0 I''V 'Pc II SPECTACULAR DISAPPEARANCES  Spectacular Disappearances CELEBRITY AND PRIVACY, 1696-1801 Julia H. Fawcett University of Michigan Press Ann Arbor Copyright @ 2016 by Julia H. Fawcett All rights reserved This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 1o8 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publisher. Published in the United States of America by the University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America O Printed on acid-free paper 2019 2018 2017 2016 4 3 2 1 A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-0-472-11980-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-472-12180-9 (e-book) ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I have often wondered if my interest in authors who wrote themselves in order to obscure themselves stems from my own anxieties about the permanence of the printed word-my own longing (that I imagine everyone shares?) for words that linger on the page for a moment only and then-miraculously, mercifully-disappear before their inadequacies can be exposed. I think I will always harbor this anxiety, but I have been blessed with mentors, colleagues, friends, and family members who have known how to couch their criticism in kindness and without whom I could never have summoned the courage to keep this work up or to set these words down. The germs for this book's ideas began many years ago, when, as an under- graduate at Harvard, I stumbled somewhat accidentally (to fulfill a require- ment) into Lynn Festa's course on "Sex and Sensibility during the Enlighten- ment." Thank goodness for requirements. That course is one of the reasons I decided, years later, to study the eighteenth century. I owe a debt, too, to Beth Lyman, my undergraduate thesis advisor and the first to introduce me to performance theory. I arrived at Yale believing I would study Gertrude Stein, and I often joke that I decided to study the eighteenth century because that's what all the cool kids at Yale were doing. People who knew those kids know how infectious their enthusiasm for their subject can be, and how much truth there is in the joke. My advisors, Joe Roach and Jill Campbell, reminded me of the kind of scholar I wanted to be. By asking generative questions, Jill helped me to write the book I was trying to write, and everything I was struggling to say in early drafts she has helped me to say better. Joe's ebullient personality, sense of humor, and limitless generosity constantly remind me why I got into this profession in the first place. His love for the literature he reads, the perfor- mances he watches, and the job he does (not to mention the Marlon Brando impression with which he lightened the mood at my prospectus defense) is infectious and has sustained me even when the obstacles seem insurmount- able and the rewards small. My professors Ala Alryyes, Wendy Lee, Claude Rawson, Katie Trumpener, and Elliott Visconsi offered me advice and support in the classroom and out- vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS side of it, on the dissertation and beyond. My fellow graduate students Dan Gustafson, James Horowitz, Daniel Jump, Heather Klemann, Hilary Menges, Lina Moe, Nichole Wright, and especially Andy Heisel provided a support- ive community at and between our Eighteenth-Century Working Group ses- sions. I had the good fortune in graduate school to feel welcome within not one field, but two; I owe gratitude as well to the Performance Studies Working Group and especially to Joe Cermatori, Emily Coates, Miriam Felton-Dansky, Jason Fitzgerald, Jacob Gallagher-Ross, Chris Grobe, Dominika Laster, Paige McGinley, Madison Moore, John Muse, Alex Ripp, and Ariel Watson. Marc Robinson, Katie Trumpener, and Brian Walsh went above and beyond the call of duty by reading and commenting on substantial portions of the dissertation-in-progress. So, too, did Linda Peterson, whose scholarship on Mary Robinson and whose cheerful support undoubtedly helped to make this project what it is. Sadly, Linda passed away as this book was in production; she will be greatly missed. My original cohort at Yale could not have been more supportive: a spe- cial thank you to Liz Appel, Sam Cross, David Currell, Mahni Ghorashi, Lau- ra Miles, Fiona Robinson, Jesse Schotter, and Steve Tedeschi. When they weren't available, I found an extremely welcoming (and hilarious) adoptive cohort in Sam Fallon, Len Gutkin, Matt Hunter, Andrew Karas, Tom Koe- nigs, Sebastian Lecourt, Sarah Mahurin, Tessie Prakas, Natalie Prizel, Aaron Ritzenberg, Justin Sider, and Joe Stadolnik, Thanks, too, to Erica Sayers and Ruben Roman, who never ran out of Hershey's kisses. The intellectual communities that have supported this project extend far beyond Yale. At Stanford, where I spent a year as a visiting student, John Bender, Blakey Vermuele, and Peggy Phelan welcomed me into their class- rooms, their colloquia, and their conversations. Nathalie Phillips, James Wood, and especially Doug Jones and Derek Miller were generous with their thoughts, their time, and their friendship. These communities include, too, those that cross institutional boundaries but are sustained by Joe Roach's influence and by the shared strangeness of studying performance within literature departments. I am especially grate- ful to Emily Anderson, Misty Anderson, Paula Backscheider, Jason Shaffer, and Stuart Sherman for their thoughtful comments on the work in progress. Conversations with and talks by Robin Bernstein, Laura Engel, Elaine Mc- Girr, Felicity Nussbaum, Nick Salvato, and Sharon Setzer added greatly to my understanding of my topic in particular and literary and performance studies in general. Joe's dedication in using a Mellon Foundation grant to fund Inter- disciplinary Performance Studies at Yale gave performance studies scholars ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Vii in New Haven a community within and outside of our home departments. The program also gave me a postdoctoral fellowship that allowed me to con- tinue my research after graduating, and for that, too, I am extremely grateful. I have been fortunate to discover a wonderful institutional home at Ry- erson University in Toronto, and I owe a deep gratitude to my colleagues in the English Department-especially Jason Boyd, Jennifer Burwell, Dennis Denisoff, Wendy Francis, Irene Gammel, Morgan Holmes, Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Nima Naghibi, Luanne MacDonnell, Andrew O'Malley, Dale Smith, Sophie Thomas, and Monique Tschofen-as well as beyond the English Department-especially Ben Barry and Peggy Shannon. Colleen Derkatch and Laura Fisher deserve special thanks for their support, their humor, their fashion advice, and their wide-ranging knowledge of Toronto cocktail bars. In addition, I have benefitted from my proximity, in Toronto, to several other great universities and their faculty members' and graduate students' gener- osity and time. Special thanks to Brian Corman, Simon Dickie, Alex Hernan- dez, Tom Keymer, Laura Levin, Danny O'Quinn, Fiona Ritchie, Terry Robin- son, David Francis Taylor, Marlis Schweitzer, and Katie Zien. Thanks, also, to the members of the Toronto Performance Studies Working Group and the Eighteenth-Century Working Group, both of which have provided a rich in- tellectual community for me in Toronto. A two-week stint at the Mellon School for Theater and Performance at Harvard University at a critical moment allowed me better to put the issues I address in this book into context. The members of my cohort that year were insightful and inspiring. I owe a special thanks to Martin Puchner for found- ing the School, to Rebecca Kastleman for making sure it ran so smoothly, and to Andrew Sofer for his invaluable comments on my manuscript. LeAnn Fields, my editor at Michigan, has provided a home not only for this book but for so many like it that don't fit neatly into categories of per- formance studies, theater history, or literary studies. The field wouldn't be what it is today without her vision and support. I am grateful, as well, to my anonymous readers, and to Christopher Dreyer, Marcia LaBrenz, and the entire staff of the University of Michigan Press. My fabulous research assistant, Kate Jefford, worked diligently and quickly to prepare the man- uscript for publication; and my indexer, Daniel Gundlach, approached his task with endless patience and admirable diligence. An essay based on parts of Chapter 1 appeared as "The Over-Expressive Celebrity and the Deformed King: Recasting the Spectacle as Subject in Colley Cibber's Richard III," PMLA, 126.4 (October 2011): 950-965. Parts of Chapter 3 were published as "Creat- ing Character in 'Chiaro Oscuro': Sterne's Celebrity, Cibber's Apology, and the viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Life of Tristram Shandy," The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 53.2 (Summer 2012): 141-162. I appreciate the thoughtful comments and careful attentions of both journals' readers and editors, particularly Jean Howard, Patricia Yaeger, and Nancy Vickers. Fellow members of the Yale Eighteenth-/ Nineteenth Century Colloquium and the Yale British Studies Colloquium as well as of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the Ameri- can Society for Theater Research, American Theater in Higher Education, and Performance Studies International commented on and influenced this work in its early stages. I am grateful to the archivists, curators, and staffs of the libraries where I conducted much of the research for this project: the Beinecke Library at Yale University, the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale University (especially Su- san Odell Walker and Cynthia Roman), Yale University Libraries, Stanford University Libraries, Belmont Public Libraries, the New York Public Library, Ryerson University Libraries, and the Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library at the University of Toronto. Thanks, also, to the staffs of the coffee shops that allowed me to sit for long hours with laptop and library books: Blue State and Booktraders (New Haven), Vineapple (Brooklyn), and Seven Grams and Ezra's Pound (Toronto). All of these places and crossings have introduced me to countless friends and confidantes whose influence over this work is indirect but no less import- ant for being so. In Toronto and beyond: Tushar Arora, Jo Baron, Teresa Be- jan, Amanda Hollingworth, Sameer Farooq, Mandy Goodwin, Jess Prince, Ali Qadeer, Belinda Schubert, Lee Slinger, Penny Smith, Morgan Sonderegger, Nick Stang, Heather Stewart, Erin Stropes, Anna Treusch, David Weinfeld, Isla Whitford, Nathan Whitford, Brad Wong, my Y Ladies and my friends at the Ramsden dog park; and especially the Cesare-Schotzko family (Nikki, Da- vid, Leo, and Duncan), Kavitha Krishnamurthy, Ronit Rubinstein, and Larry Switzky. In New York: Alison Cherry, Colleen Clark, Josh DeFlorio, Colleen Egan, Mike Hines, Wally Novacich-DeFlorio, and the Novacich family. In New Haven: Priyanka Anand, Cynthia Chang, Lucy Currell, Ben Siracusa Hillman and Betty Luther Hillman, Jamie O'Leary, Francis Song, Nikki Strong, and Owen Wolfram. In the Bay area: Davey Hathorn and Kathy Lee, the Ghorashi family, and especially Jeff Lamont. And in Cambridge: Laura Perry, Tess Mul- len, Julia Reischel, and Heather Thomason for realizing women could run a theater company (imagine!) and the Six-Headed Monster (Ellen Ching, Can- dice Cho, Christine Mulvey, Lauren Sirois, and Laura Yilmaz) for pretty much everything. Thank you. Finally, there are a few friends missing from the lists above because they ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iX transcend all categories and have been instrumental to this project at multiple stages of its development. Sarah Novacich, Nathalie Wolfram, and Molly Far- rell: thanks for lunches, for laughter, and for flowers; for reading everything from prospectus to page proofs and from edits to emails; for THE VOICE, for takeout, for early mornings and late nights, and for Thursdays. And then, of course, to my family: Robert and Christy Fawcett, Claire Fawcett, and Scout Fawcett: thanks for teaching me the words to everything (and for forgiving me even when I got them wrong).  CONTENTS Introduction 1 CHAPTER 1. The Celebrity Emerges as the Deformed King: Richard III, the King of the Dunces, and the Overexpression of Englishness 23 CHAPTER 2. The Growth of Celebrity Culture: Colley Cibber, Charlotte Charke, and the Overexpression of Gender 61 CHAPTER 3. The Canon of Print: Laurence Sterne and the Overexpression of Character 98 CHAPTER 4. The Fate of Overexpression in the Age of Sentiment: David Garrick, George Anne Bellamy, and the Paradox of the Actor 136 CHAPTER 5. The Memoirs of Perdita and the Language of Loss: Mary Robinson's Alternative to Overexpression 173 Coda: Overexpression and Its Legacy 206 NOTES 215 BIBLIOGRAPHY 245 INDEX 263  Introduction How can the modern individual maintain control over his or her self- representation when the whole world seems to be watching? This question is a familiar one amid the early twenty-first century's elab- orate architecture of twenty-four-hour newsrooms, chat rooms, and inter- rogation rooms. But in the pages that follow I argue that the question first emerged in the streets and on the stages of Restoration and eighteenth- century London, a city with its own elaborate architecture of playhouses, cof- feehouses, clubs, pubs, and print shops-and its own anxieties about privacy and the modern subject. It was, after all, in the years following the English Civil War that newspapers sprang up to document and to direct the daily life of urbanites, that the criminal justice system was reconceived as an institu- tion not to punish but to monitor the nation's subjects, and that mere actors and actresses-people with nothing to their names but the willingness to submit themselves to an ever-hungrier public gaze-began to live like kings and queens. And as this question began to circulate with more urgency, I will argue, it was England's early celebrities-the comedian Colley Cibber; his cross-dressing daughter Charlotte Charke; the preacher-turned-novelist Lau- rence Sterne; the pioneering actor David Garrick; his protegee George Anne Bellamy; and the actress, poet, and royal courtesan Mary Robinson-who first proposed an answer. The answer that they proposed and that the rest of this book will elucidate suggests a new way of approaching and understanding eighteenth-century descriptions and performances of the self-specifically, those descriptions and performances that resist the well-known narrative of how the self was made modern. These include The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gen- tleman, which Ian Watt famously excluded from his seminal work The Rise of the Novel (1957) by dismissing it as "not so much a novel as the parody of a 2 I SPECTACULAR DISAPPEARANCES novel."1 They include, also, the actor's autobiographies (as well as the auto- biographical performances surrounding them) that take the form of a novel but assume the reader's knowledge of the stage, thereby disturbing the oth- erwise neat division that previous scholarship has recognized between novel- istic and theatrical selves. Since Watt, much of this scholarship has been con- cerned with tracing the individual's emergence as "essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities," in C. B. Macpherson's words2-or, in Dror Wahrman's, with tracking precisely when and how England's writers, readers, and spectators first began to construe and to create the modern subject in terms of "a very particular understanding of personal identity, one that pre- supposes an essential core of selfhood characterized by psychological depth, or interiority, which is the bedrock of unique, expressive identity."3 Implicit in this definition, as Wahrman and others have pointed out, is the assump- tion that this "unique, expressive identity" is a consummation devoutly to be wished-a mark of modernity that, sometime between the Renaissance and Romanticism, all Britons began to strive for but only certain characters (and certain literary genres) could achieve.4 Yet it is striking how many writers during the long eighteenth century evince a deep anxiety about the vulnerability and even the dispossession facing anyone who displayed a "unique, expressive identity" to a reading or viewing public. Pamela's epistolary self comes into being only when her de- fining trait-her virtue-is threatened by Mr. B's advances; Alexander Pope's declarations of himself as the author and the owner of his poetry betray his awareness of the price of owning up to his words and bearing the criticism that ownership entails;5 Mr. Spectator introduces himself to his readers in his first issue by warning them not to inquire too much into his identity, "for the greatest Pain I can suffer, is the being talked to, and being stared at."6 Whether fictional (like Pamela), historical (like Pope) or pseudonymous (like Mr. Spectator), these characters declare the desire to be known at the same time that they betray their or their authors' apprehensions about the loss of control over self-definition to which knowability subjects them. The celebrities whose stories fill the chapters of this book lament this loss most keenly. Consider, for instance, the actor Colley Cibber, who rose to national prominence after his comedy Love's Last Shift became the runaway hit of 1696. Cibber went on to publish the first secular autobiography in En- glish, An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, in 1740-only to admit within its pages his discomfort at the attention his fame had garnered him: "Against blind Malice, and staring Inhumanity, whatever is upon the Stage, has no INTRODUCTION 3 Defence!" he writes. "There . . . I stood helpless, and expos'd, to whatever they might please to load, or asperse me with."7 Cibber's complaint articu- lates a paradox that the other examples merely suggest: by defining himself clearly and legibly, as this new ideology of selfhood seemed to require and as his career onstage demanded, Cibber left himself "helpless, and expos'd" to his spectators' and readers' opinions, misinterpretations, and manipulations of the identity he had made known. This paradox suggests, contrary to the prevailing narrative of the individual's emergence, that eighteenth-century writers, performers, and citizens had as much to gain from unmaking as they did from making the modern self. But how might a modern self be unmade? How might an eighteenth- century man or woman perform the legibility that guaranteed his or her cit- izenship within the ideology of "unique, expressive identity" while shielding himself or herself from the public gaze that threatened his or her control over that identity's expression? Though pressing for Pamela, Pope, and Mr. Spectator, such questions were even more pressing for celebrities like Cib- ber, whose careers demanded that they live their lives in the public eye. In this book, I chart these celebrities' responses to such questions by exploring the unique but related strategies each developed to paralyze their publics' attempts to decipher their private selves. By understanding why and how ce- lebrities deployed these strategies, we can better understand not only the threats that the ideology of modern selfhood posed for those engaged in it, but also why characters who seemed to break all the rules of this ideology nonetheless enjoyed such popularity in eighteenth-century culture. And we can understand, too, the possibilities for self-representation within a modern world where someone always seems to be watching. Though there are important differences between the self-representations I will examine here, my contention is that all have a common ancestor in a strategy of performance that I am calling overexpression. This strategy allows its practitioners at once to invite and to disrupt the public gaze, paradoxi- cally, by enhancing or exaggerating the features through which they might be recognized and evaluated by their spectators. An overexpressive perfor- mance appears at first glance to be an unskilled or overwrought attempt at self-definition. It employs the same signifiers that eighteenth-century audi- ences had already begun to regard as clear indications of selfhood, as mod- ern assumptions about disability, gender, sexuality, nationality, and identity were taking shape to sort the nation's bodies and characters into increasingly rigid taxonomies.8 Employing this established vocabulary, an overexpressive 4 I SPECTACULAR DISAPPEARANCES performance secures the spectator's interest by seducing him or her into be- lieving that the celebrity's true identity will be legible to anyone attempting to interpret it.9 Upon closer examination, however, an overexpressive self-representation seems impossibly excessive and spectacular. It employs costumes, gestures, or vocabularies that draw attention to themselves: misspelled words or un- grammatical sentences; wigs, hats, and suits so large they seem to dwarf their wearers-or the famous black page of Tristram Shandy, which, as Thomas Keymer has written, might represent not the absence of words but an abun- dance of them, reproduced over and over until their meanings are no longer available to us.10 As this last example suggests, the very excesses of the over- expressive performance transform it from a self-representation that invites to a self-representation that frustrates its spectators' attempts to interpret it. These excesses work not to obscure the self, but rather to exaggerate and thus destabilize the language through which the self is thought to be revealed. Cibber's staging of his own celebrity and Sterne's "caperings around" his semiautobiographical Tristram Shandy offer the most straightforward examples of overexpression, presenting subjects so comprehensively as to make them incomprehensible.11 I begin with Cibber as the first celeb- rity to have produced his own autobiography; and I have chosen the five celebrities who follow him in this study based on the availability of their autobiographical materials, whether printed books or the printed pages of the periodicals they so carefully manipulated, and on the relationship of these autobiographical materials to each other.12 Celebrities with few- er extant autobiographical materials-such as Thomas Betterton or Anne Bracegirdle-or those with a more tenuous connection to those studied here-such as the preacher and autobiographer George Whitefield-I leave to other studies.13 I focus instead on the autobiographical performances of Cibber and Sterne and those who directly follow them and who, as I argue in subsequent chapters of this book, pay tribute to their earlier brand of overexpression without reproducing it exactly. For David Garrick, this means dismantling the sentimental signs through which his audience distinguished between the sincere self and the exagger- ated one, between true emotion and the actor's performance of it. For the women of my study-Charlotte Charke, George Anne Bellamy, and Mary Robinson-adapting overexpression is even more complicated. Charke and Bellamy, I argue, attempt to adapt their male predecessors' strategies of overexpression-quite pointedly, in the case of Charke, who situates her 1755 autobiography as a response to her father's. Time and again, however, their INTRODUCTION 1 5 overexpressions fail to disrupt the judgments of their spectators, who read even their most exaggerated performances as earnest (if ineffective) attempts to express themselves, where these same spectators had read their male col- leagues' performances as deliberately perplexing. Mary Robinson, the final celebrity of my study, addresses this tendency by turning overexpression on its head, exaggerating not a certain aspect of her persona but rather that persona's conspicuous absence from the poems, portraits, and performances that promise to reveal it. In this her autobiographical performances resemble less the black page of Tristram Shandy than its white page, which, like Rob- inson's self-representations, invites the reader to fill in its blanks and thus transforms that reader from critic to collaborator. If we cannot read Robin- son's performances as reproductions of Cibber's and Sterne's overexpressive strategy, then, we might read them as responses to this strategy. Despite their differences, all of these performances share the tendency to break-in the very same breath that they make-elaborate promises to reveal their subjects' secrets. By describing them as part of a single narrative, I mean not to elide their particularities but rather to emphasize the ways in which they all emerge out of a single question: that is, how might a public figure protect his or her privacy? It is a question that few studies have asked, despite a growing interest in celebrity studies in recent years. The notable exceptions are Kristina Straub's Sexual Suspects, which illuminates how the conventions and discourse of the theater conflicted with emerging ideologies of gender and sexuality, forcing celebrities into the roles of "sexual suspects"; and Catherine Gallagher's Nobody's Story, which explores the print strategies that women writers developed to protect their personae while selling their stories. Both works offer important insights into how the public exposure demanded of literary and theatrical careers clashed with eighteenth-century gender norms, particularly those that limited women to the private sphere. Yet by focusing their discussions on gender, these scholars do not touch on the extent to which female celebrities adopted, adapted, and responded to the strategies of their male predecessors (in Gallagher's case) or the many aspects of identity beyond gender and sexuality that these performances explored (in Straub's). Studying these strategies in concert with each other, while paying close attention to their particularities, allows us to understand the development of such autobiographical performances as a literary/theatri- cal tradition-and one that runs counter to the rise of the novel as instilling the desire for a publicly known and publicly knowable self. Like a spotlight so brilliant it is blinding-or like Tristram Shandy's black page, so full of ink it cannot be read-the self-representations that these six celebrities developed 6 I SPECTACULAR DISAPPEARANCES over the course of the long eighteenth century met their public's demands to stare while paralyzing that public's power to interpret. The "expression" implied by the term overexpression is a mere illusion, of course; overexpressive performers don't reveal onstage a stable, interior self expressed from the inside out. Instead, they adopt the vocabulary that mo- dernity has come to associate with that interior self to deploy what Felicity Nussbaum calls an "Interiority Effect"-the illusion of interiority through the clever manipulation of surfaces.14 But unlike the performances that Nussbaum discusses, overexpressive performances present the illusion of interiority only to expose it as an illusion. When the spectator heeds the per- former's invitation to investigate the private self supposedly lurking beneath the public performance, overexpression prevents him or her from discovering anything but another layer of clothing, another page of preamble, another surface passing for self. The term overexpression also evokes overwriting-a word that implies ex- cess at the same time that it suggests erasure: to overwrite a text is to include too many details or words or obnoxiously obvious statements of argumen- tation, but to overwrite a file is to erase it.15 I use the term overexpression instead of overwriting, however, to emphasize that the celebrities I discuss deployed this strategy far beyond the confines of the printed page. Crucially, the autobiographical performances I examine are not limited to books; they include several forms and genres that traditional studies tend to segregate or to disregard altogether-from performances in print (playscripts, poems, portraits and novels as well as autobiographies) to printed ephemera (puffs, prologues, caricatures, and other publicity stunts) to the ephemeral perfor- mances of self staged on the streets of London before whatever impromptu audience happened to wander by. In this way they mirror and manipulate ce- lebrity culture itself, which similarly depends upon an audience's willingness to read across multiple forms of self-creation. The encomiums and epistles to unnamed lovers scattered throughout Mary Robinson's poems, for instance, assume the readers' familiarity with the roles she made famous onstage and with the part she acted in life; and David Garrick's 1749 performance as Ben- edick in Much Ado about Nothing held special meaning for spectators who had read in the gossip columns of his recent marriage to the German singer Eva Marie Veigel. When I refer to these self-stagings and life-writings as autobiographical performances, I am relying on the broadened definition of this word that per- formance studies has introduced: performance is not only a fiction presented on a stage but also an action executed on the street or even within the home. INTRODUCTION 7 I use it not as an antonym to print but rather as a term that refers to the in- teractions between a variety of media, as a theatrical performance consists of printed scripts and playbills, material props and costumes, and built sets and auditoriums as well as the live bodies and contingent reactions of actors and audience members. As performance studies reminds us, however, such per- formances are difficult to access or arrest in their own time-and even more difficult to recover three hundred years after the event.16 The ephemeral na- ture of the performances I most want to examine complicates my methodolo- gy; since I can't hear the drawled accent that Colley Cibber adopted as the fop or witness the swagger of Laurence Sterne on his first entrance into London, I must piece together what I can from the prints, letters, reviews, playbills, puffs, autobiographies, and fictions that these performers left behind. Though I am painfully aware of the limitations of this approach, I am also eager to resist the tendency in eighteenth-century scholarship to segregate cultural production by genre, so that those who study fiction rarely exam- ine drama, and those who study theater and performance must apologize for their subjects in a field so dominated, in the past fifty years, by debates over the rise of the novel. Such divisions in eighteenth-century studies replicate the divisions affecting cultural studies in general, in which those who study the "live arts" in performance reject the conservatism of those who study what they describe (by implication) to be a dead or dying discipline, and those who describe themselves as literary historians reject what they see as the ahistoricism of performance studies. This segregation seems especially lim- ited within eighteenth-century studies since it diverges from how people ex- perienced the era, often spending their mornings reading letters and novels only to find themselves at the theater by the late afternoon. Recently, several scholars (including Joseph Roach, Felicity Nussbaum, Stuart Sherman, Emily Hodgson Anderson, and Misty Anderson) have demonstrated the important insights we might gain when we study eighteenth-century theater in dialogue with other forms. In following their examples, I share Peggy Phelan's belief: "If we lose the intimacy of the connection between literature and perfor- mance, we diminish something vital in and between them."" In addition to an exploration of the paradox of modern selfhood, this study is also an attempt to answer Phelan's plea that we resuture the con- nections between literature and performance, despite the methodological difficulties of doing so. By combining the close-reading methods at the heart of literary studies and theater history with performance theory's atten- tion to the contingencies of the live event, I hope to explain how these six eighteenth-century celebrities used their spectacular performances and their 8 I SPECTACULAR DISAPPEARANCES overwritten pages to evade their spectators' attempts to interpret them- and, moreover, why they should want to. For although the vulnerability of the expressed identity was a problem shared by many of England's citizens in the eighteenth century, it was a problem identified most articulately by En- gland's celebrities. I want to take a moment to discuss the characteristics and context that make the celebrities of the long eighteenth century such unique and useful case studies for understanding this paradox of modern selfhood, before turning to a passage from Cibber's Apology that deftly articulates the strategy I am calling overexpression and that will guide our explorations of autobiographical performance throughout this book. THE RISE OF THE CELEBRITY IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND Several related cultural trends emerged in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to produce the problems that overexpression attempt- ed to solve for the modern celebrity. These include the rise of a celebrity in- dustry, based around the creation, publicization, and consumption of a few "abnormally interesting people";18 the reorientation of social and political authority around a public sphere; and the emergence of a professional class of literary and theatrical critics increasingly influential over how actors and authors regarded and practiced their craft. Though scholars disagree about who might be crowned the first modern celebrity, few have disputed Leo Braudy's claim that "the roots of the urge to find the place of fame were particularly fertilized in the eighteenth cen- tury."19 Early modern English speakers had long been familiar with "fame" as "reputation"-the gossip, good or ill, that spreads by word of mouth-or as "renown"-the deserved merit that immortalizes the writers of great po- ems or the doers of great deeds.20 But starting at the end of the seventeenth century the language began to register a new sort of fame-a flash-in-the- pan phenomenon that recognized individuals not for what they had done but simply for who they were (or for what they represented) and that transformed ordinary men and women into media sensations. This new fame was not, as Alexander Pope notes in his allegorical poem The Temple of Fame (1715), a last- ing merit enjoyed by "fabled Chiefs in darker Ages born, / Or Worthys old, whom Arms or Arts adorn"; it was instead a "doubtful Fame ... Which o'er each Object casting various Dies, / Enlarges some, and others multiplies."21 The fact that Pope adapted his eighteenth-century Temple of Fame from INTRODUCTION 9 Geoffrey Chaucer's fourteenth-century House of Fame might make us suspi- cious of his suggestion that this "doubtful Fame" was an entirely new phe- nomenon. Nonetheless, new technologies of communication and new ideol- ogies of self-creation were changing the way Britons discussed and circulated celebrity, if not how they conceived of it. Stella Tillyard has identified three factors that made the celebrity that arose in Pope's day qualitatively differ- ent from that which existed before the Restoration: "a limited monarchy, the lapse in 1695 of the Licensing Act which had controlled the numbers of print- ing presses and to some extent printing, and a public interested in new ways of thinking about other people and themselves."22 Previous studies have already examined how the second of these three factors-the lapse of the Licensing Act-led to an explosion in the number of printing presses and facilitated a dramatic increase not only of periodicals like The Tatler and The Spectator, but also of gossip columns, scandal sheets, and broadsides. These latter publications worked to disseminate both news and rumors about celebrities' adventures, along with images of those celeb- rities, far beyond the relatively small circle of Londoners who had seen those celebrities in the flesh. At the same time, they whetted the public's appetite for "'secret histories,' which told scandalous stories of immorality at court and in other high places" as well as "biographies of notorious and famous in- dividuals."23 These biographies and secret histories contributed to the trend to which I have already alluded-and with which scholars of eighteenth-century culture will be quite familiar-that established the private, interior self both as the basis of citizenship and also as a topic of increasing fascination to bi- ographers, spectators, and gossips alike. "The notion of fixed character that could be written as a literary construct and then used in a plot [was] becom- ing commonplace," Tillyard explains. "Celebrity was born," in other words, "at the moment private life became a tradable public commodity."24 This public interest in private life arose in part to compensate for the third factor that Tillyard attributes to the growth of celebrity at the turn into the eighteenth century: an increasingly "limited monarchy" that failed to satisfy the public desire for spectacular display. The fascination that Britons had once shown for a few "spectacular politicians" and "public representa- tives," who had cemented their authority by performing it in great pageants of wealth and power, was declining with the ceding of monarchical power to parliamentary control and the ceding of the church's influence to that of the state.25 This decline didn't curb Britons' enthusiasm for spectacles of glitz and glamour, however. Instead, actors, actresses, rogues, and socialites arose from relatively humble origins, according to sociologist Chris Rojek, "to fill 10 1 SPECTACULAR DISAPPEARANCES the absence created by the decay in the popular belief in the divine right of kings, and the death of God."26 What Pope denigrates as "doubtful Fame," then, most recent scholars have celebrated as fame's democratization. Men and women no longer had to commit "heroic actions" or prove their belonging within "a noble or royal class in which such regard naturally accompanies station," as Cheryl Wanko points out, in order to earn the "roles of authority" that fame offered them.27 They could become celebrities simply by being themselves-or, rather, by be- ing the selves that popular gossip and publicity periodicals had created for them and would keep alive as long as they continued to sell papers. Their development helps to explain why, despite Cibber's complaints at being "helpless, and expos'd" to his public's interpretations of his private life, he should nonetheless publicize that life in a lengthy autobiography-or why, despite the vulnerabilities famous figures must suffer, none of the celebri- ties I examine here elected simply to cover up or hide out until their public's attention strayed elsewhere. To eschew such attention because of the loss of self-possession it entailed was to eschew also the lifestyle on which they had come to depend. To embrace it was to enjoy a power and a status that would have been inconceivable to lower- or middle-class men and women only a generation before. At the same time, Pope's description of this new fame as "doubtful" sug- gests that celebrities didn't simply usurp the places once held by kings and gods, as several recent studies of celebrity have implied. In their focus on the new power that the commodification of private life allowed the modern celebrity, works such as Nussbaum's Rival Queens or Cheryl Wanko's Roles of Authority have paid less attention to the violations and humiliations to which the star who sells himself or herself on the open market is so often prone. Yet throughout their autobiographies and performances, eighteenth-century celebrities from Cibber to Robinson repeatedly express anxieties about pub- licity that stem from (and might be read against) ideologies of the modern subject more generally. Jurgen Habermas has theorized these ideologies as arising from the sep- aration of society into public and private spheres.28 In order to be recognized as a legal subject, as I noted earlier, the early modern Briton had to demon- strate his or her plausibility as a coherent subject-as a possessive individual whose word could be depended upon and whose character could be known. But in order to participate in the sphere of public opinion that controlled the invisible hand of commerce, the artistic leanings of a growing popular cul- ture, and the political decisions of an increasingly republican state, Habermas INTRODUCTION 11 contends, the eighteenth-century Briton also had to demonstrate his or her plausibility as a rational subject-one informed but not blinded by his or her private experience. And in order to demonstrate such rationality one had to divest oneself of the obvious markings of particularized identity and blend in to the crowd. One had to appear, in Michael McKeon's recent reformulation of Habermas's ideas, "disembodi[ed]" and "depersonaliz[ed]."29 McKeon's words hint at the ways that the public sphere might be seen to exclude celebrities, who make their names displaying their bodies and mar- keting their personalities for public consumption. If all the world's a stage, those who rule it aren't the players. Instead, political power, social status, and even cultural capital belong to the spectators who watch, interpret, and cri- tique from the pit, only to blend back into the crowd before their own perfor- mances can be seen, interpreted, or critiqued. (Consider Pope's denigration of the celebrity's "doubtful" and undeserved fame as opposed to the fame of the truly virtuous, who "Would die unheard of, as [they] liv'd unseen.")30 The representative of these spectators, for Habermas as well as for the ce- lebrities that interest me, is Joseph Addison and Richard Steele's enormously popular creation and arbiter of English taste, Mr. Spectator. As Habermas and others have pointed out, Mr. Spectator guarantees his authority as the unobserved observer of London society by insisting on his anonymity, point- edly refusing to reveal "an Account of my Name, my Age, and my Lodgings" in his first issue.31 Scott Paul Gordon argues that "it is only by emptying himself out, becoming passionless, friendless, and, above all, formless, that Mr. Spec- tator can subject readers to constant surveillance."32 In this way, Mr. Specta- tor's printed and disembodied persona serves as antonym and antidote to the eighteenth-century celebrity's theatrical and personality-driven presence, and it is striking how often his image (or lack of an image) haunts eighteenth- century celebrities' self-representations as an ideal valuable to pursue but im- possible to attain. The "disinterestedness" that makes Mr. Spectator such an exemplary representative of the public sphere depends on his refusal to lo- cate himself in a particular place or to inhabit a particular body-his refusal, in other words, to appear as a performer rather than to circulate as a printed text. "To be seen" in eighteenth-century society, as Gordon explains, "is to be vulnerable, to be positioned in another's field of vision and to be enlisted in another's plot.33 Mr. Spectator's example suggests that what was at stake for these celebri- ties was more than just the indulgence of vanity or the ability to walk through the streets of London without being accosted by adoring fans. It was, on the one hand, access to the fortune and social status that their publicity allowed 12 1SPECTACULAR DISAPPEARANCES them; and, on the other, access to the political, social, and literary authority reserved for those who made their private lives impregnable. In short, it was their right to define themselves rather than being "enlisted in another's plot." Such stakes become viscerally and viciously clear when we consider an amazing but not atypical artifact from eighteenth-century celebrity cul- ture: Benjamin Victor's 1733 biography of Colley Cibber's friend, fellow ac- tor, and longtime managing partner at Drury Lane theater, Barton Booth. Victor's volume provides a fascinating insight not only into celebrity culture but also into eighteenth-century assumptions about literary and theatrical criticism-and, indeed, it might stand alone as the impetus for overexpres- sion in Cibber's self-performances. Not content simply to strip Booth down to his street clothes or even to his underclothes within the pages of his biog- raphy, Victor includes in his text a copy of Booth's autopsy report. Literalizing the eighteenth-century spectator's desire to glimpse the celebrity's interior self, the report details how, upon his death, Booth's "Rectum, with the other Intestines, were ript up with a Pair of Scissars, in which was found very little Excrement, but the whole Tract on the inside, lin'd with Crude Mercury divid- ed in Globules, about the Bigness of Pins Heads."34 (The biography continues in this vein for several pages.) The posthumous airing of Booth's interior self might seem an extreme example of the sorts of revelations compelled by the emerging cult of celebri- ty, but it was not uncommon to find autopsy reports among the pages of the era's most popular celebrity biographies. Arthur Murphy's 18o1 biography of David Garrick concludes with the actor's autopsy report-a fact that Garrick seemed to have anticipated when, in a 1769 letter, he praised his friend Sturz's critique of French actress Madame Clairon's performance as "your desection of her, ... as accurate as if you had opened her alive.35 Sterne alludes to such practices in Tristram Shandy when he declaims against those writers "who will draw a man's character from no other helps in the world, but merely from his evacuations.36 Both statements draw an implicit comparison between the job of the coroner and the job of the theater critic-a job that, like that of the celebrity, was a relatively new one in eighteenth-century England.37 In an era when every pit seemed suddenly filled with professional hecklers, every newspaper overcrowded with theater reviews, and every review littered with bits of gossip dissecting players' private lives and social performances, every- one who appeared upon a stage or published himself in print exposed himself to the scrutiny and the censure of such reviewers. The articulate targets of Grub Street's jibes (including Pope himself) have taught us to disregard these early critics as hacks, and yet it isn't difficult to INTRODUCTION 13 see the ways in which their preoccupations with exposing the innards of a text or a character have continued to structure literary, theatrical, and cul- tural criticism, even today. Consider the words we often use to describe how we work on a text: we penetrate, we exfoliate, we unpack. Or consider Joseph Roach's decision to arrange the chapters of his recent book, It-one of the most insightful and influential analyses of modern celebrity-according to the attributes that Pygmalion layers onto his statue in Dryden's translation of the Metamorphoses. Roach claims to construct his own celebrity-statue piece by piece, beginning with accessories and clothes and bringing it to life through the final addition of flesh and bone.38 But we might view this struc- ture less as a building up than as a stripping down-a dissection that lays open the body and the identity of the celebrity for the consumption of his or her culture in much the same way that Victor's reproduced autopsy report lays open the body of Barton Booth. No wonder eighteenth-century icons like Cibber seemed so wary of public attention. Studying overexpression and its discontents allows us to examine celeb- rity culture not from the perspective of a society creating celebrities the way that Pygmalion created his living statue, as so many previous studies have done, but rather from the perspective of the celebrities themselves, asking what part they might have played in developing and directing the cult of per- sonality that we have inherited from eighteenth-century England. In other words, it allows us to understand these celebrities as authors in their own right, and to delve into the ways that their autobiographical performances not only reflected but also manipulated the eighteenth century's celebrity culture as well as emerging ideologies of subjectivity. Such a perspective in- fluences how we regard the individual characters in this study, so that Colley Cibber becomes not only the victim of history and the King of the Dunces in Pope's Dunciad, but, like the deformed king he plays in his version of Rich- ard III, a man manipulating how he will be remembered; Charlotte Charke becomes not only a sexual misfit weighed down by her culture's oppressive ideologies of gender and sexuality but an actress trying on, only to critique, the languages through which those ideologies operate; and David Garrick be- comes not a professional performer protecting his private life by refusing to reveal it but a highly articulate innovator in celebrity culture who curries his public's attentions at the same time that he deflects its attempts to discover his secrets. In addition to influencing how we understand these individuals, such a narrative also influences how we understand the theater history for which their autobiographical works often serve as sources. Many of the texts I ex- 14 1 SPECTACULAR DISAPPEARANCES amine here-most notably Cibber's Apology but also several (possibly apoc- ryphal) stories surrounding David Garrick's performances as well as George Anne Bellamy's autobiography and Mary Robinson's Memoirs-have been taken by generations of theater historians as fact. As such, they have influ- enced how we understand the conventions and traditions of the eighteenth- century stage.39 To read these works not as history but as literature, however, is to raise important questions about the ways we have understood Garrick's "natural" acting style as a foil to Cibber's declamations, or the ways we have understood Tristram Shandy within the tradition of novels rather than with- in the tradition of theatrical autobiography. Before defining more precisely the particular shape that this book will take, I want to turn to a specific in- stance of overexpression in Colley Cibber's Apology to demonstrate both how it works and how it might contribute to our understanding of the eighteenth- century theater and the eighteenth-century subject. OVEREXPRESSION AS "THIS CHIARO OSCURO OF MY MIND" In the early pages of his autobiography, Colley Cibber offers one of the pithiest justifications for and one of the most articulate definitions of overexpression-one that might serve as a key to the strategy of autobi- ographical performance that the rest of this book will theorize. He begins, significantly, with a direct allusion to Benjamin Victor's biography of Barton Booth as an example of eighteenth-century spectators' impertinent desire "to know" what an actor "really was."40 "It was, doubtless, from a Suppo- sition that this sort of Curiosity would compensate their Labours," Cibber writes, "that so many hasty Writers have been encourag'd to publish the Lives of the late [actors] Mrs. [Anne] Oldfield, Mr. [Robert] Wilks, and Mr. [Barton] Booth, in less time after their Deaths than one cou'd suppose it cost to transcribe them."41 Cibber explains his composition of the lengthy auto- biography as an attempt to avoid the gaze of the same critics who memorial- ized and anatomized the unfortunate "Mr. Booth." "Now, Sir, when my Time comes," he addresses his dedicatee only a page later, "lest they shou'd think it worth while to handle my Memory with the same Freedom, I am willing to prevent its being so odly besmear'd (or at best but flatly white-wash'd) by taking upon me to give the Publick This": that is, the meandering memoir that he characterizes a few lines later as "this Chiaro Oscuro of my mind."42 Cibber's vocabulary here exemplifies the play of interiority and exteriori- ty that characterizes overexpression and that complicates eighteenth-century INTRODUCTION 15 scholars' strict divisions between the novelistic self and the staged self. Cibber first declares his dread of a memory "besmear'd"-a word whose etymology (particularly given its juxtaposition to Cibber's complaint against invasive memoirs like Victor's) suggests excrement, something from inside the body being wiped across the page as a representation of character.43 But no less a threat to Cibber is a memorial that has been "but flatly white-wash'd"-one as superficial and "flat" as the "besmear'd" page is invasive. To make himself visi- ble is to make himself vulnerable to smears by his spectators, Cibber suggests, but to disguise or to conceal his flaws is to deny himself the status of a star. Recoiling at both possibilities, Cibber declares his wish to be remembered instead in "Chiaro Oscuro." A visual art term that refers to the contrasting juxtaposition of lights (or chiaro in Italian) and darks (oscuro) in a painter's palette, "Chiaro Oscuro" seems to imply here either the balance of virtues and faults that attests to the veracity of Cibber's self-portrait or the collection of black letters that grace the white pages of his Apology. More complexly, how- ever, it suggests that the picture he will paint of himself doesn't reject either the "odly besmear'd" and blackened page exposing his interior or the "flat- ly white-wash'd" page recording only his superficial persona, but rather in- corporates both. It includes, in other words, both the gruesomely embodied self of the scatological "smear"-a detail that, counter to eighteenth-century scholarship's usual division between print and performance, associates the embodied self with interiority-and the disembodied and nonspecific self "flatly white-wash'd" onto a blank canvas or a printed page. Cibber's Chiaro Oscuro self-portrait promises to plunge the reader into what seems to be the inner recess of the celebrity's selfhood, while in fact limiting the reader to the flattened surfaces of his public persona. It offers an understanding of Cibber's life that is so apparently profound as to be profoundly apparent; and it delineates a character in language that is (as the English cognates of Chiaro Oscuro suggest) so clear it is obscure. The image of a self-portrait so clear it is obscure, so overwrought it is unreadable, seems a particularly apt characterization not only of Cibber's verbose and voluminous Apology but also of so many of the autobiographical performances of eighteenth-century England's biggest stars: from Sterne's Chiaro Oscuro pairing of the black page that says too much about the parson Yorick with the white page that says nothing at all about the Widow Wadman, to George Anne Bellamy's adoption of the overwrought, epistolary style of the sentimental novel to suggest her sentimental self's inaccessibility; from Charlotte Charke's decision to evade her spectators by donning her father's oversized wig, to the self-stylings that, as Pope wrote about Cibber's poetry, 16 1 SPECTACULAR DISAPPEARANCES "explain a thing till all men doubt it."" Displaying bodies so spectacular that they become unreadable, adopting masculine costumes so exaggerated that they become feminine, and declaring their sincerity so assiduously that it be- comes theatrical, these celebrities secured their fame and destabilized their identities at once. Studying their strategies allows us not only to reexamine our assumptions about how eighteenth-century celebrities contributed to the making-and to the unmaking-of the modern self; it also allows us to examine the ways that selves staged in performance seem sometimes to ac- crue the revelatory power that literary historians often attribute to the inte- riorized selves of the novel-and the way that selves printed on static pages might defy readers' and critics' assumptions about their stability and seem, through their very spectacle, to disappear. STAGING PROPERTIES AS STAGE PROPERTIES: THE STRUCTURES OF OVEREXPRESSION The disappearances and instabilities of the overexpressed self return us to C. B. Macpherson's description of the modern subject as the "proprietor of his own person or capacities" and complicate the classic theorizations of the printed autobiography as a way of proving one's proprietorship over his or her person.45 In The Autobiographical Subject, Felicity Nussbaum explains that eighteenth-century autobiographies, journals, and diaries "allowed a literate class to define its supposed superiority to an illiterate one. .. . 'Knowing oneself' allowed an individual subject to exercise privilege [over], as well as discipline and regulate, the behavior of those who did not 'know' themselves."46 The autobiographer's proprietorship over "his [or her] own person or capacities" becomes more complicated, however, when he or she publishes and sells his or her autobiography to readers, who purchase not only the material book but also the right to interpret, discuss, and judge the "person or capacities" that that book describes. The predicament of the eighteenth-century autobiographer mirrors that of the eighteenth-century celebrity (and as we have seen, these categories often overlap): owning one- self means writing oneself down, but writing oneself down means offering oneself up to consumption by, circulation between, and misinterpretations of one's readers. It is this paradox, as Phelan argues in a book on several autobiographical performances of the late twentieth century, that perfor- mance's ephemerality resists. By disappearing in the very moment that it is staged, she contends, performance cannot be commodified; it "clogs the INTRODUCTION 17 smooth machinery of reproductive representation necessary to the circula- tion of capital."47 Despite its influence as a foundational work in performance studies, Phel- an's argument has drawn criticism from scholars who point out that perfor- mance can be and often is commodified-and who brandish the price lists for a seat at a Broadway show or a play in London's West End as proof. The performers that I examine here share with Phelan's twentieth-century art- ists a penchant for spectacular disappearance, employing the conventions of autobiography and celebrity and the vocabularies of self-revelation only to exaggerate and deform those conventions, those vocabularies, and dissolve the selves they've promised to reveal. While these performers don't exact- ly prevent the commodification of their lives or their performances-many of which, like Broadway hits, yielded substantial profits-they do challenge traditional theorizations of autobiography as either the private property of the autobiographer or the public property of its readers and point to the dif- ficulties of commodifying overexpressive narratives in the ways that more traditional properties might be commodified. Jean Baptiste Suard demonstrates precisely these difficulties in his 1765 London Chronicle review of Tristram Shandy, Volumes VII and VIII. "This ad- venture," he writes of Sterne's narrative, "is not unlike the famous story of the man who, some years ago, informed the public, that he would put himself in a bottle before their eyes." But after the "credulous multitude" had paid for their tickets to see such a sight, the man "carried away their money and left the bottle empty."48 The performance to which Suard compares Sterne's nar- rative is certainly commodifiable and commodified here. Yet Suard's descrip- tion points to an important anxiety that we shall see recurring in the reviews of and commentaries on a number of the autobiographical performances I examine-an essential confusion, when these autobiographical performanc- es and the abnormally interesting personalities they represent are offered up for sale, over precisely what is being sold. Such anxieties complicate tradition- al descriptions of printed autobiographies and the life stories they narrate as either the private properties of their writers or the public properties of their readers. Instead, I want to think about these autobiographical performances in terms of stage properties. Rather than chattel that can be valued and evaluated even if it changes hands, stage properties are material objects that take on a variety of con- stantly shifting meanings through their transferability to multiple contexts, multiple plays. It is this transferability that distinguishes a prop from a cos- tume or a set piece, according to theater practitioners: if an onstage object 18 1 SPECTACULAR DISAPPEARANCES stays in one place on the stage or adorns one actor's body in particular, it falls under the purview of the set designer or the costume designer; if it is used, moved, or manipulated by multiple actors, it becomes the responsibility of the props master. In the law something becomes property when its owner can be established and documented-when its history of ownership, like the life story narrated by a printed autobiography, can be written down. In the theater it is just the opposite: something becomes a stage property when it cannot be identified with a single performer or fixed to a single space. By discussing these autobiographical performances not in terms of legal prop- erties but in terms of stage properties, I mean to highlight the difficulty of commodifying them or of fixing them as the signifier of singular meanings or singular selves. I mean also to emphasize the way that these performances, like the props they utilize, seem at once to invite and to frustrate their spectators' attempts to reduce them to simple or stable indicators of a single, identifiable quality. Stage props are, after all, tangible objects given special provenance within the semiotic world of the stage, and as such they seem to invite their spectators to read them as symbols. And yet, as Andrew Sofer explains in his history of the stage prop, this symbolism is never quite so simple as the tangibility of these objects might lead us to expect. Sofer describes the "unstable signifying excess" that objects assume when onstage, their tendency to suggest several contradictory interpretations at once and thus to frustrate their spectators' efforts to cement their meanings.49 I want to suggest that the overexpressive performances I examine throughout this book strive for and in many cas- es achieve a similar "signifying excess," a capacity at once to magnify and to blur-indeed, to blur by magnifying-the identities they describe. To this end, I have structured each chapter of this book around a par- ticular prop that was central to the autobiographical performances of each celebrity I examine and that exemplifies the "signifying excess" that Sofer theorizes. In each case, the prop I choose begins as a fixed symbol of some aspect of identity-nationality, masculinity, or sincerity, for instance-and thus promises to stabilize the celebrity's identity by translating it into an ob- ject, a readable signifier that can be located, interpreted, and exchanged. In each case, however, the celebrity's manipulation of the prop makes its signifi- cations so excessive as to become uninterpretable or so obvious as to become undone. Chapter 1 revolves around the royal crown-a prop that, when we spot it on the stages of Restoration and eighteenth-century Britain, might remind us of the modern celebrity's similarities to the early modern king, or of both INTRODUCTION 19 public figures' roles as "effigies" of their nation.50 The crown's legibility as a symbol of Englishness becomes more complicated, however, when we con- sider Colley Cibber's appearance as the deformed king in two related works: Cibber's 1699 adaptation of Shakespeare's Richard III, in which he stars as the hunchbacked monarch, and Alexander Pope's 1743 Dunciad in Four Books, which crowns Cibber King of the Dunces. I argue that Cibber's portrayal of and pointed identification with Richard III frustrated his spectators' critical gaze by exaggerating into illegible deformities his most recognizable physical features. My discussion of these deformities as overexpressions sheds new light on the deformities of Cibber's printed works as well-and the chapter concludes with a reexamination of the misspellings and malapropisms that Pope deplored as the height of Dulness but that I interpret as Cibber's strate- gy to render himself unreadable. While chapter 1 focuses on the king's crown to interpret Pope's mock-epic hero and Cibber's deformed king as overexpressions of Englishness, chapter 2 describes another of Cibber's magnificent headpieces-the great white wig he wore as the fop-to explore his comic roles as overexpressions of gender and sexuality. Originally a symbol of masculinity, the wig in the exaggerated proportions it takes on in Cibber's performances becomes instead a mark of femininity. Its significations become even more complicated when it reap- pears on the head of Cibber's daughter, Charlotte Charke. Unlike scholars who mine Charke's transvestite performances and her 1755 Narrative for ex- amples of queerness, I argue that Charke's ambivalent descriptions of her gender and sexuality arise not from her frustrated attempts to define herself as one identity or the other. Instead, they stem from her deliberate attempts to avoid defining herself at all. Such attempts were not always successful, and in the second half of the chapter I ask what about Charke's performances made them so much more vulnerable to her audiences' appropriations and misinterpretations-a question that will introduce some of the alternatives to overexpression that I explore in subsequent chapters. In the subtitle of chapter 3, "the Overexpression of Character," might re- fer to any of the chapters in this study, all of which examine how a celebrity or group of celebrities emphasized in order to erase the features by which their spectators might attempt to interpret their characters. By lending this title to a chapter that examines Laurence Sterne's pseudoautobiography Tristram Shandy and Sterne's public appearances as two of the book's most popular characters, I mean to emphasize Sterne's centrality as the most perceptive theorist as well as the most influential practitioner of the strategy I am at- tempting here to define. I mean also to evoke the multiple meanings of the 20 1 SPECTACULAR DISAPPEARANCES word "character" as a term that refers not only to the personality that dis- tinguishes one individual from another or to the personae that populate a fictional work but also to the letters on a printed page. Sterne's radical ex- perimentations with the printed page-the prop around which this chapter revolves-have defined his most famous work for generations of readers but strike me, as I will elaborate, as some of the most sophisticated musings on how these celebrities used overexpression to lend their printed works the instability of performance. Though it might seem an anomaly to the auto- biographical performances in the surrounding chapters, I argue that Tris- tram Shandy is actually their epitome. The linchpin around which much of this project revolves, Sterne's pseudoautobiography includes several pointed allusions that its contemporary readers identified as linking it explicitly to Cibber's Apology; and its popularity introduced Cibber's strategies to later fig- ures, who adopted and adapted them as the celebrity autobiography began to emerge as a genre. In chapter 4, I analyze the self-representations of two such figures: Sterne's friend David Garrick, celebrated for the supposedly natural acting style that he introduced to the stage in the mid-eighteenth century, and Gar- rick's protege George Anne Bellamy, who evokes Sterne explicitly throughout her 1785 Apology for the Life of George Anne Bellamy. Beginning with a famous wig that Garrick wore as Hamlet (a wig rigged to stand on end at the ap- pearance of the ghost), I explore how Garrick's performances challenged his spectators' assumptions about the boundaries between natural and unnat- ural and between corpus and costume in an age of sentimentality. If early eighteenth-century celebrities developed overexpression to avoid exposing their private lives and personal emotions to public scrutiny, I ask, what hap- pens to this strategy within a literary style that seems to celebrate emotional vulnerability? After reading Garrick's performances beside Denis Diderot's Paradoxe sur le Comedien as successful examples of sentimental overexpres- sion, I turn to the autobiographical excursions of George Anne Bellamy. Like Charlotte Charke in chapter 2, Bellamy adopts props and performance styles that seem identical to those of her male colleagues, only to find that these props and performance styles fail to protect her from her spectators' jibes. Haunting Bellamy's autobiography is the awareness of and anxiety about this failure, which seems to have much to do with Bellamy's femininity. In the sec- ond half of the chapter, I ask how eighteenth-century audiences approached men's and women's autobiographical performances differently, and what this might have had to do with Bellamy's fears that her autobiographical perfor- mances would fail to stave off her spectators' stares. INTRODUCTION 21 This question leads me into a discussion of the works of Mary Robinson in chapter 5-a celebrity who, I argue, addressed this failure by inventing an al- ternative to overexpression that was more suited to a female performer. Rob- inson rose to fame as an actress and mistress to the Prince of Wales, but her poetry, feminist writings, and 18o1 Memoirs influenced and were influenced by such Romantic figures as Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth. This final chapter thus propels my line of inquiry into the Romantic era by examining the preoccupations with fame and visibility no less apparent in Robinson's later life as a poet than they were in her early years as "Perdita"-"the lost one"-a nickname she borrowed from her celebrated role in Garrick's adaptation of The Winter's Tale. Reacting to the celebrities who preceded her and who employ exaggerated personae in their performances of self, Robinson presents an autobiography littered with ellipses and a persona that seems always to leave something out. Her poems and portraits work in much the same way. Accordingly, Robinson employs a strategy related but antipodal to overexpression: one that points out the absence of her self rather than exaggerating her presence. The incom- plete records of a woman whose name was well known but whose identity was "lost," Robinson's works provide a fitting final act to a century of celeb- rities whose images were ubiquitous, whose words were overflowing, and yet whose identities were nowhere to be found. Robinson's autobiography, which appeared at the beginning of the Ro- mantic era and at the dawn of the nineteenth century, was not the last such work in Anglo-American celebrity culture, of course. Although later works lie outside the scope of this project, I speculate on some directions future research might take-as well as reiterating the centrality of overexpression to modern celebrity culture-in a coda that takes a case study from my own lifetime. In the 1980s and 1990s, Michael Jackson made his celebrity not only the side effect but also the subject of many of his most spectacular musical performances. His contemporaries described him, alternately, as an idol and as an aberration. Yet if we look closely, commentaries on the agonies and ecstasies of his own celebrity-as well as the spectacular costumes, perfor- mances, and personae he presents to his curious spectators-start to seem eerily familiar. In tracing the similarities between the long-ago and faraway performances of Cibber, Charke, Sterne, Garrick, Bellamy, and Robinson and the close-at-hand performances of Michael Jackson, I don't mean to mini- mize the historical specificity of the eighteenth-century performers or their strategies of autobiographical performance. Rather, I aim to suggest that in their searches for new ways to publicize themselves without sacrificing their 22 I SPECTACULAR DISAPPEARANCES privacy, these eighteenth-century stars asked questions that have become as central to modern celebrity culture as the modern celebrity him- or herself- and that, despite changing technologies of and assumptions about the self, have never entirely disappeared. The celebrities that I examine throughout this study offered a model for those around them and for those who followed them to maintain their privacy despite a society increasingly obsessed with watching, patrolling, and controlling the selves of its citizens. They teach us how to be modern in a world that seems increasingly to offer us little choice but to see or be seen. CHAPTER 1 The Celebrity Emerges as the Deformed King Richard II, the King of the Dunces, and the Overexpression of Englishness In the dead of winter, 1699, as the people of England struggled to forget the bloody images of the last half-century-a regicide, a civil war, a succession of violent rebellions-Colley Cibber shuffled across the well-worn boards of Drury Lane stage in the gleaming crown of a king.1 It was a costume he had long tried to claim. By the late seventeenth century England's burgeoning celebrity culture had elevated actors and actresses like Cibber to a status once thought unattainable for people of such humble origins. The tragedian Thom- as Betterton, born the son of an undercook to Charles I, received a lavish funeral in Westminster Abbey when he died in 1710. Anne Oldfield, once ap- prenticed to a seamstress, was by 1710 earning a salary greater than that of a "Gentleman" and had been offered joint ownership of Drury Lane (an offer later revoked by managers hesitant to grant such power to a woman).2 So it was that by 1740, Cibber thought himself a notable enough person to merit an autobiography. "This Work, I say, shall . . . contain the various Impres- sions of my Mind," Cibber writes of his Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, drawing an implicit comparison between the spectacular king and the celeb- rity autobiographer when he adds, "as in Louis the Fourteenth his Cabinet you have seen the growing Medals of his Person from Infancy to Old Age."3 Given the vainglory of such comparisons, Cibber's choice of his first royal role might seem a strange one. For when he stepped onto the stage in that production of 1699, he appeared not in the regal robes of an upstanding monarch but in the monstrous shape of Richard III, Shakespeare's famously hunchbacked villain. In this chapter, I explore why Cibber should choose the character of the deformed king to make his tragic debut-and I suggest that Richard's abnor- 23 24 1 SPECTACULAR DISAPPEARANCES mal body was part of the strategy he developed to frustrate his spectators' attempts to glean his private life from his public performances. For though he wore many crowns over the course of his long career on the stage, the three for which he is remembered are three that contorted his body into an image of deformity. One of these crowns was an enormous white wig, a prop I will discuss in detail in chapter 2 as deforming the noble body of the Restoration rake into the nonnormative body of the eighteenth-century fop. In this first chapter, I focus on two crowns separated by the forty-four years that divide their debuts and that represent the approximate span of Cibber's career. These crowns are separated also by the two trajectories of that career: Cibber as performer-decked out in the diadem of the player-king-and Cibber as poet-his humorous face framed by the laurel wreath. Cibber achieved the first crown when he rewrote and starred in Richard III, taking on the first and most enduring of his several royal roles. Though critics panned Cibber's performance as Richard, no one could deny the stay- ing power of his script: it was Cibber's adaptation (and not Shakespeare's) that was performed on English stages well into the nineteenth century. But the role served Cibber beyond merely cementing his version of Richard III in the English imagination. Passages in the Apology suggest that Cibber as- sumed the role of Richard because audiences-noting his short stature, his beady eyes, and his squeaky voice-could not stomach him in the romantic leading roles he coveted. Denied the role of the noble prince, he settled for that of the deformed king. The body he performed as Richard is one that, as James I. Porter writes of the disabled form in literature, "seems somehow too much a body, too real, too corporeal ... it is a body that, so to speak, stands in its own way."4 Assuming a body that is "too much a body," exaggerating the flaws that he could not escape, this chapter argues, helped Cibber to deflect (if not exactly to dissolve) his spectators' stares. The second crown that Cibber wears in this chapter was thrust upon him by Alexander Pope, who named Cibber King of the Dunces in his mock-epic poem The Dunciad in Four Books (1743) and who mercilessly denigrates his prose-not to mention his persona-as overwrought. Pope was certainly not the only reader to express this criticism, and I examine several other writings by Cibber's detractors here. But I focus on The Dunciad as the work that has best stood the test of time. If Cibber's Richard exaggerates the eccentricities of his body, Pope's Dunce King might be said to exaggerate the eccentric- ities of his prose style. Pope portrays the newly appointed laureate as the paragon of an English culture that too often mistook heaviness for gravity and preferred Cibber's pseudoliterary loquaciousness to Pope's clipped wit. THE CELEBRITY EMERGES AS THE DEFORMED KING 1 25 The Cibber of Pope's Dunciad spouts sentences that contain many words but little meaning-many of them adapted or directly quoted from the most con- voluted passages of Cibber's Apology. In pointing out and pointing up these eccentricities-and in parodying them in his own excessive couplets and footnotes-Pope offers an early articulation of overexpression and the chal- lenges it presented for critics attempting to dissect or to decipher Cibber's persona. The crowns of Dunce King and of deformed king resemble each other not only in the inflated depictions of their deformities but also in what it is they deform. Both the early modern king that Cibber's Richard corrupted and the epic hero that Pope's Dunce King mocked had once served as figureheads of their nations-a role that the celebrity, by Cibber's day, had begun to take on. Cibber's comparison of himself to Louis XIV in his Apology indicates that he embraced this role, but elsewhere he complains vehemently about its limita- tions: as symbols for a growing and diversifying nation, the celebrity, the king and the epic hero were subject to whatever meanings and representations the nation imposed upon them. To be such a person was to be watched-and perhaps worshipped-by multitudes. But it was also to surrender one's right to define oneself. Considering the celebrity's role in this way casts Cibber's Shakespearean performance-as well as his purple prose-in a new light. In this chapter, I argue that Cibber assumed the guise of the deformed king in order to maintain his position in the spotlight without imprisoning himself in his spectators' interpretations. Richard's deformed body allowed Cibber to overexpress not only his own physical eccentricities but also the English na- tional identity that kings and epic heroes had once embodied and that mere celebrities were now forced to assume. Donning a persona that defied the in- creasingly rigid codifications by which the eighteenth-century body was read and classified, in other words, Cibber frustrated his spectators' attempts to interpret his performance and cleared the way to define and describe himself. We might regard the misspellings, malapropisms, and meandering sentences that Pope satirized as deformities as central to Cibber's strategy. They also provide us with a way to understand this strategy by studying its printed remains. One final word: despite the negative implications of the word "deformity," I use it here deliberately-and not only because it is the word that Cibber em- ploys throughout his play. I want to emphasize overexpression as a process of deformation, the deliberate dissolution of the recognizable forms of identity. Scholars of autobiography (a genre roughly coextant with celebrity) describe the autobiographical performance as an attempt to mold unruly subjectivi- 26 1 SPECTACULAR DISAPPEARANCES ties into established structures or conventional narratives-an attempt that leaves those subjectivities open to the appropriations and regulations of those who read them.5 An overexpressive performer like Cibber resists this appropriation by exhibiting a deformed body that is undeniable and yet im- possible for his spectator to categorize or conventionalize. In both Richard III and The Dunciad, the disabled body becomes not an obstacle to but rather an entry into the status of subject for the spectacular celebrity struggling for the right to self-definition. THE DECLINING POWER OF THE ENGLISH MONARCH AND THE DUBIOUS POWER OF THE ENGLISH CELEBRITY Though it may at first seem counterintuitive, Cibber's strategy of disabling inquiries into his person by transforming himself into a deformed king makes sense if we consider the celebrity culture emerging at the very mo- ment that Cibber was coming of age. If we define the celebrity as a person as famous for what he performed in his private life as for what he performed on the public stage, we might think of Colley Cibber as one of the first. Cibber was born the son of a prominent sculptor (whose works, to Pope's delight, guarded the entrance to Bedlam Hospital for the insane). He was headed for the English army when he discovered the London stage. Cibber's unimpressive figure at first precluded him from roles as romantic hero or tragic king, and he spent his early years at Drury Lane playing bit parts and filling in for lead actors who had fallen ill or defected to the competing the- ater. By 1696 Cibber had become frustrated with these limited roles, and he decided to take matters into his own hands by composing a star vehicle that would highlight his unique proclivities as an actor. Love's Last Shift debuted to great applause, no less for its charming plot than for Cibber's outrageous performance as its fop. The role earned Cibber the fame and theatrical cap- ital he would need to mount his adaptation of Richard III three years later. At the same time that it established him as a celebrity and performer, Love's Last Shift also launched Cibber's career as a writer and businessman able to predict, with uncanny accuracy, the theatrical trends that would draw the fickle London audiences back to the theater again and again. By the time of his death in 1757 Cibber had composed twelve comedies, six tragedies, two ballad operas, two masques, a farce, an interlude, a "comical tragedy," and several poems.6 Not all were successes, but despite his critics' attempts to THE CELEBRITY EMERGES AS THE DEFORMED KING 1 27 dissuade him Cibber kept producing more. He served as English poet laureate under George II-a post he assumed in 1730-and as one of the most suc- cessful and longest-reigning managers of Drury Lane theater from 1709 to 1733. But the work for which he is best known today is his Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, published in 1740. Though most often cited as a source for theater history, the Apology was also a literary innovation: as the first secular autobiography published in England, it declared that ordinary life might be as worth reading about as sinners' reforms or saints' conversions. "A Man who has pass'd above Forty Years of his Life upon a Theater, where he has never appear'd to be Himself," Cibber writes, "may have naturally excited the Curiosity of his Spectators to know what he really was, when in no body's Shape but his own."7 His anticipation of his spectators' curiosity about "what he really was" was perhaps Cibber's savviest. With it, he established a liter- ary genre that was to capitalize on an emergent celebrity culture constructed not around its heroes' public performances but around the seeming secrets of their private lives. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the son of a middle-class sculptor had come to live like a king. Yet as often as Cibber declares his delight at the privileges that his pseu- doroyal status granted him, he also registers anxiety about what this new role demands. The king's place in English society had shifted in the years following the English Civil War-the years in which Cibber's own fame was rising. In her study of the street and court performances that characterized daily life in the late Renaissance and Restoration, Paula Backscheider identi- fies the Stuarts as the last of the "spectacular" kings, who guaranteed their authority by performing it in elaborate displays of wealth and spectacle. By the mid-eighteenth century, such "spectacular politics" had given way to a bourgeois public sphere ruled by figures like Mr. Spectator, who guaranteed his objectivity by refusing to stand out. Cibber's career spans this shift: he first mounted the boards in 1687, two years after the death of the Stuart king Charles II; and he surrendered his official place in the Drury Lane Company in 1745, the year that the English defeat of Jacobite forces at Culloden squelched once and for all the royalists' hopes of reestablishing a spectacular Stuart on the English throne. By the time he retired, the spectacle once exclusive to the king had passed to the celebrity-and it had been stripped of the authority it once signified. Cibber registers this shift within the pages of his Apology, which begins with his boyhood memories of being "carry'd by my Father to the Chapel in Whitehall; where I saw [King Charles] and his royal Brother the then Duke of 28 1 SPECTACULAR DISAPPEARANCES York, with him in the Closet, and present during the whole Divine Service."8 But Cibber marks his entry into adulthood at the same time that he marks his entry into authorship, with the death of the spectacular king: King Charles his Death was judg'd, by our School-master, a proper Subject to lead the Form I was in, into a higher kind of Exercise; he therefore enjoin'd us, severally, to make his Funeral Oration. ... This Oration, such as it was, I produc'd the next Morning: All the other Boys pleaded their Inability, which the Master taking rather as a mark of their Modesty than their Idleness, only seem'd to punish, by setting me at the Head of the Form: A Preferment dearly bought! Much happier had I been to have sunk my Performance in the general Modesty of declining it. A most uncomfortable Life I led among 'em, for many a Day after! I was so jeer'd, laugh'd at, and hated as a pragmatical Bastard (School-boys Language) who had betray'd the whole Form, that scarce any of 'em wou'd keep me company.9 Cibber's words discover in the figure of the modern celebrity the ghost of the early modern king: with the death of Charles as head of state Cibber as- sumes his own throne as "Head of the Form." Upon his coronation, howev- er, Cibber finds himself in a changed world. Here, "general Modesty" holds more cultural value than spectacular display, and "Preferment" comes at a hefty price. Charles's regal performances may have made him a "Deity" capable of simultaneously representing (as effigy for) and commanding (as authority over) his English subjects. In this new world, though, Cibber finds that his own promotion merely exposes him to the jeers, the laughter, and the commands of his classmates. Less the "Head" than the figurehead of his fellows, a celebrity may wear the king's crown, but he lacks the power that such a symbol represents. Worse, the celebrity lacks the king's power but still attracts his subjects' gaze-a gaze becoming less admiring and more critical as power shifts from royal display to public opinion. If Cibber presents his boyhood self as the ghost of the spectacular king, in other words, he portrays his classmates as precursors to Mr. Spectator. Even as late as 1740 it was Mr. Spectator to whom English readers turned to determine what made one properly English. And what seemed to make one properly English, according to Mr. Spectator, was the absence of any identifiable national characteristics that might attract an unwanted gaze. As an Englishman, he noted in 1711, "I am a Dane, Swede, or French-Man at different times, or rather fancy my self like the old Philoso- pher, who upon being asked what Country-man he was, replied, That he was a THE CELEBRITY EMERGES AS THE DEFORMED KING 1 29 Citizen of the World."1 This lack of personal attributes or national character- istics, which he encouraged his readers to interpret as a lack of personal bias, made Mr. Spectator the ideal observer of his surroundings, the uninterpreta- ble interpreter of English society. A similar authority belongs to Cibber's jeering schoolmates, who cloak their self-interest under a "general Modesty" and who offer their commentary (dubbing Cibber a "pragmatical Bastard") in good company within the nation- in-miniature that Cibber presents. It is these school-age authorities who de- cide, a page later, that Cibber will compose the coronation ode that will con- vince the master to release them from school. It is they who determine, too, who might and who might not be elected into their society. Having produced the ode, Cibber nonetheless finds himself excluded. "They left me out of the Party I had most mind to be of, in that Day's Recreation," he laments. "But their ingratitude serv'd only to increase my Vanity; for I consider'd them as so many beaten Tits, that had just had the Mortification of seeing my Hack of a Pegasus come in before them. ... I have met with much the same silly sort of Coldness, even from my Contemporaries of the Theatre, from having the superfluous Capacity of writing myself the Characters I have acted."" In for- mer times, Cibber implies, his spectacular identification with and encomium to the king might have elevated him above his ordinary English classmates. Yet by the late seventeenth century such a role merely exposed him to their criticisms and robbed him of the Englishman's power of self-representation. Paradoxically, Cibber's role as his classmates' public representative excludes him from his classmates' company, just as his later role as celebrity-a sym- bol of Englishness-precludes him from being truly English. Cibber's metaphorical description of his poetry as his "Hack of a Pegasus" is important here, because it helps to clarify what might otherwise seem a somewhat jumbled relationship between author, actor, celebrity, and king. The distinction between the schoolboy Cibber and his classmates-and the larger distinction between the spectacular celebrity and Mr. Spectator-is not a distinction between the writer and the reader. Rather, it is a distinction between the "Hack" who writes out of self-interest and the historian who disregards (or appears to disregard) his own fame in recording an objective analysis of his surroundings. Cibber invites his classmates' ire because he al- lows the spectacle of his overwrought prose to distract from the subject he is meant to observe, flying high on the Pegasus of his own poetic license and distorting history in his eagerness to "raise[e]" the king's character "to such height." In the final sentence of the passage, Cibber maps this distinction between "Hack" and historian onto the distinction between the actor, who 30 1 SPECTACULAR DISAPPEARANCES thinks only of his own presence in the spotlight, and the playwright, who must take the larger view of the play as the reliable historian must take the larger view of history. The problem for Cibber, of course, is that since the debut of Love's Last Shift his career had depended upon his playing both roles at once. As an ac- tor he earned his spectators' praise by demanding their attention; as a play- wright, by gaining their respect. As a theater manager, an autobiographer, and a "Historfian] of the Stage During His Own Time," moreover, he earned his readers' trust by eschewing spectacle and-like Mr. Spectator-performing objectivity. These roles become even more entangled when the play that Cib- ber is writing and performing is itself drawn from English history. History plays like Richard III recast the playwright as historian and invite the audi- ence members to contrast the actors' performance as king with their shared cultural knowledge of that king's life. Setting himself the task of "writ[ing] the Characters I have acted" (Richard III among them), Cibber attempts to establish himself as both the celebrity and the authority, both the spectacle within and the spectator of his history.12 Significantly, however, he does so by making himself so peculiar he cannot be interpreted. As I will argue in the remainder of this chapter, he finds his place not by dismounting but rather by deforming his "Hack of a Pegasus" into the lame and limping "Harse" of his most famous line as Richard III. SEIZING THE HEROSTRATIC CROWN: COLLEY CIBBER AS THE DEFORMED KING The liabilities that the role of public spectacle had assumed by the turn into the eighteenth century emerge in the very first lines of Cibber's Richard III. By portraying the position of spectacle as one of vulnerability, these lines set up Cibber's later development of Richard as a celebrity-king hungry for pow- er but wary of the dehumanizing gazes such power invites. At the same time, they suggest a strong identification between the king and the celebrity por- traying him, so that as the play continues, Richard's vulnerabilities become Cibber's vulnerabilities-and Richard's illegible body, Cibber's defense. Shakespeare's Richard III opens, famously, with a soliloquy by the de- formed king: "Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this son of York," Richard begins.13 His speech evokes the imagery of the divine right of kings at the same time that it introduces his determination to undermine that right. In contrast, the world that greets the audience as THE CELEBRITY EMERGES AS THE DEFORMED KING 1 31 the curtain opens on Cibber's play seems stripped and stark. The difference speaks to how the role of spectacular king had changed in the years between the last years of the Renaissance and the dawn of the eighteenth century. In place of Shakespeare's castle Cibber presents the prison where Shakespeare's 3 Henry IV (the final act of which Cibber has adapted as the first act of his Richard III) concludes. Here, Richard's predecessor languishes, awaiting news from the battlefield. And in place of Richard's extraordinary body and simile- laden soliloquy, Cibber introduces the nondescript bodies of a servant and an unnamed lieutenant, whose question opens the play: LIEUT. Has King Henry walked forth this Morning? SERV. No, Sir, but it is near his Hour. LIEUT. At any Time when you see him here, Let no Stranger into the Garden; I wou'd not have him star'd at.15 Reinforcing the position of spectacle as a position of humiliation, Cibber concretizes King Henry's loss of his status as subject-his demotion to the position of prisoner-by casting him as one who is "star'd at." Cibber's attraction to this short exchange (which he lifts, unlike much of the rest of the scene, from Shakespeare's 2 Henry IV) suggests the identifi- cation between celebrity and king that he would make explicit years later in the Apology, empathizing with Charles II as a man whose happiness, "like his Person," must remain "a Prisoner to its own Superiority."16 Throughout Rich- ard III, similarly, Cibber portrays the deformed king as a kind of celebrity per- former whose power both depends on and is undermined by his spectators' stares. Not insignificantly, it is through a carefully orchestrated performance that Richard first seizes the crown in both Shakespeare's play and Cibber's adaptation.17 If in Shakespeare's version such spectacles secure Richard's au- thority, in Cibber's play-as in his Apology-the king's performances suggest the "defenceless Station" accorded the object of the public gaze.18 Like Cibber, however, Cibber's Richard is not one to settle into such a "de- fenceless Station" without a fight. After dispatching his henchmen to murder the two young nephews who block his path to the throne, Richard pauses to ponder his legacy: Shall future Ages, when these Children's tale Is told, drop Tears in pity of their hapless Fate, And read with Detestation the Misdeeds of Glo'ster, 32 1 SPECTACULAR DISAPPEARANCES The crook-back'd Tyrant, cruel, barbarous, And bloody-will they not say too, That to possess the Crown, nor Laws Divine Nor Human stopt my way?-Why let 'em say it; They can't but say I had the Crown; I was not Fool as well as Villain.19 With his defiant "Why let 'em say it," Cibber's Richard suggests he is no longer submitting to a narrative he cannot control but rather permitting a narrative he has helped to create. Such a suggestion seems at odds with Shakespeare's portrayal of Richard as a cursed villain whose history is both predestined and prophesied by the deformity that buckles his back. It seems at odds, too, with Richard's determination to star in the very same history he narrates. If to be "star'd at" is to be denied the ability to interpret one's own body or tell one's own story, how can Richard maintain his position as spectacular king without surrendering his position as historian? How can he play the villain-king without also playing the fool? Cibber suggests the answers to these questions shortly after this scene, in the third act of the play, as he introduces the strategy that will become Rich- ard's defense against his spectators' stares. This strategy is one that, as I am arguing, became integral to Cibber's own performances of self-and his own defenses against his spectators' invasive attentions. He articulates his strat- egy in one of the few soliloquies original to his adaptation of Shakespeare's play. Richard has spent the preceding acts killing a king, seducing and poison- ing the king's daughter-in-law, arresting and executing all of the noblemen who oppose him, and plotting the murder of the remaining heirs who block his path to the throne. After a virtuosic performance of piety that earns him the crown he seeks, Richard takes a moment to ponder the stakes of his suc- cess. "A Crown!" he exclaims, donning the headpiece for the first time: Thou bright Reward of ever-daring Minds; Oh! how thy awful Glory fills my Soul! Nor can the Means that got thee, dim thy Luster: For, not Mens Love, Fear pays thee Adoration, And Fame not more survives from Good than Evil Deeds. Th'aspiring Youth, that fir'd the Ephesian Dome, Outlives, in Fame, the pious Fool that rais'd it.20 In this soliloquy, Cibber implicitly links his own status as celebrity to his character's status as king by portraying Richard as a spectacular (and some- THE CELEBRITY EMERGES AS THE DEFORMED KING 1 33 what unscrupulous) seeker of "fame." But he defines this fame as a very pe- culiar kind. The Ephesian youth to whom Cibber refers is Herostratus, who lends his name to the term "Herostratic fame," or fame at any cost. Eager to secure his place in the history books, Herostratus burned the domed Temple of Artemis in Ephesus in 356 BC. The Ephesian authorities tried to thwart his bid for notoriety by executing him and forbidding the pronunciation of his name. His story was later recorded, however, by the ancient historian Theopompus.21 Herostratus thus exemplifies a figure asserting his right to self-definition, one who strikes out against a history to which he is unknown by performing himself back into that history-through whatever means necessary. Like Cibber, Herostratus doesn't eschew spectacle in his pursuit of fame, and in the same breath that Cibber describes the "awful glory" of the de- formed king's crown he evokes the blazing display of a great temple burning to the ground. Yet Herostratus's history is one known primarily for what it leaves unseeable and unsayable: the dome that Herostratus "fir'd" into non- existence, the name legislated as unspeakable in ancient Ephesus (and left unspoken in Cibber's soliloquy). Through Herostratus, Cibber introduces the seeming paradox around which his overexpressions revolve: the paradox of a figure whose fame is undeniable yet whose history is one his countrymen are unable to retell. Through Richard, Cibber employs this paradox in his own performances of self. He replaces Herostratus's sentence of silence with Rich- ard's determined efforts to define himself. And he discards the desperate and destructive actions through which Herostratus achieves his spectators' atten- tions in favor of the bent back and halting gait of the deformed king. "WHAT BLOODY SCENE?": REFORMING THE SCRIPTS OF DISABILITY INTO PERFORMANCES OF ILLEGIBILITY If Herostratus's status as subject depends on the destructiveness of his ac- tions and the unspeakability of his name, Richard's status as subject (and the status of the celebrity who portrays him) depends on the illegibility of his deformed body. Like Herostratus's crimes, Richard's body earns him an undeniable and unforgettable place within his nation's history while dis- couraging the subjects of that nation from retelling (or rewriting) the story that now belongs exclusively to him. By portraying Richard's deformity as illegibility, in other words, Cibber's play provides an early example of the overexpressive strategy that his own performances of self would adopt. Like the overexpressive celebrity's, the maladroit monarch's eccentric fea- 34 1 SPECTACULAR DISAPPEARANCES tures invite the attentions that secure his power while at the same time frustrating the reinterpretations that might undermine it. With the live performances themselves lost to time, it is impossible to know how the language of Cibber's script translated to the gestures of his performance or how, exactly, Cibber suggested Richard's named deformities in his stance or costume. No images exist that can be positively identified depicting Cibber as Richard. The image that comes closest is the frontispiece to Nicholas Rowe's 1709 edition of Richard III (figure 1), published at a time when Cibber was still active in the role. The illustration that adorns Rowe's edition shows the climactic scene in act 5 in which Richard, sleepless on the eve of the Battle of Bosworth Field, is visited by the ghosts of all he has killed. Draperies framing the image suggest both the borders of Richard's tent and the curtains of the Drury Lane stage and seem to invite us to read the image as a representation of the play in performance. If we do, we might interpret this image as confirmation that Cibber's portrayal emphasized Richard's de- formities. Richard sits bent over a table, his head in his right hand and the bulk of his hunched left shoulder suggesting an awkwardly bent back. His armor lies in disarray at his feet, the jumbled gloves and greaves echoing and emphasizing the disordered body of the man who sits beside them.22 There are, however, several problems with interpreting this image as a faithful representation of Cibber's performance. While a few of the frontis- pieces that adorn Rowe's edition The Works of William Shakespear may depict the plays in performance, many certainly do not. The most obvious evidence that the Richard III frontispiece falls into the latter category is that the play for which this image serves as frontispiece is Shakespeare's version, not the 1699 adaptation that Cibber would have been performing. The most famous recent actor to have used the Shakespearean text was Samuel Sandford, who appeared in a production led by Betterton and performed sometime before 1691-1692.23 Cibber's version of the play had not been performed for five years before Rowe's edition appeared, and although Sandford had died eleven years before Rowe's edition saw publication, his performance was memorable enough that Cibber could discuss it at length in his Apology of 1740. If the illustration does depict the play in performance, in other words, it might as easily memorialize Sandford's performance as Cibber's. A representation of Sandford is not necessarily irrelevant, since Cibber writes in the Apology of having borrowed heavily from Sandford's perfor- mance in his own portrayal.24 Yet later representations of other actors in the role de-emphasize Richard's deformities as much as Rowe's illustration seems to emphasize them. William Hogarth's 1745 painting of David Garrick shows yyj Y,4 (ti;\ Fes, pio 1. Frontispiece to Nicholas Rowe's Richard III (1709). © Courtesy of Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library, University of Toronto. 36 SPECTACULAR DISAPPEARANCES 2. William Hogarth, David Garrick as Richard III (ca. 1745). © Courtesy National Museums Liverpool. the actor head on, leaning on one arm but in a posture that may suggest read- iness for battle as easily as it suggests weakness or deformity (figure 2). Wil- liam Hamilton's later painting of John Phillip Kemble in the role (figure 3) works in much the same way. Despite these arguments, there is some evidence that Richard's deformi- ties figured prominently in the audience's perception of the role, if not in Cib- ber's precise gestures. Rowe's own play Jane Shore, for instance, debuted in 1714 with Cibber taking up his old role as Richard III (a casting choice that in- dicates how much audiences had come to associate Cibber with the deformed king). At one moment in the play, Cibber as Richard invites his courtiers (and his audience members) to "Behold my arm, thus blasted, dry, and wither'd / Shrunk like a foul abortion, and decay'd."25 The stage directions tell us that he animates these lines by "pulling up his sleeves"-a detail that suggests that Richard's deformities played some part in the spectacle of Cibber's perfor- mance." Theater documents excavated by Judith Milhous indicate that Cib- ber wore the same costume to play the deformed king in both Jane Shore and his own Richard III'. Taken together, these documents suggest that there was 'd ~. ~, 4f I'll B -4 3. William Hamilton, John Phillip Kemble as Richard 111 (1790). © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 38 1 SPECTACULAR DISAPPEARANCES some effort to make Richard's deformities visible on Cibber's costumed body in the 1699 production. To whatever extent Richard's deformities figured into Cibber's perfor- mances, they figure heavily into his script. His portrayal of Richard's body is one of the ways that Cibber's version of the play departs most markedly from Shakespeare's-and that contributes most markedly to critics' complaints of the character's illegibility. In the earlier Richard III, the king endures again and again the disgust of onstage spectators who read his deformities as un- ambiguous markers of his villainy (and whose readings are confirmed in the play's final act). As disability scholars David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder point out, much of the dramatic tension in Shakespeare's text arises from Richard's attempts to "perform his deformity"-to defy with his own skillful language the prophecies proclaimed at his birth and made overt in his crook- ed back.28 Through the poetic language that he commands throughout the play, Richard struggles for the right to self-definition against the "scripts of disability" that threaten to define him and against the spectators who offer their own interpretations of a body made all too visible by its irregularities.29 These attempts are ultimately unsuccessful. By act 5, Richard's former elo- quence has dissolved into largely monosyllabic confirmations of his body's inadequacies: "A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!"30 Shakespeare's Richard ends the play imprisoned in his own body and in his spectators' read- ings of that body, the victim of his spectacular performances rather than the subject who speaks his own story. Shakespeare portrays Richard's deformities, then, as prophecies of his doom: the legible signs of his identity as a man "sealed in thy nativity / The slave of nature and the son of hell."31 In stark contrast, Cibber's language re- figures these deformities as ciphers that defy the grammar of the Enlighten- ment anatomy.32 Cibber introduces the inscrutability of Richard's deformities early in the play chiefly through the observations of the deposed King Henry, who seems baffled by Richard's "Frightful" form.33 It is not, Cibber makes clear, that Henry is a poor reader of bodies. When a lord arrives at the Tower of London fresh from the battlefield in the first act of the play, Henry intu- its the tenor of his news from the expressions on his face. "[H]is Brow's the Title-Page, / That speaks the Nature of a tragic Volume," Henry predicts. "Say, Friend, how does my Queen! my Son! / Thou tremblest, and the Whiteness of thy Cheek / Is apter than thy Tongue to tell the Errand."34 When the body before him is not the able body of the messenger but the deformed body of Richard, however, Henry seems less sure of his interpretations. "What bloody THE CELEBRITY EMERGES AS THE DEFORMED KING 1 39 Scene," he asks upon Richard's entrance in the following scene, "has Roscius now to act?135 Henry's identification of Richard as the Roman actor Roscius confirms the deformed king's status as spectacle and heightens his identification with the spectacular celebrity who portrays him. It also repositions Henry from one who would be "star'd at" to a spectator casting his gaze on Richard.36 By pos- ing his reading of Richard as a question rather than stating it as a fact, Henry betrays some anxiety about whether Cibber's Richard will indeed stick to the "scripts of disability" that dictate how each scene, in Shakespeare's play, will end. It is worth noting that Henry's question originates with Shakespeare's 3 Henry VI: in that play, Henry, upon Richard's entrance to his Tower cell, asks, "What scene of death hath Roscius to act?"37 Cibber's "bloody scene," so much vaguer than Shakespeare's "scene of death," places new emphasis on the de- formed body's illegibility. So, too, does the line's proximity, in Cibber's play, to Henry's description of the messenger's face as a "tragic volume." In contrast to the "tragic volume" of a narrative already completed and unalterable by the time that Henry encounters it in his messenger's face, Henry's question about Richard's body indicates a spectacle not quite contained or containable by the conventions of its form. It evokes the open-endedness of a performance that seems in danger, at any moment, of departing from its script. Henry's inability to read Richard clears the way for Richard to define himself-and, as I will argue, mirrors the ways that the audience's inability to read Cibber's portrayal of Richard will aid Cibber's own self-creation. This move from illegibility to self-definition is prefigured in the scene in which Henry equivocates about how to characterize Richard or to predict the form his "bloody Scene" will take.38 Henry's readings of Richard's body grow more confident as the scene progresses and he moves from questions ("wherefore dost thou come? Is't for my Life?") to conditional descriptions ("If murder- ing Innocents be executing, / Then thou'rt the worst of Executioners") to assertions of Richard's villainy ("thou cam'st to bite Mankind").39 Here Hen- ry's descriptions of Richard break off midsentence, interrupted by Richard's "I'll hear no more-die, Prophet, in thy Speech" and punctuated by Henry's murder, as Richard claims the power of self-definition as his and his alone." Having silenced Henry, Richard dismisses the readings of his body that he has "heard [his] mother say" and settles, finally, on its uncategorizable pecu- liarity: "I am-myself alone."" With this line, Richard disables his spectators' attempts to read him against earlier narratives or within predetermined rules about anatomy as a key to character. He redefines himself, instead, as one 40 1 SPECTACULAR DISAPPEARANCES who cannot be compared to-any more than he can be defined by-anyone but himself. Cibber lifts these lines, largely unchanged, from Shakespeare's 3 Henry VI.42 By inserting them into the first act of his Richard III (in place of the famous soliloquy with which Shakespeare's Richard defines his disability as prophecy), Cibber leaves somewhat more ambiguous the significance of Richard's shape. Like Herostratus's countrymen, Richard's onlookers cannot ignore him. His deformities structure their remarks and position him, from the moment he enters the stage to the moment he exits, at the center of the gaze. Despite the spectacle that his body affords them, however, these onlookers echo Henry's trepidation when it comes to reading the character of the deformed king. As unable to interpret his deformities as they are to ignore them, the spectators must surrender to Richard the privilege to define himself, alone. It is perhaps not just to limit Shakespeare's five acts to two hours' traf- fic, then, that Cibber excises so many of the speeches in which Richard or his onlookers depict his body as prophecy. Like Henry's "What bloody scene has Roscius to act?" these excisions reformulate Richard's deformities as ques- tions rather than predilections of doom. As such, Cibber's script transfers the power of naming and of narrative from the unseen viewer to the deformed king, who alone can say what or how his body means. The lines that replace Shakespeare's soliloquy in Cibber's version confirm the king's power over his own history by emphasizing his continued eloquence, in stark contrast to the declining majesty of Shakespeare's babbling monarch. At the same time, as we shall see, they suggest the triumph of the spectacular celebrity who em- bodies the king over the cits and critics who glower at him from the pit. Most telling are Cibber's changes to the spectacular scene in act 5 when, as Rowe's frontispiece illustrates, Richard encounters in a dream the ghosts of those he has murdered and wakes, in Shakespeare's version, having lost all sense of self. "What do I fear? Myself?" Shakespeare's Richard asks. He proceeds in the same sorts of interrogative sentences that Cibber will use to express Henry's bafflement at Richard's illegible body in his own first act. "There's none else by," declares Shakespeare's Richard: "Richard loves Richard, that is, I am I. / Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am. / Then fly! What, from myself? Great reason. Why?"43 Richard's "I am I" might appear to resemble the line that marks Richard's self-definition in the first act of Cibber's play: "I am myself-alone." But in Shakespeare's final act, this apparent declaration of selfhood quickly dissolves into a meaningless tautology, as Richard replac- THE CELEBRITY EMERGES AS THE DEFORMED KING 1 41 es this statement of self with a series of questions with impossible or oxy- moronic answers. ("Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am.") Shakespeare's Richard inhabits a body legible to his spectators but obscure to himself. His struggles at self-definition collapse, finally, in a doubly conscious internaliza- tion of his spectators' definitions of his body as villainous and in an impossi- ble desire to "fly . . . from myself." Cibber deletes this section. The changes that he makes recast Richard as a spectacle gaining self-awareness at the same time that Shakespeare's Richard is losing it. Departing from Shakespeare's soliloquy just before "What do I fear?," Cibber excises the nearly forty lines in which Shakespeare details, in increas- ingly unraveling language, Richard's unraveling powers of self-description. Re- placing these lines in Cibber's play is a brief meditation on determinism ("I am but Man, and Fate, do thou dispose me"),44 almost immediately interrupted by the entrance of Catesby, who has come to summon Richard to battle. The ghosts of the dead might rob Shakespeare's Richard of his former eloquence, but Cibber's Richard dismisses them with surprisingly little equivocation. The short, robust lines that replace Shakespeare's long soliloquy serve to reaffirm the king's powers of self-description. "No never be it said / That Fate itself could awe the soul of Richard," Cibber's king declares, only twenty-three lines after waking from his dream. "Hence babbling Dreams; you threaten here in vain; / Conscience avant, Richard's himself again."45 This final phrase echoes Shakespeare's "I am I" in its reflexivity, but Cib- ber's revision lacks the tautological symmetry that makes Shakespeare's lan- guage turn back on itself into an expression of self-alienation. By translating the phrase into the third person, Cibber takes advantage of the idiomatic as- sociation of the reflexive pronoun with an individual's return to his proper subject position.46 Cibber's "Richard's himself again" signifies not the split- ting of the self accomplished by Shakespeare's "I am I," but rather a reunifica- tion that permits the self to speak. The grammatical eccentricity of Cibber's sentence confirms Richard's dual roles as the star as well as the author of his history. By translating Shakespeare's subject pronoun "I" into the objective case ("himself"), Cibber composes a sentence in which Richard occupies both the subject and the predicate: he serves, in other words, as both the speaking subject and the object being spoken about. Cibber's revisions to Shakespeare's play not only emphasize the vulnera- bility that the spectacular king (and the spectacular celebrity) had acquired in a society that would recognize the unspectacular Mr. Spectator as its prima- ry spokesperson. These revisions also transform Richard's deformities from 42 1 SPECTACULAR DISAPPEARANCES the unambiguous marks of malignancy to strange hieroglyphs that make his form illegible. Undeniably visible but frustratingly uninterpretable, Cibber's Richard maintains his Herostratic fame without suffering the vulnerability of those kings who are "star'd at."47 The same deformities that increase Richard's visibility also ensure his privacy. That Cibber's Richard achieves his self-dissolution through increased self- reference is what transforms the scene from expression to overexpression. It is no accident that, though they lack the same self-doubt, Cibber's revisions contain the echoes of Shakespeare's "I am I." While these echoes do not rob Cibber's Richard of his coherence, as they did Shakespeare's Richard, they include an excess of self-reference. In proclaiming "Richard's himself again," Cibber's deformed king refers to himself twice (once as "Richard" and once as "himself"). This excess of self-reference, however, does not bring the spec- tator any closer to knowing who or what Richard is. In fact, it prevents such knowledge by replacing with "himself" any adjective that might help to eluci- date the deformed king's character. A soliloquy whose excessive self-reference serves only to deflect self-description, a deformed body whose excessive visibility serves only to increase illegibility: these are the overexpressive el- ements that allow Cibber's Richard to reclaim the powers of self-definition from his spectators and to begin to tell his own story. It is thus fitting that in addition to allowing Richard the power to describe his own intentions, his own dreams, his own life, Cibber should allow him the power to describe his own death as well. This decision marks a signifi- cant departure from Cibber's source. Shakespeare's play relegates Richard's death to a stage direction that prevents the king from speaking during his final scene onstage.48 The last line we hear from him (the line that ends the scene just before this one) is "A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!"-a line that, as I've already discussed, reduces the intricacies of Richard's earlier utterances to a succession of mainly monosyllables, capable only of naming his lameness.49 Though Shakespeare allows Richard to bring the play into be- ing through his opening soliloquy, he affords no such privilege at the play's conclusion. The end of Richard's life, like the end of the play in which he ap- pears, is performed upon him by the stage directions-and by Richmond's announcement that "the bloody dog is dead."50 Not so the final moments of Richard's life in Cibber's play. The stage direc- tions tell us that Richmond and Richard "Fight" and "Richard falls."51 In this play, however, Richard dies with a final grand farewell that increases the over- expressive spectacle of his departure. "Perdition catch thy arm-the chance is thine," Richard exclaims to Richmond as he receives his death wound: THE CELEBRITY EMERGES AS THE DEFORMED KING 43 But oh! the vast Renown thou hast acquired! In conquering Richard, does afflict him more Than ev'n his Body's parting with its Soul. Now let the World no longer be a Stage To feed Contention in a lingering Act; But let one Spirit of the first-born Cain Reign in all Bosoms; that each Heart may set On bloody Actions, the rude Scene may end, And Darkness be the Burier of the Dead. [Dies52 Like "Richard's himself again," the first four lines of Richard's death speech guarantee his dual role as subject and object by translating his self- description into the third person. This perspective allows Richard to insert himself as the star of the story even as he seems to watch that story unfold from afar. His double functions as spectacle and spectator are even more starkly juxtaposed in the passage's idiosyncratic verb tense, as Richard de- scribes his greatest misfortune to be the "vast renown [Richmond has] ac- quired" in defeating him. Speaking in the present perfect tense, Richard enjoys the perspective of an omniscient spectator able to see and to narrate not only the defeat of the king but also its consequences, the rising fame of his defeater. Perhaps even more poignant is Richard's wish that "the spirit of the first- born Cain," a character whose marked body resembles Richard's, should come to "Reign in all bosoms.53 The line betrays a desire for the inconspicuousness that guarantees the subject's power to observe others and to define himself. In a society in which Cain's deformities mark "All bosoms," Richard's own deformities will no longer seem so offensive. Significantly, Richard does not imagine achieving this inconspicuousness by contorting his own figure to fit the unmarked figures of his able-bodied fellows. Instead, he imagines forcing their figures to conform to his own. As he does so, his spectators become copies of his own body, pawns in his own plot. It is, then, a particularly overexpressive illegibility that Richard imagines here-an illegibility that he will achieve not by minimizing but by exaggerat- ing the spectacular proportions of his own body and the self-reference within his own sentences. It is also a typically Cibberian illegibility-or typically Cib- berian according to critics' depiction of Cibber as a celebrity who doesn't con- ceal but proclaims his deviations and his disabilities. These disabilities were not limited, for such critics, to the body that Cibber exhibited in performance but included also the idiosyncrasies and malapropisms that littered his print- 44 1 SPECTACULAR DISAPPEARANCES ed works and that his readers compared both implicitly and explicitly to the deformities of Richard's body. One pamphleteer even accused Cibber in his writings of intentionally "ty[ing] up your Wit, as a Beggar does his Limbs, to excite our Compassion and our Charity."54 I will turn to Cibber's critics in the final section of this chapter, where I ex- plore how critiques by Pope, Henry Fielding, and others helped to crystallize the elements of overexpression that Cibber's own autobiographical perfor- mances suggest. First, though, I examine how the strategy of overexpression that I have defined in Cibber's performance as Richard translates to his print- ed works. As I will demonstrate, the purple prose and misspelled words with which Cibber "t[ied] up his wit" and deformed the printed page worked to frustrate spectators' interpretations of his printed works much as Richard's unreadable body had frustrated their critiques of his performance. Reading these works in concert with Cibber's performances as Richard contextualiz- es Pope's famous critique of Cibber as the deformed king of The Dunciad by revealing the extent to which Cibber borrowed from his onstage role to con- struct his offstage persona. Even more importantly, such readings suggest one model for translating the features of overexpression from the stage to the page-a model that later artists would take up, build upon, and react against. "HOW FAIR A PAGE THOU'ST BLOTTED": DEFORMING THE PRINTED PAGE INTO THE LINGUA CIBBERIANA The suggestion that Cibber's stylistic techniques might apply as easily to his printed materials as to his performances in Richard III might seem surprising-especially if we recall the first act of the play and the deep dis- tinction that Henry implies between the "tragic volume" of his able-bodied messenger's face and the "bloody scene" presaged by Richard's irregular body.55 Henry's association of a normative body with the printed page and a deformed body with performance suggests a dichotomy between print and performance-one that disability scholars reproduce in lamenting Rich- ard's inability to perform his identity against the "scripts of disability" that circumscribe him.56 Both formulations portray performance as ephemeral and somewhat unruly-a medium that defies form, specializing in stories (like the "bloody scene" that Richard will enact) whose plots often do not conform to recognizable patterns and whose endings cannot be predicted. Print, on the other hand, seems in this dichotomy to belong to the deper- sonalized and disembodied world ruled by figures like Mr. Spectator. Like the THE CELEBRITY EMERGES AS THE DEFORMED KING 1 45 "tragic volume" of the messenger's able body, the printed page bears none of the distinguishing marks or distracting peculiarities that might make one author's book appear different from another's, or that might distract from the reader's ability to interpret the story's meaning. This standardization was particularly apparent in Cibber's lifetime, which saw the emergence of the dictionary; the growing insistence on standards of spelling, punctuation, and grammar; and the increasingly uniform appearance not only of printed books but also of published playscripts.57 Though dictionaries and wordbooks had begun to appear earlier in the eighteenth century, such standardization would reach its climax with the publication of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the En- glish Language in 1755, fifteen years after the debut of Cibber's autobiography. This assumption of the printed page as rule-bound and standardized suggests one reason that the Scriblerians' complaints about Cibber's malapropisms so often coincide with their complaints about Cibber's vanity. To refuse to con- form to standards of grammar and spelling was to draw unnecessary atten- tion to oneself. Cibber's greatest crime, according to the Scriblerians, was his attempt to make a spectacle of himself not only on the spectacular stage but on the supposedly unspectacular and normative printed page as well. Yet the foregoing discussion of overexpression suggests a way to under- stand Cibber's printed misspellings and malapropisms not as vanity but as its opposite: as the only means by which a celebrity of Cibber's stature could forestall his readers' tendency to interpret every word of his prose as a win- dow into his personality. In short, Cibber's linguistic tricks constitute a strat- egy by which the celebrity might avoid his spectators' anatomizing gaze at the same time that he seemed to invite it. Cibber provides an illustration of this strategy in the final scene of Richard III, in which he reimagines Richard's story not as a "Tale ... told" (or performed) by "future Ages" but rather as a history recorded on a printed page.58 As he does, he suggests that this printed page is a medium as spectacular and unstable as performance. The play doesn't end, after all, with Richard's death speech. Cibber punc- tuates this death with an elegy by Richard's opponent and successor, Rich- mond. And like Henry's "What bloody scene," Richmond's speech seems less an effort to describe or define the character of the deformed king than a confirmation of the impossibility of doing so. "Farewel, Richard," Richmond begins. and from thy dreadful End May future Kings from Tyranny be warn'd: Had thy aspiring Soul but stirr'd in Virtue, 46 1 SPECTACULAR DISAPPEARANCES With half the Spirit it has dar'd in Evil, How might thy Fame have grac'd our English annals? But as thou art, how fair a Page thou'st blotted?59 Richmond's elegy mirrors the language that the Scriblerians would later use to condemn Cibber's prose by comparing it to a deformed body. Here, Richard's distinctive figure resurfaces to "blot" the pages of English history books, rendering them illegible. Crucially, however, Richard achieves his illegibility not by leaving holes but rather by creating excesses in his self-presentations. These self-presentations play upon the excessive visibility of a body that "seems too much a body" as they do on the excessive ink that blots the deformed king's name.60 We might perceive shadows of this blotted page in the black page of Tristram Shandy, a similarly excessive and similarly inscrutable memorial to a similarly disabled character, Sterne's doomed parson Yorick (a character whose fate, like Rich- ard's, comes down to his lack of a proper horse). We might perceive its shad- ows as well in Cibber's description of his autobiography as "this Chiaro Oscuro of my Mind," a memorial somewhere in between the "oddly besmear'd" (or blotted) page of an improper memory and the "flatly white-wash'd" page of forgetting.61 The image of a page too full of ink to be properly interpreted is one that haunts the overexpressive performances of the celebrities I examine here-and one that we shall see again. The blotted page made illegible by its excesses certainly seems an apt symbol for the famously verbose prose that distinguished Cibber's printed works, and his Scriblerian enemies were quick to point out the resemblances between Cibber's overwrought performances as Richard and the deformed words and sentences of his prose. One of the most complete descriptions of his performance, published by an anonymous pamphleteer in 1740, is also one of the most negative. Specifically, it chastises Cibber for being too spec- tacular in his onstage appearance-and too peculiar in his diction. "When it came to be acted," the pamphleteer writes, "this same Mender of Shakespear chose the principal Part, viz. the King, for himself; and accordingly being in- vested with the purple Robe, he scream'd thro' four Acts without Dignity or Decency. ... When in the heat of Battle at Bosworth Field, the King is dis- mounted, our Comic-Tragedian came on the Stage, really breathless, and in a seeming Panick, screaming out his line thus-'A Harse, a Harse, my Kingdom for a Harse.1'62 The pamphleteer's mocking of Cibber's lines, heavy with the drawled ac- cent the actor assumed as fop, transforms the words that-in Shakespeare's THE CELEBRITY EMERGES AS THE DEFORMED KING 1 47 play-mark Richard's surrender to the "scripts of disability." In Cibber's play, these same words mark language as subject to the whims and the persona of the performer. In part, Cibber's crime stems from his inability or refusal to divorce his onstage role from his offstage persona: his performance fails because he continues to play himself even when he attempts to play Rich- ard. The critique suggests one way that the roles of Cibber as Richard and of Cibber as Cibber bled into one another, inviting audiences to read Cibber's deformed king as a commentary on his own celebrity. Yet it is significant that the pamphleteer's critique focuses on Cibber's mispronunciation-expressed in print through a misspelling-of the play's words. Like Richard's proper name-or like Herostratus's-the misspelled "Harse" isn't public property. It can't be found within any of the dictionar- ies that emerged during Cibber's lifetime. Instead, "Harse" is a word that acquires its meaning not in its spelling but rather in its pronunciation- not in print but in performance. It is only recognizable to the extent that it emanates from and refers back to the body and the voice of Colley Cib- ber. (One of the Scriblerians' most famous members, Henry Fielding, relies on this recognition in creating a parody of Cibber for his 1730 play, The Au- thor's Farce. Fielding identifies the ridiculous character Sir Farcical Comic as a mockery of Cibber by having him repeat Cibber's affected accent in foppish catchphrases-"Stap my breath!" and "Stap my vitals!"-that turn proper- ly English o's to Cibber's drawn-out a's.)63 Like Richard's blotted page and illegible body, such misspelled words belong to Cibber and only to Cibber: incorrect but unmistakable, proprietary precisely because they are improp- er. As such, they preserve the uniqueness of Cibber's deformed performance even within the increasingly standardized surfaces of the printed page. At the same time, they emphasize this performance's deformity and its illegibility, muddling the generic distinctions that audiences might use to categorize and interpret "our Comic-Tragedian's" performance. Richmond's description of the blotted page of Richard's history book thus anticipates the ways in which Cibber's own histories will employ misspelled words and malformed sentences to guarantee Cibber's spectacular unique- ness at the same time that they render him illegible. Should we desire an example of the blotted pages, superfluous phrases, and overwrought words that make overexpression not only a strategy of performance but also a per- formance in print, we need look no further than Cibber's Apology. Like Rich- ard's death speech, the Apology advertises itself as both autobiography and history, both an analysis of Cibber's Life and a History of the Stage During His Own Time. Cibber himself serves as the book's spectacular subject and as its 48 1 SPECTACULAR DISAPPEARANCES objective historian. His strategy for occupying both of these roles simultane- ously becomes clear when, early in the Apology, he defends one of his most egregious overexpressions by exaggerating it further. After explaining the grave offenses he suffered from his critics, Cibber alludes by way of example to a preface he wrote for his play The Provoked Husband, "where, speaking of [leading actress] Mrs. [Anne] Oldfield's excellent Performance in the Part of Lady Townly, my Words ran thus, viz. It is not enough to say, that here she outdid her usual Outdoing."64 As Cibber acknowledges, the superfluous repetition of the already ex- clamatory "outdid" turned his preface to palaver, and his readers were es- pecially vocal in their criticisms of this passage. The phrase makes a parodic appearance in The Apology for the Life of Mr. The' Cibber, which claims to be the autobiography of Cibber's son but was probably written by Henry Fielding.65 It surfaces as well in The Tryal of Colley Cibber, Comedian (attributed on its title page to T. Johnson, but probably also written by Fielding).66 Yet as Cibber points out, his overdone "outdoing" prevented his critics from doing little more than aping him. "I owe myself the Shame of confessing, I have no Ex- cuse for it," Cibber admits of his overexpressive phrase. "But . .. like a Lover in the Fulness of his Content, by endeavouring to be floridly grateful, I talk'd Nonsense. Not but it makes me smile to remember how many flat Writers have made themselves brisk upon this single Expression; wherever the Verb, Outdo, could come in, the pleasant Accusative, Outdoing, was sure to follow it. ... Nay, the very learned in the Law, have at least facetiously laid hold of it! Ten Years after it first came from me, it serv'd to enliven the Eloquence of an eminent Pleader before the House of Parliament! What Author would not envy me so frolicksome a Fault, that had such publick Honours paid to it?"67 Cibber's "outdid her usual outdoings" serves the intended purpose of overexpression in two ways. First, it frustrates his readers' attempts to divine the meaning of his prose, much as Richard's bent back frustrated King Hen- ry's attempts to divine the meaning of his performance. Second, the phrase- precisely because of the nonsense it produces-coerces the most authorita- tive figures in England ("the very learned in the law," "an eminent Pleader before the House of Parliament," the spectators and authorities who ruled Cibber's society) into speaking Cibber's tongue. Cibber translates his eccen- tric phrases into the normative language by creating a syntax so spectacular that others begin to repeat it. What author, in a print world as overpopulated with critics as Cibber's was, "would not envy" that? Cibber does not evade his critics' lambastings with his misspelled words and malformed sentences-any more than he avoids his spectators' stares THE CELEBRITY EMERGES AS THE DEFORMED KING 1 49 with his deformed costume. Indeed, he seems to encourage these lambast- ings as he does those stares. Yet at the same time that they invite his critics' ire, Cibber's blatantly nonnormative sentences also render useless his crit- ics' most powerful weapons. Unable to categorize his language as English in the strictest sense, they can hardly critique his deviations from it. Unable to understand or interpret his prose, they can only mimic it. In this they resemble the baffled Henry VI in Cibber's play, articulating what all Cibber's spectators seem to be thinking as he asks what Richard's illegible body could possibly mean. It was not only the anonymous writer of the Laureat, published shortly after the release of Cibber's Apology, who noted the resemblances between Cibber's malapropisms in print and his bent body as Richard III. The deformi- ty of Richard's printed pages is an image that recurs throughout the Scrible- rians' writings against Cibber, so that deformity comes to stand in (much as it did for Cibber's Henry VI) for illegibility. In the final section of this chapter I turn to these writings by Cibber's critics, who often reference Cibber's role as Richard in order to justify their attacks of his written works as similarly excessive, similarly deformed. The most famous of these is Pope's Dunciad, and as we shall see, the crown that Cibber donned as Richard both resembles and sheds light on the laurel wreath he wears as King of the Dunces. Even more significant than the link such critiques draw between Cibber's life as performer and his life as poet is their description of the effect that Cibber's autobiographical performances had on his spectators and readers. As they repeatedly chastise Cibber's excesses for rendering his persona impenetrable, Pope and others become the first to articulate these excesses, until what was merely an idiosyncrasy of Cibber's Richard comes to seem a defining feature of Cibber's style. As they grope for ways to express what so frustrates them about the poet laureate, in other words, their critiques succeed in popular- izing and in perpetuating the overexpressive methods that later artists will adopt. Through their writings, overexpression begins to come into focus as both the excess of deformity and as the inherent deformity of excess. "TO BLOT OUT ORDER": COLLEY CIBBER AS KING OF THE DUNCES Echoing throughout Scriblerian responses to Cibber's works is the conten- tion that the actor's printed and performed deformities violate the stan- dards of the English language and of Englishness itself. Paradoxically, such 50 1 SPECTACULAR DISAPPEARANCES violations seem only to make Cibber more English. In a pamphlet published in 1740 under the pseudonym of "T. Johnson" and later produced on the pages of his periodical, The Champion, for instance, Henry Fielding puts Cibber on trial. The charge, as the title page declares, is "writing a Book intitled An Apology for his Life, &c. Being A thorough Examination thereof; wherein he is proved guilty of High Crimes and Misdemeanors against the English Language."68 The trial consists of testimonies by personages pro- claiming the Apology's excesses as turning its syntax to senselessness. Yet the senselessness of Cibber's English language seems not to make him less English, but rather to make him more so: Fielding ends his pamphlet by ac- quitting Cibber of all crimes for which he stands accused. "Now I shall prove it to be English in the following manner," Fielding declares of the Apology's excessive language. "Whatever Book is writ in no other Language is writ in English. This Book is writ in no other Language; Ergo, It is writ in English: Of which Language the Author hath shewn himself a most absolute Master; for surely he must be absolute Master of that whose Laws he can trample under Feet, and which he can use as he pleases."69 Fielding's mock-logical conclusion that a book "writ in no other Lan- guage" must be "writ in English" makes more sense if we recall Mr. Spectator's description of the ideal Englishman as a "Citizen of the World."70 The English- man is an unmarked man who avoids the peculiarities of other nations and seeks only to remain unremarkable and unremarked upon as he mixes with the crowd. Cibber, according to Fielding, seeks a similar illegibility. While Mr. Spectator achieves his Englishness by blending in, however, Cibber does so by standing out-highlighting the excesses, the deformities, and the impropri- eties that make the Apology such an uncategorizable book. Reviews and discussions of Cibber's printed works by his contemporar- ies reiterate Fielding's suggestion that the very excesses of Cibber's language make his works impossible to dissect and that the oddities of his Englishness render him somehow more English. The writer of the Laureat faces just such a difficulty in describing Cibber's 1712 tragedy Ximena, an adaptation of the French neoclassical play Le Cid. "Our Laureat, some Years ago," the pamphlet explains, "presented the Public with a Thing he called a Play, something in Imitation of the Cid of Corneille, I cannot call it a Translation into English, for it is not English, 'tis a Sort of Lingua Cibberiana, which, as they say the Lingua Franca is a commercial, is a Sort of Theatrical Language, peculiar to himself and the Stage."71 As the pamphleteer describes it, Cibber's language hovers between originality and anonymity, between being monstrous and being un- marked. Such language is not quite the standardized "English" of the bour- THE CELEBRITY EMERGES AS THE DEFORMED KING 1 51 geois public sphere, he declares, but a "Lingua Cibberiana." The words of this language are nonstandard, "peculiar to" Cibber and to "the Stage," where the pronunciations of individual performers take precedence over the iterative words churned out by the printing press. At the same time that he marks such language as the exclusive property of Colley Cibber, however, the pam- phleteer implies that such language is unmarked. It is a Lingua Cibberiana that, like the "commercial" Lingua Franca, does not belong to a particular na- tion and does not mark its speakers as of a particular character. As he did in Fielding's Tryal, Cibber earns his national identity by relinquishing all nation- al markers. Speaking a language both "peculiar to" himself and unidentifiable as anything else, Cibber guarantees his Englishness by overexpressing it. The nonnormative body at the center of Cibber's performances and the improper words that punctuate their prose guarantee the Scriblerians' representation of the celebrity not only as "Beggar" or as actor but also, of course, as king.72 In his Tryal, Fielding descries Cibber's tendency to regard history as his own property rather than a commonality he shares with his "Countrymen"-and to treat language as his own "absolute power."73 Here again Cibber assumes the crown of the deformed king, reclaiming his lan- guage as an "absolute power" that, unlike the standardized pages legible to anyone, could not be reinterpreted by Cibber's readers. Fielding's fellow Scriblerian, Alexander Pope, would make a similar accusation just two years later when, composing a new fourth book to his 1728 mock-epic The Dunciad, he removed the crown of the Dunce King from the head of Lewis Theobald and placed it squarely on the skull of his new nemesis, Colley Cibber. The Dunciad did not begin as a poem about Cibber-or even as a poem about celebrity. In 1728, angered by the publication of Shakespeare Restored; or a Specimen of the many Errors as well Committed as Unamended by Mr. Pope in his late edition of this poet by his rival Shakespearean editor Lewis Theobald, Pope published an anonymous three-book mock-epic. This first Dunciad sat- irized Theobald as a proud and pedantic sovereign who represented all that was wrong with Grub Street printers and English letters. A second version, The Dunciad Variorum (largely unchanged but with a long prolegomenon) ap- peared in 1729. As the years passed, however, Pope's enemies changed-or merely mul- tiplied. Pope had met Cibber through their mutual friend Joseph Addison in 1713, and the two became civil if cautious acquaintances. This civility collapsed when Cibber, in a performance of Buckingham's The Rehearsal, ad-libbed a speech designed to give injury to Pope and his fellow Scriblerians. The speech sparked a pamphlet war that eventually waned only to wax again in 1730, af- 52 1 SPECTACULAR DISAPPEARANCES ter Cibber assumed the post of poet laureate. Complaining vehemently (and perhaps accurately) that the appointment had less to do with poetry than with politics, Pope took advantage of Cibber's well-known malapropisms and accused him of mangling the English language. Cibber only added fuel to the fire with his publication of the Apology in 1740, prompting Pope to compose a fourth book for his Dunciad. It appeared in 1742 and bestowed upon Cibber the dubious prize of the Dunce King's crown. Less than a year later, Pope had published a new, complete version of the poem-The Dunciad in Four Books- now focused not on Lewis Theobald but on Cibber himself. Though composed forty-three years after Cibber debuted his Richard III, The Dunciad seems haunted by the play that was still in repertoire when Pope was writing. As Laura Rosenthal, G. S. Rousseau, and others have pointed out, the poem alludes frequently to theatrical images and devices.74 The in- vocation that launched the fourth book describes Pope's nightmare vision of a world without culture. Setting the scene for the poem's final, climactic moments, Pope writes: Now flam'd the Dog-star's unpropitious ray, Smote ev'ry Brain, and wither'd ev'ry Bay; Sick was the Sun, the Owl forsook his bow'r, The moon-struck Prophet felt the madding hour: Then rose the Seed of Chaos, and of Night, To blot out Order, and extinguish Light.75 Pope's use of the word "blot" here recalls Richmond's lamentation, in the final scene of Cibber's Richard III, for the "fair page" of the "English annals" that Richard's deformity has "blotted." Evoking Cibber's reimagining of Richard's deformed body as a blotted page, this image plays into one of Pope's central objections to Cibber as a man who has earned his laurels through performance rather than print, spectacle rather than sense. At the same time, his critique registers the growing separation between celebri- ty and author-or between spectacular, flash-in-the-pan fame and literary renown-that had begun to structure the London arts scene. The English culture that Pope fears throughout the Dunciad is precisely the English cul- ture that Cibber creates in his overexpressive performances and prose: an English history "fir'd" into nonexistence by the "annals" that obscure rather than remember their subjects, an English literature so superfluous that it becomes nonsensical, and an English monarchy headed by a deformed and illegible king. THE CELEBRITY EMERGES AS THE DEFORMED KING 1 53 Pope's anxieties about the uncategorizability of Cibber's haunting per- formances and illegible print surface even before the final, four-book poem begins, in a short introduction that heads the 1743 version and articulates many of the qualities that later artists would adopt as the cornerstones of overexpression. In the voice of "Ricardus Aristarchus" (a mocking pseudonym for another Shakespearean editor, Richard Bentley), Pope compares his poem to the "greater Epic[s]" of authors such as "Homer and Virgil."76 The mock- epic he presents differs from these "greater Epics" in part because it descends from a play rather than a poem: it is a genre, Pope writes, "come down to us amongst the Tragedies of Euripides."77 In addition to tracing the origins of the mock-epic genre to the stage, then, Pope locates it more specifically in the "Tragedies" of an author known for violating Aristotle's admonitions against spectacle. (It is likely the most notorious scene of Euripides's tragedy Medea that Pope is evoking when he imagines Cibber "mounting the wind" on "grin- ning dragons" in Book III.)78 Cibber has earned Pope's ridicule, this allusion implies, because he has confused the spectacular display of the actor with the authoritative objectivity of the historian. "It is from their actions only that Princes have their character, and Poets from their works," Pope writes in a footnote to Book IV.79 To combine these two roles-to attempt to earn liter- ary fame through spectacular "actions"-is to violate Pope's rules of order, and to plunge all of England into Dulness. Yet this is precisely what Cibber does in his determination to "write the Characters I have acted."80 And Pope's inability to dissect Cibber's character or critique his nonsensical prose seems to rescue Cibber's private self-if not his public persona-from the most vicious of Pope's attacks. Signifi- cantly, Pope traces Cibber's success at avoiding such barbs to two excesses characteristic of all the actor's self-presentations: the excessive "actions" that deform his English body, and the excessive words that deform his English language. Pope's identification of Cibber's excesses as both performed and printed suggests a resemblance between the qualities that, for him, define Cibber's works and the qualities that I have attributed to overexpression-a resemblance that the continuation of the introduction (as well as the poem it introduces) will confirm. Pope defines the first of these excesses in the same preface in which he de- scribes the origins of the mock-epic form. Though he refers to the mock-epic as the "lesser Epic," he distinguishes the form from its classical predecessors by noting its exaggerations-and, in particular, the exaggerated persona of the man who serves as both the hero of the poem and the representative of his nation.81 "In the greater Epic," Pope explains (by way of contrast), "the 54 1 SPECTACULAR DISAPPEARANCES prime intention of the Muse is to exalt Heroic Virtue, in order to propagate the love of it among the children of men.82 Pope's definition of the classical epic as a poem meant to declare and define a national hero who might serve as a model for "the children of men" is one that more recent critics have also attributed to the epic form. Like the early modern king, as scholars such as Richard Terry, Ulrich Broich, Gregory C. Colomb, and Claude Rawson note, the traditional epic hero serves as an embodiment of an entire nation. He is a symbolic personage rather than a person, whose every virtue and whose every vice suggest the collective virtues and vices of his countrymen. Like the celebrity, the epic hero represents his nation but loses his relevance at the moment that his values no longer accord with those of his countrymen. In the early eighteenth century, the same shifts that had depleted the power of the English monarchy seem also to have depleted the power of the English epic. By Pope's lifetime, writes Rawson, "The epic had become impos- sible to write. A loosening sense of universal coherence, however emphatically asserted, a progressive fragmentation of faiths, vast accretions of knowledge in the particulars of the universe, could not be expected to sustain confident or consensual articulations of a universal vision, in much the same way as the evolution of bourgeois society and the growth of anti-war sentiment made it harder for good poets to write epics."83 If epic heroes, like early modern kings, serve as symbols of "their lands and times," the mock-epic hero of Pope's poem, like the celebrity-king of Cibber's play, seems a deformation of these predecessors.84 He seems a hero who has become uncategorizable through the very excesses of his person and personality. Pope suggests these excesses-and the ways that they destroyed the mock-epic hero's suitability as representation of his nation-in Aristarchus's lengthy introduction. "But then it is not every Knave, nor (let me add) Fool, that is a fit subject for a Dunciad," he writes. "There must still exist some Analogy, if not resemblance of Qualities, between the Heroes of the two Po- ems [the greater epic and the lesser]; and this in order to admit what Neo- teric critics call the Parody, one of the liveliest graces of the little Epic. Thus it being agreed that the constituent qualities of the greater Epic Hero, are Wisdom, Bravery, and Love, from whence springeth heroic Virtue, it followeth that those of the lesser Epic Hero, should be Vanity, Impudence, and Debauch- ery, from which happy assemblage resulteth heroic Dulness, the never-dying subject of this our Poem."85 As he delves into the "particulars" of each quality comprising the iden- tity of the lesser Epic Hero, Pope suggests that "Vanity, Impudence, Debauch- ery" and "heroic Dulness" are the qualities of the epic hero deformed: they are THE CELEBRITY EMERGES AS THE DEFORMED KING 1 55 "Wisdom, Bravery, Love" and "heroic Virtue" in excess.86 "It is the character of true Wisdom," Pope explains, "to seek its chief support and confidence within itself; and to place that support in the resources which proceed from a con- scious rectitude of Will-And are the advantages of Vanity, when arising to the heroic standard, at all short of this self-complacence? Nay, are they not, in the opinion of the enamoured owner, far beyond it?"87 "Far beyond" the "true Wisdom" possessed by the English hero, Cibber's "Vanity" as the mock- epic hero exaggerates the qualities recognizable as English. They become, like Cibber's nonsensical words and deformed performances, unrecognizable as anything in particular. The pattern holds for the remainder of the mock-epic hero's qualities. These include not simply Bravery but "courage in so high and heroic a degree, that it insults not only Men, but Gods" and begins to resem- ble blasphemy; not only "Love" but love that, "when it is let alone to work upon the Lees, ... acquireth strength by Old age; and becometh" debauchery; and, not merely "Magnanimity" but "Buffoonery, the source of Ridicule, that 'laughing ornament' . . . of the little Epic."88 Pope illustrates each of these heroic qualities with a direct quote from Cibber-either from his Apology or from his indignant and widely circulated 1742 pamphlet, A Letter from Mr. C-- to Mr. P--. Despite a name that deems him "lesser" than his epic predecessors, then, Cibber's ridiculousness stems from an abundance rather than a dearth of wisdom, bravery, love, and heroic virtue. If the epic hero of England exem- plifies these qualities, Cibber exceeds them. And if the epic hero stands as an embodiment of his nation, Cibber's excessive identity deforms that same embodiment: he becomes less an emblem than an overexpression of Eng- lishness. The epic hero's virtues might "manifest [themselves] in every limb," Pope suggests, but Cibber's qualities as the mock-epic hero are less revealing of his or his countrymen's characters. Promising a glimpse into the English- man's true character but offering up only the superficial and spectacular Cib- ber, Pope portrays these same qualities in the mock-epic hero as those "all collected into the Face. "89 This face is, of course, a deformed one-and its deformities make it at once unmistakable and unreadable. "Nor can we be mistaken in this happy quality a species of Courage," Aristarchus continues of Cibber's "high courage of blasphemy," "when we consider those illustrious marks of it, which made his Face 'more known (as he justly boasteth) than most in the kingdom,' and his Language to consist of what we must allow to be the most daring Figure of Speech, that which is taken from the Name of God."90 In place of poetry Cibber pronounces blasphemy, according to Pope; he speaks in curses and irregular 56 1 SPECTACULAR DISAPPEARANCES utterances because he cannot speak sense. Samuel Garth, Pope's contempo- rary and the supposed inventor of the mock-epic form, described the new genre as characterized by its "barren Superfluity of Words."91 His descrip- tion reappears, not insignificantly, as the epigraph to the Laureat's diatribe against the verbosity of Cibber's Apology.92 That Pope employs a form at once "barren" and "superfluous" to describe the indescribable aspects of his arch nemesis suggests Cibber's simultaneous omnipresence and indescribability. The "marks" that make Cibber's face so well known might be "illustrious," but they are hardly illustrative. While they make him famous, they do not make him knowable. Pope's introduction thus characterizes Cibber's self-representation in terms of its spectacular exaggerations. The epic hero exemplifies substance, but Cibber performs empty spectacle. The epic hero exemplifies the qualities by which his countrymen are categorized and known, but Cibber, in exag- gerating these qualities into deformities, cannot be categorized and cannot be known. As Aristarchus's notes on Cibber's blasphemous "Language" make evident, Cibber achieves this spectacular unknowability not merely through the exaggerated Englishness of his character but also through the excessive words and phrases of his written works. These works, like the body they evoke again and again, are distinguished by their deformities. "All my Prose and Verse were much the same," declares the King of the Dunces in Book I: This, prose on stilts; that, poetry fall'n lame. Did on the stage my Fops appear confin'd? My Life gave ampler lessons to mankind. Did the dead Letter unsuccessful prove? The brisk Example never fail'd to move. Yet sure had Heav'n decreed to save the State, Heav'n had decreed these works a longer date.93 The final two lines link the roles of celebrity, of epic hero, and of king, pok- ing fun at Cibber's self-characterization as a representative of his nation whose "works" might "save the State." Yet the first two lines suggest that Cibber will attempt to save his nation through a deformed and irregular language, a prose marked by the prosthesis of stilts or a poetry "fall'n lame." Pope goes beyond mentioning the "lame [ness]" of Cibber's poetry: in- stead, he demonstrates it. The mock-epic style that Pope at once theorizes and exemplifies to mock-honor the deformed King of the Dunces twists even THE CELEBRITY EMERGES AS THE DEFORMED KING 1 57 the lines celebrated for his regularity into the deformed excesses of Dulness. Pope's parody of Cibber's excessive style is evident in the excessive footnotes that litter-and in many places overwhelm-the text of his poem. These ap- pear as well in the three-book Dunciad, poking fun at editors like Bentley and Theobald-who (Pope claims) attempt to redirect the reader's attention from the text itself to their copious emendations of it. Retaining many of these footnotes in his later Dunciad in Four Books, Pope draws an implicit compar- ison between overzealous editors and spotlight-seeking historians. Such, of course, was Cibber, a man whose bids for stardom had overshadowed his ob- servations about the theater and who had polluted his Historical View of the Stage During His Own Time with an Apology for [His] Life. Similar deformities haunt Pope's characterizations of Cibber and of his poetic kingdom throughout The Dunciad and suggest the syntactical and for- mal qualities of overexpression as a strategy printed as well as performed. Much has been made, for instance, of Pope's heroic couplets, a form he is credited with perfecting in earlier works such as The Essay on Man. Updating W. K. Wimsatt's famous description of these couplets as embodying the dia- lectic pattern of Enlightenment thought, J. Paul Hunter characterizes them as "a careful pairing of oppositions or balances but no formal resolution. .. . Rather than privileging one half or the other of the conflict or negotiating a successful compromise, the closed couplet tends to privilege the balancing itself-the preservation and acceptance of difference rather than a working out of modification or compromise."94 Yet if Pope's perfectly rendered couplets suggest balance and rational thought, as Hunter implies, what might we make of the excessive couplet that launches The Dunciad? Following the form of the epic, Pope's mock-epic begins with an invocation to the muse of the Grub Street hacks: "The Mighty Mother, and her Son who brings / The Smithfield Muses to the ear of Kings, / I sing."95 The first two lines of the poem firmly establish the verse form for which Pope is so well known, imposing the characteristic balance that Hunter describes through the perfect rhyme of "brings" with "Kings." But the third line upsets this precarious balance by inserting an extra rhyme: "sing." This additional rhyme acts as a sort of poetic third wheel (or a deformed poetic foot) to Pope's couplet. Top-heavy beneath this excessive rhyme, Pope's cou- plet topples into chaos, his perfect poetic form suddenly taking on Cibber's poetic deformities.96 As the poem continues, Pope develops such excesses and deformities as the particular provenance of Cibber and his minions-and as the very qual- 58 1 SPECTACULAR DISAPPEARANCES ities that make his works uninterpretable. After his description in Book I of the stilted prose and "lame" poetry that exemplify Cibber's print produc- tions, Pope pauses momentarily to allow the Queen of Dulness to take stock of her collected verses and her celebrity verse-maker. "All these, and more, the cloud-compelling Queen," he writes, "Beholds thro' fogs, that magnify the scene."97 Pope's epic epithet here identifies the "cloud-compelling Queen" as one who gathers obfuscation about her rather than dispersing it, who en- courages darkness rather than enlightening her surroundings. Significantly, the "fogs" she gathers do not merely obscure but rather "magnify the scene." Recalling Cibber's blotted page, in other words, they achieve their indecipher- ability through the excess rather than through the dearth of meaning. Un- der the pen of such a dunce and under the reign of such a queen, sentences and verses exceed their communicative power and endeavor instead, as Pope writes in Book IV, to "explain a thing till all men doubt it."98 In its mocking praise and parodic imitations of Cibber's language, The Dunciad articulates several of the strategies that Cibber employs to invite his spectators' stares while frustrating their interpretations-strategies that I have joined under the rubric of overexpression and that will resurface in the writings of Cibber's successors. Cibber achieved the illegibility that would prevent his spectators from dissecting his private life, first, by adopting a persona (what Pope would call the "lesser Epic hero") characterized by an un- readable excess of the qualities that might make him readable, in this case, as an Englishman.99 Second, he exaggerated the originality of his written works through the use of misspelled words, superfluous clauses, and phrases-like "outdid her own outdoings"-so exclamatory they ceased to make sense. By articulating these qualities in his Dunciad, Pope-as well as his fellow Scriblerians-helped to publicize Cibber's excesses and to identify the help- lessness they caused in Cibber's spectators and thus, as further chapters will suggest, to popularize overexpression as a strategy for frustrating critics that future stars would take up. Pope didn't decipher overexpression as a particu- lar strategy of Cibber's, in other words. But by railing against the illegibility of Cibber's autobiographical performances and by naming precisely what qual- ities of Cibber's works produced this illegibility, he began to articulate both the qualities and the effects of Cibber's style on Cibber's critics. Ironically, it was the critics declaring their own impotence in interpreting or articulating Cibber's style that provided the first coherent descriptions of overexpression and that allowed later artists to imagine Cibber's idiosyncrasies as a single, effective strategy for disabling the critics' barbs. THE CELEBRITY EMERGES AS THE DEFORMED KING 1 59 CONCLUSION: THE UNCREATING WORD In attempting to deny Cibber the privilege of writing his own history, then, Pope, Fielding, and others seem only to confirm this privilege. The Dun- ciad claims to fulfill the prophecies that Cibber's Apology predicted but that Cibber's Richard struggled so determinedly against, promising in Ricardus Aristarchus's introduction not to "hinder [Cibber's] own Prophecy of him- self."100 In a footnote to Book IV of the poem, Pope points out that he has kept this promise. He expresses his hope that his poem "hath not injured [Cibber], but rather verified his Prophecy (p. 243 of his own Life, 8vo. ch. ix) where he says 'the Reader will be as much pleased to find me a Dunce in my Old age, as he was to prove me a brisk blockhead in my Youth.' Wherever there was any room for Briskness, of Alacrity of any sort, even in sinking, he hath allowed him; but here, where there is nothing for him to do but to take his natural rest, he must permit his Historian to be silent."101 By declaring him- self to be Cibber's "Historian," Pope reverses the actor's claim-both in the autobiography and, implicitly, in Richard III-to be both historical subject and historian of his own life. But if the prophecies are those that Cibber himself pronounced, does Pope's poem merely further Cibber's designs in writing himself into history? The question of who writes history and who is written by it is one haunt- ing even the final couplets of Pope's nearly final poem. Pope's own dark prophecies for the destruction of English culture seem to have been fulfilled in these couplets, and the last vision he leaves us is that of a world descended into chaos: "Lo! thy dread Empire, C H AOS ! is restor'd; / Light dies before thy uncreating word: / Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall; / And Univer- sal Darkness buries All."102 Here again, Pope joins print and performance, the "uncreating word" with the "curtain" that sweeps the stage. Most critics read in the reign of Universal Darkness Pope's lament for a literature he cannot rescue from the destruction of modern letters and for the culture he cannot salvage from the decay of modern times. But it is possible, I think, to see in the hand letting fall the curtain to bury the world in "Universal Darkness" an image of overexpression through which Cibber guarantees his spectacular authorship. Dustin Griffin reads this curtain as the curtain of a theater and inter- prets the final lines as a further declaration of Pope's supremacy, his power over the poetic spectacle with which he has just entranced us. "Can we per- haps say that the final couplet is designed as one last reminder that Pope has 60 I SPECTACULAR DISAPPEARANCES always been present in and behind the poem that he has presented to us, the readers," Griffin asks, "a bizarre, monstrous spectacle, a staged triumph of Dulness and de-creation of the world? What may we do, as spectators in the well-lit Augustan playhouse but applaud Pope's magnificent artifice?"103 In Griffin's formulation, Pope's "de-creation" of the world only confirms his authorship, his mastery of his text and our imaginations. But of course, it is Cibber and the Queen of Dulness that Pope is addressing as "great Anarch" here, and it is Cibber who controls the openings and closings of this curtain as he controls-to Pope's great frustration-the openings and closings of the curtain on the Drury Lane stage. Cibber becomes, here, king of spectacle; and he becomes spectacular king. But he is also (quite literally) a stagehand, the invisible authority manipulating the spectacle from the shadows behind the curtain. If we recall Peggy Phelan's argument that performance "becomes itself through disappearance," Pope's evocation of performance in these final lines seems fitting.104 Chaos, too, becomes itself through disappearance-living up to its name only when it has become something we can no longer interpret or describe. So, too, does the modern author in the eighteenth-century pub- lic sphere declare his authority, paradoxically, by disappearing-retreating, like Mr. Spectator, behind the spectacle of the objects he is observing and recording. Like his description of the mock-epic, Pope's description of the Chaos that inspires it suggests the overexpressions of Englishness that made Cibber's deformed body and performing prose at once spectacular and im- possible to interpret. We might imagine the pages of Cibber's Apology or the lines of his Richard III as littered with "uncreating words" that destroy as they accumulate, so that the more Cibber says the less we know about him. As Pope struggled to articulate what made these words so destructive and what made Cibber's person so deformed, he provided later celebrities with a strategy to strive for. And only twelve years after the publication of Pope's four-book Dunciad, Cibber's daughter, Charlotte Charke, would produce an autobiography-obviously modeled after her father's-that would do pre- cisely that. CHAPTER 2 The Growth of Celebrity Culture Colley Cibber Charlotte Charke, and the Overexpression of Gender Like the early modern kings whose images he evoked (and deformed), Colley Cibber passed on to his heirs not only his elaborate headdresses and his ce- lebrity status, but also his strategy of overexpression. His youngest daughter, Charlotte Charke, describes her inherited celebrity as a curse when, in a curi- ous scene from her own autobiography of 1755 (a narrative heavily indebted to her father's), her recognizable figure prevents her escape from some angry creditors. Charke's proclivity for male attire doesn't seem to help matters, and her pursuer easily picks her out of a crowd, she writes, "by Dint of a very handsome lac'd Hat I had on, being then, for some substantial Reasons, EN CAVALIER [i.e. dressed as a man]; which was so well described, the Bailiff had no great Trouble in finding me."1 The pitfalls of fame were not foreign to the irascible Charke, who spends much of her narrative in deep debt and in male dress, pursuing the promise of a steady income and dodging the creditors who pursue her through her many failed careers as strolling player, puppeteer, merchant, sausage seller, baker, and gentleman's gentleman, among others. Her adoption of the celeb- rity autobiography to tell her story-and her adaptation of overexpression to scramble it-provide insights into how eighteenth-century women might use such strategies differently from their male counterparts. Charke's Narrative of the Life of Charlotte Charke has attracted some notice in recent years from scholars of eighteenth-century genders and sexualities, who have attributed Charke's transvestitism to everything from a feminist desire to challenge the status quo of eighteenth-century gender categories to a homosexual desire 61 62 1 SPECTACULAR DISAPPEARANCES for her female companions to an unfulfilled desire to be welcomed as the long-lost son of the father who disowned her.2 None of these possible mo- tives, however, explain the actions that follow her arrest in her "handsome laced hat." Betrayed by a costume too easily visible and marked out in a cap "so well described," Charke is dragged off to jail. She is soon released, but worries that without a disguise she will be spotted by still more creditors. So she improvis- es: "The Officer [of the prison] advised me to change Hats with him, that being the very Mark by which I was unfortunately distinguished, and made known to him," Charke writes. "My Hat was ornamented with a beautiful Silver Lace, little the worse for wear, and of the Size which is now the present Taste; the Officer's a large one, cocked up in the Coachman's Stile, and weightened with a horrible Quantity of Crape to secure him from the Winter's Cold. ... [W]e each of us made very droll Figures; he with his little laced Hat, which appeared on his Head of the Size of those made for the Spanish Ladies, and my unfor- tunate Face smothered under his, that I was almost as much incommoded as when I marched in the Ditch, under the insupportable Weight of my Father's."3 Charke describes in miniature the cultural shifts (and the sartorial shifts) that, as chapter 1 addressed, were transforming the ways that selves were expressed and regarded in the eighteenth century. As an increasingly secular nation was replacing the spectacular king with the unmarked bourgeois man as the locus of English authority, Charke replaces the spectacular laced hat linked to the cavalier courts of the early modern era with the less dressy and markedly more middle-class cap of the "Coachman's Stile." Yet if Charke means her change of clothes to make her less conspicuous within the increasingly bourgeois and increasingly gendered public sphere, it seems odd that she should trade her old hat for one that is even larger, even more spectacular, and-"cocked up" and "weightened with a horrible Quan- tity of Crape"-even more obviously transvestite. Odder still is the trick's effectiveness. While it renders her figure more "droll," Charke's dress here seems to enable her disappearance: she strolls out of the prison unafraid of further assault, for, she assures us, "this smoaky Conveniency (for it stunk insufferably of Tobacco) was a Security and absolute Prevention from other threatening Dangers."4 Charke's conspicuous disguise makes sense only if we consider it not as her attempt to transform herself into a man, but rather as her attempt to exag- gerate into illegibility the signifiers-and the accessories-that mark a body as male or female. These signifiers include the headpiece that, when Charke wore it, seemed an obvious index of masculinity but that, on the officer's head, THE GROWTH OF CELEBRITY CULTURE 63 resembles a hat "made for the Spanish Ladies." They include the "cocked-up" cap that shifts from a symbol of normativity to a symbol of spectacular mascu- linity atop Charke's "unfortunate face." And they include also the overweight wig of Charke's father, to which she alludes in the final line of the passage and which exemplifies the oddly gendered performances I examine throughout this chapter. All of these accessories suggest not mere disguise but overex- pression, the only strategy available to a woman "so well-known [she] needs no description." Unable to make herself nondescript, Charke destabilizes the signifiers of eighteenth-century gender to make herself indescribable-and she slips through the London streets "droll" but undetected. I begin with this anecdote because it introduces two features of overex- pression that this chapter will develop and to which future chapters will re- turn. First, Charke's trading of her "cavalier" costume for a cocked-up cap demonstrates how her overexpressions deviated from her father's-and sug- gests one way an eighteenth-century woman's overexpressions must neces- sarily deviate from those of an eighteenth-century man. As Mr. Spectator's title indicates, the eighteenth-century man need not disguise or obscure his gender (whatever he might conceal about his "Name, [his] Age, and [his] Lodgings") in order to pass freely through London's public spaces.5 But a woman lacked this liberty, and thus all of the women that I examine through- out this book-including Charke-had to portray themselves in a role that made their publicity permissible before they could overexpress that role in ways that made their privacy imaginable. For Charke, this role was some- times the role of the bourgeois man-dressed "en cavalier." And it was some- times, more specifically and more poignantly, the role of her bourgeois father, whose words (and whose wigs) haunt her own autobiography. Like her father's, Charke's autobiographical performances in male dress seem at some points to be the effects of a clever disguise and at other times to be the expressions of her inner desires (for the liberty of a man, for the love of a woman, for the recognition of her father). The difficulty Charke's audiences had in distinguishing between these two meanings suggests the cleverness of the overexpressive project. Yet while Cibber's audiences merely threw up their hands in frustration, Charke's audiences, as we shall see, worked even harder to impose their meanings on her words and her costumes. In this sense, Charke's overexpressions-and, indeed, the overexpressions of all the women I examine throughout this book-failed to deflect her spectators' ex- aminations. In the second half of this chapter I ask why. What is it about the extra disguises that women like Charke, Bellamy, and Robinson must take on to appear in public that make their overexpressions, ultimately, ineffective? 64 1 SPECTACULAR DISAPPEARANCES Charke's curious allusion to her father's wig in this passage suggests a sec- ond point that will become crucial to the theory of overexpression that this book explores: that is, the way that this strategy destabilizes seemingly static signifiers (a costume piece, a stage property, a printed word) and attaches their meanings to the body that wields them. We might think here of Cibber's wig, as well as of the "cavalier" cap that signifies masculinity on Charke's body but becomes feminine as soon as it is placed on the officer's head. The hat's transformation is surprising, since we often consider the sartorial signifiers of gender to be stable even if the bodies they signify are not: a skirt, for in- stance, will always convey femininity within a certain culture, as a "cocked- up" cap will always be read as masculine. If an accessory changes meaning every time it changes bodies, however, what hope might the spectator have of interpreting it? Similarly, if a word's meaning depends on and always refers back to the famous body that writes it, what hope do we have of interpreting a book unless we know something of its author? Overexpression works in part by inviting its spectators to ask such ques- tions, challenging again and again the languages through which identity, in the mid-eighteenth century, was read. But Charke's suggestion that an acces- sory's meaning shifts depending on the body that wears it does something else, too. By attaching the object's meaning to the body that performs with it, Charke implies that the object's meaning holds only so long as the performer lives-only so long as the show goes on. In this way, the object takes on the ephemerality of performance. And, like the gesture or attitude of a perfor- mance, it changes slightly every time a new body takes it up-ensuring, as it does, that the power of meaning-making lies with the performer rather than the spectator and depends on his or her (fleeting, elusive) presence. In the pages that follow, I explore this phenomenon by focusing on the great white wig that Cibber wore in his most popular role, the fop Sir Novelty Fashion (later crowned Lord Foppington), and that, by 1740, had become an emblem of his identity. The eighteenth-century wig was a symbol of upright masculinity that transformed, on Cibber's body, into a symbol of suspect sexuality-and that transformed again as soon as Charke slipped it onto her head. The wig's shifting meanings frustrate any attempt to interpret it-or the celebrity that wields it-as masculine or feminine, as normative or not. The words of Cibber's Apology and Charke's Narrative work in much the same way, replacing their dictionary definitions with personal inflections and thus locating the meaning of a printed page, like the precise shape of a performed gesture, in the body that tries it on. This argument will lay the groundwork for my discussion of Laurence Sterne's odd language in Tristram Shandy, tak- THE GROWTH OF CELEBRITY CULTURE 65 en up in chapter 3. More broadly, it will begin the exploration of women's overexpressions-and why they so often fail to protect their performers- that I will continue in chapters 4 and 5. By tracing the tendrils of Lord Fop- pington's great wig as they wind through Cibber's most celebrated stage roles, through some of the most memorable scenes in his Apology, and through the pages of The Narrative of the Life of Charlotte Charke, this chapter explores overexpression as a strategy that not only endures past Cibber's 1699 perfor- mance of Richard III but that takes up and takes part in many of the debates central to the formation and the imagination of the eighteenth-century self. THE TROUBLE WITH EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY GENDERS Part of what made Cibber's and Charke's manipulations of gender signi- fiers so frustrating to their spectators-and so clever as overexpressive strategies-was the importance that gender and sexuality began to assume in mid-eighteenth-century discourses about identity. It was during this time, as Dror Wahrman and others have argued, that "prevailing gender norms were redefined as essential and natural, thus pulling the cultural rug from under behavior or images that seemed to offer alternatives to these dominant norms."6 Even as deformities like Richard III's were becoming less prescriptive and more performative, in other words, genders and sex- ualities were increasingly regarded as traits permanently grafted onto the body that bore them. All one need do to police these traits would be to probe that body, to strip it of its disguises and gaze upon it. If these new gender ideologies demanded a body stripped of its disguis- es, we might expect the theater, with its dependence on disguise, to be one of the last places that such ideologies might take hold. In part this is true, and Kristina Straub includes both Cibber and Charke in her book Sexual Sus- pects, which describes the complications that eighteenth-century actors and actresses introduced to emergent gender norms. Yet as Straub points out, the theater also offers a kind of magnifying lens through which we might view these emergent ideologies in high resolution. Many of the developments in theatrical practices during Cibber's and Charke's lifetimes might be un- derstood to reflect developments in ideologies of gender and sexuality that portrayed the naked body as natural, bounded, and clearly gendered. Where- as the theater of the Renaissance and Restoration seemed to delight in dis- guise and deception, the sentimental plays of the early eighteenth century betrayed some anxiety about any character who lied about his or her "true" 66 1 SPECTACULAR DISAPPEARANCES desires or covered his or her "natural" body, and it rewarded characters un- afraid to reveal themselves. Thus the English stage went from being the site of the character's dressing up (in, for instance, the dressing-room scenes so essential to the portrayal of the Restoration rake) to the site of the character's dressing down, revealing to the audience the naked sincerity of his or her "true" feelings, his or her "authentic" self. This transformation is evident in the changing attitudes toward cross- dressing and gender play in the English theater with which Cibber and Charke were familiar. In the all-male companies of the Renaissance and early Resto- ration stage, men cross-dressed as women, and audiences accepted the fem- ininity of their costumes as synecdoche for the femininity of the characters they portrayed. With the introduction of women into the acting companies in the late seventeenth century, however, cross-dressing roles became the purview of female players-like Charlotte Charke-who used masculine cos- tumes not to conceal their gendered bodies but to reveal them. Their form- fitting breeches were designed to show off their feminine figures and to re- mind their spectators (coyly or not so coyly) of the "true" identities peeking from behind their assumed roles. These developments allowed the English stage to participate in the gender significations that had begun to designate bodies as either male or female and accessories, attitudes, and object choices as either normative or not. What this meant for celebrities like Cibber and Charke was that the the- ater and its disguises no longer offered concealment from a nosy public deter- mined to trace a star's "true" self. For what Felicity Nussbaum calls the "Inte- riority Effect"-the suggestion of an interior self beyond that or aligned with that of the character the actor played onstage-works both ways. The mo- ment that the spectator perceives the illusion of interiority in one actress's performance, he or she begins to expect it in all performances. As the Inte- riority Effect took hold on the eighteenth-century stage, praise for a player's performance began increasingly to take the form of praise for his or her per- sonal character. Hence the vocabularies of literary and theatrical criticism, of celebrity gossip, and of gender critique often, in this period, overlap and intertwine. So much is clear from an anonymous pamphlet entitled The Lau- reat, published in 1740. Attacking Cibber as an "Author who is obscure, un- connected, and wrapt up and conceal'd in the clinquant Tinsel of Metaphor, and unnecessary figures," the pamphlet promises "to explain the Meaning, or to expose the no Meaning, to take off the Vernish of the rhetorical Flowers, and to undress a certain Book lately publish'd, intituled, An APOLOGY FOR THE LIFE OF MR. COLLEY CIBBER."7 THE GROWTH OF CELEBRITY CULTURE 67 The pamphleteer's attack confirms the early eighteenth century's privi- leging of the naked and naturalized body over the disguised body, the new preference for a self that was revealed rather than constructed. Moreover, it links this body explicitly-through metaphors of dressing and undressing- to the text that describes it. Cibber's book, like his body, is unsatisfactory be- cause it remains "wrapt up and conceal'd in the clinquant Tinsel of Metaphor, and unnecessary figures." In order to be understood it must be "undress'd." Of course, the same undressing that reveals the meaning of Cibber's prose- and, metaphorically, the gendered contours and sexual desires of his body- also leaves him vulnerable to the pamphleteer's critique. The language of The Laureat emphasizes the position of the early eighteenth-century celebrity as a catch-22: to "wrap up and conceal" oneself in disguise and metaphor was to invite one's critics to undress one-and to dress one down. But to present oneself as sincere and undisguised was to leave oneself-in Cibber's words- "helpless, and expos'd" to an increasingly normative gaze.8 The pamphleteer's language thus helps to explain the particular form that Cibber's and Charke's overexpressions of gender would take. The celebrity who wishes to stave off such critiques-to prevent such "exposure"-cannot simply disguise him- or herself, for critics and spectators will simply strip him or her of all disguises. Instead, he or she must seem to reveal a naked body-an "authentic self"-while at the same time dismantling the binary between the naked body and its disguises, between "authentic" desires and dissembling. This means both imbuing the naked body with the same dissem- bling power as the body in costume, and it means destabilizing the way that the costume itself signifies or constructs character. In other words, it means mixing up the body natural and the body performed, blurring the boundaries between corpus and costume. And this, as I will argue in the next part of this chapter, is precisely what Colley Cibber does. BIG WIGS: THE FOP'S HAIR AS EXCESSIVE MASCULINITY IN CIBBER'S SENTIMENTAL COMEDIES Cibber's performances of nakedness begin with his performances as the fop, a Restoration character known for self-conscious outfits and fawning speeches but who, in Cibber's eighteenth-century version, became a charac- ter so elaborately dressed as to be naked and so overt as to be unreadable. I will explain these apparent oxymorons by examining Cibber's most famous costume piece, a large white wig that he wore in his role as Sir Novelty / 68 1 SPECTACULAR DISAPPEARANCES Lord Foppington but that soon became part of his everyday dress-and that we might interpret either as a disguise over or as a metonymy for the male anatomy. Similarly, I will argue, we might associate the fop's gender as easily with superfluous as with insufficient masculinity. Understanding the complex significations of the mid-eighteenth-century fop-as well as the complex significations of his most obvious costume piece, the wig-helps us to understand why Cibber should adopt such a persona for his ramblings on stage, on street, and on page-and how Charke would revive and re- vamp these significations in her own performances of self. Even more than the deformed king, the fawning fop marked Cibber's ce- lebrity persona and made his career. In 1696, frustrated by his inability to rise in the Drury Lane company, Cibber created a star vehicle for himself in his comedy Love's Last Shift. The play introduced the world to Sir Novelty Fashion, who would reappear (as Lord Foppington) in two later plays: The Relapse (1696), Sir John Vanbrugh's sequel to Love's Last Shift; and Cibber's The Careless Husband (1704). The fop soon became a recurring role in Cibber's career-and, later, a role ghosted with his memory. David Garrick named his own fop "Fribble" (in his 1747 comedy Miss in Her Teens), echoing Henry Field- ing's parodic tribute to Cibber in The Author's Farce (1730). As his fame in the part grew, Cibber began to incorporate the fop's elaborate dress and flowery language into his everyday performances of self. It was an odd persona to settle on. Like the gender ideologies that shaped them, the significations of the fop were changing rapidly by the time Cibber introduced Lord Foppington. In one of the earliest articles on Cibber's fop- pishness, Lois Potter argues that the character acted less as a threat to than as a model of masculinity, a (somewhat less successful) version of the Resto- ration rakes and princely heroes that Cibber had once longed to play. Susan Staves, similarly, has described the Restoration fop as a precursor to the prop- erly domesticated man of the sentimental stage. Such arguments suggest that the fop presents not an alternative to masculinity, but an excess of it. In more recent criticism, however, scholars have more often characterized the fop as an outmoded throwback to the spectacular politics of the previous era. Both Kristina Straub and Thomas A. King oppose the fop to the norma- tive identity of the unmarked eighteenth-century man: the fop's obsession with self-display, they argue, associates him with a diminished or even with a castrated masculinity. For King, the castration of Cibber's private manhood results from his imitative production of a public manhood. In describing a portrait of Cibber in which an elongated quill pen points to a "negative space in his breeches," King writes that Cibber's quill/phallus "requires the displace- THE GROWTH OF CELEBRITY CULTURE 69 ment of his penis ... and therefore of his own personal embodiment into a chain of imitations. At the same time the quill points to the place of mimetic transformation, signaling that Cibber's writings and his foppish display do not originate or inhere 'in' his body but in the structure of publicness."9 Cib- ber is unfit for the new order of the bourgeois public sphere and the unmarked signifiers of eighteenth-century manhood, according to King, because he re- quires an exterior prop to indicate a masculinity that should be inherent. But in what is otherwise an insightful reading of Cibber's portrayal of the fop, King neglects to mention the most famous stage property with which Cibber's fops performed their masculinity: Lord Foppington's great wig. Wigs were not uncommon atop the heads of eighteenth-century men, and they were often read as signifiers of masculinity. But Cibber's wig was uncommon- ly over the top: puffed and plumed, curled and furbelowed-and, when it ap- peared in The Relapse, large enough to require a servant with a sedan chair to haul it across the stage. An engraving by John Simon from the first part of the century shows Cibber's hair standing in twin bouffants on top of his head and cascading down his back (figure 4). In such magnificent proportions, Cib- ber's wig blurs King's neat division between a masculinity "originat[ing] or inher[ing] 'in' [Cibber's] body" and the "structure of publicness" that consti- tutes, for King, Cibber's failed privacy. Such proportions blur even the divi- sion between the territories of interiority and exteriority-between corpus and costume-upon which King's argument depends. As a marker of gender identity, in other words, the wig was problematic, and in eighteenth-century representations it might indicate either masculinity or femininity, either to- tal discretion or egregious insincerity, depending on how (and when) it was worn. In choosing as his emblem the eighteenth-century wig, Cibber is pick- ing up and playing up the ambiguous significations of the wig as both a signi- fier of masculinity and metonymy for the male body it conceals. On Cibber's body and within his texts, however, the wig becomes a costume piece whose very overtness makes it suspect and whose excessive masculinity makes it illegible. The ambiguous representations of the eighteenth-century wig are the subject of a recent article by Lynn Festa, who traces the accessory's trans- formation over the course of the century from "a sign of the autonomy" of the middle-class male subject to "a humbling intimation that we may be pos- sessed as much by things as things are possessed by us."10 The wig's impor- tance as a constitutive part of the male body has been noted elsewhere by Marcia Pointon, who writes that the wig "might be seen as a register of so- cialized masculinity from the seventeenth to the beginning of the nineteenth "I". p 2 2/ 4. John Simon (after Giuseppe Grisoni), Colley Cibber as Lord Foppington in The Relapse by John Van brugh (ca. 1700-1745). © National Portrait Gallery, London. THE GROWTH OF CELEBRITY CULTURE 71 century."" In several representations from the long eighteenth century the wig served as a metonymy to the male body: its loss or disorder indicated a depletion of masculine virility or a disruption of a decidedly masculine de- corum. Illustrative of the wig's inseparability from the body and its sexual significations was the popularity throughout the eighteenth century of the merkin, a wig especially designed for the pubic region of both male and fe- male bodies. Wigs on the head-as well as those less in sight-served as both the expression of a healthy sexuality (since hair loss was one of the most recognizable symptoms of syphilis) and as a practical defense against lice. For this reason, they became synonymous with virile masculinity. Yet even as it symbolized, the wig also disrupted the eighteenth-century notion of the proper masculine subject. Festa notes in particular the prob- lems that the periwig presented for the notion of "possessive individualism" that, as C. B. MacPherson argues, formed the basis for English subjecthood in the eighteenth century. Most peruke makers, Festa explains, fashioned their wigs from human hair that they had collected from the heads of lower- class country girls, a fact that literalized anxieties about the body's permeable boundaries and the potential for men's subjection to and dependence on in- ferior women. "The paradox of the wig in the context of 'possessive individu- alism,"' according to Festa, "lies in the fact that the object meant to proclaim its wearer to be a freestanding individual is harvested from the bodies of oth- er people: to wear a wig is to make another's parts an integral part of one's own appearance."12 For this reason a wig too unwieldy-a masculinity too overwrought-might signify nonnormativity and chaos just as easily as the modest wig advertised masculinity and decorum. Against King's description of Cibber as a "residual pederast" who mis- takes the nonnormative identity of the eighteenth-century fop with the more acceptable masculinity of the Restoration fop, I want to suggest that Cibber assumed his foppish accouterments and donned his enormous wig precisely in order to call up the confusion of identity that King interprets as nonnor- mative. Cibber's wig is not merely a signifier of femininity, in other words. It is, more complexly, a signifier of bourgeois masculinity so overt that it be- comes ambiguous. In short, it is an overexpression of Cibber's gender that allows him to remain in the spotlight without ever being "expos'd." The unstable significations of the gentleman's periwig surface again and again in Cibber's most two most successful comedies, Love's Last Shift and The Careless Husband. Both plays feature Sir Novelty / Lord Foppington as the hero of their comic subplots, and both suggest Sir Novelty's wig as a signifier of masculinity that in its very obviousness becomes impossible to interpret. 72 1 SPECTACULAR DISAPPEARANCES In order to understand the associations of the wig and the meaning of mas- culinity in Sir Novelty's subplots, however, it's important that we look first at the plays' main plots. Both Love's Last Shift and The Careless Husband are typical of the sentimental comedies that were so popular in Cibber's day in that both pivot around a promiscuous libertine's transformation into a prop- er gentleman and a model of upright masculinity. And in both plays, the liber- tines in question negotiate their newfound masculinity through the putting on or the taking off of a periwig. In Love's Last Shift, the rake Loveless is transformed into a sentimental man and a loving husband after his long-suffering wife, Amanda, lures him into her bed by disguising herself as a high-class courtesan. Significantly, it is a wig that greets Loveless and his servant, Snap, when they enter Amanda's house in pursuit of the promised liaison. The stage directions inform us: "The SCENE changes to an Anti-chamber, a Table, a Light, a Night-Gown, and a Periwig lying by."13 Amanda, it seems, has placed the periwig in anticipation of her husband's arrival, and Loveless takes the hint: "Ha! this Night-Gown and Pe- ruke don't lie here for nothing," he tells Snap. "I'll make my self agreeable.-I have baulk'd many a Woman in my Time for want of a clean Shirt.-[Puts 'em on."1 Here the periwig seems an integral part of Loveless's masculinity, a costume he must put on in order to enjoy intimate and heteronormative re- lations with a woman he later learns is his wife. Laura Brown pinpoints Love- less's conversion in the final act of the play as an important moment in the transformation of the comedy of manners-a genre that rewarded wit and social affect-into the sentimental comedy-a genre that celebrated naked sincerity.15 Loveless's wig crowns his own transformation from Restoration wit to eighteenth-century man of feeling and serves as a metonymy for the naked and undisguised body he will offer up to his wife. The wig reappears with a similarly metonymic purpose in The Careless Husband, though its contours have grown even larger and its significations of masculinity even more complex. In this play the rake to be redeemed is Sir Charles Easy, who spends much of the first four acts pursuing indiscreet af- fairs with everyone except his wife. The climax of the sentimental plot occurs when Lady Easy comes upon her husband and her lady's maid sleeping near each other in a parlor, their clothes in disarray. Most disturbing to Lady Easy is not that her husband has betrayed her (she has known about his affairs since act 1) but that now he sleeps before her with his head indecorously un- covered, his wig having become unfastened during the strenuous activity of the preceding hour. "Ha! Bare-headed, and in so sound a Sleep!" she says to herself as she THE GROWTH OF CELEBRITY CULTURE 73 stands before his prostrate body. "Who knows, while thus expos'd to th' un- wholesome Air, / But Heav'n offended may o'ertake his Crime, / And, in some languishing Distemper, leave him / A severe Example of its violated Laws."16 As in Love's Last Shift, so in The Careless Husband the gentleman's periwig stands not as an emblem of but rather as a shield against the now transgres- sive libertinism of the previous era. Without it, Sir Charles "expos[es]" him- self to disease-both physical and moral-and provides a "severe Example of [Heaven's] violated Laws." The solution here is moderation: if an improper man is one who exposes too much of himself to those outside his domestic sphere or too little of himself to those within it, the proper man is one who reveals his sincere self willingly, but only to those in his family and only at the appropriate time. This is the lesson that Sir Charles has learned by the end of the play, as he returns to his wife openly shedding tears of shame and of sentiment. But complicating the gendered symbolism of this scene is the method by which Lady Easy teaches her husband this lesson, corrects his "expos [ure]," and elic- its his emotions. Rather than replacing the wig or waking Sir Charles to re- proach him for his unfaithfulness, she discreetly "Takes a Steinkirk [handker- chief] off her Neck, and lays it gently on his Head."17 A late eighteenth-century painting of the scene by Francis Wheatley emphasizes the discretion of Lady Easy's action, the delicacy with which she places the handkerchief on her husband's head without disturbing his rest (figure 5). Charles, waking to find his head covered with his wife's handkerchief and his wig still lying nearby, suddenly feels the pangs of conscience. He returns the wig to his head and, reformed, rushes off to beg Lady Easy's forgiveness. The wig signifies masculinity, then, but it also suggests an uneasy alliance between proper masculinity and proper femininity. Sir Charles's masculinity is redeemed from the charges of a deviant and indiscreet libertinism only after his head has been covered in the clothes of a woman. Discretion-the prized quality of the unmarked eighteenth-century man-seems here to de- pend on at least a modicum of sexual ambiguity and of empathy, the ability to put oneself into the shoes (or under the headpiece) of a member of the op- posite sex. In suggesting a masculinity allied with or empathetic to feminini- ty, Sir Charles Easy's modest wig seems less distinguished from than aligned with Sir Novelty Fashion's more ostentatious updo. This alignment suggests that the masculinity of Cibber's fop characters differed from that of their sentimental acquaintances in degree, not in kind: if Charles Easy's wig was a symbol of a new sort of masculinity, Foppington's wig was merely its overex- pression. And by inviting us to read Foppington's wig through the canopy of 74 SPECTACULAR DISAPPEARANCES 5. Francis Wheatley, Lady Easy's Steinkirk: A Scene from "The Careless Husband" by Colley Cibber (Act V, Sc. 5) (late eighteenth century). © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. its more masculine companions, Cibber prevents us from reading it as a clear or stable signifier, whether of femininity or of a nonnormative sexuality. In order to tease out the ambiguous significations of Lord Foppington's great wig, let's turn briefly to the Apology, which itself makes frequent ref- erence to its actor-author's signature prop. In a much-discussed (and much- maligned) passage toward the middle of the autobiography, Cibber describes the wig's role in establishing his friendship with Colonel Henry Brett, a no- bly born but financially strapped rake (and later a comanager of Drury Lane theater) who has come to London in pursuit of a wealthy wife. Cibber links THE GROWTH OF CELEBRITY CULTURE I 75 Brett's performances as libertine to his own performances as fop through the exchange of the famous wig, which Brett admires while watching Cibber's performance in Love's Last Shift.18 In a complexity prefigured in Cibber's most famous comedies, the wig serves at once as an expression of Brett's nonnor- mative libertinism and as the vehicle of his reform into a happily (and heter- onormatively) married man. But these categories of rake and fop and of nor- mative and not become increasingly difficult to distinguish in the heaped-up clauses of Cibber's prose. Cibber describes his meeting with Brett in the sexually ambiguous lan- guage typical of the Apology's most overexpressive moments: And though, possibly, the Charms of our Theatrical Nymphs might have had their Share, in drawing him [backstage]; yet in my Observation, the most vis- ible Cause of his first coming, was a more sincere Passion he had conceiv'd for a fair full-bottom'd Perriwig which I then wore in my first Play. ... Now whatever Contempt Philosophers may have, for a fine Perriwig; my friend ... knew very well, that so material an Article of Dress, on the Head of a Man of Sense, if it became him, could never fail of drawing him to a more partial Regard.... This perhaps may soften the grave Censure, which so youthful a Purchase might otherwise, have laid upon him: In a word, he made his Attack upon this Perriwig, as your young Fellows generally do upon a Lady of Plea- sure; first, by a few, familiar Praises of her Person, and then, a civil Enquiry, into the Price of it.19 Cibber is intent on assuring his readers that Brett's "sincere passion" for the periwig is part and parcel of Brett's sincere passion for women: his com- parison of the wig to the Lady of Pleasure implies, in one sense, an iden- tification of the wig as a commodity circulated among heterosexual men, one that confirms both their heterosexuality and their masculinity within a homosocial network. On the other hand, the wig seems at times indistinguishable from (or metonymy for) the body of the man who wears it-an observation that might further explain Cibber's nervous anticipation of "whatever Contempt Philos- ophers may have" for Brett's object choice. If the wig is a mere accessory that can be taken off and given away like an ill-fitting coat, it serves here as a tool abetting Brett's pursuit of a worthy woman-and thus a signifier of both men's normative heterosexuality. Cibber's surrender of it to Brett indicates, in that case, his possession of a "true" identity not dependent on his posses- sions and not subject to the changes in his attire. 76 1 SPECTACULAR DISAPPEARANCES But if the wig is a metonymy for Cibber's body, as Loveless's wig is a metonymy for his body, it signifies Brett's pursuit of Cibber himself. The sartorial clues that might allow Cibber's spectators to distinguish a feminine identity from a masculine one-or well-ordered discretion from outland- ish display-thus become entangled within the fop's great mop of hair. By adopting and adapting the eighteenth-century man's wig as the emblem of his identity offstage as well as onstage, Cibber creates a gender identity so blatant it is ambiguous and presents to his audience a body so unabashedly visible that it can be neither denied nor described. In this way, he preempts his critics' threats to "undress" him by seeming to strip without actually "ex- posing" anything of himself. Perhaps the most brilliant articulation of Cibber's overexpressions of gender occurs in The Relapse, composed by Cibber's friend and eventual busi- ness partner, Sir John Vanbrugh. It is Vanbrugh who promotes Sir Novelty to Lord Foppington-and who promotes the wig to its most monstrous propor- tions. He also introduces Foppington's wigmaker. "My lord, I have done what I defy any prince in Europe t'outdo," the wigmaker tells Lord Foppington as he unveils his newest creation. "I have made you a periwig so long, and so full of hair, it will serve you for hat and cloak in all weathers.20 So much more than your average accessory, Foppington's wig serves a number of different purposes for a number of different personae: it is both hat and cloak in both summer and winter; it is (much like Cibber himself) both frustratingly im- penetrable and unabashedly obvious; and it is both a signifier of upright mas- culinity and a signifier of excessive femininity. But even when it constitutes full dress in and of itself, the wig is not full enough for Lord Foppington. He demands that the peruke maker enhance his hair even further, for, he says, "A periwig to a man, should be like a mask to a woman nothing should be seen but his eyes."21 Lord Foppington's declaration drips with the uneasy significations of the eighteenth-century hairpiece: his words establish the wig as the marker of masculinity (the opposite of the mask as the marker of femininity) even as they suggest a destabilizing affinity between wig and mask, between what has come to signify "man" and what has come to signify "woman." In No- body's Story, her book about the self-fashioning strategies of women in the eighteenth-century literary marketplace, Catherine Gallagher discusses the woman's mask-a common costume piece of the eighteenth-century prostitute-as an accessory that "signals the availability of the body but also implies the impenetrability of the controlling mind."22 She presents the mask as a metaphorical tool for the female writer who must sell her work as self- THE GROWTH OF CELEBRITY CULTURE 77 representation while withholding "her true self" as the unseen and unseeable "sold self's seller."23 The mask, in other words, changes the gendered dynamic between subjectivity and objectification, allowing the women to be the object of the gaze without surrendering herself entirely to the gaze's penetration. Cibber's wig achieves a similar effect, but it does so by enhancing rather than by concealing his distinguishing features. By scrambling precisely what these distinguishing features distinguish, by vacillating uneasily between mascu- line and feminine identities, the wig makes Cibber illegible and impenetrable. In doing so, it reduces his body from something that is seen to something that does nothing but see. Peering from behind his unwieldy wig, Colley Cib- ber as Lord Foppington becomes an overexpressive version of Mr. Spectator, "nothing seen but his eyes." THE PUBLICK EYE" AND THE PUBLIC "I": LOOKING AT CIBBER'S LANGUAGE I have described the foppish wig that Cibber adopted in his performances of self as a stage property that capitalizes on eighteenth-century anxieties about men's dependence on women and on things. In emphasizing the wig's ambiguous significations, Cibber creates a persona that is as illegible as it is seemingly revealing and a nakedness that is impossible to read. As he does, he reminds his spectators that sartorial signifiers are not as stable or as legible indicators of gender as we might like to believe. It is a reminder that Charlotte Charke will take up and expand as she incorporates Cibber's famous wig into her own performances and adapts its gender significations to her own purposes. Before I turn to Charke's Narrative, however, I want to linger for a mo- ment on Cibber's autobiography in order to explore how his written language takes on the same sexual and gender ambiguities as his sartorial choices. In his promise to "undress" Cibber's prose, the writer of The Laureat implies that sentences, like clothes, encode and dissemble, and all one need do to interpret the persona they describe is to strip them down to their simplest elements-much as the new sexual ideologies taking shape during Cibber's lifetime promise that we can identify a person's "true" gender by stripping him or her down to a naked, naturalized body. Yet as Cibber's cascading wig destabilizes the distinctions between natu- ralized body and theatricalized costume and between masculinity and fem- ininity, so his convoluted prose resists attempts to interpret it. In particu- 78 1 SPECTACULAR DISAPPEARANCES lar, Cibber destabilizes the grammatical distinctions between subject and object-that is, between who is speaking and who is being spoken about, who is looking and who is being looked at. As Straub and others have ar- gued, these distinctions were, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, increasingly gendered. By confusing the hierarchical relationship between the subject and the object of his sentences-much as his wig con- fuses the hierarchical relationship between the subject and the object of the gaze-Cibber destabilizes not only the gendered significations of the fop's fawning language but also the power dynamics that these significations im- ply. His prose becomes as illegible as his body-and as immune to attempts by his critics (like the anonymous writer of The Laureat) to "undress" it. The Laureat focuses on a particular passage early on in Cibber's autobiog- raphy, chastising it as full of the superfluous clauses and ambiguous sexuality that, he argues, was so typical of Cibber's prose. Significantly, the passage is one in which Cibber, addressing his unnamed patron, attempts to mediate between the (often feminized) visibility required of his profession and the invisibility demanded for admission into the (masculine) bourgeois public sphere. "When I see you lay aside the Advantages of Superiority, and by your own Cheerfulness of Spirits, call out all that Nature has given me to meet them," Cibber begins, "then 'tis I taste you! then Life runs high! I desire! I possess you! Yet, Sir, in this distinguish'd Happiness, I give not up my farther Share of that Pleasure, or of that Right I have to look upon you, with the publick Eye, and to join in the general Regard so unanimously pay'd to that uncommon Virtue, your Integrity! ... This it is, that discourages, and keeps silent the Insinuations of Prejudice, and Suspicion; and almost renders your Eloquence an unnecessary Aid, to your Assertions: Even your Opponents, conscious of your Integrity, hear you rather as a Witness, than an Orator-- But this, Sir, is drawing you too near the Light."24 King reads this passage as further evidence of Cibber's residual pederasty, arguing that Cibber's unbridled obsequies to his patron exemplify the kind of deference appropriate of a lower-class man addressing his social superior in the seventeenth century but marked as nonnormative and emasculating by the beginning of the eighteenth.25 Yet Cibber is savvier than King gives him credit for. His refusal to reveal his patron's name indicates some awareness that spec- tacle no longer guarantees power, and that revealing his patron's identity might in fact diminish the patron's authority by "drawing him too near the Light.26 Wedged somewhere between spectacular politics and Mr. Spectator, Cibber at- tempts to recognize his benefactor without undermining his benefactor's au- thority in a public sphere that awards anonymity over self-display. THE GROWTH OF CELEBRITY CULTURE 79 Cibber's deference to his benefactor's desire for invisibility indicates that he is aware of the new politics of spectatorship emerging as he is writing. He is aware, too, that his own position as actor, as autobiographer, and as public icon-at the same time that it elevates his fortune and his social status-bars him from seizing such power for himself. "As there is no Hazard, or visible Terror, in an Attack, upon my defenceless Station" in the public eye, he writes, "my Censurers have generally been persons of an intrepid Sincerity."27 When his career choice makes it impossible for him to escape public display, Cibber flaunts it: to his patron's anonymity Cibber contrasts his own "Nakedness of Temper" and claims, "I am content, to be gaz'd at, as I am, without lessening my Respect, for those, whose Passions may be more soberly cover'd.28 Again, we might read such declarations as pleas for attention by a man unaware that such attention will no longer guarantee him the authority he seeks. Certainly this has been the assumption of several of Cibber's critics, both modern and contemporary. The anonymous author of The Laureat de- tects in Cibber's declaration of public "Nakedness" and in the breathless en- comiums of the earlier passage the evidence of a sexuality that, deemed non- normative, must be critiqued: "I taste you, I desire, I possess you," the pamphlet mocks. "Fye, Colly, Fye; have some small Regard to Decency; you cou'd go no higher than this if your Patron were of the Feminine Gender."29 The same ambi- guities that drew his contemporary's "Fyes" have also caught the eyes of Cib- ber's more recent readers. Straub interprets the Laureat's critique as evidence for the growing cultural anxiety about spectacle and disguise, as well as for an increasingly common tendency to label as deviant the man who puts himself on display. Such readings take Cibber's declaration of his own "Nakedness" at face value, interpreting it as Cibber's sincere wish to lay himself bare for the perusal (and at the mercy) of his audience members. Yet what strikes me as odd about the Laureat's critique of Cibber is the way that it chastises the author for revealing himself blatantly-with no "small Regard to Decency" or decorum-at the same time that it scolds him for "conceal[ing]" himself beneath the "clinquant Tinsel of Metaphor" and the obscurities of overly elaborate prose. What might we make of the contra- dictions in such a critique? And what might we surmise from the fact that, when Cibber does finally embark on the "honest Examination of [his] Heart" that seems to offer up his persona in all of its "Nakedness," the only fault he admits is a "natural Vanity"-a quality that might make us suspect that its very naturalness is contrived?30 I want to suggest that what King and Straub describe as Cibber's "queerness" here-the overly spectacular and ambiguous language that so bothers the author of The Laureat-is part of the overex- 80 I SPECTACULAR DISAPPEARANCES pressive strategy through which Cibber guarantees his privacy. As we shall see, the language he employs in the dedication of the Apology, like the wig he wore both on and off the stage, actually works to dissolve the distinction that his critics draw between the spectator and the spectacle, between the speak- ing subject and the object of the gaze. Nowhere is this dissolution more apparent than in the very passage that invites The Laureat's ire: "When I see you lay aside the Advantages of Superi- ority, and by your own Cheerfulness of Spirits, call out all that Nature has giv- en me to meet them," Cibber writes, "then 'tis I taste you! then Life runs high! I desire! I possess you!"31 The most obviously overexpressive moments in this sentence lie in the exaggerated enthusiasm of those final exclamations- exclamations that, as Straub notes, muddy the distinction between homo- social politics and homoerotic desire and that complicate our attempts to read Cibber's gender identity as either masculine or feminine or to read his relationship with the patron as either normative or not.32 I want to focus, however, on the confusion between subject and object that results from the sentence's great heap of clauses and its proliferation of sensory verbs. The primary agent of the first part of the sentence seems to be Cibber's patron, who "lays aside" his noble birth in order to "call out" his description of Cibber. Here the patron acts as the subject of the sentence and as the spectator charged with the task of seeing and defining Cibber, the object of his gaze. But the additional clause that launches Cibber's overexpressive sentence complicates this structure. Introducing the main action of the sen- tence with "when I see you lay aside" transforms "you" (the patron) into an object, and "I" (Cibber himself) into the primary agent and definer. With the addition of this seemingly superfluous clause, in other words, Cibber meta- morphoses from spectacle to spectator, from "Orator" to "Witness," from defined to definer. The confusion between subject and object grows as the paragraph contin- ues and Cibber-formerly "content to be gaz'd at, as I am"-sidles slyly out of the spotlight and declares "that Right I have to look upon you, with the pub- lick Eye."33 Here again, Cibber tempers his earlier admissions of "Nakedness" by casting himself as a gazer gazing upon his patron-only to find that his patron, seen "rather as a Witness, than an Orator," is casting his gaze back on Cibber. Cibber hovers around (or yo-yos rapidly between) his role as "publick Eye" and his role as public "I" until the distinction between spectator and spectacle becomes impossible to discern. Accordingly, the gendered hierar- chies that Straub and King (not to mention the author of The Laureat) assign to this relationship begin to dissolve. Cibber here, as elsewhere, is both on THE GROWTH OF CELEBRITY CULTURE 81 display and indescribable, both object and subject-"Naked" but nonetheless not "expos'd." It is telling that even the author of The Laureat, despite his determina- tion to "undress a certain Book lately publish'd, intituled, AN APOLOGY FOR THE LIFE OF MR. COL L EY C IBBE R" should, finally, give up his attempts to interpret Cibber's prose.34 "Upon reading and endeavouring to understand this difficult Author," he writes, "I found, that to go thro' and examine him particularly wou'd be more than an Herculian Labour, and that the cleansing this Augean Stable, was a Work unequal both to my Inclination and Strength. And therefore I determined only to give the Publick just so much of him as might convince them, that this long and labour'd Performance of our most celebrated Laureat, is something over-rated.35 Instead of interpreting Cibber or attempting to "examine him particularly," the pamphleteer can do nothing but repeat the most egregious excerpts of Cibber's "long and labour'd Perfor- mance." Unable to "explain the Meaning" of Cibber's complex sentences, he must be content merely to "expose the no Meaning" to which Cibber freely admits.36 Like the author of The Laureat, many critics of Cibber's work lodged their complaints in the form of parody or in a hybrid of parody and critique. It was as if, incapable of distilling Cibber's rampant exaggerations and su- perfluities into their own words, they could do nothing but exaggerate and repeat them further. After abandoning his attempt to interpret Cibber's Apology, the author of The Laureat admits that all those labyrinthine sentences and crowded pages that make it up actually reveal startlingly little of the private life they promise to explicate: "Colley Cibber is not the Character he pretends to be in this Book," the author declares, "but a mere Charletan, a Persona Dramatis, a Mountebank, a Counterfeit Colley. ... In my Opinion, his very Nakedness is a Disguise."37 It isn't, the critic makes clear, that Cibber refuses to reveal himself to us. It's that the very substance of his self-revelations-the big wig with which he makes himself up and the uncreating words through which he marks himself out-make him impossible to decipher, to dissect, or to "expose." If we can't rely on the stability of sartorial signifiers or of subject- object relations, we can no more define the limits of Cibber's body than we can translate the meanings of his prose. In the great wig that scrambles even as it seems to proclaim his masculinity and with the convoluted sentences that dissolve even as they seem to promise his self-revelations, Cibber even in his nakedness seems somewhat overdressed. Yet even Cibber himself could be outdone. In the second half of this chapter, I turn to the performances and printed works of Charlotte Charke, 82 1 SPECTACULAR DISAPPEARANCES Cibber's youngest daughter, who published her own Narrative of the Life of Charlotte Charke in 1755, fifteen years after Cibber's Apology set the tone for celebrity autobiography. Charke's Narrative recalls the Apology in more than its genre. As we shall see, the role of heir to the great Colley Cibber was one of many roles that Charke adopted-and altered-in her own interpretations of overexpression. These interpretations-like the autobiography itself-begin when, as a four-year-old child, she places the great white wig of Lord Fop- pington on her own small head. As she does, she complicates even further the significations that the wig contains. If we interpret the wig as a signifier of proper masculinity when donned by Loveless or Sir Charles Easy and as an identifiable but illegible trademark of Colley Cibber as fop when worn by the man himself, how should we read it when it reappears on the body of Charlotte Charke-a woman, but a woman known for dressing as a man? This question leads me to two others that the remainder of this chapter will take up. First, how does Charke's gender affect her performances of overex- pression? How, in other words, do societal anxieties about women in public roles necessarily change how female celebrities adopted and adapted Cibber's strategy? (And how do they account for Charke's ultimate failure?) Second, how does overexpression change when it is incorporated into a new perfor- mance, enacted by a different body? How is overexpression passed down? OVEREXPRESSION ON OTHER BODIES: CHARLOTTE CHARKE'S "UNACCOUNTABLE LIFE" At the beginning of her 1755 Narrative, Colley Cibber's youngest daughter sets herself a seemingly impossible (and undoubtedly overexpressive) task: "to give some Account of my UNACCOUNTABLE LIFE."38 Her Narrative keeps its promise, introducing a narrator nearly as descriptive as she is im- possible to describe.39 If Cibber's story can be traced through the boldly printed appearances of his given name in periodicals and gossip columns, playbills and puffs, Charke's story must be told in a series of pseudonyms. In her youth she was Charlotte Cibber, the favorite daughter of a famous fa- ther until her marriage to Richard Charke changed her name and estranged her family. Before the passage of the 1737 Licensing Act made employment on the stage harder to come by, she was Miss Charlotte Charke, famed for her roles in breeches and as impudent servants-as well as for parts that parodied her father staged by his nemesis (and Charke's sometime employ- THE GROWTH OF CELEBRITY CULTURE 83 er) Henry Fielding. To readers of novels she was Miss Charlotte Evelyn or Jane Elstone or even Henry Dumont, the long-suffering protagonists of fic- tion often read as autobiographical. And throughout much of her adult life she was Mr. Brown, a male guise that allowed her to pursue several careers denied to women and that facilitated her living with (and sleeping with?) a mysterious female companion whom she called, simply, "Mrs. Brown." Like her father before her, Charke vacillates throughout her autobiogra- phy between craving visibility and legibility as a means of acquiring property for herself and avoiding visibility and legibility as a trap by which she might become the property of someone else. Yet as this series of pseudonyms and costumes hints, Charke's status as a woman makes her status as a celebrity somewhat more complex. Like Cibber, Charke must negotiate between her own desire to be a private individual-that is, one relatively protected from the jibes, jests, and critiques of the public-and her audience's demand that she be a celebrity-that is, one who willingly surrenders herself to her public as if she has nothing to hide. Charke's audience had another demand that further complicated the first: that Charke be a woman-a role that denied her entry into many public spaces (like the coffeehouses that Mr. Spectator was said to have inhabited) and that charged her with impropriety should she venture from the private sphere. In appearing onstage or in public, in other words, Charke was fulfilling the demands for celebrity at the same time that she was violating the rules for womanhood. Not only did her public life open her up to her spectators' dissections of her private thoughts and activities; it opened her up to her spectators' critique of her gender as well. A detailed examination of Charke's description of her first appearance onstage reveals several similarities and a few key differences between her brand of overex- pression and her father's-and begins to suggest some reasons why her over- expressions, ultimately, failed to blunt her spectators' critiques. Charke's means of acquiring property depended on her willingness, as a player, to show herself off, as well as her willingness, as a celebrity, to make herself legible. She enjoyed her first taste of financial independence as an actress of bit parts on the Drury Lane stage-an experience she introduces by describing her eagerness to see her name written legibly and recognizably in the playbills. "I must beg Leave to give the Reader an Idea of that Extacy of Heart I felt, on seeing the Character I was to appear in the Bills," Charke writes about snagging her first role, as Mademoiselle in Vanbrugh's The Pro- vok'd Wife; "though my Joy was somewhat dash'd, when I came to see it in- serted, By a young Gentlewoman, who had never appear'd on any Stage before."" 84 1 SPECTACULAR DISAPPEARANCES For the young actress, the passage implies, her legitimacy as a professional and as a wage-earner depends on her legibility as a name on the Drury Lane playbills. Craving the recognition of her name rather than a general reference to her station, Charke is delighted when, upon her second appearance, she is upgraded from a "young Gentlewoman" to a proper noun. "My name was in Capitals [in the playbills] on this second Attempt," she continues; "and I dare aver, that the Perusal of it, from one End of the Town to the other, for the first Week, was my most immediate and constant Business: Nor do I believe it cost me less, in Shoes and Coaches, then two or three Guineas, to gratify the extravagant Delight I had, not only in reading the Bills, but sometimes hearing myself spoken of, which luckily was to my Advantage."41 Thus Charke celebrates her legibility and visibility, enjoying the repetition and distribu- tion of her name "from one end of town to the other" and taking great pride in "sometimes hearing [herself] spoken of." Like her father, the young actress is quick to recognize that increased visibility produces increased privilege and increased profits. Such visibility also, however, produces increased liability. Only a page lat- er Charke has found much to regret in her newly minted fame. She echoes her father's discomfort with the scrutiny exacted upon the eighteenth-century actor when she reveals her apprehensions that her first attempts should suf- fer by comparison to the performances of the great actresses of her day. "Now I leave to any reasonable Person, what I went through, in undertaking two such Characters, after two of the greatest Actresses in the Theatre, viz. Mrs. Oldfield and Mrs. Porter," Charke writes of her early performances as an un- derstudy. "I solemnly declare, that I expected to make an odd Figure in the Bills of Mortality--DIED ONE, OF CAPITAL CHARACTERS."42 By "CAP- ITAL CHARACTERS" Charke suggests not only the choice theatrical charac- ters that she will play in lieu of her more famous peers but also the "name in capitals" that clearly identifies her on the playbills. While they are necessary to Charke's acquisition of property, both sets of characters also betray Charke by forcing her "odd Figure" into a set of conventionalized definitions-the standardized language of the playbill, the standardized letters of the printed page, and the stock characters of the eighteenth-century stage. Like the iden- tity supposedly expressed by her "handsome lac'd Hat," the obvious signifi- cations of such "capital characters" imprison Charke in an identity that can be "so well described."43 The same visibility that facilitates her possession of property also marks Charke as the property of the spectators who gaze upon her and rename her according to the nouns they think she deserves. THE GROWTH OF CELEBRITY CULTURE 85 Charke's problem here resembles her father's, if it increases the stakes: for both father and daughter, fame demands servitude to increasingly nor- mative ideals of gender-and to others' definitions of self. But for Charke, unlike for Cibber, obscurity is not only unthinkable (her fame, after all, was thrust upon her at birth); it also bars her from one of the few (and certainly the most profitable) careers available to eighteenth-century women. With her social status more precarious, Charke must discover a strategy more radical than her father's. She does so, I will suggest, by adapting Cibber's overex- pressive strategies to perform her gendered body as a blank. While Cibber's overexpressions portray his gender as both-at-once-the wig so masculine it is feminine-Charke's restage her gender as neither-at-all. And while Cibber strips down to a "Nakedness" layered with both masculine and feminine sig- nifiers, Charke presents a nakedness to which no gender can be assigned and through which no gender can be interpreted. Charke hints at this strategy when she imagines her appearance in the "Bills of Mortality" not as a male or a female (as the bills often divided the dead) but rather as the ungendered pronoun "one." She develops this strategy further throughout her Narrative, in which her layers and layers of disguises serve only to emphasize the illegibility of the body they seem both to express and to conceal. Charke's promising career as an actress on London's licensed stages was short-lived, for soon after her debut she was banned from Drury Lane by de- cree of the theater manager Charles Fleetwood (the primary target of Char- ke's biting satire The Art of Management) and banned from all other city stages by the decree of the 1737 Licensing Act. Banned, too, from her father's house- hold, Charke struck out on her own, wandering London and the countryside beyond in the employ of several companies of strolling players-and in the guise of a man. The stories she relates of her adventures suggest the ways that she used gendered costumes, gendered props, and gendered language to over- express a body marked as feminine until it became blank of any recognizable gender at all. One of Charke's most successful ventures after 1737 was as a puppet master, a disguise that allowed her to earn money without disobeying the Licensing Act's ban on "plays" in the strictest sense. Extant playbills and puffs advertising Charke's popular performances list as their headliner a spectacu- lar Punch "in petticoats."44 A stock character of eighteenth- and nineteenth- century English puppet theater, Punch was a doll marked by a bulbous nose and overly enlarged facial features that suggested a rampant and overly legi- ble masculinity. Punch wears his masculinity on his sleeve in much the same 86 1 SPECTACULAR DISAPPEARANCES way that Cibber wore his masculinity on his head-or, rather, in his flowing, phallic wig. Cibber's wig invites us to read his exterior as an indication of what lay beneath. By dressing Punch "in petticoats," however, Charke seems to suggest a disconnect between Punch's body and his costume-a disconnect that renders his gender as nonnormative as that of the woman who operated his body (and who was known, on occasion, to don a "cocked-up" cap).45 Yet even as we draw comparisons between Charke's transvestitism and that of her petticoated Punch, it's important to keep in mind that Punch is but a puppet. Charke's reference to a puppet's gendered anatomy necessar- ily calls to mind not only Charke's own anatomy but also the most famous scene of Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair-a play frequently in repertory over the course of Charke's career. The climax of the scene occurs when a puppet lifts his costume to reveal his lack of genitalia, thus exposing not only his blank gender but also the hypocrisy of his antitheatrical interlocutor, who has been fooled into thinking him a man. Playing with the gender of a per- former that by definition has no gender, Charke suggests that the bulbous nose and unmistakable face that expose Punch's "natural" masculinity are as performative as the petticoats that supposedly conceal this "nature." Beneath his nose-as beneath his clothes-Punch's gender is a blank. Similarly, Char- ke implies, any spectator who looks for her gender or sexuality beneath the clothes she wears necessarily exposes himself as a fool who looks for an inte- rior self where there is, she suggests, no interior at all. Here again, Charke's gendered performances trump her father's: his exaggerated costumes suggest a body so masculine it is feminine, but her exaggerated puppets challenge the very existence of-or at least the relevance of-a gendered body beyond its exterior performance. When Charke incorporates the details of her puppet show into the pag- es of her Narrative, the confusion that her performance suggests between masculine bodies and feminine bodies and between costume and corpus re- appears as a grammatical confusion between subject and object. "For some Time I resided at the Tennis-Court with my Puppet-Show, which was allowed to be the most elegant that was ever exhibited," Charke boasts. "I was so very curious, that I bought Mezzotinto's of several eminent Persons, and had the Faces carved from them. Then, in regard to my Cloaths, I spared for no Cost to make them splendidly magnificent, and the Scenes were agreeable to the rest. This Affair stood me in some Hundreds, and would have paid all Costs and Charges, if I had not, through excessive Fatigue in accomplishing it, acquired a violent Fever, which had like to have carried me off, and consequently gave THE GROWTH OF CELEBRITY CULTURE 87 a Damp to the Run I should otherwise have had, as I was one of the principal Exhibiters for those Gentry."46 Unclear throughout the passage is who, in Charke's puppet show, fulfills the role of the critic and who is criticized. Who, in other words, is being ex- posed here? In his book Puppets and Popular Culture, Scott Cutler Shershow points out that the exaggerated facial features of Charke's puppets transform into a low-brow, "popular" form the faces of the "several eminent persons" who likely made up at least a portion of Charke's audiences. Charke reinforc- es the class dynamics of this transformation when she mentions that her caricature-like puppets have been carved from "Mezzotint[s]." Because of its relative expense, mezzotint was a form of printmaking consumed mainly by the upper classes. Charke has taken expensive portraits of her upper-class neighbors and reproduced them as caricatures. By projecting her patrons' fac- es back to them in these deformed, distended versions, Shershow argues, she makes her spectators into the spectacles, as she conceals herself behind the stage on which her marionettes perform. The syntax of Charke's sentences accomplishes a similar reversal. When she describes herself as "one of the principal Exhibiters for those Gentry" who attended her shows, her wording leaves ambiguous whether she exhibits her puppets for the pleasure of the upper classes or whether she exhibits the up- per classes themselves. The convoluted clauses of the sentence following this one only compound the ambiguity of the spectator-spectacle/subject-object relationship: "I was one of the principal Exhibiters for those Gentry; whose Mouths were, like many others we have seen MOVE without any Reality of Utterance, or at least so unintelligible in the Attempt, they might as well have closed their Lips, without raising an Expectation they were unlucky enough to disappoint, whether ORATORS or PLAYERS, is not material."47 The an- tecedent to which Charke's "whose" here refers is, like the subject of the earli- er sentence, significantly ambiguous. Is Charke describing as "unintelligible" the utterances of her patrons, who speak in a tongue so class-consciously ver- bose that it is nonsensical? Does this description apply instead to Charke's puppets, whose mouths move as she lends them a voice as "unintelligible" as the sentence that describes it? Or is the description instead a commentary on those tragic players who fail as orators by strutting and fretting their hour upon the stage-actors, perhaps, like Charke's father, who was parodied as a nonsensical puppet in The Author's Farce and whom Charke ventriloquizes throughout her own Narrative? I return to Cibber here because Charke's refusal to distinguish between 88 1 SPECTACULAR DISAPPEARANCES subject and object in this passage from her Narrative recalls Cibber's similar refusal to distinguish between "Witness" and "Orator" in the Dedication to his Apology. Like Cibber's, Charke's convoluted sentences dissolve the stan- dard (and often gendered) hierarchy of subject over object, observer over observed. Yet like her performances, Charke's language, too, goes above and beyond her father's. Referring to but revising her father's gendered lan- guage, Charke presents a gender identity that cannot be described as either masculine or feminine-and that cannot even quite be described as Cibbe- rian. Instead, as a further example will confirm, it becomes unrecognizable, indescribable-as the gender of the body that writes it becomes a blank. Both the self-consciousness and the gendered significance of Charke's borrowings from her father come into focus late in the Narrative, when Char- ke recalls (but does not quite reproduce) one of her father's most egregious misspellings. The scene begins when Charke, her puppet show dissolved and her London theater career unsuccessful, takes her show on the road. After the grandeur of the London stages, the resources of the traveling players seem impoverished. "One Scene and a Curtain, with some of the worst of their Wardrobe, made up the Paraphanalia [sic] of the Stage, of which I was Prime Minister," she writes; "and, though under as many Disadvantages as a Set of miserable Mortals could patiently endure, from the before-mentioned Reasons, and an inexhaustible Fund of Poverty, through the General Bank of the whole Company, . . . we all went into a joint Resolution to be industri- ous."48 As in her earlier replacement of the laced hat of the "CAVA L IE R" for the crepe-covered hat of the "Coachman," Charke rejects the royal spectacle for which her father was known. If Cibber portrayed himself as the deformed king of the theater, Charke strips herself down to the accouterments of its more modest (and more unmarked) "Prime Minister." Charke's misspelling of the word paraphernalia, however, implies a per- formance that is less normative-and more Cibberian-than an initial read- ing might suggest. As Fidelis Morgan notes in her edition of the Narrative, Cibber himself had famously misspelled this word (as "paraphonalia") in his preface to The Provok'd Husband.49 (This was the same preface, interestingly, where he committed his most egregious overexpression in describing an ac- tress who "outdid her usual Outdoings.") The mistake delighted Cibber's crit- ics, most notably Henry Fielding, who immortalized it in The Author's Farce, a play with which Charke was intimately familiar. I will return to Charke in a moment, but I want first to examine Cibber's use of the word-and its gen- der implications-in order better to understand the significance of Charke's repetition of it. THE GROWTH OF CELEBRITY CULTURE 89 Cibber's preface to The Provok'd Husband consists mainly of praise for the play's leading lady, Anne Oldfield, who appeared as the reformed female rake Lady Townly. Cibber writes, "The Qualities [Oldfield] had acquired, were the Genteel and the Elegant. The one in her Air, and the other in her Dress, never had her Equal on the Stage; and the Ornaments she herself provided, (par- ticularly in this Play) seem'd in all Respects, the Paraphonalia of a Woman of Quality."0 In Cibber's usage, the word refers to the stage properties and "Ornaments" that make Anne Oldfield into a "Woman of Quality"-or, more accurately, to the stage properties that she supplies to express her true iden- tity as a "Woman of Quality." Like the wig that enables the transformation of Cibber's male rakes into men of feeling, paraphonalia suggests the accessories that refer to Oldfield's naked sincerity, which enable her properly (and legi- bly) gendered performance as the reformed Lady Townly.51 Cibber's misspelling of the word works against the apparent propriety and legibility of this gendered performance, problematizing the relation- ship between Oldfield's performance and increasingly codified categories of gender as it problematizes the relationship between Cibber's word and in- creasingly standardized methods of spelling it. It was perhaps for this reason that Fielding-an author already known for scolding Cibber's deformations of language as well as for depicting and descrying nonnormative genders in works like The Female Husband-chose the misspelled paraphonalia to anchor a ballad he inserted into The Author's Farce (1730). In his lullaby for the Queen of Nonsense in the play within Fielding's play, Sir Farcical Comic (a foppish writer of comedies who bears a marked resemblance to Cibber) croons: Can my Goddess then forget Paraphonalia, Paraphonalia? Can she the crown to another head set, Than of her Paraphonalia? If that had not done too, Remember my bone too, My bone, my bone, my bone. Sure my goddess never can Forget my marrow bone.52 Morgan points out that Fielding's repetition of the word "bone" pokes fun at a particularly unpopular double entendre later in The Provok'd Husband, when the innkeeper Mrs. Motherly asks her guest Sir Francis Wronghead, 90 I SPECTACULAR DISAPPEARANCES "Will you give me leave to get you a broiled Bone, or so, till the Ladies come home, Sir?153 In Cibber's play, "bone" suggests the male genitalia. Fielding plays with this suggestion in his parody, which converts paraphonalia, too, from a word that signifies Oldfield's accouterments to a word that signifies Cibber's male body as he offers it up to his Queen. Fielding's association of this paraphonalia with the Queen of Nonsense, moreover, attaches the word to the former age of spectacle rather than his own age of the unmarked bour- geois. But Fielding echoes Cibber's own overexpressive language and suggests the illegibility of Cibber's gender as he repeats ("my bone, my bone, my bone") and deforms (the perpetual misspelling of paraphonalia) these words.54 As Jill Campbell has noted, Fielding often expresses some ambivalence about whether gender constitutes an essential or a performative aspect of identi- ty.55 His language here suggests that Cibber's gender, at least, is performed, but performed poorly, made illegible by its overexpressive accouterments. When Charke takes up these accouterments in her own performance, she renders them even more illegible, miring them even deeper in contra- dictory meanings. In Charke's Narrative, as in Cibber's preface, "Paraphana- lia" suggests the accessories of a gender identity; it signifies the props and costumes that Charke employs in her performances in breeches roles. Rath- er than the props and ornaments of a "Woman of Quality," however, Char- ke's "Paraphanalia" consists of the trappings of a man. The same word that for Cibber suggests a recognizably female body and for Fielding a deformed (or a too obviously performed) male body suggests for Charke a body that is unrecognizable according to the definition of either. By misspelling par- aphernalia, Charke evokes her father's overexpressed, illegible signification of gender. But by misspelling it differently than her father has misspelled it, she goes beyond the efforts of his parodists-who simply reproduce his overexpressions-and instead dissolves their meanings even further. Not recognizably feminine, not recognizably masculine, and not even recogniz- ably Cibberian, Charke's language here makes both undeniable and unread- able the "CAPITAL CHARACTERS" through which an identity might be "so well described" and through which a well-accoutered body might be arrested and contained.56 Such passages shed new light on the first and most famous passage from her Narrative, in which the four-year-old Charke rises early, creeps to where her father's "enormous bushy Tie-wig" hangs on its hook, and places its bil- lowing bulk on her diminutive head. The episode has become the centerpiece not only of Charke's 1755 autobiography but of recent critics' readings of that autobiography as well: a way of including Charke among the queer writers THE GROWTH OF CELEBRITY CULTURE 91 hunting for ways to express their nonnormative genders in normative lan- guage. I want to suggest, however, that Charke's first adventure in transvesti- tism marks her indoctrination not into queerness-a failed masculinity that we must read as her attempt to express nonnormative gender-but rather into overexpression-an exaggerated masculinity that we should read as her attempt to avoid expressing any gender at all. Charke's many adventures in male dress begin, as she narrates them, just shy of her fifth birthday, when she enters the servants' hall of her father's summer home in Twickenham before the rest of the family has awakened. "By the Help of a long Broom, I took down a Waistcoat of my Brother's, and an enormous bushy Tie-wig of my Father's," she writes, "which entirely enclos'd my Head and Body, with the Knots of the Ties thumping my little Heels as I march'd along, with slow and solemn Pace. The Covert of Hair in which I was conceal'd, with the Weight of a monstrous Belt and large Silver-hilted Sword, that I could scarce drag along, was a vast Impediment in my Procession: And, what still added to the other Inconveniences I labor'd under, was whelming myself under one of my Father's large Beaver-hats, laden with Lace, as thick and broad as a Brickbat."57 Modern readers of Charke's Narrative have de- scribed its most famous passage as Charke's trying on a masculinity that proves insufficient. "Charke's textual cross-dressing," writes Kristina Straub, "acts out with a vengeance a threat posed by the cross-dressed actress as a reflection of 'failed,' ideologically inadequate masculinities" such as the cas- trated male, a role that Straub identifies with Cibber's fops.58 As we have seen, however, Cibber's wig signified not a "failed" but rath- er an overly abundant masculinity-one that, in its overtness, troubled the boundaries between the body natural and the body performed. So, too, Charke's description of her father's costume emphasizes not its inadequacies bur rather its excesses. What is most striking about this passage is the sheer enormity of Charke's masculine attire. On Cibber the wig was hardly discreet, but on Charke's body it appears voluminous-even more so as an accompa- niment to the "monstrous belt and large [and phallic] silver-hilted sword," the beaver lined with lace that, far from suggesting delicacy, is "as thick and broad as a brickbat." Like the cocked-up cap of Charke's generous bailiff, the costume she assumes here suggests a masculinity that exceeds its bounds. Where queer readings of Charke's transvestitism fall short, then, is in their failure to account for the obviousness of the signifiers she employs. Despite their disagreements, such readings share the assumption that her performances on stage, street, and page attempt to express an identity that doesn't fit into normative categories of gender and sexuality. Instead, Char- 92 1 SPECTACULAR DISAPPEARANCES ke's ambiguously gendered performances work to dissolve and unmark her identity by suggesting that the very signifiers that mark those categories don't mean what they are assumed to mean. Charke's performances are not expressions of an interior self struggling to make itself known through inad- equate languages. Rather, they are attempts to expose the signifiers of gender as not so clear after all-and as such to enjoy the privilege of being looked at without suffering the limitations of being defined. The overexpressive implications of Charke's gendered performances com- pound as the passage continues. After her playful description of taking the wig from its hook and marching through the back halls of her father's house, she decides to proceed into town. "Being thus accoutred," she writes, "I began to consider that 'twould be impossible for me to pass for Mr. Cibber in Girl's Shoes, therefore took an Opportunity to slip out of Doors after the Gardener, who went to his Work, and roll'd myself into a dry Ditch, which was as deep as I was high; and, in this Grotesque Pigmy-State, walk'd up and down the Ditch bowing to all who came by me."59 The print composed for early editions of the autobiography (figure 6) makes some sense of the staging that Charke de- scribes in the first sentence quoted here. Wearing a large man's coat and small girl's shoes, the four-year-old child stands in a ditch as high as her shoulders, so that her head, burdened with its big wig and beaver hat, is just seen over the top of the ditch by the passers-by who stand outside of it. Her tumble into the ditch, Charke notes, has covered her in dirt, leav- ing her in a "Grotesque Pigmy-State" that indicates both exaggeration and indescribability. As a grotesque, Charke appears a clown: a figure, much like her Punch in petticoats, marked by exaggerated and distorted body parts, an all-too-visible corporeality. Yet at the same time that this corporeality is overt it is also unreadable. Describing herself as a "Pigmy," Charke compares her dirt-encrusted face to the dark skin of an unreadable racial Other.60 The effectiveness of black paint at transforming an actor's famous face into illeg- ibility was well known by Charke's contemporaries: fourteen years before the publication of Charke's Narrative, David Garrick made his professional debut as Aboan in Thomas Southerne's adaption of Oroonoko-"a part in which his features could not easily be discerned," notes Thomas Davies. "Under the dis- guise of black countenance, he hoped to escape being known, should it be his misfortune [in his first attempt on the stage] not to please."61 Here, the mud on her face seems not only to obscure Charke's features but also to remove her from categories of non-normative genders and sexualities altogether. The racial identity she takes on seems to exempt her from all con- siderations of the gender or sexual identity she embodies. Charke proposes THE GROWTH OF CELEBRITY CULTURE 93 _ -- -- 6 a td _ K(~ ,'.e'l(/ /'A7 ?2'(',t/?1b91 (7 ' 2 :-(/iarl' I'a/in// i /7/6 / 24e a 7/u (//J a V /rI