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PERFORMING “AKIMBO” 33
erotic about the rhetoric used by Peacham and Evelyn that, by Hogarth’s day,
could only be described as homosexuality.
The virtuosi, as I have shown, were collectors of knacks, showy but
insubstantial things. That what went on in the virtuoso’s cabinet could appear
like homosexuality was especially so, given the multiple meanings of knacks (or
knick-knacks) as visually engaging but lacking substance. Most often, knacks
were mechanical contrivances or toys like the artificial grottoes and speaking
statues collected by the virtuosi (Stone 1965:717); or the “nice” (curious,
precise) apparatuses used by the virtuosi in their scientific experiments.
(“Gimcrack,” the title character in Thomas Shadwell’s Virtuoso, is a variant of
knack.) But a knack could also be an affected person like Butler’s “huffing
courtier” or Gimcrack’s effusive friend Sir Formal Trifle; and, in the latter
context, “to knack” could mean to speak affectedly (“knack” 1989).
In Shadwell’s comedy, Sir Formal Trifle’s verbal excessiveness is punished by
the young, normatively heterosexual couples who are Shadwell’s protagonists:
his excess casts him as dubiously heterosexual, sexually suspect. The young
couples trap Formal in a dark vault with another man disguised as a woman; his
excessive speech is turned into excessive sexuality as he attempts to rape the
other man in a mistakenly homosexual encounter that is presented as sufficient
punishment for his verbal offenses.
Similarly, in Edward Ward’s satire “Of the Vertuoso’s [sic] Club” (1710), the
virtuosi are punished by arousing their curiosity about a particular “knack”—
antilaxative butt plugs used by “Egyptians,” which the virtuosi enthusiastically
smell, lick, nibble, and discourse on until the trick (knack) is disclosed:
With that one began to Spit, another Keck, a third Spew, a fourth, in a
Passion, crying, Z—s, Sir, I hope they did not wear them in their Arses! As
sure, reply’d the Gentleman, as you have had them in your Mouths.
(1710:23).
A homosexual, then, could be a knack or a gimcrack; he could also, like a
virtuoso, be a keeper of knacks. Laurence Senelick has suggested that a typical
effeminate’s occupation was maintaining toy shops, known as knickknackatories
(Senelick 39; “Knick-Knackatory” 1989). Finally, as “knackers”
were testicles, the homosexual could be at once a collector of knack(er)s and
castrated (knackered). Like the similarly castrated Sir Formal, he could also
speak in knacks; which is as much as to say that his speech was knackered.
Likewise, the fribble had been commonly described as incapable of feeling or
acting on his feelings. In 1712, Richard Steele wrote in The Spectator that the
fribble was impotent in mind, so that “those who are guilty of it [are] incapable of
pursuing what they themselves approve” (rpt. in Chalmers 4:210). Garrick’s
Fribbleriad, referred to earlier, described them as lacking power, unable to
realize pleasure, “[f]or ever wishing, ne’er enjoying” (23). The idea was more
fully developed in 1789, when Lavater described the fribble as lacking