Vaughan Williams was much involved, as observer and practitioner, with the theatre of the ‘long’ Edwardian age: less with aspects of that theatre we might first think of now (its WestEnd actor-managers, its nascent New Drama) than with its more broadly popular elements.His interest in music hall and musical comedy is evident near the beginning of the London Symphony. He worked for two seasons at Stratford-upon-Avon as musical director of a non-metropolitan troupe, Frank Benson’s touring Shakespeare company. (Sir John in Love would grow from this.) The age’s taste for pageants saw him compiling scores for an episode in the Crystal Palace’s London Pageant and for a Pilgrim’s Progress spectacular: music that connects with Hugh the Drover and his later Bunyan operas. More esoterically, he wrote music for actual and proposed revivals of Ancient Greek comedy and tragedy, also for a resurrected masque (a form he came to love). And he collaborated, or planned to collaborate, with the two most important English theatrical pioneers of the age: Harley Granville Barker, providing music for symboliste drama at his request, and Edward Gordon Craig, readying himself to work with him on a projected (though abandoned) ballet for Serge Diaghilev.

Using a short work by Jane Gallop on what the “theoretical” death of an author means when one is faced with an actual death of a writer one is writing on, the Epilogue argues that we have now entered an age in which an ethics of responsibility dictates that the death of the author is not just a theoretical problematic but one where both theory, personal loss, and mourning are brought together. The Epilogue thinks through the literary death of the writer. It is argued through close readings of three of his final works that Naipaul’s literary death coincides with the death of his first wife Patricia Naipaul in 1996. His final three major works are read as works symptomatic of a writer no longer in control of his great literary gifts. When the aesthetic impulse dies, the “author” dies too, but in the case of a great writer, which Naipaul is, before his “death” he had created worlds that no other writer had created. That achievement, singular and original, has to be acknowledged insofar as it now enables us to rethink and reconceptualize what it means to be a writer of “world literature.”

From 1908 to 1914, each summer party included a large-scale outdoor play, and these productions are considered in Chapter 4. Performed by casts of between 80 and 150 employees, between 1911 and 1914 these plays were written and produced by local theatrical personality John Drinkwater (1882–1937). Alongside other parties, charity occasions, and wartime entertainments that took place in the grounds, these performances demanded huge investments of time and money. What is clear is that they also offered a return, and these two chapters explores how outdoor theatrical events worked for and at Bournville and the ways in which they told stories about Cadbury’s and the Cadbury’s factory to in-house and external audiences.

The dominant genre of secular music in medieval Wales was cerdd dant (literally ‘string craft’), a highly distinctive repertory played on the harp or crwth. Its delivery relied on highly trained professional instrumentalists, who worked in close partnership with Welsh strict-metre poets: both crafts were an intrinsic part of Welsh medieval ‘high culture’, linked to an exclusive bardic order. Though largely transmitted orally, some thirty items from the repertory were entabulated by the Anglesey harper Robert ap Huw c.1613. Cerdd dant largely retained its status until the 1560s, when the fashion for acquiring an English education gradually brought about a sea change in musical taste, effected by the importation of English tunes, texts, instruments and books. Some of the Welsh nobility nevertheless retained a loyalty to the practitioners of the traditional bardic crafts well into the seventeenth century, resulting in a mixed economy in some households, where vernacular music and poetry might rub shoulders with the latest English-style entertainments.

This chapter discusses the nature of court dancing in England, placing it in the context of European court culture and changes across time. The chapter focuses especially on the court masque, with an emphasis on continuity and change from Tudor to Jacobean practice. The court dancer was at the heart of the performance, as a masque transformed social dancing into a theatrical performance: in other words, a ballet de cour. Elizabeth maintained the practice of masquing for seasonal celebration and significant hospitality. However, James I enhanced the genre to underpin and consolidate the new Stuart dynasty. Investigation of the Jacobean masque from the perspective of a dance historian reveals the efforts to make the dance entries more histrionic, leading to the professional antimasque, in order to convey more vividly the central message or moral of the masque to an audience of diplomats. In developing a new mode of pantomimic dancing, a rich vein of invention in dance emerged. The new form of mute expression was swiftly adopted by Shakespeare into plays after 1609; as other playwrights followed his innovation, the dance content of drama expanded.