ABSTRACT
As performed onstage within a play, song quotations are part of a conversation between performers and audiences, engendering a reciprocal pleasure through recognition. At the turn of the eighteenth century they are also part of the dialogue between the rival theatre companies at Drury Lane and Lincoln’s Inn Fields, during a period in which both playhouses reached out to theatre audiences with a variety of special attractions, particularly musical ones. After a general discussion of the functions of song quotation in seventeenth-century drama, drawing on examples from turn-of-the-century comedies, I take an in-depth look at the use of song quotations in Richard Wilkinson’s Vice Reclaim’d; or the Passionate Mistress (Drury Lane, 1703).
