by Kirk Woodward
[My
friend, and frequent ROT guest-blogger, Kirk Woodward sets out in “Henry Fielding’s Theater” to
examine the playwriting of the 18th-century English writer, best known as a
novelist now, to demonstrate, if not that he’s “the greatest dramatist with the
single exception of Shakespeare, produced in England between the Middle Ages
and the nineteenth century”—as George Bernard Shaw avers—then that “his plays
have [some]thing significant to offer.”
Kirk’s not only covering an interesting—and under-addressed—subject in
the unfamiliar plays of Fielding, but his approach is fascinating. I can guarantee that even readers who do know
Fielding’s theater work (and I do not) will learn something new from Kirk’s treatment.]
Henry
Fielding (1707-1754) is celebrated today for his raucous novel Tom Jones (1749), but he is
distinguished for much more than that. He was also a respected magistrate in
London; he and his brother founded the Bow Street Runners, which are known as
London’s first professional police force. And he was also a playwright, at a
crucial point in both British history and the history of the British stage.
George Bernard Shaw tells the story this way in the Preface to Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant, volume 1 (1898):
In 1737, the greatest dramatist, with the
single exception of Shakespeare, produced by England between the Middle Ages
and the nineteenth century – Henry Fielding – devoted his genius to the task of
exposing and destroying parliamentary corruption, then at its height. Walpole,
unable to govern without corruption, promptly gagged the stage by a censorship which
is in full force at the present moment [1898]. Fielding, driven out of the
trade of Moliere and Aristophanes, took to that of Cervantes; and since then
the English novel has been one of the glories of literature, whilst the English
drama has been its disgrace.
Sir
Robert Walpole (1676-1745) was the “prime” or leading minister – a title that
first came into use in the early 1700s – from around 1721 (when he became First Lord of the Treasury, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Leader of the
House of Commons) to 1742, the longest term any Prime Minister has served.
Walpole dominated Parliament in most of this period through oratory, thorough organization,
and clever manipulation, and was frequently accused of corrupt practices,
particularly by writers who opposed him, like Fielding, John Gay (author of The Beggar’s Opera), Alexander Pope, and
Samuel Johnson.
Fielding’s writing tended toward comedy and satire, so it
was natural that he would use the stage as an instrument for attacking Walpole.
Shaw’s account may be oversimplified; scholarship today is uncertain whether
Fielding’s plays were actually the cause of Walpole’s drive to censor the
theater, since it appears that Walpole had already begun his campaign to
establish the censorship before the two plays of Fielding most often cited as
causes, The Historical Register for the
Year 1736 and Eurydice Hiss’d
(both 1737) were produced. But there is no question that Fielding was a thorn
in Walpole’s side; that after 1737 he continued to attack Walpole, for example
in his novel The Life and Death of
Jonathan Wild, The Great (1743), which implied that Walpole resembled one of the
most notorious criminals of the day; and that Fielding continued to write plays
after the censorship was established, although they could only be printed, not
performed.
But
Shaw’s comment is interesting because it also suggests that Fielding was more
than simply a satirist – that he was a major playwright, in fact the greatest
between Shakespeare and the start of the Twentieth Century. The competition for
the title is truthfully not particularly robust. (Some possibilities include
Oliver Goldsmith, actually Irish; Robert Browning; W. S. Gilbert of Gilbert and
Sullivan fame; Oscar Wilde, also Irish; James M. Barrie; Harley
Granville-Barker; and the novelists Arnold Bennett and James Galsworthy. Much
of Shaw’s best dramatic work was ahead of him in 1898.) The paucity of
outstanding names perhaps proves Shaw’s point; who knows how many potentially
great writers didn’t bother to write for the stage because they knew the
censorship would keep their plays from ever being performed? (It was finally
abolished in 1968.)
If
we look at the list of playwrights above and ask whose plays are still
performed, the answer does not include Fielding. But there is another way to
look at the question of Fielding’s importance as a playwright, and that is to
ask whether, apart from his political involvement, his plays have anything
significant to offer. I want to try to demonstrate that they do – that they
have a coherent outlook on human nature which Fielding embodies in theatrical
terms. What we will not find in his plays is depth of characterization, or
anything that “touches the heart.” That was not his territory. We classify his
outlook as “satirical,” and it is; but it has the merit of being based on a
consistent point of view. The evidence is found in the eight plays and fifteen
farces that he wrote between 1727 and 1736.
Fielding’s
plays may be classified as meta-theater – theater about theater itself. The
template he follows is the play The
Rehearsal (1671), probably written by several authors and credited to
George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham (1628-87). The Rehearsal was itself a piece of meta-theater, a satire of the
plays of John Dryden (1631-1700). In the play, a group of actors, authors,
friends, and hangers-on, depicted as present at a rehearsal for a play, make
comments that are supposedly impromptu, not in the printed text. The device
encourages the audience to identify with the actors (who think the
play-within-the-play is silly, as in fact it is), and the author, who loves his
own work. It is clear in The Rehearsal
whom we should admire and whom we should laugh at.
Building
on The Rehearsal for the purpose of
further intensifying his satire, Fielding complicates this device. In his
plays there’s no easy identification with some characters as admirable, some as
not. He treats everyone as “suspect” – all the characters in the plays, and the
audience, too. This approach in theory presents a difficulty, because theaters
depend on audiences for their success; a play has to please the audience or it
won’t run. What if the theatrical artist believes – or claims to believe, for
purposes of the play – that the audience is evil? As a human being, the artist
ought to fight evil, but whether or not the artist eats is determined by the
audience itself. To make things more complicated, if society is diseased, then
the artist, as a member of society, is diseased as well.
So
in Fielding’s plays, such as Historical Register, the satirist-author
doesn’t come forward as the enemy of the audience; on the contrary, he is the
most civil, most polite, even fawning, even obsequious person imaginable:
MEDLEY. (the playwright) My lord, your most
obedient servant; this is a very great and unexpected favour indeed, my lord.
Everyone’s
chief concern is to make money:
SOURWIT. I hope, sir, [all the
play’s elements] conduce to the main design.
MEDLEY. Yes, Sir, they do.
SOURWIT. Pray, Sir, what is that?
MEDLEY. To divert the town, and
bring full houses.
The
fact is that the artist has no justifiable position behind his attack on the
audience, because by his nature he’s as guilty as anybody else. Likewise for his
plays: they have to deny that they have anything to say about us, because we
won’t accept their pretentions or their attacks on our own pretentions – unless
the attack is disguised. Therefore the plays deny from the start that they have
any claims against us; we aren’t
being attacked at all, as in this prelude to a satire of women:
MEDLEY. As for the nobler part of the sex,
for whom I have the greatest honor, their character can be no better set off
than by ridiculing that light, trifling, giddy-headed crew, who are a scandal
to their sex, and a curse on ours.
Satire
can also be disarmed by being identified in advance, and made fun of:
I would have a humming deal of satire, and I
would repeat in every page that courtiers are cheats and don’t pay their debts;
physicians, block-heads; soldiers, cowards . . . .
So
the situation is that a blunt attack will not succeed, because the audience
won’t want to hear it, and the satirist is in no position to lead the attack
anyway; a weak or general attack may not be heard and certainly will not change
anything. So the question becomes, what is
possible for a play to accomplish that can bring about a change in conditions?
Fielding
answers this question in a fairly drastic way. He uses the ready-at-hand
metaphor of theater, and makes the claim that our actual lives are theatrical –
not in the sense that they’re exciting, but in the sense that our being,
ourselves, our actual essence, is rhetorical. We are in a real sense, Fielding
says, the way we appear to be, whatever that is. We are the way we present
ourselves at the moment. If we can be led to understand that fact, Fielding
implies, then perhaps it is possible for us to modify our behavior – since we
are in fact the way we (the word is appropriate) act.
A
look at a few of Fielding’s plays may demonstrate how he works this idea out.
The Historical
Register for the Year 1736. We already noted that this play includes an
attack on Sir Robert Walpole. It consists of a series of scenes, essentially,
showing different groups of people speaking. The play, that is, is “about” speaking.
The first scene-within-the-play shows politicians working on foreign policy.
Their understanding of the world situation extends exactly as far as their
words do:
These mighty preparations of the Turks are
certainly designed against some place or other; now, the question is, what
place are they designed against? And that is a question which I cannot answer.
The
playwright character in the play assures us that one politician does understand; however, since that
politician is the wisest, he doesn’t say anything at all.
The
second scene shows the country’s women in conversation. Their talk doesn’t
fasten on anything of substance; neither do their minds:
FOUR. He’s everything in the world
one could wish.
ONE. Almost everything one could
wish.
TWO. They say there’s a lady in the
city has a child by him.
ALL. Ha, ha, ha!
THREE. Madam, I met a lady in a
visit the other day with three.
ALL. All Parinello’s?
THREE. All Parinello’s; all in wax.
ONE. O Gemini! Who makes them? I’ll
send and bespeak half a dozen tomorrow morning.
TWO. I’ll have as many as I can cram
into a coach with me.
The
third scene presents an auction of concepts – Patriotism, Courage, Modesty, and
so on – all turned into devices of deception, or in other words to false
rhetoric, except for some Interest at Court, which needs no disguise in order
to succeed.
In
the fourth scene we get to Walpole, presented as Pistol, the empty-headed blank
verse-speaking Prime Minister Theatrical:
But, wherefore do I try in vain to
number
These glorious hisses, which from
age to age
Our family has born triumphant from
the stage?
Remarkably,
even someone powerful like Walpole appears in the play, not as dangerous, but
as absurd. Of course the thought might occur to someone in the audience: what
will happen in Walpole’s fifth act?
An Old Man Taught
Wisdom (1735). In case we
might be tempted to think that the idea that people are their rhetoric is only a clever concept, Fielding in this play
gives a concrete example of its reality: the way a person’s occupation can
influence that person’s speech, and vice versa. The story of the play is that a
father wants to marry his sheltered daughter off to one of his relations. He
calls in three suitors: a druggist, a fencing master, and a singing teacher.
Each thinks only in terms of his profession and acts according to its ways:
QUAVER. If you had given your daughter a good
education, and let her learnt [sic] music, it would have put softer things into
her head.
BLISTER. This comes of your contempt of
physic. If she had been kept in a diet, with a little gentle bleeding and
purging, and vomiting, and blistening, this would never have happened.
WORMWOOD. You should have sent her to town a
term or two, and taken lodgings for her near the Temple, that she might have
conversed with the young gentlemen of the law, and seen the world.
In
case we are tempted to feel that “I can avoid this,” Fielding demonstrates that
there are only two choices in the matter: we can adopt a rhetorical style, or
we can try not to, and be ignorant and even dangerous, as is the daughter, who
gets everything wrong:
LUCY. O, but I would not have you think I
love you. I assure you I don’t love you; I have been told I must not tell any
man I love him. I don’t love you; indeed I don’t . . . . Hope, indeed! What do
you take me for? I’ll assure you! No, I would not give you the least bit of
hope, though I was to see you die before my face. – (aside) It is a pure thing
to give one’s self airs.
She
marries a footman, who turns out to be a good man, but this is only Fielding’s
irony: she is saved by a theatrical convention, since she hasn’t developed
enough brains to take care of herself. Both the footman and the father accept
the radically limited view of humanity that this play suggests. As the footman
says:
. . . as I have lived in a great family, I
have seen that no one is respected for what he is, but for what he has; the
world pays no regard at present to anything but money . . . .
The
father, whose plan essentially was to marry the girl to someone with money,
also learns that there are risks in knowing about corruption and risks in
remaining ignorant of it; his wisdom is that there is no dependable wisdom.
Tumble-Down Dick, or,
Phaeton in the Suds (1736). Fielding, then, conceives of human experience as
role-playing. Not only do we live lives of rhetoric ourselves; we experience it
in art, and art’s rhetoric and our own interact, providing, for example on
stage, the living image of what our minds are like. Much of Fielding’s work
concerns itself with types of theatrical art, and with what theatrical rhetoric
tells us about ourselves. Tumble-Down
Dick is Fielding’s equivalent to the major commercial entertainment of
today (film, television, Broadway plays). It uses the story of Apollo’s son who
tries to drive his father’s chariot and fails. The play’s commentary works in
two directions: first, the basic story becomes fancied up beyond belief for the
audience’s pleasure; we see Harlequin scenes, a trained dog, dances, the King
and Queen of Tragedy, and so on. Secondly, the “extra” fun in the play is of
atrocious quality; a lantern represents the sun, the comedy is demeaning and clichéd,
the play’s author is named Mr. Machine. The “serious” plot flies by so fast it
is hardly noticed:
APOLLO. Thou art so like me, sure
you would be mine;
I would be glad if you
would stay and dine;
I’ll give my bond, whate’er
you ask to grant;
I will by Styx! An oath
which break I can’t.
The
reason for this, of course, is that the audience requires less care in drama
than in “entertainment:”
In tragedies and comedies and such sort of
things, the audiences will make great allowances; but they expect more from an
entertainment; here, if the least thing is out of order, they never pass it by.
But
because the aim of both the producers and the audience is mindlessness, the
play has no mind:
2 COUNTRY. S’bud, I sweat as if I
had been at a hard day’s work.
1 COUNTRY. O, I’m scorched!
2 COUNTRY. O, I’m burnt!
3 COUNTRY. I’m on fire. (Exeunt crying fire)
NEPTUNE descends.
NEPTUNE. I am the mighty emperor of
the sea.
FUSTAIN. I am glad you tell us so,
or else we should have taken you for the emperor of the air.
Mindless
“innocent” entertainment is the worst of all; it offers escape, but false
rhetoric destroys both the audience’s and the artist’s imagination, as Fielding
illustrates in his “pantomime:”
Enter Harlequin in custody; Columbine, poet,
etc. The poet makes his complaint to the justice; the justice orders a mittimus
[arrest warrant] for Harlequin; Columbine courts the justice to let Harlequin
escape; he grows fond of her, but will not comply until she offers him money;
he then acquits Harlequin, and commits the poet.
Eurydice (1737) (“as it was damn-d at the Theater-Royal, Drury
Lane”). On the surface Eurydice is
primarily a take-off on Italian operas and imported opera singers. Orpheo, one
of those singers, goes to Hell to bring back his wife:
EURYDICE. How is it possible you could come
hither to fetch me back when I was dead, who had so often wished me here while
alive?
ORPHEO. Those were only the sudden blasts of
passion.
Orpheo
is always getting those “blasts,” and whenever he does, he bursts into song. Below
the funny digs at Italian opera, though, lies the idea that art comes from
something we cannot control. “Sudden blasts” sounds suspiciously like farting
or belching. Art comes from irrational springs in ourselves; by extension we
ourselves are irrational. The only truly controlled person in the play is
Eurydice, and in the play she has no intention of going back with her husband. She
tricks Orpheo into turning around to look at her – which ruins his chance of
getting her out of Hell – and then becomes all innocence when he accuses her of
it. He is once more moved to song, and she uses rhetoric precisely to reverse
her real feelings:
ORPHEO. And must we, must we part?
EURYDICE. We must away,
For if you stay,
Indeed ‘twill break my
heart.
Your servant, dear,
I downward steer,
You upward to the light;
Take no more leave,
For I must grieve,
’Till you are out of
sight.
Hell,
in the play, is exactly like Earth, where man and wife cannot stand each other.
Shaw says that when we want “the pure emotions of the heart,” we look in the
divorce and murder columns. Fielding posits that
drama portrays violence and conflict because the human “normal” is a
frightening thing.
Incidentally,
I indicated above that the play was howled off the stage. Fielding wrote
another farce to celebrate the condemnation of Eurydice, called Eurydice
Hissed (1737). This play also celebrates the irrational springs of art, by
putting the playwright, Pillage, rather than the audience, in a dubious light.
The writer attempts to bribe Honestus (the name, representing a straightforward
member of the audience, indicates his
difficulty) but fails; and he goes out and gets drunk in fine rhetorical style:
PILLAGE.
. . . my head begins to swim,
And see Eurydice all pale before me;
Why dost thou haunt me thus? I did not damn
thee.
By Jove there never was a better farce.
She beckons me – say – whether – blame the
town,
And not thy Pillage – Now my brain’s on fire!
My staggering senses dance – and I am –
HONESTUS. Drunk.
Pasquin: A Dramatick
Satire on the Times (1736). This highly successful play contains within it
the “rehearsal” of two plays, “The Election,” a “comedy,” and “The Life and
Death of Common Sense,” a “tragedy.” The first deals with politics, the second
with the reason for political and cultural ruin. The two plays confirm each other;
politics has a personal source, private life is lived in a public world.
The
politicians in “The Election” confront the problem of bribery. They solve it
through language:
SIR HARRY. And will you be bribed to sell
your country? Where do you think these courtiers get the money they bribe you
with but from you yourselves? Do you think a man who will give a bribe won’t
take one? . . . . For my part, I would as soon suborn an evidence at an assize
as vote at an election.
MAYOR. I do believe you, Sir Harry.
SIR HARRY. Mr. Mayor, I hope you received
those three bucks I sent you, and that they were good.
It
does not matter what a man says as long as he says it. It does not even matter
what a man feels as long as he believes
it:
O momma, I have grieved myself to death at
the court party’s losing a majority in the house, what would become of us;
alas, we should not go to London? Shall we go to London? then I am easy; but if
we had staid here, I should have broke my heart for the love of my country.
Politics,
in summary, competes with other forms of theater. It consists of making
announcements:
. . . you have it now in your power to oblige
my lord more than ever; go and return my lord and the colonel as duly elected,
and I warrant you I do your business with him yet.
The
play’s link to reality is the character of the Mayor, the basically good man
without the strength to fight rampant evil, trapped by external corruption and
his own ambiguity. He is easy prey for his horror of a wife (she forthrightly
encourages her daughter to become a mistress when they reach London), and he
takes refuge, again, in slogans:
MRS. MAYOR. Yes, I am too reasonable a woman,
and have used gentle methods too long; but I’ll try others.
(Goes
to a corner of the stage and takes a stick.)
MAYOR. Nay, then, liberty and property and no
excise! (Runs off.)
MRS. MAYOR. I’ll excise you, you villain!
(Runs after him.)
In
the second play, “The Life and Death of Common Sense,” Queen Common Sense is
finally killed by servants of the Queen of Ignorance (Law, Medicine, and the
Clergy). Common Sense has virtually no supporters; but she rises again as a
ghost, and Ignorance flees to where she will be completely safe, probably in a
theater. “Ignorance” is roughly equivalent to undifferentiated erotic drives.
Common Sense comes to stand for discrimination of values, hence of a saving
humanness:
I have also heard . . .
That men unable to discharge their debts
At a short warning, being sued for them
Have, with both power and will their debts to
pay,
Lain all their lives in prison for their
costs.
LAW. That may perhaps be some poor person’s
case,
Too mean to entertain your royal ear.
COMMON SENSE. My lord, while I am queen I
shall not think
One man too mean, or poor to be redressed . .
. .
But
common sense is no panacea either:
COMMON
SENSE. And can my subjects then complain of wrong?
Base and ungrateful?
What is their complaint?
IGNORANCE.
They say you do impose a tax of thought
Upon their minds, which
they’re too weak to bear.
Ignorance
is not simply blissful freedom from worries. It involves giving up
responsibilities and accepting inhuman behavior to others. Common Sense
represents the attempt to control and order instincts of dullness (not to
eliminate them, which is impossible), but Ignorance tries to repress
consciousness, even the quality of humanness. It cannot succeed without causing
guilt, which is why the ghost of Common Sense returns when she is killed. The
one who chooses Ignorance is allowed to become the thing he chooses:
Beat a retreat, the day is now our own.
The powers of Common Sense are all destroyed;
Those that remain are fled away with her.
The
theater is a servant to this human experience, so Harlequin reappears to offer
himself to Queen Ignorance. Tragedy and Comedy die with Common Sense; all art
is corrupted by Ignorance’s conquest. The playwright is at least as much to
blame as anyone else:
POET. I have been damn’d
Because
I was your foe, and yet I still
Courted
your friendship with my utmost art.
COMMON SENSE. Fool, thou were damned because
thou didst pretend
Thyself
my friend . . .
The
result is that human beings become vile creatures, less than human. Harlequin
presents to Ignorance:
Two dogs that walk on their hind legs only,
and personate human creatures so well, they might be mistaken for them.
A human creature that personates a dog so
well that he might also be taken for one.
Two human cats.
A most curious set of puppies.
A pair of pigeons.
A set of rope dancers and tumblers from Sadler’s-Wells.
* *
* *
I
am not certain that this look at Fielding’s plays confirms Shaw’s opinion of
his rank as a playwright; but I hope it is clear that Fielding’s plays do not
spring simply from indignation over issues, but from a conception of human
nature as role playing, often without knowledge and control and therefore
dangerous. Only a small amount of freedom comes from being aware of this
situation; as the Beatles put it in their 1967 song “Penny Lane”:
. . . though she feels as if she’s in a play,
She is anyway.
But
something worse happens to the one who tries to repress this awareness; he pays
a terrible price for not knowing the terrible price. Fielding looks for modest
results that make life more decent – for small gains, mostly, in the theater:
Our author then in jest throughout the play,
Now begs a serious word or two to say.
Banish all childish entertainment hence;
Let all that boast your favour have pretense,
If not to sparkling wit, at least to sense. (Pasquin)
[Kudos
to Kirk for getting the Beatles into a piece on an 18th-century playwright.
(I wonder if that's a first.) What's next—“The Beatles and
Shakespeare”? How about “Molière and the Fab Four”?
[The
contrast Kirk observes between using a “rhetorical style” and being “ignorant
and even dangerous” sounds like a capsulization of the differences between the
rest of the Republican presidential candidates (rhetorically “on topic” and
prepped) and Trump (“ignorant and dangerous”)—MHO, of course. (“I had Trump
in mind,” Kirk wrote me when I raised this with him.) And the designation of the playwright in Historical
Register as wise but silent strikes me as
the mirror image of Chance the Gardener,
Peter Sellers’s character in Being There. He was
thought wise because he didn't say much—but he was really a moron who didn't
speak because he just didn’t understand what was going on!
[I
asked Kirk if any of Fielding’s plays are stageable today, even as Kirk notes, the
writer’s not on anyone’s list of playwrights whose work is still performed—but
could he be? (I was thinking
specifically of Pasquin, based on Kirk’s description. The points seem valid today, especially
during an election year.) While most
forgotten and neglected plays are that way for the simple reason that they’re
just not very good, sometimes they’ve just been overlooked. Kirk replied, “I agree,
Pasquin is the one I’m most
interested in for possible production,” after which he decided to add that statement in the article. I’m curious enough now that if Kirk or
someone else decides to produce a Fielding play when I’m nearby, I’ll try to go
see it.]
No comments:
Post a Comment