The Tragedy of Tragedies - Variorum

Variorum

Fielding gives special emphasis to the printed version of The Tragedy of Tragedies by including notes and making it his only printed play that originally includes a frontispiece. The variorum, or notes, to the printed version of the play pointed out many of the parodies, allusions, and other references within The Tragedy of Tragedies. However, the notes themselves serve as a parody for serious uses of the notes and mock the idea of critically interpreting plays. By calling himself Scriblerus Secundus, Fielding connects The Tragedy of Tragedies with the works of the Scriblerus Club. These works also contain parodies of critics and scholars who attempt to elucidate literature.

As such, the play is one of Fielding's Scriblerian plays, and the commentary in the print edition adds another level of satire that originates in the Scriblerus model of Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, et al. H. Scriblerus Secundus prefaces the play with claims that Scriblerus spent ten years working on an edition and that the play comes from the Elizabethan time period and may or may not have been the work of Shakespeare. Additionally, Scriblerus abuses classical sources through mistranslations and misreadings, botches contemporary and traditional critical theory, and is a satirical representation of criticism in general in the tradition of A Tale of a Tub and The Dunciad Variorum. Regardless of the humorous elements, the notes do reveal Fielding's vast classical education.

Fielding's theatrical output of 1730–1 shows that the assumption of the Scriblerian persona may have had an opportunist character. Though Fielding was happy to share in some of the fame and power of Pope and Swift at their peak, and to borrow some of their themes and techniques, he never agreed wholeheartedly with their cultural or political aims. In his poetry of the period Fielding distanced himself from the Toryism and misanthropy of Pope, and it has been suggested that the surface affiliation of The Tragedy of Tragedies with the writing of the Scriblerus Club masks real antipathy. However, Fielding's use of the Scriblerus name doesn't seem to have been resented by its creators. Swift reportedly praised Fielding as a wit, saying that he had laughed only twice in his life, the second instance being the Circumstance of Tom Thumb's killing the Ghost in the quick accumulation of corpses that closes the play. Pope may have echoed Fielding in the expanded four-book Dunciad of 1743 which suggests memories of Fielding's The Author's Farce in some of the methods it uses to satirize the garish culture of the time.