Music of the Shakespearean stage in the Restoration period
15 March 2023
4:00pm - 5:00pm
Room SC 203
In a pub in 1667 the theatre impresario Tom Killigrew boasted to the diarist Samuel Pepys that ‘that the stage is now by his pains a thousand times better and more glorious than ever heretofore.’ Along with improved furnishings and lighting, Restoration theatres boasted an orchestra of string players with ‘harpsicals and theorboes’ to accompany the songs of Humphrey, Purcell and others. John Edwards discusses these developments which culminate in the transformation of Midsummer Night's Dream into a semi-opera.