“all deformed shapes”: figuring the posture master as popular
TRANSCRIPT
“All deformed Shapes”: Figuring the Posture Master as Popular Performer in Early Eighteenth-Century England
Tonya HoweMarymount University
2824 12th Street NE #104Washington DC 20017
Submitted to JPC June 2011
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“All deformed Shapes”: Figuring the Posture Master as Popular Performer
in Early Eighteenth-Century England
The early eighteenth-century entertainment economy can be characterized by its variety
and its modernity. Host to farcical afterpieces, harlequinade, ballet, opera, and more, the
eighteenth-century stage featured a rich and decidedly modern spectrum of entertainments
calibrated for an increasingly cosmopolitan and middle-class audience. This is a period, as John
O'Brien succinctly puts it in Harlequin Britain, when the “modern conception of entertainment
as a form of diversion directed to a mass culture...became intelligible as such” (xiii). The
participatory spaces of entertainment were newly shaped by public debate and the world of print,
offering myriad opportunities for the sometimes problematic consumption and production of
objects, ideas, and experience. An oft-cited hallmark of the development of the bourgeois public
sphere, newspapers also emerged in their modern form throughout the seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries. A cursory glance at early eighteenth-century newspapers dramatizes what
seems an astonishing schizophrenia to contemporary eyes—on one page, general Parliamentary
coverage, excerpts from foreign dispatches, and assessments of topical cultural events, and on
the other, a riot of quack medicines; new publication announcements; notices of lost wallets,
missing dogs, even people; consumer goods for sale; positions vacant or wanted; and
opportunities for entertainment extending well beyond the theater proper.
This riot of items and experiences bodies forth the consumerism integral to modernity; it
is unsurprising that the fashion for entertainment of which O'Brien speaks is coextensive with the
rise of the modern newspaper and the increasing significance of the newspaper as the dominant
vehicle for advertising. In this brave new world of print and apparent plenty, the mass audience
begins to take shape. One component of this modern entertainment economy that has received
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little attention is the posture master—in contemporary parlance, the contortionist. His highly
embodied entertainments, which strip away prop, sound, costume, and plot, became in the early
eighteenth century markedly consistent features in the advertising pages of The Daily Courant,
The Daily Post, and other popular urban newspapers. Who were these artists in flesh, and how
does their appearance in the first half of the eighteenth century intersect with the consolidation of
that modern entertainment economy?
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a “posture-master” is one who is “expert in
assuming artificial postures or attitudes of the body.”1 Early senses of the word “posture”
emphasize relative positioning of parts to other parts or wholes, chiefly the disposition of bodies
and objects in space. The term “posture-master,” however, dates only from the 1690s,
specifically in reference to one particular performer, Joseph Clark (see Figures 2 and 3, below);
significantly, use of the term seems to disappear by the middle of the nineteenth century, in favor
of the more contemporary “contortionist.”2 In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries,
the concept of the posture-master as one who places the human body into an artificially or
unusually acquired corporeal shape for purposes of entertainment begins to acquire purchase and
visibility—and no little amount of criticism from quarters increasingly concerned with the threats
1 These references are drawn from the New Edition; as of the 2010 draft revision, the word “unusual” replaces “artificial.”
2 While the noun “contortion,” according to the OED, dates from 1611, the first usage of “contortionist” as an entertainer who exhibits contortions is in 1859. In the 17th and 18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers, the search term “contortion!” yielded interesting results; though 148 hits were returned, around 60% of which were duplicates, the sense of the term was generally restricted to descriptions of bodily dispositions related to illness, pain, and death—or, in a few other cases, moral, political, or social affectations. Interestingly, most of these references fell near and after mid-century, with a higher concentration in the last two to three decades. There were a few uses of the term to describe the spectacles of harlequinade, outlandish dancing, and bad acting; a few in reference to the convulsions of enthusiasm; a few in reference to oratory or public imposture; a few in reference to the effects of simple laughter or the grimaces of stupid confusion (sometimes nationalist in origin), and so on. It is only after mid-century that the term “contortion” is appropriated , if rarely, to tumbling and physical performance, and the term is often used either as something humorous or something dreadful—it does not have the same connotations of wonder as are associated with posture-mastery. This will change in the nineteenth century.
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of a modern consumer culture.
The posture-master stages a particularly rich visual analogue to the new social and
economic mobility of the period, especially since he was becoming more and more a visible part
of the legitimate or quasi-legitimate paratheatrical3 establishment. The popularization of
corporeal and embodied entertainments in the eighteenth century transformed theater into a
widely-consumed commodity, as O'Brien suggests, foregrounding the physicality of performer
and spectator. A keystone in the development of modern concepts of entertainment, such
performance created the context for an audience subject to new disciplinary practices like those
articulated through the popular journalism of Addison and Steele. The posture-master's existence
is especially interesting in light of his increasing visibility during a period that saw the
consolidation of advertising as both a site of publicity and a marker of the limits of the emergent
rationalism associated with the newspaper. Posture-masters, with their tricksy facility at
reshaping and deforming the human body, seem to offer a ready-made analog to the popular
image of the modern audience as an anonymous and “ungovernable mass, a collectivity whose
responses to what is placed before it can neither be predicted nor controlled” (O'Brien,
Harlequin Britain xiv). The “truly free market” of “cultural discourse itself” can only exist
within “certain normative regulations” demarcating the sayable from the unsayable—the critic,
then, must emerge to “administer to those norms” in, as Terry Eagleton puts it, “a double refusal
of absolutism and anarchy” (15). In a particularly salient moment from The Function of
Criticism, Eagleton notes that the bourgeois public sphere is a realm “unable to withstand...the
inruption into it of social and political interests in palpable conflict with its own 'universal'
rational norms” (Eagleton 35). For critics of the period—most archetypally, as we will see,
3 This term, “paratheatrical,” derives from Jeffrey Sconce's work on “paracinema”--films and cinematic products typically received as marginal, like cult film, educational videos, and exploitation cinema.
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Joseph Addison in the Tatler 108—the deliberately perverse deformations of the human body as
entertainment must have seemed anarchic indeed.
It is difficult fully to appreciate or assess the meaning of the posture-master and the
discourses in which he figures; the subject is marked not only by a particular dearth of textual
residue, but also by a performative life impossible, in many respects, to recover. Nonetheless, a
surprising quantity of information from essays and—especially for the my purposes here—
newspaper advertisements helps us re-situate them in a larger historical context, even perhaps
reclaim their perversion from the normativizing stories and practices of critical debate. If, as
John Brewer has pointed out, “the spread of print was the bedrock on which British culture was
built” (450), then what, whether, and how bodies are rendered in print can tell us much about the
projections and agendas of that cultural project. These artists in flesh seem closely tied to the
modern world of advertising so central to the entertainment economy of the period, but outside
of those commercial spaces of print—or the few places where these artists are appropriated for
other purposes, as in John Evelyn's Numismata (1697), the Tatler 108 (1709), and the
Transactions (1698) of the Royal Society—their performative life is opaque. Further, the
conceptual and aesthetic schema that have enabled scholars to look at past texts, performances,
practices of spectatorship, and habits of being are themselves marked by narratives that
necessarily shape these objects of study. However, with the postmodern advent of tools like
Eighteenth-Century Collections Online and the 17th-18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers,
scholars can see quickly and clearly an outline of major and minor trends in the historical public
sphere; such resources are vital to the archeology of less well-known subjects of inquiry, in part
because very few, if any, bibliographic materials exist to help a researcher navigate the choppy
waters of print, and in part because even were they to exist, the chances of them documenting a
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passing comment that gives shape to a discursive construct is minimal, at best.
The posture-master offers one such example, with illuminating results. Use of full-text
searchable databases shows that a fad for posture-masters emerged most visibly in 1709,
continuing to grow during the next decades, then declining after mid-century—or rather, use of
the specific term “posture-master” lapses, while the more contemporary “contortionist” has yet
to come into focus. A search of the 17th-18th Burney Collection Newspapers for the phrase “po?
ture n3 ma?ter!” returns 153 results, most of which are advertisements. Strikingly, 125 of these
references fall between 1711 and 1739. Between 1740 and 1772, only one reference is returned,
and the remaining 24 occur in the last quarter century. All but a few of those 150 results were in
fact in reference to posture-masters, in a performative sense. A small handful of records are
duplicates, reflecting the poor legibility of the original scans, but these do not disrupt the larger
pattern that emerges—a great upswing in references to performances of posture-mastery during
the early eighteenth-century, and many fewer, later. More specific searches tailored4 to both
language typical in advertisements for posture-masters and the names of the performers
themselves returned additional results, all within the same pattern of a quick rise to visibility in
the early part of the century followed by an equally swift decline. After mid-century, the interest
in posture-mastery shifts toward equilibrists, acrobats, balancing acts. In 1753, an engraving of
one Anthony Maddox, “the Surprising English Posture Master,” appeared in The New Universal
Magazine, illustrating something of this shift (Brewer 332). While described as a posture-master,
4 Though this language will be examined more fully, below, it may be helpful to note here that ECCO and 17th 18th
Century Burney Collection databases support fairly complex proximity, wildcard, nested, and boolean searches. For instance, one can search for “variety” within fifty words of “shape!” (in which search the exclamation point signifies one or no characters, hence returning results for “shape,” “shapes,” or “shaped”). Because of the persistence of the long S, it is also helpful to conduct multiple searches both replacing “s” with “f” and using the question-mark wildcard, which signifies any one letter. Fuzzy searches are also useful, because they can compensate for the variant spellings and approximations common when older materials are scanned and read with OCR software. The differences in returns between a search for “po?ture ma?ter!” with no fuzzy searching and low fuzzy searching is minimal. For more information on these searches, see the online Gale help documents on “Fuzzy Searching” and “Search Tips.”
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he is clearly depicted as an equilibrist who “is allow'd to excel all the masters in the art of
ballancing and dexterity of the human body.” He walks on a wire like a rope-dancer, while
balancing or juggling various objects like swords, coach wheels, full wine glasses, even
simultaneously playing music. The deliberate deformation of the human body seems to have lost
its appeal as a central draw—or become commonplace, and in need of a concatenation of new
and curious skills to stimulate the audience. As the narrator of The Fool of Quality notes, much
later in the century:“[s]uch wonders are now so common as to be scarce entertaining; but, at that
time, they were received with bursts and roars of applause” (226). The move away from a
language of “posture” and toward “contortion” over the course of the century, and most
markedly in the nineteenth century,5 suggests also that such performances were viewed no longer
as alternative postures, but increasingly, always-already deformations of some normative
disposition figured as prior.
In 1709, the noted educator of public taste—and figure in matter theatrical—Joseph
Addison took up the popular image of the posture-master with a clearly reformative agenda in
5 In the 19th Century British Library Newspapers database, the same “po?ture n3 ma?ter!” search, limiting for advertisements, yielded a much lower 46 results, many of which were also duplicates. Though there were other notices not listed as advertisements containing other instances of the phrase, they provide some interesting insight; for instance, Mr. Pack was performing in London as a “Posture-master” in 1811, and he is described as being “the only one of celebrity that has appeared in this country within the last thirty years” (“The Poison Tree”). In 1830, the “famous posture-masters of old”—specifically, Clark—are referenced almost nostalgically in The Examiner, though even here, the language of contortion is prominent (“The Christmas Pantomimics”). A group of “Chinese Jugglers” were also performing early in the century, with a “posture-master,” though later, their advertisements added the synonym “contortionist.” In the 19th century, posture-mastery or contortion seems to have been primarily directed at an audience of children. Though the term “posture-master” was indeed still used quite frequently and metaphorically in a variety of discourses, it is less used as a signifier of an entertainer whose province is the wondrous and singular deformation of the human body, and more frequently associated with balancing acts, tumbling, and clowning. The outlandish or foreign discursive associations of the contortionist are also more frequent in the nineteenth century (there were German, French, and Chinese performers, and even female contortionists who advertised as such). Results for the search term “contortionist!,” limited to London newspapers in the 19th Century collection, were too great to work with, though a random selection of those 3219 results shows that this is undoubtedly the most common term of reference for such performers; indeed, use of “posture master” begins to feel archaic. In general, the use of the term “contortionist” is much looser, and it seems that the trend beginning in the eighteenth century of using “posture-master” to refer to acts of balancing, tumbling, and other sorts of entertainments of the body becomes much more pronounced.
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the Tatler 108, dated December 17. Using a tripartite structure, Addison first describes, in
horrified terms, the shock of seeing a posture-master performing in place of the expected Thomas
Betterton; then recounts an anecdote about a young “free-thinker” who needs to be “cudgelled
out of his system” by a patriarchal figure; and finally, turns his gaze to the great essayist Francis
Bacon, securing his own authority in place of the awestruck mass public with an extended
quotation on the value of true taste. Refusing even to grant the performer human status,
Addison's mouthpiece, Isaac Bickerstaff, describes him as an “it,” “a monster with a face
between his feet,” even a tuberous or vegetative growth that only sometimes inhabits “the figure
of a human creature”: this “monster,” he writes,
raised himself on one leg in such a perpendicular posture, that the other grew in a
direct line above his head. It afterwards twisted itself into the motions and
wreathings of several different animals, and after great variety of shapes and
transformations, went off the stage in the figure of a human creature. (2: 389)
This unexpected shock, happening as it did in the “playhouse” where Bickerstaff seeks some
“new ideas” to “enlarge [his] thoughts, and warm [his] mind” (2: 338), becomes the site of an
extended commentary on the dangers, in some sense, of untempered modernity, signified by the
misguided and youthful free-thinker. This young “Atheist” informs his father that “he expected
to die like a Dog” (2: 391); incensed, the patriarch grants him part of his wish, beating him as
one would an impertinent beast. This beating, Bickerstaff notes, “had so good an Effect upon
him, that he took up from that Day, fell to reading good Books, and is now a Bencher in the
Middle-Temple.” From there, Bickerstaff enlarges his basic judgments into a broad, scholarly
evaluation appropriate imitation—its proper forms, its proper ends, and its beneficial qualities.
The penultimate paragraph in the Tatler essay is, indeed, a citation from Bacon's The
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Advancement of Learning. Readers virtually lose sight of Bickerstaff and the posture-master’s
disreputable performance; we see only the citation and its inherited authority. Through a highly
contrived narrative of progress, Addison's essay culminates in the rational, disembodied
scholarly voice, a voice that is emphatically textual in nature. This voice seeks to remain, while
the fleshly body of the posture-master recedes into oblivion.
Such a narrative trajectory is duplicated on the scale of history; over time, we see no
longer the posture-master, but the contortionist. The discursive practices by which posture-
mastery became a fad within which some English practitioners approached celebrity status
indeed has a clear shape. By the dawn of the nineteenth century, “contortionist” had become the
dominant term, suggesting the naturalization of a normative mode of embodiment—a mode of
embodiment privileged by rationalization of the public sphere. The first cited use of the term
“contortionist,” in 1859, carries a telling history of use as “[o]ne who contorts or twists the sense
of words or ideas” (“contortionist,” n.). The swirl of alternative native postures recedes, to be
replaced with the image of normativity implied by contortion—if a body is contorted, then it has
been misshapen, debased, suggesting the priority of well-made, unproblematic, unproblematizing
flesh. That the “contortionists” of the nineteenth century are predominantly Turkish, German,
French, and Chinese is also telling.6
While one might expect posture-masters to play, at best, marginal roles in the eighteenth-
century entertainment economy, they in fact speak very much to the consolidation of the modern
cultural landscape in which “entertainment” as a category is becoming a viable, and even
threateningly dominant, mode of consumption—threatening in part because, like the “magic
assemblage” that Simon During discusses in Secular Enchantments, the site of entertainment
6 See footnotes 5 and 12.
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increasingly slips outside of the traditional boundaries of well-defined spaces. Throughout the
eighteenth century, public shows like rarity exhibitions, legerdemain, waxworks, and
ropedancing increased in number and visibility (Pender, “In the Bodyshop” 113), primarily
through advertising; this increased visibility makes the public show into a key site for the
emerging practices of modernity. The fashion for entertainment is itself a sign of the proliferation
and increasing accessibility of the public sphere, and these performers capitalized on the new
vocabulary accompanying the fashion. One posture-master, John Riner, for instance, deliberately
characterized his art as, variously, an “Entertainment of Postures” (“The Famous John Riner”)
and an “Entertainment in Metamorphoses” (“In the Little Piazza in Covent Garden”). Given the
peculiar salience of the posture-master to the image of embodied assemblage, the contortionist
must firmly be situated in this modern entertainment economy.
Four of the most famous posture-masters of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries—Joseph Clarke, (d. c. 1696), Mr. Higgins (d. c. 1710), John Riner (fl. 1721-1726), and
William Phillips (fl. 1720-1730s)—gained renown through their marvelous bodily
manipulations. Yet, these are only a handful of the working entertainers of the period; many
more are nameless, having been lost to the victors of history as well as the victors' ways of
seeing. Though we can chart some of their practices and habits of performance in the
advertisement pages that became their second home, especially after the lapse of the Licensing
Act in 1695, only the wealthiest of performers could afford to purchase newspaper space on a
daily basis. According to Jeremy Black, the cost of advertising in an urban newspaper during the
opening decades of the eighteenth century was between 2 and 3 shillings for the initial week's
run of a middling-length advertisement, like those cited here.7 The ephemera of print, in addition
7 For some useful resources on advertising rates in the eighteenth century, see Jeremy Black, The English Press in the Eighteenth Century, as well as Charles Clark, The Public Prints: The Newspaper in Anglo-American Culture,
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to the clearly authored and subsistent documents with which readers are more familiar,
references a whole host of experiences to which we have less access. There seem to be no
references to Clark's performances, for instance, in any of the public newspapers of his day; yet,
he became a significant reference point for later posture-masters, who are often described as
representing “the whole Performance of Posture Clark.” Isaac Fawkes, the celebrated sleight-of-
hand artist who inaugurated the modern mode of entertainment that During has called “secular
magic,” gained visibility not primarily through his skill at conjuring; in fact, his first
performances occurred under the sign of an unnamed posture-master to whom Fawkes was yet
an unnamed “English Artist” (“At the Duke of Marlborough's Head”).8
Amidst the urban entertainment economy, posture-masters performed in many venues
telling in their variety. As we see in Hogarth's Southwark Fair, and as numerous advertisements
document, they performed in fairgrounds, both as stand-alone artists and as pre-show
entertainment, where their antics served, like those of tumblers, ropedancers, and jugglers, to
draw crowds into booths both for summer drolls and glasses of beer alike. Displays of posture-
mastery appeared on legitimate stages as entr'acte entertainment, and in the fore- or great-rooms
of legitimate stages. Like waxworks, automata, and strange creatures from around the world,
posture-masters displayed their extraordinary bodies in taverns and coffeehouses; they appeared
in piazzas, in semi-permanent booths throughout the year, and we can infer from Clark's
inclusion—not in one engraving, but in two—in Laroon's London Cries of London that they may
have appeared on street corners and other undocumented public spaces. Fawkes even advertised
1665-1740. I want to thank Joel Berson and Jim Chevallier for their helpful suggestions. Black also notes that advertisements were first taxed in 1712, which was doubled from 1s to 2s each in 1757 (61). Therefore, by mid-century, advertising had become quite expensive, and this expense likely contributed to the lessening visibility of posture-masters in the public world of print.
8 Arguably, though it is not the subject of this essay, Fawkes built his career as a relatively respectable purveyor of middle-class entertainments on the appeal of posture-mastery, an appeal that his rise to prominence aided in marginalizing.
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private performances of his young posture-boys for the more well-heeled of his clientèle,
allowing them to distinguish themselves from the masses attending public performances, and
posture-mistresses were, as Randolph Trumbach has noted, fixtures in the sexual underworld of
the Enlightenment.9
These performers were frequented by audiences of all classes, and they could be seen
across the city throughout the year. Advertised prices ranged from 2s. 6d., the cost of prime
seating at a benefit on April 17, 1728, for William Phillips (“For the Benefit of the famous
Posture-Master Phillips”), and 3d., the cost of the “Upper Places” at Yeates' booth near
Tottenham Court Road (“At Yeates's Booth”).10 In many cases, the cost of seeing a posture-
master perform was indeed comparable to seeing Thomas Betterton tread the boards at common
prices for pit seating—an economic parity that Addison viscerally rejects in his Tatler 108 essay
when, expecting to see the great actor, he instead witnesses a “monster with a face between his
feet” (2: 389). Some performers, depending on the venue they were working, charged flat rates,
and others, tiered; a posture-master who performed for limited engagements sometimes lowered
his prices as the engagement drew to a close. At the Rummer tavern, Higgins charged 1s. 6d. for
front seats and 1s. for rear seats (“The Surprizing Mr. Higgins”), though the more elegant Duke
9 Throughout this essay, I have used the gendered “he” to refer to these performers; it is only in the nineteenth century that female posture-masters could advertise their public performances as merely entertainment. For a historical summary of the performances of posture-masters and –mistresses in the London sexual underworld, see Randolph Trumbach’s compendious Sex and the Gender Revolution, Volume 1 (157-59). The “private performances” often hawked in advertisements like those included in this essay carry the suggestion of sexual titillation, and a reader will be reminded of Fanny Hill's “friend,” who “humoured...curiosity” by “plac[ing her] in all the variety of postures and lights imaginable” (122).
10 Early cost of living is very difficult to pin down definitely, and there was a remarkable range in . However, Kirstin Olsen offers an accessible overview—from which this analysis is drawn—in Daily Life in 18th Century England. To put these prices in perspective, a laboring couple in 1737 would earn around 7s 3d each week, 18 and a half pounds a year—if they somehow miraculously worked all fifty-two. Almost 90% of that income would go to necessities like food, clothing, and lodging (Olsen 198). Around 1700, a shopkeeper's annual income was around 45 pounds a year (Porter 70). Performances by Riner and Higgins would have been accessible for shopkeepers, but beyond the reach of the laboring poor—though they would have been able to attend fairground shows. The 2g (21s or 1/1/-) reward Fawkes offered for his apprentice's return was substantial.
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of Marlborough's Head tavern in 1711, the “famous posture-master of Europe” who performed
with the as-yet-unkown Fawkes, commanded 2s. for side boxes and 1s. for the pit (“At the Duke
of Marlborough's Head”). A decade later, when Fawkes began performing under his own name
and a his own booth, he charged 12d and 6d for his shows including posture boys—little enough,
but like all of these performers he showed almost every day and often throughout the day: “Their
Hours, every Day, from 9 in the Morning till 9 at Night, the last Shows beginning at 3, 5, and 7
in the Evening” (“This is to Give Notice”).
These must have been grueling schedules indeed; yet, they were clearly sustained by audiences
who returned day after day. When Fawkes' young “Apprentice” posture-master Phillips ran away
from his “Master” in April of 1724—an astonishingly detailed account of which is given in The
Daily Post—the reward for his return was a very gentlemanly 2 guineas, suggesting just how
integral a part of the show he was; that he later received a benefit night emphasizes his
centrality.11 There was a surprisingly rich and varied culture of postury in the early eighteenth
11 It is this Phillips who, in 1728, earned a benefit performance—perhaps a reward for his return. The 1721 advertisement for Phillips' reward offers a fascinating glimpse into these performers' daily lives:
Whereas William Phillips, Apprentice to Mr. Fawks, lodging at the Three Compasses in West Smithfield, aged about 15 or 16 of a fair Complexion, with black Eye-brows, has a Cut or Blemish on one side of his Forehead, he plays on the Violin, and shows all manner of Postures and Tumbling, wears a black Plush Coat, with double breasted White Metal Buttons, a lac'd Hat, a light bob Wig, or else a black one ty'd with a Ribbon; went away from his Master on Wednesday the 15th Inst. Whoever will bring him to his said Master, shall have two Guineas Reward, and reasonable Charges, or if he will return again shall be kindly receiv'd; and whoever entertains him be it at their Peril. (“Whereas William Phillips”)
One notes, here, not only the language of apprenticeship, suggesting that posture-mastery is being seen as a craft,
Figure 1: Fawkes' Advertisement Image with Posture-Boys. From The Weekly Journal (24 October 1724).
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century—so rich, indeed, that one hesitates, today, to call it a subculture.
While there are a few notices given in papers based outside of London of provincial
performances, posture-masters incarnate a striking cosmopolitanism, a cosmopolitanism that
seems to inform the designation of “English posture-master.”12 These performers, especially
those who were known by their own names and asserted more control over their financial affairs
and image, spent much time on the Continent—there seems to have been at least a few
“European” posture-masters. Higgins had performed in Holland; Riner, in both France and
Germany; one or two of Fawkes' posture-boys were French, and if they stayed with him as
apprentices, in the language of some notices, they may have been orphans handed over to the
entrepreneur during one of his own trips abroad—a number of advertisements take special care
to mention successful performances before foreign courts. Such cosmopolitanism was a sign of
status and rank, though it was this same cosmopolitanism that would become a rallying cry for
the consolidation of “British” entertainments. Performers capitalized on the outlandishness of
their postures, suggesting an active association between posture-mastery and the un/home-like,
the uncanny. In December of 1721, for instance, John Riner was performing, for 2 shillings a
place, his daily series of “Entertainments in Metamorphosis” that included, in addition to “the
whole Performance of Posture Clarke,” an entirely novel collection of postures “Never Perform'd
in this Kingdom before.” He goes on to elaborate: “First, a Pigmy Dance, he appearing to be but
two Foot and a half high […] and a pleasant Entertainment of an Italian Scaramouch, with two
Heads and four Legs.” (“Never Perform'd in this Kingdom Before”). Not only does this
but also the rhetoric of gentility. Of course, one can only speculate on why Phillips “went away from his Master,” but the grueling performance schedules indicated in these advertisements may offer one reasonable explanation.
12 In advertisement after advertisement, the eighteenth-century posture-master is described as “English,” though he may have cosmopolitan experience. In the nineteenth century, however, the contortionist is most frequently identified as foreign and exotic. Though not the scope of this essay, such a shift suggests a way of reading the relationship between these entertainments and the rise of empire. See also footnote 5.
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advertisement capitalize on the kind of outlandishness often associated with exhibited curiosities
—“pigmies” were notorious staples in such exhibitions—but it also maps the new fad for
harlequinade and pantomime onto the allure of posture-mastery.13 In fact, two popular
entrepreneurs in contortion—Fawkes and Riner—seem to have staged a mimic duel of the sort
that would become infamous with the competing Faustus pantomimes. In January of 1723,
newspapers advertised a competing series of performances that pitted Riner's talents against
Isaac Fawkes' astonishing show of legerdemain and contortion, suggesting not only the
popularity of these performances but also their centrality within the endemically competitive and
increasingly spectacular theatrical world.14
But what distinguishes the posture master's art, as perhaps is to be expected, is the
centrality of the performer's body. Advertisements for contortionists describe in minute detail the
bodily permutations and deformities paying audiences can expect, often in terms resonant with
the visual logic of Clark's image in The Cyes, perhaps the earliest—and one of the only—images
of these performers in England. Marcellus Laroon’s 1687 Cryes of the City of London explicitly
takes up the body of the most well-known of the late seventeenth-century contortionists in not
one but two trademark positions—positions described by Sean Shesgreen in Images of the
13 It is likely that performers toured widely across Europe, including Italy. Goldsmith's narrator in Citizen of the World notes his regret that “none of our Eastern posture-masters or showmen have ever ventured to England,” for he “should be pleased to see that money circulate in Asia, which is now sent to Italy and France, in order to bring their vagabonds hither” (1: 199). This may suggest that there were few Asian posture performers in the eighteenth century, though it is, of course, difficult to prove a negative. In the early nineteenth century, Chinese performers were noted in the papers, and given the resemblance between the illustrations that have survived and several yogic poses, in addition to the extent of Continental travel, it is plausible that some Eastern knowledge had likely been acquired.
14 Boasting that he could challenge “all the Performers of this kind in England” (“The Famous John Riner”), Riner's advertisement appears just below an advertisement for Fawkes' “surprizing Tricks by Dexterity of Hand” and the equally “surprizing Activity of Body perform'd by his Little Boy[s]” (“The Famous Mr. Fawks”). This juxtaposition in print emphasizes the element of competition, endemic to the 1720s London stage; indeed, it would come to a head that Fall, when Drury Lane and Lincoln's Inn Fields staged the competing Faustus harlequinades that so captured the public imagination—and critical ire. For more on these competing harlequinades, see John O'Brien, Harlequin Britain.
15
Outcast as imitating “a hump-backed, potbellied idiot” and a “freakish acrobat” (73):
Part of a luxuriously engraved and printed sequence that, selling for half a guinea, appealed to
the wealthier, educated classes—Pepys and Addison were among the verified owners of the
earliest editions—these images illustrate key representational concepts useful to an archaeology
of the posture master (Shesgreen, Images of the Outcast 47; Criers 39). In the first, Clark’s body
sinuously conforms to Hogarth’s line of beauty. From head to waist, his body arcs into the letter
“S.”15 From an unwigged, indecorous head, his tongue protrudes impossibly, limiting speech to
inarticulate grunts, and in visual analogue to the extruded tongue,16 Clark has disjointed his right
15 See especially Ronald Paulson’s introduction to the Yale edition of Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty. According to Paulson, Hogarth’s line of beauty is subject to wildly varying interpretations. Critics of Hogarth’s aesthetic of practice tend to point out the potential slippage, inherent in the line of beauty, from beauty to grotesquerie. That is, a beautifully sinuous curve is only one tiny step away from a caricatured and grotesquely sinuous curve. The “line of beauty” was, to many, a line of disgust; see for instance the etching by Paul Sandby, The Analyst Besh-n in His Own Taste (1753), described by Paulson in his introduction to The Analysis of Beauty.
16 In Rabelais and His World, Mikhail Bakhtin cites the protruded tongue as a visual cue of the grotesque; it is an
16
leg and rotated his ankle a full 180º, drawing the physical elements of his art to the foreground.
That The Cryes gives us two images of Clark suggests the centrality of—or at least the interest in
—posture-masters at the time. In the second image, Clark appears in the same habit, this time as
a “freakish acrobat”; he raises his left leg, thrown out of joint at the hip, perpendicularly above
his head. Holding his leg in this posture with one arm, he raises the other above his head and
points, with his index finger, into the physical boundaries of the print. Significantly, his tongue
remains protruded. Possibly a hallmark of Clark’s performance, the protruded tongue is also an
important visual trope—with tongue protruded, human speech becomes garbled and
unintelligible, sense subordinated to nonsensical repetition of sound. Drawing on Susan Stewart's
formulation, O'Brien eloquently describes the eighteenth-century fashion for harleqinade as,
rather than a crime of writing, a crime against writing, for the ways in which it threatened the
desire to transform theater into a literary medium—while pantomime and harlequinade worked
against “a literary conception of culture,” the spectacle of posture-mastery could be seen to reject
the claim to written privilege entirely (xviii). This visual logic of Clark's body will be reproduced
and referenced in advertisement after advertisement for later performers, suggesting not only the
emergence of a tradition, but also an increasingly disciplined, even generic, order of description.
One 1712 advertisement in The Spectator for an unnamed contortionist is in many ways
typical of such paratheatrical entertainments as represented in the early eighteenth century, and it
is therefore worth citing at length. Performing at
the New Tunbridge Wells by the New River Head, in the Dancing Room, is to be
seen the famous Posture-Master of Europe, who far exceeds the deceased Posture-
Masters Clarke and Higgins: He extends his Body into all deformed Shapes,
instance of the body seeking to exceed itself, to transgress the borders of flesh (316).
17
makes his Hip and Shoulder Bones meet together, lays his Head upon the Ground,
and turns his Body round twice or thrice, without stirring his Face from the Place;
stands upon one Leg, and extends the other in a perpendicular Line half a Yard
above his Head, and extends this Body from a Table, with his Head a Foot below
his Heels, having nothing to balance his Body but his Feet: With several other
Postures too tedious to mention. Likewise a Child about 9 Years of Age, that
shews such Postures as never was seen performed by one of his Age. Perform'd
from 6 till 10 every Morning, and from 4 till 8 every Evening, except Mondays
and Thursdays, when it will be performed only in the Morning. Note, Tuesday
next will be the first Day of performing at this Place. (“At the New Tunbridge
Wells by the New River”)
This is a “famous” posture-master who hails, ostensibly, from Europe; his performance is aligned
through the venue with dancing as well as an existing tradition—he “far exceeds the deceased
Posture-Masters Clarke and Higgins.” In this paradigmatic advertisement, the variety of
corporeal dislocations that we can expect to see are detailed extravagantly, with an almost
scientific attention to angles and lengths and units of measurement. This level of detail
emphasizes the wondrous and surprising quality of the performance, as posture after posture is
pictured in language. There is a notable but indefinable sense of excess about this advertisement;
we are getting more—the posture master “far exceeds” what earlier artists were able to do,
though the description calls to mind Laroon's image of Clark. He “extends his Body into all
deformed Shapes” (my emphasis); he performs not only those described, but “several other
Postures, too tedious to mention” here—almost as if they could readily be imagined by an aware
and engaged reader. The advertisement actively creates a visual rubric of the performer's body,
18
suggesting at once an existing image repertoire on which readers can draw to imagine the
performance, and a need to contour the performance anew with a precise set of individual
postures occurring in a specific order. This is not a random rary-show, but a routinized
performance. It presents us with a set of still images that, in being linked together, create an
almost cinematic quality of motion—and suggest the presence of a coherent, awestruck audience,
as well. The architectural imagery of the contortionist's postures finally emphasizes his ability,
the extent to which he is indeed a master of postures, building an edifice of flesh—this language
is unlike that of later periods, when “contortion” is used. We encounter his agency, here, his
active ability to shape his body; he “extends,” he “makes,” he “lays” and “turns” and “stands”
and “extends” again. In advertisements, the posture master is clearly depicted as a master of
postures, inviting the audience to partake in the pleasures of the stare, to wonder, to situate these
bodies in a tradition quickly becoming organized into descriptive coherence.
In addition to performing their postures in fairgrounds, taverns, and other spaces of
buying and selling, contortionists also worked on the regular or patent stages, often in the
capacity of entr'acte entertainment—this is where Addison's Bickerstaff problematically
encountered the posture master he describes in horrified terms. In December 1709, Higgins was
the posture-master du jour, and from the run of his advertisements, we learn that he began
performing at Congreve and Vanbrugh's Queen's Theatre in the Haymarket, where he continued
throughout the holiday season, performing at least eleven times. While in the Queen's Theatre,
Higgins performed his postures between the acts of a variety of plays starring Betterton and
Barry, including Macbeth. It is therefore likely that Higgins is the posture master to whom
Addison refers in The Tatler 108 when he writes of an abomination that has infiltrated the heart
of the tragic stage. After his tour at the Queen's, Higgins moved across London to the Rummer
19
tavern in Cheapside, where his performance ran until March of 1710, just before his death; there,
he charged common prices for gallery and upper gallery seating in the regular theaters. At the
Rummer, Higgins participated in at least fifteen performances, though possibly many more were
unadvertised given the claim in each that his performance would begin “at Six every Evening
during his short Stay in the City” (“The Surprizing Mr. Higgins,” February 9, 1710). It is only
because of these later advertisements that we learn how Higgins had been performing earlier—in
The Daily Courant of February 9, for instance, we learn that he is now performing “several other
wonderful Postures that he had not Time to perform between the Acts” at the Queen's Theatre.
Many other performers appeared on legitimate patent stages, to the chagrin of arbiters like
Addison and Steele. John Riner performed in the Opera House, Fawkes at the French Theatre
and the James Street playhouse, and, years earlier, in 1702, an anonymous Black contortionist
performed “a Variety of Postures to Admiration” in an entr'acte during Wycherly's Country Wife
at Lincoln's Inn Fields (“At the New Theatre in Little-Lincolns-Inn-Fields”). This “infiltration”
of the popular was denigrated by many as indicative of the bad taste of the town, unsurprising in
itself; what is surprising, however, is that the posture-master becomes a focus for that critique. A
letter to Pasquin dated January 21, 1724, proclaims that “if Affairs go on at this Rate, the Poet
and the Player will become useless Things, while the Joiner, the Dragon-maker and Posture-
Master run away with all the Credit and Profit.” Not only compromising any hard-and-fast
distinction between legitimate and illegitimate performance, however, such perceived infiltration
also emphasizes the promises and threats of a mobile, urban public sphere—a commercial and
highly embodied site of exchange, debate, and diversion.
In early eighteenth-century print culture, then, we can see an outline of the contortionist's
significance. Advertisements of the day suggest the centrality of these performers to the London
20
entertainment economy, despite remaining largely nameless and unheralded, and the prices they
could command both on and near legitimate theatrical venues illustrate their popularity for a
variegated audience. With other paratheatrical entertainers, like tumblers, rope dancers, ladder
dancers, jugglers and conjurers, the contortionist participates in the production of secular magic.
His feats of agency render him a fitting Proteus. The posture-master is, fittingly, a master of
postures, a master of shapes and appearances who can slip easily from insider to outsider, and
from discourse to discourse. Joseph Clark was described in a letter to the Royal Society, situating
him firmly in modern discourses of science, curiosity, and wonder.17 In The Guardian 102, dated
8 July 1713, a jest perpetrated by Clark and his “wandring Tumor” becomes a rubric for the
“changeable...Customer” (358) who relies on fashion rather than cultivated hardiness in the face
of inconstant weather; the whimsical essay, marked with a hand as evidence of Joseph Addison's
authorship (Stephens 18), places the posture master tangentially in a tradition of health literature
and discourse on bodily maintenance, and squarely within a discourse of commerce and fickle
trade.18 His exploits also figure in Smith's sensationalistic collection of criminal biographies, The
History of the Lives of the Most Noted Highway-Men. First published in 1714, these stories were
so popular that, by 1715, the compendium had gone into a fifth edition, retitled A Compleat
History. In the tale of Patrick O'Bryan, “a Murderer, Incendiary, Ravisher, and Highwayman”
17 The earliest textual reference to Clark, appearing in a letter to the Royal Society, duplicates the images of his body in The Cryes with a tone of wonder and surprise: “he would appear in all the deformities that can be imagined, as hunch backed, pot bellied, sharp breasted; he disjointed his arms, shoulders, legs, and thighs.... I have seen him make his hips stand out a considerable way from his loins, and so high that they seemed to invade the place of his back, in which posture he has so large a bell” (“Of the Posture-Master”).
18 The difference in tone and treatment between Addison's engagement of the posture master here and in Tatler 108 is astonishing, and it suggests the utility of the image of the posture master for a variety of other discourses. However, it also suggests a fascinating performativity in Tatler 108, in that Addison, through his vitriolic analysis of the posture master, is equally capable of seeing the contortionist's work in sharply contrasted ways. The malleability of approaches to the posture-master is itself a site for worthwhile inquiry. The anecdote of the “wandring Tumor [that] puzzled all the Workmen about Town” noted in The Guardian 102 derives originally from the letter on Clark in the Transactions of the Royal Society, and it is also retold in Caulfield's popular Portraits, Memoirs, and Characters of Remarkable Persons (1794), itself reprinted for antiquarian interest throughout the nineteenth century.
21
who terrorized the English countryside during the Restoration, the dashing highwayman is said
to have accosted “Clark the Posture-Master.” However, upon being asked to “Stand and Deliver,”
the contortionist confounds O'Bryan with an extravagant display of “presently making a strange
Metamorphosis of his Body, by transforming himself into several surprizing Shapes and
Postures, sometimes having his Head betwixt his Legs and his Heels upright, sometimes seeming
to have two Heads and three Legs, and sometimes no Head at all” (258). Here, the contortionist
becomes an imitatively disruptive episode in the criminal biography, a moment where the
trickster highwayman is himself tricked. The highwayman is not only unable to collect from the
posture master, but he is himself robbed. The contortionist's astonishing display is at once
appropriated into the tale of the highwayman and murderer, and remains something that stands
without it. Not only can the posture-master confound the tailor's codes of measurement and
bodily coherence, then, but he also frustrates the highwayman's Robin-hood act. John Evelyn's
seventeenth-century Numismata categorizes Clark and his fellow artists in flesh as impostors and
heresiarchs, with quite negative connotations.19 Nonetheless, he also describes the quality and
timbre of his flesh in a tone suggesting the allure of such performers:
To this Class [of curious impostors] belong extraordinary Zanis and Farcers...and
such as excel in slight of hand; the late Famous...Dutch-Woman Tumbler; by no
means forgetting our late Proteus Clark, who tho' gross enough of Body, was of
so flexible and subtile a Texture, as to contort his Members into several
disfigurations, and to put out of joynt almost any Bone or Vertebra of his Body,
and to re-place it again. (277)
19 Indeed, the image of the posture-master was not always used in negative ways; for instance, William Hope's 1707 discourse on fencing draws on Higgins'“assiduous and daily Practice” as he gives advice to young fencers (36).
22
Evelyn's class of “curious impostors” is tellingly crowned by “our late Proteus Clark,”
suggesting the extent to which the spectrum of popular entertainment traditions are imagined
through the body of the posture-master. Such performers step easily from the street to the
fairground, from the tavern to the legitimate stage, the public world of print to the private world
of secret desires.
A dexterous wonder, whose ability to reshape the human body is surprising, the posture-
master capitalizes on the physicality and exhibitionism central to modern entertainment. His
“distorted” form becomes a metaphor for the chaotic range of voices, desires, and modes of
consumption available to an increasingly mobile, modern world, and there is much work to be
done situating the agential performance of embodiment in registers as diverse as the
development of modern concepts of disability, eighteenth-century elaborations of criminality and
physiognomy, theater history, popular performance, Augustan critiques of fraud and imposture.
The posture-master circulates as easily as money, slipping from subject to object, curiosity to
monster, outlandish to English, human to inhuman, fairground and streetcorner to patent theater,
criminal to trickster of the marketplace. His liminality offers the spectator the opportunity to
consider the malleability of the physical world and its constructs. The posture-master is thus a
crucible for modern anxieties about entertainment, about the power of curiosity to deform, and
about the meaning of the human body. Yet, while he may function as a metaphor for many, he is
also more than a metaphor—the posture master is a significant participant in and shaper of the
early eighteenth-century entertainment economy.
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