“’Tis from those of this number who are more refined, that the mountebank obtains audience and credit, and it were a good bargain if such customers had nothing for their money but words, but they are best content to pay for druggs, and medicines, which commonly doe them hurt. There is one corner of this Elizium field devoted to the eating of pig, and the surfeits that attend it. The fruits of the season are everywhere scatter’d about, and those who eat imprudently do but hasten to the physitian or the churchyard.”
In 1697, William Philips, the zany or Jack Pudding mentioned by Granger, was arrested and publicly whipped for perpetrating, in Bartholomew Fair, a jest on the repressive tendencies of the Government, which has been preserved by Prior in a poem. It seems that he made his appearance on the exterior platform of the show at which he was engaged, with a tongue in his left hand and a black pudding in his right. Professing to have learned an important secret, by which he hoped to profit, he communicated it to the mountebank, as related by Prior, as follows:—
“Be of your patron’s mind whate’er he says;
Sleep very much, think little, and talk less:
Mind neither good nor bad, nor right nor wrong;
But eat your pudding, slave, and hold your tongue.”
Mr. Morley conjectures that this Philips was the W. Phillips who wrote the tragedy of the Revengeful Queen, published in 1698, and who was supposed to be the author of another, Alcamenes and Menelippa, and of a farce called Britons, Strike Home, which was acted in a booth in Bartholomew Fair. But worth more than all these plays would now be, if it could be discovered, the book published in 1688, of which, only the title-page is preserved in the Harleian collection, viz., ‘The Comical History of the famous Merry Andrew, W. Phill., Giving an Account of his Pleasant Humours, Various Adventures, Cheats, Frolicks, and Cunning Designs, both in City and Country.’
The circus was an entertainment as yet unknown. The only equestrian performances were of the kind given by Banks, and repeated, as we learn from Davenant and Pepys, by performers who came after him, of whom there was a regular succession down to the time of Philip Astley. The first entertainer who introduced horses into vaulting acts seems to have been William Stokes, a famous vaulter of the reigns of the latter Stuarts. He was the author of a manual of the art of vaulting, which was published at Oxford in 1652, and contains several engravings, showing him in the act of vaulting over a horse, over two horses, and leaping upon them, in one alighting in the saddle, and in another upon the bare back of the horse, à la Bradbury.
Another of the great show characters of this period was Joseph Clark, the posturer, who according to a notice of him in the Transactions of the Royal Philosophical Society, “had such an absolute command of all his muscles and joints that he could disjoint almost his whole body.” His performance seems to have consisted chiefly in the imitation of every kind of human deformity; and he is said to have imposed so completely upon Molins, a famous surgeon of that period, as to be dismissed by him as an incurable cripple. His portrait in Tempest’s collection represents him in the act of shouldering his leg, an antic which is imitated by a monkey.
Clark was the “whimsical fellow, commonly known by the name of the Posture-master,” mentioned by Addison in the ‘Guardian,’ No. 102. He was the son of a distiller in Shoe Lane, who designed him for the medical profession, but a brief experience with John Coniers, an apothecary in Fleet Street, not pleasing him, he was apprenticed to a mercer in Bishopsgate Street. Trade suited him no better than medicine, it would seem, for he afterwards went to Paris, in the retinue of the Duke of Buckingham, and there first displayed his powers as a posturer. He died in 1690, at his house in Pall Mall, and was buried in the church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Many portraits of him, in different attitudes, are extant in the British Museum.
Monstrosities have always been profitable subjects for exhibition. Shakespeare tells us, and may be presumed to have intended the remark to convey his impression of the tendency of his own generation, that people would give more to see a dead Indian than to relieve a lame beggar; and the profits of the exhibition of Julia Pastrana and the so-called Kostroma people show that the public interest in such monstrosities remains unabated. But what would “City men” say to such an exhibition in Threadneedle Street? I take the following announcement from a newspaper of June, 1698:—
“At Moncrieff’s Coffee-house, in Threadneedle Street, near the Royal Exchange, is exposed to view, for sixpence a piece, a Monster that lately died there, being Humane upwards and bruit downwards, wonderful to behold: the like was never seen in England before, the skin is so exactly stuffed that the whole lineaments and proportion of the Monster are as plain to be seen as when it was alive. And a very fine Civet Cat, spotted like a Leopard, and is now alive, that was brought from Africa with it. They are exposed to view from eight in the morning to eight at night.”
At the King’s Head, in West Smithfield, there was this year exhibited “a little Scotch Man, which has been admired by all that have yet seen him, he being but two Foot and six Inches high; and is near upon 60 years of Age. He was marry’d several years, and had Issue by his Wife, two sons (one of which is with him now). He Sings and Dances with his son, and has had the Honour to be shewn before several Persons of Note at their Houses, as far as they have yet travelled. He formerly kept a Writing school; and discourses of the Scriptures, and of many Eminent Histories, very wisely; and gives great satisfaction to all spectators; and if need requires, there are several Persons in this town, that will justifie that they were his Schollars, and see him Marry’d.”