Critical Reception
The reception of Fielding's plays received early recognition; his early plays placed him in a position of popularity alongside Gay. George Bernard Shaw believed that Fielding was "the greatest practising dramatist, with the single exception of Shakespeare, produced in England between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century." However, modern critics rarely agree with Shaw, as Robert Hume points out, "Few scholars have been much interested in Fielding's highly successful career as a dramatist. To most it has seemed a false start. Readers tend to find the conventional plays derivative and sentimental, the topical ones scrappy and superficial." In particular, only one book until 1988 was published on the topic, which was Ducrocq's Le theatre de Fielding, 1728–1737, et ses prolongements dans l'oeuvre romanesque. This critical approach is not limited to just Fielding, but to the whole field; the reputation of Colley Cibber was ruined by Pope's characterizing him as the Arch Dunce and "Since the plays of Cibber's only serious rival, Henry Fielding, are hardly even read these days, let alone performed, the earlier eighteenth-century theater tends to be passed over with (at best) a polite cough."
J. Paul Hunter believes that:
Fielding's plays do not prophesy that he will become a major novelist, but the direction of his theatrical career does suggest concerns that increasingly led him away from pure representation Fielding's separation from the theatre was a forced one, but the expulsion was fortunate, freeing him from a relationship and commitment that had always been in some sense against the grain Fielding's way is not really very dramatic, either in novels or in plays; he never developed stage-likely objective correlatives, having reserved his artistic energy for the examining process in which the action is rerun again and again, reviewed, considered, nearly masticated.
To Albert Rivero, ten of the plays "mark significant moments in theatrical life": Love in Several Masques, The Temple Beau, The Author's Farce, Tom Thumb, The Tragedy of Tragedies, Rape upon Rape, The Grub Street Opera, The Modern Husband, Pasquin, and The Historical Register. Similarly, Potter organized the plays by a general theme of developing libertine characters and believed that "Fielding's most successful group of plays followed Love in Several Masques both chronologically and thematically. Comedies and burlesques such as The Author's Farce, The Tragedy of Tragedies, The Old Debauchees, and Pasquin made Fielding the most popular playwright of the 1730s, and all of these plays contain characters, situations, and dialogues that invoke libertine philosophy in some way, thought they vary in the explicitness of the depiction." In his biography of Fielding, Pagliaro declares that "Between 1727 and 1737, by which time he was only 30 years old, Fielding became England's most successful living playwright."
Read more about this topic: Henry Fielding's Early Plays
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