Hey presto!

Traveling "medicine shows," both ancient and modern, galvanized Jonathan Swift's imagination. Dubbing such multifaceted vagabond entertainments his "Stage-Itinerant" or "Mountebank's Stage," Swift mimicked their argot, puffery, and slapstick in A Tale of a Tub (1704). The author reveals how the stage-itinerant not only furnished the Tale with its irresistible model but still parades that missing link, long sought, which conjoins the dual objects of Swift's ire: "gross Corruptions in [both] Religion and Learning."