1 In particular, individuals – even major figures – are frequently unglossed (see, for example, Gordon, p. 55; Cecilia Davies's sister, p. 66; Bottarelli, p. 49 and passim; Baretti, p. 171; Mrs Sheridan, p. 130).Google Scholar

2 Perhaps part of the problem here is his tendency to quote archival material extensively or in full in the body of the text, with relatively limited commentary, and on occasion with little relevance to the topic in hand (see the passage from Ozias Humphry's memoirs concerning the Linley family, pp. 99–100).Google Scholar

3 Two recent studies that usefully problematize the ideas of ‘nature’ and ‘illusion’ in Garrick's on- and off-stage career are Leigh Woods, Garrick Claims the Stage: Acting as Social Emblem in Eighteenth-Century England (Westport, CT, 1984), and Shearer West, The Image of the Actor: Verbal and Visual Representation in the Age of Garrick and Kemble (London, 1991).Google Scholar

4 Lorraine McMullen, An Odd Attempt in a Woman: The Literary Life of Frances Brooke (Vancouver, 1983), 153.Google Scholar

5 The unstaged tragedy Virginia (1756) was Brooke's first work. She wrote the comic opera Rosina in 1771–2, and no doubt hoped also to stage that work at the opera house. Her two other works for the stage were the tragedy The Siege of Sinope (1781) and the comic opera Marian (written in 1787–8). It is ironic that Mary Ann Yates's first stage role was at Drury Lane under Garrick in 1754, in Samuel Crisp's play Virginia – the very play that pipped Brooke's work to the post, and so kept it from the stage. See Philip H. Highfill, Jr, Kalman A. Burnim and Edward A. Langhans, A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800, 16 vols. (Carbondale, 1973–93), xvi, 324; McMullen, An Odd Attempt in a Woman, 32–3.Google Scholar

6 One duty that it seems did fall to Brooke was foreign correspondence – appropriately, given her linguistic skills. She published three well-received translations from the French: Marie Jeanne Riccoboni's Letters from Juliet, Lady Catesby (1760); Nicolas Etienne Framery's Memoirs of the Marquis de St Forlaix (1770); and Abbé C. F. X. Millot's Elements of the History of England (1771).Google Scholar

7 To give one example among many, when a reviewer praised the lavish theatrical spectacle of Sacchini's Perseo (1774), which followed the style of his Il Cid, Woodfield says ‘Brooke obviously approved of this new emphasis, and Sacchini was thus permitted to continue to exploit the major set-piece spectacles of conventional opera seria plots’ (p. 60). Milhous, Hume, Price and Dideriksen, on the other hand, repeatedly point out the degree to which opera ‘direction’ was fragmented, and that managers were usually not chiefly responsible for artistic decisions. On the period immediately following the Brooke/Yates management, see i, 54, 113–23, 172–5.Google Scholar

8 See, for example, discussion of the management's litigious dispute with the singer Cecilia Davies, pp. 66–71, in which Brooke is not mentioned at all.Google Scholar

9 On the Brookes' financial situation immediately prior to the takeover at the King's Theatre, see McMullen, An Odd Attempt in a Woman, 139–40.Google Scholar

10 Roger Lonsdale has more than made the case for the unreliable nature of Fanny Burney's treatment of the Memoirs; see his Dr Charles Burney: A Literary Biography (Oxford, 1965), 437–55. Woodfield adduces another mention of Charles Burney by Brooke, described in Fanny Burney's journals, as proof of his mentoring role (p. 58), but this reading seems tenuous.Google Scholar

11 On pasticcios and opera aesthetics compare, for example, Saskia Willaert's study of Italian comic opera in the 1760s and the Milhous–Hume–Price–Dideriksen volumes, all of which assert that pasticcios were the norm, and were viewed not as second best, but as truly artistic creations. Willaert, ‘Italian Comic Opera at the King's Theatre in the 1760s: The Role of the Buffi’, Music in Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. David Wyn Jones (Aldershot, 2001), 17–72 (p. 28); Milhous, Hume, Price/Dideriksen, i, pp. 27ff.; ii, p. ix.Google Scholar

12 Charles Burney, A General History of Music from the Earliest Ages to the Present Period (1789), ed. Frank Mercer, 2 vols. (1935; repr. New York, 1957), ii, 855. Burney's comment relates specifically to the management of Columba Mattei and her husband in 1757.Google Scholar

13 The Craftsman, 7 April 1733; cited in Otto Erich Deutsch, Handel: A Documentary Biography (London, 1955), 310–13.Google Scholar

14 The St James's Evening Post, 2823 (24–27 November 1733). For another version of this mock-notice, with Handel as ‘prince Palatine of the Hay-market’, Heidegger as ‘Count of the most sacred and holy Roman Empire’ and Senesino as ‘little duke of Tuscany’, see the Grub-Street Journal, 10 January 1734; cited in Deutsch, Handel, 342.Google Scholar

15 Highfill et al., A Biographical Dictionary, xiii, 316; Linda Kelly, Richard Brinsley Sheridan (London, 1997), 274.Google Scholar

16 The opening of the Pantheon was particularly marred by the quality of the scenery, painted by the ‘fashionable’ but theatrically inexperienced William Hodges, on whom the management had pinned considerable hopes; see ii, pp. 307, 348–55.Google Scholar

17 Gerald Newman points out that nationalism focuses initially on those areas where foreign culture encroaches on native soil; The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740–1830 (London, 1987), 54–7, 67.Google Scholar

18 The most recent exposition of these ideas is found in John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1997). See also Ruth Smith, Handel's Oratorios and Eighteenth-Century Thought (Cambridge, 1995), 52–80; Paul Mattick, Jr, ‘Introduction’, Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics and the Reconstruction of Art, ed. Mattick (Cambridge, 1993), 1–15; David H. Solkin, Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven and London, 1993), 93–5, 106, 155–6, 173–81; Bertrand Goldgar, Walpole and the Wits: The Relation of Politics to Literature, 1722–1742 (Lincoln, NE, and London, 1976), 9–16; Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725–1742 (Oxford, 1994), 48–57; John Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt: ‘The Body of the Public‘ (New Haven and London, 1986), 2–3; Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Authorship, 1660–1769 (Oxford, 1992); Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven and London, 1992), 90–2, 174–6.Google Scholar

19 See Gibson, Elizabeth, The Royal Academy of Music 1719–28: The Institution and its Directors (New York, 1989), 286; eadem, ‘The Royal Academy of Music (1719–28) and its Directors’, Handel Tercentenary Collection, ed. Stanley Sadie and Anthony Hicks (London, 1987), 138–64 (pp. 138, 149–51).Google Scholar

20 ‘Opera's are the most harmless of all publick Diversions. They are an Encouragement and Support to an Art that has been cherished by all Polite Nations. They carry along with them some Marks of Public Magnificence and are the great Entertainment which Strangers share in. Therefore it seems very strange that this great and opulent City hath not been able to support Publick Spectacles of this sort for any considerable time.’ London, Public Record Office, LC 7/3, ff. 46–7. For the full proposal, see Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, ‘New Light on Handel and the Royal Academy of Music in 1720’, Theatre Journal, 35 (1983), 149–67 (pp. 165–7). See also Holles Newcastle, ‘Instructions to Mr Hendel’ (1719); cited in Deutsch, Handel, 90.Google Scholar

21 ‘Petition to George III for a site for an Academy of Arts circa 1765‘, London, British Library, Egerton MS 2134, f. 45.Google Scholar

22 Dobson, The Making of the National Poet, 146–58. On female patrons' involvement in the opera factionalism of the 1720s, see, for example, Deutsch, Handel, 206–8; Lowell Lindgren, ‘The Three Great Noises “Fatal to the Interests of Bononcini”’, Musical Quarterly, 61 (1975), 560–83; James Wierzbicki, ‘Dethroning the Divas: Satire Directed at Cuzzoni and Faustina’, Opera Quarterly, 17 (2001), 175–96 (pp. 179–81).Google Scholar

23 The redoubtable Henrietta Maria Davenant, proprietor of the Duke's Company after her husband's death in 1668, was the notable exception to this rule. See Highfill et al., A Biographical Dictionary, iv, 166–8.Google Scholar

24 Frances Brooke, The Excursion, ed. Paula R. Backscheider and Hope D. Cotton (Lexington, 1997), 60.Google Scholar

25 See, for example, her aside on virtue: ‘I have often wondered at the various ideas annexed to this respectable word, virtue; a word which in ancient Rome meant public spirit; in modern Rome means a taste in the fine arts; in England, at least in the female vocabulary, means chastity; and in France has little or no meaning at all’ (p. 78).Google Scholar

26 Brooke, The Excursion, ed. Backscheider and Cotton, 80–5, 135–6. Garrick claimed in a letter to Frances Cadogan that Brooke ‘has invented a Tale about a Tragedy, which is all a Lie, from beginning to y^e End’; The Letters of David Garrick, ed. David M. Little and George M. Kahrl, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 1963), iii, 1172.Google Scholar

27 In The Remarkable Trial of the Queen of Quavers, however, Brooke's looks caused her to be depicted as a witch; see Woodfield, p. 173.Google Scholar

28 Burney continued: ‘She was short, broad, crooked, ill-featured, and ill-favoured; and she had a cast of the eye that made it seem looking every way rather than that which she meant for its direction. Nevertheless, she always ultimately obtained the consideration that she merited. She was free from pretension, and extremely good-natured.‘ Madame d'Arblay, Memoirs of Dr Burney, 3 vols. (London, 1832), i, 334–5. See also Tate Wilkinson's description, cited in McMullen, An Odd Attempt in a Woman, 10.Google Scholar

29 More importantly, perhaps, Brooke's reputation was shielded by the legal and financial involvement of her husband and brother-in-law in the enterprise, in a way that Yates's was not. Brooke's husband John, she complained, was perpetually meddling in her schemes; see McMullen, An Odd Attempt in a Woman, 138–40.Google Scholar

30 On Richard Yates's career as ‘a leading man among the class of secondary players’, see Highfill et al., A Biographical Dictionary, xvi, 319–20.Google Scholar

31 Ibid., 325–6; on Mary Ann Yates's natural ‘loftiness’ and ‘haughtiness’, ibid., 333–4.Google Scholar

32 Burney, A General History of Music, ii, 844.Google Scholar

33 Ibid., 852, 854. Evidently, the ‘female grace and softness’ was not lacking in her appearance: before her arrival she was announced as having succeeded in Italy ‘as much for the elegance of her voice as that of her features’. The Entertainer, 24 September 1754; cited in Highfill et al., A Biographical Dictionary, x, 264.Google Scholar

34 Burney, A General History of Music, ii, 855. Interestingly, Mattei, for whom Burney has only praise, is depicted as simply stepping in to fill a managerial vacuum – with her husband, of course (ibid.).Google Scholar

35 The reviewer was William Woodfall; cited in Harriet Guest, ‘Eighteenth-Century Femininity: “A Supposed Sexual Character”’, Women and Literature in Britain, 1700–1800, ed. Vivien Jones (Cambridge, 2000), 46–68 (p. 49). On the increasing bifurcation of gender roles in the eighteenth century, see, for example, Marlene LeGates, ‘The Cult of Womanhood in Eighteenth-Century Thought’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 10 (1976–7), 21–39; Patricia Meyer Spacks, Imagining a Self: Autobiography and Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, MA, 1976); Kristina Straub, ‘The Guilty Pleasures of Female Theatrical Cross-Dressing and the Autobiography of Charlotte Charke’, Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (New York, 1991), 142–66 (p. 146).Google Scholar

36 It is, perhaps, because of this that Richard Yates is generally depicted in satires as a marginal and ineffective figure: ‘Dicky Blunderall’, as The Remarkable Trial of the Queen of Quavers would have him (Woodfield, p. 172). On the disruptiveness thought to be at the heart of the operatic enterprise in Britain, see my ‘“An Infinity of Factions”: Opera in Eighteenth-Century Britain and the Undoing of Society’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 9 (1997), 1–19.Google Scholar

37 Burney, A General History of Music, ii, 855.Google Scholar

38 Highfill et al., A Biographical Dictionary, iii, 503.Google Scholar

39 Diatribes against moral decline often singled out interest in the fine arts as particularly debilitating. In 1761 the Covent Garden preacher Thomas Cole railed against ‘the virtuoso arts … giving their instruction how to gratify the lust of the eyes, and to display the pride of life … There is always something in the delights they afford, which renders them rather dangerous with respect to their moral influence.‘ Cited in Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination, 72.Google Scholar