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The Sense of Nonsense in Fielding's Author's Farce

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2009

Susan K. Ahern
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Extract

Henry Fielding's Author's Farce, performed forty-one times in the spring and summer of 1730, was the hit of London's theatrical season. In this, his third play, Fielding turned away from the stylized realism of his Love in Several Masques (1728) and The Temple Beau (1730). In the earlier plays, and indeed throughout his career, he perceived and judged social behavior by comparing people who play roles in daily life to actors who assume roles on stage; in particular, he scrutinized the theatrical rituals and fashionable deceit of courting couples. By adopting the techniques of burlesque in The Author's Farce, he exposes simultaneously the false roles of courtship in daily life and the way that the theatre itself portrays such love-making. Understanding the technique by which Fielding criticizes courtship clearly reveals his larger purpose — to criticize the deceptive behavior and mercenary values, implicit in the stage's conventions, which the theatre fosters and endorses in real life.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , May 1982 , pp. 45 - 54
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1982

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References

1 Scouten, Arthur, The London Stage, 1660–1800. Part 3: 1729–1747 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1968), I, cxlGoogle Scholar.

2 See Smith, J. Oates, “Masquerade and Marriage: Fielding's Comedies of Identity,” BSUF, 6, no. 3 (1965), 10–21Google Scholar.

3 The London Stage. Part 3: 1729– 1747. I, 44–46Google Scholar.

4 Smith, D. F., in Plays About the Theatre in England from The Rehearsal in 1671 to the Licensing Act in 1737 (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1936)Google Scholar, calls The Author's Farce a “hurried fusion … in the fecund mind of the youthful Fielding” of The Rehearsal, The Beggar's Opera, and The Dunciad (p. 149). Rogers, Winfield, in “Fielding's Early Aesthetic and Technique,” SP, 40 (1943)Google Scholar, notes that “the piece fell into two (complementary, it is true) parts; it was not integrated” (p. 546). Anthony Hassall has suggested that the play offers “two separate presentations of the author [Luckless] designed to complement” his puppet show — himself and his precarious circumstances in the first two acts, and his commentary during the performance (“Fielding's Puppet Image,” PQ, 53 [1974], 76)Google Scholar. See also Hassall's, “Authorial Dimension in the Plays of Henry Fielding,” Komos, 1 (1967), 5–7Google Scholar.

5 See Rogers, Winfield and Hassall, Anthony, in the works cited above, as well as Donaldson, Ian, The World Upside-Down: Comedy from Jonson to Fielding (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), pp. 193–195Google Scholar; Hunter's, J. Paul brief but provocative comments in Occasional Form: Henry Fielding and the Chains of Circumstance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 54–55Google Scholar; and Rudolph's, Valerie C. “People and Puppets: Fielding's Burlesque of the ‘Recognition Scene’ in The Author's Farce,” PLL, 11 (1975), 31–38Google Scholar.

6 II.i.47–49. All references to The Author's Farce are cited in the text to the Regents edition, ed. Woods, Charles B. (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1966)Google Scholar. Unless otherwise stated, I refer to the 1730 version of the play. Woods includes the 1734 revisions in an appendix.

7 Woods, Appendix B: The Individuals Represented, pp. 101–08. See also his articles, “Cibber in Fielding's Author's Farce: Three Notes,” PQ, 44 (1965), 145–151Google Scholar, and “Theobald as Fielding's Don Tragedio,” ELN, 2 (1965), 266–271Google Scholar.

8 See Bentley, Eric, “The Psychology of Farce,” New Republic, 6 and 13 01. 1958Google Scholar; rpt. in Let's Get a Divorce and Other Plays, ed. Bentley, Eric (New York: Hill and Wang, 1958), pp. vii–xxGoogle Scholar. See also Esslin, Martin, The Theatre of the Absurd, rev. ed. (New York: Doubleday-Anchor, 1969)Google Scholar. Esslin's analysis of a theatre sensitive to the devaluation of language has influenced my interpretation of Fielding's non-representational play.

9 Poems, ed. Williams, Harold, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1958), III, 777Google Scholar, 11.125–32. The poem first appeared in 1728 in the Intelligencer no. 8.

10 See Speaight, George, Punch and Judy: A History (Boston: Plays, Inc., 1970)Google Scholar, abstracted and revised, with the addition of numerous illustrations, from his History of the English Puppet Theatre (London: Harrap, 1955)Google Scholar. Speaight notes that Punch's wife changed her name from Joan to Judy c. 1818 (p. 85).

11 Candidates for the Bays, a Poem, Written by Scriblerus Tertius (London, 1730), pp. 9–10, as noted by Woods, Charles B.Google Scholar, ed., The Author's Farce, p. 7, n.

12 Marplay Jr. is Colley's son, Theophilus Cibber; John Wilks (Sparkish) had died in 1732.

13 Woods, (The Author's Farce, III.807, n.Google Scholar) points out that the Bantamite servant Gonsalvo probably alludes to Dryden's The Rival Ladies. Luckless is identified from a jeweled bracelet he had pawned. He responds to the discovery in the same eloquent way Sealand received news of Indiana (and her bracelet): “Ha!” (Conscious Lovers, V.iii.194)Google Scholar. See also Rudolph's article cited above (note 5).