“All deformed Shapes”: Figuring the Posture-Master as Popular Performer in Early Eighteenth-Century England

The early eighteenth-century entertainment economy can be characterized by its variety and its modernity. One component of this modern entertainment economy that has received little attention is the posture-master—in contemporary parlance, the contortionist. His highly embodied entertainments, which strip away prop, sound, costume, and plot, became in the early eighteenth century markedly consistent features in the advertising pages of popular urban newspapers. Posture-masters, with their tricksy facility at reshaping and deforming the human body, seem to offer a ready-made analog to the popular image of the modern audience in need of education. Four of the most famous posture-masters of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—Joseph Clarke, Mr. Higgins, John Riner, and William Phillips—gained renown through their marvelous bodily manipulations. Though there is little archival evidence of such performers or performances in the first person, a surprising quantity of information from newspapers helps us re-situate them in a larger historical context, even perhaps reclaim their perversion from the normativizing stories and practices of critical debate. Though one might expect posture-masters to play marginal roles in the eighteenth-century entertainment economy, they in fact speak very much to the consolidation of the modern cultural landscape in which entertainment as a category is becoming a viable, and even threateningly dominant, mode of consumption.