* * * *
*
On the first of April will be
performed at the Play-house in the
Hay-market, an Opera call’d ‘The
Cruelty of Atreus’.
N.B. The Scene wherein Thyestes
eats his own Children, is to be
performed by the famous Mr Psalmanazar,
[1] lately
arrived from Formosa; The whole Supper
being set to Kettle-drums.
R.
[Footnote 1: George Psalmanazar, who never told
his real name and precise birthplace, was an impostor
from Languedoc, and 31 years old in 1711. He
had been educated in a Jesuit college, where he heard
stories of the Jesuit missions in Japan and Formosa,
which suggested to him how he might thrive abroad
as an interesting native. He enlisted as a soldier,
and had in his character of Japanese only a small notoriety
until, at Sluys, a dishonest young chaplain of Brigadier
Lauder’s Scotch regiment, saw through the trick
and favoured it, that he might recommend himself to
the Bishop of London for promotion. He professed
to have converted Psalmanazar, baptized him, with
the Brigadier for godfather, got his discharge from
the regiment, and launched him upon London under the
patronage of Bishop Compton. Here Psalmanazar,
who on his arrival was between nineteen and twenty
years old, became famous in the religious world.
He supported his fraud by invention of a language and
letters, and of a Formosan religion. To oblige
the Bishop he translated the church catechism into
‘Formosan,’ and he published in 1704 ’an
historical and geographical Description of Formosa,’
of which a second edition appeared in the following
year. It contained numerous plates of imaginary
scenes and persons. His gross and puerile absurdities
in print and conversation—such as his statements
that the Formosans sacrificed eighteen thousand male
infants every year, and that the Japanese studied
Greek as a learned tongue,—excited a distrust
that would have been fatal to the success of his fraud,
even with the credulous, if he had not forced himself
to give colour to his story by acting the savage in
men’s eyes. But he must really, it was thought,
be a savage who fed upon roots, herbs, and raw flesh.
He made, however, so little by the imposture, that
he at last confessed himself a cheat, and got his living
as a well-conducted bookseller’s hack for many
years before his death, in 1763, aged 84. In
1711, when this jest was penned, he had not yet publicly
eaten his own children, i.e. swallowed his words
and declared his writings forgeries. In 1716
there was a subscription of L20 or L30 a year raised
for him as a Formosan convert. It was in 1728
that he began to write that formal confession of his
fraud, which he left for publication after his death,
and whereby he made his great public appearance as
Thyestes.
This jest against Psalmanazar was expunged from the
first reprint of the Spectator in 1712, and
did not reappear in the lifetime of Steele or Addison,
or until long after it had been amply justified.]
