Notes Introduction 1. In Romantic Liars: Obscure Women Who Became Imposters and Challenged an Empire (2006), Debbie Lee chronicles the exploits of six Romantic-era women whose impostures subverted class and gen- der boundaries. Among the women she examines is Mary Bateman (1768–1809), the so-called Witch of Leeds, who pretended to possess supernatural powers and necromantic assistants. Bateman cheated her superstitious victims out of money and, in some cases, poisoned them. 2. See, for example, the passage from Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–48) excerpted later in this introduction. 3. Objectionable figures were also compared to air-feeding chameleons. For example, a character in Hannah Cowley’s play The Runaway, a Comedy (1776) describes “a Court Dangler” as “one whose ambi- tion is to be fostered with the cameleon food of smiles and nods” (IV.52). 4. Although a postmortem autopsy in 1810 revealed that the Chevalier D’Eon was biologically a man, he succeeded in convincing his con- temporaries that he was female and lived as a woman for decades. 5. Wahrman’s conception of the modern self is heavily influenced by the philosopher Charles Taylor, who argues that during the early Romantic period a stable, unitary, and interiorized notion of self- hood emerged and became normative. For Taylor, “the modern identity” is characterized by inwardness, uniqueness, and moral agency: “Something fundamental changes in the late eighteenth century. The modern subject is no longer defined just by the power of disengaged rational control but by [the] new power of expres- sive self-articulation as well—the power which has been ascribed since the Romantic period to the creative imagination. This [power] intensifies the sense of inwardness and leads to [a] radical subjectiv- ism and an internalization of moral sources” (390). 6. Terry Castle offers several possible explanations for the sudden demise of masquerades (98–103). 7. Jeffrey N. Cox and Michael Gamer stress the pervasive influence of theater in Romantic-era British culture: “With the four patent the- aters in London (the two winter dramatic theaters of Covent Garden 204 Notes and Drury Lane, the summer theater at Haymarket, and the King’s Theatre given over to Italian opera) standing as central national institutions, with theaters found in every major city from Bath to Edinburgh, and with forms of staged entertainment present in every kind of venue from taverns to carnivals, the theater held the same place in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that televi- sion, film, and video hold in the twenty-first” (xi). 8. Robert-François Damiens (1715–1757), who attempted to assassi- nate Louis XIV on January 5, 1757, was not related to Robespierre. He was condemned as a regicide and drawn and quartered. 9. Ormond rapes and murders “a Tartar girl” (202) and attempts to rape the novel’s heroine, Constantia Dudley. Robert S. Levine has examined Ormond’s association with the Illuminati and postrevolu- tionary conspiracy anxieties. 10. Will’s and Tom’s were popular London coffeehouses. 11. Smith quotes from an anonymous poem, possibly written by Daniel Defoe, titled The English Gentleman Justified (Part II, 47, 54). 12. In An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), Godwin writes: “It is evident . that a strict adherence to truth will have the best effect upon our minds in the ordinary commerce of life. This is the virtue which has commonly been known by the denomination of sincerity” (3.135). He also argues that “[t]he powerful recommenda- tions attendant upon sincerity are obvious. It is intimately connected with the general dissemination of innocence, energy, intellectual improvement, and philanthropy” (Political Justice Variants 4.161). 13. A Bold Stroke for a Wife remained in the theatrical repertoire through- out the Romantic period. 14. Kenney’s protagonist echoes a speech given by Letitia Hardy, the heroine of Cowley’s The Belle’s Stratagem (1780 premiere), at a mas- querade (IV.i.59). I discuss this speech in chapter 4. 15. From 1792 to 1800, The Irish Widow was performed 18 times and A Bold Stroke for a Husband was performed only once in London (Hogan 1477, 1571, 1681–2, 1782, 1994, 2100, and 2204). Of course, as a two-act afterpiece, The Irish Widow was easier to fit into an evening’s entertainment than was A Bold Stroke for a Husband, which is a five-act mainpiece. 16. A number of scholars have noted that Mayne’s Two Dissertations Concerning Sense and the Imagination is a possible influence on Keats’s conception of the chameleon poet (Roe 247). 17. Merry adopted the pseudonym Della Crusca in homage to the Accademia della Crusca, established in Florence, Italy in 1582–1583. 18. For a detailed discussion of Robinson’s Tabitha Bramble avatar and her different voices, see Daniel Robinson (168–183). 19. Sharon Setzer observes that “it is possible . to understand [the Sylphid] as a feminist anticipation of Keats’s chameleon poet” (“Mary Robinson’s Sylphid Self” 505). Notes 205 20. Cooke acknowledges that Keats would have disputed his character- ization of Byron as the “consummate chameleon poet.” 21. James Soderholm contends that Lady Blessington, who may have been the model for Lady Adeline Amundeville in Don Juan, was also chameleonic: “the Conversations presents the spectacle of dueling, conversing chameleons—a contest of verbal showiness and shiftiness that makes a hoax of the very possibility of candor, stable meanings, and sincerity as traditionally conceived” (150). 22. Richard Woodhouse, the recipient of Keats’s chameleon poet letter, wrote that Byron, unlike Shakespeare and Keats, “does not come up to [the poetical] Character”: “He can certainly conceive & describe a dark accomplished vilain [sic] in love—& a female tender & kind who loves him. Or a sated & palled Sensualist Misanthrope & Deist—But here his power ends.—The true poet can not only conceive this—but can assume any Character Essence idea or Substance at pleasure. & He has this imaginative faculty not in a limited manner, but in full universality” (Letters 1.390). It should be noted that Woodhouse penned his assessment of Byron’s chameleonism in October 1818, before the publication of Don Juan (1819–1824) and Byron’s dramas. 23. Simon Kövesi contends that Clare’s poetic chameleonism “relates to, though [it] is noticeably different from, Keats’ assertion that the poet ‘has no Identity—he is continually in for—and filling some other body’; Clare instead wants lots of identities. Rather than an absence or denial of self he wants a free plurality of ‘exist[e]nces’” (82). 24. Marshall Berman explains that “[t]he process of confessing, for Rousseau, was a process of unmasking, of differentiating, of integrat- ing, of bringing his authentic self into being” (86, italics in original). 25. Elle m’avait donné cette confiance dont le défaut m’a presque tou- jours empêché d’être moi. Je le fus alors. Jamais mes yeux, mes sens, mon cœur et ma bouche n’ont si bien parlé” (Les Confessions 291). 26. As Jerome McGann observes, in Byron’s work, “hypocrisy and the true voice of feeling cannot be separated (even if they can be dis- tinguished)” (Towards a Literature of Knowledge 40). In a nuanced discussion of Lady Adeline’s mobility, Angela Esterhammer argues that “[f]or Byron, sincerity is both spontaneous and performed; it manifests as an immediate, embodied response to stimuli, a response that is read by others through a semiotics of looks, gestures, and tone of voice, as well as words” (“The Scandal of Sincerity” 113). 27. In editions, reviews, and scholarly articles, the title of Knave, or Not? is punctuated in a variety of ways: Knave, or Not?, Knave or Not?, Knave; or Not?, or Knave or Not. The play was originally titled Knave or No Knave? 28. A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers & Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800 explains that Palmer “derived his nickname from Lord Plausible, the classic 206 Notes coxcomb in Wycherley’s Moliéresque comedy The Plain Dealer, [and] was so called not only for his excellent delineation of the character but also because of his reputation for intrigue and hypocrisy” (“Palmer, John” 11.172). 1 The Case of the Pretended Duke of Ormond 1. Some of the pages in the 1663 edition of The Case of Madam Mary Carleton are misnumbered. 2. A “catch-dolt” is a cheat. 3. Ernest Bernbaum argues that A Witty Combat and The German Princess, which premiered in 1664 with Carleton in the title role, are the same play (25–26). Mary Jo Kietzman speculates that Carleton may have collaborated with Thomas Porter in the composition of A Witty Combat (142–143). 4. Kietzman explains that she “began . work on Carleton’s life with the fact of her immense popularity” (2). 5. Hannah Cowley has bewildered patriarchal characters criticize English society as “one universal masquerade” in her comedies The Belle’s Stratagem and The Town before You (1794 premiere) (Stratagem II.i.27; The Town V.vi.95). 6. In Fictions and Fakes: Forging Romantic Authenticity, 1760–1845, Russett “focus[es] on how spectacular fakes” like John Hatfield and Princess Caraboo “participated in defining the ‘fictional identity’ bequeathed to the modern subject by Romantic culture.” She con- tends “that modern subjectivity should be understood as a subset and, to some extent, as a precipitate of the representational practices the Romantics called ‘romance’ but which, in their derogated forms, also go by such names as ‘imposture,’ ‘forgery,’ ‘plagiarism,’ and ‘delusion’” (5). 7. In his 1817 account of the imposture, John Mathew Gutch concludes “That the talents of such a girl should have been hitherto directed to no better purpose [than deception], every one must lament” (55).