Intimacy and Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Literary Culture by Emrys D. Jones & Victoria Joule

Author:Emrys D. Jones & Victoria Joule
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Joining the chorus, Rivero writes, “[a]ny play that seeks to heighten the perceptions of its audience, that challenges its viewers to read the world with histrionic detachment, makes an emphatic political statement”.48 Though Lisa Freeman disagrees, arguing that Fielding’s rehearsal-plays interrupt “[t]he very distinction we think can be made between real and merely fictional experience”, in the end she comes to a similar conclusion about the function of Fielding’s reflexivity: he shows us that “meaning is no more or less than a product of a particular epistemological framework that can be displaced or overruled”, and the subject of his drama is “the full disclosure” of theatrical and social “contrivances”.49 This makes sense. Under the aegis of literary Marxism, we want to celebrate political engagement as a critical process, and we expect to be alienated by art in order that we might recognise our own myriad alienations. As Jacques Rancière puts it, we want a “theatre without spectators” a theatre in which audiences “become active participants as opposed to passive voyeurs”.50 And we want therefore to seize upon Fielding as a principal celebrant of both artistic self-consciousness and political engagement, an author who shows us how the two go hand-in-hand, how political radicalism and artistic self-reflexivity are as interdependent as a horse and carriage.

There is good reason to suppose that Fielding belongs to this camp. In Pasquin, Queen Common-Sense asks Queen Ignorance to explain the cause of her subjects’ discontent. She answers: “They say you do impose a Tax of Thought Upon their Minds, which they’re too weak to bear”. Queen Common-Sense, shocked, asks: “Would’st thou from Thinking then absolve Mankind?” (V.i, 3: p. 306). The clear implication is that “common sense” requires thought, critical distance, critical assessment while Queen Ignorance stands for the escapism of pure entertainment. To prove his point about the contrast between thoughtful drama and pure entertainment, Fustian contrasts mainpiece plays by the acknowledged greats—“Shakespear, Johnson, Vanbrugh, and others” (V.i, 3: p. 308)—with the “Pantomime” entertainments that frequently followed them. In his epilogue, he again contrasts the mainpiece with its paratextual commentary: “The Play once done, the Epilogue, by Rule,/Should come and turn it all to Ridicule” (ln. 1–2, 3: p. 314).51 Fustian wonders “how it was possible for any Creature of Human Understanding, after having been diverted for three hours with the Productions of a great Genius, to sit for three more, and see a Set of People running about the Stage after one another … playing several Juggling Tricks” (V.i, 3: p. 308). But Fustian is hardly a reliable source—Sneerwell observes that those who complain about farce never seem to miss one. Nevertheless, his complaint was not uncommon in the period. John Dennis commented on the frustrations of having one’s emotions wrenched from tears to laughter both by paratextual commentary and by the interleaving of comic scenes in tragedies.52 Fielding is probably making fun of Dennis, but Fustian’s assessment nonetheless calls attention to a serious critical issue in the period: how consistent should the audience’s

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