Overview

In this book the author reveals how medicine shows, both ancient and modern, galvanized Jonathan Swift's imagination and inspired his wittiest satiric voices. Swift dubbed these multifaceted traveling entertainments his Stage-itinerant or ""Mountebank's Stage."" In the course of arguing that the stage-itinerant formed an irresistible model for A Tale of a Tub, Ormsby-Lennon also surmises that the mountebank's stage will disclose that missing link, long sought, which connects the twin objects of Swift's ire: gross corruptions in both religion and learning. In the early modern medicine show, the quack doctor delivered a loquacious harangue, infused with magico-mysticism and pseudoscience, high-astounding promises, and boastful narcissism. To help him sell his panaceas and snake-oil, he employed a Merry Andrew and a motley troupe of performers. From their stages, many quacks also peddled their own books, almanacs, and other ephemera, providing Grub Street with many of its best-sellers. Hacks practiced, quite literally, as quacks. Merry Andrew and mountebank traded costumes, whiskers, and voices. Swift apes them all in the Tale. Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.  

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9781644531150

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Ormsby-Lennon's thesis is both provocatively original and as old as Jonathan Swift's Tale of a Tub itself: he argues that Swift's greatest satire is irreligious and that the nature of Swift's irreligion in the Tale is willful illogicality, particularly the kaleidoscopic way which Swift rotates the variegated stuff that sustains that illogicality. Ormsby-Lennon (Villanova Univ.) carries this thesis into many dimly lit corners of the archive, centrally and most importantly the late Restoration and more generally the history of satire and learning. This array of contexts historicizes the Tale as never before. Indeed, this book's chief strength is its careful, sustained exhumation of so much relevant material. The author has unearthed enough unfamiliar sources for Swift's satire as to require a lexicon for ready comprehension--terms like terrae filius and circumforaneity make regular appearances, for example. The mountebank's stage, however, with its connotations of itinerancy, volubility, and fraudulence, becomes the chief metaphor for Swift's method throughout the Tale. Even if any number of Ormsby-Lennon's claims come under revision, qualification, or correction, the book's sheer contextualizing detail makes it an invaluable, sustaining resource for future Swift scholarship. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.--CHOICE Hey Presto! Swift and the Quacks is a work of vast erudition and sharp insight, and provides one of the most interesting recent developments in Swift studies.--American Behavioral Scientist

"""Ormsby-Lennon’s thesis is both provocatively original and as old as Jonathan Swift’s Tale of a Tub itself […] Indeed, this book’s chief strength is its careful, sustained exhumation of so much relevant material. […] the book’s sheer contextualizing detail makes it an invaluable, sustaining resource for future Swift scholarship."" * Choice * ""There is a significant crop of books on Swift, of which the most important is Hugh Ormsby-Lennon’s Hey Presto! Swift and the Quacks […] It is a work of vast erudi­tion and sharp insight […] and provides one of the most interesting recent developments in Swift studies."" * Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century * ""Hey Presto! presents the type of “history” Swift himself preferred, the charged rhetorical version that regularly issued from his own gene of satire."" * The Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer *"

Author Information

Hugh Ormsby-Lennon is Professor Emeritus of English at Villanova University

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