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Fielding's tragedy of tragedies: Papal fallibility and Scriblerian

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Citation Weinbrot, Howard D. 1997. Fielding's tragedy of tragedies: Papal fallibility and Scriblerian satire. Harvard Library Bulletin 7 (1), Spring 1996: 20-39.

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Fielding's Tragedy of Tragedies: Papal Fallibility and Scriblerian Satire

HowardD. Weinbrot

ielding's Tragedy of Tragedies(1731), we are often informed, disvalues its Fcontemporaries "before a grander vision of the past." That belief is shared by several of Fielding's ablest readers, who regard him as a young officer in the Scriblerian army battling the legions of Night. We thus hear that Fielding's comedy owes to Pope "almost its whole vision of modernity" and that its allu- sions to Swift "invoke his vision of a filthy modem world, thoroughly debased from the Vergilian world." Modernity is no more "than a collection of improb- able situations, dead metaphors . . . and a total language of sound and fury without significance" in a shabby time "unable to conceive a past better than itself." Another critic tells us that Scriblerus Secundus is "a perfect example of a

HowARD D. WEINBROTis Vilas Swiftian Modem"; yet another says that Fielding demonstrates his "allegiance to and Quintana Research Professor, his scriblerian predecessors. " 1 Department ofEnglish, University ofWisconsin, Madison. 1 The terms "disvalue," owes to Pope, Swift, and of The Tragedy. Martin C. and Ruthe R. Battestin's improbable situations, are from J. Paul Hunter, : A Life (London and New York: Occasional Form: Henry Fielding and the Chains of Routledge, 1989) includes much characteristically Circumstance(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University valuable discussion of the plays and their contexts. For Press, 1975), 39, 37, 37, 34 respectively. For "Swiftian useful essays, see Charles B. Woods, "Fielding's Modern," see Peter Lewis, Fielding's BurlesqueDrama: Epilogue for Theobald," Philological Quarterly 28 Its Place in the Tradition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh (1949): 419-24; T. W. Craik, "Fielding's '' University Press for the University of Durham, 1987), Plays," in Augustan Worlds,ed. J. C. Hilson, et al. (New 116; "allegiance," Albert]. Rivero, The Plays of Henry York: Barnes and Noble, 1978), 165-74; Eric Fielding: A Critical Study of His Dramatic Career Rothstein, "In Brobdingnag: Captain Gulliver, Dr. (Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, Derham, and Master Tom Thumb," Etudes anglaises37 1989), 75. Pat Rogers uses the same term in his Henry (1984): 129-41; and Nancy A. Mace, "Fielding, Fielding: A Biography (New York: Charles Scribner's Theobald, and The Tragedy of Tragedies," Philological Sons, 1979), while also adding that "there are no signs Quarterly 66 (1987): 457-72. Mace well-demonstrates that the Scriblerians were anxious to recognize Fielding Fielding's of Theobald. as their heir apparent" (47). For other relevant books Several of Fielding's plays have been performed in regarding Fielding's drama, see Jean Ducrocq, Le London in recent years-with critical and popular Theatre de Fielding: 1728-1737 et ses prolongementdans success. We now can applaud the rise of the novelist /'oeuvre romanesque(: Didier [ 1975]); Robert F. while lamenting the decline of the dramatist. We also Wilson, Jr., 'This Form Corifounded': Studies in the can suspect that the notion of Fielding as dour Burlesque Play from Udall to Sheridan (The Hague: Scriblerian relates to the notion of Fielding as perpetu- _Mouton, 1975); Thomas R. Cleary, Henry Fielding: ally Walpole's enemy. This view has been exploded by Political Writer (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfred Laurier Martin and Ruthe Battestin, Thomas R. Cleary, University Press, 1984); Vincent J. Liesenfeld, The Bertrand A. Goldgar, Robert D. Hume, and Brian LicensingAct of 1737 (Madison: University of Wisconsin McCrea in works cited in this and subsequent notes. Press, 1984); and most particularly Robert D. Hume, See also Thomas Lockwood, "Fielding and the Henry Fielding and the London Theatre 1728-1737 Licensing Act," Huntington Library Quarterly 50 (1987): (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). Hume is the critic 379-93. I am indebted to Hugh Amory, Thomas most concerned with performance history and, not Lockwood, and Eric Rothstein, whose helpful response coincidentally, most insistent upon the broad comedy to this essay does not denote universal approbation. Fielding's Tragedyef Tragedies 21

As Fielding might say, I have only one objection to this verity-namely, that it is not true. It overlooks three troubling contradictions. One is that such dark language makes heavy weather out of so light a play. The second is that if Fielding cloned Scriblerian gloom Pope and Swift should not have been so suspi- cious of him. The third is that Fielding's contemporaries sometimes regarded his burlesques as exemplums of the dangerous dulness that Pope satirized. Fielding's critical friend observes regarding one of the chief characters in Tom Thumb (1730), "While ... Doodle's respected, / Othello and are wholly neglected. " 2 Though that judgment is excessive, the Tragedy of Tragedies surely is a crude and rude comic farce designed to evoke laughter, banish solem- nity, and entertain us with Noodle, Doodle, Foodle, and a woman named Mustacha. Reconsideration of Fielding's presumed Scriblerian allegiance suggests an alternative reading of the Tragedyof Tragedies.The alternative is consistent with contemporary response and production history. It also helps to explain why Pope was cool to Fielding by suggesting that Pope legitimately could have thought Fielding cool to him. 3 One part of this alternative seems to me demonstrably valid; the other seems to me at the least a plausible if not probable hypothesis.

1. THE ScRIBLERIANs' CREED AND FrnLDING's CREED

As the preeminent Scriblerians, Swift and Pope embodied premises more severe than those of Gay and Arbuthnot. Pope's admirer Walter Harte well captures one aspect of their often dehumanizing severity. His Essay on Satire (1730) observes that "The good Scriblerus... displays / The reptile Rhimesters of these later days." From at least 1726 for Swift and 1728 for Pope, these Scriblerians held that the corruption of modern learning was a function of the corruption of Walpolean-Hanoverian government. For Swift, if not wholly for Pope, an enduring republic of letters was possible only in a stable and honest monarchy and ministry wedded to a "country party" and guided by a dominant, protected national religion. Failure to meet such conditions endangers the nation, its best values, and its arts that require continuity with the classical past. The consequence of moral is well exemplified in the change from the dark to the darker final lines to Pope's Dunciad Variorumof 1729 and in Four Books of 1743. In the first, "Thy hand great Dulness! lets the curtain fall, / And Universal Darkness covers all." In the second, "Thy hand great Anarch, lets the curtain fall; / And Universal Darkness buries All." 4

2 Thomas Cooke. The Candidate for the Bays. A Poem Rapsody (1733) he says that "Feilding leaves him .... Written by Scriblerus Tertius (London. 1730), 2, on [W elsted] far behind" as a bathetic poet. The Poems of which we also read that 's plays and rules of , ed. Harold Williams, 2d ed. (Oxford: art are abandoned: "Tom Thumb and such Stuff alone Clarendon Press, 1958), 2: 654, line 396. tickle this Age." The theme of displacement of the good by the bad, of the classical rules by modem irreg- 4 For Harte, see An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the ularity, was a commonplace of Scriblerian rhetoric and Dunciad .... To which is added A Discourse on , rage. The Candidate uses some of the Dunciad' s language Arraigning Persons by Name. By Monsieur Boileau of murder, punishment, and banishment, but is far (London, 1730), 14. For Pope see the Twickenham lighter in tone. For another equation of Fielding's farce Edition of the Poems of vol. 5, The and dulness, see , The Mirrour: Or, Letters Dunciad, ed. James Sutherland, 3d ed. (London: Satyrical, Panegyrica/, Serious and Humorous, On the Methuen & Co.; New Haven: Yale University Press, Present Time (London, 1733), 3, 13, 14. 1963), Book 3, lines 355-56 (1729); Book 4, lines 655-56 (1743). Subsequent references to the first three 3 Swift is supposed to have cracked a rare smile upon books of the Dunciad Variorum are cited in the text by reading Tom Thumb. Nevertheless, in On Poetry a book and line number. 22 HARVARD LIBRARY BULLETIN

On the face of it the Tragedy of Tragediesmay indeed seem to extend the Scriblerian agenda. Fielding of course displays that apparent genealogy in his assumed name, H. Scriblerus Secundus. Like Swift and Pope he uses the familiar device of a speaker undermining his own words while proudly undermining his culture's institutions. The speaker is a pedant who often is spectacularly wrong about much of what he says, whether in the mock-learned Preface or notes at the bottom of the page. Like the Wotton-figure trapped in the footnotes to later editions of A Tale ofa Tub (1704) he explicates the obvious, and like the prime annotator in the Dunciad Variorumhe mistakes the obvious and squabbles with other learned fools. His interpretive guides guide us away from his interpreta- tions. He also suggests that the disruptive Moderns seek to replace, if not to anni- hilate, both the Ancients and Christianity as continuous forces in western culture. Fielding's Scriblerus Secundus, for example, is "confident that a more perfect System of Ethicks, as well as Oeconomy, might be compiled out of [British familiar proverbs] than is at present extant, either in the Works of the Antient Philosophers or those more valuable, as more voluminous, ones of the modern Divines." Similarly, Swift's even more confident tub-thumping Modern assures us that his pronouncements are "literally true this Minute I am writing." 5 He also claims "an absolute Authority in Right, as the freshest Modern, which gives me a Despotic Power over all Authors before me. "6 Scriblerus Secundus convinces himself that the Tragedyof Tragedies he annotates is the Elizabethan, perhaps Shakespearean, font of all modern tragedy. He even corrupts the university by offering a pittance to train a research assistant in the proper mode of proceeding. Fielding's Modern will hire "a young Commentator from the University, who is reading over all modern Tragedies, at Five Shillings a Dozen, and collecting all that they have stole from our Author, which shall shortly be added as an Appendix to this Work" (46). In A Tale ofa Tub, as in the Dunciad, as presumably in the Tragedyof Tragedies there is a "vast involuntary throng" that struggles less and less while falling into Dulness' power. They "Roll in her Vortex, and her pow'r confess" (1743: 4: 82-84). On this hypothesis, Fielding sings the singers of a declining world; and on this hypothesis Scriblerus pere et fils are strikingly alike. Or not, as the case may be. In 1729, after all, Fielding was closer to the govern- ment than to the opposition. Pope's allies in the generally opposition and occa- sionally Jacobite Grub-street Journal probably would not have started a sustained and angry post-Tragedy of Tragediescampaign against Fielding's com- edies if they thought him sympathetic to opposition rhetoric. 7 In the Dunciad Pope labels Fielding's friend Thomas Cooke a counterfeit Prior and agent of Dulness. Cooke probably would not have called himself Scriblerus Tertius and

5 I quote from the Fountainwell Drama Texts, Henry 7 The most extensive study of The Grub-streetJournal Fielding.Tom Thumb and The Tragedy'![Tragedies, ed. L. remains James T. Hillhouse, The Grub-streetJournal J. Morrissey (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of (Durham: Duke University Press, 1928). For two more California Press, 1970), 82n of the Tragedy.Subsequent recent important studies, see Bertrand A. Goldgar, references are cited in the text. James T. Hillhouse's "Pope and the Grub-streetJournal," Modern Philology74 edition of The Tragedyof Tragediesor The Life and Death (1977): 366-80, and Alexander Pettit, "The Grub-street ef Tom Thumb the Great (New Haven: Yale University Journal and the Politics of Anachronism," Philological Press, 1918) remains valuable, though one eagerly Quarterly69 (1990): 435-51. Goldgar argues that Pope awaits Thomas Lockwood's Wesleyan edition. had virtually nothing to do with the Journal, Pettit that the Journal though often in opposition essentially 6 Swift, A Tale efa Tub, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil backed "a staunch orthodox Anglicanism and . . . Blackwell, 1965), 22, from the "Epistle Dedicatory." (continued) Fielding's Tragedy efTragedies 23

Scriblerus Quartus and Pope "a peevish, mishapen'd diminutive Man" if he did not think that Scriblerus Secundus agreed. The Scriblerus Maximus behind The Art of Scribling(1733) was friendly to Pope and hostile to Fielding's cousin and patron Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. He probably would not have called Tom Thumb one of the plays that "breeds Monsters Nature never saw" if he thought Fielding of his party. 8 Such readers may have seen what much of their posterity has ignored: whatever Fielding's respect for Swift and Pope, parts of the Tragedy of Tragediesnonetheless satirize Scriblerians who regard the modem world as a gateway to cultural hell. 9 That splendid farce treats its Scriblerian inheritance with the independence that Tom Jones treats its epic inheritance-it adapts form and cleanses violent content to produce a new literary species. Fielding's ambivalent response seems predictable. The Dunciad attacks impov- erished authors, several of Fielding's friends, and the mingling of genres in the theater and elsewhere as an emblem of national collapse induced by the governing classes (1: 53-76, 227-40; 2: 213-26; 3: 229-44). "That once was Britain" (3: 109) we hear regarding a now intellectually moribund nation whose imminent restoration ofDulness will be aided by dramatic farce "to Nature's laws unknown" (3: 237). Smithfield, Pope says in his second note, hitherto exempli- fied the vulgar theatrical "Taste of the Rabble"; the dunces brought it "to the Theatres of Covent-Garden, Lincolns-inn-Fields, and the Hay-Market," where it then became "the reigning Pleasures of the Court and Town" ( 1: 2n). Given some of Fielding's audience at the Hay Market, he could not have been pleased by the implicit title of docent to Dulness: Frederick Prince of Wales attended two perfor- mances of Tom Thumb, and Sir attended three. The Hanoverian princesses and Caroline also later attended the Tragedyof Tragedies.'0 Moreover, Fielding chafed at Thomas Cooke's "dictatorial" and "tiresome" domination of literary company and requirement "that deference be paid to his opinions." 11 Fielding's response to Pope as Scriblerian chafed even more. His unpublished verse poem of 1729 includes attacks on Pope as a squirrel-like "Lilliputian Bard" and impudent schoolboy who can "Give Laws successful to the wiser Crowd." Fielding shared Lady Mary's unpublished harshly anti-

a rigorous identification with the reign of Charles I" Georgia Press, 1981), 97. McCrea notes Fielding's (435). Richard Russel. the Journal's chief voice, was a unscriblerian acceptance of urban trade; that accep- non-juringJacobite. His sustained attacks upon Whig- tance, however, must be set against his consistent pref- Hanoverian Fielding's comedies had a political edge erence for the country and reward of his best or that helps to explain their virulence. For example, see reformed characters with a country life. McCrea's numbers 23, 117, 127, 128, 130, 132, 133, 134, 135, fourth chapter, "The Uncertain Opposition: The 136, 138, 141, and 150. I can only speculate that abuse Champion and]onatlzan Wild" (78-103), includes other of, say, Fielding's Modern Husband in part evens the useful remarks regarding Fielding's uncertain relation- score for what I suggest is Fielding's abuse of Pope as ship with Pope and the Scriblerians. Tom Thumb. Several of these numbers again make plain that for some readers Fielding's farces exemplify IO For such attendance and discussion of presumed insults, the literary and intellectual decay that the D,mciad see the Battestins, Henry Fielding, 87, 108----<). laments. 11 For Cooke and Fielding, see the Battestins, Henry 8 For Cooke, see The Bays Miscellany or Colley Fielding, 154. Fielding must also have chafed at Cooke's Triumphant (London, 1730), 1; Scriblerus Maximus, criticism of him as drunk, besnuffed, cursing, The Art ofScriblin.fi, Address 'd to All the Seribiers ofthe A.fie conceited, argumentative, dogmatic, and self-congrat- (London, 1733), IO. ulatory. See Cooke's The Candidate for the Bays (n. 2 above), y--10 and 911, IOn. Cooke, though, praises both 9 Brian McCrea rightly observes that "Fielding did not Fielding and his Modern Husband (1732) in The share the Scriblerians' anachronistic ideal for society Comedian, No. 3, (1732), 3-4. The Battestins express and politics." See his Henry Fielding and the Politics of reservations regarding Cooke as "the generally Mid-Eighteenth-Century En.{/land (Athens: University of accepted" author of The Candidate: see 102-4. 24 HARVARD LIBRARY BULLETIN

Scriblerian views of the same year. She characterizes Swift and Pope of the Dunciad as "A strong Confedracy of Stupid Foes!" able "To stop the progress of o'reflowing Wit." He may also have shared Lady Mary's views of Pope and Swift as social upstarts insufficiently respectful of their betters. 12 Fielding indeed was among numerous detractors who regarded Pope as a powerful and partial literary dictator able to arrest the careers of those he and his friends thought unworthy. In 1729, for example, calls Pope of the Dunciad Varioruman absolute monarch who assumes the "plenary Power" to dub his enemies "Fools, Blockheads, Dunces, and Scoundrels, according to his Sovereign Pleasure" Dennis quotes a letter from Giles Jacob complaining that, as an absolute king, Pope "endeavour'd to exercise the most tyrannick Government" over all except his few favorites who were, Dennis adds, "two or three contemptible Wretches in his own Cabal." 13 Like other men ofletters Fielding depended upon the public's purse. Hence as late as 1752 in the Covent-GardenJournal he associates Pope with censorship and with the Licensing Act of 1737 that drove Fielding from the stage. He discusses the monarch "King ALEXANDERsirnamed POPE" who succeeded Dryden in the kingdom of letters. That king "stretched the Prerogative much farther than his Predecessor," was "extremely jealous of the Affections of his Subjects," employed spies to inform him "of the least Suggestion against his Title," and branded their foreheads "with the word DUNCE" so that "no Bookseller would venture to

12 Isobel Grundy discovered the new poems among Lady (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1943), 2: 354 Mary's papers. The "Epistle to Mr. Lyttelton" responds (plenary), 373 Oacob), 375 (cabal). Like comparable to Pope's attack on Lady Mary in his First Satire of the attacks on Pope's "tyranny," these are designed to asso- Second Book of , Imitated (1733). See Grundy's ciate Pope with Catholicism and Jacobitism. Cooke, important "New Verses by Henry Fielding, PMLA 87 The Letters ofAtticus, As Printed in The London journal, (1972): 219-39, 233-34 (squirrel, bard), 237 In the Years 1 729 and 1730, On Various Subjects (London, (schoolboy) quoted. Lady Mary's own roughly compa- 1731), 35, Letter 5, 29 March 1729, "An Examination rable poem apparently was written during the summer into the Controversy betwixt the Poets and Mr. Pope," of 1729 and, her editors say, "in coajunction with" 3 5. For some other complaints regarding Pope as Fielding's efforts: !.Ady Mary Wortley Montagu: Essays literary dictator, see , Sawney. An Heroic and Poems and Simplicity, A Comedy, ed. Robert Poem. Occasion'd by the Dunciad (London, 1728), 7; Halsband and Isobel Grundy (Oxford: Clarendon Smedley, Gulliveriana, vii-ix, xi, xii; Charactersof the Press, 1977), 247; 249, lines 56 (strong) and 58 (stop). Times; Or, An Impartial Account of the Writings, Lady Mary later denigrates Pope and Swift as entitled Characters, Education, &c. of several Noblemen and "by their Birth and hereditary Fortune to be only a Gentlemen, libel/'d in a Preface to a late Miscellany couple of Link Boys." See The Complete Letters of !.Ady Publish'd by P--pe and S-ft (London, 1728), 12, 22; An Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. Robert Halsband (Oxford: Essay on the Dunciad An Heroick Poem (London, 1728), Clarendon Press, 1965-67), 3: 57, 23 June 1754 to Lady 25-26; An Essay upon the Taste and Writings ofthe Present Bute. Such familiar attacks on the contrast between Times (London, 1728), 3-5, 51-52; "Mr. Gerard," An Pope's humble origins and "monarchic" aspirations Epistle To the EgregiousMr. Pope, In Which The Beauties were related to his denigration of other men of ofhis Mind and Body are amply displayed (London, 1734), letters-as in works by authors as socially different as 4-5; Mr. P--pe's Picture in Miniature, But As Like as it Jonathan Smedley and John Lord Hervey: Smedley, can stare; A Poem: With Notes (London, 1743), 4, 4n; Gulliveriana: Or, A Fourth Volume of Miscellanies. Being , Another OccasionalLetter from Mr. Cibber A Sequel of the Three Volumes, published by Pope and Swift to Mr. Pope (London, 1744), l 1-12; The Life of (London, 1728), among other places, vii-ix, xi, xii, xiii, Alexander Pope, Esq; With Remarks on His Works: To 283, 293, 319, 326-27, 334 (these latter by various which is added His !.Ast Will (London, 1744), 4-8. As one hands); Hervey, A Letter to Mr. C-b--r, On his Letter example of the rhetoric, the author of Charactersobserves to Mr. P-- (London, 1742), 22-23. that so far as Pope and Swift go, "nothing good or bad, shall be publish'd without their Licence" (12). Nero-like 13 Dennis, Remarks Upon Mr. Pope's Dunciad, in The Pope designed to destroy all competitors (22). Critical Works ofjohn Dennis, ed. Edward Niles Hooker Fielding's Tragedyof Tragedies 25 print a Word that he wrote." King Alexander "put a total Restraint on the Liberty of the Press: For no Person durst read any Thing which was writ without his Licence and Approbation; and this Licence he granted only to four during his Reign"-Swift, Young, Arbuthnot and Gay, "his principal Courtiers and Favourites." 14 Perhaps, then, Fielding is not a Scriblerus Secundus seeking "allegiance" with the stern literary establishment. Perhaps, instead, he is the hungry young author who wants to fill his belly and his pockets and does so in part by mocking the establishment mockers of the sort of work that sinned by giving everyone a jolly good time. Accordingly, Fielding's unscriblerian Tragedy cif Tragedies encourages readers and viewers to become secure, confident, largely apolitical laughers whose move- ment from joke to joke nullifies the threats that overwhelm Swift, Pope, and their world. 1 5 Fielding also softens much Scriblerian satire because of personal and reli- gious differences with it. Fielding well understood the need to check human depravity, but his tempera- ment and his optimistic Anglicanism normally pointed to the laughing rather than snarling muse. As a committed Hanoverian, he mistrusted Catholics and Jacobites, and as an eclectic author who often blended genres, he could both compliment and correct his predecessors, adapt and modify some of their defining traits, and redefine them for his own purposes. 16 For example, by 1730 Fielding already had embraced the benevolism that char- acterizes his later work. His uncompleted burlesque version of Juvenal's sixth satire, a bitter tirade against women, was written about 1725. As Fielding says in a non-ironic note that may have been added later, "the Remainder is in many Places too obscene for chaste Ears" and for English women to whom such vitriol could not apply. He also adds a note to a passage in which Juvenal's speaker verbally lashes a servant: "The Romans derived from the Greeks an Opinion, that their Slaves were of a Species inferior to themselves. As such a Sentiment is inconsistent with the Temper of Christianity, this Passage loses much of its Force

14 The Wesleyan Edition of the Works of Henry political readings, see Hillhouse (n. 5 above), 9n; Fielding, The Covent-Garden Journal and a Plan of the Bertrand A. Goldgar, Walpole and the Wits: The Relation Universal Register-office, ed. Bertrand A. Goldgar ofPolitics to Literature, 1722-1742 (Lincoln: University of (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), No. 23, Nebraska Press, 1976), rn4-5; Hume, Henry Fielding and 21 March 1752, 153-54. Fielding concludes with brief, the London Theatre, 86--91; the Battestins, Henry Fielding, positive, formulaic praise of Pope's "Merit as a writer." 86-91, I06-12. Two other sources are useful for See comparable remarks in No. 5, 18 January 1752, 44. context: McCrea, Henry Fielding and ... Politics (n. 9, above), and in a different way, Christine Gerrard, The 1 5 The Daily Post for 29 March 1742 suggests an early Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National "political" reading of the play. See Appendix J in G. Myth, 1725-1742 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). If I M. Godden's Henry Fielding, A Memoir (London: am right in thinking that Tom Thumb parodies, or at Sampson Low, Marston & Co. Ltd, 19!0), 315. For least negatively alludes to, Pope, Walpole and his some other political readings, see Wilbur L. Cross, The government had an extra reason to enjoy the plays. History of Henry Fielding (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1918), 1: I03-4; F. Homes Dudden, Henry 16 Martin Battestin illumines Fielding's religious contexts in Fielding: His Life, Works, and Times (Oxford: Clarendon The Moral Basis of Fielding's Art (Middletown: Wesleyan Press, 1952), I: 66-69; L. J. Morrissey, scattered University Press, 1959) and in several notes to his remarks in his 1970 edition of the plays, and especially Wesleyan editions of Tom Jones (1974) and Amelia (1984). "Fielding's First Political Satire," Anglia 93 (1972): The Battestins' Henry Fielding also is a valuable guide to 325-48; Rogers (n. I above), Henry Fielding, 49; Cleary Fielding's moral and religious life and provides necessary (n. I above), Henry Fielding: Political Writer, 41-45 (Tom biographical contexts for Fielding's dramatic career. Thumb is not, the Tragedy is political). For some anti- 26 HARVARD LIBRARY BULLETIN

by being modernized." 17 Such beliefs and rewriting of models are clear in Fielding's use of in 1743. Fielding regarded Lucian as "the Father of true Humour" whom he hoped to translate. 18 However filial the sentiment, Fielding knew that sons and fathers were different persons in different times. His own Journeyfrom This World to the Next (1743) thus is demonstrably in the Lucianic tradition of dialogues of the dead and of fantastic voyages; but it is demonstrably altered by the traditions of Fontenelle' s polish, Fenelon's morality, and Fielding's own benevolence. 19 Specifically, Minos the Judge of the underworld appears in "Menippus; Or the Oracle of the Dead," a of Ulysses' visit to the underworld in Book 11 of the Odyssey. Menippus tells his friend Philonides about his journey to the under- world, one significant part of which was watching Minos at his almost wholly unforgiving bloody work. There "we saw him seated on a high throne, with the avenging spirits, furies, and punishments of every kind, as his assessors. On the other side were the male- factors, bound together with a long chain, and dragged towards him." They are chiefly accused by their own internalized sins and generally are punished by extremely unpleasant tortures. Menippus rejoices at their fate, taunts them "most severely," sees the vanity of human wishes, and notes the equivalence among the beautiful and the ugly, the king and the beggar: "their bones were all alike, without so much as a title to distinguish them. " 2 ° Fielding adapts and strikingly alters this scene in chapter 7 of his Journeyfrom This World to the Next. Most obviously, he abolishes the brutally naturalistic cynic Menippus as narrator and thus also abolishes his values. In Lucian almost everyone is punished; in Fielding only the most wicked do not get a second chance to purify themselves by returning to the real world. Some unfortunates are "tumbled immediately into the Bottomless Pit," but Fielding spares the reader a vision of Cerberus munching sinners' entrails. 21 The worst punishment we see is Minos kicking a pompous duke "on the B-ch" (M2, 34). Menippus' taunts, whips, chains, and pleasure in others' pain are anathema to Fielding's moral scheme of redemption and generosity: "no Man enters that Gate without Charity" (M2, 35). Many so enter, including a middling dramatist who lent his third night's profits to a friend and thus "saved him and his Family from Destruction" (M2, 33); and the criminal who had supported his parents, loved his wife, and was a kind father;

17 The Wesleyan Edition, Miscellanies by Henry Fielding, Parts (London, 1703). Archbishop Fenelon's Esq; Volume One, ed. Henry Knight Miller Christianized Dialogues des morts composez pour l 'educa- (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1979), 117n. tion d'un prince appeared in Paris, 1712. Andrew- (Remainder), lines 217-22, ro8 Ouvenal), and ro9n. Michael Ramsay observes that Fenelon's "Dialogues of (the Romans). the Dead, discover equally the Beauty of his Genius and the Nobleness of his Sentiments." See Ramsay's The 18 The Covent-Garden journal, 285, No. 52, 30 June 1752. Life of Franfois de Salignac De la Motte Fenelon, Archbishop The fullest discussion of Lucian and Fielding, from a and Duke ofCambray (London, 1723), 264. point of view different from my own, is by Henry Knight Miller, Essays on Fielding's Miscellanies: A 20 For Lucian englished, see The Works of Lucian From the Commentary on Volume One (Princeton: Princeton Greek, trans. Thomas Francklin (London, 1780), 1: University Press, 1961), 365-419. Nancy Mace also 192--94. Francklin's numbering of the dialogues differs questions Lucian's influence on Fielding in her Henry from some modem versions. Fieldin,(s and the Classical Tradition (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996). 21 See the Wesleyan Edition, Miscellanies by Henry Fielding, Esq: Volume Two, ed. Bertrand A. Goldgar and 19 For Fielding's major predecessors in the attempt to Hugh Amory (Middletown: Wesleyan University soften Lucian's harshness, see Fontenelle's Dialogues des Press, 1993), 32. Subsequent references to this edition morts (Lyons, 1683), with a second edition of John arc cited in the text as M2. Hugh es' translation as Dialogues of the Dead, In Three Fielding's Tragedyef Tragedies 27 and the desperately poor folk who "had been honest, and as industrious as possible"; and the speaker himself for "general Philanthropy, and private Friendship." Upon passing the gate, they see a "happy Region, whose Beauty, no Painting of the Imagination can describe" (M2, 36). Fielding rejects Lucian's unacceptable point of view while accepting several of his literary devices. He does the same with Pope, whom he compliments in the Preface to the Tragedy ef Tragedies,and whose politics, poetry, and person, I shall argue, he smilingly deni- grates. Fielding clearly is part of a tradition of satiric and annotative irony that, Thomas Cooke says of Fielding, "laughs without Anger." As Robert Hume more recently puts it, Fielding writes "not with animosity, but with gusto." 22 Richard Owen Cambridge explains how such non-apocalyptic success- oriented ridicule functions. "Comic Poetry," he says in 1751, "makes sport" with Pedantry and the "Learned Arrogance" that so mislead human understanding. 23 Cambridge follows the "grave irony of Cervantes" rather than the implicit malig- nity of the Dunciad and comparable works (v-vi). He takes up Scriblerus where the Scriblerians left him and separates himself from their activity. He does not lament the decline of civilization, but shows "the vanity and uselessness of many studies"; and he attempts "to stop the progress of this evil" of pedants who promote their difficult but useless stuff Unlike Pope in his Memoirs of Scriblerus, Cambridge says, "I have shewn throughout my Book that the Follies of Mankind provoke my Laughter and not my Spleen; and so long as they have this effect on me, I cannot have any great quarrel against them" (xvi). These remarks two decades after the Tragedy of Tragediesnonetheless illumine aspects of its psychology and its attitude towards those who overstate the danger of Modern learning. Fielding's benevolence was genuine and enduring; but it did not preclude "disvaluing" one of the eighteenth century's two archetypal Scriblerians. It did so through parody of the poet's poetic and personal body.

2. PAPAL FALLIBILITY

Satire of the satmst begins with the Preface to the earlier Tom Thumb. The Prologue opens with a redefining allusion to the first book of Pope's Dunciad. Fielding writes:

22 Cooke, The Comedian, No. 3 (n. 1 T above), 14; Hume, H. Highfill, Jr., Kalman A. Burnim, and Edward A. Henry Fielding and the London Theatre, 86. Hume Langhans, A Biographical Dictionary of Actors . . and "would t,'1.less that in perfom1ance The Tragedy of Other Stage Personnel in London 1660-1800 (Carbondale: Tragedies remained pretty much what Tom Thumb had Southern lllinois University Press, 1973--93). So far as I been, a travesty of heroic drama to be enjoyed for its can tell, the only known, but apparently little marked, sheer silliness." He outlines some of the amusing cast- copy of a prompt book of either Torn Thumb play is parts to support this approximately accurate guess (89). in the Folger Shakespeare Library, Prompt T 22. See I find the "reading" version just as pleasantly silly. See Edward A. Langhans, Eighteenth-Century British and also W. E. Henley's life of Fielding in his The Collected Irish Promptbooks: A Descriptive Bibliography (New York: Works ef Henry Fielding (New York: Croscup & Greenwood Press, 1987), 55. See also the Appendix Sterling, 1902): 16: xxiv, and Hillhouse, 22-23. For within for discussion of Yale and Harvard productions. other discussion of the casts, see The London Stage 1660--1800. Part 3. Vol. 1. 1729-1747, ed. Arthur H. 23 Cambridge, Tiie Scribleriad: An Heroic Poem. In Six Scouten (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Books (London, 1751), [iii]. Subsequent references are Press, 1961), under the records of performances. The cited in the text. performers are discussed in relevant volumes of Philip 28 HARVARD LIBRARY BULLETIN

With Mirth and Laughter to delight the Mind The modern Tragedy wasfirst design'd: 'Twas this made Farce with Tragedy unite, And taught each Scriblerin the Town to Write. (Lines r-4; 20)

The paragraph's mirth, laughter, and delight evoke the same words in the third paragraph (lines 14, 16-17). Fielding's emphasis upon amusement differs from Pope's Dunciad, which begins that poem's insistence on the decline of civilization through generic miscegenation. At the Academy of Poets Dulness sees "How tragedy and comedy embrace;/ How farce and epic get a jumbled race" (1: 69- 70).24 For Pope, the poetic mingling of unlikes weds different species in nature and produces the monsters and abortions we see later in the poem. For Fielding, Farce and Tragedy indeed produce scribblers-one of whom is Fielding-as- Scriblerus. Unlike Pope, Fielding controls his enemy. His audience agrees to mock the Modern foolishness from which their friend the sensible author disso- ciates them. Fielding assumes an allied audience, Pope an alienated audience. Hence Fielding's Prologue ends with "Long live the Man who cries,Long live Tom Thumb" (line 30). Whether in pedantic Preface or footnotes, Scriblerian jeremiad becomes the laughter of security. I suspect that Fielding also mocks Pope's association with Roman gravitas. Addison's Cato (1713) was popular, ponderous, regular, and among the "Fine Things" Fielding hoped to "banish ... from the Stage" (42). Pope's Prologue to that tragedy calls for "tears" four times (lines 7, 14, 15, 33) and calls for the inele- gant variation "drops" once (line 16). Its first line claims that the tragic muse will "wake the soul by tender strokes of art"; its thirty-seventh line urges that "Britons attend" to Cato's and Addison's Roman tragedy. Rid yourselves of "Frenchtrans- lation, and Italian song" and create a native theater inspired by Roman heroes. Dare to have sense your selves;assert the stage, Be justly warm'd with your own native rage. Such Plays alone should please a British ear, As Cato's self had not disdain'd to hear. (Lines 43-46) 25 Fielding's Prologue to Tom Thumb sets itself against this well-meaning but foreign dramatic grandeur. "The GloriousHeroes who informer Years, I Dissolv'd all Athens and all Rome in Tears" (lines 5-6), he says, have indeed been transplanted to the British stage, but in popular farces like mirthful Tom Thumb. Fielding replaces Pope's serious plea for Romanized tragedy with his own comic plea for British farce:

24 That line also appeared on the title page of James Prologue to Thomson's Sophonisba (1730) deals with Ralph's attack on Pope, Sawney. An Heroic Poem (n. 13 some of the same themes as those in lines 41-46: see above), where it implies Pope's own "jumbled" shape. "Prologue to Sophonisba. By a Friend," ibid, 3 10-1 I. Whether or not Fielding knew that Pope wrote the 25 Quotations are from the Twickenham Edition of the relevant parts of that Prologue, he of course knew Poems of Alexander Pope, vol. 6, Alexander Pope. Sophonisba itself, which is one of his many targets, and Minor Poems, ed. Norman Ault and John Butt (London which he may be recalling here. and New Haven: Methuen and Yale University Press, 1970), 96-97. The editors point out that Pope's Fielding'sTragedy of Tragedies 29

Britons awake!-Let Greece and Rome no more Their Heroessend to our Heroick Shore. Let home-bredSubjects grace the modem Muse, And Grub-Street from her Self, her Heroesch use

To-Night our Bard, Spectators, would be true To Farce, to Tragedy, Tom Thumb, and You. (Lines 18-21; 28-29) Such truth to British farce is incompatible with Pope's truth to Addisonian tragic imperial Rome. Tom Thumb's Prologue anticipates both the Tragedy's text and apparatus in which, I suggest, Fielding burlesques his presumed fellow Scriblerians. As the author of Observationson the Present Taste for Poetry (1739) complained, Tom Thumb attacks "all the Great Geniuses has produced for a Couple of Ages!" 26 This should not be surprising in a comedy whose evocation of ghosts in 3. l and 2, and concluding corpse-strewn stage mock Hamlet (1603), and whose scene in 2. 7, between Glumdalca, Huncamunca, and Tom Thumb parodies Dryden's scene with Octavia, Cleopatra, and Antony in Dryden's highly respectable All for Love (1678). The famously infamous "Oh! Huncamunca, Huncamunca,oh" (2. 5; 70, 71), Fielding's chronologically inverted note alerts us, is the source for a borrowing in Thomson's Sophonisba(1730; 7on). 27 Once the genie Parody leaves the bottle, it finds a mate, starts a family, and exuberantly visits worlds other than the ones at first designed. This happens in the Tragedy of Tragedies,where Fielding smokes respected senior colleagues, some- times at the risk of being offensive. Peter Lewis rightly observes: "it is well known that the original members of the did not exactly welcome the young Fielding as an ally," and that "Pope in particular became rather hostile to Fielding after initially ignoring him. "28 The following examples offer some reasons for that response. In the TragedyTom Thumb enthuses: "Whisper, ye Winds, that Huncamunca's mine; / Echoes repeat, that Huncamunca'smine!" (1. 3; 60). The footnote merely says that "There is not one Beauty in this Charming Speech, but hath been borrowed by almost every Tragick Writer" (6on). Contemporary readers may also have recalled such beauties from the conventional language of tropes and of repe- tition in Pope's pastorals first printed in 1709, but reprinted in 1716 and 1717 and thus at least as current as many of the heroic tragedies Fielding lampoons. Here is a relevant section from "Summer" after Alexis mourns to the beeches and streams:

26 As quoted in the Battestins, Henry Fielding, 88. Lady, ed. Angus Ross (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1985), 951. 27Less obviously, a more learned group of viewers or readers might have seen that it also mocks repetition 28 Lewis, Fielding's Burlesque Drama, 87. See also the and parallelism in Hebraic poetry. That device was Battestins' Henry Fielding, 89: many Scriblerian allies discussed, praised, and exemplified in John Husbands' regarded the Tragedy as a vulgar "Modem" effort. A Miscellanyof Poems by SeveralHands (Oxford, 1731): Hume, the Battestins, Goldgar, and Lockwood "The River Kishon swept them away, that ancient well-discuss Fielding and others in the shifting opposi- River, the River Kishon." Richardson later gives such tion to Walpole. See especially Goldgar's Walpole and an emblematic device to Clarissa in her dangerous pen- the Wits. Fielding's willingness to support Walpole knife scene: "Delivered for the present; for the present would have been reason enough for some Opposition delivered from mysel£" For Husbands, see sig. far. The animosity, and Fielding's gruff masculinity so apparent Miscellany included 's translation of in the Tragedy might have been uncongenial to Pope. Pope's "." For Richardson, see Letter 281 in See Fielding's attack on Pope's sexuality, within. : Clarissa Or the History of a Young 30 HARVARD LIBRARY BULLETIN

"nor to the Deaf I sing, / The Woods shall answer, and their Echo ring." In "Autumn" Hylas in turn moans about the absent Delia: "Thro' Rocks and Caves the Name of Delia sounds, I Delia, each Cave and ecchoing Rock rebounds." 29 Pope's pastorals also typically repeat introductory words-as in "Autumn," where Hylas proclaims "For her ... For her ... For her," followed by "Ye ... Ye ... Ye ... " who finally "Say" something that relates the poet's declining state to nature's declining state (lines 24-30; 82). Perhaps comparably, in 3. 2 the ghost of Tom Thumb's father proclaims a string of eight similes, each beginning "So have I seen." The last four repeat the cycle of the seasons on which Pope's pastorals are based but exchange nature's sequence for the poet's need for contrast-rise and fall, smile and frown in amusingly bad poetry. Fielding again creates a world of secure judges and functioning standards rather than Scriblerian apocalypse: So have I seen the Flowers in Spring arise, So have I seen the Leaves in Autumn fall, So have I seen the Fruits in Summer smile, So have I seen the Snow in Winter frown. (86)

Might understandably irritable Pope have thought that Fielding mocked the pastorals as much as Thomson's tragedies? Pope could parody himself, as he appar- ently does in the PeriBathous (1727); but it is one thing for a mature lion to joke about his earlier missed kills, and another to be nipped at the heels for them by an aggres- sive cub from an alien pride. 30 Pope would have been more troubled by the guiding device both of Tom Thumb and the Tragedyef Tragedies-laughter at a little man trying to be a big-shot and lover while actually thought a freak by the proudly normal. Fielding makes his feelings clear in an early note regarding height. Unlike the Ancients, this play honors "Lowness of Stature" rather than the height attributed to classical gods and heroes. "In short," Fielding behind the annotator slyly says, "to exceed on either side is equally admirable, and a Man of three Foot is as wonderful a sight as a Man of nine" (56n).

29 The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander (1781) in Lives of the Poets, ed. G. Birkbeck Hill Pope, Pastoral Poetry and An Essay on Critidsm, ed. E. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), 3: 187-88, and 209, Audra and Aubrey Williams (London: Methuen & where Johnson refers to Pope's "perpetual vexation" at Co.: New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), written attacks on him. Cibber, who is both biased and "Spring," lines 15-16, 72-73; "Autumn," lines 49-50, accurate in this case, discusses Pope's sensitivity in A 83. Subsequent references are cited in the text. Letter From Mr. Cibber to Mr. Pope, Inquiring into the Motives that might induce him in his Satyrical Works, to be 30 Much of the prefatory matter to the Dunciad demon- so frequently fond of Mr. Cibber's Name (London, 1742), strates Pope's tenderness regarding the criticism he read 17-20. For self-mockery in the Peri Bathous see The and collected. An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot (1735) is a Prose Works of Alexander Pope, ed. Rosemary Fowler roughly comparable example, in which the portrait of (Oxford: Basil Blackwell for the Shakespeare Head Sporus-Hervey (lines 305-333) is designed to even the Press, 1986), 2: 198----<)9.For supporting documentation, score with a tormentor and to assert Pope's own see The Works of Alexander Pope, Esq., ed. Joseph masculinity. For some comments on Pope's sensitivity, Warton (London, 1797), 6: 219; Warton, An Essay on see the product of the unsigned Curll factory, The Poet the Genius and Writings ofPope, 5th ed. (London, 1806): finished in Prose. Being a Dialogue concerningMr. Pope and 1 (1756): 80-81; and Joseph Spence: Observations, His Writings (London, 1735), 75-76;John Henley, 1-Vhy Anecdotes, and Characters ofBooks and Men, Collectedfrom How now, Gossip Pope? Or, The Sweet Singing-Bird of Conversation, ed. James M. Osborn (Oxford: Clarendon Parnassus taken out ofits pretty Cage to be roasted, 2d ed. Press, 1966), 1: 19, As an aside, Fielding probably did (London, 1743), 2-3; The Life ofAlexander Pope, Esq. not know that three-year- old Pope was attacked by a With Remarks on His Works. To 1-Vhichis added, His Last cow, but Pope himself may have thought that poor Will (London, 1744), 58-60; the Jonathan Richardsons Tom Thumb devoured by a cow reflected upon him. father and son and Samuel Johnson, "Life of Pope" See Joseph Spence: Observations, 1: 3-4, items 3-4. Fielding's Tragedyif Tragedies 31

"Wonderful" Tom lusts for Huncamunca, whom he will hug, caress, nay, "eat her up with Love." In a parody of the aubade tradition, he will spend years in bed with her and make the voyeur rising sun blush "to see us in our Bed together" (2. 2; 65). Mustacha, the practical maid in love with the more substan- tial Doodle, berates Huncamunca's choice of "that little insignificant Fellow" who is "properer for a Play-thing, than a Husband" and thus certainly to be cuckolded. She has fallen "in Love with Nothing! ... The Dove is every bit as proper for a Husband-Alas! Madam, there's not a Beau about the Court looks so little like a Man" and is so much "a Thing without Substance" (2. 3; 67). Grizzle's later courtship of Huncamunca surely would have rubbed salt into the wounded male ego of one whose private parts evoked public speculation. Fielding replaces Tom's fantasy of endless sexuality, with Grizzle's factually more ample powers and uses the word "Durgen," the term for dwarf with which Pope's enemies often insulted him. In 1717 John Durant de Breval's farce The Confederates includes Mrs. Oldfield who labels Pope a filth-spewing Durgen. Such attacks would increase shortly after the Dunciad appeared in 1728. The Female Dunciad (1728) mocks Pope as both licentious and sexually inadequate (3, 5-6). Two years later sings "Tuneful Alexis" who is a mere "Ladies Play-thing." The triumvirate behind One Epistle to Mr. Pope (1730) says that his poetic gust is "False and unsated as the Eunuch's Lust!" Pope himself has "Low lewdness, unexcited by Desire,/ And all great Wilmot's Vice, without his Fire." Leonard Welsted later says of Pope that "The Jesuit's hate inflam'd the Eunuch's fear." 31 The prize for meanest tirade goes to Ned Ward. His Durgen. Or, a Plain Satyr upon a Pompous Satyrist (1729) responds to the Dunciad and appeared some sixteen months before Fielding's original and popular Tom Thumb of 24 April 1730 at the Little Theatre in the Hay Market. In addition to various unpleasant animals, Ward calls Pope Durgen 13 times; he also is little, a pygmy and incapable oflife's sexual pleasures: "Italian Songsters have been gelt, we know it, / But, sure, no Eunuch ever made a Poet." Ward's Pope is "the little Great imperial Bard." Pope thrice mentions Durgen in the Dunciad Variorum,first as "a wretched thing against our Author" (1: 200n), then as a favorite of Dulness (3: 162), and then as "A ridiculous thing of Ward's" (3: 162n). was maliciously right in 1729 when he told readers that Pope declaimed against Ward "For writing DURGEN." 32 On 7 August of the same year Ward's 's Maggot in his Cups

3 1 Hill, The Progress of Wit: A Caveat for the Use of an Ayre, Memoirs of the Life and Writings ofAlexander Pope, Eminent Writer. By a Fellow ofAll-Souls (London, 1730), Esq; ... With Critical Observations (London, 1745), 1: 15; the triumvirate, [Leonard W elsted, James Moore 264-67, 271, and John Henley[?] Remarks on ' Smythe, and Thomas Cooke], One Epistle to Mr. A. Ayre's Memoirs ofthe Life and Writings ofMr. Pope. In a Pope. Occasion'd by Two Epistles Lately Published Letter to Mr. Edmund Curl, Bookseller (London, 1745), (London, 1730), 14 (false), 19 (low). 29. Sexual slurs against Pope were commonplace. In addition to Lady Mary and Fielding cited within see, 32 Durant de Breval, The Confederates (London, 1717), 15. among others, the unsigned Mr. Taste, The Poetical Fop He adds an extra insult by having the work by a (London, 1732), 73, reissued in 1733 as The Man of nominal Joseph Gay. Ward, Durgen. Or, A Plain Satyr Taste a Comedy, and The Poet .finish'd in Prose, 17-18, upon a Pompous Satyrist .... Amicably Inscrib'd, by the 27-28, 5 r. The numerous attacks on Pope's deformity Author, to those Worthy and Ingenious Gentlemen misrepre- and diminutive size are implicit attacks on his sented in a late invective Poem, call'd The Dunciad ( 12 presumed other lack of normalcy. These and other December 1728, but published as London, 1729). For attacks are well-chronicled in J. V. Guerinot' s valuable little, see sig. A3v, 3, 19, 30, 43; pygmy, 4; puppet, 16; Pamphlet Attacks on Alexander Pope 1711-1714. A withdrawn pleasures, sigs. A2v, 4r; Italian songsters, 22; Descriptive Bibliography (New York: New York Great, 30, great soul crammed, 19-20. Curll, The University Press, 1969). Marjorie Nicolson and G. S. Curliad (London, 1729), 6. Ward's long remembered Rousseau discuss medical aspects of Pope's crippling term "Durgen" is in Curll's pseudonymous, William illnesses in their "This Long Disease My Life": Alexander 32 HARVARD LIBRARY BULLETIN

brutally belabors Pope's sexual insignificance and calls him both Tom Thumb and Durgen. The drunken divinities decide to punish Britain "In raising up a new Tom Thumb, I To mortify her Poets" (II). The little fellow at first has no male member, but then receives 'Just an Inch of Stuff, / Enough to show the Gender" (19). Vulcan enlivens the creature with a bellows in his bottom, "which kind suppository puff/ Gave Life to Little Durgen" (p. 22).33 Pope himself could not hide from what his mirror told him and what others saw. As early as 171l he tells John Caryll that he is not "the great Alexander ... but that little Alexander the women laugh at." He surely would have resented a soi-disant Scriblerian whose farce likens its laughable little protagonist to Alexander (r. 3; 58), calls him a mouse and a baby (r. 1; 52; 2:5; 71), obscenely alludes to his sexual power as "small-shot thro' a Hedge" (2. 4; 70--"0h! say not small," Huncamunca moans), and sees him married to a lusty woman whose metonymic "heart" immediately has room for another husband (2. ro; 81). He also would have resented a putative Scriblerian who equates Tom Thumb, the Great, Durgen, and sexual inadequacy, so much of which had been negatively celebrated in Ward's too memorable attacks. 34 Fielding well-knew the pain such often repeated remarks must induce. Whatever his praise and practice of benevolence, he violently protected himself and the benefits Lady Mary could confer. Fielding's unpublished burlesque poem of 1729 inverts the Dunciad and has Dulness address her son Pope as Codrus. Isobel Grundy observes that the effort bids for Lady Mary's support and that Fielding denigrates "Swift as obscene, Gay as low, and Pope as a serious threat to the established order from his Roman Catholic religion, his Tory politics, Bolingbrokean philosophy, and subversive sweetness of rhyme." 35 Fielding diminishes that threat by emphasizing a diminutive Pope. Dulness thus observes

Pope and the Sciences(Princeton: Princeton University children as Gulliver's Travels (280); 3) as precursors of Press, 1968). Maynard Mack considers aspects of Pope's the Lilliputians in Gulliver's Travels(329, 331). deformity in "'The Least Thing like a Man in England': Some Effects of Pope's Physical Disability on 34 See Coffespondence ef Alexander Pope, ed. George His Life and Literary Career," in Collectedin Himself: Sherburn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 1: 114, 25 Essays Critical, Biographicaland Bibliographicalon Pope June 1711. Pope was displeased even when his friends and Some of His Contemporaries,(Newark: University of brought hostile works to the public's attention. On 14 Delaware Press, 1982), 372----92.He returns to the topic May 1730, No. 19, The Grub-streetJournal refers to the at various places in Alexander Pope: A Life (New York abusive Cooke-Moore Smyth- W elsted One Epistle to and New Haven: W.W. Norton and Yale University Mr. Pope;on 21 May, No. 20, it describes and hopes to Press, 1985). See also Helen Deutsch, "The 'Truest refute, suggestions that Pope needed to be whipped to Copies' and the 'Mean Original': Pope, Deformity, be sexually aroused. On 17 May Pope tells the Earl of and the Poetics of Self-Exposure," Eighteenth-Century Oxford that he has seen and dislikes the earlier Journal Studies 27 (1993): 1-26--an essay, however, to be in part, he says in other contemporaneous letters, considered skeptically because of its assumption and because the Epistle was "below all notice"-but not conclusion that Pope "silences his audience by sufficiently so for Pope not to notice it. See 3: 110 for exposing himself' (2). The best of the recent discus- dislike of the Journal, and 3: 106 and 3: 114 for dislike sions of Pope and women are Valerie Rumbold of the Epistle. Pope's brutal enemies long continued Women's Placein Pope's World (Cambridge: Cambridge their attacks on his masculinity. One of the last is University Press, 1989), and Claudia N. Thomas, Colley Cibber's A Letterfrom Mr. Cibber to Mr. Pope (n. Alexander Pope and His Eighteenth-Century Women 30 above), 47-49. For some other aspects of such slan- Readers (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University ders, see Maynard Mack Alexander Pope: A Biography, Press, 1994). 292----93,410--11, 779-80, 87rn.

33Jonathan Smedley's hostile Gulliveriana (n. 12 above) 35 Grundy, "New Verses by Heney Fielding" (n. 12 above), evokes Tom Thumb three times: 1) to suggest Swift's 214. Fielding may have known that Edmund Curll, and Pope's denigration of all work superior to their berund "Mr. Prulips," wrote Codrus: Or, The Dunciad own, so that Tom Thumb competes with The Dissected.Being the Finishing-Stroke.To which is added, (217); 2) to suggest that Tom Thumb was as useful for FarmerPope and his Son. By Mr. Philips(London, 1728). Fielding'sTragedy of Tragedies 33 that "some tall Beau oerlooks the shorter Beaus" (2: rn; 226), and has Pope himself angrily declaim that in a benevolent Hanoverian world virtue might triumph and "Beaus shall be form' d for something more than Dress / Or Belles shall slight them for their Emptiness" (2: 219-20; 233). By 1733 Lady Mary had responded in kind to Pope's ill-conceived slander that one was poxed by her love or libelled by her hate (Imitations of Horace,2. 1, line 84). In VersesAddress'd to the Imitator of the First Satire of the Second Book of Horace she and Lord Hervey savage Pope as unmoved by beauty. He is "No more for loving made, than to be lov'd" (5). Fielding again supports his cousin's values and in an unpublished epistle to his own and Pope's friend George Lyttelton insists that unhuman Pope is evil, satanic, wretched, and ugly. He also is "too impotent for Love!" and has "no Fruit to tempt a Second Eve" (241). Given young Fielding's rambunctious masculinity, he must then have been temperamentally averse to Pope. For Fielding, that small, frail, and variously vulnerable satirist gave new meaning to the phrase "nasty, brutish, and short." 36 Fielding, then, clearly had contemporary and continuing suspicion of the Scriblerians in general and of Pope in particular, whose weaknesses he exploited in private and in public works. References to a Durgen and to a sexually inade- quate little man with grand aspirations were neither accidental nor undirected. Grizzle's bemused response to a match between Tom Thumb and Huncamunca suggests unlovely allusions to Pope: And can my Princess such a Durgen wed, One fitter for your Pocket than your Bed! Advis' d by me, the worthless Baby shun, Or you will ne'er be brought to bed of one. Oh take me to thy Arms and never flinch, Who am a Man by ev'ry Inch. Then while in Joys together lost we lie I'll press thy Soul while Gods stand wishing by. (2. 5; 71)37

36 The Battestins discuss Fielding's youthful excesses in me." An endlessly efficient wax-dildo Farinelli is Henry Fielding, 145-48. Fielding's contemporaries often pleasure for which it is worth leaving one's husband. disapprovingly noted his verbal and sexual excesses. See See the anonymous The Happy Courtezan: Or, The The Dramatick Sessions: or, The Stage Contest (London, Prude Demolish'd. An Epistle from the CelebratedMrs. 1734), 11-12; James Boswell, Boswell's L!fe of Johnson, C[on} P[hillips}, To the Angelick Signor Far--n--li ed. George Birkbeck Hill and rev. L. F. Powell (London, 1735). The attribution to Con Phillips of (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934-50), 2: 173-74, 174n, course is malicious. 494~5, the latter from Charles Burney: "Fielding's conversation was coarse, and so tinctured with the rank Well knowing Eunuchs can their Wants supply, weeds of the Garden, that it would now be thought And more than Bragging Boasters satisfy; only fit for a brothel." The contrast between Fielding's Whose Pow'r to please the Fair expires too fast, Covent Garden speech and Pope's Twickenham While F--lli stands it to the last. gardening must have been as clear to Richardson as to Burney. For a discussion of the tense Fielding- How much do those display their Want of Sense, Richardson relationship, see J. C. Duncan Eaves and Who scoff at Eunuchs, and dislike a Thing, Ben D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: A Biography For being but disburden'd of its Sting? (6--7) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 292-306. Randall Trumbach, independently, also suggests that 37 The term "Baby," above, well may be a term for dildo "Baby," above means dildo. See his "London's and thus imply that Tom is as procreative as the Sapphists: From Three Sexes to Four Genders in the device-or as a thumb. See Fielding's HistoricalRegister Making of Modern Culture," in Body Guards: The for 1736, 2. 1, in which several women seek to buy wax Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Julia Epstein effigies of the castrato Farinelli. One says that "If my and Kristina Straub (New York and London: husband was to make any objection to my having 'em Routledge, 1991), 139, n. 23. J' d run away from him and take the dear babies with 34 HARVARD LIBRARY BULLETIN

According to Grizzle, Tom should "seek some Dwarf, some Miss, / Where no Joint-stool must lift him to the Kiss" (2. 5; 71). Like others in the play, Grizzle and Huncamunca themselves assume a voracious sexual ethic based on early Restoration comedy and libertine poetry. Pope's romantic fair-sexing, women of sensibility, or women outraged by a childishly snipped lock, cannot exist in this comic world of desired mutual gratification and sexually divine male inches. Fielding's hostility to Pope was both personal and political; it also extended to his attitude toward the larger Scriblerian enterprise.

3. SCRIBLERIANS SATIRIZED

The apparatus to the Tragedyof Tragediesis less personal but shares an essential unscriblerian trait-mirth in the face of a controlled threat that provokes laughter rather than spleen. In some cases even the minimally educated are invited to mock the maximum pedant. Huncamunca laments her lover's absence: "O, Tom Thumb! Tom Thumb! wherefore art thou Tom Thumb?" (2. 3; 67). This obvious reference to one of Shakespeare's most familiar lines is thus glossed by Scriblerus, who claims that this tragedy may be by Shakespeare but certainly "was written in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth" (42): "Oh! Marius, Marius; wherefore art thou Marius? Otway's Marius" (67n). Antony and Cleopatrais scarcely better known to Scriblerus than is Romeo andJuliet. Noodle tells Grizzle that Huncamunca now is married to Tom Thumb: GRIZZLE. My Huncamunca. NOODLE. Your Huncamunca. Tom Thumb's Huncamunca,every Man's Huncamunca. (2. ro; 80) The note merely says that "Mr. Dryden hath imitated this in All for Love" (Son). In each case, however, someone with modest knowledge of the national icon Shakespeare, whom Pope had recently edited, could laugh at Scriblerus' learned ignorance, at his inability to see that Otway gets his line from Shakespeare. In 1723 Pope included the remark from Romeo andJuliet under "Courtship" in his "Index of Manners, Passions, and their external Effects," calling it "a beautiful Scene betwixt Romeo and Juliet." The Pope-Sewell Shakespeareof 1728 includes 's remark that "It is needless to write the story" of Antony and Cleopatra "since it is known to every body." 38 The Dunciad uses major poetry's displacement by minor poetry as an emblem of lost distinctions in a meaningless world. During the Dunciad'smock-epic games Dulness offers prizes to her victo- rious dunces: "Three wicked imps, of her own Grub Street Choir, / She decked like Congreve, Addison, and Prior" (2: 123-24). Fielding rejects such a view. Neither Otway nor Dryden replaces Shakespeare in part because Fielding assumes a sympathetic audience with good will, intelligence, and laughter at literary posturing. Yet again Fielding sees an enlarging audience and ultimate light, whereas Scriblerians see a shrinking audience and ultimate darkness.

38 Pope, The Works

This inference is supported by the footnotes' comic internal dissension. Fielding's Scriblerus squabbles with Andre Dacier and other unnamed critics (83n); he disagrees with John Dennis regarding the use of puns (84n); and he scolds Dennis the "incredulous Critick" and "ignorant ... Carper" (89n-9on) for thinking that a mortal cannot fight and defeat all the gods. After all, Scriblerus shows, both Dryden's Almanzor and 's Achilles in The Victim (1714) claim that distinction (89n). In so showing, he compounds Dennis's errors and again allows the reader to be superior to critical folly. The notes also sometimes suggest the "real" Fielding who lets us know that he is present, at our side, and in control. In 3. 9 Grizzle asks all to draw their swords and fight for liberty, for "Liberty the Mustard is of Life" (93). "This Mustard (says Mr. D.) is enough to turn one's Stomach: I would be glad to know what Idea the Author had in his Head when he wrote it." Scriblerus knows the answer and quotes this line from Dennis's own Liberty Asserted: "And gave him Liberty, the Salt of Life .... The Understanding," Fielding as Scriblerus says, "that can digest the one, will not rise at the other" (93n). If salt, why not mustard? If covert authorial intrusion, why not nearly overt authorial intrusion? This happens after a long footnote near the beginning of the play. Scriblerus then proves that Tom Thumb was a contemporary of King Arthur, and Fielding proves that he and his audience share a living and reassuring classical tradition. He invokes Nathanael Salmon, John Bunyan, Petrus Burmanus, Lewis Theobald, Hermes Trismegistus, Justus Lipsius, centaurs, Hercules, Edward Midwinter, , Edmund Spenser, and English, high and low culture, clas- sical mythology, native folklore, and various editorial and genealogical practices. Here is a self-consciously incoherent but dazzling paradigm of comic, pedantic, excess. By the end of the note, Fielding is so pleased with himself that he assumes we have bonded to him as a friend who is tickling our ribs, just as Horace tickled the Pisones' ribs circa 20 B. C.: "Risum teneatis, Amici" (50n), he says. The full line is the fifth in the Ars Poetica:"spectatum admissi, risum teneatis amici?" If admitted to a private view could you keep from laughing? We would laugh because we view a portrait of a lovely woman's head on a horse's neck, with oddly placed limbs covered in feathers, and a body that ended with the shape of a fish. The image long remained an argument on the need for coherence in art. Pope thus quotes "Risum tenatis amici" to undercut his own pedantic Scriblerian annotator in the first note to the first line of his Dunciad Variorum.Richard Hurd later says (1757) that "The epistle begins ... with that general and fundamental precept of preservingan unity in the subject and the disposition ef the piece."39 True Scriblerians regard disunity as a paving stone on the road to a cultural Sodom and Gomorrah in which the isolated good man is increasingly endangered. H. Scriblerus Secundus regards disunity as a private joke made public for an audi- ence willing to laugh with him and with Horace.

39 Richard Hurd, Q. Horatii Flacci. Epistolae ad Pisones, et In Imitation of Horace's Art of Poetry (London, 1729). Augustum: With an English Commentary and Notes: To Edmund Curll quotes the phrase as well in The Curliad. which are Added Critical Dissertations, 4th ed. (London, A Hypercritic Upon the Dunciad Variorum. With a farther 1766), 1: 2. Uames Bramston] more recently had used a Key to the New Characters (London, 1729), 5. See also bizarre illustration of risum teneatis amici as the fron- Curll's A Comp/eat Key to the Dunciad. With A Character tispiece to his temperate The Art of Politicks, (continued) HARVARD LIBRARY BULLETIN

4. THE END OF SCRIBBLING

I return to a caveat near the beginning of this essay. I regard my view of an anti-Scriblerian Tragedy of Tragediesas essentially valid. I also regard my view of Tom Thumb as alluding to Alexander Pope as a plausible if not probable hypoth- esis rather than a verity. Candor urges recognition of the potential flaws in that hypothesis. If Fielding's Tom Thumb-plays target Pope, we might anticipate two consequences: 1) Fielding should be excoriated by Pope's friends in opposition, and 2) the name "Tom Thumb" should be a familiar post-1730 label for Pope. So far as I now can tell neither of these happens and neither sinks the good ship Hypothesis. Fielding's several consequent farces denied his contemporaries the chance to focus on Tom Thumb or its revised Tragedy. These other plays were even more offensive and all of them before the Licensing Act of 1737 could be regarded as emblems of modern cultural decay. In June of 1732 the hostile Grub-streetJournal, No. 130, for example, complains of Fielding: "Besides his Lottery and Modern Husband in the winter, he has produced two more, his Covent Garden Tragedyand Old Debaucheewithin four months after." All this, it says, is "barren fruitfulness." The author of The Usefulnessef the Stage (1738) observes that "The Decay of Dramatick Poetry hath been assigned" to these and comparable entertainments (unsigned Preface). Moreover, by 1730 Fielding already had shot at the Opposition's sitting-duck Colley Cibber and in spite of reconciliation later would do so again. By early 1734 Fielding was established both as a master of ridicule and as a friend and protegee of the Boy-Patriots George Lyttelton and William Pitt, who were pups from the powerful Lord Cobham's den. Prudence suggested that earlier sins be forgotten if not forgiven. In addition, Pope's numerous enemies, who continued to regard his diminu- tive size as an emblem of diminutive poetic and moral talents, could do so without evoking the Tom Thumb story still associated with innocent children's tales.40 By 1742 Lord Hervey's The DifferenceBetween Verbal and PracticalVirtue perpetrates an especially unpleasant version of this familiar emblematic device. He insists that Pope's ugly shape betrays "the double Darkness" of a mind "suited to its vile Abode." The deformed body "seems the Counterpart by Heav'n design'd

of Mr. Pope's Profane Writings. By Sir Colley Cibber comments both on his own role and on Kt. M. D. 3d ed. (London, 1728), 4, advertising "An the excess in these lines. See his A Letter to Mr. Pope, Essay on the Original & Progress of the Popelings- 33-34. Risum tenatis Amici?" (vi). The term clearly was asso- ciated with Pope and the Dunciad. As an example of 40 For example, see the unsigned A Tryal of Skill Between Scriblerian response to such incoherence, see the a Court Lord, and a Twickenham 'Squire. Inscrib'd to Mr. Dunciad Variorum,in which we are appalled by a fright- Pope (London, 1734). Amusingly, for young John ening, collapsing world of art, morals, and politics. Hervey "Tom Thumb was always his Delight" (9). We see Bezaleel Morrice also observes that in "Publick Amusements," which children often attended, "little How, with less reading than makes felons 'scape Thumb, and Puppet Shows go down, I And please the Less human genius than God gives an ape, choicest Relish of the Town!" See his DissectioMentis Small thanks to France and none to Rome Humanae: Or A SatiricEssay on Modern Critics, Stage and or Greece, Epic Poets . . Ambition, Truth, Greatness, and Life A past, vamp'd, future, old, reviv'd new piece, (London, 1730), 77, 78. 'Twixt , Fletcher, Congreve, and Corneille, Can make a Cibber, Johnson, or Ozell. Fielding'sTragedy of Tragedies 37

I A Symbol and a Warning to Mankind" (5-6). Other insults to Pope included terms like ape, ass, Cain, Caliban, demon, devil, dog, elf, eunuch, monkey, monster, murderer, puppet, pygmy, rat, satyr, scorpion, , traitor, viper, and worm. Such stuff makes Fielding's vulgarity seem almost playful, and demon- strates how one could emphasize Pope's deformity without calling him Tom Thumb. The anti-Scriblerian and anti-Papal readings are not foolproof, but they are superior to the orthodoxy of Fielding as tag-along kid brother of gloomy elders. Those readings also are faithful to the experience of the Tom Thumb farces, to Scriblerian coolness towards Fielding, and to the characterization of Pope's apparent lust and apparent inability to satisfy himself or the women over whom he was presumed to salivate. Pope was middle-aged, sensitive, polished, and distinguished; Fielding was young, insensitive, crude, and ambitious. These are not the ingredients for a good cocktail-about which then feckless Fielding scarcely cared. He hoped that his audience would pay for the pleasure oflaughing with him rather than scowling with Pope. The enduring comic pleasures of the Tragedyof Tragediessuggests that he was right.

APPENDIX: THE DIRECTORS' CREED

At least some production history also suggests that experience of the Tragedy of Tragediesis consistent with laughter not gloom. Those productions also are inconsistent with another commonplace regarding it-that Tom Thumb is an acting play and, as the Preface and footnotes seem to require, the Tragedyof Tragediesis a reading play. Even the presumed reading play, however, can lend itself to the stage and heighten the reader's sense of control and confidence. We lack a full prompt book and extended audience response to the many eighteenth-century performances of the Tragedyof Tragedies;but Fielding's dramatic practice could literally or figuratively bring the closet pedant onto the public stage. Accordingly, the printed version of the play was sold on opening night so that the audience would better appreciate Fielding's parodies.4' and William Hatchett recognized such potential in their version of The Operaof Operas;Or, Tom Thumb the Great (London, 1732). At the end of that play Sir Crit-Operatical enters and is outraged by the final act's ketchupy Grand Guignol and the author's "stupid, irregular, bloody, abominable Catastrophe." It will be damned "in the Eyes of all good Judges." His auditor Modely assures him that the merely enchanted dead await 's wake-up call for the proper happy ending (41). In 1989 Harvard's Lowell House performed the Tragedyof Tragedies,using Scriblerus' Preface as a kind of Prologue and his notes as an occasional interruption and riotously wrongheaded comment amusing to a collegiate audience-as was the ghost of Gaffer Thumb. He appeared as a video to be shut off and, while encased in a resolutely modern television set, wheeled off when necessary. This whimsical staging is appropriate for a play in which during the eighteenth century both Huncamunca and Glumdalca could be played by men, and Tom Thumb the Great could be played by boys or girls. Bright ploys lighten dark readings. The casting ofYale's Silliman College performance in May of 1953 was legendary. The late William K. Wimsatt, Jr., played the Amazon

41 The Battestins, Henry Fielding, 107. They do, however, second the distinction between the reading and acting plays, one I hope to blur. 38 HARVARD LIBRARY BULLETIN

Glumdalca with a blue-mop wig and partially blackened teeth: he was over seven feet tall (figure r). At appropriate times, two Scriblerian clerks sitting near the front of the stage read printed notes. Such casting and stage-practice well exemplify the cloud- cuckoo land into which Fielding invites us, in which book and performance mingle, and which provokes our laughter but neither spleen nor fear. Cross-dressing, violation of generic expectation, and an intrusive pedant are Scriblerian nightmares in a tottering world; they are jokes in Fielding's stable world.42 There characters speak in couplets, triplets, blank verse, prose, and whatever is most adaptable to zany metaphorical language we recognize as non-threatening. Envision this as one sign of the comic release that Fielding hoped his stage would create: Wimsatt the seven-foot tall blue-mop-headed preeminently high-serious and distinguished scholar-critic wrapped in drapery, and reciting his own "Epilogue: A Key to Tom Thumb." It parodies the critical commonplaces of the 1950s and tells us what much of The Tragedyof Tragediesis not.

But now I'm here to expound our serious pith, Unfold our symbols, explicate our myth.

Figure 1. William K. Wimsatt, Jr., as the Amazon Glumdalca. William Kurtz Wimsatt Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.

42 Audience involvement of various kinds was common- (New York: Methuen & Co., 1987), 62-83, 283-86. I place in eighteenth-century British theater, as it was in have offered a full discussion of this essay and its unfor- French opera. See Thomas McGeary, "Shaftesbury on tunate cousins in "The New Eighteenth Century and Opera, Spectacle and Liberty," Music & Letters 74 the New Mythology," The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly (1993): 540 and 540 n. 5. Paul Hunter discusses aspects Annual, ed. Paul]. Korshin, 3 (1990): 353-403. "When of Fielding's authorial interventions in chapter 3 of his Men Women Turn" is reprinted as the first chapter of Occasional Form, "Fielding's Reflexive Plays and the Campbell's Natural Masques: Gender and Identity in Rhetoric of Discovery." For a grim view of Fielding's Fielding's Plays and Novels (Stanford: Stanford comic drama as a reflection of his fear of threatened University Press, 1995), where she laments criticism of male phallic power, see Jill Campbell, "When Men it by "some male readers"-Trumbach and Weinbrot. Women Turn: Gender Reversals in Fielding's Plays," She nonetheless accepts our reading of "Baby" as a in The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English dildo in Fielding's Historical Register: see Natural Literature ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown Masques, 263 n. 39. Fielding's Tragedyef Tragedies 39

"They who have best succeeded on the stage, Have still conformed their genius to their age." Thus Dryden wrote, and thus repeats your bard, Conscious you may have found his moaning hard. The action of our play, the outward show, Has been but rough, nay rowdy-that we know. But now I'm here to expound our serious pith, Unfold our symbols, explicate our myth. Our theme tonight-this truth will shave the devil- Our theme has been the profound theme of evil. Glumdalca, Amazonian queen, moans what? Her size, her poise--what thoughtless sot Could miss the fact she stands for all she's got: Good uncorrupted, primitive and tall. And then Tom Thumb, good too, and brave, though small. The pint-size package of the virtues, Thumb Is Innocence Abroad and Nature's chum. And O their fate! Think you our message glum? Think you our bard has botched his tragic fable, Messed up poetic justice, smeared his label? Our bard has painted Nature's honest phiz, Life as he sees it, and as in fact it is. King, Queen, and Courtiers, each a bleeding hunk, a Disfigured corpse, and eke fair Huncamunca. Glumdalca, noble girl, the sword that stuck her Thrust by a fopling gallant, a low mucker. And Thumb, our youthful tender, raw idealist! The dark bovine digestion now thou foolest! That cow, my friends (don't laugh) it stands of course As symbol of brute evil-that rude force That stalks fields, streets, schools, shops, and towers and hovels. That cow occurs in each of Faulkner's novels. That cow its cud on every lawn doth chew, And moos in every home--that cow is you! 43 The cow is as much brute evil as the Tragedy ef Tragediesdisvalues its world "before a grander vision of the past."

43 Cited by kind pemrission from the William Kurtz Wimsatt please, improve, instruct, reform mankind from Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library. over the footlights. On Monday 4 May 1953 the Yale Daily News announced This is a begging letter. Could you give me a the weekend's entertainment and observed: "Prominent in copy of that superb epilogue you wrote and deliv- the cast is a member of the English Department who, ered? I was vastly amused and should treasure it. rumor to the contrary, will not play the title role." On 12 May 1953 Professor Eugene Waith, staggered by the The Wimsatt papers include an early draft of the Epilogue, quality of his colleague's acting and poetty, wrote to photographs of Wimsatt on stage, and a copy of the Wimsatt: program. H. Scriblerus Secundus was divided into two parts, H. Scriblerus and H. Secundus. Scriblerus was the, My respect for your achievements has never subsequently, distinguished Renaissance scholar Thomas been less than gigantic, as I hope you know, but Roche. I am grateful to Martin Price for helpful anecdotes it is infinite now that I have seen your interpreta- regarding this performance, which I must lament never tions of the mighty role of Glumdalca. I was right having seen. Given the description, however, perhaps there with you through pathos and wrath, some of the more solemn readers should consider the value grandeur and tenderness. It was a terrific of production history as a restraint upon interpretive excess. emotional purge. Martin Battestin informs me that Scriblerus's commentary Clearly, the stage is for you, Bill. No more of also was worked into a production of the Tragedy ef the idle pedantry and pedagogy which have been Tragediesat the University of Michigan late in the 19(\os. wasting your time. From now on you must