This chapter presents a view on context as understood within functional models of language, specifically the theoretical framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). Amongst the functional approaches to language, SFL is recognized as a framework which has maintained an account of context that has prioritized its relationship with lexicogrammar, allowing it to make a causal connection between culture and language. The aim of this chapter is to highlight and explain the principal ways in which context works within the SFL framework and explore the main themes and parameters which situate context within an integrated theory of language as a semiotic resource. As no theory emerges in a vacuum, the first part of the chapter will consider the historical development of context as a concept within SFL theory with reference to how context is situated in other related functional grammars. Following this, we examine two areas of challenge related to the approach to context outlined in the chapter. Finally, the chapter concludes with closing remarks and key directions for future research in this area.

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.