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This essay posits an analogy, in Rochester’s poetry, between the mind-body problem and the juxtaposition of acoustics against semantics. Specifically--and in implicit dialogue with Thomas Hobbes’ language theory--Rochester can be seen, at times, to invert the traditional prescription that sound serve sense, instead allowing phonics to govern content, thereby further enriching the poems’ thematic investigation into the material basis of consciousness. Correspondingly, Rochester’s poetry suggests that it is only by occasionally allowing our most abject physicality to derail, or even to dictate, our mental operations that we become capable of our most complex--perhaps our most truly human--thoughts.

With his book Cruelty and Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsenti- mental Eighteenth Century (Chicago 2011), Simon Dickie delivers a bracing jolt to some of our most accepted narratives about what the eighteenth century was and what it meant. The work's impact is only increased by the fact that eighteenth- century studies is a field that for the past twenty- five years has constantly questioned its own underpinnings: many of the period's most per- sistent concepts have been redefined and reexamined— in scholarship tracing the history and nature of enlightenment, of domesticity, of the public sphere, of the modern bourgeois subject, and of the role that gender, sexuality, and class have played within each of these. Yet in his bold and sensitive explora- tion of a whole swath of eighteenth- century writing that has her etofore re- mained either invisible or overlooked— a vast domain of "for gotten comic literature" ranging from joke- books, to pithy anecdotes, to detailed accounts of famous pranks, to pulpy picaresque "ramble" novels, to pocket- sized col- lections of witticisms guaranteed to spice up the reader's conversational skills— Dickie compels us to rethink the ideological touchstones by which we define the century: modernity, the middle class, the emergence of a discourse of human rights. In doing so, he forces us to revise both how we conceptual- ize the period and, just as importantly, our understanding of how the period conceptualized itself. Let us begin with a few jokes quoted in the book: A Woman prosecuted a Gentleman for Rape; upon Trial the Judge ask'd her, if she made any Resistance? I cry'd out, an't please your Lordship, said the Woman. Ay, said one of the Witnesses, but that was nine Months after. (193)

Indexing the Indecorous in the Life and Work of William HogarthThe title of Bernd W. Krysmanski's Hogarth's Hidden Parts (Georg Olms, 2010) captures at once both the book's strengths and its limitations. More nominative than predicative, the title could be imagined at the head of a list or catalogue: and indeed, it is in this book's role as a self-declared "compendium" of bawdry and blasphemy that it will prove most valuable to readers (9). The phrase "hidden parts" is similarly apt: not only does the book concern itself with the multitude of impolite themes and motifs in Hogarth's work, but these motifs are, more often than not, "hidden" within the compositions in which they play a part (half-obscured, disguised as something else, or exiled far from a picture's focal-point)- an element that renders the book particularly rewarding in many cases. The title's emphasis on "parts" (rather than wholes) likewise points to key characteristics of Krysmanski's method: for better and for worse, one effect of the volume's compendium-like quality is that it rarely seeks to engage in full-fledged "readings" of an entire composition or series. Nor does the book claim to present a unified interpretive approach: rather, it remains focused on identifying, and gathering together, a number of recurring details. Finally, the metonymy sponsoring the title's pun ("Hogarth's Hidden Parts") proves-regrettably- just as fitting: Krysmanski purports to show us not just the hidden parts of Hogarth's work, but also the hidden parts of Hogarth the man. This conflation of art and artist leads to a number of assertions that Krysmanski rightly refers to as "provocative" (8), but provocative for the wrong reasons. Unsupported speculations abound: "Could it be," Krysmanski asks (in what is merely one instance of a maddening tendency toward rhetorical questions), "that Hogarth had little pity for maltreated children or did [sic] he even derive a voyeuristic pleasure in observing acts of child abuse? . . . It may be asked if Hogarth, for all his charitable efforts, could have been among those who primarily took young children into their houses with covert intent to abuse them" (208, 220). These and a number of similar conjectures contain disturbing subject matter, of course, but the reader's distress stems less from the statements' content than from their complete lack of evidence or explanatory power. For those readers capable of overlooking this aspect, however, Krysmanski's wonderfully teeming, keen-sighted rogues' gallery will no doubt facilitate new and complex understandings of Hogarth's oeuvre. In particular, the book provides a treasure trove of raw material for scholars interested in the changing perceptions of sex, gender, and the body; the impact of urbanization, commodification, and secularization; and the intersection of high and low culture in the eighteenth century.At its best, Krysmanski's book provides a marvelously thorough registry (the book contains over three hundred illustrations) of the many instances of erotic, scatological, sadistic, irreligious, and otherwise subversive motifs in Hogarth's art. Of course, such elements will be familiar to any student of Hogarth; and much scholarship, both recent and less recent, has drawn attention to them, including work by David Bindman, Mark Hallett, Ronald Paulson, and James Grantham Turner, as well as nearly all of the essays in Bernadette Fort and Angela Rosenthal's 2001 collection, The Other Hogarth.1 However, Krysmanski's project of aggregating his motifs systematically, and of displaying them alongside other examples of the same motif (taken both from within and from outside Hogarth's own body of work)-in addition to his discovery (promised in the title) of hitherto unnoticed details-can result, at many points, in real revelations. For example, by placing "Boys Peeping at Nature" (the well-known subscription ticket for the Harlot's Progress series) alongside other images of cherubim or small children engaged in adult activities, while also juxtaposing it with other images of bodies being unveiled or uncovered (including French rococo paintings and obscene British prints), Krysmanski allows us to see more clearly what Hogarth's engraving is (and is not) doing. …

This essay examines a convergence, at the center of John Gay's 1715 play The What D'Ye Call It, between two representational paradigms. The first is that of print, and a corresponding set of values that the play seems to associate with print, including technology, commodity culture, urban bureaucracy, and the law. The second is that of embodied expression-voice and gesture- and a network of ideals that the play seems to connect with these, including candor, communality, and life lived in accordance with a "natural order" (i.e., pastoralism). As I will show in the following pages, at times this latter paradigm also entails a kind of wishful or utopian form of "performance." I argue that, by putting these two paradigms into dialogue-that is, by juxtaposing an increasingly technical, apparatus-filled mode of representation with one that is pure, unmediated, and enacted nakedly on the human frame-The What D'Ye Call It is able to reconsider the role of the theater in a world ever more dominated by the printing press and its allied cultural productions.1In its title alone The What D'Ye Call It: A Tragi-Comi-Pastoral Farce signals a self-consciousness about the problems of how to reconcile ancient modes (tragedy, comedy, pastoral) with modern ones (farce-and with just a touch, or "spice," as one character puts it, of opera). So too, the play raises questions about not just classification, but also class. For the play's play-within-a multigeneric yuletide pageant from which Gay's own play takes its name-is staged through a joint effort of landowners and laborers, as a country squire and his son (along with two of the squire's fellow justices of the peace) enlist the talents of the estate's tenants so as to impress the neighbors. Yet The What D'Ye Call It is not simply a commentary on the breakdown of classical categories in a debased eighteenth-century theater, nor does it function solely as an expose of the debauched morals of the upper classes. Rather, The What D'Ye Call It explores the fundamental representational capacities of old and new art forms, old and new media, while, simultaneously, it reminds us that questions of representation always implicate questions of power, hierarchy, and access. The play takes up this exploration at a time when such issues were coming to the forefront of cultural consciousness-as the drama was losing its centrality in popular culture and beginning to cede that position to printed literature.As I will demonstrate, Gay starts out by playing with the notion of an "opposition" between the two representational modes that he is considering; he then parallels that opposition with divisions of social class. Print thus becomes linked to the propertied characters, while an oral and corporeal pastoralism becomes linked to the disenfranchised. Gay's flirtation with such a dichotomous schema may initially lead us to think that he is portraying print as the medium that overpowers (or, historically, overpowered) traditional forms of storytelling. Ultimately, however, The What D'Ye Call It explodes this opposition (and this version of literary history) by insisting that the embodied forms of representation at the heart of its dramatic action are in fact inextricably bound up with print. In the hybrid art form that results, books figure as theatrical props: characters may hold up a text, read from it, or declare a complete lack of any literacy whatsoever, all as ways of enhancing the rhetorical effect of their plaintive speeches and melancholic poses. In this way Gay suggests that the body, as a representational form, can be just as mediated as print-and indeed, that each can mediate for the other. Gay thus implies that all representation is necessarily fraught with inherent disparities in knowledge and power, and can be used just as easily for deception as for expression. In the end, then, The What D'Ye Call It goads its audience to continue to question the systems by which we claim to know and lend order to external reality-from orality to print culture, from pastoral song to pragmatic prose, and from stage to page. …

Standard accounts of literary history posit a reorientation, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, from the play to the novel, exteriority to interiority, public to private. Scholars describe a new set of ontological priorities, privileging an intensive, focused mode of accessing information--best facilitated by a printed page--over and against a notion of the world in which reality is performatively produced and communally experienced. I would like to contest this history, and to do so by way of a rather unlikely text for the task: the epitomically "Scriblerian" comedy Three Hours After Marriage (1717), written by John Gay with collaboration from John Arbuthnot and Alexander Pope. The unlikeliness of this counterexample stems from the traditional construal of the Scriblerians (Pope, Gay, Arbuthnot, and Swift) (1) as pursuing a quintessentially print-based strategy of satire--creating typographically elaborate tomes; becoming the first writers to make a living from the print market; and chastising "bad" uses of print and encouraging others. (2) I want to demonstrate, however, that Three Hours After Marriage in fact valorizes an improvisatory and performative mode of interpreting the world in addition to a more "reading"-based mode. That is, in this play of disguises, cunning, and quick changes, "meaning" derives not only from the diligent design and decipherment of surfaces, but from dynamic processes of transformation and performativity. Yet neither is the play simply a celebration of theater over text: rather, I will argue--with reference as well to a few of Pope's so-called"minor" poems from the same period--that Three Hours ultimately privileges a (literally--as we will see) "bastardized" mode of art, combining the fixed and the metamorphic, the textual and the oral, the abstract and the embodied. In this way, Three Hours After Marriage proposes a new genre that allows for the "printification" of drama, the "performativization" of print. I. The Problematization of Genre in Three Hours After Marriage The melding of media that I am here ascribing to Three Hours After Marriage does not accord with the reigning narratives of genre history. In English Dramatic Form, Laura Brown concludes that late-seventeenth-century drama, hampered by its baggage of ideology and theatrical convention, found itself unable to address a new world-order: the Enlightenment's emerging realist epistemology, along with an increasingly democratic ethos and the capitalist values of an ever-more bourgeois and imperialist Britain, all favored the novel. (3) Significantly, these same changes could be said to have favored print as well, with its emphasis on documented, cross-indexable information, affordable popular editions, and an ever-more commercially driven market for broadsides, periodicals, and books of all kinds. J. Paul Hunter likewise emphasizes many of the same cultural shifts in his depiction of an eighteenth-century literature that "no longer ... trusted ... group reactions" one that believed that "the route to influence was a private and subjective one, to be found only in private converse between a fixed book and the response of an individual reader, deciding silently and alone." (4) All of these changes favored the page over the stage. However, Three Hours, though written long after the peak of the Restoration Theater and well into the period of the novel's "rise," (5) ultimately privileges an epistemology very different from that described by Brown and Hunter: Three Hours suggests, indeed, that we can most effectively navigate our world not only by "reading" reality, but also by staging, mimicking, and feigning it. Yet neither does the play constitute a mere throwback to the libertine performativity of the Restoration; rather, it sets out to explore the very boundaries of both print and performance. Such avant-gardism might seem unlikely given the premise of Three Hours, which seems to embody the libertine convention: two rakes attempt to sleep with the devious Susannah Townley within three hours after her marriage to the crusty Doctor Fossile, thus cuckolding him even before the union has been consummated. …

In his book Authors and Owners, Mark Rose describes the increasing tendency in the eighteenth century “to read authors’ works in the contexts of their biographies”: the literary work, “no longer simply a mirror held up to nature,” came to be seen instead as “the objectification of a writer’s self.” 1 If, however, eighteenth-century writers and readers increasingly agreed on the association between a man’s life and his writings, the age may have seen less consensus on the specific nature of that association. Samuel Johnson implicitly meditates on the question in his Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, in which he attempts to trace and articulate life and work in a dynamic or dialectic: in each preface, the biography stands apart from the consideration of the poet’s character, which in turn is set off from the discussion of the poetry itself. Yet in at least one instance, the poet Johnson was portraying had conceived of the life-and-work relationship quite differently. Alexander Pope consistently manifested an embroiled unity of self and work—a unity that he cemented all the more strongly by continually asserting it both textually and biographically. That is, the way that Pope wrote, and lived, along with his historical status as the first “professional” poet, joined forces both to compel and preclude Johnson’s analytical project. 2 In this essay, by considering Johnson’s and Pope’s competing claims about authorship, I show how Pope, in becoming the first author to make a living from his writing, was also the first to blend writing and living into an amalgam so complete as to beg for differentiation while also wholly thwarting it. In so doing, I hope to draw new implications from the phenomenon observed by Helen Deutsch when

In Alexander Pope s imitations of Horace, Pope famously uses Horace's model as a legitimation and defense of his poetic provocations. Thomas Bentley noted the strategy already in 1735, when he described Popes Sober Advice from Horace as "an admirable Expedient [...] to get upon the Back of HOR ACE, that you may abuse every body you don't like, with Impunity!"1 Popes practice of printing certain of his imitations alongside the source-text further buttressed the protective function of the original: small numerals within the text referred the reader directly from a potentially offending line to its Horatian "equivalent." But in the First Satire ofthe Second Book of Horace, the reader witnesses the legitimation not merely of themes or particular phrases, but of the satiric project itself: for the source-poem is the second of Horaces famous "defenses" of satire. Thus in this work Pope enacts a kind of double justification, legitimizing not only his particular choices of words and motifs, but also his chosen profession. Ironically, however, Popes strongest defense may emerge not from the alignment of his work with Horaces, but rather in its difference. For it is true that both poets set out to legitimize or justify their satire, and indeed to do so literally?putting versions of themselves in discussion with a legal counsel, and in dispute against the charge of libel (an actionable offense in both Pope's England and Horace's Rome). However, it is precisely in their use of the figure of the law that the two poems diverge. For Horace invokes the law as a kind of metaphor for the "laws" of genre, ultimately declaring the sovereignty of his poetry under its own, literary codes