De Achttiende Eeuw. Jaargang 46

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The pleasure of being deceived: spectatorship in the arts and other deceptions in eighteenth-century England
Jacqueline Hylkema

Eighteenth-century Britain was rife with deception and its fascination with the subject was reflected in an abundance of pamphlets and prints discussing exposed cases of forgery and imposture. A small number of these discussions continued a Baroque tradition in which the illusionary nature of the arts was explored in sustained comparisons with actual deception. This article presents several of these visual and textual commentaries, including William Hogarth's The Wise Men of Godliman (1726) and prints and pamphlets related to the Great Bottle Hoax (1749), and shows how these reflected eighteenth-century developments in the perception of the arts and their dynamics, especially in terms of spectatorship, while remaining thoroughly in line with the Enlightenment's ideas on truth and lying.

In the first week of January 1749, an intriguing advertisement appeared in a number of London newspapers. Next Monday, the advertisement announced, a man would appear on the stage of the New Theatre in Haymarket and perform a number of ‘most surprising things’, including jumping into a small tavern bottle.¹ Of course this would be physically impossible but the New Theatre did have a reputation to uphold when it came to sensational productions. In 1737, The Historical Register for the Year 1736, a play written by Henry Fielding, the then-manager of the theatre, had been the main cause for the introduction of the Licensing Act and over the next decade, Fielding's successor, Samuel Foote, had become famous for the quirky productions he devised in order to dodge this law. However, none of these had been quite as eccentric as the one promised by the advertisement. It soon became the talk of the town and on the evening of 16 January, the New Theatre was packed. However, when neither man nor bottle appeared, the audience's eager anticipation quickly turned into suspicion, disappointment and frustration. When it finally realized that the whole affair had been a hoax, the audience flew into a collective rage, wrecked the theatre and built a bonfire with its remains in the street.

Over the following weeks, the events at Haymarket were eagerly discussed, in word as well as image, in newspapers, pamphlets and prints, demonstrating

1 Kirby, Kirby's Wonderful and Eccentric Museum, 11.

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Fig. 1. ‘Mercury’, engraving by Jan Saenredam after Hendrick Goltzius (1596). © British Museum, London.

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a particular characteristic of eighteenth-century deception. As Jack Lynch writes: ‘What is unusual about the eighteenth century is the copious and detailed debates over these deceptions, with their growing sophistication and scepticism’.² This abundance of public discussion is not entirely surprising as deception was rife in eighteenth-century England and was closely related to many of the key concepts of the Enlightenment, such as judgement, rationality and, indeed, scepticism. In the case of the Great Bottle Hoax, as the Haymarket prank would become known, the discussion focused on the identity of the culprits but a significant number of these went beyond the simple game of ‘seek the bottleman’ and included reflections on the dynamics of deception. Why had the audience expected to see a man jump into a small bottle when it must have known this to be impossible? And why had the discovery that they had been fooled caused so much outrage?

The public debates on specific deception cases like the great Bottle Hoax are a crucial source for any study on the perception and role of deception in eighteenth-century English society but they also include a smaller and very specific thread that appears to elaborate on a European-wide discussion found in seventeenth-century works of art, paintings and plays in particular. Hendrick Goltzius' drawing of Mercury, from his 1596 The Children of the Planets series, provides a particularly good introduction to this discussion. The drawing, which was turned into a highly popular print by Jan Saenredam (figure 1), depicts Mercury along with the professions associated with him. By placing two rhetoricians, identified by their gestures, books and clothing, in the foreground, Goltzius emphasizes that he presents Mercury in his role as the protector of rhetoric, the art of persuasion. Behind the statue we see Mercury's other children: the painter, the sculptor, the actors on stage and - right in the centre - the quack, the profession associated with so many different forms of deception, from textual forgery to imposture, that it had become a by-word for deception in late sixteenth-century Europe.

What unites all of these professions is that they all weave a fabric of lies, a notion that Goltzius emphasizes by prominently placing a weaving shuttle between the quack and the painter. The shuttle refers to the early modern Dutch word ‘ webbe’, which referred to a woven tissue but was also used in the meaning of a literary text and in the phrase ‘een webbe van leughens’, which literally translates as ‘a tissue of lies’. More importantly perhaps, all the professions presented by Goltzius use rhetoric, as the motto in Saenredam's print states, to

2 Lynch, Deception and Detection, viii.

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persuade their respective audiences of their ‘artes’ - which in Latin refers to arts as well as tricks. It is significant to note that Goltzius' drawing explicitly depicts this process of persuasion: all the deceivers are shown in action, with their audiences. But what do the artists need to persuade their audiences of? The answer is, indeed, a deception, the kind of deception that occurs when the work transcends its representational frame and is experienced as that which it represents. It is, for instance, the moment when we forget that the figure in front of us has been sculpted out of marble and respond to it as if it were a real person. We may kneel down to worship it or reach out our hand to stroke skin - only to touch cold marble and discover that we have been deceived.³

This effect was to become one of the key concepts of Baroque art and was epitomized by its popular genre of the trompe l'oeil. The comparison between actual deception, such as that committed by quacks, and the arts provided painters and playwrights with the opportunity to present sustained explorations of the dynamics of the deception of the eye in their particular medium. Deception became a popular subject for canvases and stages all over Europe, from the works of Dutch painters like Frans van Mieris and Gerrit Dou to the comedies of Ben Jonson, Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Thomas Asselyn, and served as vehicles for reflections on the relationship and processes between artist, work and audience.⁴ It is important to note that unlike the many seventeenth-century neo-Platonic and Calvinist discussions about the deceptive nature of the imitative arts, these reflections did not dismiss the illusionary nature of art nor condemn it for any negative effects its deceptions might have on the spectator. On the contrary, this particular debate celebrated the artist's ability to create illusions, discussing it in terms of craftsmanship and authority, and emphasized that its effect on the viewer was mainly that of pleasure. In fact, the association between the experience of deception and pleasure was so strong that at the end of the seventeenth century, John Locke remarked, with a slight weariness: ‘'tis in vain to find fault with those Arts of Deceiving, wherein Men find pleasure to be deceiv'd’.⁵

In the long eighteenth century, the comparison between the dynamics of the arts and deception found a second medium in the many discussions about newly exposed cases of forgery, imposture and other types of actual deception. This article focuses on two of these cases and discusses how the comparison was

3 For a discussion of this effect in Baroque art and how it relates to the effect theorized by anthropologist Alfred Gell as ‘presence’, please see Van Eck and Bussels (2011).

4 Ben Jonson's Volpone (1606), Gian Lorenzo Bernini's The Impresario (1643) and Thomas Asselyn's, De Kwakzalver (1692).

5 Locke, Essay, 235.

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elaborated on in a number of specific images and texts. The first of these cases is the Great Bottle Hoax, which will be discussed in terms of the relationship between deception and the theatre, with particular reference to the notions of audience, experience and pleasure. How does the representation of deception in this particular debate reflect contemporary theories about the nature of the theatre and the role of the audience? And how does it relate to the eighteenth century's preoccupation with the concept of truth?

The second case concerns that of Mary Toft, ‘the pretended Rabbet-Breeder of Godalming in Surrey’.⁶ In the autumn of 1726 Toft created an overnight sensation by claiming to have given birth to 15 rabbits, and an even greater one, several weeks later, when the whole affair was exposed as a hoax. This exposure immediately generated an abundance of visual and textual commentaries, including William Hogarth's print Cunicularii or The Wise Men of Godliman in Consultation (1726). Like the other commentators, Hogarth satirizes those who had fallen for Toft's deception but on a deeper level the image also reflects on the dynamics of spectatorship in the visual arts and engages with earlier visual discussions of this subject, particularly those found in the Dutch genre of the quack painting. This particular genre, made popular by seventeenth-century painters like Jan Steen and Jan Mientse Molenaer, depicts quacks, usually standing on a small, raised stage, as they attempt to sell their worthless medicines to a mesmerized audience. These paintings focus on the concept of gullibility - a theme reflecting the importance and fear of deception in early modern Europe - and aimed to give the spectator pleasure by evoking the sense of superior judgment and feelings of Schadenfreude. The spectator would have known to interpret the figure of the quack as a deceiver and would have revelled in the sense of superiority afforded by the idea that he or she would have known better than the audience in the image.

Gerrit Dou's painting The Quack (figure 2), from 1652, includes all of the genre's traditional elements. The quack takes centre-stage, literally, and is shown presenting his captive audience with a bottle of medicine. He is accompanied by all the props traditionally associated with quacks: an exotic parasol, an even more exotic monkey and a medical diploma so grand it has to be a forgery. What makes the painting different from all previous examples of the genre however is Dou's own presence in the painting. He is show hanging out of the window directly behind the quack, holding a palette. The composition and the similarity in how the figures of Dou and the quack are both presenting

6 Manningham, An Exact Diary, title page.

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the attributes of their profession immediately establish an implicit comparison between the two. Unlike the audience in the image, Dou is not watching the quack but directly confronts the viewer's gaze. This creates a relationship between spectator and painter that explicitly resembles that between the quack and his audience. I, Dou appears to tell his viewer, am doing exactly to you what he is doing to them: I am deceiving you. However, the quack's audience falls for his lies as a result of their gullibility, Dou's spectator is fooled by the exquisitely realistic nature of his painting. The gleaming seal on the quack's forged diploma looks deceptively real and the velvety fabric of the tablecloth is conveyed so realistically that the viewer wants to reach out and touch it. Through his ability to deceive his viewer's eye, Dou manages to cross, for a brief moment, the representational boundaries of his medium and this, in turn, instils the viewer with admiration and pleasure.⁷

Fig. 2. ‘The Quack’, painting (oil on panel) by Gerard Dou (1652). © Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam.

Fig. 3. ‘Cunicularii or The Wise men of Godliman in Consultation’, etching by William Hogarth (1726). © British Museum, London.

The composition of William Hogarth's Cunicularii or The Wise Men of Godliman in Consultation (figure 3) is reminiscent of the conventions

7 For a more extensive discussion of Gerrit Dou's The Quack, please see Gaskell (1982).

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of seventeenth-century quack paintings. The deceiver Mary Toft is shown presenting her deception to a captive audience but the tables are turned, for this captive audience consists of the legitimate physicians who fell for her hoax. In November 1726, the first of these victims, a man-midwife called John Howard, had started writing to some of the most famous physicians of the day, claiming that a patient of his, a poor girl from the small village of Godliman in Surrey, had given birth to bits of cat (three legs to be precise) and twelve rabbits. Although sceptical, several of these doctors rushed to Toft's bedside. including Nathanael St. André, surgeon to the Royal Household of George I. After witnessing another rabbit birth, St. André examined Toft before and after the birth and carried out several tests on the animal tissue that had emerged from Toft's womb. These tests should have told St. André that the births had been faked but he was so fascinated by them that he dismissed the scientific evidence and pronounced the births to be authentic.

King George I found himself fascinated too by St. André's reports, especially as they appealed to his well-known interest in extraordinary natural

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phenomena. However, he was a cautious man and sent the renowned German surgeon Cyriacus Ahlers to Surrey to investigate the case further. Ahlers examined Toft as well as the preserved rabbit bits she had supposedly given birth to and observed that the bodies contained droppings with pieces of straw and grain. This meant that the rabbit must have lived and eaten before emerging from Toft's womb, which led Ahlers to conclude that the births could not be anything but a hoax. Even in the face of Ahlers' evidence, Howard and St. André kept insisting the births were real but the king ordered Toft to be brought to London, where she could be kept under close observation. Within days, she became the toast of London, with every medical man worth his salt attending her chambers to discuss the case and witness the birth of the sixteenth rabbits. However, it was not to be. On 7 December, Sir Richard Manningham, England's most famous man-midwife, decided to deceive the woman whom he believed to be a deceiver by pretending that he was going to carry out a painful examination to find out the truth. Toft believed him and in order to avoid being examined, she confessed. Having heard of the king's fascination with strange natural phenomena, she had decided to create one herself in the hope that the king might grant her a pension. After buying or catching the animals, she had cut them up, inserted them into her body and then pretended - with the necessary acting - to give birth to them.⁸

Hogarth's representation of the Mary Toft affair in Cunicularii or The Wise Men of Godliman in Consultation presents Toft mid-birth and flanked by Manningham, identified by the dramatis personae underneath the image. Manningham's arm is up Toft's skirt as he tries to deliver yet another monstrous child to add to the group of rabbits in the front of the bed. She and Manningham are surrounded by her accomplices and other physicians, all of whom seem to accept the veracity of the birth without question. St. André cries out: ‘A great birth!’ According to Jenny Uglow, Hogarth's print was published on 12 December 1726, only five days after Mary's confession. As no detailed accounts of the affair had been published yet at that stage, Hogarth created his image without knowing all the facts relating to the case. The image presents Howard as her accomplice, which he was not, and Ahlers and Manningham are depicted as having been as credulous as St. André - which they most certainly were not.⁹ Despite getting these details wrong, Hogarth's satirical representation of the case is very similar to the other images produced in the

8 For extensive accounts of the Mary Toft affair, please see Ahlers (1727), Manningham (1727) and St André (1726).

9 Uglow, Hogarth, 119.

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immediate aftermath of the exposure, in the sense that it ridicules the physicians for choosing to believe their eyes rather than trusting scientific evidence. The effect is exactly that of Dutch quack paintings: the image allowed Hogarth's spectator to look at the physicians in the image and derive pleasure from knowing what they did not know and seeing what they refused to see.

At first sight, Hogarth's print is a fairly straightforward satirical study in Schadenfreude but the image is extremely complex and has several layers of meaning. Mary Toft's first name and the fact that her hoax involved births allowed Hogarth to create an explicit comparison between deception and the narratives of Christianity. The title of the work and its composition of course refer to the adoration of the Magi and turn the image into a perverted nativity scene, with Mary Toft in the role of the Virgin Mary and Manningham, Ahlers and St. André as the three wise men. This, Uglow notes, ‘is the work of a realist who scorns fantasy, medical or religious’.¹⁰ However, Hogarth's image has more to offer than enlightened blasphemy for he also compares Toft's deception to the illusionary nature of the arts.

The most obvious of these arts is the theatre, which is evoked by the curtains behind Toft and the dramatis personae underneath the image. We are looking at a stage, her stage, and see her mid-performance. The curtains also evoke Hogarth's own medium in a reference to the contest between the Greek painters, Zeuxis and Parrhasius, in which the latter deceived his rival by painting curtains that were so lifelike, that Zeuxis tried to open them and as a result, lost the contest. In his Inleyding tot de Hooge Schoole der Schilderkonst (1678) the Dutch painter and art theorist Samuel van Hoogstraten concludes his praise of the achievement of Parrhasius with the remark that the perfect painting is ‘like a mirror of nature, that makes things that are not there appear as if they are, and as such is deceptive in a permissible, entertaining and praiseworthy manner’.¹¹ The Zeuxis story was a popular motif in early modern art and many seventeenth-century artists, most notably Gerrit Dou, had included curtains in their images to highlight the seductive deceptiveness of the realism of their paintings.¹²

However, Toft's hoax differs from the illusions created by the arts in the sense that in art, the illusion is offered in the explicit context of its medium and the deception occurs when the representation transcends this frame and

10 Ibidem, 120.

11 Hoogstraten, Inleyding tot de hooge schoole. My translation from Dutch: ‘Want een volmaekte Schildery is als een spiegel van de Natuer, die de dingen, die niet er zijn, doet schijnen te zijn, en op een geoorlofde vermakelijke en prijslijke wijze bedriegt’.

12 See Hénin, ‘Pharrhasius and the Stage Curtain’, 49-61.

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is experienced as that which it represents. In 1735 for example, The Prompter magazine would describe this effect beautifully in an introduction to a dialogue on the pleasures of painting by the French painter and playwright Charles-Antoine Coypel:

There's a sort of Magick in the Art, which (distinct from the Satisfaction we receive in contemplating the Beauties of a fine Picture) charms by the Deception it puts upon us. [...] To see an irritated Sea, and a Vessel struggling with the over-pouring Wave, or splitting on a Rock, while Horror and Despair strike from the ghastly Looks of the drowning Mariners: - It is no longer a dumb Entertainment to the Eye, but a Speaking Image to the Mind, that awakens ev'ry Sentiment and Power in it, and hurries the Beholder, by an imperceptible Violence, thro' every Passion represented in the now living Canvas.¹³

In deception however there is no representational frame to transcend: whether it concerns a persona, object or event, the deception is immediately presented as that which it purports to be. In other words, it has to be presented as original, authentic and real, and a good deceiver will make sure that it will never cross his victims' minds that it could be anything else. Only after the exposure, the deception can be seen for what it really is and can be compared to art. This is a crucial point in Hogarth's references to the arts in Cunicularii or The Wise Men of Godliman in Consultation: the physicians are completely unaware that the birth they see unfold before them is a deception. To them it was real but those viewing the image would have known better. These viewers knew that the image depicted a hoax and would have seen Hogarth's references to painting and the stage as a reinforcement of the idea that the birth was mere fiction, ‘a now living Canvas’, put in front of those who believed it to be real.

It is difficult to tell whether William Hogarth approved of artistic deception in the same way Gerrit Dou and his fellow Baroque artists did. After all, Hogarth was an Enlightenment man, who believed in truth and detested hypocrisy and other kinds of dishonesty. However, the references to the theatre in Cunicularii or The Wise Men of Godliman in Consultation do include a complex process of identification between artist and deceiver. Hogarth presents Mary Toft to his viewer as an actress, a Parrhasius and the living image that she herself has created and embodies. However, this is his image of her, his recreation of her creation, which creates a similar identification between artist and deceiver as the one found in Dou's painting. It is also important to note that Hogarth's

13 Anon., The Prompter, 1.

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recreation of Toft is mendacious. By all accounts, Mary Toft was a plain girl but Hogarth presents her as quite beautiful and, as Jenny Uglow observes, ‘the gullible, self-important men in this print look far more absurd than the strong, supine woman. For once the “lower” groups - the women and the poor - have hoodwinked the rich and the experts’.¹⁴

This victory would most certainly have appealed to Hogarth's sense of social justice, even if it was achieved through deception, and it is exactly this idea that made the illusionary nature of art acceptable to Hogarth. Matthew Craske notes that Hogarth, like other eighteenth-century artists with what he calls ‘a strong civic humanist agenda’, subscribed to

a civic humanist theory of illusion - the belief that it was permissible to deceive the senses of their viewers for the sake of a higher moral mission. [...] [The art of Hogarth and Goya] explores a rich vein of irony inherent in the work of the visual artist concerned with moral reform; an individual; who was obliged to harness an essentially deceitful medium of imitation to the task of clarifying his public's moral vision.¹⁵

This approach to artistic illusion sets Hogarth firmly apart from seventeenth-century artists like Gerrit Dou whose illusions had fully adhered to Baroque ideals and whose artistic identification with his quack had served to explore and emphasize his own artistic authority and mastery. Whereas the illusions created by Dou's masterly painting skills evoked admiration and pleasure in his spectators, Hogarth's pictorial lies, including his embellishment of Toft's beauty, ultimately serve social justice and the happiness of mankind rather than the pleasure of his spectator.

Hogarth's representation of the Mary Toft affair also differs from seventeenth-century representations in its emphasis on the deceived rather than the deceiver. Gerrit Dou's image is about the quack and asks how can the deceiver deceive? Hogarth's image however asks: how are the deceived deceived? Ultimately the image is not about Mary Toft: as the title indicates, it focuses on the wise men in consultation, Toft's audience, and reflects on the way they observe and perceive her. In this sense, the print is a prelude to Hogarth's The Laughing Audience, which was published in 1733 as a subscription ticket for Hogarth's The Rake's Progress series. The image depicts a theatre audience and shows their response to the unseen performance. The audience in the pit is

14 Uglow, Hogarth, 120.

15 Craske, Art in Europe, 146-147.

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attentive and amused by the performance, with one member wiping away tears of laughter, whereas the gentlemen up in the box pay no attention whatsoever to the stage and instead chat up the Orange Girls. The image not only reflects Hogarth's interest in response but also the eighteenth century's general shift in interest from creation to response.¹⁶ Another example of this shift is found in The Prompter's introduction, in which the author exclusively focuses on the spectator's experience of the illusion and explores ‘how it charms by the Deception it puts upon us’.¹⁷ Hogarth's image is one of the very first representations of this shift to the audience and may, as Jim Davis suggests, ‘have set the tone for visual depictions of eighteenth-century spectators’.¹⁸

Although it took place nearly 25 years after the Mary Toft affair, the Great Bottle Hoax is very much related to the same shift to the audience. In the days that followed the riot at the New Theatre, many of the London newspapers published accounts of the event and a range of pamphlets and cartoons were produced to satirize the events. Initially these publications focused on the possible identity of the culprit. Samuel Foote, the New Theatre's manager, was the obvious suspect: not only was he infamous for his quirky productions but he was also a savvy businessman and many thought that placing a fake advertisement to pack a house would not be beyond him. However, the day after the riot, Foote and John Potter, the owner of the New Theatre, both took out advertisements in several London newspapers to deny any responsibility in the matter.¹⁹ Others published satirical anonymous pamphlets, including An Apology to the Town, for Himself and the Bottle (1749) and A Modest Apology for the Man in the Bottle. By Himself (1749), to present themselves as the culprit. The author of the second pamphlet also explained that he would indeed have jumped into ‘a very, very large Bottle’ if only the audience hadn't frightened him so.²⁰

Fig. 4. ‘The Magician, or Bottle Cungerer/English Credulity; or Ye're all Bottled’, etching by Bispham Dickinson (1749). ©British Museum, London.

However, the most interesting part of the Great Bottle Hoax is not so much who committed it, but how it was responded to and how these responses were represented. In the satirical prints and the pamphlets that were produced in the weeks and even months after the event, the main emphasis was placed on the notion of gullibility, condemning the audience for having believed the advertisement, and the way they behaved when they found out that they had

16 For more extensive discussions of the eighteenth-century emphasis on spectatorship in respectively painting and the theatre, please see Matthew Craske (1997) and Jim Davis (2007).

17 Anon., The Prompter, 1.

18 Davis, ‘Spectatorship’, 62.

19 Kirby, Kirby's Wonderful and Eccentric Museum, 14-16.

20 Anon., A Modest Apology, 22.

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been fooled. Bispham Dickinson's highly popular print English Credulity; or, Ye're all Bottled (figure 4) shows Britannia exclaiming ‘O! My Sons!’ while the gullible Bottle Hoax audience is seduced by Satan. The opening lines of the accompanying verse read: ‘With Grief, Resentment and averted Eyes, Britannia droops to see her Sons (once Wise so fam'd for Arms, for Conduct so renown'd with every Virtue, every Glory crown'd) now sink ignoble, and to nothing fall; obedient marching forth at Folly's Call’.

However, the pamphlet A Letter to the Town concerning the Man and the Bottle, which was published anonymously a few weeks after the event, argues that gullibility had nothing to do with the events at the New Theatre and points out that the audience knew very well that the bottle trick promised by the advertisement was in fact impossible:

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Notwithstanding all that can be said, I will never be persuaded but this gentleman was really a Conjuror; For sure nothing less than a supernatural power could draw so many wise, witty and polite Beings together! - Among which were Philosophers, Mathematicians, Astrologers and Authors, both tragic and comic; every one of which declared it was an imposition, and a thing not possible to be done, and yet all went with eager expectation to see it! - I hope, Gentlemen, you won't deny but your practice was different from your Opinions.²¹

The author then states that the theatre is where the audience goes to witness an illusion. So what, he asks, caused the fury of the audience at the New Theatre when they realized that the bottle trick was exactly this, an illusion? He warns the town's playwrights and actors to be cautious in future, for staging illusions has become a dangerous business in London now:

How will the combin'd Atoms of the Town deal round their Vengeance, when scenes incorrect, Characters uncouth, and Plots unnatural appear before 'em? Will they not then unbung the Hogshead of Displeasure, uncork the Bottles of their Rage, and fling 'm, direful, at the Actors Heads?²²

The point seems sensible but is not entirely valid as it ignores a fundamental difference between artistic and actual deceptions. As argued earlier, the line between these two is located in the acknowledgement of the representational frame. Works of art are presented as works of art and if they succeed in creating an illusion that the spectator believes to be real, this effect will only be temporary and the spectator will always remain aware at some level that the illusion is not real. A painting may appear to its spectator as, to use The Prompter's phrase, a ‘now living Canvas’ but it remains a canvas nevertheless. Actual deceptions may be similar to illusionary works of art in the sense that they have been created for an audience but in order to succeed and be accepted into the fabric of reality, they must hide that they are not real and be offered as part of reality. This did make the Great Bottle Hoax different from a work of art because the advertisement was published in a newspaper and not presented within an artistic and obviously fictional context.

The author of A Letter to the Town concludes his discussion by scolding the audience for its behaviour at the New Theatre and for wrecking the theatre: ‘The Poor house had not been guilty of Any Error, but kindly stood with Open Arms to receive you in her Bosom; little thinking you wou'd tear her guts out,

21 Anon., A Letter to the Town, 9.

22 Ibidem, 10.

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and reward her hospitality with ruin’.²³ He advises the town to let the matter rest now: ‘for if you Prostitute your Applause and Censure at so mad a rate, both will be despised; nor will an Author think his fame secure, though built upon the firmest ground your Approbation can bestow’.²⁴

The points raised in A Letter to the Town about the illusionary nature of the theatre and the audience's response reflect key developments in the eighteenth-century perception of the theatre. The connection between these two points is made clear in A Guide to the Stage, or Select Instructions and Precedents from the best Authorities towards Forming A Polite Audience (1751). In his introduction the anonymous author of the pamphlet writes, with a certain degree of pride, that his is the first book to lay down rules about audience behaviour for those who frequent the playhouse. There is, he writes, much need for such instruction:

We daily see and hear injudicious applause, laborious attention, rustic laughter, and inelegant tears, with other errors no less gross than obvious. There are even some who wilfully forget themselves, see and hear Romeo and Juliet in person, are at Denmark or Mantua, without once dreaming of Drury-Lane or Garrick.²⁵

This effect of seeing and hearing Romeo and Juliet in person is the illusion that occurs when the work transcends its own representational boundaries and the spectator experiences the work as real rather than a representation. It is also mentioned in The Prompter's 1735 introduction to Charles-Antoine Coypel's dialogue:

To have some celebrated Action, express'd with so much Force, that we see Dignity, or Grief, Terror, or Love, according to the Circumstances of the Story, and are moved as strongly, as if the Persons represented were actually in Being, and before our Eyes: - To see a stabb'd Lucretia, or a dying Cleopatra, and exposed Andromeda, or a forsaken Ariadne'.²⁶

To this author, seeing Lucretia, Cleopatra, Andromeda and Ariadne in person is a desirable experience and part of the magic of art that ‘charms by the Deception it puts upon us’. However, for the author of A Guide to the Stage, art holds no such charm. To him, believing the illusion presented by the theatre reflects

23 Ibidem, 15.

24 Ibidem, 22.

25 Anon., A Guide to the Stage, B.

26 Anon., The Prompter, 1.

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unsophisticated viewing processes and the author argues that it is responsible for the impolite behaviour displayed in London's theatres. The remedy to this behaviour is for the spectator to cling to the stage's representational frame and remain aware that this is Drury Lane or Garrick. The best way to achieve this, the author suggests, is to adopt a rational and objective attitude towards the theatre and to gain knowledge about actors and specific plays, especially by trying to attend good productions several times. This will enable the spectator to assess how well the actors convey the text and prepare him or her for the feelings certain events and speeches are expected to evoke.²⁷

As for the expression of audience response in the theatre, the author admits that the most elegant behaviour takes time and practice to learn and that the best way to go about it, is to copy that of those who conduct themselves best. The very best conduct, the author asserts, shows composure of mind, which involves laughing only at appropriate moments and no weeping. A simple nod, a short clap or a simple statement of ‘That is very moving’ will do.²⁸ The important thing is not to get carried away and fall for the deceptions of the stage, even for a single moment: the sophisticated spectator never forgets the representational nature of the scene in front of him or her. This distinction between the highbrow and the lowbrow spectator was common in eighteenth-century discussions and representations of the theatre. Matthew Craske notes that Hogarth's The Laughing Audience makes this distinction too: ‘The general mass of Hogarth's audience appear to be of the “middling sort” who laugh in an unattractively raucous manner, showing themselves to be over-involved in the fiction which they witness’.²⁹ The difference between the highbrow and lowbrow lies in their conduct, but more importantly, in their approach to the deceptive qualities of the theatre - the unsophisticated spectator falls for the lie, the sophisticated spectator does not but appreciates it and bases his judgment on how well the illusion is staged.

Most representations created during the aftermath of the Great Bottle Hoax were intended to provide Schadenfreude but there was one notable exception. This is George Bickham the Younger's The Bottle Conjurer, from Head to Foot, without Equivocation (figure 5), which was published on 24 January 1749. The image shows the audience building a bonfire in the street with the remains of the theatre they have just destroyed. The title of the print promises to show the scene as it happened and despite a number of obviously comical elements,

27 Anon., A Guide to the Stage, 12-14.

28 Ibidem, 16.

29 Craske, Art in Europe, 182.

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such as the gentleman who has literally lost his head, the image is marked by savagery and references to the serious consequences of the audience's fury. Several people are being trampled by the mob, a man is about to throw a cat on the fire and the banner on top of the fire spells out the extent of John Potter's financial ruin. The image is unequivocal in its condemnation of both the hoax and the audience's response and underlines this in the poem underneath. This starts by accusing the culprit, whoever he was, of having tried to earn gold with little trouble ‘by putting giddy Lyes in publick Papers’ and concludes by pronouncing ‘The Audience Fools, the Conjurer a Thief’.

Fig. 5. ‘The Bottle Conjurer, from Head to Foot, without Equivocation’, etching/engraving by George Bickham the Younger (1749). © British Museum, London.

The Bottle Conjurer, from Head to Foot is also, to my best knowledge, the only commentary to make a serious attempt to identify this thief, and it is likely that its identification is correct. As the mob riots on, it is observed by three gentlemen who are hanging out of the window of the public house on the right-hand side of the image. Underneath the pub window two words have been scribbled, the first of which is ‘Chesterfield’ and might be a reference to Philip Stanhope, the Earl of Chesterfield, who has long been the main suspect in the case of the Great Bottle Hoax. According to a persistent story that has never been proven conclusively, Stanhope had made a bet with the Duke of Portland that he could ‘find fools enough in London to fill a playhouse and pay handsomely for the privilege of being there’.³⁰ The gentleman on the left indeed

30 Walsh, Handy-Book, 476.

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bears a strong physical resemblance to Stanhope and the way he proudly points at the fire does suggest that the artist believed that Stanhope was responsible for the hoax and its disastrous consequences.

While it is highly unlikely that the similarity between the depiction of Stanhope and Gerrit Dou's self-portrait in The Quack is deliberate, its effect is striking. Both men take pride in the illusion they have created but Dou's achievement is artistic and fully adheres to the Baroque objective of giving pleasure to its spectators. By the 1720s, this perception of artistic illusion had become out-dated. In his representation of the Mary Toft affair, Hogarth refers to the Baroque tradition but ultimately rejects it in favour of artistic illusion that does not bring pleasure but adheres to the social and moral ideals of the Enlightenment. As for the actual deception depicted by Hogarth, his sympathy lies with Mary Toft. Hogarth might have disapproved of deception but does acknowledge that the creative dynamics of imposture resemble that of art and more importantly, that despite crossing a line by hiding its fictional status, Mary's imposture revealed and, initially, triumphed over poverty and inequality. George Bickham the Younger has no such understanding for Stanhope, whose motives were frivolous and selfish and caused nothing but misery.

The Great Bottle Hoax had a remarkably long aftermath, in the sense that references to the case would be used well into the 1820s to denote gullibility and stupidity in visual satire. It then, like most exposed hoaxes, quietly slipped away into obscurity and would only sometimes be quoted as a literary curiosity. The case of Mary Toft has fared rather better in this respect. Hogarth would portray her once more, in Credulity, Superstition and Fanaticism (1762). This print, which attacks secular and religious credulity, and Cunicularii or The Wise Men of Godliman in Consultation have both become popular subjects in academic discussions of the English Enlightenment, especially in the context of the roles of rationality, judgement and scepticism in eighteenth-century science and religion. However, as this article has attempted to show, Cunicularii or The Wise Men of Godliman in Consultation and the visual and textual commentaries on the Great Bottle Hoax also elaborate on the Baroque discourse of the illusionary nature of the arts and continue its tradition of exploring the dynamics of art through the dynamics between deceiver and deceived in actual deception. Unlike their seventeenth-century predecessors, many of these commentators did find fault with the arts of deceiving but they found new ways to use and appreciate them that not only gave pleasure but were also thoroughly in line with the ideals and values of the Enlightenment.

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About the author:

Jacqueline Hylkema is Assistant Professor at Leiden University College The Hague and is currently completing a six-year PhD project, The Rhetoric of Illusion: Persuasion and Response in Forgery, the Arts and Other Deceptions (1600-1750) at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS). Email: [e-mail].

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