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 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

But then in her own performed work, she was tended towards a rather more Tory view, though some of her work was censured.

And I think the other thing that one has to bear in mind now is that popular theatre

is political.

The point about Drury Lane, which was um founded um under Charles auspices, you get the Royal Patent Theatres, and that means that the court has a great deal of control over what can be performed, and if what is performed is not to the taste of the court, you can get into quite hot water.

So Afra Ben's extraordinary career takes her in and out of

what is politically acceptable in those years.

And I think the other thing that's interesting is that this is also of course the age of Dryden.

So you've got a continuing

a coterie literature where people are writing

for each other, about each other and with Dryden, if you don't know who he's talking about, it's not very funny.

But if you do, it is, and very pointed.

And at the same time this much more popular

Theatre going public.

No, um not at all.

Um and but there is a moment when you read Dryden and you've looked up all the footnotes and you know exactly who he's talking about and it's like reading Private Eye and you fall over laughing, but then you forget who they all are again and it sort of goes away.

The other major court poet was the notorious figure of the Earl of Rochester, who made great play with the goings on in these new parks, which we've been talking about.

I'm not going to talk about Rochester here because I can recommend a whole episode on him with Claire Bucknell and Colin Burrow in the close reading series on satire.

But Rochester's poems are, to say the least, graphic about exactly what people were getting up to in the new parks.

So there is a sort of court literature.

But there is well, as ever, more and more of a theatre going

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