Music, Books and Theatre in Eighteenth‐Century Exton: A Context for Handel's ‘Comus’. By ColinTimms. Abingdon: Routledge. 2024. x + 125 p. £54.99 (pb). ISBN 978‐1‐032‐62781‐6.

describes his monograph as a 'wide-ranging study', and the description is certainly apt.Although the book is subtitled A Context for Handel's 'Comus', the focus of the study really is Baptist Noel, 4th Earl of Gainsborough, at whose home Comus was staged in 1745 and 1748.Timms explores the cultural and social life of Gainsborough and his family in great detail, drawing on a vast array of surviving documentation to form a fascinating picture of Gainsborough as a patron, appreciator, and practitioner of the arts, far beyond the Comus productions.In doing so, he touches not only on Gainsborough's ownership and use of musical materials (scores, treatises, instruments, and so forth) but also of literary works, visual art, and texts concerning these subjects, as well as demonstrating his interest in garden design, the sciences, and more.The range is indeed wide, and even the monograph's subtitle of 'Music, Books and Theatre in Eighteenth-Century Exton' does not wholly do it justice (although admittedly most of Gainsborough's non-musical, non-literary, and non-theatrical interests are illuminated chiefly by examination of his receipts for the aforementioned texts about these artforms; Timms was wise to say 'books' rather than 'literature').Indeed the monograph might appear, at first glance, to deal more with context than with Comus, or even be accused of straying still further by framing Gainsborough's musical interests among his broader cultural ones.In fact, however, the study comes across as remarkably coherent, and Timms has achieved an admirable balance between generality (which risks appearing sprawling, but here seems simply rich) and specificity (Comus or even music alone could have offered slim pickings, but is in fact judiciously sprinkled throughout).The book is certainly first and foremost a tour of the cultural landscape of Gainsborough's life; but Comus, Handel, and music are always very clearly the guides on that tour, and the reader never feels lost in the trees.Readers familiar with Timms's work will be aware that he has already produced a great deal of extremely valuable scholarship on Comus itself, with context of the kind presented in this book being the next logical step.For the musicologist with an interest in Comus per se, the book will likely work best as a companion to Timms's 2016 edition of the masque's score for Novello and to his 2022 study of its poetry and music ('Handel and Comus at Exton', in New Perspectives on Handel's Music: Essays in Honour of Donald Burrows).For those interested in the reception and production of Handel's music more generally, however, and especially in eighteenth-century English culture and society, the monograph is a fascinating trove of information and insight, touching as it does on issues of performance history (especially the performance of Handel'sand others', not only musicalworks outside London), cultural practice (the collecting habits of artistically and scientifically engaged gentry), and even broader sociological issues (that gentry's thoughts on the nature of the relationship between parents and children, as evidenced by the edits made to the scripts of plays performed by Gainsborough's family).The book also goes above and beyond to show the work that underlies its conclusions on these matters: over half of the study's page count consists of lists and inventories of the documents on which Timms bases his interpretations.Despite this impressively thorough presentation of sources, however, one of the book's most striking virtues is being eminently readable.Much as Timms weaves an admirable throughline among the wide-ranging concerns of the monograph, so his prose remains both colourful and clear, even when drawing conclusions from extremely complicated minutiae.There is no attempt to force a narrative where facts are scarce, or to turn the book into a biography, but academic rigour and scholarly interpretation are excellently conveyed through admirably well-crafted language.