The Bad Taste of the Town

Outside the building to the left – probably King's Theatre, Haymarket – a queue of masked people is being led to a masquerade ball by a devil or satyr bearing aloft a bag containing £1,000 accompanied by a figure wearing a jester's cap and bells with a garter round his right leg (possibly intended to be the Prince of Wales, later George II, who was said to enjoy masquerades).

A banner hanging above the entrance shows Charles Mordaunt, 3rd Earl of Peterborough and two other noblemen kneeling before the Italian soprano opera singer Francesca Cuzzoni, asking her "pray accept £8,000" to perform in London.

To the right, another crowd waits outside Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre to see John Rich's commedia dell'arte pantomime Harlequin Doctor Faustus.

Later in 1724, Hogarth published A Just View of the British Stage, in which Ben Jonson's ghost rises through a trapdoor and literally pisses on the idiocies of the theatre managers.

He followed up with his Emblematical Print on the South Sea Scheme – a similar composition with crowds between buildings to either side – and another 1724 engraving entitled The Lottery, sold through the printsellers Mrs Chilcott in Westminster Hall and R Caldwell in Newgate Street.