Margery Pinchwife’s translation to the capital and its playhouses was no less bedazzled than Farquhar’s. Reflecting on her first experience of the theatre, she tells her sister-in-law, Alithea,

Her innocence is to mistake performance for text; fetching up in the wrong academic department, she prefers the show to the play. If this is another reminder that the ‘gaze’ of recent theory was by no means directed only at actresses, it also highlights the fraught symbiosis of playwrights and performers. Actors were integral to the process of writing, but their business was to steal the show – a habit in which audiences were thoroughly complicit. Actors’ ‘lines’ or customary stage profiles determined to a significant a playwright’s understanding of what roles could and could not be written for a particular play, while their personal qualities and history might form an important part of the overall effect of performance – a sign system that would become commonplace in the eighteenth-century theatre as much as in the celebrity culture of commercial cinema today. Good actors could rescue a poor play and bad ones spoil a masterpiece. ‘Lord, what prejudice it wrought in me against [Macbeth],’ lamented Pepys, to see John Young deputize for Thomas Betterton.