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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Much of Fielding's amusing literary and social satire in his plays of 1736 and 1737 was in a popular vein, if we may judge from the abundance of similar satire in the newspapers of the time. Elsewhere I have shown why Fielding's hits were sure to have been met by the laughing approval of his audiences. His attack on pantomime was somewhat different, however, for pantomime was at the height of its popularity. Critics of it, like Fielding and Aaron Hill, were running counter to popular taste.
1 “Fielding and the Cibbers,” Philol. Quart., i, 278–289, and “Social Satire in Fielding's Pasquin and The Historical Register,” Philol. Quart., iii, 309–317.
2 The ladies here referred to may very well have been the ladies of the Shakespeare Club, mentioned at the close of Fielding's The Historical Register for the Year 1736 (1737).
3 As early as 1729, in the prologue to The Temple Beau, Fielding had said:
Humour and wit, in each politer age,
Triumphant, rear'd the trophies of the stage,
But only farce, and show, will now go down,
And HARLEQUIN'S the darling of the town.
4 Lun was the stage name of John Rich, manager of Covent Garden Theatre; he brought out a counter-satire on Pasquin there.
5 From “Harlequin-Horace; or the Art of Modern Poetry.”
6 iii, 261–264.
7 Pope's note (1729): “Mr. John Rich, master of the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden, was the first that excelled this way.” Note in this connection the following lines from An Essay on the Theatres (1745):
By whom were Scenes of Harlequin begun,
By some French Dancer, or our native Lun?
Though they dispute, no Connoisseurs can fix;
Some say Lun brought, some say improv'd the Tricks.
8 In Eurydice Hiss'd (1737), Fielding has Honestus say:
Then give us a good Tragedy for the Money,
And let not Harlequin still pick our Pockets,
With his low paltry Tricks, and juggling Cheats,
Which any School-Boy, was he on the Stage,
Could do as well as he. In former Times,
When better Actors acted better Plays,
The Town paid less.