One Popular Playwright, One Private Man

Henry Fielding acquired many nicknames through his long, varied, and controversial career—most of them far from complimentary—but one that he would surely have relished was that given by the Universal Spectator in July 1734: Henry Drama Esq. (he would particularly have liked the “Esquire,” an honorific that he insisted upon). The theatergoing audience in London—and that may have meant almost all the aristocracy, gentry and tradespeople, and their servants, in the capital with a bit of spare cash for a ticket—would have known exactly whom the Universal Spectator was referring to. In 1734, at the age of twenty-six, Fielding was the most famous working dramatist of an age in which it was no easy matter even to get new plays produced. His theatrical career had begun precociously with the staging of Love in Several Masques at Drury Lane in 1728 and was effectively to end in 1737 when the Licensing Act was passed in the wake of a series of his scurrilous and scatological political satires.

During those nine years, Henry Fielding wrote, revised, presented, and published an extraordinary number of plays. Some were performed but not published, some published but not performed, some were original, and some revised from other plays (sometimes his own). They vary widely in tone and subject matter, from domestic comedy, to ballad opera, to mock-tragedy, to satire, to outright burlesque, and in form, from the short single-act afterpiece, to the traditional five-act drama, with many variations in between. What they have in common is that they all feed on the turbulent, tumbling world around them, particularly the political and social life of London in the early eighteenth century.

Fielding was a playwright of his time in every sense, and while some of his plays entered the standard theatrical repertoire through to the late eighteenth century, most did not survive longer; few have had modern editions, and with a small number of heroic exceptions—notably Robert D. Hume’s Henry Fielding and the London Theatre, 1728–1737 (1988), rightly much-cited here—there has been little sustained academic study of them. Any attempt to produce a scholarly edition of Fielding’s dramatic oeuvre, therefore, faces huge challenges.

All this makes Thomas Lockwood’s achievement the more remarkable. In a three-volume, 2,400-tightly-packed-page project, published over seven years, not far short of the length of Fielding’s main dramatic career, Lockwood has produced authoritative texts of twenty-six plays (generally based on the first printed edition, unless later revisions can be identified closely with Fielding himself), and a patient summation of what can realistically be known about each play’s context, its conditions of creation, its reception, and its subsequent performances and critical history. Appendixes add further invaluable information, including the tunes (where known) to the many songs included. The only plays missing are Eurydice (1737) and The Wedding Day (1743), both originally printed as part of Fielding’s own Miscellanies (1743) and already reproduced in the relevant volume of the Wesleyan Fielding, edited by the late Bertrand A. Goldgar.

Volume 1 (1728–31) of the Plays begins with Fielding’s apprentice work, Love in Several Masques (1728), and deals with the remarkable phenomenon that was Tom Thumb (transformed into the Tragedy of Tragedies), a play that later attracted the young Frances Burney to play Glumdalca, and that was still being referred to familiarly by Scott and Byron. Volume 2 (1731–34) begins with the puzzling story of The Welsh Opera and its expansion into the unperformed Grub-Street Opera and goes on to Fielding’s acclaimed adaptations from Molière, The Mock Doctor and The Miser. Volume 3 (1734–42) is at the same time the most interesting and the most frustrating volume. It traces not only the chronological juxtaposition of...