Plays: Volume I, 1728-1731

Cover illustrationThis beautiful volume, we are told in the Preface, “is the first of three Wesleyan Edition volumes containing the whole of Fielding’s surviving dramatic works, except for two plays already published as part of the Miscellanies, Volume Two (Eurydice and The Wedding Day)” (viii). Thus it contains the texts as established by Lockwood of Love in Several Masques, The Temple Beau, The Author’s Farce in both the 1730 and 1734 versions (including The Pleasures of the Town), Tom Thumb, The Coffee-House Politician (Rape Upon Rape), The Tragedy of Tragedies, and The Letter-Writers. There are also a General Introduction, an introduction for each play, and four appendices, as well as an index of names, places, and topics. The General Introduction contains a useful account of the situation of playwrights that Fielding found himself in when he began writing for the stage. But Lockwood’s scholarship particularly shines in the specific introductions—which discuss the composition and sources, the stage history, the critical history, and the textual history for each play—and in the explanatory notes.

It is hard to claim much for Fielding’s first attempts, the “regular,” Congrevian five-act comedies, Love in Several Masques and The Temple Beau, and Lockwood does not do so in his introductions to these plays. Clearly—with the exception of The Coffee-House Politician—it is the “irregular” plays, the farces, and burlesques that are of main interest in this volume. “All students of Fielding,” Lockwood writes, “have agreed in identifying this winter of 1729-30 as crucially important for producing a result, in The Author’s Farce, that would stand in the same vital relation to his dramatic career as Shamela or Joseph Andrews to his novel-writing, in opening the way into some essential creative vein” (185). As well as the evidence allows—and in all he says Lockwood seems to be aware of all available evidence—he works out the complex stage history for this interesting rehearsal play. The Author’s Farce, as he notes, “comes second only to The Tragedy of Tragedies as Fielding’s most written-about play,” though “nearly all of the writing belongs to the later twentieth century, and for nearly all these writers this work is of interest as what [the character] Bookweight would call ‘one of your Reading Plays’“ (203-204).

But perhaps plays should be considered in other ways than as reading matter. In his introduction to Tom Thumb, Lockwood suggests that there may be something to be said for Robert D. Hume’s point that the simpler first version of Tom Thumb is a better play to be performed than is the expanded version that attracted so much later twentieth-century commentary. In a different way, Lockwood also goes against the grain when, in his introduction to The Coffee-House Politician, he considers the play might be praised for its “coarseness.” “No other playwright,” he maintains about this work, “had taken his audience quite so low into the life of the town, unless on carefully stylized visits” (419). He maintains that this play, which has remained within “the last generation of scholarship […] mainly invisible,” nevertheless “is a work of considerable interest and verve, and would also seem a plausible candidate for more critical attention than it has managed to attract” (420). Indeed, one could venture further than Lockwood. It could be argued that Fielding studies in general would do well to pay more attention than they have to the “coarseness” and “lowness” of his work, including the novels. Such a view might well help us to see a Fielding whose work is not most valuable for any of its presumed success in illustrating Christian morality, neoclassical values, imposing order on a supposed chaos of experience, or the like. The Fielding who would emerge may well be like the one many of his contemporaries disapproved of, but anyone not committed to their values could well experience much of his dramatic work as especially vital and refreshing. Fielding the “practicing dramatist,” instead of being seen as going in a wrong direction that the Licensing Act of 1737 providentially arrested so that he could become the great novelist instead, might even begin to be understood as justifying G. B. Shaw’s famous high opinion of him.

At any rate, Lockwood’s first volume establishes the texts needed for a critical understanding of the plays it includes, and its genuine scholarship already takes us a considerable distance towards new understanding. Here the copious notes to the texts of the plays are especially helpful. It may not be easy to imagine anyone reading this volume needing an annotation to explain who Gulliver is (59) or that Penelope is “the faithful wife of Ulysses” (115). But some over-annotation, if it is that, is a very minor fault when we are given such a wealth of really illuminating notes that themselves often amount to small brilliant essays. Besides these notes and the introductions, Lockwood provides us with four appendices, the first of which provides a “summary of essential information about the source tunes” (667) for the lyrics of the plays, including a transcription by JoAnn Taricani of the music itself. The other appendices discuss the problem of compound words in the printed versions, list emendations and variations of all the London editions published in Fielding’s lifetime, “with occasional references to other editions” (706), and provide a descriptive bibliography for the plays. Lockwood’s edition certainly lives up to the admirable standard of scholarship—and, it should be added, good clear prose—set by the other volumes of the Wesleyan Edition. This volume is indispensable for any serious student of Fielding.