Spectacular Disappearances

Front matter

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Introduction

The Celebrity Emerges as the Deformed King: Richard III, the King of the Dunces, and the Overexpression of Englishness

The Growth of Celebrity Culture: Colley Cibber, Charlotte Charke, and the Overexpression of Gender

The Canon of Print: Laurence Sterne and the Overexpression of Character

David Garrick, George Anne Bellamy, and the Paradox of the Actor

The Memoirs of Perdita and the Language of Loss: Mary Robinson’s Alternative to Overexpression

Coda: Overexpression and Its Legacy NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY

Index

173 206 215 245

Introduction

How can the modern individual maintain control over his or her self-representation when the whole world seems to be watching?

This question is a familiar one amid the early twenty-first century’s elaborate architecture of twenty-four-hour newsrooms, chat rooms, and interrogation rooms. But in the pages that follow I argue that the question first emerged in the streets and on the stages of Restoration and eighteenth-century London, a city with its own elaborate architecture of playhouses, coffeehouses, clubs, pubs, and print shops—and its own anxieties about privacy and the modern subject. It was, after all, in the years following the English Civil War that newspapers sprang up to document and to direct the daily life of urbanites, that the criminal justice system was reconceived as an institution not to punish but to monitor the nation’s subjects, and that mere actors and actresses—people with nothing to their names but the willingness to submit themselves to an ever-hungrier public gaze—began to live like kings and queens. And as this question began to circulate with more urgency, I will argue, it was England’s early celebrities—the comedian Colley Cibber; his cross-dressing daughter Charlotte Charke; the preacher-turned-novelist Laurence Sterne; the pioneering actor David Garrick; his protégée George Anne Bellamy; and the actress, poet, and royal courtesan Mary Robinson—who first proposed an answer.

The answer that they proposed and that the rest of this book will elucidate suggests a new way of approaching and understanding eighteenth-century descriptions and performances of the self—specifically, those descriptions and performances that resist the well-known narrative of how the self was made modern. These include The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, which Ian Watt famously excluded from his seminal work The Rise of the Novel (1957) by dismissing it as “not so much a novel as the parody of a novel.”' They include, also, the actor’s autobiographies (as well as the autobiographical performances surrounding them) that take the form of a novel but assume the reader’s knowledge of the stage, thereby disturbing the otherwise neat division that previous scholarship has recognized between novelistic and theatrical selves. Since Watt, much of this scholarship has been concerned with tracing the individual’s emergence as “essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities,” in C. B. Macpherson’s words*—or, in Dror Wahrman’s, with tracking precisely when and how England’s writers, readers, and spectators first began to construe and to create the modern subject in terms of “a very particular understanding of personal identity, one that presupposes an essential core of selfhood characterized by psychological depth, or interiority, which is the bedrock of unique, expressive identity.” Implicit in this definition, as Wahrman and others have pointed out, is the assumption that this “unique, expressive identity” is a consummation devoutly to be wished—a mark of modernity that, sometime between the Renaissance and Romanticism, all Britons began to strive for but only certain characters (and certain literary genres) could achieve.*

Yet it is striking how many writers during the long eighteenth century evince a deep anxiety about the vulnerability and even the dispossession facing anyone who displayed a “unique, expressive identity” to a reading or viewing public. Pamela’s epistolary self comes into being only when her defining trait—her virtue—is threatened by Mr. B’s advances; Alexander Pope’s declarations of himself as the author and the owner of his poetry betray his awareness of the price of owning up to his words and bearing the criticism that ownership entails;° Mr. Spectator introduces himself to his readers in his first issue by warning them not to inquire too much into his identity, “for the greatest Pain I can suffer, is the being talked to, and being stared at.”® Whether fictional (like Pamela), historical (like Pope) or pseudonymous (like Mr. Spectator), these characters declare the desire to be known at the same time that they betray their or their authors’ apprehensions about the loss of control over self-definition to which knowability subjects them.

The celebrities whose stories fill the chapters of this book lament this loss most keenly. Consider, for instance, the actor Colley Cibber, who rose to national prominence after his comedy Love’s Last Shift became the runaway hit of 1696. Cibber went on to publish the first secular autobiography in English, An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, in 1740—only to admit within its pages his discomfort at the attention his fame had garnered him: “Against blind Malice, and staring Inhumanity, whatever is upon the Stage, has no

Defence!” he writes. “There ... I stood helpless, and expos’d, to whatever they might please to load, or asperse me with.”’ Cibber’s complaint articulates a paradox that the other examples merely suggest: by defining himself clearly and legibly, as this new ideology of selfhood seemed to require and as his career onstage demanded, Cibber left himself “helpless, and expos’d” to his spectators’ and readers’ opinions, misinterpretations, and manipulations of the identity he had made known. This paradox suggests, contrary to the prevailing narrative of the individual’s emergence, that eighteenth-century writers, performers, and citizens had as much to gain from unmaking as they did from making the modern self.

But how might a modern self be unmade? How might an eighteenth-century man or woman perform the legibility that guaranteed his or her citizenship within the ideology of “unique, expressive identity” while shielding himself or herself from the public gaze that threatened his or her control over that identity’s expression? Though pressing for Pamela, Pope, and Mr. Spectator, such questions were even more pressing for celebrities like Cibber, whose careers demanded that they live their lives in the public eye. In this book, I chart these celebrities’ responses to such questions by exploring the unique but related strategies each developed to paralyze their publics’ attempts to decipher their private selves. By understanding why and how celebrities deployed these strategies, we can better understand not only the threats that the ideology of modern selfhood posed for those engaged in it, but also why characters who seemed to break all the rules of this ideology nonetheless enjoyed such popularity in eighteenth-century culture. And we can understand, too, the possibilities for self-representation within a modern world where someone always seems to be watching.

Though there are important differences between the self-representations I will examine here, my contention is that all have a common ancestor in a strategy of performance that I am calling overexpression. This strategy allows its practitioners at once to invite and to disrupt the public gaze, paradoxically, by enhancing or exaggerating the features through which they might be recognized and evaluated by their spectators. An overexpressive performance appears at first glance to be an unskilled or overwrought attempt at self-definition. It employs the same signifiers that eighteenth-century audiences had already begun to regard as clear indications of selfhood, as modern assumptions about disability, gender, sexuality, nationality, and identity were taking shape to sort the nation’s bodies and characters into increasingly rigid taxonomies.® Employing this established vocabulary, an overexpressive performance secures the spectator’s interest by seducing him or her into believing that the celebrity’s true identity will be legible to anyone attempting to interpret it.°

Upon closer examination, however, an overexpressive self-representation seems impossibly excessive and spectacular. It employs costumes, gestures, or vocabularies that draw attention to themselves: misspelled words or ungrammatical sentences; wigs, hats, and suits so large they seem to dwarf their wearers—or the famous black page of Tristram Shandy, which, as Thomas Keymer has written, might represent not the absence of words but an abundance of them, reproduced over and over until their meanings are no longer available to us.” As this last example suggests, the very excesses of the overexpressive performance transform it from a self-representation that invites to a self-representation that frustrates its spectators’ attempts to interpret it. These excesses work not to obscure the self, but rather to exaggerate and thus destabilize the language through which the self is thought to be revealed.

Cibber’s staging of his own celebrity and Sterne’s “caperings around” his semiautobiographical Tristram Shandy offer the most straightforward examples of overexpression, presenting subjects so comprehensively as to make them incomprehensible."' I begin with Cibber as the first celebrity to have produced his own autobiography; and I have chosen the five celebrities who follow him in this study based on the availability of their autobiographical materials, whether printed books or the printed pages of the periodicals they so carefully manipulated, and on the relationship of these autobiographical materials to each other.” Celebrities with fewer extant autobiographical materials—such as Thomas Betterton or Anne Bracegirdle—or those with a more tenuous connection to those studied here—such as the preacher and autobiographer George Whitefield—I leave to other studies.” I focus instead on the autobiographical performances of Cibber and Sterne and those who directly follow them and who, as I argue in subsequent chapters of this book, pay tribute to their earlier brand of overexpression without reproducing it exactly.

For David Garrick, this means dismantling the sentimental signs through which his audience distinguished between the sincere self and the exaggerated one, between true emotion and the actor’s performance of it. For the women of my study—Charlotte Charke, George Anne Bellamy, and Mary Robinson—adapting overexpression is even more complicated. Charke and Bellamy, I argue, attempt to adapt their male predecessors’ strategies of overexpression—dquite pointedly, in the case of Charke, who situates her 1755 autobiography as a response to her father’s. Time and again, however, their overexpressions fail to disrupt the judgments of their spectators, who read even their most exaggerated performances as earnest (if ineffective) attempts to express themselves, where these same spectators had read their male colleagues’ performances as deliberately perplexing. Mary Robinson, the final celebrity of my study, addresses this tendency by turning overexpression on its head, exaggerating not a certain aspect of her persona but rather that persona’s conspicuous absence from the poems, portraits, and performances that promise to reveal it. In this her autobiographical performances resemble less the black page of Tristram Shandy than its white page, which, like Robinson’s self-representations, invites the reader to fill in its blanks and thus transforms that reader from critic to collaborator. If we cannot read Robinson’s performances as reproductions of Cibber’s and Sterne’s overexpressive strategy, then, we might read them as responses to this strategy.

Despite their differences, all of these performances share the tendency to break—in the very same breath that they make—elaborate promises to reveal their subjects’ secrets. By describing them as part of a single narrative, I mean not to elide their particularities but rather to emphasize the ways in which they all emerge out of a single question: that is, how might a public figure protect his or her privacy? It is a question that few studies have asked, despite a growing interest in celebrity studies in recent years. The notable exceptions are Kristina Straub’s Sexual Suspects, which illuminates how the conventions and discourse of the theater conflicted with emerging ideologies of gender and sexuality, forcing celebrities into the roles of “sexual suspects”; and Catherine Gallagher’s Nobody’s Story, which explores the print strategies that women writers developed to protect their personae while selling their stories. Both works offer important insights into how the public exposure demanded of literary and theatrical careers clashed with eighteenth-century gender norms, particularly those that limited women to the private sphere. Yet by focusing their discussions on gender, these scholars do not touch on the extent to which female celebrities adopted, adapted, and responded to the strategies of their male predecessors (in Gallagher’s case) or the many aspects of identity beyond gender and sexuality that these performances explored (in Straub’s). Studying these strategies in concert with each other, while paying close attention to their particularities, allows us to understand the development of such autobiographical performances as a literary/theatrical tradition—and one that runs counter to the rise of the novel as instilling the desire for a publicly known and publicly knowable self. Like a spotlight so brilliant it is blinding—or like Tristram Shandy’s black page, so full of ink it cannot be read—the self-representations that these six celebrities developed over the course of the long eighteenth century met their public’s demands to stare while paralyzing that public’s power to interpret.

The “expression” implied by the term overexpression is a mere illusion, of course; overexpressive performers don’t reveal onstage a stable, interior self expressed from the inside out. Instead, they adopt the vocabulary that modernity has come to associate with that interior self to deploy what Felicity Nussbaum calls an “Interiority Effect”—the illusion of interiority through the clever manipulation of surfaces.* But unlike the performances that Nussbaum discusses, overexpressive performances present the illusion of interiority only to expose it as an illusion. When the spectator heeds the performer’s invitation to investigate the private self supposedly lurking beneath the public performance, overexpression prevents him or her from discovering anything but another layer of clothing, another page of preamble, another surface passing for self.

The term overexpression also evokes overwriting—a word that implies excess at the same time that it suggests erasure: to overwrite a text is to include too many details or words or obnoxiously obvious statements of argumentation, but to overwrite a file is to erase it.’° I use the term overexpression instead of overwriting, however, to emphasize that the celebrities I discuss deployed this strategy far beyond the confines of the printed page. Crucially, the autobiographical performances I examine are not limited to books; they include several forms and genres that traditional studies tend to segregate or to disregard altogether—from performances in print (playscripts, poems, portraits and novels as well as autobiographies) to printed ephemera (puffs, prologues, caricatures, and other publicity stunts) to the ephemeral performances of self staged on the streets of London before whatever impromptu audience happened to wander by. In this way they mirror and manipulate celebrity culture itself, which similarly depends upon an audience’s willingness to read across multiple forms of self-creation. The encomiums and epistles to unnamed lovers scattered throughout Mary Robinson’s poems, for instance, assume the readers’ familiarity with the roles she made famous onstage and with the part she acted in life; and David Garrick’s 1749 performance as Benedick in Much Ado about Nothing held special meaning for spectators who had read in the gossip columns of his recent marriage to the German singer Eva Marie Veigel.

When I refer to these self-stagings and life-writings as autobiographical performances, I am relying on the broadened definition of this word that performance studies has introduced: performance is not only a fiction presented on a stage but also an action executed on the street or even within the home.

I use it not as an antonym to print but rather as a term that refers to the interactions between a variety of media, as a theatrical performance consists of printed scripts and playbills, material props and costumes, and built sets and auditoriums as well as the live bodies and contingent reactions of actors and audience members. As performance studies reminds us, however, such performances are difficult to access or arrest in their own time—and even more difficult to recover three hundred years after the event. The ephemeral nature of the performances I most want to examine complicates my methodology; since I can’t hear the drawled accent that Colley Cibber adopted as the fop or witness the swagger of Laurence Sterne on his first entrance into London, I must piece together what I can from the prints, letters, reviews, playbills, puffs, autobiographies, and fictions that these performers left behind.

Though I am painfully aware of the limitations of this approach, I am also eager to resist the tendency in eighteenth-century scholarship to segregate cultural production by genre, so that those who study fiction rarely examine drama, and those who study theater and performance must apologize for their subjects in a field so dominated, in the past fifty years, by debates over the rise of the novel. Such divisions in eighteenth-century studies replicate the divisions affecting cultural studies in general, in which those who study the “live arts” in performance reject the conservatism of those who study what they describe (by implication) to be a dead or dying discipline, and those who describe themselves as literary historians reject what they see as the ahistoricism of performance studies. This segregation seems especially limited within eighteenth-century studies since it diverges from how people experienced the era, often spending their mornings reading letters and novels only to find themselves at the theater by the late afternoon. Recently, several scholars (including Joseph Roach, Felicity Nussbaum, Stuart Sherman, Emily Hodgson Anderson, and Misty Anderson) have demonstrated the important insights we might gain when we study eighteenth-century theater in dialogue with other forms. In following their examples, I share Peggy Phelan’s belief: “If we lose the intimacy of the connection between literature and performance, we diminish something vital in and between them.”””

In addition to an exploration of the paradox of modern selfhood, this study is also an attempt to answer Phelan’s plea that we resuture the connections between literature and performance, despite the methodological difficulties of doing so. By combining the close-reading methods at the heart of literary studies and theater history with performance theory’s attention to the contingencies of the live event, I hope to explain how these six eighteenth-century celebrities used their spectacular performances and their overwritten pages to evade their spectators’ attempts to interpret them— and, moreover, why they should want to. For although the vulnerability of the expressed identity was a problem shared by many of England’s citizens in the eighteenth century, it was a problem identified most articulately by England’s celebrities. I want to take a moment to discuss the characteristics and context that make the celebrities of the long eighteenth century such unique and useful case studies for understanding this paradox of modern selfhood, before turning to a passage from Cibber’s Apology that deftly articulates the strategy I am calling overexpression and that will guide our explorations of autobiographical performance throughout this book.

THE RISE OF THE CELEBRITY IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND

Several related cultural trends emerged in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to produce the problems that overexpression attempted to solve for the modern celebrity. These include the rise of a celebrity industry, based around the creation, publicization, and consumption of a few “abnormally interesting people”;’* the reorientation of social and political authority around a public sphere; and the emergence of a professional class of literary and theatrical critics increasingly influential over how actors and authors regarded and practiced their craft.

Though scholars disagree about who might be crowned the first modern celebrity, few have disputed Leo Braudy’s claim that “the roots of the urge to find the place of fame were particularly fertilized in the eighteenth century.” Early modern English speakers had long been familiar with “fame” as “reputation”—the gossip, good or ill, that spreads by word of mouth—or as “renown”—the deserved merit that immortalizes the writers of great poems or the doers of great deeds.” But starting at the end of the seventeenth century the language began to register a new sort of fame—a flash-in-the-pan phenomenon that recognized individuals not for what they had done but simply for who they were (or for what they represented) and that transformed ordinary men and women into media sensations. This new fame was not, as Alexander Pope notes in his allegorical poem The Temple of Fame (1715), a lasting merit enjoyed by “fabled Chiefs in darker Ages born, / Or Worthys old, whom Arms or Arts adorn”; it was instead a “doubtful Fame ... Which o’er each Object casting various Dies, / Enlarges some, and others multiplies.”**

The fact that Pope adapted his eighteenth-century Temple of Fame from

Geoffrey Chaucer’s fourteenth-century House of Fame might make us suspicious of his suggestion that this “doubtful Fame” was an entirely new phenomenon. Nonetheless, new technologies of communication and new ideologies of self-creation were changing the way Britons discussed and circulated celebrity, if not how they conceived of it. Stella Tillyard has identified three factors that made the celebrity that arose in Pope’s day qualitatively different from that which existed before the Restoration: “a limited monarchy, the lapse in 1695 of the Licensing Act which had controlled the numbers of printing presses and to some extent printing, and a public interested in new ways of thinking about other people and themselves.””

Previous studies have already examined how the second of these three factors—the lapse of the Licensing Act—led to an explosion in the number of printing presses and facilitated a dramatic increase not only of periodicals like The Tatler and The Spectator, but also of gossip columns, scandal sheets, and broadsides. These latter publications worked to disseminate both news and rumors about celebrities’ adventures, along with images of those celebrities, far beyond the relatively small circle of Londoners who had seen those celebrities in the flesh. At the same time, they whetted the public’s appetite for “secret histories, which told scandalous stories of immorality at court and in other high places” as well as “biographies of notorious and famous individuals.”** These biographies and secret histories contributed to the trend to which I have already alluded—and with which scholars of eighteenth-century culture will be quite familiar—that established the private, interior self both as the basis of citizenship and also as a topic of increasing fascination to biographers, spectators, and gossips alike. “The notion of fixed character that could be written as a literary construct and then used in a plot [was] becoming commonplace,” Tillyard explains. “Celebrity was born,” in other words, “at the moment private life became a tradable public commodity.”™

This public interest in private life arose in part to compensate for the third factor that Tillyard attributes to the growth of celebrity at the turn into the eighteenth century: an increasingly “limited monarchy” that failed to satisfy the public desire for spectacular display. The fascination that Britons had once shown for a few “spectacular politicians” and “public representatives,” who had cemented their authority by performing it in great pageants of wealth and power, was declining with the ceding of monarchical power to parliamentary control and the ceding of the church’s influence to that of the state.” This decline didn’t curb Britons’ enthusiasm for spectacles of glitz and glamour, however. Instead, actors, actresses, rogues, and socialites arose from relatively humble origins, according to sociologist Chris Rojek, “to fill the absence created by the decay in the popular belief in the divine right of kings, and the death of God.”

What Pope denigrates as “doubtful Fame,” then, most recent scholars have celebrated as fame’s democratization. Men and women no longer had to commit “heroic actions” or prove their belonging within “a noble or royal class in which such regard naturally accompanies station,” as Cheryl Wanko points out, in order to earn the “roles of authority” that fame offered them.” They could become celebrities simply by being themselves—or, rather, by being the selves that popular gossip and publicity periodicals had created for them and would keep alive as long as they continued to sell papers. Their development helps to explain why, despite Cibber’s complaints at being “helpless, and expos’d” to his public’s interpretations of his private life, he should nonetheless publicize that life in a lengthy autobiography—or why, despite the vulnerabilities famous figures must suffer, none of the celebrities I examine here elected simply to cover up or hide out until their public’s attention strayed elsewhere. To eschew such attention because of the loss of self-possession it entailed was to eschew also the lifestyle on which they had come to depend. To embrace it was to enjoy a power and a status that would have been inconceivable to lower- or middle-class men and women only a generation before.

At the same time, Pope’s description of this new fame as “doubtful” suggests that celebrities didn’t simply usurp the places once held by kings and gods, as several recent studies of celebrity have implied. In their focus on the new power that the commodification of private life allowed the modern celebrity, works such as Nussbaum’s Rival Queens or Cheryl Wanko’s Roles of Authority have paid less attention to the violations and humiliations to which the star who sells himself or herself on the open market is so often prone. Yet throughout their autobiographies and performances, eighteenth-century celebrities from Cibber to Robinson repeatedly express anxieties about publicity that stem from (and might be read against) ideologies of the modern subject more generally.

Jiirgen Habermas has theorized these ideologies as arising from the separation of society into public and private spheres.” In order to be recognized as a legal subject, as I noted earlier, the early modern Briton had to demonstrate his or her plausibility as a coherent subject—as a possessive individual whose word could be depended upon and whose character could be known. But in order to participate in the sphere of public opinion that controlled the invisible hand of commerce, the artistic leanings of a growing popular culture, and the political decisions of an increasingly republican state, Habermas contends, the eighteenth-century Briton also had to demonstrate his or her plausibility as a rational subject—one informed but not blinded by his or her private experience. And in order to demonstrate such rationality one had to divest oneself of the obvious markings of particularized identity and blend in to the crowd. One had to appear, in Michael McKeon’s recent reformulation of Habermas’s ideas, “disembodiled]” and “depersonaliz[ed].””°

McKeon’s words hint at the ways that the public sphere might be seen to exclude celebrities, who make their names displaying their bodies and marketing their personalities for public consumption. If all the world’s a stage, those who rule it aren’t the players. Instead, political power, social status, and even cultural capital belong to the spectators who watch, interpret, and critique from the pit, only to blend back into the crowd before their own performances can be seen, interpreted, or critiqued. (Consider Pope’s denigration of the celebrity’s “doubtful” and undeserved fame as opposed to the fame of the truly virtuous, who “Would die unheard of, as [they] liv’d unseen.”)*°

The representative of these spectators, for Habermas as well as for the celebrities that interest me, is Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s enormously popular creation and arbiter of English taste, Mr. Spectator. As Habermas and others have pointed out, Mr. Spectator guarantees his authority as the unobserved observer of London society by insisting on his anonymity, pointedly refusing to reveal “an Account of my Name, my Age, and my Lodgings” in his first issue.” Scott Paul Gordon argues that “it is only by emptying himself out, becoming passionless, friendless, and, above all, formless, that Mr. Spectator can subject readers to constant surveillance.” In this way, Mr. Spectator’s printed and disembodied persona serves as antonym and antidote to the eighteenth-century celebrity’s theatrical and personality-driven presence, and it is striking how often his image (or lack of an image) haunts eighteenth-century celebrities’ self-representations as an ideal valuable to pursue but impossible to attain. The “disinterestedness” that makes Mr. Spectator such an exemplary representative of the public sphere depends on his refusal to locate himself in a particular place or to inhabit a particular body—his refusal, in other words, to appear as a performer rather than to circulate as a printed text. “To be seen” in eighteenth-century society, as Gordon explains, “is to be vulnerable, to be positioned in another’s field of vision and to be enlisted in another’s plot.”

Mr. Spectator’s example suggests that what was at stake for these celebrities was more than just the indulgence of vanity or the ability to walk through the streets of London without being accosted by adoring fans. It was, on the one hand, access to the fortune and social status that their publicity allowed them; and, on the other, access to the political, social, and literary authority reserved for those who made their private lives impregnable. In short, it was their right to define themselves rather than being “enlisted in another’s plot.”

Such stakes become viscerally and viciously clear when we consider an amazing but not atypical artifact from eighteenth-century celebrity culture: Benjamin Victor’s 1733 biography of Colley Cibber’s friend, fellow actor, and longtime managing partner at Drury Lane theater, Barton Booth. Victor’s volume provides a fascinating insight not only into celebrity culture but also into eighteenth-century assumptions about literary and theatrical criticism—and, indeed, it might stand alone as the impetus for overexpression in Cibber’s self-performances. Not content simply to strip Booth down to his street clothes or even to his underclothes within the pages of his biography, Victor includes in his text a copy of Booth’s autopsy report. Literalizing the eighteenth-century spectator’s desire to glimpse the celebrity’s interior self, the report details how, upon his death, Booth’s “Rectum, with the other Intestines, were ript up with a Pair of Scissars, in which was found very little Excrement, but the whole Tract on the inside, lin’d with Crude Mercury divided in Globules, about the Bigness of Pins Heads.”™ (The biography continues in this vein for several pages.)

The posthumous airing of Booth’s interior self might seem an extreme example of the sorts of revelations compelled by the emerging cult of celebrity, but it was not uncommon to find autopsy reports among the pages of the era’s most popular celebrity biographies. Arthur Murphy’s 1801 biography of David Garrick concludes with the actor’s autopsy report—a fact that Garrick seemed to have anticipated when, in a 1769 letter, he praised his friend Sturz’s critique of French actress Madame Clairon’s performance as “your desection of her, ... as accurate as if you had opened her alive.”* Sterne alludes to such practices in Tristram Shandy when he declaims against those writers “who will draw a man’s character from no other helps in the world, but merely from his evacuations.”** Both statements draw an implicit comparison between the job of the coroner and the job of the theater critic—a job that, like that of the celebrity, was a relatively new one in eighteenth-century England.” In an era when every pit seemed suddenly filled with professional hecklers, every newspaper overcrowded with theater reviews, and every review littered with bits of gossip dissecting players’ private lives and social performances, everyone who appeared upon a stage or published himself in print exposed himself to the scrutiny and the censure of such reviewers.