Rosemary Hill

speaker

490 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 7 Sep

Rosemary Hill’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

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Close Readings · London Revisited: Pepys, Plague and Fire · 10 Aug 2026 podcast

I mean I don't think Charles II was interested in watching boys.

He was very keen on having women on the stage and

just walking in the parks.

I mean the parks which we'd seen we saw how these areas under Henry at the Reformation

were well, essentially kept for royalty and for hunting, but that meant that there were these green spaces, these open spaces, which a later age could landscape

could invest with a certain sociability.

And we begin to get more images that we can draw on to see what London is actually looking like from contemporary not just reconstructions, but contemporary

Images.

Yes, exactly.

Street figures, not just I mean obviously we'd have we have the portraits of the grandees.

Yes.

But um yes, a sense of what it was like

in the street, bustling about again the sense of the West End coming to life and being just a lively and attractive place to be.

And part of that was um the new theatres.

This is the beginning of Drury Lane Theatre.

Yes.

And that is one of Charles's great um contributions, the influence of French culture and French theatre and French theatre design.

So the the wooden O of Shakespeare.

Is modified with the introduction of the proscenium arch, which is not quite what we think of yet.

So there's the proscenium arch, and behind that there's all sorts of increasingly elaborate stage effects, um, flying cars and scenery and things, but the acting, of course, has to take place in front of it on the apron stage.

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