These afterpieces offered what turned out to be an irresistible mix of spectacular pleasures: silent pan- tomimes, often gorgeously choreographed, that em- ployed Italian commedia dell’arte characters in farcical routines, which were intermixed with operatic arias and stately dances, all of which were enlivened by elaborate machine entries, dazzling sets, and all the other spectacular tricks of eighteenth-century stage- craft. In their juxtaposition of high art and low farce, they claimed kinship with the Stuart court masque, but they were really very different from those sub- limely classical affairs, where the serene majesty and classical order of the masque was only temporarily disturbed by the incursions of the antimasque. 2 In eighteenth-century pantomime, medley, surprise, and misrule—all centered in the figure of Harlequin— were the leading pleasures. In this essay I will suggest that far from being “mere” entertainment, the popu- larity of Rich’s Necromancer stems in great measure from its deployment of that very rhetoric of surprise and misrule to represent the outsized ambition (and mediate the attendant anxieties) of natural philosophy in the wake of Sir Isaac Newton and the new indus- try of commercial and educational “public science” that his achievement called into being. In the conjur- ing of Harlequin Faustus, we can locate an ironic dou- ble for the heady (and, to some, suspect) “conjuring” that contemporaries recognized in the glorification post-Newtonian natural philosophy. Though we know that the dueling Harlequin Faus- tus afterpieces were not the first pantomimes to tread the boards, Rich’s Necromancer and Thurmond’s Har- lequin Doctor Faustus are rightly credited with igniting the Hanoverian rage for Harlequin and establishing the British pantomime form. We can judge this from the vast body of printed ephemera that these shows spawned: a handful of quick-and-dirty lives of Faus- I BEGIN WITH A SCENE THAT HAS SERVED AS A touchstone for John Rich and the eighteenth-century stage, a scene that is arguably the most spectacular theatrical moment of the 1720s—and quite possibly the most famous beside the gallows reprieve in Gay’s Beggar’s Opera: The Doctor waves his Wand, and the Scene changes to a Wood; a monstrous Dragon appears, and descends about half way down the Stage, and from each Claw drops a Dæmon representing divers Grotesque figures, viz. Harlequin, Punch, Scaramouch, and Mezzetin. Four Fe- male Spirits rise in Character to each Figure, and join in an Antick Dance; as they are performing, a Clock strikes; the Doctor is seiz’d by Spirits, and thrown into the Dragon’s Mouth, which opens and shuts several times, ’till he has swallow’d the Doctor down, belching out Flames of Fire, and roaring in a horrible Manner. The Dragon rises slowly; the four Daemons that drop[ped] from his Claws, take hold of ’em again, and rise with it; The Spirits vanish; and other Daemons rejoice in the fol- lowing Words: “Now triumph Hell, and Fiends be gay / The Sorc’rer is become our Prey.” 1 This is the stupendous grand finale of The Necromancer of course, the pantomime featuring John Rich in the role of Harlequin Faustus that enthralled London au- diences in the theatrical season of 1723–24. Indeed, so enthralled were the good citizens of London that they were voracious consumers of all things Harle- quin Faustus that year. In Drury Lane, the other patent theatre across town, John Thurmond had first staged his Harlequin Doctor Faustus some three weeks earlier. Both performances offered what was then a radically new kind of entertainment—an unrepen- tantly lightweight dramatic confection that was served up after the evening’s main play of serious tragedy or proper comedy. 238 15 Harlequin Newton: John Rich’s Necromancer and the Public Science of the 1720s Al Coppola