Love in Several Masques - Critical Response

Critical Response

Love in Several Masques was "neither a success nor a fiasco", and Fielding writes in the preface, "the Play was received with greater Satisfaction than I should have promised myself from its Merit". The play was later quoted in The Beauties of Fielding more than any of Fielding's other plays, according to Thomas Lockwood, "because for anthology reading purposes it supplied far more extractably witty bits than other Fielding plays more representative or still holding the stage."

Eighteenth and nineteenth century critics did little to discuss the play. David Erskine Baker simply lists the play in Companion to the Playhouse (1764), Charles Dibdin's History of the Stage (1800) makes a short comment on the dialogue, and John Genest said that the play was "moderate" in Some Account of the English Stage (1832). A page is devoted to Love in Several Masques in E. P. Whipple's review of a collection of Fielding's works, which calls the play "a well-written imitation" that has "smart and glib rather than witty" dialogue even though it contains "affected similes and ingenious comparisons, which the author forces into his dialogue to make it seem brilliant." Frederick Lawrence, in his Life of Henry Fielding (1855), connected the play with those of Congreve and enjoyed some of the dialogue.

Twentieth century critics tend to range in opinions on the play. F. Homes Dudden argues that "The dialogue is smart; the plot, though insufficiently compact, is fairly ingeious; the characters are conventional comic types It deserved what in fact it achieved—a qualified success." Robert Hume believes that "The play is not, in truth, very good", that "Fielding offers three minimally intertwined love plots", and that the narrative is "clumsy". However, Rivero believes that this characterisation is "unjust" and that the play deserves more merit. The play, as Rivero argues, "evinces what critics have identified as the quintessence of Fielding's art: its clear moral purpose, its conspicuous moral tone." Thomas Lockwood argues that the play "has been noticed mainly as it was Fielding's first play, or else as the example of that imitation of Congrevean form which supposedly marked his beginning in dramatic authorship. Beyond these impressions of the play, there is no real tradition of critical discussion." Pagliaro, one of Fielding's biographers, simply states that "By the standards of the day, the play neither failed nor succeeded, running four nights as it did."