Bewitching Politics and Unruly Performances: Mother Shipton Gets her Kicks in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Popular and Print Culture
Department of English
Haverford College
370 Lancaster Avenue
Haverford
PA 19041
USA
lmcgrane{at}haverford.edu
| Abstract |
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This article explores the textual and theatrical spaces in which the figure of Mother Shipton trifled with history, hierarchy and seditious discursive strategies in Restoration and eighteenth-century London. Shipton resonated in the popular imagination not merely as a faux-historical personage but also as a fantasy hermeneutic key operating outside of linear history, a linguistic marker of oracular knowledge communicated by performances that belied a tidy shift from oral to print-centred genres in the period.
Key Words: print oracle witchcraft popular culture pantomime Fielding, Henry orality eighteenth century Defoe, Daniel Mother Shipton