Hey Presto!: Swift and the Quacks

Traveling "medicine shows," both ancient and modern, galvanized Jonathan Swift's imagination.

Dubbing such multifaceted vagabond entertainments his "Stage-Itinerant" or "Mountebank's Stage," Swift mimicked their argot, puffery, and slapstick in A Tale of a Tub (1704).

Hugh Ormsby-Lennon reveals how the stage-itinerant not only furnished the Tale with its irresistible model but still parades that missing link, long sought, which conjoins the dual objects of Swift's ire: "gross Corruptions in [both] Religion and Learning." From the early modern stage-itinerant, the quack doctor delivered a loquacious harangue, stuffed with magico-mysticism and pseudo-science, with high-astounding promises and boastful narcissism.

To help him peddle his nostrums, elixirs, and panaceas, he enlisted a tatterdemalion troupe: funambulists, puppeteers, snake-handlers, toad-eaters, sword-swallowers, spoon-benders, prestidigitators, a Merry Andrew.

From their stages, charlatans reviled each other and hawked their own books, almanacs, and other ephemera, providing Grub Street with its hottest titles.

Hacks practiced, quite literally, as quacks. Mountebank and Merry Andrew swapped costumes, whiskers, patter, foreign accents.

Swift apes them all in the Tale. Swift mobilizes the stage-itinerant in order to crush "gross Corruptions [in] Learning. " Documenting how early modern scholars vilified one another as mountebanks-by peppering their learned culture with invective filched from market-place harangues-Dr. Ormsby-Lennon revisits both Hans Sloane's dark archive of quacks' broadsides and J.

B. Mencken's international best-seller, De charlataneria eruditorum . . .de circumforanea literatorum vanitate (1715). To such Bakhtinian cant, Swift had early attuned his ear when attending the Tripos entertainments at Trinity College, Dublin, wherein fellow-students guyed dons as snake-oil salesmen.

Eventually, Swift preached from an oaken pulpit of his own decanal design, manhandled around St.

Patrick's Cath