Performances ‘in No Other City Possible’: Mountebanks and Theatrical Vagrancy in Seventeenth-Century London

Abstract

The English word ‘mountebank’, borrowed from the Italian montimbanco to describe a performing quack doctor, crucially defines its subject in terms of motion in space: the motion of ascending a stage. In fact, the early modern mountebank in London was a player known for many kinds of motion—geographical itinerancy, rhetorical circumlocution, and even appropriative journeys from bank to theatre to print. This article articulates the mountebank’s license to roam physically and representationally across London as a kind of theatrical vagrancy, one that begs the question not only of where theatre can exist in urban space, but how—how a physically and rhetorically unfixed performance can still be recognised by an audience as a performance. Playing with and across space, as this article argues, is perhaps one of the most crucial of the mountebank’s many ‘impossible’ feats.

KEYWORDS:

• Medical Quackery
• Street Performance
• Vagrancy
• Appropriation
• Early Modern
• Pageantry
• Theatre
• Language

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to University College London’s Department of English Language and Literature for acting as a host during my research tenure in London. My thanks also to the generous staff at the Newberry and Bodleian Libraries for their help during brief fellowship residencies, and to Andrew Gordon and Tracey Hill for convening this special issue and its formative seminar at the annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America.

Notes

1 Notable research on the spatial-social codes and affordances of the early modern stage includes: H. Turner, The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts 1580–1630 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); T. Fitzpatrick, Playwright, Space and Place in Early Modern Performance: Shakespeare and Company (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011); the special issue ‘Space on the Early Modern Stage’, edited by C. Preedy and L. Publicover for Cahiers Elisabéthains 88:1 (2015); and A. Bozio, Thinking Through Place on the Early Modern English Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). Significant work on urban London’s contextual and referential role in drama and prose has included literary/textual studies, theatrical studies of London’s mutually constitutive relationship with the stage, and the role of place in city and Restoration comedy. See, for example: L. Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); J. Dillon, Theatre, Court and City, 1595–1610: Drama and Social Space in London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and J. Sanders, The Cultural Geography of Early Modern Drama, 1620–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

2 On civic performances, see: A. Lancashire, London Civic Theatre: City Drama and Pageantry from Roman Times to 1558 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); T. Hill, Pageantry and Power: A Cultural History of the Early Modern Lord Mayor’s Show, 1585–1639 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010); and J. C. Finlayson and A. Sen (eds.), Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London (New York: Routledge, 2020). On some other forms of public spectator entertainment, see: A. McShane, ‘Political Street Songs and Singers in Seventeenth-Century England’, Renaissance Studies, 33:1 (2019), 94–118; and F. K. Barasch, ‘Shakespeare and the Puppet Sphere’, English Literary Renaissance, 34:2 (2004), 157–75.

3 For overviews of mountebank activity in England and continental Europe, see especially M. A. Katritzky, Women, Medicine and Theatre, 1500–1750: Literary Mountebanks and Performing Quacks (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); R. Porter, Health for Sale: Quackery in England, 1660–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989); and D. Gentilcore, Medical Charlatanism in Early Modern Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

4 The office of the Revels licensed mountebanks throughout the tenures of both Sir Henry Herbert and Charles Killigrew. See: J. Q. Adams (ed.), The Dramatic Records of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels, 1623–1673 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1917); and L. G. Matthews, ‘Licensed Mountebanks in Britain’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 19:1 (1964), 30–45.

5 Contemporary authors at times used labels like ‘quack’, ‘empiric’, ‘charlatan’, and ‘mountebank’ interchangeably to label medical practitioners without university or apprenticeship training. Despite flexibility in titles, seventeenth-century literature often separated out the mountebank as distinct from other kinds of empirics; it is not uncommon to see the name parsed out in lists of practitioner types, as, for example, ‘Mountebanks, Quacks, Old Wives’. G. Starkey, Natures Explication and Helmonts Vindication (London, 1658; ESTC R13346), sig. F2v.

6 T. Jordan, Pictures of Passions, Fancies, & Affections Poetically Deciphered, in Variety of Characters (London, 1641; ESTC R639), sig. D8v–E2r; [George Jones], Jones of Hatton-Garden, His Book of Cures (London, 1673; ESTC R36855), 10.

7 I use performatic following Diana Taylor to denote an act or utterance that is both theatrically significative and socially performative. See: D. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 6.

8 Titles like ‘High German’ appear in B[ritish] L[ibrary] advertisements C.112.f.9[27] for one John Schultius and BL C.112.f.9[77], among others.

9 D.G., The Harangues or Speeches of Several Famous Mountebanks in Town and Country (London, c.1715–1725; ESTC T58200). Texts spliced into the first edition of the Harangues include the broadsides ‘Pharmacopola Circumforaneus; or, The Horse Doctor’s Harangue to the Credulous Mob’ (c. 1713; B[ritish] M[useum] no. 1850,1109.3) and ‘The High German Doctor, and the English Fool’ (copy c. 1740; BM no. 1868,0808.3338), the pamphlet of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester’s character Alexander Bendo (1691), and excerpts from Jonson’s Volpone (1606), Thomas Killigrew’s Thomaso, or The Wanderer (Part 1, 1664), Aphra Behn’s The Rover (Part 2, 1681), Thomas Brown’s Letters from the Dead to the Living (Part 2, 1703), Peter Motteux’s Farewell Folly, or, The Younger the Wiser (1705), Thomas Rand’s ‘The Quack’ in Pax in Crumena (1713), and William King’s The Northern Atalantis, or, York Spy (c. 1713).

10 Peter Motteux’s The Anatomist, or the Sham Doctor, for example, has its protagonist shunned as ‘a High German Doctor—a Great Negromancer, a Conjurer’ (London, 1763; ESTC T97143), sig. C4r; Thomas Shadwell’s Bury-Fair shows a Jack-Pudding advertising ‘Pimper le Pimp, the High German Juggler’ (London, 1689; ESTC R18450), 24. On the transnational work of performers across England and continental Europe, see especially R. Henke and E. Nicholson (eds.), Transnational Exchange in Early Modern Theater (London: Routledge, 2016); and M. A. Katritzky and P. Drábek (eds.), Transnational Connections in Early Modern Theatre (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019).

11 D. Turner, Apologia Chyrurgica (London, 1695; ESTC R219447), sig. B3r.

12 Circumforaneous could refer more generally to peddling: Richard Huloet’s Dictionarie glosses the term as a ‘[c]arier of tales about in markettes, and lyke common places’ (London, 1572; ESTC S119246). Authors sometimes therefore distinguished the mountebank as a pharmacopola circumforaneus or medicus circumforaneus, as in later seventeenth-century glossaries compiled by Charles Hoole (1649), George Townesend (1675), and George Meriton (1685)

13 In the records of the comitia censorum for 3 October 1657 concerning ‘Johannes Puntaeus’, BL Sloane MS. 3914, f.33r.

14 J. Hart, Klinike, or The Diet of the Diseased (London, 1633; ESTC S126803), sig. a2r; F. Quarles, The Virgin Widow (London, 1649; ESTC R21344), sig. E2v.

15 Quoted in D. H. Sacks, ‘London’s Dominion: The Metropolis, the Market Economy, and the State’, in L. C. Orlin (ed.), Material London, ca.1600 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 20.

16 N. Levine, Practicing the City: Early Modern London on Stage (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 3; see also I. Archer, ‘Material Londoners?’, in L.C. Orlin (ed.), Material London, 174–92.

17 J. Dillon, ‘Clerkenwell and Smithfield as a Neglected Home of London Theater’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 71:1 (2008), 115–35.

18 G. Thomson, A Letter Sent to Mr. Henry Stubbe (London, 1672; ESTC R32804), sig. C4r.

19 W. Thornbury, ‘Smithfield and Bartholomew Fair’, in Old and New London: Volume 2 (London: Cassell, Petter & Galpin, 1878), 347.

20 Ibid.

21 C. Merret, The Accomplisht Physician, the Honest Apothecary, and the Skilful Chyrurgeon (London, 1670; ESTC R26201), sig. Bv.

22 A. O. Faber, preface to Paradoxon De Morbo Gallico, trans. J. Kauffman (London, 1662; ESTC R200448), sig. C3v.

23 Faber’s associations with English Quakers led to an interest in religious prophecies regarding papacy, as seen in his XII Visions of Stephen Melish a Germane (London, 1663; ESTC R217795).

24 M. A. Everett Green (ed.), ‘Vol. XCI. January 20–31, 1664’, in Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series: Charles II, 1663–1634 (London: H. M. Stationary Office, 1862), 461.

25 F. H. Blackburne Daniell and F. Bickley (eds.), ‘1671’, in Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series: Charles II, Addenda 1660–1685 (London: H. M. Stationary Office, 1939), 344.

26 The Newdigate newsletter reports that the mountebank’s zany impersonated the Earl, pretending that he ‘was greatly in hast to goe into Holland & other Countreys to practise his Intreagues there alsoe’. Folger Library MS L.c.1327, f.2r-v.

27 See British Library adverts C.112.f.9[78]; BL 551.a.32[163], BL C.112.f.9[6], and BL 551.a.32[116]; and 551.a.32[3]. On the formulae of mountebank handbills, see R. Mullini, Healing Words: The Printed Handbills of Early Modern London Quacks (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2015); and my forthcoming article ‘“Printed follyes”: Mountebanks and the Performance of Ambivalence within the Archive’, part of the special issue ‘Performance Beyond Drama’, eds. I. Murakami and D. Sherman in The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies.

28 British Library C.112.f.9[4], BL C.112.f.9[104], and BL C.112.f.9[83]; BL C.112.f.9[94].

29 British Library C.112.f.9[36].

30 BL C.112.f.9[124]; BL 551.a.32[181].

31 L. C. Orlin, ‘Temporary Lives in London Lodgings’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 71:1 (2008), 231.

32 J. C. Jeaffreson (ed.), ‘Middlesex Sessions Rolls: 1687’, in Middlesex County Records, vol. 4 (London: Chapman & Hall for the Middlesex County Record Society, 1892), 312–21. On Covent Garden’s construction and reputation, see: A. Zucker, The Places of Wit in Early Modern English Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); and J. Sanders, ‘Writing the City: Emergent Spaces’, in The Cultural Geography of Early Modern Drama, 1620–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 213–35.

33 W. Harris, Pharmacologia Anti-Empirica (London, 1683; ESTC R688), sig. X8r.

34 R. Head, Proteus Redivivus (London, 1675; ESTC R13684), sig. P7v.

35 British Library 551.a.32[34].

36 British Library C.112.f.9[36]. On the difficulty of navigating London’s overwhelming density of text and image on its streets, see: A. Gordon, ‘“If My Sign Could Speak”: The Signboard and the Visual Culture of Early Modern London’, Early Theatre, 8:1 (2005), 35–51.

37 British Library C.112.f.9[148]. Records of Russell’s licensing can be found in British Library MS 19256, fol. 69r; M. A. Everett Green (ed.), Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series: Charles II, 1667 (London: H.M. Stationary Office, 1866), 431; and Extracts from the Court Books of the City of Norwich, 1666–1688 (Norwich: Printed for the Norwich Archaeological Society, 1905), 129.

38 J. Pontaeus, ‘To All the Noble and Warlick Nation of Great Brittain’ (London, 2 April 1656; ESTC R219498), sig. Ar.

39 British Library 551.a.32[21]; BL C.112.f.9[143].

40 British Library C.112.f.9[77].

41 See: J. Walker, Site Unscene: The Offstage in English Renaissance Drama (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017); and T. Fitzpatrick, Playwright, Space and Place in Early Modern Performance: Shakespeare and Company (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011).

42 F. Quarles, The Virgin Widow, act 4, sig. G2v; T. Brown, Letters from the Dead to the Living, Part 2 (London, 1703; ESTC N4159), sigs. C1r-C2r.

43 J. Taylor, Three Weekes, Three Daies, and Three Houres Observations and Travel (London, 1617; ESTC S118268), sig. D3v.

44 Anon., The French Mountebank, or An Operator Fit for these Present Times (London, 1643; ESTC R11335), sig. A3r; W. Phillips, A New Fairing for The Merrily Disposed: Or, the Comical History of the Famous Merry Andrew (London, 1688; ESTC R181776), sig. Er.

45 J. Lacy, The Dumb Lady, or, The Farrier Made Physician (London, 1672; ESTC R7295), 70.

46 P. Motteux, ‘The Mountebank, or, The Humours of the Fair, a Musical Interlude’, in Farewell Folly (London, 1707; ESTC T68215), 65.

47 Defoe, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (London, 1719; ESTC T72273), sig. Y3v; L. Williams, ‘The Manchu Invasion of Britain: Nomadic Resonances in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Chinoiserie Aesthetics, and Material Culture’, in C. Gallien and L. Niayesh (eds.), Eastern Resonances in Early Modern England: Receptions and Transformations from the Renaissance to the Romantic Period (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 115–35.

48 J. S., The Starr-Prophet Anatomiz’d & Dissected (London, 1675; ESTC R183116), sig. C1v.

49 T. Brown, Letters from the Dead to the Living, Part 3, 2nd ed. (London, 1707; ESTC T52781), sig. O1r-O1v.

50 Although mountebanks are not featured in the major cony-catching corpus, there is abundant sympathy between mountebanks and other kinds of rogues known for equivocation, vagrancy, ambivalence, peddling, and urban removal. See: C. Dionne and S. Mentz, (eds.), Rogues and Early Modern English Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004).

51 S. Ward, Vindiciæ Academiarum (Oxford, 1654; ESTC R12478), sig. B1v.

52 J. Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. William Bray (London: J. M Dent & Sons, 1920), 359.

53 Harris, Pharmacologia Anti-Empirica, sig. Y1v.

54 Turner, Apologia Chyrurgica, sig. C4v.

55 Newes out of the West: or, The Character of a Mountebank (London, 1647; ESTC R12979), sig. C3r.

56 Merret, The Accomplisht Physician, sig. B1v. Patricia Fumerton has shown how vagrants often took on this kind of ‘displaced labor’—undertaking illegal crafts, changing trades, or practicing multiple trades at once—for which reason vagrant livelihoods demanded ‘open-ended role-playing’. See: P. Fumerton, ‘London’s Vagrant Economy: Making Space for “Low” Subjectivity’, in L. C. Orlin (ed.), Material London, 258; and Patricia Fumerton, Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

57 From Pope’s Dunciad Variorum 1n2, quoted in C. Wall, The Literary and Cultural Spaces of Restoration London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 127.

58 For more on mountebank characters’ defiance of narrative norms, see: Sarah Elizabeth Mayo, ‘Sexual Healing: Medicine, Pleasure, and Mirth in Mountebank Representations’, Shakespeare Studies, 49 (2021), 167–74.

59 T. Thomas, The Life of the Late Famous Comedian, Jo. Hayns (London, 1701; ESTC T99217), sig. F2r-F2v.

60 An anonymous Comparison between the Two Stages [Drury Lane and Lincoln’s Inn Fields] declared Penkethman ‘the Flower of … Bartholomew-Fair, and the Idol of the Rabble’ (London, 1702; ESTC T113793), 199. On the connections of comic actor-singers to fairs, see: L. Hughes, A Century of English Farce (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1956); and K. Lowerre, Music and Musicians on the London Stage, 1695–1705 (London: Routledge, 2016).

61 Diverting Post, 20–27 January 1705, issue 14; the songs reappear throughout the eighteenth century in the Wit and Mirth and Tea-Table miscellanies and in a songsheet etching (British Museum no. Gg,4F.86).

62 W. Andrews (ed.), The Doctor in History, Literature, Folk-Lore, Etc. (Hull: W. Andrews & Co, 1896), 144–45.

63 On the use of ‘mountebank’ as a derogatory term, see especially: S. Knight, ‘“He Is Indeed a Kind of Scholler-Mountebank”: Academic Liars in Jacobean Satire’, in M. Crane, R. Raiswell, and M. Reeves (eds.), Shell Games: Studies in Scams, Frauds, and Deceits (1300–1650) (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2004), 59–80.

Additional information

Funding

Support from the Social Science Research Council through an International Dissertation Research Fellowship made much of the research in this article possible.

Notes on contributors

Sarah Mayo

Sarah Mayo received her PhD in English with a focus on early modern literary studies from the University of Georgia, where she specialised in the history of science, medicine, and occult philosophy. Her current research explores the presentations and representations of mountebanks within England and the ways in which the figure navigated and exploited contemporary medical anxieties in performance.