author
Hurlothrumbo
An eccentric dancing-master from Cheshire, he became famous for the wonderfully chaotic 1729 stage extravaganza Hurlothrumbo. His brief burst of theatrical fame came from a play so odd and energetic that it was remembered long after its first performances.
2 Audiobooks
About the author
Samuel Johnson, often nicknamed "Maggoty" Johnson, was an English dancing-master and dramatist from Cheshire. He is best known for Hurlothrumbo; or, The Super-Natural, a wildly unconventional play published in 1729 that mixed spoken scenes with music and spectacle.
The play made Johnson a striking figure in London theater. Contemporary accounts note that he performed in it himself as Lord Flame, famously fiddling, dancing, and even appearing on stilts. That larger-than-life style helped make Hurlothrumbo notorious, and the work was later mocked by Henry Fielding in The Author's Farce.
Although little else about his life is widely recorded, Johnson remains memorable as one of the great oddities of 18th-century performance culture: a provincial dance teacher who briefly turned himself into a theatrical sensation through sheer extravagance and invention.