What the Drama Does in Fielding's Jonathan Wild

What the Drama Does in Fielding's Jonathan Wild Alexander Pettit Fielding's The Life ofMr. Jonathan Wild the Great was first published in his generically chequered Miscellanies (1743), but was probably drafted and possibly written before Joseph Andrews (1742); it belongs equally to his career as dramatist and as novelist. Many readers have remarked that the anti-Walpole strain recalls Fielding's later drama at the Little Haymarket theatre. Jonathan Wild can tell us more about the shape of Fielding's career, however, if we read it as a study of genre in transition, a working-out of the question of what counts—or what works—in a genre new to Fielding and still uncertain of its own formal parameters. Fielding calls attention to the absurdity of his protagonist by presenting him as an actor unaware that his overblown theatricality denies or contradicts the generic requirements of the' novel. Wild "acts," habitually and very much as an actor acts, but without realizing that his acting is a behaviour both granted by and mocked by a narrator who abdicates his role as the controller of the narrative whenever he is especially eager that his protagonist discredit himself.1 1 For the dating of Jonathan Wild, see Martin Battestin, Henry Fielding: A Life (London: Routledge , 1989), pp. 281-82, 655n37. While many critics note in passing the dramatic trimmings of Jonathan Wild, Simon Varey's survey is the most useful. See Varey, Henry Fielding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 39-41. Only Claude Rawson analyses the presence of the drama in Jonathan Wild; see Rawson, Henry Fielding and the Augustan Ideal under Stress (London: Routledge, 1972; Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1991), pp. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 6, Number 2, January 1994 154 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION I shall first suggest that Jonathan Wild is structurally and thematically allied to the drama of the Restoration and the early eighteenth century; secondly, I shall examine the parodie and evaluative functions of the drama in Jonathan Wild—the manner in which the drama is used to indicate its own limitations. I hope to demonstrate that Jonathan Wild offers a self-conscious evaluation of, and ajudgment against, the appropriateness to the novel of the conventions of the drama. Robert Hume designates the period 1728 to 1737 the "New Wave" of English eighteenth-century drama, introduced by the great commercial successes of The Beggar's Opera and Vanbrugh and Cibber's The Provole 'd Husband, and brought to an abrupt close by Walpole's Licensing Act; he notes that the period is characterized by "writers [who] experiment vigorously in new play types."2 The conservative resonance of his occasional pseudonym "H. Scriblerus Secundus" aside, Fielding was throughout the 1730s experimenting as broadly as any of his contemporaries . The vigour in Fielding's plays manifests itself as an intolerance for rules and conventions, a youthful, joyous, and relaxed irreverence that defines the central difference between the Peri Bathous of "Martinus Scriblerus" (1727) and a piece in many ways indebted to it, The Tragedy of Tragedies of "Scriblerus Secundus" (1731). Jonathan Wild transposes the great creative energy of 1730s drama into the novel, punching through generic boundaries as surely as The Tragedy ofTragedies and The Historical Registerfor the Year 1736 (1737) did. A bantering and propulsive, if finally novel-centric, relationship between genres is evident throughout Jonathan Wild: the distance that separates the literalistic and prose-bound Partridge from the actor Garrick in Tom Jones is never taken for granted in the earlier novel. Dramatic convention, which embellishes theme, character, and narrative in Tom Jones (1749), is integral to theme in Jonathan Wild, in which Fielding 101-259; and Orderfrom Confusion Sprung: Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literaturefrom Swift to Cowper (London: Allen and Unwin, 1985; Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International , 1992), pp. 261-310. In The Drama and Fielding's Novels (New York: Garland, 1988), Charles Trainor claims that Fielding "borrows" several characters from the drama (pp. 7-8), and notes the dramatic structure of the Heartfree plot (p. 41) and the sentimental strain in the novel (pp. 100-101). Trainor believes that "Jonathan Wild portrays a lower-class world far removed from the privileged...