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  • Chapter 3 - Realising The Enraged Musician

  • Edited by James Grande, King's College London, Carmel Raz, Max-Planck-Institut für Empirische Ästhetik
  • Book:
    Sound and Sense in British Romanticism
    Published online:
    24 August 2023
    Print publication:
    07 September 2023, pp 60-89
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  • Summary

    Dubbed ‘the noisiest picture in English art’ by Martin Meisel, William Hogarth’s The Enraged Musician (1741) has enjoyed a long and prominent afterlife. Long before it became a canonical image in sound studies, it was adapted for the London stage as a musical afterpiece, Ut Pictura Poesis, at the Haymarket Theatre (1789). Though the performance took its plot, very loosely, from Ben Jonson’s Epicœne, its central conceit was not just the embodied reenactment of an image, but its conversion into a linear sequence of music. In this chapter, Oskar Cox Jensen interrogates this adaptation through a combination of close reading (of playtext, score, and imagined performance) and contextualisation, considering the key roles played by both the theatrical space itself and the members of the company – particularly the scene painter Michael Angelo Rooker (1746–1801). The resulting blend of sound, sight, and movement, Cox Jensen contends, reveals much about wider issues of the era, from the construction of national identities to the interplay between stage, street, and social class.