not read the blacklead’, or pencil. ‘But now, I have got the words clear.’ Sitting in the newly darkened Restoration playhouse, attempting to jot down the words to a song he had heard at least six times before, Pepys cuts a figure that is at once both familiar and, in many ways, entirely new. His dramatic consumption both reflects and is part of the cultivation of his social ambition, marking affiliations with men and women of influence while simultaneously signalling Pepys's suitability for such circles. As such, it is anything but unthinking or accidental. But as Pepys's diary entries also repeatedly show, he could be just as interested in what was happening offstage as he was in what was happening on it. In fact, Pepys's first account of Dryden and Davenant's play is strikingly different from the one quoted above:
[November 7, 1667] Up, and at the office hard all the morning; and at noon resolve with Sir W. Penn to go see The Tempest, an old play of Shakespeares, acted here the first day. And so my wife and girl and W. Hewer by themselfs, and Sir W. Penn and I afterward by ourselfs, and forced to sit in the side Balcone over against the Musique-room at the Dukes-House, close by my Lady Dorsett and a great many great ones: the house mighty full, the King and Court there, and the most innocent play that ever I saw, and a curious piece of Musique in an Echo of half-sentences, the Echo repeating the former half while the man goes on to the latter, which is mighty pretty. The play no great wit; but yet good, above ordinary plays. Thence home with W. Penn, and there all mightily pleased with the play; and so to supper and to bed, after having done at the office.
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- Information
- Listening for Theatrical Form in Early Modern England , pp. 173 - 177Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2016