The plays of Henry Fielding : a critical study of his dramatic career
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Bibliographic Information
The plays of Henry Fielding : a critical study of his dramatic career
University Press of Virginia, 1989
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Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Fielding was one of the most interesting playwrights of his time because of his historical position, similar to that of Shaw, and his awareness of what it meant to be a playwright at a time when the native dramatic tradition appeared to have died and when the only hope for drama lay in such low crowd-pleasers as farces, puppet shows, "laughing" tragedies and ballad operas. The plays of Henry Fielding, while far from being neglected, have not received the critical attention they deserve. Rather than studying the plays in their own right, critics have assumed that these early dramatic pieces merit attention only insofar as they serve as a prologue to the later fiction. Rivero, through critical readings of ten representative plays, aims to shows that Fielding was not writing plays with novelistic features but, until the Licensing Act of 1737 ended his career as a dramatist, was very much involved in expanding the possibilities of the theatre, constantly seeking new approaches, new forms and new emphases. By focusing on the plays themselves, he tells the story of Fielding's dramatic career but avoids an exhaustive history of contemporary plays and playwrights.
He aims to provide us with a clear, critical account of Fielding's dramatic career in terms of trends in contemporary dramatic affairs that help to account for his artistic choices in individual plays.
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