Satire and Embodiment: Allegorical Romance on Stage and Page in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain

Theatrical presentation of character relies on embodiment and mimesis where the novel constructs plausible character through the diegetic presentation of consciousness and action. This article argues that, with the introduction of stage censorship in the 1730s, allegorical prose romance mediates the transition from theatrical to novelistic modes of rendering plausible embodied character. Theatre and the novel in the mid-eighteenth century share a preoccupation with the relation of embodiment to allegorical abstraction, often represented in the figure of the Quixote, who mistakes one for the other. This essay charts the translation of techniques found in Henry Fielding’s satirical allegory in his short stage plays of the 1730s with three allegorical romances of 1736 that take Frederick, Prince of Wales, and his new bride, Princess Augusta of Saxa-Gothe-Altenburg, as the hero and heroine: Celenia and Hyempsal, The Adventures of Prince Titi, and The Adventures of Eovaai. Discursive play with the magical reincarnation of “dead” figures in new forms of embodiment—puppets, ghosts, supernatural visitation—is central to these acts of generic transformation. Allegory, as we see in Sarah Fielding and Jane Collier’s The Cry (1754), has an unacknowledged afterlife in the mid-century novel.