The Introduction explains the volume’s scope, material to be investigated, research questions to be pursued and methods to be deployed. Additionally, it situates the book within current scholarship on Shakespeare in performance, theatre history and historical musicology. In doing so, it underlines the volume’s distinctiveness in (i) topic: the first edited collection devoted to Restoration Shakespeare in performance (ii) interdisciplinary methods: the volume integrates archival and practice-led research, embracing Shakespeare studies, theatre history and historical musicology (iii) contributors: chapters are written not just by scholars but also by leading practitioners in music and theatre. We also emphasise how the volume serves as the main publication record for the insights developed during our AHRC-funded project ‘Performing Restoration Shakespeare’ (2017-2020).

In 2017, as part of the research project ‘Performing Restoration Shakespeare’, the editors led a research team of scholars and artists in discussing, workshopping, rehearsing, and performing scenes and songs from Thomas Shadwell’s 1674 operatic revision of Davenant and Dryden’s The Tempest at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. This chapter offers reflections on how scholar-artist collaboration in performing Restoration Shakespeare has functioned as sustained moments of what Rebecca Schneider (following Gertrude Stein) has called ‘syncopated time’ – in this instance, a collision of archival past and embodied present, in which each dimension punctured the other. Reflecting on their practice-based research, the authors propose that what can emerge through such syncopations are performance-generated insights that neither the recorded past nor the embodied present could fully apprehend on its own.

How might we define English opera in the seventeenth century? Whole books have been written on this topic, and because of the variable terminology with which seventeenth-century writers labelled their works (‘opera’, ‘dramatick opera’, ‘masque’, ‘comedy’, ‘tragedy’), it is unlikely that absolute clarity will ever be had.1 Indeed, the English had a capacious and fluid notion of what constituted opera during the seventeenth century, and we should adjust our overly narrow definitions if we are to understand English opera as people in the seventeenth century did: as a genre that sometimes was fully sung, but, more often than not, included spoken dialogue.2

The performance activities of grammar-school boys in early modern London and its vicinity are relatively well known, particularly regarding students from institutions such as the Merchant Taylors’ school, the Charterhouse and Dulwich College. Yet evidence from account books, diaries, letters, school records and other archival sources indicates that engagement with the performing arts reached far beyond London and its environs. This chapter will consider the evidence for musical instruction of and performance by boys in the North-East of England, particularly Durham, York and Newcastle upon Tyne. These schoolboy performances served various purposes: to entertain important dignitaries and patrons; to allow boys to practise important rhetorical and musical skills; and, perhaps most importantly in persistently Catholic areas of the North-East, to inculcate boys with the Protestant faith through singing.

In compiling archival evidence for this chapter, I could not help but suspect that the surviving historical record for the North-East represents only the tip of the iceberg with regards to schoolboy performance. The quotidian nature of musical instruction is suggested by a woodcut from the time of Elizabeth I (Figure 9.1). The image shows a busy scene. In the foreground one boy is being thrashed while other boys are reading aloud before a schoolmaster. On the back wall there is musical notation on a board. Perhaps school-based musical instruction was as commonplace as the birching of schoolboys, as conjugating Latin verbs before a teacher. As Diana Taylor has demonstrated, the archive is not unmediated – what survives depends on a range of factors, including what people deemed important to save. Access to the archive, moreover, is controlled by classification systems created by other human beings with their own prejudices and priorities. The archive is also mutable: documents might be lost, stolen, purposely or unintentionally sequestered from view. It is possible, for instance, that grammar-school boys performed with regularity, but that it was not considered necessary to preserve the documents that recorded their activities. What follows, then, must be an incomplete account of the ways in which schoolboys in the North-East engaged with the performing arts.

❧ Performing Arts and the Early Modern Grammar School

By the early seventeenth century many communities, including those in the North-East, supported a local grammar school; these institutions had prolif-erated in the sixteenth century and were funded in various ways; generally a wealthy landowner, a clergyman, merchant or yeoman founded the school.

This chapter maps how students moved, sometimes literally and sometimes figuratively, between church and schoolroom, and the purposes religious music-making served in these contexts. It focuses on students’ performance of psalms, especially how particular performance practices (processing two-by-two) and the selection of psalms with moralizing texts inculcated potentially unruly children into the Protestant faith through bodily discipline and the act of communal singing. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the “Easter Psalms” sung at the Spital Sermon by children from the school at Christ’s Hospital as a multisensory event. Religious speech, music, and the display of the children’s bodies in their characteristic blue uniforms worked together to solicit charitable donations for the school and to demonstrate their piety, a performance practice that continues to this day. However, the potential for disruption, for something to go awry, for the script to be overturned is ever present, then and now.

This chapter turns inward, considering how the performance of vice haunted the early modern child, how the positionality of boyhood or girlhood inflected and shaped the act of performance, and the possible reasons for casting children as rule-breakers, sexual deviants, and seducers in a pedagogical context. Plays and masques with antimasque style roles were performed by schoolgirls and boys, including a boy who played an unruly scholar celebrating truancy in song, young ladies who sang as Furies and witches, and schoolgirl dancers who enacted scenes of murder and violence. Children of both genders also practiced the arts of musical seduction: a boy, Wentworth Randall, sang as Dame Siren in Apollo Shroving (1627), before his costume was violently torn from him, revealing a monstrous fish tail; a girl sang to persuade Paris to choose Venus and pleasure in Beauties Triumph (1676), even as she warned of the dangers of doing so. As these entertainments reveal, the performance of vice was dialectical – the pedagogues who crafted the entertainments claimed they displayed immorality only to uncloak its rottenness. Yet, given early modern pedagogical theories, there was also the very real danger that children might become what they performed – imitatio gone terribly wrong.