^{Note 1 in page 221} G. M. Godden, Henry Fielding: A Memoir (New York and London, 1909), p. 315; Wilbur L. Cross, The History of Henry Fielding (New Haven, 1918), I, 103. But James T. Hillhouse (ed. The Tragedy of Tragedies, New Haven, 1918, p. 9, n. 1) and Mabel D. Hessler doubt that there is intentional Walpole satire here (The Literary Opposition to Sir Robert Walpole, 1721–1742: Fielding's Attacks on Walpole, Chicago, 1936, p. 125). My dates and facts about Fielding's career come from Cross. This study was assisted by a grant from the Faculty Research Fund of the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies of the University of Michigan.

^{Note 2 in page 221} J. Paul de Castro, “Did Fielding Write ‘Shamela‘?” N&Q, 12 ser., I (1916), p. 25; Cross, l, 307; R. Brimley Johnson, ed. Shamela (London, 1926), p. iii; Brian W. Downs, ed. Shamela (London, 1930), p. x; Charles B. Woods, “Fielding and the Authorship of Shamela,” PQ, xxv (1946), p. 250, n. 8.

^{Note 3 in page 221} Baker, ed. Shamela (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1953), p. xxiii.

^{Note 4 in page 221} “Four Plays by Henry Fielding,” Summaries of Doctoral Dissertations, Northwestern University, v (1937), p. 5; “Henry Fielding's Grub-Street Opera,” MLQ, xvi (1955), 41.

^{Note 5 in page 221} For information on Cibber, I draw generally upon Richard H. Barker, Mr. Cibber of Drury Lane (New York, 1939).

^{Note 6 in page 221} An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber (Everyman ed., n.d.), p. 266. See also pp. 256 and 210, where Cibber credits “the 193rd Tatler, vol. 4” with the parallel. Hessler (p. 141) takes the stage-state parallel of The Historical Register as Fielding's own invention.

^{Note 7 in page 221} Fog's Weekly Journal, 11 January 1729 quoted from Barker, p. 152.

^{Note 8 in page 222} Charles W. Nichols, “Fielding and the Cibbers,” PQ, i (1922), 278–289; Houghton W. Taylor, “Fielding upon Cibber,” MP, xxix (1931), 73–90; Cross, passim.

^{Note 9 in page 222} 1730: iii, i, p. 34; 1734: The Complete Works of Henry Fielding, Esq., ed. William Ernest Henley (New York, 1902), viii, 233—hereafter cited as Works: I have restored capitalization from the 1750 ed. (i.e., the 1734 version) to keep emphases comparable.

^{Note 10 in page 223} Charles B. Woods (“Fielding's Epilogue for Theobald,” PQ, xxxviii, 1949, 423–424) and Martin C. Battestin (“Fielding's Changing Politics and Joseph Andrews,” PQ, xxxix, 1960, 39–55) suggest the flexibility of Fielding's political partisanship.

^{Note 11 in page 223} See Dane F. Smith, Plays About the Theatre in England . . . (London and New York, 1936), pp. 124 (and illustration), 126.

^{Note 12 in page 223} John E. Wells, “Fielding's Political Purpose in Jonathan Wild,” PMLA, xxviii (1913), pp. 34–39.

^{Note 13 in page 223} Punch and Joan, among puppets in general, had been identified with anti-Walpole satire for some time. An anti-Walpole pamphlet entitled A Second Tale of a Tub, or the History of Robert Powel, the Puppet-Showman (1715) pictures Powell with Punch and Joan in the frontispiece (“Punch,” Encyc. Brit., 11th ed.). On puppets, Punch, and Walpole, see also Milton Percival, Political Ballads Illustrating the Administration of Sir Robert Walpole, Oxford Historical and Literary Studies, viii (Oxford, 1916), p. xxv. Punch sometimes represented Horace Walpole, the elder, Robert's brother, and his unsuccessful ambassadorship to France, where he had been sent by Harlequin (Sir Robert). But Punch is Walpole in Politics in Miniature: or, The Humours of Punch's Resignation (London: J. Mechell, [1742], from the Westminster Journal,

^{Note 20 in page 224} Mar., 20 Oct., 6 Nov. 1742,38 pp., in the Univ. of Michigan Library). The rest of the title page (I normalize it) bears closely on points I shall raise presently: “A tragi-comi-farcical-operatical puppet-show with a new scene of Punch's levee, and the surprising metamorphosis of his puppets. To which is added, The political rehearsal. Harlequin le Grand: or, The tricks of Pierrot le Primer . . . Being, a tragi-comipantomimical performance of two acts . . . The whole interspers'd with, patriots, chorus of patriots; courtiers, chorus of courtiers; songs; observations, critical and political.”

^{Note 14 in page 224} Aurélien Digeon, Le Texte des romans de Fielding (Paris, 1923), pp. 25–26.

^{Note 15 in page 224} The tune Fielding uses is Bobbing Joan; the tune of an anti-Walpole ballad Percival describes as vulgar (Political Ballads, p. 192) was Joan Stoop'd Down to Buckle her Shoe. The satirical import of dances in puppet shows is suggested by Fog's ironic horror (3 Oct. 1730) that anyone should imagine such a thing: “Some people indeed will make us believe that all the farces in dumb shew are so many political satires; as if the disaffected had a notion that what they dare not speak they may venture to dance” (quoted Percival, p. xxiii).

^{Note 16 in page 224} Cross, i, 79—80, 112. Fielding's contempt for Hurlothrumbo should not obscure his proximity to it. Hurlothrumbo had been revived for three weeks in Jan. and Feb. 1730 at the Hay market before The Author's Farce opened there 30 Mar. Fielding, rejected at Drury Lane, closed out at Goodman's Fields, was forced (happily) to appropriate the farcical-burlesque pattern of the Haymarket theater, a pattern dominated by Hurlothrumbo. Again, the same Haymarket troop that Fielding had rehearsed with his Grub-Street Opera, only to withdraw it under government pressure, was the one that then immediately turned to The Fall of Mortimer and Hurlothrumbo, which brought Walpole's constable. Fielding was closely associated with them.

^{Note 17 in page 224} This appears directly following a letter from “Pasquin” (to which I shall return shortly) in Select Letters Taken from Fog's Weekly Journal, 2 vols. (London, 1732), i, 260 ff. The writer, deploring that Italian opera has loosened the national fiber, works from a sneer at the “Minstrals” who head political parties, through an extended allusive definition of “fidling,” the musical as well as the dilatory, and ends with an ironic equation about “Ministers of State” taken as “no more than most wretched Fidlers.”

^{Note 18 in page 225} See James Sutherland, The Dunciad, Twickenham ed. (New Haven and London, 1953), p. 444. Henley is also included in Fielding's “Mr. Hen” of The Historical Register, a cynical auctioneer of virtues, à la Walpole. Cross (l, 214) believes Hen no more than an effeminate version of Christopher Cock, a fashionable auctioneer, nicely tailored to Charlotte Charke's impersonative talents. But Charles W. Nichols quotes a passage from James Ralph (Fielding's friend) that associates Cock with Henley as two of a kind: “Social Satire in Fielding's Pasquin and The Historical Register,” PQ, iii (1924), 315. Fielding, in other words, seems to be making both social and political satire with “Mr. Hen.”

^{Note 19 in page 226} Cross, i, 114, 157; Brown, “Henry Fielding's Grub-Street Opera,” p. 35.

^{Note 20 in page 226} Cross, i, 85, 89; Barker, 147–148, 158–159. In 1755, twenty-six years after the fact, Charlotte Charke, Cibber's strange and estranged daughter, is still working the old joke along with the stage-state business: “. . . the Paraphanalia of the Stage, of which I was Prime Minister . . .” (A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke, London, 1929, p. 167).

^{Note 21 in page 226} The first version has one “laureate” reference, clearly not to Cibber. Luckless names the people in his puppet show to offices in his new kingdom: “... you, Sir, my Orator; you my Poet-Laureat.” This can refer only to the “Poet” who had appeared earlier in the Stygian fantasy; it carries no political weight. Fielding leaves Luckless's speech unchanged in his revision, but now it has the force of several “laureate” additions behind it, so that Fielding now has no less than three comical representations of Cibber on stage at the same time: (1) Poet-Laureate, (2) Sir Farcical Comic, and (3) Marplay.

^{Note 22 in page 226} Cross, i, 103–104, 107–112. Percival (pp. xix-xxiv) states that 1731 was a year of unparalleled political audacity, on and off the stage, and of susceptibility to reading innuendoes into everv Dossible place.

^{Note 23 in page 226} Walpole was Squire Noodle in W. R. Chetwood's The Generous Free-Mason (1730-31), and his brother Horace was his man Doodle—the country boys from Norfolk. At the same time, Fog's Weekly Journal (3 Oct. 1730) gives an extended account of a hypersensitive reaction to a “droll” at Southwark entitled The Generous Free-Masons (plural) about Squire Noodle and Doodle, ridiculing the Walpoles. Percival, quoting Fog's (pp. xxiii-xxv), says it is not the same as Chetwood's play; Cross (i, 97) says it is. At any rate, Noodle and Doodle seem to derive from Fielding's Tom Thumb, and Fielding's associates produced Chetwood's play at the Haymarket in Dec. and Jan. 1730–31, sometimes as a companion piece to Tom Thumb (Cross, i, 97). Moreover, late 1730 produced a ballad, The Squire and the Cardinal, about Horace Walpole's ambassadorship to France: the tune, King John and the Abbot, accompanied many other anti-Walpole ballads and is the same Fielding was to use for Walpole satire in

Tumble-Down Dick (see below, p. 230). In 1734, another anti-Walpole ballad begins: “In Briton's Isle there lives a Wight, / Tho' once a Country 'Squire ...” (Percival, p. 193).

^{Note 24 in page 227} Works, XV, 101, 200. Fielding seems to be pretending, ironically, that he has heard of the Hyp-Doctor only recently. Actually it ran from 15 Dec. 1730 to 20 Jan. 1741 (R. S. Crane and F. B. Kaye, A Census of British Newspapers and Periodicals, 1620–1800, Chapel Hill, N. C., 1927, p. 48).

^{Note 25 in page 227} Select Letters, i, 256. On 28 July 1733 Fog's again vigorously pursued the Walpole-quack-pill theme, indicating that the “pills” were Walpole's famous bribes (with perhaps a pun lurking in the archaic meaning of pill: “to rob”). A ballad entitled The Quack Triumphant immediately put Fog's material into song: “‘For sure such Pills cannot be dear, / ‘From Poverty that save; / ‘Come, here, who takes this little Box? /‘They'll cure both Poverty and Pox / With a Fa, la & c.” (Percival, pp. 81–85). The frontispiece to Vol. i of the 1732 reprint from Fog's shows a rather good likeness of Walpole (with full wig, and figure, and double ribbons of merit around his neck). He is on a table before a crowd, as if, it appears, he were a quack doctor. One hand holds a money bag, the other what appears to be a coin, which he could be recommending as a pill. Behind him, as if directing his actions by magic with one upraised hand and pointing for him to go with the other, is Harlequin, with ribbon of merit around his neck too (Walpole was much criticized for “reviving” the Order of the Bath in 1725, receiving it himself, then rejecting it for the Order of the Garter the next year, which earned him the name “Sir Bluestring”—DNB, p. 190, cited by Wells, pp. 31–32).

^{Note 26 in page 228} Pochard's Fall of Phaeton also included an episode entitled Harlequin Restor'd, or, Taste a [sic] la Mode (Allardyce Nicoll, A History of English Drama, 1660–1900. ii (Cambridge, 1952), p. 350; Smith, p. 213, n. 49).

^{Note 27 in page 229} Cf.: The Historical Register, iii, i (Works, xi, 267), Medley's concluding speech about “Mr. Quidam the fiddler” (Walpole): “This, sir, I think is a very pretty Pantomime trick, and an ingenious burlesque on all the fourberies which the great Lun has exhibited in all his entertainments. ...” All of Act iii, in fact— which borrows Apollo-as-Great-Man from Tumble-Down Dick along with a reference to “Thespis's . . . cartload, of comedians” (p. 260, see my remarks soon to follow in the text)—is a kind of summary of Fielding's dramatic satire on Walpole and the Cibbers, and political-theatrical management. The Champion for 22 April 1740 (Works, XV, 287–292) begins with the parallel between Rich's pantomimes and the political world, and works on to “ministers and actors, parliaments and play-houses, of liberty, operas, farces, C. C. [,] R. W. and many other good things” (p. 290) as Fielding excoriates Cibber and his Apology: the initials, of course, stand for Colley Cibber and Robert Walpole. Champions for 3 and 8 May 1740 (cited by Wells, pp. 36–38) also mingle Rich, Cibber, and Walpole in extended disquisitions against “greatness” in the similar worlds of stage and state.

^{Note 28 in page 229} The ass is Fielding's addition to what actually happened in Rich's most famous stunt, occurring in Harlequin a Sorcerer. Smith (p. 213) quotes a description of Lun's gallinaceous emergence from the shell; Pope refers to it in the Dunciad (iii, 248).

^{Note 29 in page 230} Wells (p. 39) states that in the picture “Walpole appears as Harlequin receiving orders from Satan for trampling on the freedom of the Press. ...” The text states otherwise, and the picture clearly illustrates the text. Nothing about freedom of the press appears in either place. Walpole appeared as Harlequin Doctor Faustus in The Golden Rump of 1737: “like Harlequin Faustus in a modern Pantomime” (Smith, p. 234, quoting Gents. Mag., vii, March 1737, 167–168).

^{Note 30 in page 230} Cross, i, 112. Henley's remark derives, I suspect, from Captain John Durant de Breval's The Play is the Plot, a frequent afterpiece from 19 Feb. 1718 until converted into ballad opera in 1734 for even higher glory (Smith, pp. 112–115; 115, n. 120). It is about a company of traveling actors: “... the only Performers in England, who keep up to the original Rules of the Drama, as 'twas instituted by the mighty Thespis our Founder.—Our Heros, Sir, travel in Carts, eat in Carts, sleep in Carts, and sometimes make their Exit out of Carts” (London, 1718, p. 40, quoted by Smith, p. 114).

^{Note 31 in page 230} The title varies: The Abbots of Canterbury; King John and the Bishop of Canterbury; A Cobler There Was; The Cobler's Death; The Cobler of Canterbury; Down, Down, Deny Down; etc. See Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript: Ballads and Romances, ed. John W. Hales and Frederick J. Furnivall (London, 1867), i, 508 (citing Chappell's Popular Music of the Olden Time, i, 348–350), and Percival, pp. 4,43, 46, 90, 94, 98, 115, 117, 124, 183, 185, 188, 191, 192 (2 ballads), 193, 194, 195 (No. 66 indicates 2 ballads, the one cited and the one imitated), 196 (4 ballads). Meter also points to several others not assigned tunes.

^{Note 32 in page 231} Even this is not exclusively Fielding's. The Fog's frontispiece shows a harlequin manipulating Walpole, and Craftsman No. 74 opens (after a brief mob scene) on Harlequin “in close Conference with a middle-aged, well dressed Gentleman, who seems very dejected, and carelessly holds a white Wand, in his Hand” (p. 219)—Walpole with his staff of office. Harlequin takes the wand, waves a screen down between Walpole and mob, and then he himself becomes the statesman of the piece.