Hurlothrumbo; or, The super-natural is an 18th-century English nonsense play written by the dancing-master Samuel Johnson of Cheshire, and published in 1729. The spectacle incorporates both musical and spoken elements. The play opened on March 29, 1729 at the Theatre Royal Haymarket. [1]
Writing in 1855, Frederick Lawrence says of the play: [2]
The extraordinary drama of Hurlothrumbo, above alluded to, was then (mirabiledictu!) the talk and admiration of the town. A more curious or a more insane production has seldom issued from human pen.
— The Life of Henry Fielding, p. 21.
The author himself performed as a principal in the play, with singing, dancing, playing fiddle, and walking on stilts. The novelist and playwright Henry Fielding mentions the play in his novel Tom Jones :
Thus the famous author of Hurlothrumbo told a learned bishop, that the reason his lordship could not taste the excellence of his piece was, that he did not read it with a fiddle in his hand; which instrument he himself had always had in his own, when he composed it.
A significant early collection of graffiti was published under the pseudonym Hurlothrumbo in 1731. The book, titled The Merry-Thought: or, the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany, transcribes graffiti found in public latrines in England, much of it humorous or sexual. The volume may have been attributed to Hurlothrumbo by the publisher or editor to benefit from the popularity of Johnson's play. [3]
Hurlothrumbo is said [4] to have been the name of the steamship on which Emperor Norton came to San Francisco. Norton then went into partnership with the ship's engineer to use the engine from the scrapped ship to power equipment for gold mining camps, an apparatus also called Hurlothrumbo. [4]
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Henry Fielding was an English novelist, irony writer, and dramatist known for earthy humour and satire. His comic novel Tom Jones is still widely appreciated. He and Samuel Richardson are seen as founders of the traditional English novel. He also holds a place in the history of law enforcement, having used his authority as a magistrate to found the Bow Street Runners, London's first intermittently funded, full-time police force.
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This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1729.
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Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
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The Author's Farce and the Pleasures of the Town is a play by the English playwright and novelist Henry Fielding, first performed on 30 March 1730 at the Little Theatre, Haymarket. Written in response to the Theatre Royal's rejection of his earlier plays, The Author's Farce was Fielding's first theatrical success. The Little Theatre allowed Fielding the freedom to experiment, and to alter the traditional comedy genre. The play ran during the early 1730s and was altered for its run starting 21 April 1730 and again in response to the Actor Rebellion of 1733. Throughout its life, the play was coupled with several different plays, including The Cheats of Scapin and Fielding's Tom Thumb.
The Covent-Garden Journal was an English literary periodical published twice a week for most of 1752. It was edited and almost entirely funded by novelist, playwright, and essayist Henry Fielding, under the pseudonym, "Sir Alexander Drawcansir, Knt. Censor of Great Britain". It was Fielding's fourth and final periodical, and one of his last written works.
Samuel Johnson was an English dancing-master, dramatist and violinist, known especially for his 1729 stage work Hurlothrumbo. This was satirised by Henry Fielding.
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This last distinction is quite often visible in the basic categorical differences between anthologies on the one hand, and all other types of collections on the other, for it is in the one that we read poems of excellence, the "best of English poetry," and it is in the other that we read poems of interest. Out of the differences between a principle of selection and a principle of collection, then, comes a difference in aesthetic value, which is precisely what is at issue in the debates over the "proper" material for inclusion into the canon.
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