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On 25 May 1676, Thomas Shadwell's satiric play The Virtuoso opened to great acclaim at Dorset Garden, with King Charles II and many notables in attendance. The play was the latest in a series of attacks by wits and churchmen on the new science associated with the Royal Society.1 Robert Hooke, the Society's best-known curator of experiments, did not see the play on its opening night, but he was told about it that evening at Garaway's coffeehouse.2 When Hooke went to see The Virtuoso in its second week with some friends, he left the theater convinced that the play was a personal attack on him. His diary entry for that day ends in a wounded staccato: "Damned Doggs. Vindica me Deus. People almost pointed" (2 June 1676, p. 235). The next day, the situation worsened. Back at Garaway's, his regular haunt, more people Hooke knew "[came] from Play [and] Floutingly smiled" at him (3 June 1676, p. 235). As his diary shows, Hooke was asked about Shadwell's play several more times in the coming weeks. Playgoers were of course correct to look to Hooke as one of The Virtuoso's targets, for the play had directly parodied material from his Micrographia (1665) among other recent Royal Society works.3 But perhaps what troubled Hooke most was how Shadwell's attack from the stage confirmed his own worst fears, namely, that the new science could be seen as a species of drama and his empirical work merely a kind of comic performance. In the 1650s, after all, Cambridge Platonist Henry More could refer to the work of the new science as that "Mechanical kind of Genius that loves to be tumbling of and trying tricks with the Matter (which they call making Experiments.)"4 Spectacular public shows of natural magic, legerdemain, and other tricks with objects made the association of empirical manipulation with theatricality and deceit almost inevitable. Given the long history of natural magic and alchemy and their empirical repertoires, historian G. MacDonald Ross is correct to note how "mechanists of the seventeenth century had a considerable problem if they wanted to maintain that they were different in kind from the magicians of old, and were not simply the first generation of successful magicians."5 Since the late 1650s, Hooke...