SOURCE: “Men from Boys: Cibber, Pope, and the Schoolboy,” in Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Vol. 32, No. 3, Autumn 1991, pp. 219-39.

[In this essay, Straub examines the eighteenth-century practice of gendering literary authority as masculine and in that context focuses on Cibber's unusual use of the sexually ambiguous figure of the schoolboy to construct an alternative model of authority.]

The trope of the schoolboy threads through a range of eighteenth-century discourses, connoting a subjected position in a homosocial, sometimes homoerotic economy of power. The spectacle of the schoolboy's bent knees or his bared ass before the corrective birch comprises a semiotic terrain upon which are continually being inscribed masculinities defined in power-relation to each other. As Foucault comments, “the sex of the schoolboy became in the course of the eighteenth century—and quite apart from that of adolescents in general—a public problem. … Around the schoolboy and his sex there proliferated a whole literature of precepts, opinions, observations, medical advice, clinical cases, outlines for reform, and plans for ideal institutions.”¹ The need for such containment may arise from the schoolboy's ambiguous position. He is not a man and therefore is subjected to the domination of men. On the other hand, he presumably will be a man and is, furthermore, engaged in the educational process that is the conduit to masculine authority, particularly literary authority, in the eighteenth century. His very figure connotes masculinity as contingent and relational, however achievable, and it is not surprising to see him crop up in ad hominem arguments over questions of literary authority.

I chose to write about this trope as it is used by two famous adversaries in eighteenth-century print wars—Colley Cibber and Alexander Pope—because it helps to disclose a process by which literary authority is constructed in relation to gender and sexual identity. Historians of sexuality as diverse as Thomas Laqueur and Lawrence Stone position the eighteenth-century as a transitional period in the social construction of gender from a hierarchical structure of difference to one of opposition and “commensurability.”² As Nancy Armstrong has argued, over the course of the century masculinity becomes increasingly dependent on its oppositionality to femininity as that oppositionality is, in turn, produced by the ideology of separate and opposing gendered “spheres.”³ And as gay historians such as John D'Emilio and Randolph Trumbach point out, the definition of masculinity within this oppositional system of gender was itself undergoing an exclusionary process of narrowing down the kinds of gendered identities and sexual behaviors permissible within its bounds.⁴ Concurrent with these changes in sex/gender systems, the public image of English literary authority, according to Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, was under revision from a figure associated with the fair and carnivalesque to the more remote and dignified figure of the Author.⁵ The figure of the schoolboy in the discursive rivalry between Cibber and Pope reveals the incompleteness, during the first half of the eighteenth century, of all three historical processes. Both Cibber and Pope sought to establish their respective versions of literary authority through, among other means, the use of this trope. Whereas Cibber identifies himself with the schoolboy, Pope excludes the schoolboy from his construction of what that authority should be. This difference is all too facilely explicable in our modern terms of literary “greatness” versus “minor” authorship: Cibber is a boy to be separated out from the privileged group of literary men to which Pope belongs in the modern canon. Placed in the context of a just-emerging eighteenth-century definition of masculinity as exclusionary of “deviate” sexualities and gender characteristics, the difference in Cibber's and Pope's uses of this trope suggests a historically specific struggle over how literary authority is to be staged in the shifting terms of gender and normative sexuality.

The schoolboy came to Pope and Cibber ready-made as a locus for sexual ambiguity, a disturbing third term against the neat binarism of men and boys. While the schoolboy represents the promise of the educated, civilized man and the concurrent erasure of sexual ambiguity, he also represents the possible sexual victim to the predatory older male. In his vulnerability and feminization, the schoolboy suggests even more intolerable possibilities for male sexual identity than the sinister sodomite, who, however mythically horrible to the popular imagination, could function handily as a scapegoat. As Michael Rey reports of sodomy in eighteenth-century Paris, “it was much more difficult to accept being sodomized” than to assume the role of sodomizer.⁶ Most of the relatively few cases of male/male sodomy brought to trial in Renaissance and seventeenth-century England (in which another crime was not at issue) came to light, Alan Bray suggests, through the outcry of a resistant or at least passive object of another male's more-or-less forcible advances.⁷ As Trumbach has recently argued, the image of the feminized male is central to homophobic responses to male sexual behavior;⁸ the male who is cast in the role of woman disturbs the illusion of a stable and natural dominant—that is, dominating—masculinity.

The schoolboy is directly associated with a feminized social role in popular assumptions about the prevalence of homosexual contacts between teachers and students. Bray documents the institutionalization of male homosexuality in English universities, grammar schools, and village schools, and while legal prosecution of masters was rare—the cases of Nicholas Udall in 1541 and one “Mr. Cook” in 1594 being exceptions to the rule of legal silence—representations of schoolboys often cast them as their masters sexual victims:

How many towardly young gentlemen
(Instead of ink, with tears I fill my pen
To write it) sent unto thee by their friends
For art and education, the true ends
Their parents aim at, are with this infection
Poisoned by them whose best protection
Should keep them from all sin! Alack the while
Each pedant tutor should his pupil spoil!

(Bray 51)

Pederasty in the schools is also frequently traced, in anti-Catholic propaganda, to the influence of the Catholic seminaries, established abroad due to the legal persecution of priests. John Marston writes,

Hence, hence, ye falsed, seeming patriots.
Return not with pretence of salving spots,
When here ye soil us with impurity
And monstrous filth of Douai seminary.
What though Iberia yield you liberty
To snort in source of Sodom villainy?
What though the blooms of young nobility,
Committed to your Rodon's custody,
Yee Nero-like abuse? Yet near approach
Your new St. Omer's lewdness here to broach,
Tainting our towns and hopeful academies
With your lust-baiting most abhorred means …
Had I some snout-fair brats, they should endure
The new found Castilian calenture
Before pedant-tutor in his bed
Should use my fry like Phrygian Ganymede.

(Bray 52)

J. P. Kenyon argues that Titus Oates's sexual predations at St. Omer's had become a part of popular memory by the turn of the century, as his homosexuality certainly did.⁹ Tom Brown has Oates promising to hang a picture of “the Destruction of Sodom” in his bedroom on the eve of his wedding, and Oates, that “Odd Amphibious Animal,” is popularly depicted holding a flail, perhaps reminiscent of a souvenir taken by Oates during a raid on a Catholic women's boarding school. The story goes like this in the account of a contemporary: Oates finds “a Discipline, which they had formerly taken among the spoils of some Popish Houses: and which Oates had a long time carried in his pocket. With this infallible demonstration of a Monastery they returned: Which relic Oates kept afterwards in his pocket still, and I have seen him flang his menial Ganymedes with it.”¹⁰ Oates's proclivities must have afforded some grim amusement to persecuted Catholics, who, as we shall see, were commonly associated with sodomy, but in any case they sustain, into Pope's and Cibber's era, the cultural assumption of the schoolboy's vulnerability (as well as the master's or older student's abuse of power).

Oates's flail points to a less direct means by which the schoolboy was associated with a feminized sexual role: whipping had taken on sexual associations by the beginning of the eighteenth century. Whipping was a widely recognized and accepted part of being at school, but it seems to have been a subject of some ambiguity itself. On the one hand, it reinforced discipline and hierarchy in the educational system. Pope's “gay embroider'd race” is “sacred from the rod” and, hence, of the chaotic tribe of dullness. On the other hand, contemporary writers worry that whipping may give a pleasure to the beaten or beater, the student or the master, that certainly has sexual overtones. Shadwell's Snarl explains his attraction to flagellation as the legacy of his schooling: “I was so us'd to't at Westminster School I could never leave it off since.”¹¹ A 1697 broadside focuses explicitly on the perverse erotic possibilities of flogging “Boys Arses.”¹² Even when the issue of sexual perversion does not explicitly arise, the whipped schoolboy is often a locus of social and moral ambiguity. One problem implicit in whipping was the degradation of the boy who might be rendered, according to Locke, morally and socially less human—hence, by gender definition, less ideally masculine—by the discipline.¹³ The schoolboy was, then, an image embued with sexual and social ambiguity, the focus of concerns about the uses and abuses of authority. Steele casts these concerns into a pathetic mode: “no Man has passed through this Way of Education, but must have seen an ingenuous Creature expiring from Shame, and silent Tears throw up its honest Eyes, and kneel on its tender Knees to an inexorable Blockhead.”¹⁴

Cibber probably came by his use of this trope through its strong associations with his profession. The representation of actors in popular discourse implicitly and explicitly evokes the trope of the schoolboy in relation to the socially marginalized position of actors in eighteenth-century culture.¹⁵ The frequency of the association between actors and schoolboys was probably facilitated by the physical and psychological treatment of actors as the public's humble “servants.” The infamous command that actors literally kneel and submit to the will of their audiences placed the actor in a posture evocative of the “tender Knees” and bared bum of the schoolboy submitting to a whipping. Despite the fact that actors often fought back, the rakes and bucks of the audience seem to have assumed their right to beat actors who defied their will on and off the stage. In a case important to the legal rights of players, Charles Macklin brought suit against individual audience members who attempted to have him barred from acting. Lord Mansfield, in ruling for Macklin, reveals the casualness with which the right to beat players was assumed: “if they had only whipt him a little, and mortified him, it would not have been so much; but when it is carried so far as to advise the Managers to discharge him, and take his bread from him, it is then carried too far.”¹⁶ Some actors are treated like unruly children who, like the schoolboy, can only be controlled by whipping. Davies reports that Will Pinkethman “consented” to “receive, on his back, three smart strokes of Bob Wilks's cane” whenever he digressed from the script (a common occurrence for Pinkethman).¹⁷ Not surprisingly, whippings are often figuratively a part of actors' representations. Paternalistic whippings were commonly images by which actors showed their professional submission to audiences. An epilogue by Aaron Hill formulates this relation:

Pit, and fond parents, when they act severely,
Tell child, they whip it—'cause they love it dearly.
Well! Heav'n be prais'd, we've proofs of your
          affection;
Lord, how you love! If we may trust correction.(18)

When Garrick returned after taking a leave from acting to travel and recuperate his health and spirits, he uses the figure of the schoolboy to charm his way back into his audience's favour:

I, like a boy who long had truant play'd,
No lesson got, no exercises made,
On bloody Monday takes his fatal stand,
And often eyes the birchen-scepter'd hand.(19)

The image of the schoolboy also crops up in theatrical quarrels as a favorite “put-down” to a male opponent. The contrast between Garrick's immense power in the London theater and his diminuative stature seems to have provoked attempts to render him even smaller, infantilized. James Quinn once cracked that Garrick “might possibly act Master Jacky Brute, but that it was impossible he should ever be Sir John Brute” (Dramatic Miscellanies II:428). A Letter to Mr. G———K (1749) casts Garrick and his partner James Lacy in the role of schoolboys: “Then, since I am oblig'd to leave this Crime uncorrected, not being able to know the Offender, (for, like School-Boys, I suppose you will lay it upon one another, and cry, It was not me, Sir, it was Johnny: and Johnny will reply, It was not I, it was Davy) … really you have been a notorious Youth.”²⁰ Theophilus Cibber throws the schoolboy figure at Thomas Sheridan during their quarrels in the Dublin press. Cibber tells Sheridan to “go to School again; learn to make Themes, and to mend your Manners”; he also calls Sheridan “child,” “youth,” and says that a “School-boy would act with more Discretion.”²¹ Critics and satirists of actors were quick to use the schoolboy in their attacks. Mimicking Colley Cibber's schoolboy memories in the Apology, James Ralph and Henry Fielding have Theophilus Cibber tell degrading tales of his own schooldays, often culminating in a whipping.²²

Power is, of course, an issue in the use of this trope, and it plays itself out on two different but related grounds: sex and language. In The Egoist, “Frankly” asks Colley Cibber, in relation to Pope's characterization of Cibber having his whore at “four-score,” if “a Boy of Seventy odd” is not “a very odd thing.”²³ The actor's infantilization reads as an inappropriate sexuality, either of impotence or excess. The schoolboy trope also expresses the actor's inadequacy in the field of language. Fielding's The Tryal of Colley Cibber, Comedian foregrounds the issue of power over language implicit in the trope. Hercules Vinegar complains of Cibber's misuse of the word “adept”: “This Spirit of absolute Power is generally whipt out of Boys at School, and I could heartily wish our Adept had been in the Way of such Castigation.”²⁴ Power over sexuality and language is, I would argue, the primary issue in the quarrel between Cibber and Pope. What is the nature of literary authority's power? And how is its power reflected in the terms of gender and sex? The trope of the schoolboy figures in both Pope's and Cibber's implicit answers to these questions.

The Letter to Mr. Pope works, as I have argued elsewhere, to denigrate Pope's literary powers by associating them with and then demeaning his sexual powers.²⁵ Pope is the oversexed but impotent “Tom Tit” who makes a spectacle out of both his sexuality and his literary prowess. Cibber, as in his Apology, openly displays his faults—his “whore” and his “blunt” language—as part of his authoritative, even paternal relationship to the reckless young Pope. Another Occasional Letter from Mr. Cibber to Mr. Pope (1744) focuses even more virulently on constructing a sexual contrast between Cibber and Pope. Cibber begins this attack on Pope willing to “come to a Trial of Manhood with you”²⁶; the sexual rivalry implicit in the first Letter emerges even more blatently in the later pamphlet. Cibber carries out his strategy of sexual comparison by a metaphoric hierarchy. Pope is a “cursed Cat in a Kennel” while Cibber is “old Towser the House-Dog”; Pope is, again a “Tom-Tit,” a diminutive, over-sexed spider “crawling on the Bosom of thy deer Damsel” and saved by a colossally larger Cibber “with a Finger and a Thumb” (Another Occasional Letter 52-53). Cibber also uses body parts metonymically to construct his masculinity as dominant over Pope's. Like old Towser, Cibber will “merrily lift up my Leg to have a little more Game” with the helpless Pope, whose sexuality is, despite his abortive attempt on a whore, focused on the ass rather than the penis. Cibber homes in on the scatological details of the Dunciad to characterize his enemy; he asks Pope “If, therefore, you think you have a Right to lay your satyrical Tail at my Door, whenever your Muse has a Looseness, have not I an equal Right to rub your Nose in it?” (Another Occasional Letter 16). Cibber proceeds to do just as he threatens. If Pope, he says, won't clean up his language, Cibber “e'en clap the whole Close-stool, you have filled, upon your own Head” (Another Occasional Letter 17). He implies that Pope is obsessed with excrement out of his inability to perform sexually. In response to Pope's crack about Cibber's alleged octogenarian sex life, Cibber replies that “Even thou thyself, my little Tom-Tit, I suspect would'st be glad of the same Reproof, with the Power of deserving it … this raking into a Man's private Sins, to prove him a Dunce, is but much about the Sagacity of peering into his Close-stool, to prove him a Glutton” (Another Occasional Letter 51). Like the “sodomite,” who dives “in Excrements” rather than in the “proper” place, Pope focuses more on the work of the ass than the work of the penis, and the former defines him sexually and literarily: “Now he has shewn the bare A-se of his Wit with a Vengeance” (Another Occasional Letter 30).

Cibber also bares Pope's ass as a “Truant School-Boy, that deserves as severe a Whipping for the Confident Excuse he makes for his Fault, as for the Fault itself” (Another Occasional Letter 38); Pope, in Cibber's text, is a child, needing the correction which Cibber enthusiastically gives (Another Occasional Letter 54). The school-boy version of Pope constructed by Cibber is presented as abject, obscene rather than erotic. A homophobic subcurrent runs through Pope's obsession with excremental functions, his bared ass, and his school-boy-like position of reluctant submission to Cibber's “rod,” underscoring the school boy's association, already circulating in that image's connotative cultural uses, with “perverse” sexuality. Ironically, the school boy of Cibber's attack on Pope mirrors its homophobic counterpart in the Dunciad. As we shall see, Cibber's application of the school-boy trope in his self-characterization takes a significantly different form, far more ambiguous, playful, and more homoerotic than abject. Used against Pope, Cibber's school boy takes on the homophobia that Pope himself participates in and helps to construct as a part of English literary tradition.

Feminist readings of Pope have usually focused on his construction of women as the key to analyzing and critiquing his gender ideology. As Ellen Pollak points out, Pope's portraits of women tell us more about how masculinity is constructed than about how femininity is experienced: “Having no meaning in herself, woman here is at best a part and counterpart of man, whom she at the same time mirrors and completes.”²⁷ I would argue that while Pope's representations of women are crucial indicators of Pope's attitudes towards masculinity, much could also be learned about his construction of masculinity from those less-than-flattering representations of masculine sexuality that people his satires. What Pope excludes from a masculine or human ideal can tell us a lot about the ideological and psychological work involved in defining what is “manly.” While Cibber was faced with the gender ambiguities attendant upon his profession, Pope also found himself in a not-always-comfortable relation to sexual ambiguities implicit in his marginalized religion and ailing body. Pope's difficulty in meeting the physical requirements of the emergent form of dominant masculinity is a commonplace in Pope criticism and biography; the “little Alexander the women laugh at” certainly had reason to confront—and to seek to resolve—the problem of not fitting dominant definitions of maleness. The matter of Pope's religion has been foregrounded as a factor in Pope's social and political marginalization in Maynard Mack's biography,²⁸ and I will go on to argue that Pope's Catholicism contributed to associating the poet with suspect forms of male sexuality not within the pale of dominant heterosexuality. The links between homophobia and bigotry on the grounds of religion or nationality are, as Simon Watney points out, traditionally strong in the history of British nationalism.²⁹ Anti-Catholicism and homophobia are, indeed, often fused in seventeenth and eighteenth-century rhetoric and ideology.

First, as Mack suggests, Catholicism excluded Pope from many of the possibilities for public action available to eighteenth-century males of his class, placing him outside dominant, nonsexual, male gender roles. Macaulay's description of the English Catholic gentleman is laughable when applied to Pope's busy and, in many respects, quite public life, but it vividly suggests the inertia implicit in many contemporary descriptions of the Catholic male role: “The disabilities under which he lay had prevented his mind from expanding to the standard, moderate as that standard was, which the mind of the Protestant country gentleman then ordinarily attained. Excluded, when a boy, from Eton and Winchester, when a youth, from Oxford and Cambridge, when a man, from Parliament or the bench of justice, he generally vegetated as quietly as the elms of the avenue that led to his ancestral grange.”³⁰ Halifax, in his 1700 Miscellanies, confirms that the “Laws have made them [Catholic gentlemen] Men of Pleasure, by excluding them from Publick Business.”³¹ Closer to home, as it were, Halifax also sees the Catholic gentleman as disadvantaged within his home. Halifax's “Character of a Trimmer” is designed to illustrate the alleged disadvantages of Catholicism and to argue for tolerance on the grounds that, left alone, Catholics will smarten up and convert. It is, of course, just a drop in the sea of eighteenth-century English anti-Catholic propaganda and a relatively mild one at that; for our purposes, it expresses one way in which Catholic men were viewed by English society: as not fully in control as fathers and husbands. The Catholic head of his family will, Halifax says, “reflect what an Incumbrance it is to have his House a Pasture for hungry Priests to graze in, which have such a never-failing Influence upon the Foolish, which is the greatest part of every Man's Family, that a Man's Dominion, even over his own Children, is mangled, and divided, if not totally undermin'd by them.”³²

Patriarchal masculinity is undermined by the institution of priests, a class of men themselves highly suspect for their sexuality, as John Miller notes: “Clerical celibacy and monasticism were at best unnatural and at worst hid rampant sexuality and nameless vices behind a facade of chastity.”³³ The image of the Catholic layman in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, ruled even in his domestic castle by priests infamous for the “vice which cannot be named,” militated against his access to dominant masculine sexual identities. Further blocking him from “real man” status, as Alan Bray points out, is a whole history of anti-Catholic propaganda, the pervasive Renaissance mythic association of “Papism” and “sodomy”: “the figure of the Papist, follower of Antichrist, servant of the terrible King of Spain, and, as the propagandists of the Reformation added, sodomite.” As Bray documents, Catholicism in the English Renaissance was viewed in a mythic schema linking heresy, treason, sorcery, and sodomy in an unholy league: “Was not the Papacy itself a ‘second Sodom,’ ‘new Sodom,’ ‘Sodom Fair,’ nothing but ‘a cistern full of sodomy’? With such propaganda—and it becomes wearisomely familiar—the Protestant party was doing no more than adapting to its own use the identification of religious deviation with sexual deviation” (19). While the actual activity of sodomy, hetero- or homo-, was itself rarely detected and punished, it functioned mythically and imaginatively as the ultimate label of evil, a label commonly applied to Renaissance Catholics. Catholics were not, of course, the only ones so labeled; as Bray suggests, sexual and religious deviation were linked from many different religious perspectives and the charge could shift with those perspectives. During the frenzy of the Popish Plot, the charge of sodomy was commonly tagged on to charges of treason and other more serious crimes allegedly committed by both the supposed plotters and the plot's alleged detectors³⁴—including the infamous Titus Oates, whose taste for boys made the charge appropriate in at least one case.³⁵ But it had come to function as a sort of pre-fabricated association with a range of allegedly anti-social roles, and the frequency with which it was linked to Catholicism suggests the vulnerability of Catholic men to exclusion from dominant sexual identities.

Hence, whatever Cibber's and Pope's respective individual self-images, both were, for different reasons, culturally positioned as at least somewhat sexually ambiguous, and both developed strategies for coping rhetorically with that ambiguity. The trope of the schoolboy, with its historical associations with abject and/or subjected masculinity as well as with the question of linguistic as well as physical mastery, provides an obvious point at which to begin understanding their respective strategies. Whereas Cibber uses the trope with the full force of its sense of abject masculinity in Another Occasional Letter, he also, as we shall see, identifies himself in the Apology with a version of the schoolboy that is far more ambiguously and far less abjectly homoerotic. Pope's Dunciad positions the schoolboy as unambiguously other to his own “manly” self-representations. Cibber's schoolboy persona functions in relation to ideologies of sexual identity and literary authority as a sort of door that swings both ways. On the one hand, he opens into a rigidly binary system of heterosexual roles that grounds literary authority and sexual dominance in an oppositional, binary structure of gender difference. On the other hand, he also opens into a sexual fluidity that threatens binary gender roles and places literary authority on ambiguous ground. Without being subversive himself, Cibber perpetuates uncertainities about the dominant versions of sexual identity and literary authority that are emergent in the eighteenth century. His schoolboy suggests a fluidity and liminality still barely possible amidst the growth of a new ideology of authority and masculinity. Pope's use of the schoolboy trope is more of a slamming than a swinging door. Confronted with his own problems of sexual ambiguity and literary authority, Pope associates verbal with sexual deviation, and firmly positions both outside newly dominant definitions of masculinity and literary authority.

An identification with schoolboys obviously carried certain threats to the self-image of the slight, youthful author of An Essay Upon Criticism. But the young Pope was, while aware of this vulnerability, capable of self-irony on the subjects of his precocious youth and diminutive size. He writes in his Guardian report on the Club of Little Men, that “At our first Resort hither an old Woman brought her Son to the Club Room, desiring he might be Educated in this School because she saw here were finer Boys than ordinary.”³⁶ One wonders, however, if the mistake of the “old Woman” might not have been a snide glance at John Dennis who, in “Reflections Critical and Satyrical, Upon a Late Rhapsody, Call'd An Essay Upon Criticism” (1711), refers to Pope as “under the Rod,” a “Youngester … pretending to give Laws,” having done “what School-boys do by their Exercises,” a “very young Author.”³⁷ Dennis's attack must have angered Pope; he wrote to Caryll that “such a critic as you will find him by the latter part of his book, is no way to be properly answered but by a wooden weapon.”³⁸ Pope wishes the caning applied to him back on its administrator. By the time of the 1742 Dunciad in Four Books, Pope had suffered far worse attacks on his manhood and literary authority than Dennis's; the schoolboy trope that Pope had turned against Dennis in the letter to Caryll takes on, in the fourth book, the scope of an entire society's sexual and social perversion of authority.

The master's whipping of his charges sets off cultural resonances of perverted authority and “spoiled” masculinity on the multiple levels of literature, sex, and politics. Pope's staging of the spectacle of the whipped schoolboy takes on the full force of abject, homoerotic sexuality, particularly as reflected in its victim. Richard Busby, the headmaster of Westminster school who was famous for his use of the birch, rises as a “Spectre … whose index-hand / Held forth the Virtue of the dreadful wand; / His beaver'd brow a birchen garland wears, / Dropping with Infant's blood, and Mother's tears.”³⁹ Busby emerges in Pope's poem as a sort of bug-bear to scare children, an overtly theatrical ghost designed to frighten no one but schoolboys. Pope's portrait of the schoolboy victim, however, is a homophobically conceived object of violated (or about to be violated) masculinity. Pope calls our attention to a less pathetic portion of the schoolboy's anatomy than Steele's “pale Looks” and “honest Eyes.” Scriblerus gives us a typically obtuse note on the lines, “The pale Boy-Senator yet tingling stands, / And holds his breeches close with both his hands”:

An affect of Fear somewhat like this, is described in the 7th AEneid,

Contremuit nemus———
Et tredidae matres pressure ad pector natos.

nothing so natural in any apprehension, as to lay close hold on whatever is suppos'd to be most in danger. But let it not be imagined the author would insinuate this youthful Senator (tho' so lately come from school) to be under the undue influence of any Master.

(IV:147-48; 356n)

Just as Scriblerus' denial of any homoerotic suggestions in his note on Duckit's “pious passion to the youth” (II:176) makes sure that the reader picks them up, his note here calls sexual perversion to the reader's attention. Furthermore, the note links sexual deviation with the realm of political authority. The “Master”—tentatively identified in Sutherland's notes as Walpole—and the “Boy-Senator” with his vulnerable rump conjure up a scenario of sexual corruption with political overtones. Hierarchy dwindles from a great chain of being to a homoerotic pecking order, such as is implied by the bared asses of the “Festival of the Golden Rump” or “The Road to Preferment.” Pope's focus on the school boy as the abject product of a perverse political and sexual hierarchy foregrounds the failure of masculine sexuality and authority even more than the abuse of power that is implicit in the imagery. At the same time, Pope's emphasis on the abject nature of the school boy's sexuality places that failure “outside” the poet as the product of a corrupt political and social order.

The schoolmaster does not, however, come off unscathed in Pope's homophobic vision of the political and sexual order of things gone “perverse.” The most striking counterpart to Pope's “Boy-Senator” is, perhaps, not the “Master” Walpole, but the “gentle JAMES” for whom Dullness wishes:

Oh (cry'd the Goddess) for some pedant Reign!
Some gentle JAMES, to bless the land again;
To stick the Doctor's Chair into the Throne,
Give law to Words, or war with Words alone,
Senates and Courts with Greek and Latin rule,
And turn the Council to a Grammar School!
For sure, if Dulness sees a grateful Day,
'Tis in the shade of Arbitrary Sway.

(IV: 175-82)

The figure of James I brings together the realms of sexuality, language, and politics through which the trope of the schoolboy weaves in Pope's poem. James's preference for pretty men was a cliché in the eighteenth century. The Pretty Gentleman; or Softness of Manners Vindicated (1747) locates homosexual effeminacy in its present, but adds some history: “I do not find one PRETTY GENTLEMAN, till the glorious Reign of King James I. This Prince had an odd Mixture of contrary Qualities. In some respects he retained the rusticity of Gothick Manners; in others, he was very refined.”⁴⁰ James's “refinement” consisted, the writer suggests, of giving preferment to the prettiest and best-dressed men. Contemporaries of James did not miss this predeliction, either, as is evident in Anthony Weldon's homophobic caricature of James, “ever leaning on other mens shoulder; his walke was ever circular, his fingers ever in that walke fidling about his cod-piece.”⁴¹ Not only did James bring a disturbingly homoerotic slant to structures of political authority, but his construction of authority on models of pedantry brought, in Warburton's and, I would argue, Pope's view, authority to rest on the fragile base of a nonreferential language. Dulness's desire for a “pedant Reign” alludes, as Warburton's note directs us, to the centrality of language to James's politics. As Warburton says, “The matter under debate is how to confine men to Words for life” (358n).

Jonathan Goldberg has elucidated the centrality of language in James's construction of monarchical authority in his poems and political treatises. A crucial metaphor to James's concept of ruling is that of the schoolmaster. James's poetry, especially, expresses political and religious hierarchy in terms of schooling; God is James's own “sharpest schoolemaster,” while James himself takes on that role to his nation; the House of Commons, for example, “shalbe school'd” by him.⁴² The image of James the schoolmaster evokes, for Pope, a hollow authority based on words that have no referent in traditional morality—“Give law to Words, or war with Words alone.” It also evokes a political hierarchy modeled on the suspect relation between master and schoolboy. Warburton's note tells us, “this King, James the first, took upon himself to teach the Latin tongue to Car, Earl of Somerset; and that Gondomar the Spanish Ambassador wou'd speak false Latin to him, on purpose to give him the pleasure of correcting it, whereby he wrought himself into his good graces” (IV:176n). James's pedantic political and linguistic authority is self-serving and sexually suspect. Goldberg says that not only was James well-known for his patronage of pretty young men, but that he also delighted in playing tutor to attractive male courtiers.⁴³ The pedant James in Pope's poem links together perversions of both political authority and sexual hierarchy through a common practice: the use of words merely for their own sakes, without reference to traditional moral and religious authority. The stakes, at least for Pope, in the quarrel over literary authority, the right and proper way to use language, are who or what will determine the form and nature of political power and masculine sexual identity. The masculinity that constructs itself on words—and words alone—might, indeed, make a threatening picture to a man as verbally potent and as physically frail as Pope, a man who was, furthermore, excluded by religion from the public work upon which dominant masculinity often depends. Authority, for Pope, must depend on more than words, and yet words were the means by which Pope could “make himself a man” in the public world of Walpole's London. Pope's slotting of male sexual ambiguity in the realm of Dulness is, then, homophobia that masks, as homophobia often does, fears that extend past the specifically sexual—fears, in this case, about the nature of authority and its problematic relation to language.

Pope's homophobic use of the trope of the school boy should, then, be understood in relation to his construction of literary authority. An improper use of language is never merely that in the complexly layered Dunciad; false literary authority carries with it both false politics and false sexuality. All three kinds of falseness are associated, in Pope's view, with a meaningless and morally suspect display of masculinity—which, in Pope's moral system, is better heard than seen. The school boy's unhealthy relation to language—“First slave to Words, then vassal to a Name” (IV:501)—blossoms into a shameless exhibitionism that, significantly, imbues masculinity with sexual and gender ambiguity. In Book IV, an ambiguously gendered being, neither “Boy, nor Man,” the product of modern education, is presented to Dulness for her special care and interest. This “young AEneas” embarks on his tour of the Continent as much to be seen as to see:

Thro' School and College, thy kind cloud o'ercast,
Safe and unseen the young AEneas past:
Thence bursting glorious, all at once let down,
Stunn'd with his giddy Larum half the town.
Intrepid then, o'er seas and lands he flew:
Europe he saw, and Europe saw him too.

(IV: 289-94)

This mindless tour of sight-seeing mixed with exhibitionism takes this “glorious Youth” through a round of European dissipations,

But chief her shrine where naked Venus keeps,
And Cupids ride the Lyon of the Deeps:
Where, eas'd of Fleets, the Adriatic main
Wafts the smooth Eunuch and enamour'd swain.
Led by my hand, he saunter'd Europe round,
And gather'd ev'ry Vice on Christian ground.

(IV:307-12)

Male exhibitionism of the mindless sort that Pope lampoons takes on suggestions of sexual excess—and ambivalence. Pope's school boy grows up to make a spectacle of himself, his dubious morals, and his compromised masculinity. Pope taps the sexual ambivalence implicit in the trope of the school boy to turn it into a sign for an abject, despised masculinity. Exhibitionism and sexual ambivalence are excluded from what it takes to be a man in Pope's poetic world.

Cibber, by direct contrast, incorporates both exhibitionism and sexual ambivalence into his identification with the trope of the school boy. Far from abjecting the qualities that Pope rejects as proper to masculinity, Cibber uses them to construct his own version of literary authority in the Apology. For Cibber, the school boy provided a trope by which he could fashion a rhetoric in keeping with his contradictory position as an actor. Cibber's very sense of public identity was linked to making a spectacle of himself, to subjecting himself to the not-always flattering gaze of the public; on the other hand, as a professional, he also controlled, to some extent, his own specularization. Unlike Pope, who emphasizes the specular nature and “deviate” sexuality of the school boy, Cibber foregrounds the school boy's qualified mastery over the spectacle he makes and the ambiguity of his sexuality. The trope of the school boy becomes, in Cibber's text, an important figure in his rhetoric of nonmastery.

Cibber plays on the sexual ambivalence implicit in the figure when he presents himself as a sort of over-grown school boy in the Apology. Unlike Pope, whose homophobic definitions place the school boy clearly outside the pale of dominant masculinity, Cibber allows the sexual ambiguity of the figure to resonate within an economy of masculine desire in which heterosexuality certainly dominates but by no means excludes ambiguity. The eroticism which Cibber sometimes invested in representing his relations with aristocratic male patrons remains implicit in the school boy, as if calling attention to it would turn it into the homophobic caricatures of Pope's discourse. To name the homoerotic too explicitly is to render it subject to homophobia. Cibber explicitly represents the problematic sexuality of the school boy, however, in Woman's Wit, an unsuccessful play whose subplot Cibber re-tooled into one of the most popular afterpieces of the century, The Schoolboy (1707), providing a trademark part for himself and what was later to be a favorite of Garrick. Cibber is listed in the title role of “Master Johnny,” a trickster-like character of erotic playfulness within a not-so-playful oedipal sexual economy that is structured around competition to possess, quite literally, the mother. Old and Young Rakish, a father-and-son team of financially impoverished sexual adventurers, compete for the hand of Lady Manlove, the schoolboy's affluent mother. While this competition goes on, Master Johnny fends off the advances of his Jesuit tutor and tries to run down his own sexual prey in the form of Lady Manlove's maid. The play ends with Young Rakish winning Johnny's mother and taking the young man under his wing to teach him the modes of sexual expression proper to his age and class—the pursuit of whores. As the plot suggests, the play, by its end, reinstates class lines, reforms the family along “normal” oedipal lines, and channels, through the guidance of Johnny's new father, the school boy's sexual energy into its proper, heterosexual course. Yet in the process, the character of the school boy presents the far more ambiguous spectacle of a young male as both object of desire and desiring subject.

The school boy functions as a sort of third term in the play's struggle between father and son; Old Rakish gives up his “rakishness” to assume the asexual role of patriarchal protector, a role that he has previously rejected by refusing to support his son. Young Rakish succeeds to the sexual possession of Lady Manlove, a role that carries with it the fatherhood of Johnny. The Rakish men act out a father-to-son succession of sexual privilege that would seem to confine masculine sexuality to an oedipal structure all-too-familiar—even before Freud gave it that name—in Anglo-European culture. Johnny, however recuperated as a “child” into this structure, sets off within it ripples of sexual “confusion.” His “French Jesuit” tutor pursues him on stage, whip in hand, attempting to fondle and flirt with him. His mother, we are told, plans to send him abroad to St. Omer's Jesuit academy and to “make a priest of him.”⁴⁴ The school boy takes on, in short, the erotic charge historically connected with the trope. He responds to the threat of a beating from his tutor with “flea my backside! he kiss!———won't he?” (V:121). Johnny is no feminized “player-boy,” however, and though he evinces a clear awareness of the priest's intentions, he tries to assert his heterosexuality by seeking marriage with his mother's maid. As I have argued elsewhere, the eighteenth-century actor was often represented as sexually excessive, both an over-desiring subject and an improperly desired object⁴⁵; similarly, the school boy in this play is sexually overcharged, both the object and the owner of improper desires. His recuperation into “the family” at the end of the play affirms heterosexuality by jettisoning the “French Jesuit,” homosexual tutor and giving Johnny to the tutelage of Young Rakish, but it does little to confirm that chasing whores will curb Johnny's excessive sexuality. The trickster figure of the school boy remains a site of potentially unstable sexuality, of an excess that might rupture through the surface of the play's heterosexual economy. Johnny retains the potential, in short, for making a sexual spectacle of himself. This is not to say that Johnny functions as a point of resistance to patriarchal sexual ideology within the heterosexual economy. Quite the reverse: his relationship to a homosexual economy of desire does not, as with Pope's boy-senator or his “Young AEneas,” brand him as “deviate” or as abject. The Dunciad's binary thinking about masculinity—manly vs. “deviate”—does not fully structure sexuality in Cibber's play, however homophobic and heterosexist it is in many respects. The homoerotic spectacle of the school boy co-exists with the heterosexism of Cibber's play, without apparent contradiction, perhaps because masculinity was not yet as rigidly exclusionary as it was to become later in the century.

In his Apology, Cibber similarly positions himself in an ambivalent relation to heterosexuality. He is, as I have argued elsewhere, both the homoerotic “butt” in a “full-bottomed perriwig” and the heterosexual male who impregnates his wife and his muse with rabbit-like regularity.⁴⁶ By identifying himself with the school boy in his Apology, Cibber brings the trope's sexual ambiguity into play in his formulation of authorial control. His identification with this trope helps to shape the rhetoric of Cibber's self-representation; the schoolboy becomes even a kind of model for Cibber's approach to his audience. At school, Cibber tells us, he was the “same inconsistent Creature I have been ever since! always in full Spirits, in some small Capacity to do right, but in a more frequent Alacrity to do wrong; and consequently often under a worse character than I wholly deserv'd.” Cibber's identification with the school boy he once was is self-abjection with a difference: while submitting to the justice of being corrected for his faults, his very submission demands sympathy and acceptance, if not unqualified approval. It also carries with it the implicit homoerotic baggage of the school boy trope—with a twist. Cibber connects a school days incident when he was “whip'd for my Theme, tho' my Master told me, at the same time, what was good of it was better than any Boy's in the Form” to the “same odd Fate” that “has frequently attended the course of my later Conduct in Life.”⁴⁷ Cibber's school boy submission to correction plays off the abjection associated with the trope against an assertion of merit. Like the contradictory Master Johnny, Cibber defies the dichotomous thinking that separates authority from abjection. In fact, Cibber's literary authority depends on abjection.

In the Apology, Cibber often repeats the gesture of presenting himself as the school boy who is whipped for his linguistic performance although “what was good of it was better than any Boy's in the Form.” “I grant,” Cibber humbly confesses, “that no Man worthy of the Name of an Author is a more faulty Writer than myself; that I am not Master of my own Language I too often feel when I am at a loss for Expression.” Like the schoolboy, Cibber submits to the audience's rod while simultaneously claiming a kind of superiority in the very failure to attain mastery: “This [lack of correctness] I ought to be asham'd of, when I find that Persons, of perhaps colder Imaginations, are allow'd to write better than myself” (33). As in the farce, the school boy in the Apology is characterized by a slipperiness that makes him hard to fix as either dominant or submissive, authoritative or abject. Is he the whipped object of another's mastery, or the claimant of a kind of mastery for himself even as he is whipped? His literary authority parallels the school boy's ambiguous sexuality in that both Master Johnny and Master Colley establish control—over words and sexuality, respectively—through the gesture of its renunciation. Johnny gains access to virile, mature, heterosexual masculinity by submitting to the superior sexual judgment of Young Rakish. Cibber gains access to literary credibility by willingly admitting the superior authority of other writers. The “sharpness” of Pope's verse does not, however, prevent Cibber from using his “blunt instrument” with brutal force.

The trope of the school boy provides Cibber with a rhetorical posture very useful to an actor, manager, and playwright whose livelihood was made in a public realm that discouraged actors from assuming a dominant, masculine stance. It is also central to the development of what Potter has called Cibber's strategy of evincing a “total self-awareness” in the thick of verbal combat.⁴⁸ Cibber bases this strategy on another school-boy story, this time the tale of a playground dispute that teaches Cibber a lesson about responding to the aggressions of those more powerful than himself:

A great Boy, near the Head taller than myself, in some wrangle at play had insulted me; upon which I was fool-hardy enough to give him a Box on the Ear; the Blow was soon return'd with another, that brought me under him, and at his Mercy. Another Lad, whom I really lov'd and thought a good-natur'd one, cry'd out with some warmth, to my Antagonist (while I was down) Beat him, beat him soundly! This so amaz'd me that I lost all my Spirits to resist, and burst into Tears!

(9)

Cibber discovers that the “good-natur'd” boy's animosity stems from Cibber's earlier, thoughtless teasing: “Because you are always jeering and making a Jest of me to every Boy in the School.” Cibber blames his humiliation on “not having Sense enough to know I had hurt him” and on the boy's not having “Sense enough to know that I never intended to hurt him” (9-10). Self-awareness, Cibber concludes, is a better defense than counter-aggression, especially when one is likely to lose. The audience, Cibber suggests, matters more than one's antagonist in verbal battles as well as physical ones:

There is besides (and little worse than this) a mutual Grossness in Raillery, that sometimes is more painful to the Hearers that are not concerned in it, than to the Persons engag'd. I have seen a couple of these clumsy Combatants drub one another with as little Manners or Mercy as if they had two Flails in their Hands; Children at Play with Case-knives could not give you more Apprehension of their doing one another Mischief. And yet when the Contest has been over, the Boobys have look'd round them for Approbation, and upon being told they were admirably well match'd, have sat down (Bedawb'd as they were) contented at making it a drawn Battle.

(11)

Strategic submission to the enemy works better, in Cibber's view, than this unself-conscious combat. If a clever combatant finds himself being overwhelmed, “If you are too strong for him … his last Resource is to join in the Laugh till he has got himself off by an ironical Applause of your Superiority” (14). Hence, Cibber responds to jibes at his famous gaff of saying that Mrs. Oldfield “outdid your usual Out-doing” by admitting it “A most vile Jingle” while turning the joke against the “many flat Writers [who] have made themselves brisk upon this single Expression”: “What Author would not envy me so frolicksome a Fault that had such public Honours paid to it?” (34).

Cibber's use of the school boy trope turns the abjection associated with it into a rhetorical strategy. By making a spectacle out of his faults, Cibber claims a kind of control over his self-display. Literary authority in the Apology, as well as in Cibber's print wars with Pope, entails a duplicitous approach to exhibitionism in which the creator of the spectacle's awareness of and control over his own specularization is itself a part of the show. Cibber's self-conscious exhibitionism offers an alternative model of literary authority to the seeing but unseen Mr. Spectator-style narrator. In this alternative model, literary authority is still gendered masculine, but masculine in a different sense than Pope's “manly” authority. The latter works through a rhetoric more inclined to define authority by condemning what it is not than to display authority for what it is. The actor's professional exhibitionism cleared the ground for Cibber to play school boy to his audience, for masculine literary authority to do its work in different ways.

I hope that this demonstration of diversity in masculine literary roles has helped in the work of dismantling a monolithic construct that I have inherited from my own training in both traditional and feminist literary history, a gendered construct called “literary authority.” There are distinctions to be made between the literary powers of a Cibber and a Pope, although they are hardly the ones usually made between these two writers. It should be noted, however, that the professional abjection of the actor is constituted in Cibber's culture less as an attack on dominant masculinity than as one among diverse means to authority—means open to men but not to women. But distinctions among the means of masculine empowerment still have their uses in feminist politics. As Paul Smith warns, “The Oedipus divides those of us who are assumed to obey—and to be able to obey—the law from those who are assumed to be unable. In this sense the Oedipus entails the demand that men forget a past in favor of access to the law.”⁴⁹ Reconstructing a masculine past of diverse positions in relation to oedipal law is my attempt to help counter that amnesia.

Notes

1. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York, 1979), 28.

2. See Laqueur's “Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproduction Biology,” Representations 14 (1986):1-41. Stone's The Family Sex and Marriage in England, 1500- 1800 (New York, 1977) argues for an eighteenth-century transition from hierarchical to “companionate” relations between men and women in marriage.

3. See, especially, the introductory chapter to Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York, 1987), 3-28.

4. See D'Emilio's “Capitalism and Gay Identity” in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, eds. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson (New York, 1983), 100-116; Trumbach's “London's Sodomites: Homosexual Behavior and Western Culture in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Social History 11 (1977-78):1-33, “Gender and the Homosexual Role in Modern Western Culture: The 18th and 19th Centuries Compared,” in Homosexuality, Which Homosexuality? (London, 1989), 149-70, and “The Birth of the Queen: Sodomy and the Emergence of Gender Equality in Modern Culture, 1660- 1750,” in Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, eds. Martin Bauml Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr. (New York, 1989), 129-40.

5. See chapters one and two, “The Fair, the Pig, Authorship,” and “The Grotesque Body and the Smithfield Muse: Authorship in the Eighteenth Century,” in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, 1986), 27-124.

6. “Parisian Homosexuals Create a Lifestyle, 1720-1750: The Police Archives,” Eighteenth-Century Life 9 (1985):179-91.

7. Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London, Gay Men's Press, 1982), passim.

8. This is one of the main points made in “The Birth of the Queen.”

9. The Popish Plot (London, 1972).

10. See Jane Lane's Titus Oates (London, 1949), 231-32.

11. The Virtuoso, eds. Marjorie Hope Nicolson and David Stuart Rodes (Lincoln, 1966), 67.

12. See B. R. Burg, Sodomy and the Perception of Evil: English Sea Rovers in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean (New York, 1983), 34.

13. See The Educational Writings of John Locke, ed. James L. Axtell (Cambridge, 1968), 182-86.

14. See The Spectator, ed. Donald Bond (Oxford, 1965), II:160-62.

15. The marginalization and subjugation of actors is the subject of my forthcoming Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual Ideology.

16. See James Thomas Kirkman's Memoirs of the Life of Charles Macklin, Esq. (London, 1799), II:132-33.

17. See Thomas Davies, Dramatic Miscellanies (London, 1784), II:86.

18. See Hill's Works (London, 1754), II:109.

19. Thomas Davies, Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick, Esq (London, 1784), II:100.

20. Letter to Mr. Garrick, on His having purchased a Patent for Drury Lane Playhouse (London, 1749), 8.

21. See the exchange of letters between Sheridan and Cibber in Dublin Miscellany (Dublin, 1743), 43, 48.

22. Apology for the Life of Mr. TC, Comedian. Being a Proper Sequel to the Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber, Comedian (London, 1740), 6-7.

23. The Egoist: or, Colley upon Cibber (London, 1743), 41.

24. The Tryal of Colley Cibber, Comedian (London, 1740), 11.

25. I treat the Letter at some length in the forthcoming Sexual Suspects.

26. Another Occasional Letter from Mr. Cibber to Mr. Pope (Glascow, n.d.), 7.

27. The Poetics of Sexual Myth: Gender and Ideology in the Verse of Swift and Pope (Chicago, 1985), 109.

28. Alexander Pope: A Life (New Haven, 1985), 3-12.

29. Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS and the Media (Minneapolis, 1987), 47-48.

30. Philip Hughes, The Catholic Question 1688-1829 (London, 1929), 127-28.

31. George Saville, Earl of Halifax, “The Character of a Trimmer,” The Complete Works of George Saville, First Marquess of Halifaz, ed. Walter Raleigh (Oxford, 1912), 83.

32. Halifax, 84.

33. Popery and Politics in England, 1669-1688 (Cambridge, 1973), 70.

34. Burg, 28-29.

35. Lane, 231-32.

36. The Guardian, Ed. John Calhoun Stephens (Lexington, 1982), 326.

37. “Reflections Critical and Satyrical,” Popiana I: Early Criticism, 1711-1716 (New York, 1975), I:2, 5-6, 25.

38. The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn (Oxford, 1956), I:121.

39. The Dunciad in Four Books in The Poems of Alexander Pope, Ed. John Butt (New Haven, 1977), IV:139-42.

40. The Pretty Gentleman: or Softness of Manners Vindicated (London, 1747), 10.

41. Robert Ashton, James I by His Contemporaries: An Account of His Career and Character as Seen by Some of His Contemporaries (London, 1969), 12.

42. Quoted by Jonathan Goldberg in James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne and Their Contemporaries (Baltimore, 1983), 19.

43. Goldberg, 19.

44. The Schoolboy in The Dramatic Works of Colley Cibber, Esq (London, 1772), V:121.

45. The actor is frequently represented as oversexed; see, for instance, The Trial of Two Causes: Between Theophilus Cibber, Gent., Plaintiff, and William Sloper, Esq. Defendent (London, 1887), 40: “The players are a people who act and enter into all manner of characters; that their men and women are made to fall in love with each other, this day with one, tomorrow with another; that this practice in variety must give them an uncommon propensity to love without any confinement of the passion to a particular subject; 'tis very likely that this enters into their common course of life.” The Theatrical Biography: or Memoirs of the Principal Performers of the Three Theatres Royal (London, 1771) reports that “gallantry” is “a projectile feature of the histrionic character; and a player without his amour, is more seldom known than a general without his victory” (II:80-81).

46. Cibber's rhetoric in the Apology cuts a fine line between homoerotic flirting with aristocratic male patrons and his self-representation as a husband and family man.

47. An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber, ed. B. R. S. Fone (Ann Arbor, 1968), 9.

48. Lois Potter, “Colley Cibber: the Fop as Hero,” Augustan Worlds, eds. J. C. Hilson, M. M. B. Jones, and J. R. Watson (Leicester, 1978), 161.

49. “Vas,” Camera Obscura 17 (1989):109.