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In the space of a few years in the 1730s Fielding became the most dominant playwright in London since John Dryden ( Hume 1988: ix). Indeed, no less a judge than George Bernard Shaw declared without irony that Fielding was "the greatest dramatist, with the single exception of Shakespeare, produced in England between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century" ( Shaw 1909: xiii). Fielding achieved this success in part by experimenting with new concepts and new forms of comedy and satire and in part by adapting to the modern stage the "Old Comedy" of his favorite Aristophanes, who impudently ridiculed reallife characters. In this, Fielding was regrettably too successful: his politically charged satires Pasquin ( 1736) and The Historical Register ( 1737) were so popular, and so galling to the government, that they precipitated the Theatrical Licensing Act of 1737, which closed Fielding's theater and ended his career as dramatist ( Liesenfeld 1984). Indeed, the censorial powers it gave to the Lord Chamberlain would remain in force for 230 years and were invoked to stop productions of plays by, among others, Shaw and Henrik Ibsen, Samuel Beckett, and Tennessee Williams.
Silenced by an act of Parliament, Fielding entered the Middle Temple in November 1737 in order to prepare himself for the bar, to which he would be admitted less than three years later. But expenses were heavy -- for law books to read and pleasures to indulge. Fielding struggled with difficulty to support his wife Charlotte Fielding and daughter by writing for the antiministerial journals The Craftsman and his own paper, The Champion ( 1739-41). The essays of wit and humor that he published in these periodicals are comparable in quality to those of Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steele in The Tatler ( 1709-11) and The Spectator ( 1711-12), his great models in this literary genre. It was, however, an entirely unexpected and improbable event of November 1740 that changed the direction of Fielding's literary fortunes. This was the publication of Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded, a hugely popular first novel written entirely in letters by Samuel Richardson, whose professional credentials were those of a master printer. While confined for debt in a bailiff's sponging house (a half-way house to prison for those charged with debt), Fielding responded to this literary phenomenon by parodying Richardson's novel in Shamela ( April 1741). In a few months' time he would offer readers his own, alternative conception of the art of fiction. Joseph Andrews ( 1742), by Fielding's own definition in the preface was a new species of writing, "a comic Epic-Poem in Prose," written in imitation of Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote. Before the 1740s had run its course, these two great rivals would publish their masterpieces: Richardson's Clarissa ( 1747-48), the greatest, and the only, tragic novel of the century; and Fielding's Tom Jones ( 1749). The direction in which Fielding took the English novel would lead to Tobias Smollett and Charles Dickens, Thackeray and Kingsley Amis. Fielding's last novel, Amelia ( 1751), is in a different, darker mode -- one, as ever with him, entirely innovative. It tells the unconventional story not of a courtship, but of the troubled marriage of the principal characters, while at the same time offering the reader a kind of anatomy of evils in the constitution of England. In this respect Amelia may be considered the first novel of social protest and reform in English. The compliment Shaw paid Fielding as a dramatist has its parallel in one paid him by the late Anthony Burgess, who, reviewing Fielding's life in The Observer ( 29 October 1989), called him "the man who is, conceivably, England's greatest novelist.". . .
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