ABSTRACT
To judge from the bills discussed in Chapter 2, there was a great deal of cultural activity at Exton in 1743–51, particularly in the spheres of music and theatre. This is the context in which Comus was performed in 1745 and 1748. Everything changed with the death of the 4th Earl in 1751. Neither the 5th Earl nor the 6th, the last in the line, pursued the same interest. The inescapable conclusion is that Comus is the only piece of musical drama that the 4th Earl staged and that the performances in the 1740s were the high point in the cultivation of the arts at Exton. That the production in 1748 involved three of his children bears witness to his belief in the value of performance to the development of young people, a conviction that sits well with his purchase of educational books. Unlike some of his contemporaries (e.g., the 4th Earl of Shaftesbury), Gainsborough was evidently less interested in collecting per se than in performing the musical and dramatic works that he bought.
