Comedy, Too Fatal Emblem: Anne Damer and Occult Theatricality

Sculptor, actress in private theatricals, novelist, executrix of her godfather Horace Walpole, and legatee of Strawberry Hill, Anne Seymour Damer (1749–1828) was also vilified in libellous pamphlet satires as a Whig and a Sapphist. My article explores Damer’s figuration of comedy as a fatal emblem of her life, a life interpellated by the violent comedy of satirical abuse. Tracing the intricate multimedia landscape that hosts Damer as a figure of sexual scandal from the 1770s to the early 1800s, this essay examines the interpenetration of theatricality, publicity, and fictionality that marks Damer’s life and career, as well as her extravagantly reparative capacity, as a skilful manipulator of artifice, for pleasure and diversion. My analysis of intermedial relations between theatre and print focuses on genres with a key—à clef—and the occulting, emblematizing, and deflection that is theatricality’s prerogative across a range of print, performance, and visual forms.