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

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