User:Ottava Rima/Fielding 2

Later plays
The later plays include those produced after the 1733 until the Licensing Act of 1737 which effectively ended Fielding's theatrical career. The Actor Rebellion of 1733 changed the shape of drama. With the passage of the Licensing Act of 1737, Fielding was unable to produce and put on another play. This effectively ended his career in drama.

The Miser

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Deborah

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An Old Man taught Wisdom

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The Universal Gallant

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Don Quixote in England
After Fielding returned to London from the University of Leyden during the end of 1729, he brought with him a version of Don Quixote in England. It was refused by the Theatre Royal and it was not produced or printed until 1734. The only information on the origins of this play come from Fielding's 1734 preface. It was his second play, and Fielding attributes it to being written at Leyden during 1728. It was intended more as amusement than as a serious production and was an imitation of Cervantes's Don Quixote. After the prompting of Barton Booth and Colley Cibber, Fielding put away the play until 1733, when the Drury-Lane actors asked him for a new play. Soon after, Fielding rewrote parts of the play. Because of this rewriting, it is impossible to know what the original edition of the play looked like.


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 * Don Quixote
 * Sancho - Don Quixote's companion
 * Dorothea
 * Fairlove - Dorothea's love interest
 * Sir Thomas Loveland - Dorothea's father
 * Squire Badger - Loveland's choice of suitor for Dorothea

Sir Thomas Loveland wishes for his daughter to marry Squire Badger even though she desires to marry Fairlove. Loveland persists in the match until he experiences Badger's drunken behavior and realizes that he is an unsuitable match. During this time, Don Quixote wanders through England and comments on how the characters act and on marriage in general. His companion, Sancho, provides a humorous commentary for Don Quixote's moral lectures.
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In Fielding's preface, he admits that the play originally mistook its imitation of Cervantes and that Fielding agreed with Barton Booth and Colley Cibber that the play should not be produced in its original form. Robert Hume believed that the play lacked "a genuine plot structure" and that "Most of the fifteen songs are poorly integrated".
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Pasquin

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Tumble Down Dick

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The Historical Register

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Eurydice Hiss'd
Eurydice Hiss'd was the companion piece to Fielding's The Historical Register. As such, the plays are connected in many ways, including sharing structure and characters.


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The Good Natur'd Man

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Miss Lucy in Town

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Fatal Curiosity

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The Wedding Day
After Fielding returned to London from the University of Leyden during the end of 1729, he brought with him a version of The Wedding-Day. It was refused by John Rich to be staged, and it was not produced until 1743 by David Garrick. The only information on the origins of this play come from Fielding's preface to the play in his Miscellanies (1743). In it, Fielding says that he intended the leads, Millamour and Charlotte, for Robert Wilks and Ann Oldfield. However, Oldfield died before the play could be produced, and that Fielding and Wilks got into a fight, which made it impossible for Fielding to convince him to join the production. Fielding continues: The Play was read to Mr. Rich upwards of twelve Years since, in the Presence of a very eminent Physician of this Age, who will bear me Testimony, that I did not recommend my Performance with the usual Warmth of an Author. Indeed I never thought, 'till this Season, that there existed on any on Stage, since the Death of that great Actor and Actress abovementioned, any two Persons capable of supplying their Loss in those Parts: for Characters of this Kind do of all others, require most Support from the Actor, and lend the least Assistance to him.

From the Time of its being read to Mr. Rich, it lay by me neglected and unthought of, 'till this Winter It is impossible to know exactly how the original play looked like because Fielding rewrote parts of the play before it was produced. Fielding denies that he edited and revised the play, but the Licenser reviewing the play objected to various aspects of the play which caused those parts to be reworded. As such, there are, there are changes between the manuscript edition and the 1743 printed edition which Fielding did not acknowledge and the differences between the 1729 edition and the 1743 edition cannot be ascertained.


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 * Millamour
 * Charlotte
 * Heartfort
 * Clarinda
 * Stedfast - Father of Clarinda
 * Mutable - Father of Heartfort
 * Mrs Plotwell - Mother of Clarinda

The plot involves a complicated series of relationships that, through revelation of familial relationship, end abruptly. Clarinda and Charlotte are pursued by Millamour and Heartfort, but Clarinda marries an older man, Stedfast. However, it is revealed that Clarinda is really his daughter, and Stedfast allows her to marry Millamour instead. While this happens, Heartfort's father, Mutable, allows his son to marry Charlotte.
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Millamour, before he can finally marry Clarinda, must give up his rakish ways. Until Act five, he persists in believing that he should not settle with only one woman, for which Heartfort criticizes him. However, the morality of the play, according to Robert Hume, is "totally unconvincing".
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The play found little support and experienced little success. A response to the play read; "Benefit the author of this bad new play, which would have sunk the 1st night but for Garrick's acting". Robert Hume generously adds, "About all we can say in the play's favour in the context of 1729 is that Fielding was obviously working to improve his plot cohesion."
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Structure and concern
Fielding was concerned with the audience's reaction to his various scenes. This is internally reflected in the actions of the character Merital in Love in Several Masques in controlling the behavior of Helen and that many of his characters believe that they are either actors or are performing on a stage. Also, this is a primary concern of Fielding's when he crafted his Scriblerian plays.

Reading and how reading defines characters is a focus within many plays and in Fielding's later works. In Love in Several Masques, the character Wisemore focuses on classics but ignores contemporary society. In The Temple Beau, the character Wilding practices law but doesn't read at all. Reading is an outlet to understanding humanity, and Fielding uses his plays to inform an audience how to better understand humanity.

Critical reception
The reception of Fielding's plays received early recognition; his early plays placed him in a position of popularity along side of Gay. George Bernard Shaw believed that Fielding was "the greatest practising dramatist, with the single exception of Shakespeare, produced in England between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century." However, modern critics rarely agree with Shaw, as Robert Hume points out, "Few scholars have been much interested in Fielding's highly successful career as a dramatist. To most it has seemed a false start. Readers tend to find the conventional plays derivative and sentimental, the topical ones scrappy and superficial." In particular, only one book until 1988 was published on the topic, which was Ducrocq's Le theatre de Fielding, 1728–1737, et ses prolongements dans l'oeuvre romanesque. This critical approach is not limited to just Fielding, but to the whole field; the reputation of Colley Cibber was ruined by Pope's characterizing him as the Arch Dunce and "Since the plays of Cibber's only serious rival, Henry Fielding, are hardly even read these days, let alone performed, the earlier eighteenth-century theater tends to be passed over with (at best) a polite cough."

J. Paul Hunter believed that: "Fielding's plays do not prophesy that he will become a major novelist, but the direction of his theatrical career does suggest concerns that increasingly led him away from pure representation [...] Fielding's separation from the theatre was a forced one, but the expulsion was fortunate, freeing him from a relationship and commitment that had always been in some sense against the grain [...] Fielding's way is not really very dramatic, either in novels or in plays; he never developed stage-likely objective correlatives, having reserved his artistic energy for the examining process in which the action is rerun again and again, reviewed, considered, nearly masticated."

To Albert Rivero, ten of the plays "mark significant moments in [Fielding's] theatrical life": Love in Several Masques, The Temple Beau, The Author's Farce, Tom Thumb, The Tragedy of Tragedies, Rape upon Rape, The Grub Street Opera, The Modern Husband, Pasquin, and The Historical Register.