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Almost all ‘histories’ of eighteenth-century English drama have focussed on the new plays. This is a natural and in some ways defensible way to proceed, but ‘new plays’ are a product of the theatre system inwhich they are produced, and any attempt to treat them in glorious isolation must inevitably produce fallacious and misleading results. New plays did not beget one another, and neither were they necessarily a major influence on their immediate successors. Between 1730 and 1790 something like 85 per cent of the mainpiece performances in London were of old plays – many of them several decades old or more. New plays tended to be written as vehicles for the principal performers, and consequently the parts those performers took in stock plays had a major influence on the new works written for them. Innovation was rarely a desideratum; neither was literary merit a prime concern. Whatever critics of the time had to say, plays served primarily as popular entertainment. To comprehend eighteenth-century drama as it was written and experienced in its own day, one must start by realising three things. First, only a few of the plays have ever received attention from twentieth-century critics, and most of those plays are atypical. Second, a performance did not consist of one comedy or tragedy viewed in decorous silence. People came, wandered about and left; those who stayed bought refreshments and talked. Many of the mainpieces were not comedy or tragedy but musical. Most nights included an afterpiece as well as a mainpiece, and a great many nights featured interpolated entertainments of various sorts – song, dance, spectacle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the chaotic intersection of English popular and print cultures stands Hogarth's magnificent female hawker, anchoring The Idle 'Prentice Executed at Tyburn (1747), the eleventh plate of a didactic moral history engraved in a consciously unpolished style and priced to appeal to an apprentice class at the crossroads of virtue and pleasure: The Effects of Industry & Idleness Exemplified in the Conduct of two fellow prentices in twelve points Where calculated for the use & instruction of those young people wherein every thing nescessary to be convey'd to them is fully described in words as well as figure … [E]very thing necessary to be known was to be made as inteligible as possible and as fine engraving was not necessary to the main design provided that which is infinitely more material viz the characters and Expressions were well preservend, the purchase of them became within the reach of those for whom they [were] cheifly intended. In this description, written in 1763, Hogarth fairly sums up the complex of instruction, entertainment, ostensible simplicity and affordable prices that had characterised the production and marketing of popular literature and drama for the previous hundred years. Of course, simplicity of intention in no way guaranteed simplicity of result, and in the hawker and her surroundings we find the abundant paradoxes linking official or commercial productions and popular responses to them: a legal demonstration of terror and control results in a chaotic festival fuelled by irreverence and gin; a printed ‘Last Dying Speech’ makes a marketable celebrity of a condemned man who has yet to speak; a ragged, dirty female carrying a child at the periphery of the crowd becomes a central symbol for popular print culture as she cries a minatory publication she probably cannot read to a socially mixed audience who will buy it more for entertainment than instruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]