Sir Laurence Olivier’s 1955 film of Richard III centres on a single character and has, according to Anthony Davies in Filming Shakespeare’s Plays, more links with his Hamlet than with his Henry V. It is, says Davies, a 'psychological study developed along the lines of attitudes to and conceptions of power'. The film is unabashedly theatrical, with the kind of stylised sets that Peter Holland labels 'fake medievalism'. As Davies shows, however, the play becomes cinema. 'The primary articulation of Olivier’s Richard III is essentially filmic.' Richard III, writes Jack Jorgens, is 'not really a history play'. Olivier depicts a 'renaissance wolf among medieval sheep … Richard’s opponents [in the film] are weak and stupid, but they do not seem as evil as they do in Shakespeare'. Indeed, his victims tend to yield to him without resistance. Clarence does, of course, not reading his own vivid treachery as a family trait that inheres in his brother. Hastings does, ignoring Stanley’s dream and his own stumbling horse. But Lady Anne, we notice, has taken off her wedding ring before her second meeting with Richard. It is as if she is waiting for him to ask 'Is not the causer of the timeless deaths … As blameful as the executioner?' in the second confrontation that Olivier crafts from the script.

Franco Zeffirelli’s contribution to the Shakespeare on screen canon continues to receive considerable commentary even though his last film of Shakespeare, Hamlet, was made as long ago as 1990. Zeffirelli has made three films of Shakespeare’s plays: The Taming of the Shrew (1966), Romeo and Juliet (1968), and Hamlet (1990). While each film clearly appropriates a particular cultural moment, they are stylistically similar in so far as they share an unmistakable operatic conception; it has been repeatedly observed that they make as much use of colour, movement and music as they do of Shakespeare’s lines. Opera, for Zeffirelli, is the complete form: it combines dance, drama, poetry, music and the visual arts. His films of Shakespeare, similarly, unashamedly aim to appeal to all the senses. Their appeal is largely sensual rather than cerebral and in this the director achieves his ambition, in defiance of his critics, to make Shakespeare, as he says, even more popular. In many respects, Zeffirelli’s screen interpretations of Shakespeare owe as much to travelogues as they do to the playtexts. Zeffirelli has no qualms about imposing his own tastes on to Shakespeare’s texts. Shakespeare is, for Zeffirelli, 'a frustrated traveller' with a desire to take his audience on a sight-seeing tour of Italy; and his union of Shakespeare with Italian Renaissance culture earned him the nickname, 'Shakespirelli'.

We all object to stereotypes. They are oversimplified preconceptions, involving those who trade in them in lazy thinking and prejudice. They don't derive from direct experience. They are subject to fashion. And they tend to come into conflict with one another. But however objectionable they may be, on intellectual or moral grounds, we can't avoid them in our own, as well as other people's, thinking. When, in Kenneth Branagh’s film of Hamlet (1996), the Gravedigger (Billy Crystal) remarks that in England the men are as mad as Hamlet, we laugh. Not exactly uproariously, but in the way, no doubt, that the line has raised a laugh for four hundred years. We laugh at the complexity of the dramatic irony in the situation - the Gravedigger’s subject is his Prince, he is his Prince’s subject, and yet here he is literally addressing his Prince on the subject. However, we also laugh at the English playwright giving the Danish character a stereotypical characterisation of the English. And if we're English we laugh, slightly awkwardly, at the joke at our expense (not sure whether or not we recognise ourselves in it, not sure whether we're particularly proud of our great English playwright’s laboured handling of it). But when the actor saying the line is Billy Crystal, we laugh in a new way, too. Now the joke is not just a joke delivered by those traditional Shakespearean stereotypes the Common Man and the Clown, but a joke delivered by another set of stereotypes - the comic, the film star and the American. Even the nationality of the joke itself seems somehow to have changed a little. But what does 'nationality' mean? It is all very well objecting to national and racial stereotypes on the grounds that nations and races are maligned by their use. But what is it that is being maligned?

Henry Fielding was born on 22 April 1707 and this Companion thus appears in his tercentenary year. He died on 8 October 1754. In a life of less than fifty years he became the most important English playwright of his time, whom Shaw thought the 'greatest practising dramatist … between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century' apart from Shakespeare. He is also one of the great inaugural figures of the history of the novel, admired and imitated by Stendhal, Dickens, Thackeray, and other masters of the particular species of fiction that uses a strong controlling narrator. His novels were from the start written in self-conscious opposition to those of his rival Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), who represents an equally foundational but more self-effacing mode, in which the author purports to be invisible, and which aims at creating a feeling that the reader is witnessing real events rather than reading a story. Though not the only or the first important early novelists in Western literature, both writers represent, and helped decisively to shape, alternative styles of what was to become the dominant literary form of the modern world.

Fielding had aristocratic lineage and was educated at Eton. He was also continuously short of money, and experienced debt and various forms of low life as a penniless author and frequenter of taverns. His novels are laced with a lightly worn classical erudition, and have an ironic urbanity, partly worn as a badge of caste, but they also show a not wholly incompatible fondness for coarse popular entertainments. His manner derives to some extent from the satirical writers of the preceding generation, themselves spokesmen for a quasi-aristocratic ethos and a deep cultural loyalty to the ancient classics, who, while themselves mostly non-patrician, knew how to combine lordly hauteur with touches of demotic vulgarity.

A few weeks before he died in December 1784, the great lexicographer and essayist Samuel Johnson wrote a short note to his friend Charles Burney which he ends by sending his respects 'to dear Doctor Burney, and all the dear Burneys little and great'. Johnson, without a family himself, was intrigued by and enamoured of the Burneys, 'little and great'. By 1784, the family comprised Charles Burney, the musician and scholar, and his second wife Elizabeth, along with their combined household of six children from Charles's first marriage and the two much younger children from his second. The second Mrs Burney also had three children from her first marriage. Such a blended family of siblings, half-siblings and step-siblings was not unusual, but the Burneys appear to have been peculiarly close-knit, drawn together by the powerful personality of their father. Johnson declared of them, 'I love all of that breed whom I can be said to know, and one or two whom I hardly know I love upon credit, and love them because they love each other.'

The Burneys were a talented clan of musicians, writers, scholars, geographers and artists. And their shared habit of 'journalising', recording their encounters in vivid, as-they-happened letters and diaries that were written for each other but with an awareness, too, of their potential historical significance, has ensured that they will never be forgotten. Between them, the Burneys left behind more than 10,000 items of correspondence. Reading through this enormous written record is to be entertained by an everyday saga of family life that is not so very different from our own: Dr Burney is mugged, his house is burgled, and his daughters fall out with their stepmother.

Fielding established himself as a writer before he embarked on his legal studies, and he had achieved success in the novel before he became a magistrate. Nevertheless, issues related to crime and the law underlay his entire career as an author, even in his earlier days as a dramatist and journalist. For much of the 1730s, he had practised the often reviled trade of a professional scribbler, and on several occasions found himself in the line of ministerial fire because of his Oppositional broadsides against officialdom. At the end of the decade his social position was more respectable, even though his finances remained on a precarious footing and his debts brought him into the courtroom as a defendant rather than an advocate. By the time Tom Jones was published, he held a central position in the judicial system of London, as chief magistrate for Westminster. This may look like a sudden swerve, but it was not altogether an unpredictable development. His family background, for one thing, included distinguished jurists. Nevertheless, his ancestry also embraced a number of soldiers, and Fielding did not join the army; it also covered some notable churchmen, and he did not enter holy orders. Some explanation is called for, since a variety of personal and political factors must have gone into his decision to switch the course of his life.

As soon as Fielding was appointed to the magistracy, he naturally took a central role in the national discourse regarding legal and social affairs. The area of his responsibility covered some of the most notorious blackspots in the entire country, with a thriving criminal subculture and a pattern of unrest marked by frequent riots. In addition, Fielding did more than serve as a proactive Justice of the Peace in the capital. He wrote widely on matters of public policy, as they were affected by the law and by the institutions which supported its implementation: pamphlets, charges to the jury, and articles in the press flowed from his pen during the brief tenure of his magistracy. Of course, his novels deal centrally with some of the same issues, as they had done from the start.

Shamela was the first and most famous parody of Richardson’s Pamela, but Fielding never acknowledged having written it. Nor did those who studied and wrote of Fielding for the next century and a half show any more inclination to claim it for him, despite the signs of his authorship which lay here and there in plain sight, and only within the past sixty years has it really been shown to be his. Yet there is nothing dubiously recent about this attribution, which is not so much the invention of a latter day as the willing forgetfulness of a former. It was Fielding himself who first studied to forget his title to this work, for though it was cheerful and brilliant, it was very low. Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones had that mark upon them too, but only from the low scenes or characters they descended to treat: or in other words only because they were stooping to truth. To that meritorious form of the low Fielding would gladly claim the title, mocking the bigotry of critics and taunting them with their own cant word itself of 'low'. But Shamela was another matter. There it is not the vulgar story but the vulgar tone - Shamela’s tone - that engrosses the work and puts it beyond respectable ownership. Whatever Shamela talks of she cheapens, with an effortless spirit and charm uncalculated by her but on Fielding’s part very carefully calculated to please and to frustrate disapproval. She is indulged so freely and so sympathetically by her creator that no pretence of condemnation, no postscripted report of her having been caught in bed with Williams and turned out of her house, can make it seem that she is not also beloved of her creator, or that all this comic indecency from her does not simply amount to indecent comedy from him.

Do Burney's fictional representations of ineffectual mentors, impracticable conduct book advice, and the social artifice that is required of women constitute a critique of her society? If so, this aspect of her fiction seems to have eluded her original critics, since they praise Burney for purveying 'instructive' and 'illustrating' sentiments in all four of her novels. Even The Wanderer, which was pilloried both by the Tory critic John Wilson Croker and by the liberal William Hazlitt for its Francophilia, its stylistic misdemeanours, and its flagging creative energy, was not branded a radical novel, although as one of Burney's recent biographers observes, it contained 'an astringent exposé of Regency Britain'. On the surface at least, Camilla (1796) and The Wanderer (1814) promote a conservative moral agenda as regards female conduct, social class and feminine identity. Yet it is also true that both novels feature numerous moments of gender construction and disintegration, as well as reflecting contemporary anxieties about the impossibility of interpersonal knowledge in a society where social and moral protocols govern every aspect of conduct and desire. In Camilla, the gender distinctions and ideals that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century moralists take for granted are overtly endorsed even as they prove to be unsustainable for the heroine and for the novel's gender-ambiguous characters.

Early criticism

The afterlife of Frances Burney is a story as varied and exciting as the tale of one of her heroines, stepping tremblingly out on the stage of the world. The evolution of her reputation since her death in 1840 can be plotted as an upward trajectory of early vicissitudes crowned with eventual triumph. The reception history has the added twist that while she wrote in several genres, it has taken time for her whole oeuvre to emerge in reliable editions. With basic material still lacking, a full appreciation of her power as a writer has not yet been achieved.

Burney's posthumous reputation was a story which she tried to control herself, both through the voluminous material provided and the considerable amount destroyed, putting the evidence forever beyond reach. The legacy she would leave was very much on her mind during the last decades of her life when she worked on the 'myriads of hoards of MSS' (JL XII, 954) collected over seventy years - selecting, annotating and censoring her own papers in preparation for their possible future publication. In her will, she left them to her niece, Charlotte Barrett, who lost no time in contacting a publisher eager to capitalise on her aunt's reputation. Guided by the preselection of material, Mrs Barrett culled out seven volumes' worth of highlights, the first five appearing in 1842, the last two in 1846. Beginning in 1778 with the publication of Evelina, the first five volumes cover the years of literary fame, of royal service, of courtship and marriage, up until 1793. The last two volumes curtail drastically the last fifty years of Burney's life.