Tonya Howe Marymount University ASECS 2009, Richmond, VA

“Harlequin Toft; or, Imposture, Pantomime, and the Instabilities of Satire in the Early Eighteenth Century”

From October to December of 1726, Mary Toft hacked dead rabbits into small and not-so-small pieces; forced them, piece-by-piece into her vagina; then expelled these “made…monster[s]”i under the gazes of eminent and not-so-eminent medical men, scholars, general readers, and those of the public who could pay to see the freakshow. For some time, this fraud was acknowledged as fact by several medical men, and those who weren't convinced were nonetheless caught up in the debate, publishing tracts, treatises, rebuttals and apologies. Well over ten substantial tracts—earnest medical explanations,

“exact diaries” and “narratives,” satirical responses, philosophical mediations, and more—appeared in print throughout the months of November and December. The poets and satirists of the period quickly climbed aboard, too, riding the tide of Toft's fraud. Alexander Pope published an anonymous broadside ballad satirizing the affair, though most students of 18th century will never see this in an anthology;

Jonathan Swift, also writing anonymously, weighed in with two critical pieces on the subject. O ballads about Toft—or rather, the different surgeons associated with the case—emphasized the bawdy humor endemic to the meticulous examination and publicization of Toft's lady parts. A fictitious “confession” also appeared, ostensibly in Toft's own words and “natural” style, playing up ample opportunity for sexual innuendo. From November 1726 to January of the following year, the Toft affair made it into the newspapers over fifty times (Nov/Dec=47x; Jan=16x), in both advertisements for related publications and as news in its own right. The hoax was eventually discovered; various key players in the newly- minted auctoritas of obstetric medicine were subsequently and virulently branded “quacks,” and Toft herself briefly but impotently imprisoned—after which she virtually drops off the map until her death in 1763.ii In The Gazeteer, or London Daily Advertiser for January 21, 1763, a brief paragraph marked

1 her passing.iii

The effect of her dramatic act of body manipulation resonated for years. William Hogarth created at least two engravings in which Toft’s ecstatic body figures prominently, and a collection of ephemera was given “Gratis” to anyone visiting the purveyors of the famous Anodyne Necklace.iv

Several sales of eminent libraries throughout the eighteenth century list various tracts from the Toft affair in their catalogues, some selling for upwards of 17s.v A History of England (1749), written by

“Thomas Thumb,” sandwiches a condensed version of the Toft affair between an account of the 1726 earthquake and a rumination on scrofula (277-78). Defoe describes the town of Godalmin in his Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1742) as notable chiefly because “the Place of Residence of the

Impostor Mary Tofts, who so long amused Statesmen, Physicians, Anatomists, and, in short, all

Degrees of Men, learned and unlearned, with her infamous Rabbet-productions, &c” (214). In 1776, a rogue's biography of “Jemmy Sharp” was published, made even sweeter to the public with the addition of two of the most controversial pamphlets of the affair—Nathanel St. Andre's Narrative of an

Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbits and Richard Manningham's prodigiously titillating Exact Diary of

What Observed During Close Attendance upon Mary Toft.

In contemporary criticism, as in the eighteenth-century, she becomes a springboard for inquiry into other discourses rather than a site of inquiry herself. Alan Shepard discusses how the satirical literature of the event renders the medical community's failure itself the real monstrosity. Dennis Todd's

Imagining Monsters reads the Toft affair as a powerful sign of a larger web of Augustan cultural politics consumed with the threat of structural collapse (68), particularly the ongoing debates about proper and improper forms of representation, knowledge, and entertainment. The abstractions of print which, in the eighteenth century, focused increasingly on what Shepard has termed the doctors' monstrosity, effectively disciplined them through satire, and they were left to “[heal] their Reputations as well as they [could] by writing of Pamphlets” (Mists, December 17, 1726). As the public shifted its

2 satire to the doctors, who—as visible members of the public sphere—had more to lose from such discipline, Toft also became less significant as a producer of meaning. It is almost as though, uncertain what to do with Toft, the doctors offered a more approchable site for satiric reform.

Given the nature of the textual production surrounding the Toft affair, it important today to remember that she did stand at the center of it all. The eye at the center of that storm, her body seems unanswerably present—anyone can comment, but none can know. She is present largely insofar as she has been remade in language, the last refuge of absence. The threat facing the body's abstraction into print is much like the difficulty of accurately recapturing or completely theorizing performance, or even satire itself. In both cases, we attempt to treat the physical and experiential with tools of a more stable textual analysis, with the paradigms of thought descendant from the turn to print.

Yet, significantly, her act also became matter for another aspect of the modern entertainment economy: the notoriously wordless, problematically textless harlequinade or farce-pantomime so disagreeable to many the policeman of appropriate representation. A topical event par excellence, the

Toft hoax seems to speak with the same tongues as pantomime, emerging from the fraught position of imagination publicly staged. While pantomime was routinely set up as the Bogeyman of good taste, it nonetheless commanded public attention, much like the Toft affair itself. And because of its silent, spectacular mode of presentation—as well as the distance of time--it is notoriously difficult for even ostensibly satirical pantomimes to maintain a stable core of meaning, rendering their satire at best vagrant.

The print output constituting the Toft affair mined the discourses of poor taste, bad theatricality, and the modern entertainment economy. When John Howard began advertising his discovery to his medical colleagues, he did so using the language of participatory spectacle, inviting the “Curious” to observe her give birth. Toft’s labor (and the discursive and medical effluvia surrounding it) was routinely described as “uncommon,” “singular,” an “extraordinary…Production,” an “extasy,” a

3 “Wonder,” and, several times, an astonishing “Piece of Diversion” or a “[glib] Trick” (Brathwaite 20).

On December 17, Mist's Weekly Journal featured a letter from the deceased Thomas D’Urfey in which he argues from the grave for an aesthetic continuity of kinds between the performances of “Italian

Comedians” and the performances of “Bartholomew Fair,” including “Harlequin Clark, Mrs. Violante and her Companions, together with the Rabbet-Woman, the Puppet-Show, Mr. Fawks, and Mr. Clinch of Barnet [...]; nay, even the itinerant Bear and Monkey, the Woman in the Box, and all the Raree

Shows about Town….”vi Finally, the Toft affair was playing out, in real time, during a particularly vivid parade of holiday harlequinade and farcical variety shows on the legitimate stages.vii [including

Violante's and High German woman's rope dancing exploits and Fawkes' noted “dexterity of hand,” as well as the productions of Rich at LIF]

It is thus in some sense no surprise that a pantomime emerged from the affair; not only did it throw into relief the most appalling tastes of the town, but it also became the means through which those bad tastes were perpetuated. One of the many products of Toft's imaginative act was a pantomime for Lincoln’s Inn Fields that recreated the whole event through spectacular stage magic. The “Rabbit

Scene,” as Mist's terms it, apparently took place on December 9th, during the concluding afterpiece entertainment at Rich's theater—either Harlequin a Sorcerer or The Necromancer (the reporting newspapers seem to use the titles loosely). Within this entertainment, there seems to have been either an additional entr'acte entertainment based on the Toft affair, or another episode incorporated into the existing afterpiece. According to Brice's Weekly Journal, published out of Exeter, “the Audience were unexpectedly diverted with a Representation ridiculing the aforesaid imposture; Harlequin, assisted by a Man Midwife, being delivered of 4 Rabbits, which ran about the Stage, and raised such a Laughter as perhaps has not been heard upon any other Occasion” (Fri., Dec. 16, 1726). Mist's takes a much more removed glance at the event, merely noting that during the “Entertainment call'd the Necromancer...a new Rabbit Scene was introduced by way of Episode--” (Saturday, December 17, 1726).viii

4 While there is no text of the episode referred to in the newspapers, there is a printed version of a piece called Harlequin Turn'd Imposture; or, The Guilford Comedy, billed on the title page as “a

Diverting Entertainment in British Characters; Shewing the whole Intrigue of the late Guilford

Imposture, Or, Rabbit Gossiping.” The title page, advertising that the “part of the Rabbit Woman” was played by Mr. R---h, also indicates that “the Scenes [are] entirely New, and beautifully Painted for that purpose.”ix The pantomime, like the impromptu entertainment, details the entirety of the media event, from Toft's fascination with rabbits and the miraculous births themselves, facilitated by an effeminate husband and a savvy nurse, all the way to the doctors' salacious examinations and inept exhortations, and even her imprisonment in Bridewell.xxi All this suggests that Harlequin Turn'd Imposture is probably a revision of the impromptu performance of the 9th, especially since Toft's imprisonment, staged at the end of the pantomime, had not yet occurred. Though there is no hard evidence that this pantomime was performed again, it may have continued as an unadvertised insertion or addition. It is also probable that this harlequinade is the same alluded to in at least two prints published during the height of the affair, both of which draw on the visual symbology of early eighteenth-century pantomime.xii The first of these is a print by George Vertue called The Surrey-Wonder, an Anotomical

Farce as it was Dissected at the Theatre Royal. Published around the 23rd of December (CPPS 1778), it may represent a scene from the harlequinade entertainment of the 9th. In The Surrey Wonder, the Toft figure's black mask ties her to Harlequin and suggests her trickster status. Another print again takes up the pantomimic context, though less directly than the first; this print, undated and unsigned but probably published late in 1726, is entitled The Doctors in Labour; or a New Whim Wham from

Guildford (CPPS 1781), and it characterizes itself as “a Representation of the Frauds by which the

Godliman Woman carried on her pretended Rabbit Breeding; also of the Simplicity of our Doctors, by which they assisted to carry on that Imposture...and contributed to the Mirth of His

Majesties...Subjects.” In a series of twelve panels, throughout which both Toft and a Harlequin figure

5 centrally, the print couples each rendering with satirical lines beneath.

What is striking about these prints, like the pantomime Harlequin Turn'd Imposture, is the way

Toft's act becomes a conduit not only for satire against the doctors' flagrant—even itself monstrous— scientific ineptitude (Shepard), but also for the popular entertainment in the early eighteenth century. In both The Surrey Wonder and The Doctors in Labour, the symbology of harlequinade dominates the satire, suggesting an intimate connection between Toft's act and the actor at the center of English pantomime.xiii In the twelve panels of The Doctors in Labour, the print tells the story of the Toft affair and the medical men who “Plac'd all their faith in such a Stupid Creature” (panel 1).xiv Throughout the panels, a harlequin figure distinct from Toft features prominently; described in the accompanying satirical verses as a “Merry Andrew,” he is identified in Nichols' Biographical Anecdotes of William

Hogarth as Nathanel St. Andre, the most virulently attacked of the surgeons concerned in the affair.

Yet, there seems only anecdotal evidence that this is in fact a representation of St. Andre, who was also reviled as an ex-dancing and fencing master.xv It is equally plausible to read this figure as a less concrete but no less efficacious force in the plates, a kind of deliberate, entertaining, and intensely physical will-to-fraudulence that interferes in and directs the happening itself, especially given the overlap here and in the pantomime I'll discuss later.xvi Whether we read the harlequin figure here as a satire on a specific individual or on the dangers of improper representation more generally, it is clear that the public saw an easy connection between the events of the Toft affair and the pantomimic stage.

If the public sphere becomes a dissection-chamber for the discovery of frauds and cheats, then what kind of dissection-chamber is a pantomime, itself subject to criticism and, as a quintessentially performative entertainment, nearly impossible to hold accountable?

Drawing attention to the imitativeness of the action,xvii Harlequin Turn’d Imposture dramatizes

—indeed, relishes—the act of turning imposture, the pleasures of the body become a site of uncertainty.

Ultimately, we are not meant to condemn Harlequin Toft, despite his/her being “Committed to

6 Bridewell.” Rather, we are meant to enjoy the spectacle of fungible flesh and the extravagant technologies of mimesis. As a pantomime, Harlequin Turn’d Imposture treats the human body as the primary mimetic technology. In his guise as Lun, Rich becomes a body double for Toft. When his body is laminated onto Toft’s, the crisis about to be played out becomes not only one of aesthetic value, but also interpretative instability. [in the interests of time, I will only bring up one important aspect of the pantomime's performance as indicated in the text]xviii

In Harlequin Turn’d Imposture, Rich plays the title character as a woman; throughout the text,

“he” is referred to as “she,” “his” becomes “her,” and so on. The pantomime's sense of the body and its meaning is already subject to debate and uncertainty, especially in the realm of gender as a sign of identity. In the beginning of the entertainment, we are told that Harlequin “goes first with Petticoats on”; and yet, we know the cross-dressing is just that. In fact, the “imposture” pointed to by the title— while implicitly Toft’s notorious hoax—refers primarily to Harlequin’s long-maintained camouflage, but as Toft or as Harlequin, we are never sure. At the end of the farce, after the bustling activity of the miraculous births and the quarreling doctors, Harlequin, like Toft, is imprisoned in Bridewell and exhorted to confess. Yet, unlike the happenings that played out in the newspapers of the day, in the pantomime, Harlequin’s comeuppance is clearly described as a function of his refusal to admit his identity as Harlequin. After a live rabbit was discovered in his/her chamber,

poor Harlequin was brought to Confession, but no agreeing thereto, they pull of

Harlequin’s Apparel, and discover’d her proper Habbit [sic], for which cheat poor

Harlequin was Committed to Bridewell, there to remain, till the next time it is Acted.

(8)

The “cheat” for which “poor Harlequin was Committed to Bridewell” is one of appearance, a crime of performative uncertainty.xix Of course, the missing term here is precisely our knowledge of the crime itself—both Toft's performance and that of Harlequin Turn'd Imposture. Left with only a very brief and

7 general description of what occurs on stage, as well as a few possible prints and some anecdotes, we must acknowledge the opaque transience of the body in time. Left with only the doctors' effusions of text, the newspaper accounts, and a few other documents, we must acknowledge what we don't know.

What this pantomime represents, above all, is what happens when we try to get back to the origin of the hoax, when we realize that the performance is not satirizing something stable—like the doctor's clearly imperfect knowledge—but rather staging harlequin as a sign of impossible knowledge. Harlequin

Turn’d Imposture deliberately leaves the satire open—and there harlequin will “remain, till the next time it is Acted.”xx The closure presented is far from resolute, in contrast to the authority of verse satire or the authority of print in general to give stability to meaning.

In Harlequin Britain, John O'Brien has described Harlequin as a widely recognized symbol of

“the expansion of the entertainment culture” (103) in the early eighteenth-century, an entertainment culture increasingly organized around the dynamic and transitory structures of the “media event”-- which the Toft affair certainly was. Critics of this expansion of entertainment culture often satirized it as effeminate and effeminizing, smacking of luxury and the sensuous gratifications of spectacle over the rational pleasures of the mind set down in measured verse. During their boom in the 1720s and 30s, harlequinades “both narrated and marked” the transformation of a traditional culture into a modern one

(O'Brien 95), though that modernity was not untroubled by anxieties. According to O'Brien, these entertainments—emblematized by the Faustus pantomimes during one of which the Toft harlequinade was inserted—dramatized how secular magic had “displaced superstition.” Yet, that spectacle of modernity was effected through a threatening because “wordless form” (95). Given the ease with which

Toft was not only subsumed into the discourse of harlequinade but also imagined as, herself, a harlequin figure, we might fruitfully read her as an icon of that modernity—and specifically, as an icon of the problems of interpreting performance in a world increasingly governed by print.xxi

While the media event dramatically remade her body as an effect of print, its presence in

8 harlequinade offers an opportunity to theorize some of the problems of embodiment. Performance of all kinds, as Jean Marsden has noted, “lacks a narrative voice to establish authority” (Marsden 161), making the question of satire necessarily difficult—and wordless performance doubles that lack.

Further, embattled modes of performance like harlequinade—much less the kind of modern media performance that takes shape both in print and in the spaces between, or an act like Toft's that spurs such media events—are themselves subject to critique by other established voices of authority. By taking Toft's body as not only the center but also the sign of such a media event, much like the masked, voiceless Harlequin itself, we can begin to see the instabilities of satire emerging from it. After all, what Toft's act presents us with is the very real fact that, for bodies as bodies and acts as acts, we have no interpretive index but must make one. Her act—like the pantomime that seems so natural an aesthetic form for her act—brings home the way in which, increasingly, one's being in the eighteenth- century public sphere is less defined by true or false and more by the acts and products of being. And in this new world, even an illiterate woman who had the temerity to make such a spectacle of herself can trouble the power of print to structure meaning.

9 i This is Toft’s expression, as quoted in Todd, 7. ii According to Nichols' Anecdotes of Hogarth, The Weekly Miscellany for April 19, 1740 reports that Toft was again committed to prison for “receiving stolen goods” (qtd. in Nichols 133). iii : “Last week died at Godalming in Surry, Mary Tofts, formerly noted for an imposition of breeding Rabbits.” iv The Hogarth prints I refer to here are Cunicularii; or, the Doctors in Labour (1726) [CPPS #1779] and Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism (1726) [CPPS #1785]. Cunicularii is overtly and specifically about the Toft affair, while Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism deploys the image of Toft in labor—along with several other iconic images of the period—to critique enthusiasm and zealous excess. An addendum to the Anodyne Necklace ad routinely found in London newspapers read: “Where is given Gratis, the Account of the whole Affair of the Delivery of the RABBETS, with the Pictures of the Woman herself Mary Toft, and the RABBTS [sic], and of the Persons who attended her during her pretended Deliveries.” Other ads of this sort, from the makers of the Anodyne Necklace, feature the free ephemera before mentioning the product actually on sale (see below). v Lot 2716 of the “large and curious English library of Mr. John Hutton,” auctioned in 1764, contained “Ten Tracts on the Case of Mary Tofts, the Rabbit-Breeder, by Howard, Brathwaite, Manningham, Douglas, Ahlers, and others” (104). It sold, as a handwritten note in the margin indicates, for 17s. 6d.. An earlier lot from the same auction lists a variety of other Toft affair tracts that, together, sold for 18s. 6d. (96). From this catalogue, it seems that some gentleman named Payne was collecting Toft tracts—all items contain a marginal note, perhaps of purchase, reading “Payne.” Other Toft tracts were auctioned from the libraries of Richard Rawlinson in 1757 (Baker); “the late Right Honourable Henry, Lord Viscount Colerane, the Honble Mr. Baron Clarke, the Rev. Samuel Dunster” and others in 1754 (Osbourne and Shipton); and John Murray of Sacomb, Hertfordshire, in 1749 (Corbett). In 1767, George Wagstaff sold off “several thousand scarce and valuable books, manuscripts, pamphlets, &c.,” including St. André’s Short Narrative (Wagstaff). vi Mist’s Weekly Journal, December 17, 1726. [insert notes about other personages named, especially fawkes.] vii During the month of December, 1726, London newspapers were flooded with exactly the selection of problematic offerings that so tempted the satirists and the marketers of national identity. From John Rich's infamous pantomimes at LIF (i.e. Harlequin Sorcerer and The Necromancer) and the competing entertainments at DL (i.e. Harlequin's Metamorphosis and Harlequin Doctor Faustus), all the way to Isaac Fawkes' celebrated dexterity of hand, the rope dancing acts by Mrs. Violante and the High German Gentlewoman at the (New Theater) Haymarket, and the Italian harlequin farces at the King's Theater. As the scandal wore on, Toft was consciously appropriated into the antitheatrical debates centered around illegitimate entertainment. viiiInitial research into this strange confluence of content and form suggested that there may in fact have been not one but two pantomimes generated from the affair; w ix The title page also contains a Latin motto from Juvenal's sixth satire, described by Courtney as “a blunderbuss assault on women” (13), translated as “After that Astraea withdrew by degrees to heaven, with Chastity as her comrade, the two sisters taking flight together.” x Todd, 2. Though Todd describes the pantomime as staged at Drury Lane, the title page of Harlequin Turn’d Imposture indicates rather Lincoln’s Inn Fields. It has also been suggested that Rich wrote the farce pantomime, in which case it would make more sense for it to have been performed at his theater. I would like to extend special thanks to Dr. Todd, who took time out of his busy day to mail a photocopy of this text to me after I made the appalling discovery that the original copy, housed in the special collections library of Glasgow University, had been “temporarily misplaced.” xi Curiously, outside of Todd's brief mention of the fact of the performance in Imagining Monsters, there seems to be no other sustained treatment of what strikes me as a significant coincidence. That Mary Toft's fraud, and the critical frenzy surrounding it, should become material for staged drama, much less for a harlequinade suggests a confluence of discursive threads that cannot not speak to the metatheatrical penchant of English theater in the 1720s and 30s. xii and suggest a broader, more critical position on the ambivalent aesthetic status of the form. xiiiWe will return to the image of Toft as, herself, a trickster figure in a moment, and for now I'd like to turn to its use in the narrative print. xiv Drawing at points on actual language from other printed materials, the story progresses from Toft's story about ineffectually pursuing several rabbits, to her subsequent sexualized dreams about them, to her pregnancies and the doctors' thorough and publicized examinations of her, to their scientific debates about the “preaeturnatural” quality of the rabbits that lept from her womb, to Toft's removal to the Bagnio where “flock[ed] the Town and Court, / T'improve their Judgment some, and some for Sport” (panel 10), and finally to the discovery of the fraud and its aftereffects. xv; unlike other plates documenting the event, like Hogarth's Cunicularii, the characters in The Doctors in Labour are not identified in a key. xvi In the final plate, when Toft is led off to Bridewell, the harlequin figure remains, alone, seated “upon Repenting stool, / Cursing his fate in being made a Fool” (plate 12). We can easily read the harlequin figure in the plates as an impish force instigating the event and pushing forward—perhaps the doctors, but not necessarily. In the eleventh plate, when Toft's imposture was discovered, the harlequin figure is not directly present; however, the diamond checked pattern of the floor, which recalls Lun's particolored suit, suggests that such a force nonetheless presides. xviiHarlequin Turn'd Imposture is replete with the rhetoric of seeming, and this rhetoric is doubled in the generic imperatives of the pantomime play-text. The form is so contingent upon the actor’s work that it necessarily escapes textual utterance; on the page, the pantomime is full of gaps. Paradoxically, however, these gaps do not signify absence, but rather the unspeaking presence of the body—here, both Toft's and Rich's. The rhetoric of seeming inundating Harlequin Turn’d Imposture may at first seem too commonplace to merit mention. Yet, we cannot ignore the satirical work this rhetoric of seeming accomplishes. In play-texts of most any other kind, stage directions do not foreground the “make believe” aspect of what is staged, though the audience acknowledges it as such. Here, however, we are constantly reminded of the fact that these actors “seem,” “pretend,” and act “as tho’.” In other words, we are constantly reminded of the fact that these actors are using their bodies in ways that make evident that quality of seeming, pretending, and acting “as tho’.” xviiiHarlequin Turn’d Imposture opens on Harlequin “first [in] Petticoats and pretty bigg belly'd” weeding “[a not very beautiful] a Garden” (2). This is the garden primeval, perhaps an abandoned Eden, or, tongue-in-cheek, as the sad patch of modern entertainments so grossly marred by weeds like this farce. In this garden marked by hyperactive fecundity, creativity has no boundaries, no logic, no order or rule. This is a space of bad fecundity and barren productivity. The kind of creation that marks the space of play is, much like John Rich’s dramatic creations and Mary Toft’s biological creations, somehow askew, deviant, perverse. And yet, as conscious as Rich—and Toft, as well—must have been about the embattled status of his aesthetic practice, it seems hard to read these representations of bad fecundity as purely self- satire. Self-conscious participation in a rhetoric that damns you is a time-honored oppositional tactic. In fact, I think the pantomime goes much further in destabilizing its objects of satire, largely through its self-consciousness about the inability to pin the body down, to make sense of it as itself. xix . What doesn't Harlequin agree to confess—are we to take this as a comment on Toft's confession, which may have been coerced under threat of torture? Are we to remain within the fiction presented by the stage, or are we asked to step outside the stage and acknowledge Rich’s performance as such? Is this a play about Mary Toft? A play about Harlequin? Or a play about harlequinade? What does it mean, “there to remain, till the next time it is Acted”? Are we talking about the play, Harlequin Turn’d Imposture, or about the hoax, in which case the piece concludes with a sense that these modern media events will necessarily happen again, and again? xx Indeed, the ending of this pantomime refers us once again to the popular print in which, anecdotally, it is St. Andre—not Toft—who takes on the guise of harlequin; in the twelvth panel, after the gig is up, bailiffs lead Toft off to Bridewell as Harlequin takes her place on the “Repenting Stool,” perhaps there to remain till the next time. xxi So, when confronted with the choice to translate the Toft affair into harlequinade, was the only product of the event a unidirectional satire on the doctors' gullibility, the persistence of superstition, the threat of the excessive, unnatural, fraudulent products of the feminine imagination, whether they be Toft's rabbits or Rich's pantomimes? Or is the satire less stable, like the subversive potential of the trickster figure?