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Notes on Three of Fielding's Plays

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Charles B. Woods
Charles B. Woods*
Affiliation:
Lehigh University
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Extract

The only adequate and trustworthy account of Fielding's théâtre is that given by W. L. Cross in his three-volume biography, The History of Henry Fielding (New Haven, 1918). Yet, in my opinion, three of Fielding's plays, The Letter-Writers (1731), The Modern Husband (1732), and Eurydice Hiss'd (1737), have received inadequate treatment from Professor Cross, for he has failed to indicate their sources properly.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 52 , Issue 2 , June 1937 , pp. 359 - 373
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1937

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References

page 359 note 1 In The Daily Post of March 30 The Letter-Writers was advertised to be played on March 31, but on that day the Post advertised The Author's Farce and The Tragedy of Tragedies for the Haymarket.

page 354 note 2 “Of all eighteenth-centuryfarces Fielding's is perhaps the best; the ideaof the threatening letters is a clever one, and Commons and Rakel are vigorously drawn types.” Allardyce Nicoll, A History of Early Eighteenth Century Drama: 1700–1750 (Cambridge, England, 1925), p. 215. Cross (i, 102) thinks that “as a whole,” the play “was too conventional to arrest attention; it was too detached from those phases of contemporary life that the audience was then demanding of the actors at the Haymarket.”

page 354 note 3 The Letter-Writers (1731), p. 26.

page 354 note 4 Ibid., p. 12.

page 354 note 5 The Letter-Writers, p. 68.

page 354 note 6 Henry Fielding: His Life and Works (Oxford, 1929), p. 28.

page 354 note 7 The daughter of Basil Feilding, fourth Earl of Denbigh, and Henry Fielding's second cousin. Diana Feilding (or Fielding) and the dramatist were great-grandchildren of George Feilding, first Earl of Desmond.

page 354 note 8 The Monthly Chronicle, January, 1731, p. 4.

page 354 note 9 For examples of threatening letters and the text of the King's proclamation see The Political State of Great Britain, xl, 505–515; and The Monthly Chronicle for March, 1731, p. 45. and for December, 1731, p. 228.

page 354 note 10 Banerji, op. cit., p. 28.

page 354 note 11 The Daily Post for these dates.

page 354 note 12 In the issues of March 30 and July 13,1732.

page 354 note 13 It is often intimated that The Modern Husband failed dismally on the stage. Banerji (p. 36) calls it “a complete failure,” and according to A. Digeon, The Novels of Fielding (London, 1925), p. 12; “The public received The Modern Husband coldly not to say inimicably.” But in The Daily Post of March 3,1732, we read: “Last Night their Majesties, his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, their Highnesses the Princesses, and the whole Royal Family, were to see the new Comedy, call'd The Modern Husband, acted to a splendid crowded Audience, for the Benefit of Mrs. Porter. This Play has been performed thirteen Nights with Applause, to very good Audiences, but it is now discontinued, on account of the Indisposition of a principal Actress.” This might be a mere puff, but the harshest contemporary criticism of the play begins with these words: “The favourable reception The Modern Husband has met with from the Town, having given me some occasion to doubt of the justness of the judgement I had framed of that Piece, from seeing it the first night of its representation, I resolved to give it a careful and unprejudiced reading.” And this hostile critic in The Grub-street Journal, March 30, 1732, feels it necessary to write a whole paragraph on the fact that success in the theatre does not inevitably indicate a good play.

page 354 note 14 Cf. Cross, 1,119, and iii, 359.

page 354 note 15 The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Worthy Montagu, ed. Lord Wharncliffe (London, 1837), i, lvi-lvii.

page 354 note 16 Woven into the story outlined above is a large amount of more or less extraneous material, which shows the influence of sentimental dramatists like Cibber and Steele.

page 354 note 17 See the lines from Juvenal on the title-page of The Modern Husband.

page 354 note 18 The Modern Husband (1732), p. 23.

page 354 note 19 Lady Abergavenny died on December 4, 1729. See The Monthly Chronicle, 1729, p. 252.

page 354 note 20 The Monthly Chronicle, 1730, p. 24.

page 354 note 21 See the full account of the trial in the Appendix to The Monthly Chronicle, 1730, pp. 19 ff. See also The Political State of Great Britain, xxxix (1730), 217–220; and Crim. Con. Actions and Trials and other Legal Proceedings relating to Marriage before the Passing of the Present Divorce Act (London, n.d.), pp. 89–94. For the titles of three contemporary pamphlets on the trial see The Monthly Chronicle, 1730, pp. 42,43,65.

page 354 note 22 The defendant's name was spelled in various ways. “Lyddel” is the form in the Appendix to The Monthly Chronicle, 1730.

page 354 note 23 The Monthly Chronicle, 1730, Appendix, p. 23.

page 354 note 24 The Modern Husband, p. 47.

page 354 note 25 Viscount Percival (later Earl of Egmont) wrote the following entry in his diary under the date of 16 Feb., 1730: “I think it was today that the trial between my Lord Abergavenny, prosecutor, and Mr. Lyddall, defendant, was judged, and the jury brought in ten thousand pounds damages against Mr. Lyddall for criminal conversation with my Lord's wife, who lately died of grief and shame for the discovery. A great many blame my Lord for prosecuting the gentleman, since his lady died for that fact.” Diary of the First Earl of Egmont, Historical MSS. Commission (3 vols. London, 1920–1923), i, 50.

page 354 note 26 W. S. Holdsworth, A History of English Law, 3rd ed. (London, 1922), i, 623.

page 354 note 27 Crim. Con. Actions and Trials, p. 4.

page 354 note 28 A vice which was certainly prevalent in Fielding's day although one of his early biog-graphers doubted it. See Frederick Lawrence, The Life of Henry Fielding (London, 1855), p 42. But compare “The Present State of Matrimony: Or, The Real Causes of Conjugal Infidelity and Unhappy Marriages. By Philogamus. London. Printed for John Hawkins, mdccxxxix,” p. 10: “How many Men marry pretty Wives, on purpose to raise their Fortunes, and keep Mistresses with the Money their Wives get for them? How many sell them out and out; or let them out for Time, as they do their Hackneys?”

The Grub-street Journal, March 30, 1732, may have been partly responsible for the idea that Fielding was depicting an imaginary state of immorality when it pretended to take seriously these ironic lines in the prologue to The Modern Husband:

To Night (yet Strangers to the Scene) you'll view,

A Pair of Monsters most entirely new!

Two Characters scarce ever found in Life,

A willing Cuckold—sells his willing Wife!

page 354 note 29 B. M. Jones in his Henry Fielding: Novelist and Magistrate (London, 1933) is the only critic who indicates that he understands the main object of Fielding's attack. On p. 50 Mr. Jones remarks that Fielding frequently poured scorn on actions for criminal conversation, and aptly quotes the couplet from the epilogue to The Modern Husband; but unfortunately he assigns the couplet to The Letter-Writers, and fails to connect The Modern Husband in any way with “crim. con.”

page 354 note 30 Some of the opinions of “crim. con.” that were voiced in Parliament when the Divorce Bill was under consideration, reflect exactly the same sort of indignation that Fielding had expressed a century and a quarter before in The Modern Husband. Lord Campbell stated that “in conversation with foreign jurists he had been reproached with the existence of such actions, and had nothing to say in reply; for, though he was able to deny that men sold their wives with ropes about their necks, he could not deny that actions for crim. con. were permitted, nay made necessary in certain cases by law.” And the Marquess of Lands-downe said: “my constant opinion has been that neither this Bill nor any Bill of this nature ought to pass if it were not accompanied, or immediately followed, by a Bill removing that great stigma upon the legislation, the manners, the habits, and the customs of this country—the trial for what is called ‘criminal conversation‘—which exists in no other country in the world, and which, existing here, is represented in all other countries in the world as an indication of … the loose, selfish, and sordid principles which prevail in this country.” (Harnard's Parliamentary Debates, 3rd series, cxlii, cols. 1977–78, and cxliv, col. 1714.)

page 354 note 31 From the lines “Sent to the Author by an unknown Hand,” which Fielding printed with his The Intriguing Chambermaid (1734).

page 354 note 32 No one else has praised him as playwright so highly as has Mr. Shaw: “Henry Fielding, the greatest practising dramatist, with the single exception of Shakespear, produced by England between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century.” (Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant [London, 1904], i, xiii.) It seems to me that the dramatic careers of Shaw and Fielding present such striking similarities that the latter may appropriately be called an immature Bernard Shaw of the eighteenth century.

page 354 note 33 See F. W. Bateson, English Comic Drama, 1700–1750 (Oxford, 1929), p. 118.

page 354 note 34 See Cross, i, 206–207.

page 354 note 35 Nicoll, op. cit., p. 265, n. 3.

page 354 note 36 Fielding's Miscellanies (1743), ii, 269–270.

page 354 note 37 Statutes at Large, 9 Geo. II, c. xxiii.

page 354 note 38 London Evening Post, April 7–9, 1737. There were at least sixteen additional performances of Eurydice Hiss'd at the Haymarket in April and May.

page 354 note 39 Life of Garrick, 4th ed. (London, 1784), ii, 216.

page 354 note 40 Diary of the First Earl of Egmont, ii, 390.

page 354 note 41 The best accounts of Walpole's misadventure in 1733 are Paul Vaucher's La Crise du Ministère Walpole en 1733–1734 (Paris, 1924), and E. R. Turner's “The Excise Scheme of 1733” in The English Historical Review, xlii, 34–57. My remarks are based chiefly on the latter.

page 354 note 42 See the Egmont Diary for April 11, 1734: “This night the mob assembled in several places and committed riots, this being the anniversary day of the defeat of the excise scheme in the House of Commons.”

page 354 note 43 April, 1737, was an especially appropriate date because Parliament was then considering a tax on “all Liquors made by Infusion, Fermentation or otherwise, from Foreign Fruit or Sugar mix'd with other Materials.” See The Craftsman, April 2, 1737.

page 354 note 44 Sometimes the farce stands for the Walpole administration. For instance, we learn from Eurydice Hiss'd that the failure of Euridice was partly due to the joke about the Gin Act cited above. Two gentlemen are discussing the fate of Pillage's farce:

3. Gent. … At length, from some ill-fated Actor's mouth,

Sudden there issued forth a horrid Dram,

And from another rush'd two Gallons forth:

The Audience, as it were contagious Air,

All caught it, hollow'd, catcall'd, hiss'd and groan'd.

1. Gent. I always thought, indeed, that Joke would damn him;

And told him that the People wou'd not take it.

In other words, the Gin Act was one of the most detested jokes in the farce of Walpole's government. A letter in Common Sense, May 21, 1737, by Fielding makes it clear that Eurydice Hiss'd was intended to suggest that government under Walpole was an outrageous farce.

The quotations from Eurydice Hiss'd here and below are from pp. 42–47 of the second, though not so-named, edition (see Cross, iii, 301) of The Historical Register For the Year 1736 … To which is added a very Merry Tragedy, called Eurydice Hiss'd, Or, A Word to the Wise. (London, n. d. [1737]).

page 354 note 45 John, Lord Hervey, Memoirs of the Reign of King George II, ed. R. Sedgwick (London 1931), i, 154.

page 354 note 46 E. R. Turner, op. cit., p. SI.