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English Aristophanes”: Fielding, Foote, and Debates Over Literary Satire

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English Aristophanes”: Fielding, Foote, and Debates Over Literary Satire chapter 6 The “English Aristophanes”: Fielding, Foote, and Debates over Literary Satire Matthew J. Kinservik When discussing comic drama in any era, Aristophanes seems to figure into everything—all comic roads lead back to him. In the introduction to Aristophanes in Performance, Edith Hall notes the following: Precedents for every single tradition of comic theatre and humour in the West have . with justification, been identified in Aristophanes: per- sonal satire, philosophical satire, mimicry, parody, puns, double entendre, Saturnalian role inversion, Rabelaisian and Bakhtinian carnival, drag acts and cross-dressing, stand-up, bawd and scatology, slapstick, farce and knockabout.1 As with genre, so with ideology: throughout modern history, radicals and conservatives, alike, have been inclined to invoke Aristophanes as an ancient exemplar of their views. Given this ubiquity and malleability, we ought to tread with some caution when we see his named invoked—especially when we see texts or writers of very different sorts being labeled “Aristophanic.” This is important when considering the comic drama of eighteenth-century England, particularly when trying to make sense of the career of Samuel Foote, a play- wright who flourished between the 1740s and 1770s. Foote was so thoroughly identified with his Greek predecessor that he was often referred to as “our Modern Aristophanes” or “the English Aristophanes” or simply “Aristophanes.” But Foote was not the only “English Aristophanes.” That label also belonged to Henry Fielding when he was in his heyday, writing satirical comedies in the 1730s. How could Foote and Fielding both be the “English Aristophanes” when their work was so different? When first considering this issue in the context of a book-length study of theatrical censorship in eighteenth-century England, I posed the following question: 1 Hall (2007b) 1. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi ��.��63/97890043�4657_007 110 kinservik If both men were Aristophanic satirists, we must pause and wonder why Fielding was locked out of the Little Haymarket in 1737, whereas Foote was given a royal patent to operate the Haymarket in 1766. In other words, what had changed, either in the nature of satire or censorship, to make Aristophanic satire so tolerable by 1766?2 The question is important because being the “English Aristophanes” was a dangerous game for Fielding. Not only did it lead to the untimely end of his theatrical career, but it also contributed to the passage of the Stage Licensing Act of 1737, a heavy-handed censorship measure that was not fully repealed until 1968.3 The story is different for Foote. In his case, assuming the Aristophanic mantle resulted in three decades of theatrical success and the acquisition of a royal patent to operate the Little Theatre in the Haymarket—the very building that Fielding was literally locked out of when the censorship was imposed. The answers I provided to the question focused on comic drama produced in the decades after the passage of the Licensing Act, but they relied upon a fairly narrow conception of what “Aristophanes” meant in the eighteenth century. My aim now is more fully to account for eighteenth-century English attitudes toward Aristophanes and reconsider the significance of both Fielding’s and Foote’s reputations in light of that fuller sense of what “Aristophanes” meant in the period. Matthew Steggle’s essay, “Aristophanes in Early Modern England,” notes that the old idea that Aristophanes was largely ignored until he was rediscovered in the nineteenth century needs to be discarded. Specifically, he observes that the “reception of Aristophanes is part of a far more complicated cultural picture,” and he goes on to say, “Renaissance culture was interested, quite particularly, in one aspect of Greek Old Comedy: the fact that it offered a precedent for a drama that satirized living people by name on stage.”4 There were, of course, sharply differing attitudes toward personal satire, both on the stage and off, in the eighteenth century. And there were correspondingly divergent attitudes toward Aristophanes, and they are significant for us to understand because the more we come to appreciate that there were different conceptions of Aristophanes in eighteenth-century England, the better we can understand the culture’s attitudes toward personal satire and how writers as different as Fielding and Foote each came to be called “the English Aristophanes.” 2 Kinservik (2002) 134. 3 For context on the passage and implementation of the Stage Licensing Act, see Conolly (1976) and Leisenfeld (1984). 4 Steggle (2007) 52..
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