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² Ibid., 183.

³ Ibid., 184.

⁴ Brown, John, A Dissertation on the Rise, Union, and Power, the Progressions, Separations, and Corruption, of Poetry and Music (London, 1763), 206.Google ScholarOn the interchangeability of roles, see Larue, C. Stephen, Handel and His Singers: The Creation of the Royal Academy Operas, 1720–1728 (Oxford, 1995), particularly Chapter Four, ‘Margherita Durastanti as Leading Man and Leading Woman’, 80–104.Google Scholar

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⁶ Baker, David Erskine, A Companion to the Play-House, 2 vols. (London, 1764).Google Scholar

⁷ Hurlothrumbo had an initial run of seventeen nights and a total of thirty-six performances in the 1729–30 season at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket. Avery, Emmet L. notes the unprecedented success of this work; The London Stage, 1660–1800 Part 2: 1720–1729 (Carbondale, Ill., 1960), 987, 1023–35.Google Scholar

⁸ A comment made in a letter to his wife, written around 15 May 1729, shortly after the premiere of the work. Byrom, John, Private Journal and Uterary Remains, ed. Parkinson, Richard, 2 vols. (Manchester, 1854), I.2, 355.Google Scholar

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¹¹ For ‘Hurlothrumbo’: Advertisement for Henley's oratory, The Daily Post, 29 April 1729;Google ScholarPope Alexander's Supremacy and Infallibility examin'd (London, 1729);Google ScholarHarmony in an uproar: a letter to F-d-k H-d-l, Esq … from Hurlothrumbo Johnson (London, 1733);Google ScholarThe fortune-teller (London, 1785);Google ScholarA curious letter from a mountebank doctor to a Methodist preacher (London, 1797).Google ScholarFor ‘Lord Flame’: ‘C.L.’, Letter to the Editor, The Monthly Magazine (1798), 416.Google Scholar

¹² Johnson, 's other extant published works are: The Blaming Comet (London, 1732);Google ScholarCourt and Country (London, [1737?]);Google ScholarA Vision of Heaven (London, 1738). Johnson reiterated his own high regard for his works at the end of his career, according to a posthumous memoir; ‘C.L.’, Letter to the Editor, 415–18.Google Scholar

¹³ Byrom, , Private Journal, 1.2, 355.Google Scholar

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¹⁶ Fog's Weekly Journal, 5 07 1729; see also the issues of 31 May 1729, 7 June 1729 and 5 July 1729; The Craftsman, 22 August 1730; The Daily Post, 29 April 1729.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Fiske, Roger, English Theatre Music in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1973), 146;Google ScholarKern, Jean B., Dramatic Satire in the Age of Walpole, 1720–1750 (Ames, Iowa, 1976), 117;Google ScholarWierzbicki, James Eugene, ‘Burlesque Opera in London: 1729–1737’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Cincinnati, 1979), 167.Google Scholar

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¹⁹ Recent studies of the problems of London's opera seria include Campbell, Jill, ‘ “When Men Women Turn”: Gender Reversals in Fielding's Plays’, The New Eighteenth Century, ed. Nussbaum, Felicity and Brown, Laura (New York, 1987), 62–83;Google ScholarCervantes, Xavier, ‘ ’Tuneful Monsters”: Les Castrats et le Publique Lyrique Londonien au début du XVIII^e Siècle’, Bulletin de la société d'études anglo-américaines des XVII^e et XVIII^e siècles, 39 (11, 1994), 227–54;CrossRefGoogle ScholarKowaleski-Wallace, Beth, ‘Shunning the Bearded Kiss: Castrati and the Definition of Female Sexuality’, Prose Studies, 15/2 (08, 1992), 153–70;CrossRefGoogle ScholarMcGeary, Thomas, ‘Gendering Opera: Italian Opera as the Feminine Other in Britain, 1700–1742’, Journal of Musicologkal Research, 14 (1994), 17–34;CrossRefGoogle Scholarand McGeary, , ‘ “Warbling Eunuchs”: Opera, Gender, and Sexuality on the London Stage, 1705–1742’, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theater Research, 2nd ser. 7/1 (Summer, 1992), 1–22.Google ScholarMcGeary, has also written persuasively on opera and politics; see his ‘Shaftesbury on Opera, Spectacle and Liberty’, Music & letters, 74 (1993), 530–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁰ McGeary, , ‘ “Warbling Eunuchs” ’, 1.Google Scholar

²¹ Campbell, , ‘ “When Men Women Turn” ’, 63.Google Scholar

²² The Contre Temps; or the Rival Queans (London, 1727);Google ScholarAn Epistle from S—r S—o to S—a F—a [London, 1727];Google ScholarAn Epistle from Signora F-a to a Lady [London, 1727];Google ScholarF-NAs Answer to S-NO [London, 1727].Google Scholar

²³ An Epistle from Signora F-a to a Lady, 7.Google Scholar

²⁴ F-NAs Answer to S-NO, 7.Google Scholar

²⁵ Ibid., 6.

²⁶ Onania: or, the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution, 16th edn (London, 1737), 7.Google Scholar

²⁷ See Porter, Roy, Mind-Forg'd Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency (London, 1987), for an excellent discussion of the way in which evolving medical and scientific thought accommodated itself to older concepts, like the ‘humours’.Google Scholar

²⁸ The most extended and explicit figuring of a bestial humanity in the works discussed here can be found in The Connoisseur. A Satire on the Modem Men of Taste (London, [1735]).Google ScholarGuilhamet, Leon, Satire and the Transformation of Genre (Philadelphia, 1987),CrossRefGoogle Scholarpresents a sophisticated study of the ‘monstrosity’ of satire, as do Stallybrass, Peter and White, Allon in ‘The Grotesque Body and the Smithfield Muse: Authorship in the Eighteenth Century’, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London, 1986), 80–124.Google Scholar

²⁹ The Contre Temps, 11.Google Scholar

³⁰ The Connoisseur, 18, 11.Google Scholar

³¹ The Happy Courtesan: Or, the Prude Demolish'd. An Epistle from the Celebrated Mrs C— P— to the Angelick Signior Far-n—li (London, 1735), 8, 13.Google Scholar

³² F-NAs Answer to S-NO, 8.Google Scholar

³³ The Happy Courtesan, 13.Google Scholar

³⁴ For general background see Stone, Lawrence, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (London, 1977).Google ScholarOn the political implications, see Pocock, J. G. A., The Machiavellian Moment Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, N.J., 1975), Chapters 13 and 14;Google ScholarKramnick, Isaac, Bolingbroke and his Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Cambridge, Mass., 1968);Google ScholarDickinson, H. T., Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London, 1977);Google ScholarGunn, J. A. W., Beyond Liberty and Property: The Process of Self-Recognition in Eighteenth-Century Political Thought (Kingston, 1983);Google ScholarGoldsmith, M. M., Private Vices, Public Benefits: Bernard Mandeville's Social and Political Uought (Cambridge, 1985).Google Scholar

³⁵ Kramnick, , Bolingbroke and his Circle, provides the best discussion of early eighteenth-century opposition to individualism.Google Scholar

³⁶ Dennis, John, ‘An Essay on the Operas after the Italian Manner’, in Select Works, 2 vols. (London, 1718), I, 457–62.Google Scholar

³⁷ Brown, John, An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Time (London, 1757), 67, 158.Google Scholar

³⁸ Hume, David, ‘Of Luxury’, Political Discourses (London, 1752),Google Scholarcited in Sambrook, James, The Eighteenth Century: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature, 1700–1789 (London, 1986), 106. Hume here follows a version of Bernard Mandeville's famous and highly provocative argument that any vice which kept the economy growing was good; see The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Publick Benefits (1714–29). For a summary of Mandeville, see Sambrook, 103–6.Google Scholar

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⁴⁰ Brown, , Estimate, 111–12.Google Scholar

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⁴² Barish, Jonas, The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice (Berkeley, 1981).Google ScholarRaven, James has a particularly good discussion on commerce, luxury and fashionable behaviour; Judging New Wealth: Popular Publishing and Responses to Commerce in England 1750–1800 (Oxford, 1992), 157–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴³ The Happy Courtesan, 13.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ The Prompter, 14 November 1735; Brown, Dissertation on … Music, 205; On Operas. ‘These lines were written, during the Dispute whether such Entertainments ought to be exhibited, in a time of actual Rebellion.’ [n.p., n.d. 1715?]; The Prompter, 4 December 1734.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ Woof, Lawrence, ‘Italian Opera and English Oratorio as Cultural Discourses within Eighteenth-Century English Literature, with particular reference to the Novels of Samuel Richardson and Fanny Burney’ (D.Phil, diss., Oxford University, 1994), 88.Google Scholar

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⁴⁷ [Jones, William], A Treatise on the Art of Music (Colchester, 1784), 42 – 3.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ Treitler, Leo reminds us of the link; see his Music and the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 12.Google Scholar

⁴⁹ The Woman of Taste (London, 1733), 7.Google Scholar

⁵⁰ Bardies, Roland, S/Z, trans. Miller, Richard(New York, 1974), 109–10.Google Scholar

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⁵² Johnson, Samuel, A Vision of Heaven (London, 1738), 32.Google Scholar

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⁵⁴ Hill, Aaron, The Tears of the Muses (1737), 24–5.Google Scholar

⁵⁵ ‘C.L.’, Letter to the Editor, 417–18.Google Scholar