Hurlothrumbo; or, The super-natural is an 18th-century English nonsense play written by the dancing-master Samuel Johnson of Cheshire, and published in 1729. The spectacle incorporates both musical and spoken elements. The play opened on March 29, 1729 at the Theatre Royal Haymarket.[1]
Writing in 1855, Frederick Lawrence says of the play:[2]
The extraordinary drama of Hurlothrumbo, above alluded to, was then (mirabiledictu!) the talk and admiration of the town. A more curious or a more insane production has seldom issued from human pen.
— The Life of Henry Fielding, p. 21.
The author himself performed as a principal in the play, with singing, dancing, playing fiddle, and walking on stilts. The novelist and playwright Henry Fielding mentions the play in his novel Tom Jones:
Thus the famous author of Hurlothrumbo told a learned bishop, that the reason his lordship could not taste the excellence of his piece was, that he did not read it with a fiddle in his hand; which instrument he himself had always had in his own, when he composed it.