Stock characters named “Nobody” and “Somebody” were mainstays of British performance culture in the mid- to late eighteenth century. Playbills and newspaper advertisements show that these roles were popular with audiences in London, Dublin, and Edinburgh, as well as on the regional stages. Men and women alike took on these personae to deliver songs, prologues, and epilogues, often as part of benefit performances where they chose their most crowd-pleasing roles to maximize ticket sales. Some of the pieces spoken by Nobody and Somebody were popular enough to make their way into print, excerpted in novels and miscellanies. The duo appeared in George Alexander Stevens's wildly popular Lecture on Heads (1764), which traveled across the Atlantic to stages in Charleston, Philadelphia, and New York, continuing to be performed in the early Republic until the nineteenth century. Offstage, the figures were staples of visual culture; as Terry Robinson has shown, audience awareness of these figures from Romantic-era political cartoons formed an important backdrop for Mary Robinson's theatrical afterpiece Nobody (1794).

名为“Nobody”和“Somebody”的股票角色是 18 世纪中后期英国表演文化的中流砥柱。宣传单和报纸广告显示，这些角色在伦敦、都柏林和爱丁堡以及地区舞台上都很受欢迎。男人和女人都扮演这些角色来提供歌曲、序言和尾声，通常作为福利表演的一部分，他们选择最受观众欢迎的角色以最大限度地提高门票销量。没有人和某人所说的一些作品很受欢迎，可以印刷出来，摘录在小说和杂记中。这对搭档出现在乔治·亚历山大·史蒂文斯广受欢迎的《头脑风暴》中（1764 年），它穿越大西洋，在查尔斯顿、费城和纽约的舞台上演出，在共和国早期一直持续到 19 世纪。在台下，这些人物是视觉文化的主要内容；正如特里·罗宾逊 (Terry Robinson) 所展示的，观众对浪漫主义时代政治漫画中的这些人物的认识构成了玛丽·罗宾逊 (Mary Robinson) 的戏剧后作《无名之辈》( Nobody )（1794 年）的重要背景。