[In the following essay, Simon examines Hogarth's relationship to popular theater, suggesting that the artist drew inspiration from a number of productions and, in turn, provided inspiration to various theatrical producers.]

I have endeavoured to treat my subject as a dramatic writer; my picture is my stage, and men and women my players, who by means of certain actions and gestures, are to exhibit a dumb show.

I wished to compose pictures on canvas, similar to representations on the stage; and farther hope that they will be tried by the same test, and criticised by the same criterion.

[William Hogarth]

His gesticulation was so perfectly expressive of his meaning, that every motion of his hand or head, or of any part of his body, was a kind of dumb eloquence that was readily understood by the audience.

[Thomas Davies on the pantomime of John Rich]

The most popular form of theatre during Hogarth's lifetime (1697-1764) was that of the booths in the London fairs, and I would suggest that these booth-theatres were one of the most pervasive influences on Hogarth's art throughout his career. I would also like to make some suggestions in support of the little-known tradition that one of Hogarth's earliest commissions in his attempts to turn himself into a painter was to paint scenery for Lee and Harper's booth at Bartholomew and Southwark Fairs in 1724.¹ Hogarth's influence on the theatre in turn was considerable: at its highest level he waged a fruitful campaign for the revival of Shakespeare in the original; at its simplest, his works provided the song-writers and the booth-theatres with any amount of material for pantomimes, ballad-operas, drolls, and songs. It is largely with his mutually profitable relationship with the booth-theatres that I wish to deal here.

In a brief note, Sybil Rosenfeld posed the question Was Hogarth a Scene-Painter?, drawing attention to a tradition recorded by that most amusing anecdotalist J. T. Smith to the effect that, soon after Hogarth left his master (which was in 1720), Hogarth and William Oram painted scenes for Drury Lane together. That in itself is interesting enough, in view of the way in which Drury Lane appears so frequently in Hogarth's work, but in addition ‘they were also employed by a famous woman who kept a droll booth at Bartholomew Fair, to paint a splendid set of scenes. The agreement specified that the scenes were to be gilt but, instead of using gold leaf, they covered them with Dutch metal. The mistress of the drolls thereupon declared the contract broken and refused to pay for the scenes’.² Rosenfeld identified this play with The Siege of Troy by Elkannah Settle which Mrs. Lee advertised in 1724 for Batholomew Fair in lavish terms:

the Booth coming as near the perfection of the Theatre as possible, being adorned by the most ingenious Workmen: Her Head Characters are all Dress'd in real Gold and Silver beyond what was ever worn at any Fair before but by her own people.

The Siege of Troy had indeed to be postponed that year from Bartholomew Fair (the site of the anecdote, held at the end of August) to Southwark Fair (held early in September) because the scenes and dresses were not ready. Rosenfeld concluded that the tradition involving Hogarth was therefore probably true and that it referred to this production.³ I feel that a considerable amount of circumstantial evidence can be offered in support of this conclusion.

It is to c. 1724-5 that Hogarth's earliest paintings are generally dated, and of a very humble kind they are, including the Sign-board for a Paviour (Mellon Collection) which itself suggests Hogarth's readiness to accept any commission which came to hand.⁴ And the Oram mentioned as his collaborator was almost certainly the one employed under Hogarth (in his capacity as Serjeant Painter) in 1761 to paint the Grand Triumphal Arch for the Coronation of George III.⁵ But the most compelling evidence comes from a hitherto unexplained anomaly in Hogarth's Southwark Fair of 1733, the presence, among so many details which are historically correct for that year—in the way of performances, sites of booths and so on—, of The Siege of Troy right in the middle of the picture at Lee and Harper's booth, when it had not been acted since 1726.⁶ Its anachronistic presence in such a prominent position—and the confusion of the architecture of the ‘Great Til'd Booth’ with that of the church behind is deliberate—can only be explained as a wryly personal reference to Hogarth's own difficult beginnings as a painter. This seems the more reasonable if we take into account the fact that Lee and Harper were putting on (at their own booth) the first theatrical ‘spin-off’ of a Hogarth series, Theophilus Cibber's pantomime, The Harlot's Progress or, The Ridotto al'Fresco: Hogarth's prints had only appeared the previous year, but such was the speed with which the popular theatre cashed-in on popular engravings.⁷ Such too was the measure of Hogarth's rapid rise to success since 1724; and the pattern of reciprocity is completed by Lee and Harper's revival of The Siege of Troy in 1734, no doubt as a result of the success of Hogarth's engraving of Southwark Fair. By this date, indeed, there can have been no element of rancour between Hogarth and Lee and Harper, whatever the dispute of 1724, for very shortly after those difficulties Hogarth had recorded John Harper in his most famous role as Falstaff in Henry IV (and in itself this tends to add one more detail in favour of Hogarth's scene-painting).

Hogarth's painting of Falstaff Examining his Recruits (Earl of Iveagh) has always been discussed briefly in the Hogarth literature and an air of uncertainty has hovered about it, and about the dates of the theatrical performance it is thought to record. No attempt, so far as I can see, has been made finally to settle the dates, the precise performance, nor to identify the cast beyond the leading figures. The picture does not show, in fact, Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 2, III, ii, as it is universally held to do, but IV, iii of Betterton's adaptation, in which form it was invariably played at this time. To be more precise still, it seems to me certain [that] the painting records the Drury Lane production which opened on 21st February 1726/7 and then played on 25th February, 14th March, and 9th September.⁸ It had not been produced since 1722 (an unthinkably early date for this picture) and after its revival was not performed again until 18th October 1728. Stylistic comparison of the preliminary drawing and painting with the drawing and earliest paintings of The Beggar's Opera (which opened 29th January 1727/8) has always placed it c. 1727-8 and I would tend to go for the 1728 performance as that actually recorded. But in any case the main cast did not change until the last Drury Lane performance of 1733. In the reasonable attempt to identify the actors, therefore, it is important also to stress that the preliminary drawing (H. M. the Queen) is clearly taken directly from the stage. It bears all the signs of a hasty note of a passing moment of the action: the scene in question would be a conveniently extended, rather static, one for this purpose (as is that in The Beggar's Opera) with little movement of the main characters, Falstaff, Shallow, and Silence. There is a vestigial indication, also, of a curtain at the left, carefully omitted from the painting. Falstaff, then, is played by John Harper; Silence, seated behind the table nearest to Falstaff, actually shows us another booth-proprietor at the fairs, Josiah Miller; while the figure of Shallow, to Silence's right, shows us none other than Colley Cibber. As a matter of fact, each of these actors in the Falstaff painting also appears in Southwark Fair, on a stage-cloth, ‘The Stage Mutiny,’ above the collapsing stage which makes all-too-literal the bathetic ‘Fall of Bajazet’ (i.e., Tamerlane).⁹ Colley Cibber, wearing his laureate wreath, is seated at one side labelled ‘Quiet and Snug’; Josiah Miller is identified under the banner ‘We eat’; and most telling of all, John Harper stands in the middle dressed in a costume identical with that of Falstaff Examining His Recruits. The actual painting of Southwark Fair (Mellon Collection) shows him with the same red jerkin and breeches, white boots, the same hat, white hair and beard.

The presence of this stage-cloth, ‘The Stage Mutiny’, is itself evidence of Hogarth's intimate knowledge of theatrical goings-on of the time, for it is adapted from a print by John Laguerre of 4th July 1733 satirising the split between the new manager of Drury Lane and most of his actors (who had staged a ‘walk-out’). Within a month, Laguerre's print had been turned into farce at Covent Garden by the rival manager John Rich. As it happens, Laguerre (son of the Louis Laguerre immortalised by Pope) was the chief scenery-painter for Rich, and, among other additions to the original design, Hogarth identified the trade of his scenery-painter friend John Ellys with a paint-pot and brushes. All these details seem to add circumstantial evidence to the tale of Hogarth's working as a scenery-painter himself, while the one picture of his certainly executed in stage-distemper, The Turk's Head (Angus A. Brown, Esq.), was painted ‘in a fit of pleasantry, one evening in the Painting Room at Covent Garden Theatre’.¹⁰ In 1724, in any case, Hogarth was already engaged in his earliest attacks on the degeneracy of the theatre, in the engravings Masquerades and Operas (February 1723/4) and A Just View of the British Stage (December 1724).¹¹ Here, it is important to distinguish between Hogarth's obvious love of the popular theatre in all its vigour, and his contempt for the abuse of the serious theatre in pandering to ‘the Bad Taste of the Town’—his own title for Masquerades and Operas. Thus John Rich, the greatest harlequin and pantomimist of the age and producer of The Beggar's Opera, is not really the target of that print, which is rather the public's preference for harlequinades and masquerades at the expense of the serious theatre. In it, the works of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson are being hawked about the streets as wrapping-paper for shops.

The harlequinades and masquerades really did flourish at the expense of serious drama: A Just View of the British Stage, for example, satirises the actual decline of Drury Lane to the level of extravagant competition with such as John Rich in the way of harlequinades. Cibber, Wilkes, and Booth, the proprietors, had hit on the idea of a criminal harlequin, Harlequin Shepherd, based on the escapades of the notorious (even popular) Jack Shepherd (or Sheppard). Hogarth's print shows the stage at Drury Lane, with Hamlet, Macbeth, and Julius Caesar reduced to paper of an even more fundamental kind, while Ben Jonson's ghost (in part-parody of the ‘machinery’ of popular productions) rises through the floor to gaze in horror at the spectacle. The caption to the print is well worth repeating:

This Print Represents the Rehearsing a new Farce that will include ye two famous Entertainments Dr. Faustus and Harlequin Shepherd to wch. will be added Scaramouch Jack Hall the Chimney Sweeper's Escape from Newgate through ye Privy, with ye comical Humours of Ben Johnsons Ghost, concluding with the Hay-Dance Perform'd in ye Air by ye Figures A, B, C, Assisted by Ropes from ye Muses. Note, there are no Conjurors concern'd in it as ye ignorant imagine [N.B.] The Bricks, Rubbish &c. will be real, but the Excrements upon Jack Hall will be made of Chew'd Gingerbread to prevent Offence.

Vivat Rex.

The similarity in conception between Harlequin Shepherd and The Beggar's Opera will not be missed, but this venture in 1724 was a failure, ‘dismiss'd with a universal Hiss’. There is a suitable irony therefore, in Rich's ultimate success with The Beggar's Opera in 1728 and it was with his paintings of this production that Hogarth really established himself as a painter: Rich bought the first and commissioned another, and in all there were at least six versions. From our point of view, it seems characteristic opportunism on the part of Hogarth to have painted The Beggar's Opera and no doubt an element of opportunism was present. But Hogarth was already an archetypal ‘stage-door johnny’, and everything about his career so far had made a success in such a medium inevitable.

The ‘stage mutiny’ of 1733 involved another close friend of Hogarth's, Henry Fielding, who remained loyal to John Highmore, the manager of Drury Lane. At this time Fielding was pouring out satirical plays of all descriptions and already the similarity of method in the work of Hogarth and Fielding is often as striking as the identity of the reforms at which they aimed. Not least among these was the reform of the theatre, and both were in effect working at its reform from the inside.

In the pattern of mutual inspiration and frequent cross-reference which was to develop in the work of the two men, it is possible that Hogarth first inspired the other with one of his early attacks on masquerades. A spoof Masquerade Ticket by Hogarth of 1727¹² specifically attacked Heidegger, the master of masquerades now newly under royal patronage, and carried the following key:

A. a Sacrifice to Priapus. B. a pair of lecherometers shewing ye Companys Inclinations as they approach em. Invented for the use of Ladys and Gentlemen by ye Ingenious Mr. H[eidegge]r.

Fielding's first published work, The Masquerade, followed in 1728 and was, as Professor Paulson suggested, probably influenced by Hogarth's print.¹³ A decade later, the most important turning-point in Fielding's career, the Theatre Licensing Act of 1737 designed to silence his attacks on the government, finds Hogarth joining in the fight. At the time, Hogarth was starting work on Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn and The Four Times of the Day, the engravings being eventually published in 1738. All these prints are related to Fielding's career in one way or another,¹⁴ but from Strolling Actresses especially certain features of Hogarth's relationship with the popular theatre emerge.

Across the bed lies the play-bill for The Devil to Pay in Heaven ‘being the last time of acting before the Act commences’ (the ‘Act against strolling Players’ is placed in the crown at the left foreground). This play did not, so far as one can see, ever exist, but is an amalgam of several which did, and it is interesting to note where they had appeared. Thus, there was a ballad-opera by Coffey, The Devil to Pay (which has a different dramatis personae), which had been put on at Harper and Lee's other booth at Southwark Fair in 1731. In 1733 at their main booth they had put on The Fall of Phaeton, which followed Jephtha's Rash Vow, the characters for which are visible at the centre of Hogarth's Southwark Fair. There are certain similarities between The Fall of Phaeton and the Strolling Actresses: Phaeton, Apollo, Jupiter, Eagle, a Thunderbolt feature in the synopsis. Clearly this is largely a matter of coincidence, but less of a coincidence is the relationship between the play and Fielding's Tumble-Down Dick or Phaeton in the Suds of 1736, although it is only with the ‘original’ Fall of Phaeton in mind—familiar both to Hogarth¹⁵ and Fielding—that the relationship established by Paulson between Phaeton in the Suds and the Strolling Actresses makes its full impact: ‘with its emphasis upon the reality of stage properties, the play of Fielding's that most inspired Strolling Actresses [was Phaeton in the Suds]: the Sun is a lantern, the Palace of the Sun is a round-house, Aurora is delayed going out to meet the sunrise because her linen is not washed’.¹⁶ In fact, Fielding's play has further interesting light to shed on the common preoccupations of the two artists. It is, of course, a brilliant satirical squib, and in its constant movement in and out of the ‘play’ and in and out of character, the beginnings of the profounder ironical structure of Fielding's novels can be discerned. It also includes the following scene (Fustian is an author):

MR. Machine to Mr. Prompter:
. … Mr. Prompter, I must insist that you cut out a great deal of Othello, if my pantomine is to be performed with it, or the audience will be palled before the entertainment begins.
PROMPTER:
We'll cut out the fifth act, sir, if you please.
MACHINE:
Sir, that's not enough, I'll have the first cut out too.
FUSTIAN:
Death and the Devil! Can I bear this? Shall Shakespeare be mangled to introduce this trumpery?
PROMPTER:
Sir, this gentleman brings more money to the house than all the poets together.
MACHINE:
Pugh! Pugh! Shakespeare!—Come, let down the curtain, and play away the overture.
(The curtain draws up, discovers Phaeton leaning against the scene).

Now it is to this period, c. 1736, that Hogarth's most brilliant exercise in the interpretation of Shakespeare's original text, The Tempest (Major the Rt. Hon. Lord St. Oswald), can be assigned. At this time the play was invariably performed in near-unrecognisable form as an opera.¹⁷ In view of Hogarth's friendship with so many actors and with Garrick especially (who owned Falstaff Examining His Recruits, among other paintings by Hogarth), it seems reasonable to suppose that Hogarth exerted a distinct influence on the revival of Shakespeare in the original which took place in the next two decades. In the 1730's Hogarth must have decided that if actors would not perform Shakespeare properly on the stage, then he would ‘produce’ a good example in paint.

The remaining sources for Strolling Actresses are less significant, though very characteristic of Hogarth. The Devil to Pay in St. James's, published as a pamphlet in 1727, most nearly suggests the parodic nature of the play-title in the picture and featured the activities of one of Hogarth's early targets, the Italian singer Cuzzoni: it includes the scandalous occasion when she had had an on-stage fight with her rival as a prima donna, Faustina, during a performance of Bononcini's Astynax.¹⁸ The remaining specific theatrical reference is to John Dryden and Nathaniel Lee's Oedipus: in the top right of the engraving appear the painted heads of Oedipus and Jocasta. As Nichols pointed out, ‘painted prodigies of this description were necessary to the performance of Lee's Oedipus’,¹⁹ and Hogarth would surely have seen these close-to in the ‘painting room’ of Covent Garden Theatre where the Beefsteak Club met: the play was performed there on 1st November 1736. He could even have seen it at the time that he was, as I believe, painting scenery in Southwark Fair, for it was put on there in 1724 by Bullock and Spiller, whose booth figures so prominently at one side of Hogarth's Southwark Fair.

To return to Hogarth's relationship with Fielding, among several interesting examples of Hogarth's providing inspiration for the author may be mentioned Fielding's Covent Garden Tragedy (1733) which ‘shared at once the impact and the popularity’ of Hogarth's Harlot's Progress (1731/2).²⁰ By this date the two obviously knew each other well, and Hogarth had provided the frontispiece for Fielding's Tragedy of Tragedies, or the History of Tom Thumb the Great in 1730. This, and much more, has been discussed in great detail by Professor Paulson. One of the points of contact between them, however, could do with a little clarification, and that is the source of the sub-title to Hogarth's Gate of Calais (the print published 6th March 1748/9), ‘O the Roast Beef of Old England’. The picture is a very personal one, and so, inevitably it seems, it is very theatrical, both in its ‘stage-like structure’ and in its various references. The theme approximates to the motto of John Rich's Beefsteak Club, ‘Beef and Liberty’, and implicitly contrasts the diet, the political and religious freedom, of the English with those of the French. The action is based on an actual experience of Hogarth's which seemed to confirm all his chauvinistic contempt for the French: he was arrested as a spy while sketching the walls of Calais, and he shows himself in profile at the side of the picture, drawing the gate while the hand of an unseen soldier grasps his shoulder. Paulson states that Hogarth takes the sub-title from ‘Fielding's song that originally appeared in his Welsh (or Grub-Street) Opera (1731)’;²¹ this is not entirely correct for, although the theme is similar in that song, the words do not correspond. In fact the theme was more fully developed in Fielding's Don Quixote in England (1733) where the famous refrain quoted by Hogarth actually appears:

Oh the roast beef of old England
And old England's roast beef!

It is surely doubtful whether Hogarth could have relied on people to recall a single song from a farce of fourteen or more years earlier, and indeed the Grub Street Opera (in its earlier version as The Welsh Opera) had been last performed on 4th June 1731, while Don Quixote in England had been last performed on 5th October 1734. In fact, there is another theatrical friend of Hogarth's involved here, Richard Leveridge (1670?-1758) who had set the song from Don Quixote and made it his own. By the time of Hogarth's Calais Gate, Leveridge (a famous bass) had turned ‘The Roast Beef Song’ into a popular entr'acte and benefit night song. He had first performed it on 5th April 1735 at Covent Garden Theatre. As the Beefsteak Club had been founded there on 11th January of that year it might be reasonable to suggest that the song was their idea. In turn, Hogarth's painting was specifically the inspiration of the ‘Roast Beef Cantata’ of Theodosius Forrest, son of Hogarth's fellow-member Ebenezer; the later official song of the club was his also and also probably related to Hogarth's picture.²² By 1735 Hogarth would certainly have known Leveridge for he produced a frontispiece for Leveridge's Collection of Songs in 1727.²³ Perhaps the most instructive, if amusing, indication of the immediate popularity of Leveridge's Roast Beef Song itself is that, six days after he had first performed it, it was featured as an added attraction to Othello (!) at Lincoln's Inn Fields. It was in opposition, of course, to this sort of jovial mutilation of Shakespeare that Hogarth and Fielding were so united. But there is no sense of contradiction in Hogarth about the inspiration which he drew from the theatre in its most popular forms, despite his missionary zeal for high drama; and I would be tempted to say that Hogarth's early experience in Lee and Harper's booth-theatre had a profound effect on the shaping of his imagination: it is difficult to find a satirical picture of his which is not connected with the popular theatre in some way.

Although so many of Hogarth's sources have been so thoroughly dealt with, especially by Professor Paulson, I have attempted thus far to clarify a few aspects specifically of Hogarth's relationship with the popular theatre, and have tried to make a few new suggestions. I hope that I have emphasised the fundamental importance of the booth-theatres in general, but especially that of Lee and Harper, to Hogarth's art, and two final examples must suffice to reinforce the argument: The March to Finchley (1750) and The Bathos (1764).²⁴ In both cases, 1733, the year of Southwark Fair, is significant.

Sybil Rosenfeld noted the probable presence of another booth of Lee and Harper in the background of The March to Finchley (this time, for Tottenham Fair):

The Lee and Harper combination returned [to Tottenham] in a booth behind the King's Head in 1733. This is probably the tall wooden building which is shown behind the tavern [i.e. the tavern-brothel with the head of Charles II] in Hogarth's March to Finchley. It was probably permanent.²⁵

I think this identification must be correct, and propose that Hogarth's picture derives the most prominent details of its action from the performance which Lee and Harper gave that year at Tottenham Fair on 30th July. It is only reasonable to assume that Hogarth would have gone to the fair—he lived in Leicester Fields—not least because Lee and Harper were giving their first performance of The Harlot's Progress. The main attraction, which this followed, was Bateman, or The Unhappy Marriage: with the Comical Humours of Sparrow, Pumpking, and Spicer going to the Wars. The coincidence is striking, for Hogarth's March to Finchley has three soldiers in the foreground clearly displaying ‘Comical Humours. … going to the Wars’. At least this would explain Hogarth's choice of this particular site in Tottenham Court between the Adam and Eve and King's Head for the ‘march to Finchley’ of 1745, showing Lee and Harper's booth in the background. In view of Hogarth's obvious knowledge of the details of Southwark Fair in 1733, the probability of this production of Bateman's being the inspiration for much of The March to Finchley is enhanced by the fact that Lee and Harper took it on to Southwark Fair, where it was acted on 10th September. This ran at their second booth at the lower end of Mermaid Court, together with The Harlot's Progress. At their main booth they played Jephtha's Rash Vow, the characters for which are seen (in part) on the balcony of their booth in the centre of Southwark Fair. Following Jephtha's Rash Vow was the pantomime of The Fall of Phaeton.

In his very last work, The Bathos of 1764, I believe that Hogarth recalled The Fall of Phaeton. Sick, bitter, and disillusioned, with all his hopes dashed and his revolutionary schemes scorned, Hogarth produced what is still a defiant, though rather self-pitying engraving, and I feel that the fall of Phaeton had become a very personal image. The print itself is more obviously personal than any other which Hogarth produced: expiring Time lies surrounded by the broken remnants of Hogarth's career, in the form of mangled remains of many of the pictures closest to his heart. Thus, for example, the palette of the manifesto Self-Portrait of 1745 is split; nearby lies the now-broken bow from Strolling Actresses. As for the rest, it is best described by way of reference to the synopsis of The Fall of Phaeton (printed in 1733):

[Phaeton] ascends in the chariot through the air to light the world. In the course the Horses prove unruly, go out of their way, and set the World on Fire. … the whole intermixed with comic scenes between Punch, Harlequin, Scaramouch, Pierrot and Columbine.²⁶

Punch, Harlequin, and Scaramouch were indeed all to be seen on Lee and Harper's balcony in Southwark Fair … :²⁷ in his last engraving, Hogarth has omitted any ‘comic scenes’. But, in its wholly natural announcement of what is really a quite extraordinary mixture of low comedy and potentially epic grandeur (certainly of subject), the pantomime synopsis suggests both the very nature of Hogarth's art and the closeness of the popular theatre to his instinctively parodic habit of mind. The very title of his last print, The Bathos, suggests as much, as does the final characteristic flicker of humour—Hogarth had to ‘set the World on Fire’ in a pub-sign.

Notes

1. Hogarth had been apprenticed only to ‘a mean engraver of arms on plate’; he then turned himself into an independent engraver and publisher of prints (c. 1720), and finally into a painter, largely self-taught. In December, 1727, he was commissioned to produce a tapestry-design which Morris, the tapestry-maker, refused to pay for. Hogarth sued for payment and in the process established his right to work as a painter. Cf. R. B. Paulson, Hogarth, his Life, Art, and Times, 2 Vols., New Haven and London, 1971, hereafter Paulson, Life. I am grateful to Mr. Neill Menneer for taking the photographs which accompany this paper.

2. Rosenfeld, ‘Was Hogarth a Scene Painter?’, Theatre Notebook, VIII, [1952?], p. 18; J. T. Smith, Ancient Topography of London (1815), p. 60. I cannot see that Professor Paulson is aware of this tradition, and he has consistently attacked the early attributions to Hogarth and ‘the idea that he painted publicly’ before 1726/7; cf., e.g., R. B. Paulson, ‘Hogarth the Painter’ (review of Hogarth exhibition), The Burlington Magazine, CXIV (1972), pp. 71-79, v. pp. 72-3.

3. Cf. also S. Rosenfeld, The Theatre of the London Fairs in the 18th Century, Cambridge, 1960, pp. 83-4, 28, hereafter Rosenfeld. She states (p. 19) that The Siege of Troy was ‘the most famous and elaborate of drolls’. Poor Elkannah Settle! He ended up playing a dragon in the booths, dressed in a green leather costume of his own invention (Rosenfeld, p. 20 etc.).

4. Late in life, Hogarth held a sign-painters' exhibition at which he himself exhibited (Paulson, Life, II, pp. 334 ff.). The Sign-board for a Paviour (v. L. Gowing, Hogarth, Tate Exhibition catalogue, London, 1971, no. 9) is only grudgingly admitted to be Hogarth's by Paulson, (Hogarth the Painter, art. cit., p. 74), but it is quite inconceivable, in terms of the phenomenon of style (on which Paulson apparently bases so many of his criticisms), that the Sign-board should be a late imitation of a sign-painter's technique. To accept this picture but not The Carpenter's Yard (Tate Gallery) is even odder.

5. Paulson (Life, II, pp. 339-40) describes the coronation arrangements. Rosenfeld correctly identified the Oram referred to by J. T. Smith as William (‘Old’) Oram (d. 1777) rather than Edward his son (ff. 1770-1800) from whom J. T. Smith learnt the story. Old Oram and Hogarth would thus have been about an age in 1724, and they certainly collaborated later in life on the Coronation when Oram was Master-carpenter to His Majesty's Board of Works and Hogarth Serjeant-Painter (cf. Dictionary of National Biography). Rosenfeld (‘Was Hogarth a Scene-Painter?’) mentions the fact that Hogarth definitely painted scenery on one occasion when he and Garrick helped to put on ‘a vulgar parody on the ghost scene in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar’ (cf. D.N.B. entry on Dr. John Hoadly, Hogarth's friend, who wrote the parody).

6. Southwark Fair is illustrated and discussed by R. B. Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works, 2 Vols., New Haven, 1965, no. 131, pl. 137, hereafter Graphic Works. But Paulson is wrong in arguing for the ‘generalised’ nature of the fair-scene, e.g., on the grounds that Tamerlane (The Fall of Bajazet) was not performed that year by Bullock and Cibber at Southwark, but rather, at Bartholomew Fair. In fact, they were surely performing it at Southwark, intermixed with Fielding's adaptation of Molière's The Miser (Rosenfeld, p. 94), it is just that The London Stage (v.n. 8 below) gives no details at all of Cibber and Bullock's booth at Southwark Fair in 1733; v. J. Genest, Some Account of the English Stage etc., 10 Vols., 1832, Vol. III, p. 401. Another point which my argument here explains is that raised by Paulson (Life, I, p. 320), ‘why Hogarth chose Southwark Fair, rather than Bartholomew, with which he was so much more familiar’ (itself a confusing presumption).

7. Another such, Rich's farce The Stage Mutiny, is discussed below. The acting of The Harlot's Progress at the fair may conceivably be referred to in the scene at the right of the print which echoes the first plate of the series. The girl is ‘a close copy of the Harlot as she appears in the first plate’ (Paulson, Graphic Works, I, 156) and in addition, as Miss Anne Lloyd has pointed out to me, the gesture of the would-be seducer in raising the girl's chin is identical with that of Mother Needham in the same plate.

8. Performance dates and details throughout have been checked against The London Stage, 1660-1800, five parts, Carbondale, Ill., 1960-1968, edited respectively by W. van Lennep, Emmett L. Avery, A. H. Scouten, G. W. Stone Jr., and C. B. Hogan; and against C. B. Hogan, Shakespeare in the Theatre, 1701-1800, 2 Vols., 1952 and 1957. As these are arranged in calendar-form, in order to avoid too tedious a proliferation of footnotes, no further reference will be made to these works save for specific details. Falstaff Examining his Recruits is illustrated in F. Antal, Hogarth and his Place in European Art, London, 1962, pls. 19(a) and (b).

9. Cf. Graphic Works, no. 131, pl. 137 for details of The Stage Mutiny and of the engraving as a whole.

10. The quotation is from an inscription on the back ascribing the painting to Hogarth; v. Gowing, exhibition catalogue, No. 196. It was in the ‘Painting Room’ at John Rich's Covent Garden that the ‘Sublime Society of Beef Steaks’ met, of which Hogarth was a founding-member (see below). Perhaps I may point out that an identical Turk's turban is falling off the collapsing stage in Southwark Fair, another slight circumstantial detail to add to the many more convincing ones in support of the inscription and style of this painting since Paulson bafflingly claimed that this picture was not by Hogarth (Hogarth the Painter, art. cit., p. 79, Note ‘196’). None of Paulson's arguments makes any sense and the points he raises can be readily explained in terms of characterisation or medium. Nor is this painting surely to be considered in terms of a comparison with Hogarth's portraits; in addition to the theatrical connection (and Bajazet, Emperor of the Turks, was to be seen regularly on the stage of Covent Garden) the artists met at The Turk's Head tavern in Gerrard Street. Here might indeed be a brilliant ‘imitation’, in a strictly eighteenth-century sense, of a sign-painter's style.

11. Graphic Works, respectively No. 34, pl. 37, and No. 45, pl. 48. In view of the tradition of Hogarth's employment there, it is worth noting that the stage of Drury Lane is portrayed in 1724 in A Just View of the British Stage.

12. Graphic Works. No. 109, pl. 113; J. Nichols, Biographical Anecdotes of Hogarth (2nd. ed.), 1782, pp. 133-140, pp. 435-6.

13. Paulson, Life, I, p. 291.

14. Cf. Ibid, pp. 394 ff. Strolling Actresses is no. 156, pl. 168, in Graphic Works.

15. See below, in the discussion of The Bathos.

16. Paulson, Life, I, p. 398.

17. I am grateful to my colleague Mr. Simon Shepherd for first pointing out to me the dominance of the operatic version during this period. I discuss The Tempest in more detail in a forthcoming study of Hogarth's Shakespeare paintings.

18. Cuzzoni appears on a theatre-sign in Masquerades and Operas with a nobleman begging her ‘Pray accept £8,000’. There is a discussion in Phaeton in the Suds, following the passage quoted above, concerning the gross over-payment of foreign, compared with English, performers. Dr. Arbuthnot was the supposed author of The Devil to Pay in St. James's, and Nichols (p. 157) pointed out that Hogarth is mentioned in a complimentary manner in it.

19. Nichols, op. cit., p. 211.

20. Paulson, Life, I, p. 292.

21. Graphic Works no. 180, pl. 192, I, p. 203; there is a somewhat confusing reference ibid., no. 111, to Leveridge's having written the music to Fielding's song ‘The Roast Beef of Old England’. This latter is the one identified here, and not that in The Grub Street Opera.

22. Cf. The London Stage, Part 3, Vol. 2, 6th illustration (The Roast Beef Cantata); Paulson, Life, I, p. 548 n. 58. Another favourite song of Leveridge's was Of English Brown Beer, the superiority of which was also admitted by craven foreigners in Fielding's Don Quixote. Hogarth's Beer Street (1751) comes to mind, and his pair of etchings, The Invasion, France and England (1756), is more specific still:

    ‘With lanthern jaws, and croaking Gut
    See how the half-starv'd Frenchmen Strut,
    And call us English Dogs!
    But soon we'll teach these bragging Foes,
    That Beef and Beer give heavier Blows,
    Than Soup and Roasted Frogs’.

23. Graphic Works no. 111, pl. 116.

24. Ibid, respectively no. 237, pl. 277, and no. 216, pl. 240; for The Bathos drawing and engraving cf. Paulson, Life, pls. 313(a) and 313(b). Among the several changes from drawing to print is the addition of Phaeton's chariot (identified as such here, identified by Paulson, Graphic Works I, p. 260, as ‘Apollo and his horses dead’).

25. Rosenfeld, pp. 124-5.

26. Rosenfeld, pp. 40-1.

27. Scaramouch is mixed up with the actors on the main balcony. The Fall of Phaeton was actually last performed in this year. It was distinct from the very superior production of The Fall of Phaeton: with Harlequin a Captive, first performed at Drury Lane on February 28, 1735/6. This was by William Pritchard and featured music by Thomas Arne and (interestingly enough) scenes by Francis Hayman. In the long and elaborate cast there is no Scaramouch nor Punch.