Dubbed ‘the noisiest picture in English art’ by Martin Meisel, William Hogarth’s The Enraged Musician (1741) has enjoyed a long and prominent afterlife. Long before it became a canonical image in sound studies, it was adapted for the London stage as a musical afterpiece, Ut Pictura Poesis, at the Haymarket Theatre (1789). Though the performance took its plot, very loosely, from Ben Jonson’s Epicœne, its central conceit was not just the embodied reenactment of an image, but its conversion into a linear sequence of music. In this chapter, Oskar Cox Jensen interrogates this adaptation through a combination of close reading (of playtext, score, and imagined performance) and contextualisation, considering the key roles played by both the theatrical space itself and the members of the company – particularly the scene painter Michael Angelo Rooker (1746–1801). The resulting blend of sound, sight, and movement, Cox Jensen contends, reveals much about wider issues of the era, from the construction of national identities to the interplay between stage, street, and social class.

This chapter studies small things that were neither expensive nor finely crafted, but were cherished by their owners, drawing on trials for theft at the Old Bailey and John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728). Small items such as buttons, thimbles, needles, and handkerchiefs were easily pilfered by thieves, and appear frequently as stolen goods that women and men sought to recover through the courts. In both the courthouse and the playhouse, thieves and victims agreed that small things could be recognized by their original owners. Trial testimony shows how owners recalled “remarkable” details about their possessions, describing tiny marks known only to them and discerned via repeated handling and viewing over time. In this way, these remarkable details, through their emphasis on sight, offer alternative ways to comprehend the affordance of things in the eighteenth century. Such personal marks prove troublesome to the thieves of Gay’s ballad opera, whose operations depend on small things being made unfamiliar in order to circulate in the secondhand marketplace. Nothing was too small or too commonplace to be reclaimed by someone. Remarkable details held out the promise that small things could be returned and that no thing was too commonplace to be missed by someone.

With quotations from Phiip Gossett, Rebecca Harris-Warrick and Tom Christensen, the argument is reiterated for an ‘integrative model for French opera’ that includes opera with spoken dialogue. The importance of the independent, commercial theatre and the cultural value it commanded in Paris are summarised. Knowledge of French popular opera is demonstrable elsewhere, with London the obvious example shown in research by Vanessa Rogers and Erica Levenson. The nature of John Gay’s musical integrations in The Beggar’s Opera is compared with Paris practice and with Brecht’s in Die Dreigroschenoper. Key discoveries in the book are reviewed, especially the ‘new’ manuscript for La Chercheuse d’esprit. Opéra-comique research by Thomas Betzwieser and Ruth Müller is summarised and related to the current project, ending with further quotations from Tom Sutcliffe, Thomas Bauman and Alfred Roller.

Chapter Three argues that the Mughal emissary I’tesamuddin adopts contradictory personas in London parks, theaters, and ballrooms. His Persian travelogue, Shigarf-nāma i Wilāyat [The Wonder-book of the Province/England], narrates his 1767–1769 diplomatic mission to deliver Mughal Emperor Shah Alam II’s letter requesting military assistance from King George III, circumventing the Company’s authority. Because this mission failed after Robert Clive withheld the letter, the Mirza instead writes about London’s theatrical and touristic attractions, including Shakespeare’s King Lear, John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, and a pantomime farce.Enthralled by these shows, he morphs into a black-masked Harlequin in sexual pursuit of white fairy-like Englishwomen – the repertoire by which he judges off-stage Britons as deluded by worldly gain, figured as a Protestant work ethic that values efficient labor and capital accumulation. By the end of his narrative, his identity shifts from an admirer of an Islamized Anglican state to an ascetic Muslim who prefers elite Mughal society and its veiled light brown women.