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ALBERT J. RiverO. The Plays of Henry Fielding: A Critical Study of His Dramatic Career (Charlottesville: Virginia, 1989). Pp. xiii + 170. $24.50.
Critics who write about Fielding's plays usually feel that they are engaged on missionary work, redeeming his drama from a limbo to which literary history has consigned it. Mr. Rivero ranks as a particularly enthusiastic champion of the plays. Today Fielding's reputation as a founding father of English fiction is familiar, yet students often express amazement on discovering that Fielding wrote plays- let alone that he was a prolific and innovative playwright during his twenties. His political satires of 1736-1737 probably did more than anything else to precipitate the Licensing Act of 1737, which institutionalized censorship of the English stage for over 230 years. Fielding's career as dramatist and manager had immense consequences for the theater until the recent past. The extremely high regard with which Fielding's novels were and still are held has clearly not aroused much interest in his dramatic work, as might have been expected. This curious phenomenon is one of the issues Mr. Rivero addresses.
Chronology makes it easy to separate Fielding the dramatist from Fielding the novelist. The effect of hiving off the plays from the rest of his work is to relegate them to prentice work, a phase that Fielding had to go through before finding his true medium- the novel. Mr. Rivero argues that even those scholars who have written about Fielding's plays in a particularly illuminating...