In 1668, after attending his seventh performance of The Tempest, or the Enchanted Island, Pepys writes that he slipped backstage to ask the actor Henry Harris ‘to repeat to me the words of the Echo, while I writ them down’. Though he had tried to record the part as it was being performed, ‘having done it without looking upon my paper’, he explains, ‘I [found] I could not read the blacklead’, or pencil. ‘But now, I have got the words clear.’ Sitting in the newly darkened Restoration playhouse, attempting to jot down the words to a song he had heard at least six times before, Pepys cuts a figure that is at once both familiar and, in many ways, entirely new. His dramatic consumption both reflects and is part of the cultivation of his social ambition, marking affiliations with men and women of influence while simultaneously signalling Pepys's suitability for such circles. As such, it is anything but unthinking or accidental. But as Pepys's diary entries also repeatedly show, he could be just as interested in what was happening offstage as he was in what was happening on it. In fact, Pepys's first account of Dryden and Davenant's play is strikingly different from the one quoted above: